00:00:00.340Today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by Encyclopedia Britannica, sorry, Brat Summer, the Democratic National Committee, Matt Iglesias' content calendar, the Liberal Order, the Abundance Agenda, all the leftists who came before me and taught me about what it means to stand on business, and finally, the Dark Money Group generously funding Barry Weiss' ops.
00:00:28.020wow uh what a comprehensive group i already have a few shivers coming down my chest
00:00:34.140caro are you ready to talk about liberalism honestly no
00:00:39.200okay so before we get into it today uh just some brief housekeeping you may have noticed
00:00:46.380our new branding and that it goes fucking crazy designed over the last several months by chris
00:00:52.460Mara Muldrow of Studio Portico. So I would say consider this our formal relaunch of Diabolical
00:00:58.380Lies. Caro, I think one of the craziest things to you and I about doing this show together is that
00:01:04.240listeners just autonomously began forming Diabolical Lies local groups with one another,
00:01:11.140and they'll do meetups to listen to the episodes. They'll do unrelated events together. They'll form
00:01:16.540book clubs. They're politically organizing in their towns. That is the sort of organic organizing
00:01:21.920that the Democratic consultants being paid millions of dollars could only dream of.
00:01:25.400And if you listen to the show a lot, you know that we redistribute 33 percent of our net
00:01:31.260revenue. And so far this year, we've donated something like seventy thousand dollars.
00:01:35.840But we have a new idea and we're calling it our local group distribution pilot, because
00:01:41.620I think one of our core philosophies is that money is not the only thing that should be
00:01:47.380distributed, but that the power to decide where that money goes should also be distributed.
00:01:54.180So we are piloting our first local group redistribution. We are giving the next $30,000,
00:02:01.040which will actually allow us to cross our six-figure redistribution goal for the year,
00:02:05.520to the dirty little liars in the Colorado local group. And they get to decide how that money is
00:02:12.500going to get distributed, how it is best used, ideally in their communities, but it's completely
00:02:17.700up to them. And so our hope is that we can keep doing this. We're going to work out all the
00:02:21.640logistical kinks, but we're really excited about it. Yeah. Quick cutaway to a new Chuck E. Cheese
00:02:26.420franchise popping up in Denver, Colorado. We're like, whoa, maybe we should have set up some
00:02:33.000guide rails. Maybe democracy isn't a good idea. Maybe I do like, what do they call it now? State
00:02:39.400sponsored capitalism. Is that what we're calling it in legacy media? We are the twin dictators
00:02:45.600that get to make all the decisions. A lot of this local group organizing happens in our paid
00:02:50.280subscriber chat. I think someone at some point made a spreadsheet where, you know, there's like
00:02:54.860all these links to the different groups. So if you want to get in on that, join the dirty pack
00:02:59.300of liars. And of course, you'll also get access to every paywalled subscriber episode that we've
00:03:04.280ever done and we just launched our discord i just have to add and it is it goes so hard have you
00:03:09.620been on it yet katie no i haven't oh i have already i am already sending voice memos
00:03:14.520i literally was like welcome you guys are getting the katie text message treatment
00:03:19.620i was sending them voice memos there are so many channels already i have never been on discord
00:03:24.340before and it fucks big time so you also get that as a paid subscriber this is like how we find out
00:03:31.160that the Diabolical Lies audience is just like a bunch of fucking weird gamers.
00:03:36.740Yeah, well, what is it called? Oh, you don't play video games. I was going to make a Zelda joke.
00:03:40.760Anyways, I'll save it for the Discord.
00:03:42.280Oh, goddammit. Yeah, okay, time to move on. All right. I often like to study narrative and
00:03:49.440cultural movements on the right. I think that has become my quasi-beat on this show. Usually when
00:03:54.500it's my turn to write an episode, I'm like, what weird shit is Charlie Kirk into right now?
00:04:01.920Sometimes, though, I actually think it can be more instructive to look a little bit closer to home.
00:04:07.900So since Vice President Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, we have witnessed something of a desperation of the center-left contingent to prove that their ideology is still relevant to voters.
00:04:25.100We know that Harris ran a very centrist campaign and lost, and so media figures who share that ideology have now had something of an uphill battle to convince their spheres of influence that, hey, no, these are still the correct priorities for the left.
00:04:41.780And I'm going to be talking intermittently today about Harris, and I just want to clarify up front, this isn't about her. I think my broader critique of the Democratic Party is that the candidate in this present paradigm basically doesn't matter.
00:04:58.780Like, you can put anyone in that slot, and the rejection or acceptance of that person has very little to do with them and any principled positions that they hold. It is a little bit of an interchangeable revolving door, and I think that is central to the critique that we're going to be making today. So consider this like a little checking in of sorts with the Democratic Party.
00:05:19.960Something that interests me about what you just said is you just mentioned Harris being a centrist candidate. I find that interesting because I think a lot of centrist political influencers always describe her as having run the most progressive political campaign that has ever happened. What do you think about that?
00:05:35.540Oh, yeah, we're going to talk about the radical woke Marxist Kamala Harris and her lethal fighting force. I got so frustrated writing this outline. I just stop and start over like four times. I went on so many walks.
00:05:48.000while I was working on this. But I do really want to closely examine the nature of centrist
00:05:53.820politics today and see what we can learn from them. Because the Democratic Party's approval
00:05:59.440rating is the lowest it has been since Gallup began measuring it in 1992, which was incidentally
00:06:06.560right before the election of a man named Bill Clinton. It is at 34% right now. This data just
00:06:13.920came out. And if you look at the trend line, it sort of looks like the stock market. Lots of
00:06:18.480jagged peaks and valleys, right? But there's one real difference, which is that rather than
00:06:22.660trending up over the last 30 years, it has been trending downward. And recently, when they ran
00:06:28.920these polls that came out on July 31st, they found that it's rated no better than the GOP
00:06:35.640at its ability to A, manage the government effectively, or B, bring about necessary change.
00:06:42.740And I think that is pretty damning considering what the GOP is doing right now.
00:06:48.900But Katie, what if we just paid a series of influencers some money to spread the word?
00:06:53.720Do you think that would solve the popularity crisis?
00:06:55.840What if we just said it's not happening?
00:06:58.880You can just get on the internet and say stuff.
00:07:02.080So I'm looking at these record low approval ratings.
