Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Spectre of Alternative Politics: Libertarian Dreams to Modern Alliances with Alex Strekal
Are modern political ideologies simply a remix of old ideas, or are we witnessing a seismic shift in belief systems? Join us as we, along with my longtime interlocutor Alex Strekal, embark on a riveting exploration of alternative politics spanning the last twenty years. This episode unravels the journeys of influential figures like Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, uncovering how their impact has rippled through the political landscape, creating unexpected intersections and new alliances. We reflect on our personal transitions from paleo-conservatism and libertarian roots to more progressive stances, uncovering the hidden links that have brought seemingly disparate movements together.
We navigate through the early 2000s to the Obama era, examining the rise and evolution of libertarianism and its eventual decline, as well as the anti-war sentiments that united unlikely allies. Our discussion touches on the ideological tensions and strategic voting behaviors that often accompany political cycles, highlighting the transformative nature of the Ron Paul and Occupy movements. By tracing the origins of the alt-right movement and its connection to paleo-libertarianism, we reveal the splintered nature of right-wing politics and the complex dance between nationalism and anti-systemic beliefs.
Hear how figures like Michael Rectenwald and organizations such as C4SS have navigated the shifting landscape of political ideologies, contributing to the resurgence of certain libertarian ideas. We also offer a glimpse into the challenges of balancing anarchism and Marxism, sharing insights from personal experiences and the broader political context. As we wrap up, we reflect on the revival of blogging through platforms like Substack, advocating for a return to thoughtful, long-form content amid the rapid consumption of social media. Join us for a journey through the intricate world of political ideologies, where each chapter offers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving narrative of alternative politics.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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twitter: @varnvlog
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Hello and welcome to Grumblog. And today I'm here with my longtime interlocutor and one of the few people who knew me before I was on the left at all, Alex Strekal, and we are talking about three pieces. Alex wrote for St Ron Paul politics and Bernie Sanders politics and Trump politics. I mean, a lot of people in a lot of even standard liberals think there's a direct relationship between Bernie Sanders politics and Trump politics. To Bernie Bros and Madigan communists any bros and mad at the communists. But I think the precursor to all that in the anti-war wing of the paleo conservatives trying to court a youth vote in the aughts during the bush administration was effectively a waste from everyone's public memory by the actually not even by Trump by Barack Obama's winning in 2008. And the reason why I mentioned that you and I have known each other for a long time, when I was a paleo conservative and you were a libertarian. So now this is nine, 20 years ago, at the wee early days of Facebook, that's right years ago at the wee early days of Facebook.
C. Derick Varn :That's right. Um, you and I encountered each other around debates about the Ron Paul campaign and its aftermath in 2004. Um, now, I was not a supporter of Ron Paul. Um, his association with Lou Rockwell and the Neo Confederates had always concerned me, but it was amazing to me how many young people did not know that back in the day. So I want to get to your piece. How would you frame the Ron Paul phenomenon from 20 years ago?
Alex Strekal:Yeah, I mean as part of why I have three pieces here that you're referring to, and it does start speaking about Ron Paul and that was kind of my own entrance into politics, even though, to be clear, I actually had progressive parents. But the beginning of my independent political consciousness was the libertarian movement and at the time Ron Paul was one of the main people who would suck in young people and lead you to lewrockwellcom and then misesorg and even though I was kind of liberal or progressive in my beginnings, in a way I got sucked into that because it was an alternative politics in a sense, and there were certain senses in which people who had progressive leanings actually got sucked into that orbit, partly because of the anti-war sentiment.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, rob Reich used to talk about Wampaw positively all the time on Left, right and Center, back, you know, in the day when I would still listen to stuff like that and it did make me want to vomit and I think a lot of people even miss it. The branding was similar. Do you remember the re-love, the re-love-lution stuff that out of the Ron Paul campaign? What exactly the revolution, but it was re-love-lution, yeah, okay.
Alex Strekal:Now that you're clear about that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. It was marketed that way. There was a tagline, yeah, and it was called the Ron Paul Revolution.
