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00:00:27.040Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Astra Taylor,
00:00:36.740a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. Elections matter, but they're not synonymous
00:00:42.940with democracy, right? Democracy has to really exceed that level of engagement. And when we do
00:00:47.240talk about them, we need to somehow figure out how to do it that acknowledges the sort of
00:00:51.480anti-democratic and contradictory nature of our electoral system. Astra is the director of three
00:00:57.680acclaimed philosophical documentaries, What is Democracy, Examine Life, and Zizek, all of which
00:01:05.200premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She's the author of the American Book
00:01:10.800Award winner, The People's Platform, Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, and her latest
00:01:17.900book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Named a new civil rights leader
00:01:24.080by the LA Times, she co-founded the Debt Collective, a groundbreaking membership organization
00:01:30.260that has won over a billion dollars of debt relief for poor and working people.
00:01:37.560Well, Astra, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to diving
00:01:43.060into conversation. So welcome. Thanks so much for having me. So Astra, in preparing for this
00:01:50.100interview, a question I kept coming back to is, what is it exactly that our society wants? Do we
00:01:57.200truly yearn for democracy? You know, our current model of governance feels like a relinquishment
00:02:02.720of our power. We want to elect a small group of individuals we deem qualified as a way to
00:02:07.780absolve ourselves from the burdens of democracy, from having to reckon with our history, the
00:02:12.920cycles of oppression and systemic injustice. So I'm curious, in your time reflecting on democracy,
00:02:20.600what have you observed about our collective desire? How do we orient people towards democracy
00:02:26.360and encourage each other to make a commitment to a somewhat messy and difficult collective endeavor?
00:02:33.180Yeah, that's a good and deep question to begin with. I mean, I'd almost want to back up a little
00:02:37.660bit and think about the word democracy itself, because I have to confess that that wasn't always
00:02:41.880a word that appealed to me in a deep way. I think even six or seven years ago, I would have been
00:02:48.340quite critical on first blush of the word democracy. I came of age in the aughts. I was
00:02:54.76021 when 9-11 happened and George W. Bush made it his mission to bring democracy to Afghanistan,
00:03:02.680to Iraq, you know, and it was a terrible, terrible war that has unleashed so much human suffering.
00:03:08.320I mean, suffering on a scale that's unimaginable when you think of the lives lost and also the forced migration that's resulted.
00:03:15.520So democracy was not a word that really moved me.
00:03:19.080I was moved by words like freedom and liberation, equality, revolution, socialism.
00:03:25.260You know, many other words seemed more trustworthy than the word democracy, which was so corrupted.
00:03:31.640And it was through my engagement with Occupy Wall Street, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the movements of 2011 that, you know, now I think in this moment we're in today, we're speaking June 2020.
00:03:44.160I mean, it's almost like 2011 kicked off this wave of social movement energy that hasn't been able to be totally suppressed.
00:03:51.280You know, we're still feeling the echoes and reverberations around the world.
00:03:55.820People started rising up and chanting that word.
00:08:18.920is that you think the people can be transformed, right?
00:08:22.660That we have the capacity to become more democratic.
00:08:25.660And I guess my democratic hope is that,
00:08:27.940you know, we get further along the path
00:08:29.820to a more equitable, sustainable, and just society, and then future generations go even
00:08:35.080further and look back on us and think, gosh, those people weren't democratic at all.
00:08:39.220Well, I'd like to explore our desire for leadership a little bit further in context
00:08:45.660of the pandemic and the technocratic future we seem to be on the precipice of.
00:08:51.360And based off your research and writing for the People's Platform, what do you predict will
00:08:56.140happen should we quietly relinquish our power to a technocratic system? How is the total
00:09:01.520integration of technology in our daily lives an inherent commercialization of our existence?
00:09:08.900Yeah. I mean, so maybe to define our terms again, what is technocracy? It's rule by technique or
00:09:15.780rule by experts. And I think it's always good to acknowledge what maybe was the initial
00:09:23.160positive impulse in something, right? So the idea is, well, if we could just have rule of experts
00:09:28.500or just rule of sort of neutral technique, then we could bypass some of the problems of democracy,
00:09:34.040right? The problem of the tyranny of the majority or unruly passions, mob rule, right? These are
00:09:39.880problems that happen when you have people making decisions together. The problem is that there's no
00:09:46.520perfect neutral technocrat, right? Expertise is never neutral. It's always invested. It always
00:09:52.580comes out of power relations. And, you know, and people often forget that even the term,
00:09:57.380the word technocracy and meritocracy are kind of, you know, in my view, similar, they're kind of
00:10:01.840twins. We forget that the concept of meritocracy actually began from a satire that a man named
00:10:08.260Michael Young wrote. He was a Labour Party organizer in the UK, and he wrote a satirical
00:10:14.900book as a warning. And it was a society outlining a society where those, the academic achievers
00:10:21.300ruled and they believed like that they deserve to rule compared to everyone else. He wasn't,
00:10:25.020he was not naming this system of meritocracy as though it was a good thing. He was warning
00:10:29.520against it. And yet we're in a society that's very sort of attached to that as a, you know,
00:10:36.640a conception of a fair society. So, you know, technocracy then also manifests, yeah, as you
00:10:44.120said, you know, in our technology, the idea that we're living in a world where so many of the
00:10:51.420tools we use, the platforms we use, the devices we use, are these interfaces that we, you know,
00:10:57.960as just regular users have very little control over that we don't understand are in fact made
00:11:02.300to be opaque and untransparent, you know, so that we can't really see the way they work or who
00:11:07.680they're serving. We don't understand the algorithms determining what actually shows up in our feed.