00:07:05.600and simultaneously, I'm thinking about the fact that in the last year, people have started
00:07:11.880openly talking about post-liberalism, or the end of neoliberalism. Mexico's president,
00:07:20.060Claudia Scheinbaum, has said Mexico's, quote, neoliberal period is over, and she recently
00:07:26.300announced a bunch of new public works, like passenger rail, highways, airports, affordable
00:07:31.740housing, hospitals, like the government investing in building these things. And then on the right,
00:07:36.900of course, you have J.D. Vance, who has characterized the MAGA movement as, quote,
00:07:42.820post-liberal. So anyway, taken together, I think there is a conversation worth having right now
00:07:48.840about what all of this means and what I am most interested in, which is who is still working
00:07:55.700tirelessly to defend a status quo that might already be dead? So to do this effectively,
00:08:01.300I realized that we kind of have to do two things today. So number one, we are going to go era by
00:08:06.520era of liberalism here because its meaning has shifted over time. I think the way that we got
00:08:11.880here and being clear-eyed about that is actually really important to contextualize what is happening
00:08:16.200now. And number two, we need to be specific about what we mean by some of the terms that we are
00:08:22.400using today. Liberalism, neoliberalism, leftism. These are all different political philosophies
00:08:28.540that have different theories of power and different goals.
00:09:24.160So Ron Mamdani winning the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. OK, this is an outspokenly pro-Palestine Democratic socialist running on a platform of raising taxes on people with incomes over a million dollars to do things like making buses free and rent cheaper.
00:09:41.460Okay, we're talking about New York City, home of Wall Street. This is arguably the epicenter
00:09:47.940of global capitalism. And this person went from total obscurity to winning his primary so
00:09:54.460decisively that Andrew Cuomo conceded the night of in eight months flat. And I think most of the
00:10:00.540people who listen to this podcast probably know how the Democratic Party more broadly has reacted
00:10:04.980to this. But Caro, can you like give us a little fill us in? How has the Democratic Party embraced
00:10:11.100this Momdani popularity wave? The Democratic Party has treated Momdani the way that I used
00:10:18.180to feel going to parties in my hometown when I was in college, which is not well and like a
00:10:24.380fucking loser. Yeah. Powerful Democrats won't endorse him. New York Democratic Governor Kathy
00:10:30.220Hochul has already indicated she is going to block his plan for a tax increase so he can't
00:10:35.520pay for anything. We're going to be specific here about what exactly she said.
00:10:40.920I've spoken to hundreds of business leaders saying, listen, nothing is going to happen to
00:10:45.780this city without me being aware of it and involved in it. So don't talk about packing
00:10:50.040up and leaving and all these other overreactions, Hochul told MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday.
00:10:56.700I've become the therapist-in-chief, it seems.
00:10:59.420So I'm saying to everybody, we're going to be okay, Jesus Christ.
00:13:33.820We are not scared enough of Mamdani. This is a young person who has principles. He has a vision.
00:13:39.740He has consistently stood by those principles and that vision. He has a track record of actually fighting for working people. And critically, he understands how to wield power. He understands how to get people with power to do what you want them to do.
00:13:57.140And his ideas were popular. They had widespread grassroots support, 50,000 volunteers. And that translated to a decisive electoral victory. And it would be easier to dismiss Zoran as like a one-off if he were the only one, but he's not the only person that this is happening to.
00:14:20.020So Omar Fateh, another Democratic socialist representing the district of Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed, recently won the Democratic Party endorsement in Minneapolis for mayor at their recent convention.
00:14:33.020The party in Minneapolis is called the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, or DFL.
00:14:37.620Now, the incumbent that he defeated, Jacob Frey, had used the mayoral veto 19 times since being elected, including a record-breaking eight times in 2024.
00:14:50.380So I was looking into some of the reasons, like what was he vetoing?
00:14:54.560What was the city council passing that he was like, nope?
00:14:57.560And some of the past resolutions he vetoed were a call for a Gaza ceasefire, a labor standards advisory board.
00:15:06.500oh my god amnesty for university of minnesota anti-genocide protesters
00:15:11.760a measure intended to build more affordable housing oh my god minimum wage for rideshare
00:15:19.980drivers and on that one he said he would refuse to enact it even if his veto were overridden
00:15:26.100which it was so the voting process at this convention where where fate beat fry it was
00:15:34.380weird. Okay, there was like this technical malfunction in the first round of voting. So like
00:15:38.580176 votes didn't get counted. And then they redid it with just a show of hands, apparently.
00:15:45.360And Fateh won that too. So I'm going to have you read something from current affairs reporting on
00:15:52.040this. Undoubtedly, the convention was a mess. The best solution would probably be to just gather
00:15:58.260everyone together again and hold a new clean vote. But the DFL has not done that. Instead,
00:16:03.580the party has announced that it's stripping Fate's endorsement from him, giving Jacob Frey
00:16:08.660access to the voter rolls, and prohibiting the Minneapolis DFL from making any endorsements
00:16:13.560separate from the state-level party. This was reportedly decided by a closed-door vote of just
00:16:18.28028 party elites, most of them not Minneapolis residents, and it seems the sanctity of voting
00:16:23.800processes was not their first priority. Okay, so it gets worse. We are actually going to listen.
00:16:31.320And then we're going to listen to a leaked video clip from a pro-Jacob Fry.
00:16:37.720This is like a Zoom call that someone leaked.
00:16:42.640It's a PAC meeting in which Minneapolis City Council member Lisa Goodman says that she will withhold $25,000 of checks from the DFL if the endorsement is not overturned.
00:17:00.420So I'm holding checks, Lenny, from a lot of people who contributed to this multi-candidate expenditure in our ward to help Elizabeth because some of the largest contributors at the $5,000 level didn't feel comfortable giving the money to the DFL.
00:17:15.920If the decision is overturned, I have permission to cash a bunch of those checks.
00:17:21.320You're welcome to add to the pod, by the way.
00:17:24.200And we've raised, Lou Remley and I have raised roughly $25,000 to help Elizabeth get another
00:33:30.140it is kind of a dead giveaway from the jump of like,
00:33:32.940our goal with this media project is to convince people that liberalism is good, that it is a
00:33:41.620fundamentally good thing. It is a thing that is working. And all that is left to do is persuade
00:33:46.860people of that truth. I also just think whenever you see these announcements of people leaving
00:33:53.840very prestigious publications to work on Substack, like you and I had nothing to lose,
00:33:58.840me especially like I came from the mud I've got nothing to I've got nothing to lose by building
00:34:04.100a career on Substack like no one else was going to take me these people work at the Atlantic they
00:34:08.800are like very established writers and so the question I always have is like well what are
00:34:13.320you going to do here that you can't do there and it's really not entirely clear to me because it
00:34:18.640seems like they're just advocating for a content strategy that like most of legacy media currently
00:34:23.800has. So I don't really get what they think they're going to gain on Substack.
