Unraveling the Intricacies of Irish Politics: A Global Perspective with Nicholas Kiersey

Ever wondered how the political landscape of Ireland shapes its global presence? Get ready to unravel the complexities of Irish politics with our guest, Professor Nicholas Kiersey, an acclaimed expert on the matter. We kick off our conversation with a fresh perspective on the recent events in Ireland, the seismic shift in public consciousness during the 2008 economic crisis, and its aftermath. Together, we analyze the cultural influences and the perceptions of economic virtue in Ireland, and how these have been shaped by historical and contemporary events. 

In the throes of our discussion, we navigate through the influence of the Irish Labour Party, its alignment with the Brahmin left, and how neoliberalism has altered the political scene in Ireland. We draw parallels with center-left parties across Europe and the Americas, examining Brexit's ripple effect on Ireland's relationship with the EU, and the unique role Irish immigrants play in East Asia's teaching realm. We also grapple with the challenges faced by the left, the absence of a parallel economy in Ireland, and the broader implications of these on the global stage. 

As we wrap up, our discourse takes a fascinating turn towards the Occupy movement in Ireland, with riveting insights from guest speaker Occupy IR Theory. We dissect the current state of global affairs, the war, and the use of RICO charges. What's more, we delve into the evolving Dublin cityscape, the generational shift, class politics, the housing crisis, and the transformation of Sinn Fein, all painting a comprehensive picture of Irish politics. Join us for this riveting exploration that promises an in-depth understanding of Irish politics and its global implications. You wouldn't want to miss it!

Nicholas Kiersey is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research addresses austerity, biopolitics, and the crises of the neoliberal capitalist state. He is currently working on a book about socialist governmentality, and the cultural political economy of the end of capitalism.

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:34

Hello, welcome to VARMVlog, and today I am talking to Professor Nicholas Kiersey, professor of Political Science at University of Texas, rio Grande Valley.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:49

Good evening.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51

Good evening. Today we're talking about a lot of things. It's going to be a little bit of socialism, a little bit of politics of Ireland, a little bit of Shinai Dohkana and actually I wanted to talk about Shinai Dohkana's recent death, seemingly putting the Emerald Isles politics back into the American consciousness. Because it seems to me and we were talking about this off air a little bit that since the failure of Corbinism and the fact that there haven't been troubles in you know a decade and you know the capital T, we haven't given a shit about Ireland.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:35

Yeah, it's an interesting point, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39

And so, which you know, conard Dying. There was recently, you know, kind of discussions about that again and about, I guess the other thing is, you know, the politics of Northern Ireland, with Shin Fane having some dominance parliamentarily, but you know these things are, I think the politics of contemporary Ireland are pretty removed from the US consciousness.

Nicholas Kiersey : 3:09

That's an interesting sort of question implicit in that already right about like well, why is what's going on in the US left right now that it can't really focus on a sort of a more global left?

C. Derick Varn: 3:22

movement. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like we can't walk in true bubblegum at the same time. A lot of the time, or when we focus on the global left, it's like in these and I guess maybe part of this is in nature the US state, so we must be somewhat forgiving, but it's on like grand geopolitical strategy issues between like multi-polarity or gene polarity, and not actually on the content of what's going on in a lot of these countries. So I wanted to ask you what is going on in contemporary Ireland right now?

Nicholas Kiersey : 3:59

um, I mean it's a tricky one. First of all, I should explain for your viewers and listeners. While I am Irish born and raised and I do still spend a good bit of time there a couple of times a year I'm over, maybe sometimes more depending on the circumstances I've been living in the United States for about 23 years now, and so you know I've been in a sense, more tuned to American politics than Irish politics, and academically I do write about Irish politics and have some pieces over the years focusing on various aspects of Irish culture and specifically cultural receptions of political economy. So that's kind of. My main thing is I'm sort of interested in how Irish you know version of Dragonstone or you know what Americans call Shark Tank you know, I'm kind of interested in questions of like how these shows and kind of cultural products represent the idea of economic virtue for one of a better term, and I'm interested in them as a kind of a form of pedagogy for how Irish citizens are sort of expected to behave and respond to the idea of crisis in the economy, which has been endemic since 2008. So all that is a sort of a rounded by way of explaining to listeners and viewers how I kind of my initial kind of like go to intuition as I seek to respond to your question. You know, what's going on in Ireland right now is that the country is sort of going through a transitional period.

Nicholas Kiersey : 5:53

I think when I first started to look at the Irish cultural scene in the years especially between 2008 and 2014, there was already, I think, a major shift in consciousness going on. Right in the year of 2008, which I remember very well because it was the year my sister got married. Apart from other things, there was in that fall a sort of an ominous sense as Lehman Brothers collapsed, that you know, maybe things were not looking good in the Irish economy as well. That year and over the next year and a half two years, the government began to articulate to the people that there would have to be some serious bell tightening, and I suppose sort of my opening kind of fuselage here would be just simply to lay out the significance of the shift in consciousness that I'm talking about, because in that 2008 to 2010, 2011 timeframe, which are the years of the Troika the European Union, the IMF and basically Germany did strongly sort of step into the Irish economic scene and required the imposition of austerity, for want of a better term. The really interesting puzzle that I think we have to contend with at this time frame is the fact that Irish people were so willing to absorb the moral strictures of the IMF and the European Central Bank.

Nicholas Kiersey : 7:50

At this time there was a strong sense, I think, in the collective consciousness, that in fact indeed Irish people had partied too much in the sort of Celtic tiger years, as they were known. Of course people will maybe be familiar with the designation tiger for a country right, because if you think about the 1990s and the rise of the so-called Asian tigers, you got a sense of this idea of maybe a small country, an outlier, that was never really supposed to make it right but somehow did, became economically prosperous and economically successful as a result of maybe planned economic development in our corporate partnerships. This kind of thing very, very much characteristic of the Asian phenomenon. And indeed you find that same model in Ireland. There was a generous dash of neoliberalism thrown in, of course, but you can't be gained said that without state involvement and special measures being introduced to lead educational policy in the 50s and 60s to lead the country out of a second world status and into a stage of advanced readiness to catch the wind of the economic boom of the sort of late 80s and into the 90s, ireland simply wouldn't have been able to achieve what it did. So the cliché of the time was that the Irish had partied too much and it had been fueled by a kind of genetic defect in the Irish psyche, which is that because we've been poor for so long and we had never really had to deal with success before that, we weren't really able for the big time, you know, and so we had to turn to the adults in the room, we had to turn to the serious players, the Germans, the Europeans, in order to kind of take over, temporarily take over our economic sovereignty and sort of show us how it's done, For better or for worse.

Nicholas Kiersey : 10:11

I think it's fair to say that Irish people internalized this kind of idea of it being a necessary hangover, a pain after the party, as Mark Blythe put it in his book on austerity, which of course was not a unique discourse to Ireland. It just happens to apply really well in the Irish context. But even Mark Blythe would not have, I think, expected such a convenient elite discourse to be so internalized by a population. It took a long time, it took years for Irish people. I think maybe probably until 2014 or so for Irish people to begin to sort of say, hey, second, this doesn't stack up right. I mean, you've nationalized the banks here. You've foisted the debts of a lot of corporate development, project corporate developers, construction developers. If, for one of a better term, you've foisted their debts onto the nation and absorbed them into the national debt and basically bailed them out, you've bailed out the banks and you're asking us to accept billions in costs that we as the people now have to pay back.

Nicholas Kiersey : 11:32

So by the time 2014 comes around and you start to see interestingly, the Troika had already left by this stage but you begin to see a sort of an interesting affirmation of a principle that's quite well known in political science Theta, scotch-paul and other people talk about this that protesting in times of economic crisis never really happens as much on the way down as it does, as you're beginning to kind of come out of it. And so in 2014, as the early signs of recovery are starting to happen, the Irish government begins to openly talk about water privatization. And this is something we can get back to later in the discussion, but it's at that moment, the moment where water privatization becomes sort of an openly discussed issue among the editorial writing classes, among journalists, that you begin to see a real shift in the consciousness and actually the largest protests in the history of the entire country take place. Hundreds of thousands of people come out on the streets. Remember, keep in mind it's a country with a relatively small population. I think there's just like maybe five and a half million people in the actual republic itself at the moment, and to see that kind of such a large percentage of the country showing out on the streets to protest against water privatization is a big deal. There's a lot that more can be said about the question of those protests from a left strategy perspective and whether they were adequate to the challenge, but we're just kind of laying out the kind of the long sweep of the last 20 years here.

Nicholas Kiersey : 13:22

To answer your first question and the elections that happened then. I believe I may be getting the dates wrong on this, but I think there was a 2016 election. What's really interesting is to see how those politics did not play out. The water protesting politics did not really play out the way you would have expected for the left parties in Ireland.

Nicholas Kiersey : 13:54

For those unfamiliar, ireland has a number of left political parties, the most famous and largest of which is Sinn Fein. Typically Sinn Fein has not sort of been a political consideration as a serious political party in the parliamentary politics of Dublin. But in that election you start to see a real shift, a real increase. I think there's something. I'll check my figures in a second but I think there's something like 34 seats returned and what's interesting is that the smaller Trotsky's parties don't quite get the same wave and there may be reasons to think about why that's so that are rooted in the politics of that water protest moment, because there were serious disagreements among the different factions about how to sort of strategize and try to leverage gain from that moment, probably the most significant moment for the Irish left in decades.

Nicholas Kiersey : 15:06

Where that's left us today, I think, is that Sinn Fein came out of that moment as the serious left alternative and it is. You know, thomas Piketty has a very good analysis of this. Actually it's gaining in successive elections and it's polling very well right now this year and probably on track to be a majority party, possibly in coalition in the next election. So it has, in a manner quite uncharacteristic for the European left, it has made these gains on the back of a very material kind of politics.

C. Derick Varn: 15:58

Well, I think we do need to talk about the nature of the difference between Sinn Fein and Ireland proper and the Republic of Ireland proper. Actually, we don't want to.

C. Derick Varn: 16:12

We are Ulster brothers, but versus Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, which I think is actually more understood in the United States, although it's actual social democratic politics I don't think is actually understood in the US. But what? What is the politics of Sinn Fein? I remember looking at like this Irish party political breakdown once and being like wow, there's a lot of options and also I don't really understand all of them. So um you me both.

Nicholas Kiersey : 16:53

I mean, I'm not. There are some great sort of historians that are extremely well qualified to address these issues. I can happily recommend some, some guests that'll do deep dives into this topic for you and probably correct anyone have a number of analytical mistakes I might make if I try to to to kind of rehearse this for you. But you know you do have a kind of an Irish Labour Party, I suppose, to start, which kind of like the British Labour Party, has succumbed largely to a neoliberal agenda. Excuse me, one of the issues for them and why they have languished and nearly disappeared in Ireland it's in the year since 2008.

Nicholas Kiersey : 17:47

To be clear is because when the crisis broke out, they were in a coalition with Finafoil, which is seen as a very kind of cross between some kind of like maybe Gaulist Party and a corporatist, corrupt, grifting kind of grassroots party representing small time developers, large farmers and bankers, the, the. The reputation of Finafoil is very much. You know it's the party of the brown paper bag and the kind of. What that refers to in Irish politics, by the way, is this usually cash in that bag and it's being traded for political favors, usually in a very undeclared way.

Nicholas Kiersey : 18:42

You know you scratch my back, I scratch yours, and there's these kind of cozy, corrupt relationships that you know have been the number of the subject of a number of recent and my recent, I mean last 20, 30 years or so in the Irish courts, which have been looking into any number of forms of corruption that almost always emanate from Finafoil as a party, although Finnegeal is by no means an exception to the rule here. So so the Irish Labour Party is kind of ruled out for that for that reason, and it has has not really done enough to kind of do the mea culpas in terms of its involvement in in that moment, the Irish Labour Party would very much be a party of the sort of the Brahmin left, the sort of suburban, college educated, identitarian, not not a word I'm necessarily comfortable with in an interview context like this, but hopefully it's a good shorthand here and so you know it's politics yes certainly mid Atlantic politics, probably very, very hot on the question of maybe Ireland participating in NATO in order to, for example, combat the influence of Vladimir Putin.

Nicholas Kiersey : 20:15

Blah, blah, blah right. So there is a very kind of some some might call it the Montrose left in in in Ireland, because in fact it refers to the idea of Montrose. And and and and Donnie Brooke are sort of key areas geographically, where, where we find Ireland's national broadcaster located and a lot of the people who sort of the, the, the, the intellectual labour of the national broadcaster, which is by no means comparable to the BBC although that would be sort of the natural inclination it is. It is a does not have the autonomy the BBC has from the state, and so it tends to sort of be an organization that that embodies and channels the values and morals of this sort of Brahmin class of, as you will put it, american, american leftist, american style leftist.

C. Derick Varn: 21:19

Yeah, this is something that I've noticed. You know, we see this in the SP, a contemporary early in Germany, and the Greens we've seen right.

Nicholas Kiersey : 21:27

It's a good example.