00:11:12.500and you know so we we end up ceding a lot of power to effectively to algorithms algorithms
00:11:18.920that are designed by people whose goal is to make profit and to shape our behavior in in ways that
00:11:24.840are beneficial to them so I think that's a very troubling scenario what I what I outlined in the
00:11:30.420people's platform so that was a book the people's platform came out in 2014 at a kind of apex of
00:11:38.540techno-utopianism. And there was a lot of talk then. It was very different than it is now. There
00:11:43.980was a lot of talk then about how social media was going to democratize everything and get rid of
00:11:48.120middlemen. And I never believed that. So I pointed out, well, no, social media actually isn't a
00:11:56.800middleman. All these platforms, be they Google, Amazon, Facebook, these are mediators, these are
00:12:03.300middlemen, and they're concentrating wealth in an absolutely egregious way. I mean, the internet,
00:12:09.820as it's designed, is this huge wealth extraction machine. Google sucks up wealth from around the
00:12:13.940world and concentrates it in one geographic location, mainly in Southern California in the0.80
00:12:20.000hands of a handful of white men. So I was making these observations that now seem very, they seemed0.82
00:12:26.800kind of edgy or cynical at the time, and now they're just commonplace. But my point was that
00:12:33.040The problem isn't so much the technology, it's the political economy that underlies them. It's the underlying business model. The fact is, the idea of having a search engine like Google that organizes knowledge and makes it accessible to people in their homes or wherever we are, in our cars, on walks, whenever we can look at our phones, that's a beautiful concept.
00:12:52.140But to keep itself afloat, Google has to engage in the most invasive forms of digital surveillance and advertising.
00:13:00.460I mean, Google is effectively an advertising company, right?
00:13:02.920It's not really in the business of knowledge sharing.
00:13:12.560And so it's those business models that are the core problem.
00:13:15.920And therefore, you can't disconnect technology from the from broader social and economic concerns.
00:13:22.880So, you know, I'm very concerned with the path we're on.
00:13:26.240I'm very concerned with the drive or just the power that this corporate technocracy has and the underlying motivations of these corporations that are so intimately entwined in our daily lives.
00:13:40.180But I think to solve the problem, we have to look beyond tech and think about the business models and think about what would it mean to make more of our digital lives truly public, you know, turn search engines into public utilities?
00:13:55.680What would it mean to make them into cooperatives, right?
00:13:57.980So why couldn't we have a ride-hailing service like Uber, but that is controlled by a municipality and run cooperatively, like a food co-op or a bike co-op, right?
00:14:08.140it's not that the idea of being able to hail a ride is so terrible. It's that it's happening
00:14:14.140under these extremely extractive, exploitative conditions. And so it's that kind of, I think
00:14:20.400right now we're in an interesting moment because people are so cynical about tech companies,
00:14:24.700but what we still need is that a sort of utopian spark or kind of ideas about how it could be
00:14:29.680redesigned to serve the public interest. The other thing I would say too, is not just
00:14:34.340taking things out of the private sector, but being, being willing to abolish certain types
00:14:41.000of technology. I mean, I think there are some forms of technology that shouldn't exist. Like
00:14:44.820in my opinion, we shouldn't extract fossil fuels, hydrocarbons, they should stay in the ground
00:14:49.220and we should use solar energy. It's like, we also shouldn't, there's lots of personal data
00:14:54.260that we shouldn't extract, you know, facial recognition technology that's being used by
00:14:59.140employers just to essentially turn human workers into robots. Like that should be abolished. It
00:15:03.740shouldn't exist. So there's lots of technology that should be democratized, socialized, made
00:15:08.740public, however you want to frame it. And then there's a lot of technology that just, we don't
00:15:12.660need if we want to have a better life. Yeah. Well, and Astrid, your book, Democracy May Not
00:15:21.560Exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. You write, quote, the problem stems, I believe,
00:15:27.560from the fact that democracy is something people rarely encounter in their everyday lives,
00:15:31.640certainly not during the media and celebrity-obsessed money-driven circus of national
00:15:37.000elections not at their jobs where they are often treated like replaceable cogs in a machine
00:15:42.880and have to keep their heads down not at their schools or colleges where they are encouraged to
00:15:48.000see themselves as consumers seeking a return on investment rather than as citizens preparing to
00:15:53.660participate in the common good, end quote. So I'd like to ask you, what does democracy feel
00:16:01.980and look like in our lived experience? And do you think actively participating democracy every day
00:16:09.280is enough to subvert the large scale corporatized systems that are running society into the ground?
00:16:14.700yeah I mean I think that that section that you read came out of my experience of making the film
00:16:24.260what is democracy and so these sister projects sort of had the same genesis right so I went out
00:16:30.200into the world and I talked to people and I asked strangers well what what is democracy what does
00:16:34.860it mean to you uh and then I edited the film and once I was really familiar with the the footage
00:16:40.940and maybe three quarters of the way through the filmmaking process, I began to write the book.0.99
00:16:46.780And what was striking to me, especially when talking to Americans, was how unable people
00:16:51.580were to articulate a robust definition of democracy. I mean, people would say democracy
00:16:56.700was freedom or elections, and then they would tell me that they didn't feel like their vote
00:17:01.700counted, but they didn't have very in-depth, let alone personal or passionate conceptions of
00:17:09.080democracy. Now, there are some people, there's exceptions to that, but they were people who
00:17:12.580tended to be involved in democratic projects. And whether, as I say in the thing, whether as
00:17:17.960activists or because they were involved in electoral politics or because they happen to
00:17:22.180work at a cooperative or something exceptional, but the average person. And instead of sort of
00:17:28.460saying, oh, well, this is just a sign that people don't care and are tuned out or maybe even too1.00
00:17:34.440stupid or disinterested to deserve democracy. I thought, well, this is a symptom of the fact1.00
00:17:39.540that we don't have a democratic society. You know, when do people really get to experience
00:17:44.840self-government? I mean, we have a system based in voter suppression in the most profound way.