00:34:28.280Amazing segue. Thank you. The thing that you won't catch if you're just listening to that
00:34:33.340and not watching it is that the beginning of the video when she's talking about how liberalism
00:34:40.660used to do things and that like the nice liberals of yesteryear actually were like good at their
00:34:45.820jobs. There are newspaper clippings that are announcing the New Deal. There are pictures of
00:34:52.240people protesting for civil rights and voting rights. There's shots from like the women's
00:34:57.540suffrage movement. Funny that the left and the right alike both agree. It seems that nothing
00:35:02.140good has happened since 1950. I'm like, wow, we are aligned. So the only other thing that I want
00:35:08.800to call out before we continue just to draw attention to it is I think it's easy to miss
00:35:13.400because it's just kind of such a common talking point now. The tariffs inclusion that she's
00:35:20.480talking about how Trump is, you know, lobbing tariffs and like the left is doing it too. And
00:35:25.100trade is what made America rich and we have to embrace this. I actually think that that inclusion
00:35:30.580is exemplary of a trend that we're going to unpack a lot today. Trade protectionism, it is just worth
00:35:36.600saying, has been part of the U.S. economy since its inception. Trump's tariffs are obviously erratic
00:35:41.980and dumb and random, but free trade does spur economic growth internationally. That is true,
00:35:49.200But it also means that work is going to be offshore somewhere cheaper where labor protections are weaker. It means that American workers are going to lose jobs. This is essentially the pattern that has led to like the hollowing out of many American cities that produce the sort of like grievance politics that got Donald Trump elected.
00:36:06.660So to say that trade made America wealthy, it certainly made some Americans very wealthy, but the effects of free trade under capitalism are more complex than just, this is liberal and therefore good, and because Orange Man doesn't like it, we are for it.
00:36:23.620So at this point, I want to pause and I want to actually explore this idea of liberalism
00:36:28.820more precisely because they're saying liberalism is responsible for these leaps forward, right?
00:36:34.380Liberalism as a philosophy is what gave us all the good things that we have now and that
00:36:39.180we are here at the argument to defend and continue this same intellectual tradition.
00:36:43.880So we're going to start with describing liberalism.
00:36:47.980Are you going to fucking put me on blast like you did in the capitalism episode?
00:41:33.440In his influential work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 1936,
00:41:38.760the liberal British economist John Maynard Keynes introduced an economic theory that argued
00:41:43.320that government management of the economy could smooth out the highs and lows of the business cycle
00:41:48.180to produce more or less consistent growth with minimal unemployment.
00:41:51.980So, in other words, this was yet another era of liberalism where capitalism was failing us. We had the New Dealers. We had, you know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saw their role as intervening to save it.
00:42:07.480much of what the New Deal attempted to do was lifted directly from the Socialist Party platform
00:42:14.520of the early 20th century. Because yes, there was a Socialist Party in the United States in the
00:42:19.520early 20th century. Some have pointed out that if you read the Socialist Party's platforms in the
00:42:24.780years leading up to World War I, it reads like a blueprint for the New Deal. Here are some things
00:42:30.720that this Socialist platform was fighting for, if you can just read this list for me.
00:42:37.480Reduced working hours and higher wages.
00:43:51.840they're pointing to as exemplary liberal governance.
00:43:55.060This is the period that we look back on today
00:43:56.680as peak damn shit, peak living out, okay?
00:44:00.560They also reference civil rights era liberalism.
00:44:03.200We're not going to read the entire section on that, but it's worth pointing out again. It was not liberal governance that achieved civil rights. It was sustained, highly organized, often violent mass protest that led to black Americans getting equal rights.
00:44:20.480These were radical movements that did not have popular liberal support and were characterized
00:44:26.460at the time as extreme. This is a sampling of public sentiment from 1964.
00:44:32.900Oh, I'm so glad that you got this. I saw this a while ago and it genuinely blew my mind. Okay.
00:44:39.040When civil rights activists led a bloody protest march in Selma, Alabama on March 7th, 1965,
00:44:45.340that is credited with helping to assure passage of the Voting Rights Act that year,
00:44:49.060civil rights was a top issue for the American public, but opinions about it were very mixed.
00:44:54.200Yep. Even so, America's verdict on Selma was clear. In all, the protesters staged three marches
00:45:00.820that month, and polling showed the public clearly siding with the demonstrators, not with the state
00:45:05.180of Alabama. A nationwide Gallup poll in February 1965 found 26% of Americans citing civil rights
00:45:12.580as a problem facing the nation, second only to the expanding war in Vietnam. Wow, which was 29%.
00:45:18.820There was broad-based support for the war at this early stage in its history, but views about civil rights and integration were clearly mixed. Yep. On one hand, Americans continued to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, at least in principle, but had concerns about its scope and implementation. Classic. I support in theory, but I have good concerns about the interests.
00:45:37.920Not in my backyard, though. Not in my neighborhood.
00:45:41.000Not in my school. A Gallup poll in October 1964 reported that the public approved of the new law by 2 to 1, 58 percent to 31 percent.
00:45:50.560And in April 1965, Gallup found a whopping 76 percent in favor of a then-proposed equal rights voting law.
00:45:56.960But while the public supported civil rights legislation conceptually, they expressed concerns about the pace of its implementation.
00:46:03.860There we go. Indeed, although most supported the new civil rights law soon after it was passed, a National Opinion Research Corporation poll showed 68 percent of Americans wanting to see moderation in its enforcement.
00:46:29.800So that's what public sentiment was at the time.
00:46:31.900Okay. This was not a popular liberal position, nor a position that liberal leaders were, like, fighting especially hard for.
00:46:38.600And just to say really quickly, if it was popular, then protesters would not have had to throw themselves in the line in front of police hoses and attack dogs in order to generate interest.
00:46:49.400The leaders of the civil rights movement were leftists. Many were socialists. This is from Jewish currents.
00:54:56.940Right-wing media turned a mythical migrant crime wave into a national fixation by spotlighting tragic individual cases like the murder of Lake and Riley.
00:55:05.880We had a fever dream national debate about whether Haitians were barbecuing cats in Ohio.
00:55:11.400At the risk of recycling an old line, we bumbled our way into a trial run with open-ish borders.
00:55:16.860And from a purely macroeconomic perspective, it was basically all upside.
00:55:22.600Suffice to say, that's not the main lesson most American politicians appear to be taking away from the immigration story of the last few years.
00:55:30.480Democrats, with good reason, are still scared shitless of looking too soft on the border after it helped undo Biden,
00:55:36.760even if Trump's gulag-first enforcement philosophy has turned public opinion back against his approach, too.
00:55:43.000But the hard politics shouldn't blind them to a simple fact.
00:55:45.940The United States desperately needs more people.
00:55:49.500I read this and I'm like, OK, so the rest of the picture is just even though all this stuff was actually good, it looked bad for the Biden administration.
00:55:59.460The real problem with all the immigrant stuff is that it's just bad optics for Democrats.
00:56:04.040Right. We just need to change people's opinion about this.
00:56:07.400And like, I want to be clear, I'm not trying to be nitpicky.
00:56:10.180I largely did not have a problem with this article.
00:56:12.300And I understand that it's not fair to judge an argument based on something that you wish they would have been arguing for instead.
00:56:17.560But I do think that it is illustrative of the broader project, which is basically to say, hey, things are pretty good, actually. And all those problems that the conservative base is reacting to, there's nothing there. The immigration system's actually fine. Our GDP is going up. Like, what more do you want?