C. Derick Varn: 21:27

Yeah, we saw it in a lot of the kind of center left parties and Central Southern Europe, the old socialist and France, etc. And what we've seen in a lot of those those cases with the exception of the SP day, which is currently in a coalition government Most of those parties actually very similar to a place like fucking the industrial, where the Labour Party, like dissolved effect of me, still technically exists, but it doesn't matter A lot of these Labour and socialist parties that were, that had a kind of Brahmin left character, that are that allowed them to be neoliberalized, who took on concerns actually, that seem to come out of a weird. There's this weird mirror world effect that I remember when my chrome was complaining about this, about you know, american politics and France was like, yeah, you know, the weird frameworks are weird. Frameworks come from you, then we flip it back on itself and make it all American and then we give it back to you and it's unrecognizable.

C. Derick Varn: 22:34

But also, like the other thing that I pointed out, that the center left parties in Europe will actually try to rule on ideas that the Democratic Party will appeal to but never actually legislate, even at a local level. It's kind of an interesting problem and we're seeing this dissolve in a lot of places, even in places that I consider strongholds of it, like Canada. So the Liberal Party is finally showing the inability to maintain that sort of stuff after, after you know, a long run of Trudeau and and how and how Harper seemed to have completely kind of like the way, pushed in the United States, completely gut and bankrupt the Conservative Party there. That, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 23:18

For for me, like you know, when we talk about, like you know, I think I'm going to follow in thin gay, like I kind of know what they are but, because I really try to follow Irish politics to some degree, for, for the way, I have the thing that you should make fun of Americans for where, like, we had some kind of weird Celtic ancestor and we're like totally obsessed.

Nicholas Kiersey : 23:45

Okay, thank you, I will accept your blessing, but I actually if it's any consolation, the, the, the, the the inverse, if that's the right, the mirror version of that. Is also true that a lot of Irish people will kind of explain their kind of social credentials through the lens of how many family relatives have moved to the States and what sort of impact and splash they've made over there, certainly politically, that that's not an entirely uncommon sort of way for people to to present themselves. So you know, and any, any pub in Ireland is going to have its mandatory, you know, black and white photo in the corner of, you know, jfk and the Pope you know, it's American politicians that certain American politicians are venerated in in Irish political life for sure.

C. Derick Varn: 24:41

Yeah, it's, it's something that I do get slightly embarrassed about when you like, well, I am, you know, I have Irish roots and I'm like, well, you know, I have like three Irish ancestors to a from Ulster, once from County court, and like, okay, and like, most of my ancestors are actually from Scotland, so I think in Wales, so it's, but there is an interest in, like you know, a. My interest in British politics tends to be like how can we screw over England and and when they're not doing it to themselves.

C. Derick Varn: 25:22

Here's the thing lately I've just like, oh, it's gotten sad. Now I no longer like you've got so good at doing all the stuff that I kind of wished upon you for you that I no longer getting enjoyed from, and I just feel sorry for the British class.

Nicholas Kiersey : 25:37

So to an extent, yeah, I mean I don't, I shouldn't, I would. I would be dishonest to an extent with your viewers and listeners If I were to say that I, in recent years, I have not sort of felt a little torn in terms of my own sort of commitment to things like Brexit and whatnot. I probably would have, you know, a few years, would have been much more staunchly opposed to Brexit. But I think, as as time has gone by, I I kind of without endorsing it, I have become at least more comprehending of, an understanding of, of some of the arguments in favour of not even left Brexit, but just Brexit. You know, full stop. I probably wouldn't have, you know, a lot of a lot. I wouldn't have supported the original referendum, but certainly I think the intuition about not having a second referendum was was it was, it was a smart, it was the right thing to do, I think, not to have a second referendum. I think that would have been incredibly kind of productive.

C. Derick Varn: 26:46

Anyway, we're kind of off topic about the UK, but I kind of have to do some of these yeah, of course we are going to have to get to Ireland's relationship to the EU, and one of the things you think about the Celtic Tiger nature of Ireland is. I've always heard it compared like. Ireland was like well, you know, you know it had two routes it could go to either go to Estonia in it, and it went Estonia kind of and and so that was, you know, my comparison.

C. Derick Varn: 27:18

For those of you don't know, estonia has always listed as the good country that neoliberalized to get all the benefits for joining the EU and actually get benefit from it, whereas most of the people who went through the austerity prescribed by EU membership actually hurt from it. And Ireland has been hard to characterize until recently because it it seemed to hurt from it for a long time, then it seemed to get, it seemed to go gangbusters for a little while and it's back hurting.

Nicholas Kiersey : 27:46

Well, I mean post Brexit, I think a lot, sorry, I meant post COVID. I think a lot of the sort of trusted analysis of you know where, where Ireland's economy is going, has has had to be maybe parked for a little while. This does. It's very hard to have a crystal ball right now. You know, a year or two years ago people were very worried about inflation. Certainly as the war broke out that became an even greater. I mean trying to put a you know the tank of gas in your car for 8090 euros. You know I live in Texas. It's a third of that if even to fill my tank of gas in my car. And you know incomes aren't necessarily greater in Ireland. Traditionally their incomes are in European. Incomes by and large are lower, but you know the social wage, as Michael Taft would put it, is greater. You know you've more access to more services, right, but the benefits of that get corroded over time by things like inflation and especially when inflation is showing up in in those regular kind of grocery basket items and gasoline and housing.

C. Derick Varn: 29:17

Yeah, when you have US style inflation. So you mean one of the things that when I say with US inflation is there are three percent of our 3% inflation mark, which we're close to back down.

C. Derick Varn: 29:26

That's the average. It never includes food, doesn't include housing, doesn't include any of that. Right, it's all, and and our consumer goods that are superfluous are tend to be super cheap compared to the rest of the world. But but actual things you need every day or not? One of the one of the things I think it's the reason why I like to compare some to Estonia is because, like Ireland was seen as like well, you know, we expected them to be Portugal, turns out they're not, which shrug as to what that actually means. But we know about our, our central European brethren. By but that I mean France and Germany, and and I have, I have, you know, watch this from afar. My first exposure to a lot of Irish people actually was not even when I was in Europe, which was 20 years ago, and then a completely different part of it. I've never actually been to the British house. Something is kind of funny.

Nicholas Kiersey : 30:35

We'll have to fix that.

C. Derick Varn: 30:39

I am. My one threat was, if I ever come to London it would be to invade. But that aside, I met a lot of Irish people actually in East Asia because there were lots of Irish teachers who taught in Korea and Japan and like lots actually.

Nicholas Kiersey : 31:05

In 1999, I taught English in Korea in Degu.

C. Derick Varn: 31:10

Oh, I have family from Degu no.

Nicholas Kiersey : 31:12

I worry.

C. Derick Varn: 31:13

Yeah, I, I taught in Bundung at the university, but both from University of Teachers to hogwands, it was Irish and Canadians. Americans were actually kind of rare if they weren't soldiers and that's actually true.

Nicholas Kiersey : 31:30

I think I remember being that way as well. A lot of Canadians.

C. Derick Varn: 31:35

Well, yeah, I the Irish, to have queased and the last like this was this was this was about 10 years after you were there, so this has been like 2009, 2010. But, um, and the Canadians for people who don't know Canadian like teacher policy is to over train for jobs. So, like for every teaching job, there's like they actually create two candidates, so it's a highly competitive situation, kind of artificially. So there's all kinds of teachers to be exported abroad and since they actually get, ironically because they're quite well trained teachers but they usually can't easily teach in the states, they often end up in Asia. So, with Ireland, I just think comparative advantage, the one to the euro was not too bad and so there was a lot of that there.

Nicholas Kiersey : 32:28

That's interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 32:29

That's how I learned actually, where I actually got a better feel for like actual street politics in Ireland as opposed to, just like you know, americans are manizing about the troubles.

Nicholas Kiersey : 32:40

I mean, I think it's a fairly decent and interesting point to think about. Why do so many, even working class Irish people trained to do this sort of teaching abroad stuff and end up in places like Korea, japan? It's a, you know, it's an interesting, unique niche thing that that Irish people seem suited for. I don't know why that would be so and I don't know why they go to that type of work so much.

C. Derick Varn: 33:16

I think it's. I have my theories about the political economy of a place. It's like Ireland's industrial base has never been like this strongest.

Nicholas Kiersey : 33:27

We've always had an immigration culture Right, and it is kind of a wanderlust. That's part of that. I suppose it would be naive to think otherwise. As project, as immigration has always been for Ireland, let's be real.

C. Derick Varn: 33:40

Yeah, it's not. This is not a good policy. This is actually like a kind of India, but but you do have the, you do have a decent education system. So yes, that's a good point yeah those two things kind of that's great for for brain drain, yeah, yeah which again see, see urban India for a similar policy set. That's interesting. Actually, I was like and is that because of British colonialism? It's actually never occurred to me until I said it right now.

Nicholas Kiersey : 34:12

But I will say in the Irish context, I think the kind of that educational aspect that you were talking about a little while ago and I'm not an expert so anyone in the comments can correct me here but the, the, the, the, the. The early version of the Irish free not not free state, but the sort of Republic in the 1950s was very sort of centered on on two things One is kind of producing low tax zones that that could be used to incentivize the creation of an industrial base, and then the other was creating a university structure, a third level education structure that would, you know, be accessible to the population and would would train people For technical, scientific jobs. I mean it's it can't be gained. Said that there was a very strategic policy in terms of charging the course for the country's future to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 35:27

Yeah, I think that's so. So the test back in the what we were we were thinking about in terms of, like contemporary politics. It seems like you know, and one way to understand it is you know, the Republic of Ireland still has more European than, say, british politics, which really have, since the 90s, remarkably resemble the United States, even though it has a different constitutional basis, whereas we've seen, like the Labour Party in a split and a split from the Labour Party. We can see some more things. I said in Israel, although actually, in Israel, the left just collapsed. We've seen it in in France to some degree. We've seen it explicitly in Greece I get the feeling that it kind of happened with Podemos in Spain, but we have not. One of the things I think you pointed out, though, is Sinn Féin would actually be in a slightly different position than some of these populist left parties that emerged after Arqipai, which unfortunately you like Sereza and Podemos, which unfortunately have discredited themselves as well at this point.

C. Derick Varn: 36:41

So it's hard to be where that left goes. Because they stayed in their labor and socialist parties, they moved to a left coalition party that was a more populist bend and that also seems to have failed them, and right now the left seems to have very little electoral credibility. That's not the case in Ireland, which puts them in an interesting comparison to both Europe and the kind of economies that are vaguely the similar size to them. I actually think it's a little bit unfair compared to Greece, but also they're not. They haven't fallen into this trap in England, where the Tories, I mean, it really does seem like they could just start shooting people in the street and have a 90% disapproval rate, and still labor couldn't unseat them.

Nicholas Kiersey : 37:40

So- yeah, due to the way the parliamentary votes are locked in, I mean, I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the British legislation that requires this.

Nicholas Kiersey : 37:51

Maybe you do, derek, but there is this legislation that says you can't have these no confidence, you can't have a no confidence vote in the British parliament for something like a five year period of time, isn't that the case? Or if you can, you can only do it like once a year, I think, and so you shoot your shot and that's it. Which means, yeah, you get these sort of long, protracted periods of time where someone like Barth Johnson could just hold on because there's no real mechanism for removing him, which of course means that the public isn't exactly going to be able to sort of rally behind an opposition party as a sort of a champion to change. The change is kind of prevented. It's fairly anti-democratic really when you think about it Although obviously here is not that much different because you can't we don't have a strictly parliamentary system here and you can't vote out, you can't have a vote of no confidence within the House of Congress against the other party. It doesn't work that way.

C. Derick Varn: 39:01

Yeah, our federalism is particularly weird and in some ways it makes it more unstable, because you can completely flip the government every four years and in another case, like, however, in between those terms, it doesn't really matter how unpopular you are, you can't do anything. You can't really do anything. There are some states that have some ways of handling that, but the thing that it's hard to explain to Europeans I know you know this, but my American audience would know this, but I have a significant European audience.

C. Derick Varn: 39:32

Yeah you do. American elections are state issues, not federal ones. So there's literally 50 different sets of laws that govern US elections, and only in the case of civil rights violations, and like certain things promised in the Constitution, does federal law actually ensure anything. So it's very hard to even talk about reform, which is why for people who don't understand why we can't seem to get a third party in the United States, it's because it would take a reform of up to 50 different states laws, because our parties are both private corporations, effectively, and a lot of them are enshrined with legal protections and state laws that they don't have in federal laws. But you can't change them easily.

Nicholas Kiersey : 40:21

So Are you in Nevada? Even if you do overtake the party, the party just leaves and forms another version of itself and you're left holding the rump.

C. Derick Varn: 40:33

That's happened a couple of times. There's a couple of places where like what is it? It's one of the Midwestern states where the Democrats is like this leftover populist party and that's what they go by. In that state it's like the farm or something, something, party. But they're actually Democrats now. But yeah, so these things do happen. America's weird.

Nicholas Kiersey : 40:56

Yeah, that can't be denied. It can't be denied. Just to kind of speak to one of your points there, the interesting thing about Sinn Fein is how much the party has had to internally transform itself to become this viable force in Irish politics. It's a not trajectory. It's maybe not entirely unreasonable to compare it to the ANC. So you have, I mean, a kind of a party that is politically quite associated with a terrorist organization, a nationalist terrorist organization, for decades.