00:17:51.980A functioning American election is an election of voter suppression. There is no reason that
00:17:57.860people should have to jump through hoops to register to vote, you know, that you can't vote
00:18:01.700effortlessly and safely through a digital channel. We have pretty advanced technologies. If that was
00:18:07.720a priority in this country, we could do it. There's no reason that election day isn't a
00:18:13.240federal holiday, right? There's all of these ways in which we make it so difficult for people to do
00:18:17.380this pathetic baseline of participation. And I just want to clarify and say that my definition
00:18:21.940of democracy is not just casting a ballot. But, you know, that minimum threshold is one that we
00:18:27.820are sabotaging actively in the way that our society is structured. So that's where I kind
00:18:34.460of came to this position of, I would say, you know, having empathy for people and saying,
00:18:39.500okay, well, this is, I'm not blaming people for their lack of a passionate response to the question
00:18:43.680of what is democracy. I'm looking at it as a consequence of the political structure that
00:18:50.640they're accustomed to. And so I do think it's very powerful to create more democratic spaces.
00:18:57.640And, you know, I saw that, for example, both in the film and the book, I visit this amazing cooperative factory.
00:19:05.000It's one of the remaining, it's one of the few remaining textile factories in North Carolina.
00:19:10.380Almost every other textile factory was shut down after the passage of NAFTA, when most companies took their factory work south of the border.
00:19:18.360It's run by Guatemalan immigrants, mostly people who fled the Civil War, which was a civil war that was precipitated by the involvement of the American government.
00:19:29.380So refugees, they are mostly indigenous in the factory, which didn't have that many workers.
00:19:37.240They spoke something like 20 or 30 indigenous dialects with Spanish as their common tongue.
00:19:42.180And they had a very deep sense of democracy.
00:19:46.300They ran their company in a cooperative way. There was no boss, no single leader. They shared
00:19:53.020responsibilities. They shared the profits. And so this was a place where I could show democracy
00:19:58.540in action and also try to express to the audience or my readers that democracy isn't something that
00:20:05.360just applies to government, to the state. In fact, if you go back a few hundred years,
00:20:09.340You know, the state wasn't democratic, right? People lived in aristocracies. People lived in, you know, if you were the ruling elite, if you were the royalty, you didn't care what the peasants thought. It wasn't a democracy. So people had to fight for the state to become democratized to the degree it is.
00:20:26.300And now that's the public realm. And now the private realm, in my opinion, is the next realm that needs to be democratized. Right. Why should we be subjected to a kind of authoritarian rule at the workplace? Your boss can tell you what you're allowed to say, what you have to wear, whether you can go to the bathroom, they can fire you and thereby, you know, therefore take away your health care and your livelihood.
00:20:46.200I mean, people have very few sort of civil liberties on the job. And I personally think that that's wrong. I think that's the next phase of, that's one of the next arenas of democratic struggle.
00:20:57.980You know, I think when we're thinking of huge social transformation, these little experiences do add up, right? I mean, one cooperative workplace in the American South isn't going to take down corporate capitalism or, you know, American liberal democracy. You know, in that sense, it's not the solution, but they can be profound when added up.
00:21:18.800So for example, this one factory is working on a larger project that's called the Industrial Commons. So what if you start aggregating the power of these industrial cooperatives, right, to build them into a force, to start articulating the fact that, hey, if you want these good, well-paying factory jobs to be in your community, well, actually, you need to run your businesses in a different way.
00:21:39.060And also, you know, the immigrants who you're blaming for taking your jobs are actually the ones creating the good jobs, the only good jobs left in your community.
00:21:47.400And, you know, I think if we want to change the bigger society, we have to have a much more articulated conception of power and the power struggle and the class struggle that lies ahead.
00:21:59.060This is why, you know, I think investing in reviving, revitalizing the labor movement is really crucial.
00:22:05.760It's why paying attention to the campaigns across the country right now to challenge establishment Democrats and sort of use the primary system to take over the Democratic Party are really important.
00:22:17.380I just read a piece that went up today for The New Yorker about all of these socialists who are managing to unseat incumbents in the Democratic Party and down ballot races.
00:22:27.540We have to look and see, well, where is their power that regular people are leaving on the table?
00:22:31.660How can they get organized and wield it?
00:22:33.980And how can we find solidarity and common interests?
00:22:51.500I mean, that doesn't mean that that's the only method for change.
00:22:55.940I think what we need to do is sort of everything.
00:22:58.020We need all kinds of unions, labor unions, tenant unions, student unions.
00:23:03.160We need social movements, movements against police brutality, movements for immigrant rights.
00:23:09.040You know, it's only when we do all of these seemingly little things, these individual actions, and then aggregate them that we'll have a chance of taking on these much bigger, more entrenched forces.