00:56:36.200I also think that this is really illustrative of what you and I tipped our hats to when we were watching that intro video, which is this is not a media publication that's going to be about liberals, conservatives, libertarians and socialists.
00:56:51.100You can tell by who they're framing their debate against, right? And who they're actually catering to. They're acknowledging the arguments that conservatives make without ever acknowledging the arguments that leftists make, which is like, okay, fine, you don't care about what socialists think, but be honest about that. This is you trying to basically acknowledge and win over the sentiments you're never going to win over, but that you're going to keep trying to win over, which is the sentiments of conservatives.
00:57:15.380I'm, of course, open to the idea that in the future they'll write more articles about immigration and like, OK, what does fixing it actually look like?
00:57:23.480I think what he would say if Jordan Weissman were here and I presented this critique to him and said, like, hey, dude, like, you're not really addressing what's actually wrong here.
00:57:33.220He'd probably say, right, you know, but I'm just trying to convince people that immigration is a good thing first.
00:57:38.200Like, I'm trying to establish the base argument that we should not fear immigration.
00:57:42.840I just personally feel a little squeamish based on this initial foray into this topic that there
00:57:49.280is no mention that the problems with it are way more than just an optics issue for Democrats or
00:57:55.220chaos at the border. It badly needs to be reformed. American industry relies on people
00:58:02.220remaining undocumented so they can be paid shit wages and essentially receive no real worker
00:58:07.560protections. And I think it also sort of sidesteps part of the core grievance that is being expressed
00:58:12.800by the MAGA base. A lot of the MAGA opposition from the top down is obviously just straight up
00:58:17.460racism and white nationalism. We know this. But there are a lot of people for whom that
00:58:21.960anti-immigrant message appeals precisely because they sense that they have no economic opportunity.
00:58:29.160And when someone points to the immigrant and says they are the reason that your life is bad
00:58:34.260and you cannot find work and your town is in a downward economic spiral and you can't afford a
00:58:39.780House and the liberal across the aisle is going, no, no, no, no. See, that's actually where you're
00:58:44.980wrong because actually that immigrant's really good for economic growth and like, see, GDP is
00:58:49.640going up and so everything's fine. Like, you are not going to get very far convincing that person
00:58:55.300that the economy is working for them. And there does not seem to be any recognition of the fact
00:59:00.160that in the MAGA imagination, immigrant is just a stand-in for a displeasure with the economic
00:59:07.500status quo. Yeah. And I would also add the phrase there about open borders really itched at me. I
00:59:15.260think that that is doing a lot of work to imply that prior to Trump, we were some lawless,
00:59:21.840rudderless nation. And I'm like, dude, I understand that we had a surge of people
00:59:26.980crossing the border. To equate that to open borders is to cede so much ground to bad faith
00:59:33.220conservative actors, and it just really feels like a dog whistle that kind of perked my ears up.
00:59:38.400Yeah, I mean, what was that chart that showed, like, even before this new round of ICE funding,
00:59:43.400they still had more money than, like, any other law enforcement agency? It's like, no, that's
00:59:48.700really not a fair way to represent what was happening then.
01:00:50.220And the TLDR is that a study began a couple years ago that gave people who were living below the poverty line around $300 per month to see if it had any positive effects on their lives.
01:01:03.360So they were measuring things like health outcomes, levels of stress, depression, body mass index, child development.
01:01:44.840Why would anyone think that that would make a change? Am I being stupid?
01:01:47.800Yeah, no. So she acknowledges that. She acknowledges the pandemic. She acknowledges inflation. She's like, yeah, you know, $300 per month really isn't that much money. But then she pulls forth two more studies where people were given cash transfers of $500 per month or even $1,000 per month and says, hey, look, those studies did not show a measurable impact either.
01:02:09.920So her position is basically cash transfers are not an effective or efficient way of improving
01:02:16.580people's lives. Now, before we really dig into this, I do want to note there are valid arguments
01:02:22.380against things like universal basic income. Somebody named Jason Hickel, he wrote an article
01:02:27.600critiquing basic income as like a silver bullet solution. He argues that a UBI does not address
01:02:33.600the underlying system of production. It doesn't do anything about who controls it. It doesn't
01:02:38.000change what kinds of goods or services are produced or under what conditions they're
01:02:42.040produced or for whose benefit. He says this. So I want to extend this some, you know, good
01:02:49.080faith. Like this is this is a real argument that one can make.
01:02:52.520Is this an argument that the argument made?
01:04:55.580So I'm going to have you read that now.
01:04:57.080What? Oh, Kelsey. Girl, know your enemies. What? Oh my God. Okay. These latest small to null results largely weren't surprising to people who watch this issue closely. Many of them had realized years ago, when first such studies came out, that the effects of cash weren't going to be transformative.
01:05:19.520While exciting big results from pilots tend to make headlines and travel quickly on social media, sobering results from RCTs generally don't.
01:05:28.880The depressing facts I've recounted for you are largely missing, obscured, or glossed over in the public communications about these studies.
01:05:37.080Articles focus on tiny positives, or at best, we'll note the evidence is uncertain.
01:05:42.100Very few articles or press releases put the big picture together even if they cover one disappointing result.
01:05:46.900I'm loving this world she's describing where, like, People magazine is over-covering and over-embellishing the effects of universal basic income, where our legacy media is, like, 24-7 pumping up universal basic income.
01:10:15.440and we just need to set the record straight, you guys.
01:10:17.820I know you all want to give more money to poor people,
01:10:21.440but wake up because it doesn't actually
01:10:23.880solve poverty which is of course literally the condition of not having enough money
01:10:29.420i am not trying to critique in bad faith here but i'm just like this feels like a really fucking
01:10:34.960weird first week out of the gate yeah take to be hitting us with she's kind of doing the same thing
01:10:41.780that klein and thompson do in abundance abundance thank you thank you for getting on board they
01:10:48.320spend a lot of time arguing for something that I would classify as, like, pretty fundamentally
01:10:54.320neoliberal in framing, and then will toss in a single line. In her case, there is one sentence.
01:11:00.980She says, winning the war on poverty will require more than just transfers. It will require building
01:11:07.100and improving institutions that provide education, health care, and housing. Okay, so we have, like,
01:11:12.340But that's the article. Write that article. Exactly. Why aren't you writing that?
01:11:16.560Or in their case, in Thompson and Klein's case, they'll say things like, well, we're not against universal or redistributive policies, but like they're never arguing for universal or redistributive policies.
01:11:29.820So I'm like, well, that's really not your position, is it?
01:11:32.500So to the argument's credit, one of their other writers, Matt Brunig, who Twitter has taken to calling good Matt, wrote a pretty harsh rebuttal of this article, which they did publish, which I'm like, cool.