Nicholas Kiersey : 41:38

And even though maybe Sinn Fein might have had electoral opportunities in the Republic, I mean the state fairly stridently clamped down on their ability to speak directly to Irish people. Famously. I maybe know this, maybe you don't, but when Sinn Fein politicians were being interviewed on the Irish media, because there was a rule saying that nobody from this organization could be, or any terrorist organization could be, that neither their image nor their words could be spoken on the airwaves, they would get actors to do it. So it was a way for the sort of media outlets to kind of get around this kind of idea of a soft censorship, as it were, on the airwaves.

C. Derick Varn: 42:42

I think I remember that. Actually, I remember hearing that they had to get actor-siducian fame. Yeah, so you know. So it's not.

Nicholas Kiersey : 42:48

You know a lot of Americans will associate Sinn Fein with the national struggles and the violence in the North that really kind of heated up in the 1970s and dominated the political landscape for most of my time living in Ireland. Let's be real, until the 90s really, and things began to sort of calm down, but there was a good 20 years where the troubles were very, very much an active part of Irish political life. So how then does a party with that kind of association start to rebrand itself and kind of come in from the cold and become an acceptable face of a certain Irish left Right? It's an interesting question and I don't claim to know all the answers here, but I mean some of it's going to be to do with the fact that you know, much as in the United States and the distance of today's young people from 1989 in the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's a certain kind of history is kind generationally and as certain generations kind of mature and not necessarily die off exactly but, you know, become cemented in their political preferences, newer generations emerge which don't have the same memories, don't, you know, have the same emotional memories. Especially right, because I think a lot of people my age and older would be certainly my father's generation would be, you know, very sad, I think, to think that a political force that was so openly associated with the kind of violence that afflicted the country would be even seriously being considered for office right now. But you know, as you can see this also in the way the TV show Dairy Girls I don't know if you've ever watched it kind of narrates this shift. This is a very important moment that it's narrating, which is the visit of Bill Clinton to Northern Ireland to sign and be part of the Good Friday Agreement, to be a witness and to help negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. You know this is seen as a major transformative moment in not just the politics of the North but of the whole country and in stops and starts beyond. Then, you know, the violence starts to diminish and if war is politics by other means it starts to become politics again. I think, beyond that point. So Sinn Fein is certainly still an old political party in Ireland, probably, I think, actually the oldest political party in Ireland. All the other parties, I think, kind of stem from it. In various times in Irish history they sort of broken off from Sinn Fein.

Nicholas Kiersey : 46:12

It's the original mothership of an Irish sort of nationalist politics going back a very, very long time. It's a conservative party socially in many ways, especially the older nationalist version of it. It hasn't always had socialist credentials. It has had a socialist wing since its establishment but it hasn't always sort of been politically or socially progressive. It has had to deal with that element, that sort of lingering element within it that still sort of speaks that old language of the nationalist struggle. A generous chunk of that is materialist, socialist in its orientation, but not exclusively.

Nicholas Kiersey : 47:10

And it has had to kind of walk the line between, for example, at its national conventions every year, recognizing, for example, the continued status of what it refers to as its political prisoners, that is, people who are still serving jail time for terrorist activities in the 80s, on the one hand, and yet also trying to appear to be very modern and Corbyn-esque, bernie Sanders-esque in its contemporary political formulation. So its opposition tries to saddle it with this older version of itself constantly. That's the way they believe that they will limit Sinn Féin's ability to penetrate into the mainstream electorate. By the look of things, that's a losing battle. But it's not ineffective. It does, I think. I mean, if I was in one of those opposition parties, if I was in Sinn Féin. Sorry, finnegeal or Finnefoil, that's what I would be doing too. It makes perfect sense. But again, I think demographics are to a certain extent destiny in Ireland. It is a young country and the proof is in the pudding. Sinn Féin has been doing very well on the strength of its process of internal change.

C. Derick Varn: 48:49

So I guess that leaves me to ask you something about demographics in Ireland. Is it a younger country than, say, Britain or most of continental Europe?

Nicholas Kiersey : 49:00

I would hazard a guess and say, yes, it is. I don't have data right in front of me on that, but that's something I could probably look up for you and get back to you on. But yes, I would hazard a guess and say yes.

C. Derick Varn: 49:16

I would suspect so too, at least compared to the UK and the other countries which are pretty old. Demographically speaking, they're up there with the US and average age, late stage industrial.

Nicholas Kiersey : 49:26

Yeah, I mean also Ireland. It's worth noting that. You know, after Poland and the Baltic countries were exceeded to the European Union, ireland had a massive influx of immigrants into the country, which was a very unusual thing for Irish people to have to experience. You know we normally quite what's the word I'm looking for? Homogenous. As a people, I think it's. I've seen some statistics now that sort of suggest that actually, like after English, polish is the most commonly spoken language in the Republic of Ireland, not Gaelic, which I mean. That wasn't like that when I left the country, but you know, it certainly seems to be that way now.

C. Derick Varn: 50:23

Our attitude to, about Slavic peoples is negative in Ireland as they are, and not not in my experience.

Nicholas Kiersey : 50:31

No, I think, for whatever reason, irish people have been receptive to immigration. This is actually something that's remarked on is like why there is no Irish far right per se. I mean, you do get. I mean this is what I was saying to Jason Miles on the this is revolution show a couple of weeks ago. You know, there's certainly some elements of what we call kind of right wing sentiment in Ireland. There's the obvious ones that are kind of largely the biggest right in Ireland is kind of clustered around economic libertarianism really with, you know, the electorate that supports especially Finnegale, which is weird.

C. Derick Varn: 51:24

I mean, it does seem like Ireland's one of the places that still has economic libertarians.

Nicholas Kiersey : 51:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's sort of classic, classical Tory, classical Tory economics right, let's be real. But then once you sort of step outside of that and this is where my sort of knowledge becomes a little more anecdotal, so forgive me, but you know, a few times I've been home in the last year or two, it's been noticeable, for example, that there were movements and there seems to be an overlap here between the anti-abortion movement and also the kind of COVID, skeptic, anti-vaccine, anti-mask, libertarian movement as well. I mean, I think that I think this, I think I'm probably right on that. Just based on the kind of names I'm seeing cropping up in newspapers and knowing the positions that these various op-ed writers take on these different topics, you know you can see this overlap, at least in the media space.

Nicholas Kiersey : 52:30

So the Irish right in that sense would maybe be kind of a strange overlap between the kind of religious, motivated position on abortion and then the kind of oddly flip of that. You know, my body, my choice, vaccine hesitant group and square that circle for me. I'm not sure I can do it, but you know there hasn't really been an alt-right emerge in Ireland, some smattering of men's rights activism. That's part of this cluster that I was just describing. But you know in terms of like a far right presence like you'd see in mainland Europe. It just doesn't seem to have shown up in Ireland yet.

C. Derick Varn: 53:25

Do you think that may be so. Way back there was a scholar, I believe his name is Stephen Bruce, who talked about why secularization and yes, stephen Bruce, secularization in Europe and America and he was actually a big predictor of American secularization of this generation and called it about 15 years before it happened. But he actually one of the things he, one of the interesting observations he said about Catholicism in Ireland is that Irish identity being wedded so much to religion means that it doesn't entirely have the same racial character of a lot of other post-European national projects. And that leads to two things that are kind of interesting. One, it means religion actually still plays some role in civic life, although that is changing seemingly.

C. Derick Varn: 54:25

I was going to ask you about the nature of political Catholicism in Ireland because it does confound me a bit. And two, it means that Irish identity, despite in American heads we seem to think of Irish as a racial type almost, of which, like half of us claim of ancestry because you know it looks better than the English. But and I mean you know there are in a real sense almost I think there's more Irish-distant people in the United States, even for real, than there are than there is in Ireland, but there is just the scale of the country makes it more likely. One of the things that I think about in regards to this, though, is you know, I find that argument somewhat convincing, but what's interesting to me is like it doesn't stop anti-immigrant sentiment in Poland for them to also have an identity that is so heavily Catholicized, but it does do in Ireland, and I think I can help you with that.

Nicholas Kiersey : 55:47

I mean, that's the Polish Catholicism. I'm not an expert, but I mean so far as I've ever encountered this question before. Throughout the former Soviet bloc, religion has been a vector for social conservatism in a very sort of strident sense, because it was a permissible way of, you know, holding on to a kind of a certain anti-communism.

C. Derick Varn: 56:24

You can hide your reaction and not get totally persecuted for it.

Nicholas Kiersey : 56:28

Well, perhaps yeah, but I think also you know, religion was largely restricted in former Soviet, in a lot of former Soviet countries. And if you, certainly if you look, I know it's not, it wasn't a Soviet country. But Yugoslavia is a good example here. It's the case I'm more familiar with than Poland. But you know, the pro-Catholic swing in the 90s in places like Croatia is indicative here, I think, because it was a way of kind of recasting oneself in the aftermath of the sort of implosion of the secularist, communist Yugoslavia. One could sort of find an identity, find a way of belonging in the new sort of, in the new type of freedom that Yugoslavia, ex-yugoslavia, was experiencing. I suppose you know conflict obviously played a massive role there too. So that's not something that's present in the Polish case. But I think some of those dynamics would still apply. Where I wanted to kind of distinguish Ireland here and Irish Catholicism, obviously many of the same kind of doctrinal trends would still be influential. I mean, it's no accident that Ireland has had a long time out in the cold in terms of its national policies on abortion and indeed divorce being illegal, until I think I remember it was the 80s, I think, where the divorce became legalized. Certainly I remember it in my lifetime. So either the 80s or the early 90s. That said, I want to try to loop in a few things here.

Nicholas Kiersey : 58:22

Irish Catholicism has also had in Ireland a very unique kind of opportunity. Maybe that's not the right word, but it has also been a kind of a fertile ground for the left in so far as the Irish national struggle was perceived as a struggle also for the autonomies of Catholicism, but not necessarily in this anti-communist sense that it would have been in Eastern Europe, but rather to the contrary, in the opposition to the crown and unionism and Protestantism, if so facto, you find an opening more to almost like at least look Irish perspective. Irish sort of in. The Irish intuition when it comes to foreign policy has always been very left-wing. This is an interesting thing for a country that has a profoundly conservative social demographic. Ireland has long recognized the Palestinian struggle. Ireland is one of the very early countries to actively boycott the importation of South African goods in a demand to put a stop to apartheid. Irish Catholic orders were connected with sponsors of the liberation theology of South Central American leftists.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:01

You're the only European country that has liberation theology in its veins.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:00:07

Your words, not mine, but I would find it hard to contest that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:16

I greatly appreciate your humble scholarly rigor, but I do think there is something very specific about the fact that the fighting nation, the antagonists for Irish Catholicism, it's not communism, it's not even like a Laosist French state, it's a Protestant colonial order. Interestingly, that's also meant that I'm sure there is an integral. I was going to ask you is there an integralist Catholic movement in Ireland? Because this is another interesting thing you don't seem like even in Latin America there's a very polarized Catholic political spaces For patrons.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:09

I did a show on liberation theology recently, actually in Latin America and in the United States. One of the things that I talked about in this regard is how, if you look at the theological orientations of the various Protestant groups and the various Catholic internal orders, people who aren't Catholic and luckily the Irish and part of the Slavic part of my family are Catholic, so I know this and the other parts are Jewish. It's something that I'm a little bit aware of because I've had both liberation theology heads in my family and the other things and people who are sympathetic to opus dea and the legionnaires of Christ.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:02:01

It doesn't make sense, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:02

Nevertheless, what I haven't seen out of Ireland, that I even see in Latin America, is this kind of integralist, almost phalangist kind of movement.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:02:17

Maybe you can do me a favor here, because I'm not sure I know what you mean by integralist and that might be just a gap in my reading. But maybe you could just explain a little bit more about. Is it phalangeism?