00:23:33.160You keep telling me to climb this ladder
00:24:55.640what you think democracy means or what it needs to look like under changing climate regimes and
00:25:01.620ecological collapse. Do acute ecological limits or even just the mentality of possible dystopian
00:25:07.980futures somewhat hinder our ability to think about democracy? The climate crisis is the crisis
00:25:14.660of our time because it's the crisis that limits the amount of time we have, right? So we have
00:25:20.240very few years to address this. You know, it's common actually to kind of frame the climate
00:25:26.360crisis as actually a problem of democracy, right? To say, well, the problem is all of these
00:25:31.140individuals and their excessive freedoms over consuming. And I'm quite resistant to that
00:25:38.480view because, you know, when we're trying to address something like the consumption of fossil
00:25:46.360fuels or the greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, these are things that we can't adequately solve
00:25:51.340as individuals because what we need social solutions, we need infrastructure, we need
00:25:55.640green infrastructure, we need green housing, we need to retrofit our existing buildings, and we
00:26:03.820need to revamp our food chains. Like this isn't something that we can do sort of one by one. And
00:26:10.960if you look at people's attitudes, if you look at the attitudes of the public, you know, I quote
00:26:18.620some of these statistics in the book, I mean, a majority of people would sacrifice economic growth
00:26:22.580for environmental sustainability. So yeah, which is remarkable to me, given the decades and decades
00:26:29.600of misinformation, and the sort of war on environmentalists that fossil fuel companies
00:26:35.520have been waging right so even even despite all of this people the average american is still
00:26:42.720you know concerned about ecology um so you know i think what we have that what we have is really a
00:26:50.200problem uh the problem of anti-democracy the problem of uh greedy minority the minority that
00:26:55.980is invested in environmentally destructive industries uh that has sort of captured our
00:27:02.560political system and has trapped us in this destructive regime. And then once we, you know,
00:27:13.400I think with that understanding, then that kind of clarifies that the solution is a democratic
00:27:20.700solution, right? I mean, we want a solution where the majority of people, and I think this is a,
00:27:27.280and here I mean people beyond Americans, beyond the country that we're speaking in right now,
00:27:32.560you know the majority of people on the earth are not responsible for the excessive emissions
00:27:36.260that are causing climate crisis you know a minority of affluent people living in
00:27:41.240rich countries have caused this crisis and so i think you know ultimately what we want is a
00:27:45.220democratic solution where masses of people don't have to pay for the mistakes of a minority in the
00:27:52.640book you hinted at this question of time and in the book i try to go beyond that and think about
00:27:57.380the fact that part of what is holding us back is that we have to challenge ourselves to think about
00:28:03.720democracy and our democratic responsibilities beyond the present. And we have to have,
00:28:09.960so it's like, what is the time scale of democracy? So in the book, you know, one chapter is about
00:28:15.560democracy and scale, you know, like we live in a global warming is global. We live in a society
00:28:20.760where what happens on the other side of the earth affects us. So how do we, how do we reconcile
00:28:25.220that fact to the fact that democracy often works better in a kind of smaller, more intimate
00:28:30.480context, right? It's really hard to imagine making decisions with 7 billion people. So there's a
00:28:35.640tension there that we just have to grapple with. And I think there's a temporal tension to democracy
00:28:40.080too. And for me, it's really embodied by the American constitution. So what we have is this
00:28:44.340constitution and the bill of rights that were written by these white guys who were slave owners,0.81
00:28:50.260mostly with very different values. And they wrote down these laws and these principles.0.78
00:28:56.540And now we, we, you know, are stuck with them. Right. I mean, it's like the second amendment to
00:29:02.420me is the sort of dead hand of the slave owning class constraining the present. So, you know,1.00
00:29:08.040the rules, so there's this group of dead men who have an enormous vote in our democracy today.
00:29:13.360And then all of the future generations, not just for me of human beings, but, you know,0.89
00:29:18.160future generations of all non-human life too, right? Life on this planet that basically don't,0.80
00:29:22.820they don't have a say. They're not factored into our democratic calculus. And this is, you know,
00:29:29.200other societies, other forms of democratic self-government have addressed this. A lot of
00:29:35.340indigenous societies in the Americas mandated their leaders to think in terms of generations0.89
00:29:43.220yet to come um and so this is i think a major failing of our sort of you know political
00:29:48.900philosophical tradition and so i think we need to expand this idea of democracy the people
00:29:54.120you know in a system that's for the many and not the few to include future generations
00:29:58.860as well and ultimately i think people in the present would benefit from that because we would
00:30:04.000be acting in a more sustainable um way in a more generous way towards people who aren't here
00:30:09.560right now. But it's certainly one of the main, it's a, it's a pitfall and it can seem a bit
00:30:15.040abstract or philosophical, but I think it has huge policy implications, right? That especially
00:30:21.180when you couple the way we conceive of democracy in the sort of present sense with capitalism,
00:30:26.900which is all about short-term profits and also, and has this tendency, what economists say is
00:30:32.800it discounts the future, right? So for sort of typical economists, they're going to say,
00:30:38.080well you know it's better to have economic growth because then solving we're going to be richer in
00:30:43.680the future and so solving our problems will be cheaper right so let's burn all this carbon now
00:30:48.300because in the future we're going to be so rich we're going to make some robots to fix it
00:30:52.800and it's literally called discounting the future they mean it in terms of price but it's actually
00:30:58.020like a moral discounting it's like it doesn't matter and um and so i think when you have this
00:31:03.720huge hole in our political philosophy the fact that we can't account for people who are not yet
00:31:09.920with us um and again my people is like not just human people because that's my you know ethical
00:31:16.880framework and then you combine that with uh an economic system that cares about nothing else but
00:31:23.340short-term returns on investment then you have you know you have a a suicidal system because
00:31:29.140its sense of time is completely off. Yes to what you just said. And I'd now like to talk about
00:31:40.520voting, which is a topic that we could truly spend the entire hour on. But with an election
00:31:46.600year, it's on everyone's mind and people hold a lot of contested opinions. It's been shown that
00:31:52.680in democracies around the world, the rate of people voting is decreasing. In recent U.S.