01:11:43.340Okay, the argument. I guess the argument just means the commentators are going to be arguing with one another, which is kind of fun. And all the comments were like, man, why are you being so mean to Kelsey? Brunig is a wonk when it comes to poverty research. So he points out where just the core framing of the piece is flawed. So she ends up writing a rebuttal to his rebuttal. And then he gets on Twitter and he's like pointing out where she's actually just making very baseline mistakes in her interpretation of the data.
01:12:11.280It was like something with Medicaid spending where she was like, see, we're spending so much.
01:12:15.160She's like, no, dude, that's Medicaid.
01:12:16.620And the reason we're spending a lot on that is because of fucking UnitedHealthcare.
01:12:24.040I'm going to have you read the end of Brunig's rebuttal because I think it really ties a nice bow on what is so frustrating about the ideological project that they're engaged in.
01:12:38.180What is ultimately disappointing about Piper's piece is that it is yet another effort to make
01:12:42.760poverty, inequality, the welfare state, and issues of distributive justice seem much more
01:12:48.000complicated than they really are. As a policy matter, these are mostly solved problems. Yes,
01:12:53.880Matt. This is why they give him good Matt moniker. There are countries in the world right now with
01:12:58.140very low levels of poverty and inequality, and they follow a very well-documented policy approach
01:13:02.740called the Nordic model to get there. Acting like this is all very inscrutable and we don't really
01:13:07.460know and we need more study can make you sound like you are overflowing with intellectual
01:13:11.460honesty. But in reality, it is the pseudo profundity that papers over the moral atrocity
01:13:17.000of poverty amid plenty. Yes, this is also American exceptionalism at work. It's complicated.
01:13:22.840What applies for them could never apply to us. It immediately nullifies any conversation that
01:13:27.500you would have. I have gained a lot from reading Matt Desmond's work on poverty. And I think that
01:13:33.360there was another opportunity that could have come up in this piece. And again, like I said,
01:13:37.820I don't think it's fair to be like, well, you should have argued it this way. But I do think
01:13:43.040that part of the problem to me with her core argument that, see, the U.S. government is
01:13:49.480spending so much money on anti-poverty. And like, she's basically creating a false equivalency where
01:13:56.260the U.S. government having a lot of very expensive programs for anti-poverty and giving
01:14:02.980people cash transfers but it's worth noting that like a lot of people that study this have already
01:14:08.300said no no the reason that anti-poverty measures are so expensive and don't work well is because
01:14:12.880they're structured like private public partnerships where like the government is outsourcing this shit
01:14:17.640to private companies that have 25 profit margins like that's why this shit is expensive not because
01:14:23.860the government is just writing blank checks to poor people she's not arguing it explicitly but
01:14:29.120she's creating this connection there of like see we're spending so much money and look giving poor
01:14:33.860people money doesn't help and it's like these things are not related and now for our last one
01:14:39.200uh the case for staying on twitter against the politics of hygiene oh my god by jerusalem herself
01:14:45.720no one argues anymore no one takes a joke anymore the thing about airplane food i don't know what
01:14:52.880my accent is here is that new yorker i'm not sure it felt right will you please read the first
01:14:58.080sentence okay twitter is a cesspool i hold elon musk the site's owner personally responsible for
01:15:04.620the deaths of nearly 300 000 children wait what is that yeah i know i was like wait is this about
01:15:09.620gaza uh no actually there there actually have not been any articles yet as of this recording on
01:15:15.540august 29th about the u.s's foreign policy of paying for a genocide in palestine which actually
01:15:21.400might be the most liberal thing about it uh this is about us a id being shut down oh okay and yet
01:15:29.620i visit his website every day i tweet i respond to posts i scroll i will also always call it twitter
01:15:35.660i love how it's like an establishment journalist who like who is like the type of person the
01:15:40.660demographic of people who love twitter the most being like i bravely use twitter i'm like yeah i
01:15:45.740bet you fucking do so her thesis her argument if you will our argument argument the argument
01:15:51.360is that leaving Twitter is deplatforming yourself
01:19:02.760Well, and a lot of the comments were like, hey, I get it. You're a journalist. Totally agree. Totally makes sense. But like, why am I right? Why am I on Twitter? Like, what am I getting out of this? And I think that there is like a sort of insular argument happening here, which is like, yeah, not everybody wants to go be an ideological warrior on Twitter to like try to convince maybe three open minded people.
01:19:25.200It's like her audience is other journalist peers. And it's like, but your audience should be tens of millions of Americans.
01:19:32.800There are kind of these like flashpoint moments where I'm like, oh, I get it.
01:19:37.900Yeah, this is what's happening here is it's like these are... Barry Weiss is like, yes.
01:19:45.160Diabolical Lies announces that we've been acquired by the free press.
01:19:47.980i also just checked again this morning because i wanted to double check that my comment that like
01:19:53.660they have not touched gaza was still true because i pulled some of these articles earlier this week
01:19:59.560and um i was greeted with this treat from matt iglesias's first argument post caro can you please
01:20:10.120read the headline and sub headline for me what is his debut take on this platform oh oh katie he is
01:20:21.300brett stevens he is absolutely the left's brett stevens now that we're an hour and a half in and
01:20:26.180only the real ones are listening we can confirm he is the brett stevens of the center left okay
01:20:30.840the forgotten american value of minding your own business subhead liberalism means not caring if
01:20:38.800someone spends $10,000 on their pet bird. Let me guess. Is this like some niche discourse that
01:20:44.940happened online that no one else would ever care about? Uh, yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So this
01:20:51.540is okay. This is also, I think obviously Katie, I always think that you're a genius, but I think
01:20:56.280that one of your recent genius arguments that we are argument arguments that we have, that we have
01:21:03.640discussed again and again is, like, the most important thing you can do as a person in general
01:21:08.860being alive today, but specifically as someone who likes to think of themselves as having a voice
01:21:14.460that is worth reaching people, is to ask yourself, would I know about this if I was not online today?
01:21:20.780Half of the articles we have read today are for things that, like, you would not care about if
01:21:25.860you were not online that day. I would also add that the broader argument that he is making here
01:21:32.760is that basically it's a free country we should not be mad if people want to waste money on stupid
01:21:38.980shit or shit that we perceive to be stupid and it's like even that to me has this kind of weird
01:21:44.820permissiveness around the economic reality that most people are living in right now which is that
01:21:51.540most people don't have fucking ten thousand dollars to spend on a bird and he's not policing
01:21:56.380you woke snowflake whore if you're a good liberal you value freedom and value money freedom means
01:22:03.960you don't police how other people are spending your money it kind of is this like thought
01:22:08.780terminating cliche that basically says like there's no fair value judgment of how our society
01:22:13.800is allocating resources the tweet that like the discourse that he was responding to was somebody
01:22:19.640quote tweeting helene olin who wrote a book about how personal finance is a broken industry
01:22:24.360she was quote tweeting someone talking about spending a lot of money on their pets and like
01:22:29.320how silly it is to spend a lot of money on your pets and she was like my take is that we need to
01:22:34.940get private equity out of veterinary practices so saving your animal's life doesn't cost ten
01:22:40.420thousand dollars and iglesias is like whoa whoa isn't liberalism her being able to say that
01:22:45.820okay it's so stupid moving on all right we are going to take a second now to define what i mean
01:22:52.100by neoliberalism. We've used that phrase a couple times. I think it's a phrase that people will
01:22:58.740sometimes critique the left for using because it's very broad. We've reached our final section
01:23:04.020of the encyclopedia, lucky for you, which is called the revival of classical liberalism or
01:23:10.400the beginning of the period that has come to be known as neoliberalism. By neoliberalism, we mean
01:23:16.140An economic and political theory that emerged in the late 20th century that at least superficially advocates for things like free market capitalism, deregulation, privatization, and again, private control of the economy by individuals with as little government intervention on behalf of those individuals as possible.