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:29

Phalangeism is a type of it, but in Latin America it's not phalangeist Typically. For example, if you think about the right wing of the legionnaires for Christ, then they're politically aligned movements from America, like the artinian junta, those are generally considered.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:02:47

Francois, spain, perhaps.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:48

Yeah, francoism and phalangeism is kind of the model. What I would say is take distributism, which Catholics will know what I'm talking about, but everyone else is going to be lost. Had a little bit of fascism, but removed the racial components and replaced it with religious identity and also maybe a boner for the Habsburg Empire. That's integralist. There is that in Latin America. Latin American reactionaries do not fuck around, they are super reactionary. I don't see that in Ireland. I guess maybe because, like I don't know, maybe you don't have a monarchical tradition to attach it to.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:03:40

No, but I think you can see something along the lines of what you're talking about maybe in you know the sort of stereotype at least of Devalera's Ireland there being the first president and, as many people will know, he was an American citizen and sort of part of that initial sort of 1916 moment, and you know a very sort of, I would say, gaullist figure in Irish political life, but certainly you know a traditionalist in terms of his values.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:04:19

If, if, if, if De Gaull was kind of a military patrician figure, devalera didn't really have quite those credentials and would tend to lean a little heavily on the sort of social conservative vision of Ireland. There's a, there's a sort of a very I'm not even sure if this is apocryphal or not, but there's, there's always this kind of myth of Devalera as being someone who kind of advocated for, you know, a small Ireland, the Ireland of the kind of movie Innish Aaron, if you, you know, you kind of imagine that kind of rustic life and that the cliche is the calmly made and stancing at the crossroads kind of thing. So I don't think that quite meets your criteria for for integralism as you, as you're calling it, but it it's part of it in terms of actual Irish fascist.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:19

You do have those.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:05:21

Well, yeah, I suppose who doesn't? But you know, the, the, the connection there is more going to be with the finna Gale, because, in fact, the, the, the sort of notion there, what a pseudonym for finna Gale is always like this the blue shirt party, right, and that, if you go back far enough, the blue shirts were, were a kind of a semi fascist party, our group, in their, in their origins. So that's not, that's not something that's brought up in polite company nowadays, but it's, you know, it's true, it's, it's part of their, their origin. I don't know if that helps you, or, or I think, one thing to sort of consider moving forward though, because I think you know your question is, is a good, intuitive question. That kind of flows from, I think, where I would, where I had kind of left my account of the sort of internal transformation of Sinn Fein, and you know, I think the, the, the, the ability of Sinn Fein to leave its its kind of Catholic identification in the past to, to leave its nationalist identification in the past and move forward as a kind of modern European, internationalist, secular parties, is, is, is very much in the, is very much in the balance right now. I think it it will be very interesting to see how they move forward For those who don't follow it all that closely.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:07:06

One of the decisive moments for Sinn Fein was when Mary Lou McDonald became the leader of the party in the Republic of Ireland and when Jerry Adams, the former leader, stepped aside. He was a long, long, long time leader of that party and you know generations at its helm and then you know this, I think, was a very decisive moment in determining and showing to the public where Sinn Fein was going. It was no accident. They placed a woman born in the Republic, without the kind of characteristic Sinn Fein Northern Irish affectation, you know. So you now have a young Gen X female leader with a Dublin accent, a very working class Dublin accent, and you know in.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:08:10

So in terms of like the, the, the spokesperson, the, the identity of Sinn Fein, I think is, is, is now sort of strategically at least, you can kind of see where they're going. I mean, one question I would have, derek, not necessarily of yourself, but just you know, in terms of my own curiosity, where the country's going from here is. You know, wither Catholicism as a sort of a part of Irish life. You know like everywhere else church attendance has has declined dramatically. It's very hard even to find Irish born priests to to, you know, to serve as pastors in these, in these churches. More and more you're seeing priests come in from overseas and it's it's not clear to me what, what kind of role faith has in Irish society anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:18

It seems like Irish secularization is as kicked up pretty quickly I mean, and when I think about like liberalization of marriage and abortion.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:09:28

Yeah, massively in my lifetime.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:30

Yeah, yeah, I mean like like from what I remember hearing about Ireland as a kid in the 80s and 90s, and what happened like I don't know, like before it even happened in the States was like what Ireland's a country to do? That Like it was.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:46

It was like, well, something's changed very quickly and and in that sense it's one of the few ways where the the Irish secularization seems to remind me of the US, where it's where it's finally happening, but it's happening like a generation to a generation and a half later in a more secular state, developed Europe. I suspect the reasons for it looking the same are completely different. Like it's like, and that's that's something I would love to do more research in, because, because it used to be, when you were talking about the non secular developed world, the two places you would bring up was the United States and Ireland.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:32

the United States yeah being Protestant, af and Ireland being Catholic. And, and now I mean in the United States, the largest singular Christian religious group is the Catholic church, and thoroughly, although I think they're still technically more Protestants than Catholics, but it's they're so divided over so many different movements that, like the Catholic church, actually has a disparate like kind of a even bigger influence than you think it would be, and also, just if you deal with people younger than me and you, their likelihood of being religious is a quarter flip, as opposed to in my generation where it's like 75% and the generation above me where it's like 80 182%.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:17

So it's it's been relatively rapidly rapid. And what I think interesting though, this point about something about the appeal you know we were talking about the Brahman left of like the Labor Party in the beginning. Yes, one of the things about like putting a working class woman as a face of the party is you actually do sort of diffuse some of those criticisms that you might get about that that's it.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:11:44

That's exactly right. That's exactly right, that's exactly right. You know it's it's. They've been very clever about it, I think. To be to be honest, it's no accident, given that Sinn Féin often would be kind of a target of criticism by those who perhaps represent that more suburban perspective, suburban left-wing perspective.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:20

So I, I, I. This is one thing I don't understand about, let's say, settlement policy in Ireland but I don't mean the English coming in I mean like where people actually live. So in continental Europe, suburbs are slums basically, I mean. And in the United States we have seen a flip to this European-style city model where we went from like urban blight to suburbs, being where everybody ran to to. In the last 10 years is actually inverted and the suburbs are now looking more and more like the suburbs of Mexico City or France, which is interesting, which is kind of a bad thing, in so much that, like the city actually has infrastructure for poor people and the suburbs really doesn't, but now infrastructure is now priced at a premium, so poor people pushed out. That again, like I think when you talk about Ireland, it sounds like it still actually maintains, like the, the like for most of my life, the American pattern where suburban's, where the middle class moved. Is that still true? Is it? What is it?

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:13:30

Yeah, it's a great question and I'd sort of probably need to talk and think it through at the same time, if you know what I mean to give you an answer. I'm thinking about the fact that I, you know, I live 10 years of my life in Columbus, ohio, before moving to where I live now, and in that 10 years I saw that city.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:48

My mom lived in Columbus there you go and I.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:13:54

It's a great city. I really liked it when I first moved there in 2008, it it was not as pretty. You know, it was a lot poorer than than than it was in, you know, 2018, when I, when I left, the amount of, I guess, what we'd call phenomenally gentrification but I think it's more complicated than that that took place in the downtown of Columbus was really dramatic and it did squeeze out a lot of indigent peoples. You know various shelters and you know you know low cost housing facilities were bulldozed, removed to allow this sort of encroachment of very high rise sort of hotel projects and you know kind of nightlife, restaurant dining, high street retail type culture has kind of emerged there in a very it was, it was always kind of there in a kind of an offbeat hip punky kind of way, but it's it's really become very bougie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:12

Yeah, this whole cheap town, cheap post industrial town that people come into. Yeah, it's so cheap.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:15:19

And then they, they flag it a lot that they want to look like Austin, texas, and having having, now that I've moved to Texas and I've been to Austin a couple of times, I I think I see it's, it's, it's kind of working right. I mean they're, they're, they're achieving their goal. Put it that way, not saying that that goal is is a good goal by any means. Now, just thinking about Dublin, then and I don't know if this answers your question, but one thing I would say is that people, dublin is a, is a, is a hard city to understand from an American perspective in some ways, because it's it's not gridded the way Midwestern and East or West Coast, rather, cities are. It's it is sort of very much premised on a kind of a medieval squiggly streets and whatnot, downtown, not exactly, you know, house man's Paris either. It's it's it's properly an old city and as a result, it has kind of always had a kind of a natural tendency towards mixed use planning in the downtown areas. I think people do choose to live downtown, especially with the arrival in Ireland, and this is something I should have gotten into earlier on. By the way, you know the fact that so many of the comms have opened headquarters in in the old sort of port district of Dublin and taken up residents there. You know, ireland I was, you know, going to mention earlier on. You know, in the 90s wasn't for nothing that the New York Times referred to Ireland as the Wild West of European capitalism, because it really was with it with kind of a sort of a Singapore style low tax structure trying to bring in a lot of these multinationals to set up and of course, these people, these, these companies, do employ a lot of people and they have to live somewhere. And the plan is kind of I don't know if you're familiar with Buenos Aires at all, but it's the same kind of idea like the docklands have been converted. I guess London has similar structure as well. The docklands kind of get converted, these old port warehouses and whatnot get converted to to being apartment blocks and whatnot. So you have that in Dublin but the the.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:17:34

I think most people still have an ambition to kind of get out of the city at some point. If you're young maybe you want to live there in one of those smaller apartments. They're very, you know, ikea catalog style places, very slick but small, right and maybe not a place to raise a family. You're on the third, fourth floor, whatever. You're not going to have access to much, much of a garden and there is, I think, sort of a desire or yearning to to have that sort of semi detached house in the suburbs. Still, and given the size of Dublin, you can, you can kind of do it. Bus routes are generally serve the suburbs well, better than most American cities than I can think of, and to be fair.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:22

That would not be hard.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:18:23

No, it's not hard, and late night buses are not easy to get in Dublin and you know, generally people have to get a taxi home if they're out partying at a certain hour of the night, right, but yeah, I think people do still kind of yearn for that, that kind of little little patch of garden, semi detached house.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:43

And that's still possible in Ireland.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:18:45

Then, and like, like, I've always kind of tried to figure that out because it's not a particularly large country, it's a very expensive place to have a house now that the so again, this was sort of something I I apologize I kind of overlooked this in my introductory remarks, but I mean the 2008 crisis decimated the construction sector and it has never really recovered. And, to be really brutally honest about this, one of the major reasons Sinn Fein is doing well in Ireland is because of its absolute insistence on the question of housing as a kind of a public right. Ireland has not engaged in public housing construction in decades. It has constantly relied on the private sector to to provide housing solutions. But given that the market hasn't, literally a growing population has not been served by new construction of basic affordable housing for decades now not since 2008.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:19:53

You know that there's there's there's a real burgeoning demand. Now, if you're a middle class family who already owns your home and you're locked into, you know a low interest mortgage, you know you're probably sitting pretty because you know it doesn't affect you right, you're happy where you are. But for young families, even in the middle class, who are seeking to, you know on on on early stage career salaries to to get that semi detached home that that I was telling you about, that's kind of still the Irish mythical kind of symbol of of having arrived as an adult. You know that that is, even for middle class people, I think, going to be a really big concern when it comes to you know the ballot and how you cast your vote.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:44

Well, that's. I mean that's interesting because that Desmond Ireland has a trend on home ownership. It is so much similar to the United States. I mean Britain has a similar problem.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:20:54

But yeah, it's an Anglo phenomena. People in Germany don't really identify with that because they're much more apartments right used to living in apartments. Why not yeah?

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:03

Yeah, I mean my one for right of living in Europe was in Germany and I do remember, like apartments were basically homes and everyone thought about them as such, and that's right. You also, you know, coming in and like wait, your apartment comes with nothing, but anyway, um, but it was. It's interesting to think about, whereas, like you, do have this Anglo home ownership thing. But the other thing and it leads to is this weird One of the things I tried to explain about why are Americans so obsessed with generational politics?

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:39

And I'm like, well, when you turn of age and benefit from this or that arbitrary interest rate, and what the home of value is when you enter the market makes a huge difference to your wealth possibility and it's basically based on on arbitrary relationships to time, like, did you buy a home at the right time or not? Like, if you bought a home in 2007, because you had a little bit of that extra cash right during the beginning of the downturn and didn't lose it, you are in a great position right now. Whereas if you are, if you waited, even till, you know you waited till five years ago, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:20

I mean you are in a good position in regards to your interest rate but not your home cost, and right now you're in a good position on neither. So like it's, it's, you know this is this is hard to explain, and it's also like almost all wealth accumulation of any significant amount, if you are not, you know, have a have like a labor, aristocratic, middle class job, what you might call either PMC. I also include like, though, like trade, crafts and stuff have these kind of, because they have great benefits and whatnot, but everybody else has kind of shed out of that possibility. But even they can't get into these houses anymore. I mean, like I was, and I had heard that Ireland is facing a similar problem and also doesn't have a culture of like apartment ownership, apartment inhabiting being seen as equivalent to ownership, like.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:23:16

Let me rephrase that so I mean that might come in a couple of generations, but we're not there just yet. You know, I appreciate your point about generation of politics as well. I mean, if anyone's curious, I do an occasional podcast called Fully Automated and it one of a guests a couple of years ago was a cure Melbourne who who wrote a book I think it was called Generation Left, and he's British commentator, not a. If you're British you'd be familiar with his voice from Novara Media podcasts. Well, you know his argument. I think largely backs up what you're saying, which is that you know the left right distinction in that sort of post occupy moment is is is very much a generational one, and so you know what. What he's trying to do in some ways is trying to explain, on the one hand, the okay, boomer sort of meme culture, on the one hand, the why that makes sense to people, but also, in another way, like just to sort of put the brakes on it a little bit and just try to remind everyone that it's also very much a class distinction. This is the important thing to remember here is that there's residual lumps of saved capital that middle class people here and there have access to generate people who are older but that's getting chipped away at it all the time, and subsequent generations obviously if you have more than two children, you know that's that's going to be splitting up that, that lump, and so there's there's a, there's a kind of a downward mobility effect. You know one thinks also of the. You know the so-called graduate with no future, that preoccupied. You know a lot of the Occupy Wall Street people and you know those are, those are real, I think, sociological phenomena.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:25:24