00:31:58.080general elections, about 60% of the eligible population votes. We could certainly speak about
00:32:03.960how the state benefits off of us not voting, you know, what mass engagement could accomplish or
00:32:09.180explore why we don't have compulsory voting. But what's on my mind is what happened in Georgia this
00:32:15.700past month, where state ordered voting machines were missing or malfunctioned, setting a really
00:32:21.580dangerous precedent for this year's presidential election in a state that might emerge as a
00:32:26.380battleground and has two competitive Senate elections. So I'd like to ask you, why is it
00:32:32.480important to vote? And how do we ensure that states don't just get away with further disenfranchisement?
00:32:41.320Yeah, the example of Georgia really breaks my heart because I'm a Georgian. So I'm a Canadian
00:32:45.960who grew up in Athens, Georgia. Athens, Georgia is the sort of famous college town in the South.
00:32:52.680And, you know, I think it's someone so, you know, I'm still so connected to that community. That's my definition of home. That's my hometown and my family is very embedded there. And Georgia has so much potential, right? It has so much potential to become a different state.
00:33:10.600And the South has always had that. I mean, if you go back to the history of Reconstruction, right, after the Civil War, it's astonishing to look at the statistics in terms of how many Black representatives were elected to office.0.94
00:33:28.840The fusion coalition, right now I'm speaking from North Carolina, the fusion coalition that was formed in North Carolina, which was essentially a sort of multiracial populist movement. So, you know, a movement for economic justice, for public education, for an alliance between working people, black and white. And these forms of social progress were violently suppressed. I mean, there's actually a violent coup.
00:33:51.900It was one of the only true coups, maybe even the only coup in the United States where a government was literally overthrown in North Carolina.
00:34:00.740And then, you know, the emergence of Jim Crow, of all of these legal but completely immoral methods of voter suppression.0.55
00:34:08.800And we see the same tricks being deployed today.
00:34:13.480I mean, this gets back to what I was saying.
00:34:14.720It's like even a functioning American election is an election based on voter suppression.
00:34:18.880And then in Georgia, you see the kind of things you're outlining, which is just outrageous
00:34:45.500Like, you know, why are you having people talk about being poor and needing health care or whatever? Right. Or being afraid.
00:34:51.400And then he says, and don't you know, people just need to vote. And, you know, it's like the sanctimony to be sanctimonious about voting is to deny all of the ways in which our system is anti-democratic, has been has been set up to deny people the right to vote.
00:35:07.440We don't even really have the right to vote, right? The idea of one person, one vote is not an American idea. It was articulated in the United States by John Lewis at the famous March on Washington, and he called it the African cry because it was the cry of South African anti-apartheid activists. They're Marxists. That is an idea, one person, one vote, and it was one man, one vote was the phrase they used then, even in the 60s, that came from the labor movement, that came from Marxist anti-racist radicals.
00:35:35.360not an American idea. So let's not be sanctimonious. Let's understand that to embody
00:35:42.240that idea, we'd have to seriously revolutionize our society. And so for me, I guess someone who
00:35:47.840wants to build left power, voting does matter. So that's why I wrote this piece about these
00:35:53.320primary campaigns that I mentioned. And there are campaigns that are really pivotal. I think
00:35:58.620sometimes those are presidential campaigns. I think this is a really crucial year. I would do
00:36:03.020anything. I would cut off a limb to have a different candidate running as the Democrat.
00:36:07.900But, you know, also most elections in the United States are not competitive. We don't really have
00:36:14.200a choice between the parties. So the elections that are competitive in the United States are
00:36:18.340primary elections because our society is so gerrymandered that typically whoever has the
00:36:24.380nomination from the party that kind of controls that district, right? So we know that you live
00:36:28.980in a Democratic district or Republican district, right?
00:36:51.260and insist on things like Medicare for All
00:36:53.420and a Green New Deal and defunding the police,
00:36:56.420reallocating money that is going towards violence and punishment towards the things that we need to
00:37:02.920survive and thrive. So I guess I just want us to think, you know, about the uneven geography of
00:37:07.520our electoral system and to think strategically about where it is that we could have a real
00:37:12.180transformative effect. I mean, voting in the presidential election should take like very
00:37:15.920little brainpower. I mean, depending on where you live, it might be hard to do because they
00:37:19.860make voting hard. And there might be shenanigans like there were in Georgia that then we need to
00:37:24.220really mobilize against and be outraged about. But there are other electoral campaigns that can
00:37:30.600be really pivotal. I mean, right now we're in a moment where people are talking about policing and
00:37:35.140incarceration. That's mostly state and local budgets, right? So I think that's a powerful
00:37:41.180example of why who's in charge in your municipality and at your state really matters.