01:24:20.780but the result too often was increased inflation
01:24:23.320and ever smaller declines in unemployment rates.
01:24:26.600Okay, so again, you're probably picking up on this.
01:24:30.100There is the cyclicality here where, again,
01:24:32.500eventually the capitalist system, it stops working properly
01:24:35.640Like, the contradictions become hard to resolve.
01:24:38.740As modern liberals struggled to meet the challenge of stagnating living standards in mature industrial economies, others saw an opportunity for a revival of classical liberalism.
01:24:48.600The intellectual foundations of this revival were primarily the work of the Austrian-born British economist F.A. Hayek and the American economist Milton Friedman.
01:25:05.640One of Hayek's greatest achievements was to demonstrate on purely logical grounds that a centrally planned economy is impossible.
01:25:15.660He also famously argued in The Road to Serfdom, 1944, that interventionist measures aimed at the redistribution of wealth led inevitably to totalitarianism.
01:25:25.880Friedman, as one of the founders of the modern monetarist school of economics, held that the business cycle is determined mainly by the supply of money and by interest rates,
01:25:34.880rather than by government fiscal policy, contrary to the long-prevailing view of Keynes and his
01:25:40.080followers. These arguments were enthusiastically embraced by the major conservative political
01:25:44.540parties in Britain and the United States, which had never abandoned the classical liberal
01:25:48.560conviction that the market for all its faults guides economic policy better than governments
01:25:53.200do. Revitalized conservatives achieved power with the lengthy administrations of Prime Minister
01:25:58.660Margaret Thatcher, 1979-90, in Britain, and President Ronald Reagan, 1981-89, in the United
01:26:05.220States. Their ideology and policies, which properly belonged to the history of conservatism
01:26:10.260rather than liberalism, became increasingly influential, as illustrated by the British
01:26:14.880Labour Party's official abandonment of its commitment to the quote common ownership of
01:26:19.140the means of production in 1995, and by the cautiously pragmatic policies of President
01:26:24.540bill clinton in the 1990s the clearest sign however of the importance of this quote neoclassical
01:26:30.220version of liberalism was the emergence of libertarianism as a political force as evidenced
01:26:36.140by the increasing prominence of the libertarian party in the united states and by the creation
01:26:40.600of assorted think tanks in various countries which sought to promote the libertarian ideal
01:26:44.980of markets and sharply limited governments yeah so this period is intensely critical for this
01:26:52.400conversation today. This was the shift in which the Democratic Party decided that in order to beat
01:26:58.960Reagan Republicans, they needed to become Republicans themselves. This is the era which
01:27:06.080produced Bill Clinton and real Democratic endorsement of centrist, quote-unquote, third-way
01:27:11.900thinking, where there is an emphasis on staying close to the ideological center, endorsing market
01:27:18.660solutions or involvement for the delivery of public services, so the proliferation of the
01:27:24.880private-public partnership, scaling back social democratic expectations and ambitions so they
01:27:30.620don't challenge the economic competitiveness of globalization. And in 1994, the Democrats suffered
01:27:37.240losses, and the conservative New Democrats leadership was prepared to tack further right.
01:27:43.840And in 1995, Ted Kennedy warned against, quote, sheepishly acquiescing to Republican caricatures of their values. He said, and I quote, the last thing this country needs is two Republican parties.
01:27:58.820But as we know, that is the direction of the party went in. Ideas like universalism and decommodification were perceived to be too unpopular in the post Reagan era to be worth pursuing.
01:28:10.920It is presented as this very common sense, very reasonable, well, this is what you have to do to win approach to politics.
01:28:19.940But Katie, I thought Jill Stein was why the Democratic Party wasn't succeeding.
01:28:23.660Yeah. Jonathan Chait, who is not a columnist for The Argument, but who operates in a very similar vein, wrote this column for Intelligencer in October 2024. Would you mind reading the headline and sub-headline for me?
01:28:42.680wow perfect segue okay the race is close because harris is running a brilliant campaign
01:28:51.240stop complaining the centrism is working wow this is like lifted right out of like the latest
01:28:57.660fucking online discourse about how leftists are too powerful no they don't exist which
01:29:03.280is it hard to say i'm slowly raising the continuity through change change through
01:29:08.720continuity or whatever the fuck the slogan is. Is the effective centrism in the room with us
01:29:13.660right now? I'm now going to have you read the final two paragraphs because he includes an
01:29:18.740Iglesias tweet. I can't get over how quickly and how frequently they move back and forth between
01:29:23.920calling Kamala Harris a centrist candidate who faced other problems and calling her the most
01:29:28.540progressive candidate we've ever seen. She's the last person who ran for president. So she was the
01:29:33.140face of the Democratic Party. But I'm like, this is not about Kamala. This has been the Democratic
01:29:37.680Party for 20 fucking years. Okay, go ahead. Mm-hmm. For all the complaints his stance on
01:29:42.780Israel drew from the left, Biden generally avoided criticism from the left on his broader
01:29:47.380campaign themes. This is why progressives remained loyal even as he was drifting toward inevitable
01:29:52.440defeat. Harris has violated progressive shibboleths, doing almost everything within her
01:29:57.660power to meet the decisive handful of persuadable voters where they are. Okay, yep. However depressed
01:30:03.900progressive activists may feel as she has moved towards the center, the country as a whole has,
01:30:09.120not coincidentally, grown dramatically more favorable towards her. Will it be enough? That
01:30:14.520is hard to say. Wow. Hope he gets paid a lot for that. But the inverse relationship between the
01:30:18.900mood on the left and Harris's standing with the electorate as a whole is no accident. It is the
01:30:23.640fruit of a well-executed strategy that has created an even chance of victory out of certain defeat.
01:30:28.080It just, like, blows my mind the extent to which centrist Democrats and, of course, everyone in the Republican Party will just never stop painting as people on the left who are, like, principled or who aren't aligned with the Democratic Party as being wildly irrational or out of touch.
01:30:45.980They never talk about, like, oh, well, you have to win over progressive voters.
01:30:49.460It's in the same way they talk about winning over Trump voters.
01:30:52.520Well, the progressive activists might be sad.