What it means in Ireland, I think again, is just pointing to this thesis I was arguing for earlier on, that Sinn Fein is just is the party that's uniquely positioned to to kind of reap that harvest, because it's the only party and I'm quite serious about this right now it's the only party that's really making any kind of sense on housing. It's the only party that is, is is literally willing to face down what is what is. It might be hard for non Irish people to grasp this, but the entrenched power of the property developing class in a small country like Ireland is formidable, especially when you know, as I say, there hasn't really been a state led housing project for decades. By that I mean state constructed, I mean the state itself has not built homes in Ireland in a very long time. American audiences might have a tough time getting their head around that as a concept, but it used to be a thing, and in in Britain it was very much, has been a thing yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:32

It was a thing here until the 80s. I mean the thing is, but our millennials do not remember a time when there's been significant public housing. I mean like that, in fact, the way to try to deal with the lack of significant public housing in the United States is very ineffective use of block rams.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:26:50

Nobody in Ireland can. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, derek, you can tell me, but I mean I don't. One thing, at least in terms of how American capitalism seems to be working, is at least there does seem to be some semblance of fluidity in the market for housing where I'm.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:08

Oh yeah, and there's a lot of stuff.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:27:09

You're not finding these middle class people. Young middle class people are not road blocked Right, and I have criticisms of this, by the way, you know I I'm not, I'm not hugely a fan of, you know, fastening my left wing identity to um, to, to, to, to what are ultimately kind of middle class demands. I sometimes have questions in my mind about, you know, why are we demanding college debt forgiveness and not free college? I know there's like short term strategic reasons why that's so, but it often seems to me to be kind of an alienating demand for 40% of Americans who never set foot in college. And I'm a university professor.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:27:50

I mean, I'm a university professor. I shouldn't be saying these things, right, you know? Don't tell anyone.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:55

I mean my big critique of of student debt. Forgiveness is that it doesn't fit any of the structural problems whatsoever, not that like not not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:03

I'm not one of these people who is like, oh you know, these people don't deserve it. There's a lot of people who there's a lot of even poor people in the United States that think of working class people of color, favorite demographic um, who get suckered into all kinds of loan schemes and don't get degrees and just get settled with a lot of debt. However, however, one time debt forgiveness fixes none of that. It actually like um and it doesn't fix the need for it. It doesn't fix the fact that maybe some of this is because we've let the public infrastructure and public schools completely fall a fucking part. And, um, you know, if you fix those issues, then maybe this wouldn't be, you know, that big a deal. Plus, I also agree with you.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:48

Now I even have my criticisms of free university, because where I've seen it, I have seen it tried in a way that actually ends up meaning that the rich of a country actually benefit more from the free education because what they do is they'll only open a few schools. This is like, true, like the state. The prestigious state schools in Korea are free. South Korea, but you're advantage in getting into them still privileges wealth. So it actually leads to this fact where now you have a wealthy carter of people getting this very good, free education that's really prestigious, whereas the majority of the country is taking on massive amounts of debt to get any credential.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:34

To get a job. It doesn't have to be that way, but if you don't set it up right, it ends up that way. So it's an even in place like Germany, where it's not as big of a deal. And the reason why it's not a big deal in Germany is Germany does invest significant amounts of money into vocational training and support, and so education as class mobility is not seen as as big a deal, is like just making sure working class people are taken care of. And this is not to say that Germany is not a neoliberal hellhole, like everywhere else it still is, but like it's it's somewhat less of a neoliberal Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:09

It's like my friends in Sweden, who you know, talk about how much they become a neoliberal hellhole and I'm like, yes, you're right, but I just want to remind you the difference that you're at where we are.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:30:21

The version of it is a lot more anarchic, shall we say.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:26

Yeah, but so where is it going this? But it does a higher education and well, I was going to ask you because this, you know, I do think this generational stuff is a class problem. But what's interesting is, for example, millennial leftism and I know a lot of people get mad that are referred to lefts by their, by their generational archetype in the United States and I don't do it elsewhere, but it's for the reason that we're just talking about.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:30:58

It makes sense to me Right as a short hand.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:01

Yeah.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:31:02

As a media culture. No, it's not perfect.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:04

But but one of the things that you that that has been, I think, discussed by someone like Kristen Perente, I think somewhat accurately is you would think that the splitting. You know, barbara Ehrenreich really thought that the PMC was going to have a function, with part of it, because it was down, really mobile and being proletarianized, would have a function as skilling the working class and tying in with them and having common interest in them and around occupy when she was still alive and so active. That was a viable thesis, I think what. What I think has changed and you know my, my criticism is a PMC thesis aside Is that there has been an allegiance of rentier capital with a lot of these downwardly mobile people, because they see their interest as being able to enter that in a way that has stopped them completely from adopting a broad, working class friendly left paradigm, which has led to an acceleration of the decoupling of class politics with the Democratic Party in a time period where left ideas, even ones that seemingly would have been more concessionary to labor, literally like go join a fucking union Thus have not really had the same purchase. And Christian Perente has talked about this because I think he's picking up on the Brenner-Reilly thesis, although he didn't see it as as positive as Brenner and Reilly did. For those of you don't know, that's that was it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:52

The Seventh Thesis is on Biden and Bidenism or whatever, and he was also responding to Peter Church. And because Peter Church is like, well, there's going to be an inter elite civil war and he's like, no, there's not, because so many of these of these downwardly mobile leftists do have a floor and that floor is access to, like rentier stuff patronized by, by government contracts. Now what I think is interesting is I think that actually broadly does parallel the de radicalization of, like the dirtbag left and all that that we saw and occupy and all that.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:33:31

OK talk. Can you connect it for me a little better? Maybe I'm not grasping, because I mean I've always seen that as kind of maybe not sufficiently in an or sufficiently robust or self aware way, but I've always seen the kind of dirtbag thing as a sort of a, a mutant strand in the, in the, in the, in the sort of PMC culture, like it seems to be quite. I mean, when you think about the notion of the black pill, the leftist or whatever have you.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:34:06

Not putting words in your math, but I just curious about that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:09

Well, so to to expand on that a little bit, you have seen one of the people who made structural critiques of the of the center left of the Democratic Party and the like, even the right wing of the progressive movement, make the same defenses of their people, the squad or whatever that and structurally identical arguments to say what a war, and I would have made for, like Rokana Before. Why is that? Well, to me it seems like they're more and more invested in this idea of a technocratic patronage economy, which they've also been sold on this, mostly through monetary schemes as an ability to to offset that. And while they're perfectly they're not hostile to working class politics, they still talk working class language. They're going to talk union stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:08

There has been a just blanket denial, for example, of economic stagnation from from people like Seth Ackerman, like and if you talk to working class people, they are not experiencing this as like a great heyday for themselves, of of government largesse and and what is what is weird to me Is that standard level democratic like poster pundits are more aware of this than, say, people who write for Jack in a man magazine. And you know, we're the kind of intellectual people that you go to after you got introduced to the left and chopper trap house and so that's okay.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:35:55

Okay, I get it now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:56

Yeah, it likes so that. So I actually think whether, like, the phenomenon is broader than that. But even just look at that tendency.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:36:06

Why you know it's so interesting you bringing this up, because someone I generally do have an admiration for and I think she's she's sharp. I don't I don't always agree with her intuitions or instincts, but Breanna Joy Gray has been really going deep into this territory that you're sort of sitting out here the last couple of days, would you believe, on the show that she does, you know, rising on YouTube, which I admit I watch quite a lot. I find it at least informative and usually thought provoking. One thing she's been saying, and I think, in a very eyebrow rising way, just just as you also have now. You know the are at least asking the question.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:37:02

You know, why is it the young Turks are like right now are so strongly behind Biden? Why is it that you know a lot of left wing media outlets that were were maybe Bernie, bernie Crattach in 2016, 2020, are now kind of weighing in and sort of saying like we have to be serious about the good things that that Biden has done economically. I think I can speak for you, derek, and I hear with some confidence that you know this is, this is not going to work Right. There's there's a massive amount of economic anxiety out there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:53

It comes off as gaslighting your own. It's what it comes off.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:37:56

Yeah, yeah, it also just comes off as what's the word that people use cope Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:08

It is structurally the same thing that we critique the Clintonites for doing in 2016. It's like it is structurally identical and that's that's my mind, because it means the same people who are making that critique of the Clintonites. You know, the America was always great strand of blue maga. Basically, they are now making the same argument, not even for their guy.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:38:31

The only people, the only people now who seem to be saying this with any kind of audience on in any sort of vaguely left wing sense is, like Jimmy Dore, in a handful of other people, that a lot of, a lot of mainstream leftists, as they grow older, out of the era of occupy and the Bernie wave, you know, think is an absolute creep. You know, and it's strange that that you know, I'm not going to speak for Jimmy Dore. I find a lot of his positions very defensible, some not so much, but I'm sure he would be the first to say I think it's interesting for us collectively that he is the person that that that is, you know, being left to make these kinds of arguments.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:27

Well, I, I it's funny I've been accused of tailing door, which, which is amuses me.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:39:31

I didn't know that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:33

Yeah, it amuses me because I've also been accused of hating on door, because for reasons that are complicated, and what I will say is what I specifically said even a year ago, is like I often don't agree with most of doors solutions. I'm probably too much of a of a standard Marxist for that, even though I have.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:40:00

I even have I get it, I get it, I get it. I told you what you're saying.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:05

You know, if you want to and there's times where, like you know, I like Sam Cedar enough he says he said good things about broad left tendencies. However, if you're going to actually listen to to someone on what the Democrats are likely to do, your track record is better than.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:25

And so, like it's just, you know whether or not you like what he has to say, whether or not you like his, his positive political analysis is kind of irrelevant to how to calling what say the squad is going to do or whatever. And yeah, it's beyond the scope of this here what I think again just just as a footnote to that.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:40:46

I mean, it's very interesting to me and forgive me, I don't want to talk over you are are are divert us from a very important discussion here. But I will just say, on a personal level, it's interesting to me that you know again someone I have many disagreements with, but Breonna Jogre has been able to trace, in the positions that she has taken on a number of these things you know, quite unique and iconoclastic positions and and is in a sense often the more sort of intellectual, articulate, acceptable face of a number of Jimmy Doris positions, be it Ukraine, war, be it, you know, even going back, you know, force the vote. And I'm just kind of losing my this idea of the the rail workers strike and the, the possibility that the squad could have intervened to maybe do something at that moment to to kind of win more support for the rail workers, which is, I guess we're already going back to the start of this year with that. But you know who, who else out there is really saying these sorts of things. But it's interesting that she has that platform and can has, I think, just been a brave person, I think in general, even if I don't agree with everything she says. I think she's brave to in in in this moment, and I would say, a lot of the people that we were kind of turning to for intellectual guidance in the 2016 2020 period do seem to sort of stutter and hesitate now, for whatever reason.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:42:34

I don't fully understand it, but they hesitate in the face of of conceding any strikes on Biden. I think they're they're just incredibly worried about Trump being reelected, and so the Trump derangement syndrome, if we can use the phrase. I'm not sure if I'm mean able to using it, but it does seem to be very strong. Calling it that is not sociologically accounting for it. Derek, that's where I'm going to maybe turn to you for some help with this, because I think that's where you were about to go with your, your point. But it is. It is a. It's a real phenomenon. I think it's incredibly depressing for me. I'm not going to lie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:17

The sociological accounting you know and I want to make people understand these are not Marxist points, these are just banal sociological points tied in.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:43:26

We're just two guys right Shotting it up here, Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:30

Like I'm not doing formal class analysis here because, frankly, traditional formal class analysis is hard to do Because Marxist do not generally concern themselves with wealth outside of capital, outside of productive capital holdings traditionally, and I mean, yes, we hate the rich, but like that's not. We're not looking at like income gradients among workers traditionally, if that Marx actually warns against that. But I think we do have to understand the current situation with this like educated strata, half of what is interesting about it and I think this is under theorized this part of it is. There's also something we haven't talked about which there really was in the 90s a push of a lot of the best and brightest of the working into colleges.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:25

I am an example of it and a lot of my peers were just told if you don't go in the colleges in the future, for you because the jobs that we relied upon are gone and so so there's a professionalization of a large, like a large strata of people who traditionally would have gone into the trades, are into industrial labor, are into logistics work, and while some of us have ended up back there anyway not myself, I've been very lucky. But I think that's under discussed as as this, and I think that might be one of the weirder dividing lines right now because you have this downwardly mobile. People who came from you know the fail. Sons of dentist is a real, is a stereotype, for for reason right fail sons of dentists.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:15

Yes, like.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:45:16

I mean, I haven't heard that one before.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:19

But but like you know, professional like I cannot tell you how many left this, including PMC critics, frankly who, like their parents, are doctors. They did not have that, they didn't have access to the same amount of wealth, but they do have like they can go, you know, they can go live at home for four years if you need to and, like I think that's led to an interesting tension in, like, the occupy milieu, because I think a lot of the DSA menu is actually really from the collapse of that 90s movementist left. That occupy signals the end of right.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:46:05

You're right, that's a good point, that's a very good point.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:07

So to tie this all together, I do think what a lot of people see right now in the Democratic Party is the possibility for patronage out of, out of the idea that you have to stimulate consumption for economic growth and that that's it opens up a place for them to get patronage from, from rent seeking relations to the government and that's, you know, in the tech sector, whatever. That's how they exist, that's how they got to where they are. If they're not getting it now and right, I think that the sorts are politics. The reason why I brought you know this long diversion in US politics actually relevant to Irish politics, because I want to triangulate that In British politics, what we've seen is the utter collapse and disintegration of the millennial left into I don't even know what, like I've not got a good feeling for where it's ended up.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:06

But all you know, all these, all these- like podcast on this on moment of like momentum and all that, and even like Navara media's, you know, moved from like autonomous it's pretty bad. Yeah, it's all gone effectively and a lot of those people are like now. Some of them are are are like left wing cultural warriors. Some of them are right wing cultural warriors. It's very strange where all that's ended up.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:47:32

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:33

Conversely, in America you do have people on the kind of pink, the pink Democrat left and some who wanted an independent party movement, I think, braying for scraps at the Biden movement and utterly terrified that the administrative state might actually take a hit, because that's the only way they can imagine the stabilization of their position.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:47:58

That's a great point. You can put your finger on it right there. That's a great point.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:04

Which means that, like, they're way more concessionary to the same people they were critiquing just just, you know, a mere eight years ago. And that's not just because they grew up, it's because, like, the politics have had a certain trajectory.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:48:20

Well, you know, for a man who just said he wasn't doing class analysis, that sounds pretty good to me. Derek, I think you've just given a good back of a back of a back of an envelope, a sketch of of what an analysis, like a class analysis, this would actually look like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:38

So what I want to get pivot to about Ireland is so why hasn't Ireland, in its kind of post, its own post, occupy occupied Dublin, or whatever left?