Alex Strekal:And yeah, I mean it was a strange time to think back on because it was the anti-war thing and to a certain extent it was also just the libertarian pretense of, like you know, I guess, civil libertarianism, in a sense of like being left alone to smoke pot or whatever, that kind of dragged people who were regressives into it too. But a big thing, part of it was the anti-war movement, which, of course, was ultimately um, set to rest under Obama and everyone went to sleep again and forgot about it, um, but yeah, no, it was the Ron Paul thing that majorly sucked people in. For me, and, to be clear, I actually ended up arguing against voting for Ron Paul, even when I was a libertarian and even when I was briefly an anarcho-capitalist, like my motivations for being into it was more abstract or philosophical and I always opposed the paleo libertarians who were like super reactionary. But you couldn't help but run into those people when you were in the libertarian movement back in the day.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, I mean, it was right before. A former Marxist and friend of mine, former friend of mine, michael Rettenwald, a left communist turned anti-woke professor, turned temporary head of the Vamises Caucus in the Libertarian Party, almost their presidential candidate until he screwed it up at the last minute.
Alex Strekal:I was. I mean, I was late to the game about learning about him, but I was shocked to learn. Yeah, I saw that he joined the Mises Institute, but I learned about his controversy back when he was still, I guess, a Marxist professor at New York NYU it was.
C. Derick Varn :but you know, and I guess he he started some blog under a pseudonym and then he people discovered that it was really him and he definitely was having like a public mental breakdown, from what I could tell too oh yeah, he was associated with lauren goldner and a lot of left communists and he actually wrote for me, as well as insurgent notes, uh, he wrote, uh, a defense of mark Fisher's Vampire Castle piece as well as a discussion about changing attitudes towards religion in the Marxist left that we were co-writing a book on, and then the beginnings of the NYU scandal fell apart. But he was very much in that milieu. He even was my successor at the North Star for about for a few months. He probably doesn't ever want to talk about it again. The and I say this because by and large more people go that way than the way I went, which is from the paleo-conservative right through during the Ron Paul period was actually and I don't talk a lot about this specific because I didn't vote for Ron Paul either.
C. Derick Varn :My first foray into electoral politics was the debate in the Reform Party in 2000 between somebody's going to come up at the end of this, donald Trump, who was running as more moderate to Pat Buchanan in 2000, as the successors to weirdly, ralph Nader in that party.
C. Derick Varn :So the Reform Party had come out of Ross Perot but it had passed its torch to this unity ticket of green slash reform to Nader and when that didn't go well in 2000, I guess that must have been 2006, pat Buchanan ran for the Reform Party platform and we all know kind of how that went, and he was opposed by the first presidential run of Donald Trump, which is where that famous, you know Simpsons predict Trump presidency comes from the first time.
C. Derick Varn :That was actually because they were commenting on his running for the reform party candidacy in competition with pat buchanan in 2000. And what I think is interesting to talk about when we talk about the specter of alternative politics and and, uh, the the libertarian movement in particular, is that I was coming at it from the paleo-conservative view, but my form of paleo-conservatism was very influenced by a lot of the same people you had talked about. I had been pulled into when I was 21 years old, into the Justin Raimondo end of Antiwarcom, which people today, when I mentioned that that was a right-wing outlet and kind of still is a right-wing outlet it definitely was.
Alex Strekal:I mean rockwellcom linked right to it, and it was a lot of the same people right.
C. Derick Varn :they published a lot of like far left progressives on on antiwarcom and they also had an overlap with Counterpunch which people often ignore. At that point Alex Coburn was really trying to build something like a paleo-conservative, far-left coalition.
Alex Strekal:Something I did see when I look back at lewrockwellcom, which I occasionally spy on. It's a weird website, but they will selectively platform progressives or left-wing people. They even had Gabriel Coco write for them at one point.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, they have at times done really strange things, like ran a defense in celebration of Derrida when he died Really, I didn't catch that one, like oh yeah, I mean it was. Uh, they published the unedited version of murray rothbart's. You know left and right where they were, where rothbart was literally talking about making allegiances with maoists I would have a word about that.