01:30:55.400But no one can deny that this campaign is rocking and, like, the centrism is working.
01:31:02.180Donald Trump won all seven swing states.
01:31:05.700It was the first popular vote win by a Republican in a very long time, was it not?
01:31:10.300Everything that has happened over the last 30 years, I want to connect the dots here to what Trump is doing now.
01:31:15.400All of this has made it very easy for Trump to dismantle the federal government
01:31:19.340because Democrats and Republicans worked in lockstep to minimize its physical presence in
01:31:24.940our lives. Because anything that you're getting from the government is like indirect interventions.
01:31:29.600You're getting tax incentives. Your employer might be getting a subsidy for something.
01:31:33.960There might be grants that are going to the local and state governments.
01:31:37.560There is a thinker named Suzanne Mettler who calls this the submerged state for the way that
01:31:42.380the state has become invisible as opposed to big flashy efforts like the New Deal era Works
01:31:47.780Progress Administration and how this actually has the effect of undermining support for the
01:31:52.580government because people don't understand what the government is fucking doing for them.
01:31:56.640People don't even realize that they're on public benefits because of the reliance on
01:32:01.560public-private partnerships. Medicaid, for example, has a different name depending on
01:32:06.440which state you're in. There may be a private insurer's name on your health insurance card.
01:32:11.520Even though you're on Medicaid, you probably don't even realize you're on it. There are so
01:32:15.980many stories this year of red state or right-wing voters going on the news being like, I'm not
01:32:22.140worried about Medicaid cuts because I'm on health first. And it's like, that's Medicaid. You are on
01:32:28.160Medicaid. Anyway, why does this matter? Why are we talking about it? I think it all comes down to
01:32:34.360framing this commitment to the center, a commitment to a few tenets of the status quo that you are
01:32:40.580just refusing to touch, which then prevents you from ever seeking real solutions to major
01:32:46.540structural problems. The major example of this that I would point to is the way that liberals
01:32:52.480have historically tried to quote unquote fix health care, usually through trying to taper
01:32:58.060the worst instincts of the health insurance companies like the Affordable Care Act took
01:33:02.440rescission away. But that was something where an insurance company could just be like, oh,
01:33:06.280we've spent too much on you. Your coverage is gone. Bonk. And they were like, no,
01:33:10.260you shouldn't be allowed to do that. But that's like, that is the extent of the steps that they're
01:33:14.520willing to take. And a lot of this just functions, unfortunately, to drive the prices of things up.
01:33:21.060They're trying to make a fundamentally untenable and inefficient and expensive system slightly
01:33:27.120more tolerable without actually addressing any of the underlying root causes, which then gives
01:33:33.700conservatives ammunition to say, see, look at how much prices have gone up since the Affordable
01:33:38.740Care Act, we need government out of health care. And the only thing the American people know is
01:33:43.820that health care is expensive and they can't afford it. And it's like, yeah, okay, I guess
01:33:46.640the government's the problem. Yeah, this is also in the same way that in our Rise and Fall of
01:33:51.120Capitalism episode, we were talking about how capitalism is so ingrained in our lives as
01:33:55.560Americans that you know how to defend it, even if you didn't study economics. Neoliberalism
01:34:00.880is so ingrained in our lives that I can already hear some neoliberal talking head being like,
01:34:06.240yeah, well, this is why progressive activists don't get anything done and they're just online
01:34:11.020keyboard warriors because this is the reality of the hard work of governance. You have to work
01:34:17.040really hard to achieve very small wins. And that's what I'm invested in doing, creating real
01:34:22.700incremental non-existent change in people's lives by upholding a stupid fucking system that never
01:34:29.120worked to begin with. And you're just a keyboard warrior. And won't the Democratic voters get on
01:34:35.620bored with that? We just have to persuade them that we're doing a good job. Look, the reason
01:34:41.720the Democrats can't do anything about it is because the only long-term solution for a problem
01:34:47.120like that, the amount of waste, the amount of fraud, the amount of inefficiency would be to
01:34:51.960shift to a single-payer model. Now I'm melting! Which every other country has accepted as objective
01:35:00.540fact and just fucking ripped the bandaid off and done it. And everyone who understands health care
01:35:06.280basically concedes that that is the real solution. But liberals can't do that because that exists
01:35:12.800outside the scope of capital R, capital L, capital S, reasonable liberal solutions. We can't do that
01:35:19.480to our health insurance companies. Obama famously argued that part of the reason you cannot have a
01:35:25.020single payer system, even though it clearly makes more sense, is because it would be too disruptive.
01:35:30.540That the administrative state in the insurance industry is enormous and employs a lot of people.
01:35:35.680That doing a bunch of pointless paperwork is actually, there's a lot of people's jobs to do pointless paperwork.
01:35:40.960David Graber rolling over in his grave.
01:35:43.580You cannot create a cheaper, more efficient, more equitable system that works better for everyone because it would get rid of a lot of jobs and it would hurt a lot of shareholders.
01:35:53.500And so you get stuck in this weird fucking limbo where arguing for an actual fix gets you painted as a keyboard warrior idealist, and then everyone else just has to LARP working diligently toward a solution and celebrating our incremental wins that are ultimately just maintenance of something that is never going to work.
01:36:15.480Putting aside all of my morals, all of my spirituality and my ethics for a moment, putting that aside.
01:36:20.440Oh, good. This only ever takes us somewhere good.
01:36:23.500racial epithet, racial epithet. No, putting aside all of my morals of like why I find
01:36:32.160leftism to be like genuinely interesting as a political ideology. The thing that I also feel
01:36:38.040like I have been shocked to realize this week is that we have reached a stage in our economic
01:36:45.680history as a country where like you actually can't lie to people anymore because the costs
01:36:50.980of being alive have actually become too much. And as such, even if we agree at face value that,
01:36:55.840yeah, it's going to be super disruptive, it's going to be really hard to sell
01:36:58.380single payer health care system, you're never going to beat Republicans with the strategy that
01:37:04.360you're selling. That is the thing that really blows my mind is like, fine, you guys hate leftist
01:37:09.620ideas. I get it. Donald Trump is actually a great politician because he is promising and he is now
01:37:15.260carrying out revolution. He promised revolution and he is carrying out revolution. Do I support
01:37:22.340the revolution? Fucking no. But there's a reason why people voted for him. And it's because people
01:37:27.860wanted change. And it's so strange to me that these people are still like, oh, it's going to
01:37:33.840cause too much of an upset. I'm like, the candidate who has been beating you handedly for over a
01:37:38.640decade now has been campaigning on upset he's literally campaigning on on huge huge huge changes
01:37:47.620he's saying out loud at rallies everything is gonna change he's literally said to people you
01:37:52.880might suffer temporarily yeah it'll be worth it in the long run and you guys are still sitting
01:37:58.360with your hands on your fucking asses pretending that people can't be bought over with a promise
01:38:03.920of revolution the majority of americans by the way support universal health care yeah i know that
01:38:10.500universal health care and single payer are not technically the same thing like there would be a
01:38:14.720way to have universal health care without a single payer system but it's just worth mentioning that
01:38:19.380like that is a fucking popular idea and like to shut up political party that's like would never
01:38:25.880work quick cutaway to kirsten cinema just like sitting on a fucking 24 karat gold toilet because
01:38:32.080of all the fucking donations she's received from corporations to vote against anything.