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:48:50

Dame Street occupied. Dame Street Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:52

Like, not to. Why has it not suffered that exact same fate? Like, like. Is it the structure of Irish government? Is it the fact that that those people are still, even though we've talked about this and this might even tie back to the whole observation about you know exporting, you know smart labor to other countries from Ireland, going back a century? But is it that that valve? It just there's, there's, no, there's no state relation for that valve to go on to anyway, like what's going on there.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:49:29

My first reaction to your question is my God, someone should write a book about that, because I mean dynamite question.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:49:37

I mean you're in a sense you're asking what potentially is a, and I guess we won't know for another couple of years whether you know how profoundly important the question is, but it seems, based on the current trajectory, that it is in fact the question. If you're someone part of the global left interested in questions of socialist strategy, right, and my real surprise here, that that Ireland you know I'm speaking to you, I suppose thinking of you as a, as an American person on the left interest in this question and aware that you know people like yourself and others may be really kind of turning to Ireland as a kind of a case study it messes with my head a little bit because, you know, when you think about other countries that have served in this role as big kind of like these, these lightning rod examples for the left, these bad these, these rallying points, as it were, where we can all kind of get behind. You know the Chilean, you know elections, we can get behind.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:57

Oh, you're making me think this might be bad for Ireland if we think about it.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:51:00

No, that's where I'm, that's, yeah, you read my mind right. So I'm thinking, like you know, in that horrible cliched sense. You know, like sometimes success for the left is sometimes, well, almost universally. Success for the left Hitherto has been somewhat disappointing. Right, it's tended to fall short, and which, which invites a question or conversation about what counts for us as success. It will either go that kind of compromise, Ruth, then try to do something like some Sweden before 1973 that you know takes it right to the cusp of causing a capital strike and then pulls back again, or or it will try to do something more like a Latin American style move, I think, in in the Irish context it's much more likely to be Sweden than it is Venezuela, and so you know we have to be ready to be disappointed a little bit here.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:14

I mean, and also to be fair, you don't really have the commodity base of Venezuela has, so you probably couldn't do it. That's a very good point.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:52:20

You're quite right. I, if I'd been thinking properly, I probably would have copped on to that a little bit sooner. So thank you for that, but you know, but I'm. But my point here is I'm simply thinking about, you know, some older kind of stuff that maybe we would have read from someone like Ben Burgess or Adam Proctor years ago, when, you know, at the height of the Bernie wave, they were, I think, intelligently raising the question, you know, are we ready for power? You know, it's not enough just simply to get your guys elected. That party that they constitute has to have capacities to govern. It has to know how to wield the state. They queue up here a lot of argumentation from the likes of Leo Panitch and others who you know have theorized from a Marxist perspective the question of the state, and so you get into state theory, you get into the Miliband versus Polansis debate and you have to start parsing in a very careful way. You know your expectations. If you're going the electoral route, which is what Chinfeng ultimately will be doing, you will not achieve your utopia overnight. It will be one half a step forward, two steps back and a few step sideways, and you know you're really up against a very difficult set of limitations that are inherent in the strategic approach.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:54:11

In some of my writing, derek, I've talked about the comparison between the Greek left in the context of its Oki referendum and the Irish left in the context of the water protests of 2014. And one of the things I was trying to sort of argue there that came out of the Greek crisis was a profound sense that, for better or for worse, when Yanis Varoufakis and Alex Tsipras had their moment in the sun, if nothing else, they did have a set of parallel economies in Greece that they would be able to kind of turn to as Leo Panitch was arguing at the time mobilize the military to sort of help them build this sort of parallel economy that can maybe survive an EU siege, an EU orchestrated capital strike, adopt a kind of a state theory, terroristic strategy. Right, it has limitations, of course, but and of course it never really got tested because, as we know, tsipras bottled at the at the last minute, much to the criticism of people like Varoufakis. I bring this up. I bring this up just if I may and I go ahead. I'm perfectly happy if you have objections, by the way, because these are speculative thoughts, but Ireland doesn't even have that like. There isn't even a parallel economy in Ireland.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:55:48

So this project of like that, there's sort of what some people in the literature call left wing convergence, the kind of convergence between the kind of syndicalist, anarchist syndicalist parallel economy approach and the long march through the state approach, the hegemonic, parliamentary hegemonic approach. If these two strategies within the European context are merging, they can only do so where there's an actual institutional possibility for doing so. You can't just wish it out of thin air. And it doesn't exist in Ireland, to be clear. So that already right there does suggest that a Sinn Fein party in office is going to have only the most limited ability to put its hand on the tiller number one and number two strategically may in fact have only really one play, which is to wait for a constellation of other European countries to move left at the same time and band with them to become a counter hegemonic block in the European Union. But these things have a terrible habit, derek, of not showing up at the same time.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:09

Right, it seems like actually just the end of the half.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:57:12

We're doing it now. We needed it all at the same moment. It's not that these the waves are not lined up, despite what you know, a heart and negris or Paul Mason might argue, you know, it doesn't really work in these kinds of sometimes, of course, but it doesn't always work in these kind of cycles that leftist historians sometimes refer to. Well, there's Sorry, I spoke a lot there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:47

No, no, no, no. I really appreciate this, because this is actually. This is crucial, and it gives me a time to make a miacopa about some stuff I said 10 years ago about grief. I said I was right about it, so what I? My argument against Sereza in 2013 was that they had come up with an economic policy for what they wanted to do, and it was a monetary policy, but they did not come up with an industrial base for that policy. The only person really talking about that was Leo Panitch. Yeah, including most of the Sereza people were begging this purely on maybe some kind of internal drachma stimulating the lapavitzis kind of model of Grexit, right yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:36

Right, which I was just like. This is ridiculous because you are going to need to purchase all kinds of stuff to build up your industrial base. You do have one in Greece, but it's not been utilized and, without utilizing, basically converting military capacity, like we were just saying, into a parallel economy. This wasn't going to be happening. Almost nobody I got the hint and I love to hate on Verifakis. People know that. I've heard you.

Nicholas Kiersey : 1:59:09

Yeah, go ahead.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:10

Sorry, yeah, you've heard me go off of Verifakis.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:17

I had a friend from Greece who was like you're blaming the wrong person and I was like, well, he should have known his allies were shitty, but I remember you said that I'll quote you on that in the future, but also I think he was too into a very early manifestation of modern monetary theory that I think was going to run up into some real problems. But he did seem to hint at Some of the stuff you were talking about, some of the stuff implied by Leo Panantriou, who's still alive and I interviewed Leo around the same time, so I heard a lot of this. One of the things that I would say that I want to make the Miocopa on, though I was like, well, you know, the problem is is, if you don't build up that internal economy, the Europeans are going to punish you so bad that you might as well stayed. Here's where I was wrong. The Europeans punished them so bad any fucking way that it really doesn't matter.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:00:13

Even though they completely capitulated.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:15

Right, they still. I mean Greece has benefited none from any of the economic improvements in the last 10 years. Not a whit.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:00:26

And Retrospectively, then does that give you some sympathy for Lapavitsis in the end?

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:32

Well, it gives me some sympathy with Lapavitsis, even though I think the monetary schema was foolish. But I think they would have run up against the reality of building up, of having to transfer their military capacity into an industrial base anyway.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:00:45

Of course yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:47

And they probably could have leveraged the US or China or even plugged them both off of each other to get okay deals for cheap materials. Because, you know, while people forget this, because basically made militarily Europe's kind of our bitch, it is still true, that's a great point, Derek.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:01:09

I mean whatever chances there was of this working in 2014, 2013,. That sort of moment now, with the war going on, it's over, it's no way. And the emerging multi-polarity and the sense of geopolitical stakes around say hypothetical. Here, greece moving closer to using Chinese capital or leveraging Chinese capital to do some of the things you're talking about, you could just imagine the antics that would be deployed.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:40

Oh, absolutely, I mean, it might even be a military situation where it would not have been in 2013. Even if they were playing both sides off of each other, it would have been like okay, whatever, sarisa's Nasser, we can deal with that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:57

It's an interesting hypothetical my feeling at the time, I guess I actually I've always thought that the EU I mean my friend and comrade Deepse Kuba is always telling me I'm too hard on the EU. But Greece is always my example of where I'm like no, like they didn't just capitulate them, they have punished them for a decade for no reason other than to make sure Portugal and Italy and maybe Ireland and any of the Baltic states never get any wild ideas. That's pretty clear to me that Greece was used as a global example by the EU. You can't even blame that on Western hegemony because the US doesn't care. That's one of the things where it's like the nature of the EU here. That cannot be blamed on the US. That is EU internal politics and it shows you what it really is.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:04

So, when people get all weepy about the EU. A friend of the show, Steve Paxton, kind of scolded me for being too hard on the EU and I was just like I'm not taking any of it down. I saw what they did to Greece. Don't give me that.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:03:25

When the IMF is writing papers and publishing papers about why you're being too harsh.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:32

You're on a strategy regime that's too mean for the IMF and the World Bank.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:03:37

There's a problem when the US Treasury is telling you you might be overdoing it. When the so-called ordo liberals are being flagged as being even more into austerity than the neoliberals, Something's up yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:04

And this is my great friend. I still think I was read about the over reliance on monetary theory, but maybe you should have done it anyway, because I underestimated how I let the Europeans convince me that they would not be that cruel, and I was wrong. So I will not trust Europe again.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:04:29

Well, it's hard to trust them now when you have Angela Merkel saying things like oh yeah, minsk too. We weren't serious about that. That was just a facade to allow us to prepare Ukraine more for.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:49

NATO accession.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:04:51

What's wrong with you people?

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:53

Yeah, that was the thing. I actually remember thinking that.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:04:56

They do lie, Derek.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:00

I remember reading about Yanukovych at the time and going like, oh, it's all the US. I'm like, yeah, the US has its own shenanigans. I get it with NATO, but on the actual botching of the possibility of I blame Merkel, I'm almost Merkel as a person. It was just like. And then in 2016, when she became a weird darling of the center left in America, I was like what are you on? Because she kind of made a concession to refugee policy, however, without really building the infrastructure in Germany for it for either. The refugee sakes are for the sake of Germans being able to deal with the integration. So of course, it led to a xenophobic backlash, which is totally predictable. It didn't have to be that way. She could have accepted the refugees under different conditions. They didn't do it and then they shamed everyone else, which, of course, made the right, the people to the right of her, look good, and American liberals are like blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:22

It was maddening to understand anything about European politics and know that, and I also think the idea that, while I will say, yes, the boss of NATO is the United States and yes, it is part of US imperial policy, the idea that this is just a US project is a way to deflect blame from the European project and so that they can have their cake and eat it too. On these shenanigans and I mean, I can't prove that that it's a speculative thing, we're talking about motives here but it really does seem to me that whenever something bad happens, it's like well, the US is the one really responsible for that. I'm like okay, yes, sure, I mean from the standpoint of an American, we should say that, as an American leftist, I should say that because, ultimately, we're the most powerful in the room. But a European should not say that. A European should be looking at their own power structures. And when you use us as an excuse for what you do, it leads me to think that, like you know, even if we weren't here, you probably have to sit similar shenanigans See also Macron in Africa right now and so I do not have a lot of hope.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:45

I wish I did. I wish I could say that I'm that I'm saying we're going to have Sinn Fein as a model. We're going to feel good. Luckily, nicholas, I think we can say safely that right now US left hasn't picked up on Sinn Fein as a model for its problems, because otherwise there'd be 50 Jack-O-Made in the world about this, but like there was about Borek and Chile just a few months ago before.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:08:05