Alex Strekal:You know that was in what like the late 60s, early 70s, and people do talk about that from the left libertarian camp. I should couch this in the right the left libertarian camp of the market anarchists, which is kind of a weird thing in and of itself, but they would appeal to this left Rothbardian thing. And there was this brief period where Rothbard, yeah, he was allied with the new left and the hippies, mostly over anti-war stuff. But then even as far back as like 1974, once he writes egalitarianism as a revolt against nature, like he turns against them and makes pretty clear that he's a right winger.
C. Derick Varn :Oh yeah, oh yeah. He starts siding with neo-Confederates and sometimes defending and not just in the ACLU sense, defending neo-Nazis beyond their right to free speech.
Alex Strekal:He also defended as did Lou Rockwell later Rush Dooney and Gary North, who were actual dominionists, the people that everyone thought the Bush administration kind of was, although they weren't at all. Yeah, the thing about Gary North that I recall was him advocating bringing back public stonings.
C. Derick Varn :Yep, and my introduction to the libertarian instantiation of the cult around Stephen Molyneux, before he went all weird Canadian hyper-nationalist, was on lewrockwellcom, and as was my introduction to things like Joe Sobrin and Avola, so um. So this idea, the very weird neo-traditionalist stuff, would also occasionally make its way into that milieu, but it was in the weirder end of it because they weren't really libertarians. But you could find people on Lou Rockwell that were one step down from being tied to Greca or Alain de Venise, even though those people are anti-libertarian to their core.
Alex Strekal:It was definitely a confusing environment to maneuver in, I would say especially from about 2006 to 2010,. It actually goes back earlier than that. For me, it was around 9-11 that I got politicized. Then I got into it. My motivations for it at the time was the anti-war thing, it was the more abstract anti-statism that leads you into a sort of anarchist pipeline, and it was abstract philosophical questions about rights and property and things like that, which I ended up thinking my way out of their positions pretty quickly actually. But there was a brief time in which I basically was an anarcho-capitalist. But even when I was an anarcho-capitalist I would run into these people like, like, especially Hoppe. Once Hoppe wrote Democracy the God that Failed. That definitely was a big controversial thing that split the movement in a way, because it was all of a sudden. People were arguing for nationalism and strict immigration control and they were hanging around with people who really?
C. Derick Varn :were white nationalists and neo-Nazis, basically right around the corner. Yeah, and Hoppe went even further. I think that one of the things about that that people miss. Hoppe went so far as to argue that feudalism was actually more capitalist than capitalism was because it was a private form of state.
Alex Strekal:Yes, he argued that monarchy is better than democracy because it's private and he argued that the sort of ideological grounds of private, private propertarianism that ANCAPs are super into and in a sense, when I look back at it, he actually I would describe him as fully owning the consequences of the ANCAP view, while others didn't, others with more liberal inclinations wanted to make it something that really wasn't and paint a happy face on it when, in a sense, hoppe, yeah, he fully owns the consequences of that view, although some might frame him as imposing his cultural conservatism on it. I guess Right.
C. Derick Varn :You and I both also came through a period I this is a period I don't talk about much. I think it was as you and I encountered each other in this exact moment of transition. Um, I was also radicalized by nine 11 and, uh, radicalized towards left by the failure of Barack Obama. But almost immediately in the Obama campaign, obama, but almost immediately in the Obama campaign. But, like by the, by the time of the appointment of his cabinet, I was already like I'm out. But the, the, the. It's interesting because when people talk about, for example, glenn Greenwald today and they talk about the weirdness of his politics, I actually don't find it that weird. What has happened with Glenn is that his ability, because of the change in the market, to do what he's actually good at, which is international war reporting, has been dramatically limited. But in a weird way, glenn Greenwald has kind of been everywhere that I have ended up being in about the same time. So during this time period we're talking about, he was aligned with Ron Paul.
Alex Strekal:He was, I'm pretty sure he was featured on Lou Rockwell at some point.