01:50:53.820erroneously believing that their own views
01:50:55.920are based on an objective consultation of the evidence
01:50:58.580rather than a coherent ideological framework.
01:51:01.360This oversight is what makes liberals so dangerous.
01:51:04.220Their ideology is hidden and unacknowledged, yes,
01:51:07.200which means that it is hard overtly to challenge.
01:51:09.360You might think I'm overstating the hold liberalism has on Western elites.
01:51:14.380The narcissism of small differences means that the pages of our major newspapers are full of liberals griping at one another, but the constant buzz of their minor disputes only underscores the fact that they agree on most things.
01:51:26.120And the most important thing that they agree on is that things are, by and large, fine.
01:51:30.320If things aren't fine, it's because some bad guy is messing with a system that isn't broken.
01:51:34.740get rid of the bad guy restore normality hence the liberal refrain make politics boring again
01:51:40.860yes okay this is oh wow she's such a great writer this is really unlocking a feeling i have had in
01:51:47.440my brain but haven't really been able to put words to that feeling that like there are so many
01:51:51.660assumptions built in and we rarely challenge any of those assumptions so on the note of appealing
01:51:57.780to the center that you have to tack to the center you have to tack to the right to to get all these
01:52:02.280supposedly persuadable, middle-of-the-road voters that exist out there, and you want to avoid
01:52:08.320accusations of being too radical or being too progressive. Kara, how would you characterize
01:52:13.700the Democratic campaign positioning in the last election?
01:52:18.780Uh, I would not characterize it as radical.
01:52:22.860They had Harris campaigning with the Cheneys. Dick Cheney was one of the most consequential
01:52:29.120players in justifying a historically unpopular Iraq war, which ended up killing millions of
01:52:35.360Iraqis for effectively no reason. In August, she said that we were going to have, and I quote,
01:52:41.640the most lethal fighting force in the world. She reiterated her support for Israel, which by that
01:52:48.240point, there were already credible reports from The Lancet and others that the IDF had already
01:52:52.000killed over 100,000 Palestinians, a fact that Biden insiders have since admitted they were
01:52:56.780fully aware of. Yeah, it's worth reminding people there was a full year. They were in charge for
01:53:02.220the first full year of the invasion of Gaza. So this was not a small period of time.
01:53:07.280The Democrats by September had totally adopted the conservative framing that immigration is an
01:53:12.460issue that is predominantly defined by managing crime and chaos. And I would say to her credit
01:53:17.960and in fairness, many of the quotes that I found when I was looking back to feel like,
01:53:21.900what was she actually saying at this time? She did emphasize wanting the process to be humane
01:57:29.900All the gentlemen whom I have named want somehow to keep the profit system. Socialism means to abolish that system. Those who want to keep it will soon find that out of war or out of the fresh economic collapse inevitable when business prosperity is so spotty, so temporary, so insecure as it is today, will come the confusion to which capitalism's final answer must be the fascist dictator.
01:57:54.180In America, that dictator will probably not call himself fascist. He, like Mr. Roosevelt in his
01:58:00.260address to Congress, will thank God that we are not like other nations. But privately, he will
01:58:05.380rejoice in the weakness of our opposition to tyranny. Under the forms of democracy, we have
01:58:10.680not preserved liberty. It has not taken black shirts to make us docile. Given the crisis of
01:58:16.460war or economic collapse, we, unless we awake, will accept dictatorship by violence to perpetuate
01:58:22.300a while longer the class division of income. We shall acknowledge the religion of the totalitarian
01:58:27.940state and become hypnotized by the emotional appeal of a blind, jingoistic nationalism.
01:58:33.920Against this fascist peril and its Siamese twin, the menace of war, there is no protection in the
01:58:39.980New Deal, no protection in the Republican Party, less than no protection in the Liberty League.
01:58:45.700Who of them all is waging a real battle even for such civil liberties and such democratic rights
01:58:51.680are as ostensibly are possible in a bourgeois democracy. When Al Smith appeals to the Constitution,
01:58:58.140is he thinking of the liberties of the Bill of Rights, or is he thinking of the protection
01:59:01.880the Constitution has given to property? Damn. Something that you discussed in our capitalism
01:59:08.320episode that I really appreciated is an awareness of how slowly economic systems changed. Like,
01:59:13.360it took a good 500 years for kind of our, like, feudal serfdom period to transition over into
01:59:19.040capitalism. When I read this, I am struck by how hard it is to have a firm grasp on history when
01:59:26.420you are looking at it from, like, the anthill perspective of your own life. Because I can see
01:59:32.140300 years from now someone reading that speech and being like, and he was right, a mere 70 years
01:59:37.440later, this is what happened. And, like, we view those 70 years as so consequential and so much
01:59:42.720happened in them. But really, it's like, this is kind of a one-to-one. And, like, we slid down this
01:59:47.120hill, he predicted the hill, and now we're experiencing it. And it's going to be so
01:59:50.620condensed when people view this time period. And if you think about even the beginning of
01:59:54.520the neoliberal order that brought us to this point, that only happened like 40 years later.
02:00:00.700Yeah, very short time period. It stopped working again pretty quickly. So the Democratic Party
02:00:06.600has been trying to rerun the Bill Clinton playbook for the last 20 years. They want to
02:00:13.540throw progressives and their causes under the bus,
02:15:36.360and why everyone should just calm down
02:15:38.840and embrace the goodness of liberal democracy
02:15:42.200and all the freedoms and fruits therein.
02:15:45.340This guy totally would pay for some woman's plan B,
02:15:48.800like Venmo her for it after he left the apartment. That's the vibe I get from him. I'm reading as
02:15:53.240Chu, not this guy. Another way to put this is that all social movements are also intellectual
02:15:58.440movements. They both contribute to and rely on the ideological groundwater of society.
02:16:04.220But the panicking ruling class wasn't just interested in flattening the encampments or
02:16:08.780quelling the looters. It wanted to crush the ideas that these things represented.
02:16:13.800This is what James Baldwin was getting at when he spoke of the spiritual state of America.
02:16:17.920The political institutions of any nation, he wrote in The Fire Next Time, are always menaced and controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.
02:16:26.460What he meant, I think, was that every time a person contests or defends a political situation, they are also contesting or defending the intellectual terms on which that contest is conducted.
02:16:37.900You cannot fight without fighting about how you fight.
02:16:40.900That is why Williams cares so desperately
02:16:42.820about what the summer of 2020 made us think,
02:16:45.520even if the protests manifestly failed