00:37:44.980And we saw that with coronavirus too, right? That suddenly who was your governor mattered a lot. So
00:37:49.900You know, I think elections matter, but they're not synonymous with democracy, right? Democracy has to really exceed that level of engagement. And when we do talk about them, we need to somehow figure out how to do it that acknowledges the sort of anti-democratic and contradictory nature of our electoral system, instead of reinforcing this sort of romance of the right to vote, which we've never had.
00:38:12.120Yeah, it seems like democracy is suffering globally, with total declines in political
00:38:18.280rights and civil liberties around the world. And I believe the Democracy Index rated the
00:38:23.040United States as a flawed democracy, not a full one. And I'm particularly interested in
00:38:28.860discussing the decline of democracy amidst period of anxiety, insecurity, and isolation in terms of
00:38:36.040the political ramifications of our society being pushed into these periods of instability.
00:38:42.120What is the connection between dominant cultural despair and the rise of tyranny or fascism?
00:39:14.320So, you know, the famous March on Washington, I just mentioned, that was the early 60s.
00:39:18.280I mean, when was America a truly inclusive, multiracial democracy, not just in terms of
00:39:26.240political rights, but economic rights?
00:39:28.520I mean, I think for me, fundamentally, democracy is incompatible with capitalism, because capitalism
00:39:33.860is an economic system that concentrates wealth and power.
00:39:36.240So we have 600 billionaires in the world. And thanks to COVID-19, some of those billionaires are now on track to become trillionaires. And when you have that astonishingly outsized wealth, you can buy political power.
00:39:49.480So study after study shows that regular people in America have basically no say over public policy because we don't own the political class. And people are trying to break that now by campaigning and running on small dollar donations and trying to penalize politicians for taking corporate money and all that. And that's great, but great in a serious way.
00:40:09.520I mean that. Like, that's the direction we need to go in. But on a deeper level, I think the
00:40:13.540question is, you know, can we ever have a democracy with this economic regime? And, you know, I would
00:40:20.260say not. I think that's why the task ahead is a dual task of both democratizing the economy
00:40:24.680and democratizing our political system. That means we need to think about democratic socialism or
00:40:30.420think about some other way of describing the world we want to live in. So, you know, to your
00:40:38.840point, I think, yes, we've never had democracy, but there does seem to be something, whether it's
00:40:44.240a decline or something else, like something terrible is happening. We're seeing the rise
00:40:47.540of these authoritarian leaders. We're seeing people's despair be translated into a support
00:40:53.000for despots and for people basically seeming like they don't want to be part of the democratic
00:41:02.000project, right? And that's really, I think, you know, it's, I don't know, I don't know where it
00:41:08.500comes from, or what the roots of those impulses are. But I think certainly, you know, I am of
00:41:15.700the opinion that various forms of inequality are contributing to it. I mean, it's everything is
00:41:21.960contradictory, right? So on the one hand, you go like, wow, this is a moment of incredible
00:41:26.240downward mobility. And that makes people really anxious. Yeah. And for some people, it makes them
00:41:31.420want to basically build a wall, right? To protect what's theirs, to blame people below them,
00:41:37.700to scapegoat. And for others, downward mobility causes them to have empathy, right? And to say,
00:41:44.840okay, well, I guess we're all in this together. And let's have solidarity and let's mobilize
00:41:50.560and let's not blame the people who are worse off, but look at the people who are hoarding
00:41:54.580wealth at the top. I mean, despair can have different consequences depending, I think,
00:41:59.420on individual human impulses, but also what coalitions are organized to channel it. And those
00:42:05.460coalitions, I think, are really pivotal. And that's why the right wing in the US has spent
00:42:10.020the last 50 years just attacking unions and literally making solidarity illegal, right? I
00:42:15.420mean, solidarity strikes are illegal in this country. So I don't know, to me, the thing we
00:42:20.720have to do is like, how can we build organizations to re-channel despair, right? To transform anxiety
00:42:27.360and shame into activism and solidarity, right?
00:43:27.360Well, Astra, I'd like to talk about the presidential election specifically and what you would say to those who are reckoning with the importance of ensuring Trump is a one-term president while also being completely disenchanted with Biden as a guiding figure and not wanting to legitimize or further a very harmful system.
00:43:51.860Yeah. Yeah. I mean, God, you know, I don't like Joe Biden. I like Trump even less. I mean, I have no illusions about Democrats. I mean, you know, my organizing before Trump was focused on fighting the Obama administration. Right.
00:44:07.060I mean, if we look at the legacy of 2008, the Obama-Biden administration completely
00:44:11.480mishandled the financial crisis, left 9 million homeowners foreclosed upon, totally screwed
00:44:20.720But, you know, you don't get to choose who your enemies are.
00:44:23.760And I think that four more years of Trump and emboldening the far right wing would be
00:44:28.520catastrophic on a much more profound level.
00:44:31.760So I think if you are living somewhere, you know, and it's a swing state.
00:44:36.360I mean, to me, it's like, yeah, it's clear what way you should vote. And then we have to be ready to mobilize like hell against the Democrats. I mean, in a way, I don't know, one way of thinking about it is like, you know, vote for the enemy you'd rather have.
00:44:48.900And so I know, to me, it was incredibly frustrating, right, that the Democrats squandered the fact that Obama had every, you know, had briefly control over all branches of government.
00:45:00.400But we managed to make a bit of progress under that administration by just relentlessly battling them, whereas we have struggled so hard for the last few years to just, this is, again, just focused on my work around indebtedness and student debt.