I remember that's actually. I'm glad you mentioned Sinn Fein, because I was reaching for that earlier. Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:10

It's just how bad they fucked up and you're like it's With the plebiscite.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:08:16

You mean the yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:18

And the whole, their whole reading of their own internal politics, and then they're back away from that, yeah.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:08:23

The Constitution, the constitutional referendum that they were trying to do.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:24

The constitutional referendum which, like, has apparently like set the Chilean left back like almost to coup standards. I mean it's bad.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:08:37

So this is what happens when you believe, when you invest a little bit too much in the idea that the way people describe you is the way you are. And so when people said that the pink tide in South America was captured perfectly by La Tlaue and Moeuf, and then you're like, okay, great, there's my playbook, I'm going to actually run with this now. And then you find out, oops, that's maybe not what actually I was this whole time and that was a mistake.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:16

Yeah, yeah, and I think.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:09:19

Essex right, because there are a lot of these Venezuelan types, bolivian movement types and Chilean, but didn't they? Am I wrong here? I think some of them have more than a dash of exposure to.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:36

Oh no, I think Venezuela. Yeah to Sussex and to La Cama. I think that's not true for Venezuela as much. That's a mixture of like Latin American.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:09:49

I'm just thinking like the Podemos guys in Spain, did kind of steep themselves in a lot of South American La Tlaue stuff, if I'm not.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:59

Yeah, absolutely they did. No, you're not wrong about that. And this is this Maroworld reflection where, like you get European theories from the 90s which we were all hip on. I've talked about this in a couple of places recently.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:12

I remember buying Hart and Negiri at my freshman year of college because it was in the New York Times fucking bestseller list when I was 19 years old, which is insane, like the more I think about that it's like that was insane. But because, like, how did that book of all things end up on a New York Times bestseller list? At the same time, all the movement politics that inspired not only failed I mean we could talk about like the new left failing in the West and particularly in like France and America, but like that was actually more tangible than the 90s left failing. And then this movement towards this movement back into social democratic politics in what used to be like a mixture of anarcho-syndicalist and Euro-communist world really has also washed up on the beaches of history. Partly some of it is timing, like you said. Some of it is like well if Sinn Fein and people of Deimos and Sereza and maybe even Bernie have popped off at the same time like it might have been a different world.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:27

But like because these places would have had other counter-hegemonic blocks to side up with. There'd have been also, like, the development of something like a coherent left wing geo policy, which just does not exist.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:11:41

Which you know, with a fight that I get into sometimes with some of the more sort of left Brexit type people that I relate to sometimes in my academic profession. They exist, you know, they will often make this challenge. You know that what you need is to sort of accentuate and focus on the democratic question before the left question, right Like that. You know the left has abandoned the British working class already. So we need, you know, just like a working class democratic movement, as it were, which I find to be kind of like a hollow point to some extent, but I think I sort of respected from afar as a kind of an understandable or, you know, I have empathy, put it that way for it, even if I don't agree with it. I think I understand where it's coming from. I don't know if that's speaking quite to your point. Please go back to what you were saying, because I've lost my train of consciousness and I want to.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:02

I mean we're going big picture today, so why not? I mean, I don't Any Irish listeners out there and I know there's at least two of you, because you yell at me when I mispronounce things which, by the way, you're not special and you must pronounce everything but even in languages I actually speak. So one of the things that I would say about the situation in Ireland is to Irish people is like our complaints about this should not be taken as a reason not to try. So I just want to put that out there. We're not condemning you. We Chimpanzees like an actual organic political movement. No one here is contesting that. It's justI think we are gonna. Well, if you come into power, my Irish listeners and assuming you are a chimpane fans even you're gonna have to deal with this Now for everybody else. Okay, quit investing in people as tokens of hope in your own politics, as not having a coherent geopolitical strategy.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:09

Like talking about how great Ammo is even if he's great, which I have a very mixed opinion on Ammo, but he's not bad are talking about Borek back in the day, or Sereza or Podemos, which no one was shut up about a decade ago, almost exactly. If you do not actually understand the situation and if you cannot support them and a lot of times we can't, we're not in a position to then overly identifying with these kinds of movements will end up with egg on your face and you learn nothing for your own politics. Like I don't know that anybody in the US really learned anything by what happened from Sereza, because our context is so different anyway, but like it just seems like any lessons of the actual politics of what happened to Sereza has been lost. I think that was true multiple times with the multiple pink waves and tides which I've always been somewhat skeptical of. I've never been oppositional to them. Also, it doesn't matter if I'm oppositional to them. I have no political power. People can just decide how they relate to me. Maybe somebody who has the ear of someone important could do something. But like, come on, I don't bomb anyone, so like, but yeah, yet in England.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:37

So the thing that I think about when we think about this is that we, as outsiders to Irish politics, or to whatever politics, should be supportive of this, but we should not cheer lead any of it. Because, one, we will wear egg on our face to anyone who listens to this, both domestically for that politics, and on our own for anyone who follows it. And two, and we have no control over it, so it's a real dumb thing to do. And two, I don't know that it helps anyone. I don't know that it's going to help any member of Sinn Fein if they became the next you know darling of Jacobin and Nation Articles Like I, just maybe they could get some funding. I don't know, I doubt it.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:16:22

There's something to it, right. I mean like it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a next generation of young people exposed to a sense of possibility and on this kind of stuff. I mean I'm always a little bit romantic about stuff like that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:39

I know it can be naive, I know, but you should push back against my cynicism, but I think the last point I want to get to is how can we actually, though, if we were to say, what should it like? The left's question should not be, should we cheerleader, condemn this? The left question could be if any left wing faction, even in the Democratic Party, got power.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:16:59

Yeah, and what?

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:00

we do as trade policy to support Sinn Fein, like that's a realistic thing. We don't have that power, it's totally hypothetical at this point, but it seems to me like a much more useful imaginary than just being like go Irish left. We can do that here, because the other thing is the context of Ireland, as I think I've been trying to point out, is both like and like enough to the US and it can be superficially the same, but when you actually look at it it's dramatically different, even for the reasons why it is superficially the same.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:17:40

No, I think that's a really good point. You know, I had lost my train of consciousness earlier on and I kind of remembered the thing that I was trying to get to, which is this idea that you know, one of the arguments people like me have used well, people like me, one of the arguments I just to be very clear that this is, you know, on me here, my hands are dirty with this One of the arguments I have used in the past is, you know, that the European left needs to get serious about constituting itself as a European left. It needs to become a policy, it needs to be a policy, and, as I was saying, I was kind of almost at the point and then it disappeared out of my head earlier on. But one of the things that the sort of the pro-Brexit crowd tend to do and I think it's a weakness in their argument, necessarily is that, as they say that there's no really hope, there is no hope for a European left because there is no such thing as a European policy.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:18:48

It does. There's no European political community to go with the institutions that constitute the European capital, e capital C, european community, then, and they're, of course, mostly right, but what I always think about is the fact that the nation isn't exactly a natural existing policy either. I mean, and if you're certainly if you're British claiming that there's no European policy in the present moment, given your I think, well-taken remarks earlier on about what's happening in the UK being kind of a disaster right now, I mean it's small comfort to think that, oh goody, the British policy got its autonomy back, or something like this.

C. Derick Varn: 2:19:42

It wasn't exactly being a great experience, I mean if you wanna see one of the heads of empire become. Argentina in effectively three years. From my Schadenfreude standpoint, then I guess it's fine, but from a standpoint of an actually developed European left, of which even I think an actually developed North American left, which is where I think our internationalism is being developed, yeah.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:20:18

So if that's the big card you're playing in your pack, that there's no such thing as a European policy, I mean, okay, I agree with you and empirically it's got a ways to go, but I'm not particularly impressed by the track record of trying to play the national policy card. Do you wanna fight the motherfuckers excuse my language in your state or do you wanna fight them at some kind of European federal level? I'm not sure you're going to have much luck, much difference in your luck. Whichever path you choose. This pros and cons to both, and so that really just is kind of like a way of sort of drawing a line under the Sinn Féin question, because of course, not to I don't want there's nobody in our conversation tonight that's here to defend the Brexit perspective.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:21:19

And again, I have complicated feelings about Brexit. I'm not a anti-Brexit person, I just I have these kinds of questions for both sides, as it were, and one of my questions for the pro-Brexit left was okay, well, good luck with your policy then, you know, because one of the things that they seem to say is that and I've seen one of the members of the Alpha Bunga podcast make this point in writing it's, I forget which one of them. It was now but the-.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:53

Probably fill up if I-.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:21:54

I think it was George actually, to be honest, but he said something at the end of one of his chapters in an edited volume. He said that the repudiation of the nation is always an elitist project. And I'm just like get the fuck out.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:12

Do you know what I mean? That's literally an inversion of one. I mean, yes, I will admit there is a certain appeal to nationalism on this working class that can not be done. I like George I should Right, right, but I think he's a friend, I don't-.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:31

Yeah, I know, and again I appreciate your humbleness. Humility, I actually do see it as a virtue. It's just a virtue that I lack. So I will say that too. You're right, I have many virtues, but humility is not generally one of them. One of the things that I would say to that I mean other than the fact that, like yes, there is a certain amount of like internationalism ironically does historically, for Marxism, require nationalism as a modernizing project, but the point is for nationalism to go away even in that scenario. So to say that like the Marxist project is to repudiate nationalism is always elitist just seems to me like a wild overclaim, the way we tend to do it the way we tend to yeah that's a great point, kind of developmental cosmopolitanism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:24

Totally, yes, absolutely An elitist project, I agree. Yeah, but Well said.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:23:31

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:33

But I'm not giving up international. I got no interest in American nationalism, my friends, I just don't care so like Neither do I. Unless you're thinking I should like organically go back to being a partisan for my state, the great state of Georgia, which you know. Normally I just trust those people that you tend to be neo-Confederates, just normally. Not a great idea. It is not something that really appeals to me Now, maybe it's my lack of an organic rootedness to anything, but it is something that I find. I tend to be skeptical of nationalism, because I do think the one thing that you have to remember is capital, even if it's different country to country, is an international project, necessarily, and it has been for a moment one, that's true, and nations, particularly small little island ones, don't stand that much of a chance, and that's something that I think, like I mean when you think about, okay, the USSR-.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:24:42

I will tell you. You know, sorry, just to interrupt. I mean, this is where I actually do maybe have an opinion which is not settled or cast in concrete just yet. But I do kind of in this moment think about Bernie Sanders' claim that you know the open borders movement is a Koch brothers conspiracy, and I understand that there's a kind of a left-wing sort of position there. But when it comes to something that's already been underway for several decades now, like the European Union, which obviously is an internally you know open, are relatively open emerging federal system for want of a better term you know the ship sailed. And if you're a small country like Ireland to borrow your phrase from just a moment ago and you're a left-wing political party about to take power in that context, you know I'm not really seeing an IRA exit, if that's a neologism that will be permitted. An IRA exit movement is not in the offing. It's not something Irish people want. I don't know if I'm-.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:06

And it would probably be economically disastrous for the reasons of not even having the ability to do what Greece didn't do.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:26:13

Precisely. Yes, that's the punchline, that's the punchline. So, again, that's just why I was saying, just for listeners who may be like, you know, is this guy being too flip, or whatever? I think that's why earlier on I was talking about the importance of this question of synchronization and the difficulty of it and, just to be kind of quite realistic, that Sinn Féin's hands will be tied on a number of things. I mean, they have, in the European Union context, major constraints on what they can do as part of the eurozone in terms of fiscal expansion no monetary software.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:26:49

Monetary autonomy is very difficult. Debt ratios are tightly controlled and so this idea of you know, now there's land held by the state which could be parceled off, there's definitely there's ways they can get their hands on some cash internally, but it won't really move the needle in terms of the expense of what we're talking about here, which are, you know, very high tech, environmentally friendly, you know, eco efficient dwellings for modern families. It's going to be tough.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:33

Yeah, and I you know, I suppose, nicholas, sometimes I think we should burn the EU down, but I have always thought that you need a Republican nation to replace it Like, or you need to change it internally. Those are your options.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:27:51

Yes, yeah, I mean like.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:53

Germany. I just make you think. If England, you know 300 years of the world's greatest island nation power that the world ever knew is used to not to offend my Argentinian friends but oh, is reduced to Argentina in three years you know of Brexit yeah, then because it's ability to leverage its trade imbalance is to hide its deindustrialization, completely goes away and it can't be the money laundering capital of the world anymore. It's what chance does any of the European nations have, except for maybe, france and Germany? Even that seems questionable. So, and I think you know, for us in North America I mean, yes, we are bigger polities, like you know, like I always remind myself that, like most of the UK fits in Alabama, like you know, just to remind myself of the difference in scale we're talking about here.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:29:04

But I think you can put 15 Ireland's in Texas. I'm not sure, but I think it's 13 or 15. I can't know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:11

It's my other thing where people can compare. I figured that out. One day I sort of sat down and calculated the area it's kind of striking when people compare to Nordic countries and I'm like you do realize that, like I don't know, a Nordic country has like 100th of the population of the US and and, relatively speaking, a lot more oil.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:29:36

Right, if you know it, right, right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:38