00:45:14.300we've had to fight so hard against Betsy like I don't want to fight Betsy DeVos for another four
00:45:18.800years that woman is evil and so that's the choice we have I mean it's a to me it's just again it's
00:45:25.640one of these things like this is one of those things that doesn't take it shouldn't take that
00:45:29.580much time and people people really go back and forth over it and I'm like to me I'm going to
00:45:35.820put my brain power and my organizing power into other things right like that's not the big dilemma
00:45:40.400It's how do we, and here I mean we as the left, we as people who want deep transformative change, we as people who are anti-capitalists or socialists, we need to work on building power, building membership organizations, figuring out where we actually have leverage, figuring out where we can disrupt business as usual.
00:46:04.200Like these are the things that need our attention and creativity and energy.
00:46:09.060So I think, you know, there are rules of the game and we're not in control of those right
00:46:13.700And the rules, you know, the rules suck.0.84
00:46:15.940We're in a political system that enshrines minority rule, whether that's the electoral0.90
00:46:20.680college, whether that's the way the Senate works, right?
00:46:24.440So each state gets two seats, no matter what the population of the state.
00:46:28.280So therefore your vote counts for a lot more if you're in Wyoming than California, because
00:46:31.940Wyoming has no people in comparison, the way our districts are gerrymandered. I mean, it's not
00:46:38.700democracy. And so that's where, you know, we vote, vote and exercise what little democratic
00:46:44.940way we have and then figure out how to build power with the transformative long-term strategic
00:46:49.660agenda. That's my view. And I just think we kind of, we pay too much attention to voting. And I
00:46:54.680feel like part of it for me is that this will actually be the first presidential election I've
00:46:58.340ever voted in because I'm Canadian. And I finally claimed my American citizenship, which I had never
00:47:03.280done before. I'm actually an American from birth, but in a complicated way. So I am a natural born
00:47:09.660citizen, but I didn't know it. And so it's very complicated. But anyway, so this is the first time
00:47:15.080that I will be allowed to vote. And I wish I was voting for Bernie Sanders. I'll just say it.
00:47:22.440But, you know, I think because I'm such a civically minded person, but I knew I couldn't
00:47:26.780cast a ballot that for me, democracy has always exceeded the electoral realm. You know, it was
00:47:31.120just like, okay, I'm not a citizen, but I'm still going to fight and work for other things I care
00:47:35.860about. You know, and I think that's basically how I will continue to live. You know, I've got my
00:47:39.780absentee ballot and I'm going to, I'm going to send it in, but I'm not going to spend my days
00:47:44.260fighting with people about whether or not to vote for Biden on the internet. Right. Well, you know,
00:47:49.920to be honest, I'm also worried that if we do successfully elect Biden, we'll never open
00:47:55.040ourselves to conversations that recognize Trump not as an anomaly, but as a byproduct of a very
00:47:59.960unique brand of American fascism. Because it's still there. I mean, whether Trump wins or not.
00:48:06.080I'm not sure that Trump winning the election again would cause that epiphany either. I mean,
00:48:10.020because I think one thing Trump did was, you know, his victory allowed people to say,
00:48:15.380this is so anomalous, right? You know, this isn't us. Our democracy is being destroyed,
00:48:21.040right? Whereas my thing was like, well, hold on. This is actually rather predictable. I mean,
00:48:24.000you know, George Washington was an incredible racist real estate speculator, right? I mean,0.54
00:48:28.140Trump is so American. And, you know, our democracy was in decline before he was elected,
00:48:34.600right? I mean, he's an acceleration of a much longer trend. And he's a continuation on that
00:48:42.540trajectory. I think one benefit that stems from having Democrats in an office and having Democrats
00:48:48.320be our opposition is that we actually better see how the problems are structural, right? It's not
00:48:53.800just the problem of the exceptionally bad president. Because when you have someone like
00:48:58.040Barack Obama in office, then, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that it was actually
00:49:03.260under him that people started to turn towards socialism, right? And this generation sort of
00:49:08.660started to break away from the kind of liberal status quo, because it's sort of this thing like,
00:49:15.640okay, wow, you know, yeah, the Democrats can't save us. Something's wrong with the system.
00:49:19.760instead of the situation we get with, you know, a Republican or Trump, where a lot of people just
00:49:26.220want to go back to the big D Democratic Party status quo. I mean, I just wrote another piece
00:49:31.560about state budgets for The Intercept. And, you know, states are about to push enormous austerity
00:49:38.200on their populations, and they're going to blame the COVID crisis for that and decimated tax
00:49:44.820revenues. But, you know, the problem is that they're also, you know, not willing to tax people
00:49:50.620who have wealth. They're not willing to tax the rich, tax corporations. They'd rather close the
00:49:54.640budget gaps on the backs of poor and working and disproportionately black and brown people.0.92
00:49:58.540And in countless states, you know, the obstacle to a just response to the economic crisis we're
00:50:04.800facing, the obstacle is Democrats, right? It's, you know, it's like Democrats control every branch
00:50:10.200government. Like look at Cuomo. He, you know, refuses to raise taxes on the rich and instead
00:50:15.680is cutting Medicaid and rolling back cash bail reforms and all of this. So, you know, I think
00:50:19.860that's clarifying to have bad Democrats in office because it shows the limits of the limits of their
00:50:26.980politics. And instead of getting in a situation where what we're fighting, what many people want
00:50:34.120is just for them to be elected. Right. Yeah. That's not very hopeful, but that is an interesting
00:50:39.600angle and yeah i want to now talk a little bit about the protests that are steadily transpiring
00:50:45.340across the nation and what they're revealing about our public spaces and protesting under an
00:50:51.340inherently violent administration and the potential for active civil life as well as an antidote to
00:50:58.660what we might have assumed would be a period of severe political disconnection and isolation
00:51:03.280you know we're witnessing a mass reckoning in which americans are being forced to contend with
00:51:08.320racism, far-right extremism, militarism, surveillance, poverty, and discriminatory
00:51:13.540practices. And the timing of this has been incredibly interesting as well. So how do you
00:51:19.840see this moment shaping democracy? And can these moments of collapse and renewal be entry points
00:51:26.640for democracy? I mean, I think we're already seeing this moment be an entry point for democracy,
00:51:34.060I find this moment so remarkable that we're seeing the largest outpouring of civil rights protests, anti-white supremacy, anti-racism protests that this country's ever seen.