I mean per capita, for sure. I mean even though US is fairly energy secure.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:29:41

but yes, Sovereign wealth funds are a great thing, though not to be, not to be poo-pooed, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:48

Agreed. The only reason, the only reason, is that Venezuela still exists. So like, let's be honest, yeah, yeah. So these things are something that we have to think about. I think for us on the Atlantic side of the channel, just to like tie it in for a minute, why should we care? Because I've already said that, don't turn Sinn Fein into your next pedamos, like that's not gonna go well for Sinn Fein and it's not gonna go well for you. But I do think we have to start asking ourselves some serious questions about how we align.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:28

If, for some wild hair that we ever broke out of our current rut and actually I don't know formed a labor party, broke, did the dirty break, did a clean break, like took over the government by military coup, I don't know like good luck on that, since left us our military, but nonetheless, I mean, you know, if any of those things happened which, I will admit, the chances are not zero, but not far from it what would we do to be supportive and also not ruin the autonomy of these other lefting movements in states, because the other thing that you like, let's say you did have a left movement take over in America? We would have to be incredibly careful not because of America's imperial history not to delegitimize anything we help. So that's a bind that we should be thinking about in relations to these sorts of movements. In a more serious way, yes, it's a hypothetical, it's a total hypothetical, but it seems to be. Like you know, I've been one of the things that I've told people about a multi-polarity. Multi-polarity is like brain it's happening, it's gonna happen, it's like El Nino it's a thing, it changes the way stuff works In and of itself.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:57

I have apparently the unpopular opinion of thinking it's neutral, that it's neither good nor bad, it's just a thing, and that we really have to think about how we enter this phase of multi-polarity without encouraging war and economic devastation in other areas and the left, instead of merely celebrating or condemning it, which is like, again, celebrating or condemning rain.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:24

In my opinion, we have to think about how we orient towards this now, because the one thing I will tell you is the US, as a regional hegemonic power, is not going away for sheer geography Like that is something that we have to deal with, whether we like it or not. I mean, maybe something else replaces it, maybe this current constitutional government's debt I don't know, we're talking real hypotheticals here, but some kind of very like. The likelihood of a fairly strong power emerging out of this geographic alignment is actually pretty good. So you have to think about that when you orient towards the rest of the planet. And there's two ways to do it. You can either be helpful or you can be an imperialist shipbag. Those are, I mean, like I guess you can also stay out of it, but there's almost no way that in a multi-polar world that a strong power won't be caught up in regional games and other hegemonic blocks.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:33:28

Which means that's right. It's gonna be a lot harder for us, I think now, yeah, with the geo-strategic pressure kind of now, look, I mean, you know it's so interesting to think about. I was just talking to this up with my students the other day and might be an interesting way for us to begin to wrap up the show. I don't know. But when you think about the absolute meltdown that DC is having right now over the revelations in the New Elon Musk book, the biography written by Walter Isakson on the fact that he would not, at the drop of a pin, turn on Starlink over the Crimea Peninsula this is coming out in the book now it's Elon Musk corroborated it the other day. So this is a story that's really emerging in the last few days. So people are basically saying now that this is at rate. The Democrats are saying it's outrageous. Another reason to maybe depose Elon Musk are perhaps even nationalize SpaceX for these sort of geo-strategic reasons. Now, look, I think there's plenty of reasons to nationalize SpaceX, right? I yeah, but this is a bad one.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:34:59

I don't want it, for the same reasons that they wanted it, and it just it's. We're entering into an odd moment, Derek, I'm afraid, and the opportunities are going to narrow considerably, I fear, given that this war and I've been guilty of this, I think for a while now I've been thinking this is just a short war. This is a war that it's the Falklands, it's just a bigger version of the Falklands. It's a misunderstanding. More sober minds will prevail and hell, even capitalist rationality will prevail and prevent the war from going on too much longer. Everyone wants a way out of this.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:35:48

Global capitalism is not enjoying this war. Maybe individual arms manufacturing entities might be, but on the whole, it hasn't been great for global finance, whatever. It's broken the dollar and the gemini. It's creating these parallel credit card systems. It's fragmenting things, and so capitalism doesn't want that. So rationality will prevail, but that doesn't seem to be happening, Derek. So it seems like we're having conversations in Capitol Hill now that I would have actually been really surprised to see, even a year ago two years ago, shall we say centrist Democrats talking about nationalizing SpaceX. It's just, the priorities are shifting and you are going to be seeing great difficulty now for any European left-wing movements, I think as a result of that, because you could easily see strategies of tension reappearing in a European context.

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:55

Absolutely, and I also think the American left shouldn't underestimate this either, because wow which is not to say that I'm defending any January 6th Cretans, but they use some.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:06

RICO charges for that In context with some other things I've been seeing happening since 2021 of like civil RICO charges being launched on unions and whatnot, and we now see these like really draconian, like even more draconian than we saw in like the 1950s stuff coming down on the Cop City protesters. Regardless of how you feel about all the Cop City stuff, there's parts of that I'm ambivalent about but, like these RICO charges are terrifying because, like they are, potentially they're drag nets that you haven't even thought of like oh, you gave to the DSA ones, the NSA gave to this, and also you caught up for the RICO case.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:44

Rico case, yeah, and that's going to both be an internal and external pressure. We've also seen the ability to paint an anti-war movement as largely right wing, even if the anti-war movement does not speak in terms of, like, unilateral concessions to Russia.

C. Derick Varn: 2:38:09

I mean like like you know, I'm one of these people who thinks you don't like, like total war victories are not even possible in the modern era, except in very rare scenarios. And I'm just like. This is insane to me. That like being like no. We should start thinking about how would we orient in a way also that both sides can say face and you don't end up having an Afghanistan-like situation on the edge of Europe. There seems to be a disaster. One of my dystopian moments and again I like when listeners know that I do make me a copas I also went. There were two mistakes I made in the beginnings of the Ukraine war. One I went with Merchandise like there's no way they're going to go for Kiev, they're just going to do the smart thing and occupy the Separatist Republics.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:39:01

And and you feel like they didn't go for Kiev.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:07

I don't feel like they went for Kiev to take it. I don't think they were trying to even do regime change but, I, do think they went to Kiev as a kind of like establish a power base for negotiations of strength, and it just you didn't even work.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:39:23

I know you had another point to make, but I mean just food for thought maybe. But I mean, I think we can kind of do a post facto reconstruction of the motivations.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:39:32

Now I don't know a little more about what was going on in those negotiations that Boris Johnson interrupted, because it seems that, in fact, what the Russians were initially kind of posturing for was the terms of Elise in the Crimea, basically, and they would have been very happy to accept that. So, and maybe that's not chronologically correct because, of course, like where the negotiations, the original position or where they position after the early part of the war, hadn't gone well for them and they felt, you know, willing to compromise, some of them, who knows, who knows, yeah, but I think that is a, I think it would have been close enough to their original position.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:21

My assumptions is, even though this was a preemptive war and thus not under my doctrine of justifiable war, I will say that I've always assumed that the Russians were rational Like that there was a rational reason for each step and I just didn't see it.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:40:38

That's something Mir Shimer would give you, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:40

Right.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:40:41

So what was your other?

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:42

mea culpa. My other mea culpa is I thought that Ukrainians would realize that NATO had no interest in giving them exactly what they wanted, but had every interest in having them being a bleeding ground, and that thus that they would be smart and realize maybe to negotiate before things got so bad that they would never be able to. But of course that's I was just way, way naive on that. My nightmare assumption is that I did have early on and it was my nightmare assumption was that NATO's goal was to make this war so bad that, whether or not Russia runs or loses, they still win as far as their strategic the NATO, not the US economy.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:41:27

It's a scorched earth, the hand basket yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41:31

That's like this is just gonna be a problem for you forever now, whether you win or lose, and and.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:41:37

Blow up all the dams and infrastructure and, yeah, any government that takes power.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41:44

You know, whether it's Russia supported or Western support is gonna be illegitimate from here on out, but one side or the other, yeah, Like it's just going to be a problem. And so I was like surely people realize that that's part of the goal here and that the other thing it does is, even though you're right, it's led to de-dollarization, my unpopular opinion has also led to the acceleration of the yuan as a global currency before it was ready, and that's also not gone well.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:42:14

So Absolutely that's a good point, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:42:18

So it's like it's one of these things where you look at the balance and it's like, well, the US has hurt, but it's also hurt everybody else.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:42:26

I would just say that the thing about the yuan, though, is that those things don't happen on a course of natural evolution, and I don't disagree with you.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:42:34

It's just to sort of put it out there that you know.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:42:37

If you, we've mentioned Leo Panich already in this conversation once, in a different context, but what he's most known for, I suppose, is his book with Sam Ginden on the you know, the making of global capitalism, where they do a very sort of intricate, detailed, blow by blow account of how the pudding was made, the state managerial intensity that was brought to bear on the project of making the US dollar the numerator, not just in a sense of what they negotiated and hashtag it bread and woods, but in a sense of aligning institutional practices in central banks in Indonesia, south Korea, you name it right Like there was meticulous attention brought to bear, and so this is you were talking about these this kind of a question of the evolution of the one, like it's in some ways you're more right than you know, and in some ways you know it points to this question of possibility and political will and the idea that it's not inconceivable that this new multipolar entity would want to maybe do this work to produce this other currency and it would take maybe a very long time, but it would take more than that.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:44:03

It would take political will and capital to do so before it's ready. Yes, you're right, but not that it couldn't be made more ready, and it will have to be made ready in the fight anyway. Like you don't just get to, the US dollar did not just kind of arrive ready made, it had to be. Look, the metaphor is kind of like electric cars and you can't just like have one, you need to have charging points all over the place. You know what I mean. Like it's the same kind of idea there has to be an infrastructure and the US dollar had to create one.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44:41

And it was created.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44:42

It was created both by the US and by the failure of Britain to maintain its empire, which is like there's a reason why, like I don't know, mmt currencies have rented perfectly in lines with the post war Anglo-imperial world.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44:57

I don't know why. That is not the reason why I'm skeptical about anyone like I think we're gonna see a massive reshuffling. But the idea of, like China, being able to replace the world and I'm not even sure they wanted, to be completely frank, they did want an alternative system that would not, that would also somehow not be hostile to the US system and this is a vision that I get pushed back on people for being too pro-Chinese for, which I think is funny because I'm generally kind of skeptical. But I really do think they wanted to do Keynesian internationalism of the Marshall Plan type without imperialism, which is really fucking hard, and this war has greatly complicated that, and so other strategies have had to merge. What we have over all of our heads is not only do we have the climate change problems, whatever they are and I don't wanna get into climate change apocalypticism because I don't think it's helpful but even if it was true, I don't think it's helpful.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:46:05

I'm not sure.

C. Derick Varn: 2:46:06

I think it's true either, but one of the things that I would say about this is even assuming the worst case scenario for climate change and that overheads we also have the fact that we live in a nuclear-armed world with the war capacity as such that no one knows how to unleash it, and that is both good and bad as far as people's ability to pivot here. The last thing we also all the developed world has a demographic bomb, including China that's about to go off, and-.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:46:50

Sounds ominous.

C. Derick Varn: 2:46:52

Yeah, I mean theoretically it actually could be a good thing, but we live in capitalist world and so, like, stabilizing your growth pattern would be a disaster for capitalism and so it's a bad thing. And we're also gonna see a bunch of great, I think, from the equatorial places great moments of people, and that's gonna destabilize everybody. So I guess my sense with that is not that I know the future, it's actually that I have no idea-.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:47:19

Me neither what the future is.

C. Derick Varn: 2:47:21

It's like I feel less certain than I've ever felt.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:47:24

May I just briefly put you on pause, derek. Would you mind if I just excuse myself for a moment and I'll be right back.

C. Derick Varn: 2:47:32

Absolutely, I can just pause this All right? Yep, all right. Well, we're back and it's been a short last of time. Nicholas, you've given me a lot of your time tonight, so we're gonna start to write this down, since we're moving from Ireland to like. How to avoid global nuclear war, all the talk is Global nuclear war. We're trying to I think you know-.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:47:59

Take up the duties as podcast host on an ad hoc basis and say thank you for having me tonight. It was a great pleasure. Anybody who is interested in Irish politics I would strongly suggest you know, for deeper investigations into some of the stuff, checking out the work of Daniel Finn, great scholar. Michael Taft, an American economist living in Dublin. He's a trade union economist, so he is worth checking out as well. And I want to say maybe a few other names as well of people who are worth following.

Nicholas Kiersey : 2:48:51

On the Trotskyist left you have people like Richard Boyd Barrett, who often has good things to say. There are, on the sort of academic side of the equation you have people like Helena Sheehan, who recently retired but who was actually on the ground present for a lot of the Occupy Dame Street protests. She is someone who's sort of done a couple of publicly available and quite meticulous essays on that sort of Occupy moment in Ireland and what went right, what went wrong. So worth checking out. And of course, anyone who's interested can reach out to me. I'm at Occupy IR Theory on Twitter and thanks again to Derek for having me tonight. I will hopefully be able to join you guys again soon on a future episode. It was a great pleasure, thank you. Thank you for listening.