00:51:51.540I mean, the scale, I mean, especially beyond this country, look at the actions that have been happening in solidarity.
00:51:57.900You know, I've seen the most beautiful images from France, Japan, New Zealand, right?
00:52:05.480I mean, it's just, it's, yeah, it's this global moment.
00:52:07.980And I think it's a profound teaching moment.
00:52:10.640I mean, even for me, I'm working on another essay.
00:52:13.320And this moment has pushed me to think so much more deeply about the role of racism.
00:52:18.020I'm looking, I'm looking at the crisis right now in the university system.
00:52:22.200And, I mean, even how I'm being challenged to think more deeply about the role of anti-Blackness in destroying or subverting the expansion of truly public, free higher education in this country.
00:52:42.140So I think that the conversation that's just being sparked is really remarkable. And another thing that's been striking me is that it's not following the model that a lot of experts thought. So there was a kind of thinking that, oh, public opinion will react against this white public opinion, right?
00:53:00.980And what we're seeing actually is a sudden, incredible spike of support for the protesters and concern about the issues they're raising, a kind of realization that they're right and it's undeniable.0.74
00:53:13.540And so that's, I think that's hugely helpful.
00:53:16.220And, you know, I don't know what confluence of things led to that.
00:53:20.080I mean, is it that, you know, maybe it is partly having this, the Trump administration and the fear that inspires having an economic crisis and the sense of, you know, sort of larger vulnerability people are experiencing.
00:53:36.620Maybe it's partly the role of the Internet and the fact that people can circulate images and messages without a handful of channels, you know, dictating what gets seen or the framing of it.
00:53:46.320But certainly something really remarkable is happening.
00:53:49.100And, you know, I think what also is encouraging to me as someone who thinks a lot about economics and finances, that this call that, you know, was not the call of, it was not the sort of primary slogan of Black Lives Matter in 2014 and 15, but the call to defund the police, which is an invitation to think about where public money, where our money is spent, where it goes, what's valued in our society, what gets resourced and what doesn't.
00:54:15.980in this moment of, you know, looming economic collapse, right? And I think that the way that
00:54:23.920it's weaving together attention to racial injustice and also economic injustice is just
00:54:29.200so incredibly powerful. So, you know, it's, it is a, it's a, it's a source of, of intense hope.
00:54:35.520And it's a reminder that, yeah, you know, people there's, you know, we don't know, we don't know
00:54:40.480if these forces, like we were talking earlier about, you know, of increasing inequality,
00:54:47.640precarity, these things aren't predictable. Like, yeah, they can make some people more mean-spirited
00:54:52.760and reactionary, but look at what's happening right now in the United States of America.
00:54:59.020It seems to be going in the opposite direction. So it's kind of incredible. I'm hesitant to make
00:55:03.940any predictions because I feel like one thing the last few months has been taught is that we don't0.98
00:55:08.920know what the fuck is going to happen next. So, but man, you know, it's like, this is why I think0.94
00:55:17.100to me, you look at, I look at people in the streets and this is, you know, this is like why
00:55:22.880I believe in democracy. Most people want to be good. They want to live in a fair place. You know,
00:55:28.420they don't want to live in a fucking violent, racist, you know, world where other people suffer0.99
00:55:36.760and that, you know, their little scrap of security only comes at the expense of somebody else0.99
00:55:41.800being exploited and abused. Like, you know, I don't think, I think people on the whole don't
00:55:47.400want that and they're willing to go out into these streets and, you know, and many people are risking
00:55:52.360their lives by doing so. I interviewed the other day, Cori Bush, who's running for Congress in
00:55:57.600Missouri. She was one of the organizers of the Ferguson protests, you know, six years ago. And0.94
00:56:02.460she was like, you know, yeah, you can die in these streets. You could die of COVID. You can get shot
00:56:06.700by a cop. And yet all of these people who have been traumatized and re-traumatized are out there
00:56:11.800and saying, you know, we've had enough. Like we want something else. So it's really encouraging
00:56:17.240beyond words. I don't have, I don't actually know how to express how much heart it's given me these
00:56:22.740last few weeks. I feel the same way. Astra, you co-founded the Debt Collective, which grew out of
00:56:31.360your experience at Occupy and powerfully reframes our debt as a collective tool to be leveraged
00:56:37.200against private collectors and government agencies. And society today seems to be much more class
00:56:44.260conscious, no doubt because debt is much more pervasive, yet I was still surprised to learn
00:56:51.000that the average American dies with roughly $62,000 in debt. So can you talk about how exactly
00:56:58.780it is that our debt, which is so often accrued in the name of basic survival, is becoming