C. Derick Varn :All the time I used to read him all the time on Lou Rockwell. I don't know that he published it directly. One of the things about Lou Rockwell is they would syndicate stuff that they didn't really always tell you the source, but I read him all the time on lou rockwell back in the day and and on antiwarcom. Uh, then when I moved left he seemed to move left with me like we were part of the anti-war end of the socialists. Now he was never a socialist but he was showing up at like the ISO's conference and I forget the early 20 teens and the intercept went under.
C. Derick Varn :His leadership when they first opened was very much a we're aligned with progressives if they're actually anti-war and we want to bring this back to the forefront and he, him and Jeffrey Scahill, we're all about that. It's very different than you know the Ryan Grimton today. Um, and as he moves with with where he could get an audience, frankly, um it, it did seem like he had like two concerns one is you can't trust democrats and the other is you can't really trust establishment republicans. Um, and it's interesting today when I talk to younger people who just do not get um, that there was an anti-bush right there absolutely was.
Alex Strekal:It was the whole neoconservative versus paleoconservative split in some ways and the libertarians took that up and it was the libertarians versus the neoconservatives and a lot of Ron Paul's rhetoric was like fiercely anti-neoconservative.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, if you were a peace person in 2004,. Your only viable candidate in 2004 who did not vote for the war in any way Was Ron Paul. Was Ron Paul? Or you're voting third party and otherwise the only other person I would associate with.
Alex Strekal:I guess Dennis Kucinich was similar in some ways.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, and I will admit in this time period, because I was coming out of being a paleo conservative, I didn't stay in that movement very long, but it was slow going and I was weighing my options. I was like, ok, do I back the Green Party? Do I back, uh, dennis Kucinich? Are, I don't know Dennis Kucinich and the? And the democratic party? Do I back Ron Paul and the Republican party? Do I back I think it was Gary Johnson, I can't remember what you?
Alex Strekal:I think he was the one, yeah, 20. What period are you talking about here?
C. Derick Varn :2004, in 2008. It's Bob Barr.
Alex Strekal:When Bob Barr renounces Because I remember Gary Johnson, but I don't remember exactly what year that was. Yeah, and then, yeah, it was Bob Barr. And then, honestly, even when I was a libertarian, I never joined the party. I was a rogue anti-electoral anarchist type.
C. Derick Varn :Well, what I wanted to talk about, about the specter of this alternative politics, is the Ron Paul stuff. Actually, paul stuff actually went two ways and we have kind of forgotten about one way. It went all right. So I signed on to the houston manifesto and this is a really embarrassing part of my life uh, in 2005, 2006, as part of the anti-war camp of it, but who was opposed to people like I don't know, saying the phrases of various, you know, islamic theocracies, um, and so I didn't want to go there and I got kind of involved in the politics around the anti sam harris end of the new atheist movement, so the people who would later on be called like atheism plus, and there's a lot of embarrassing stuff in this time period.
C. Derick Varn :We don't it's funny Cause I talk about, you know, the, the left and the millennial left, but we always like, we're like anti-war stuff. We're not going to mention anything between 2004 and 2010, uh, except for Barack Obama, because it's all really weird, um, and I remember just trying to go through this, and one of the things that your piece really spoke to me about is this attempt for an anti-systemic politics, like in the developed world and before 2007, marxism wasn't on the fucking radar, and I think people really don't get that. Like yes, there were these old Marxist sects. They still existed, but they were mostly not of any consequence.
Alex Strekal:Yes, when I look back at it and this is part of my analysis is that you know, back in the you know 9-11, bush Jr days, it's like it almost seems natural that the libertarians were the natural alternative politics. Quote-unquote, because the Soviet Union falling was still pretty recent and I did encounter Marxists online but it seemed like it was de facto. The libertarians had a huge marketing campaign. They had these political compass tests that almost seemed slanted to convince you that you were a libertarian.
C. Derick Varn :Oh yeah, in some ways, I don't think, almost seem slanted. I mean they were.
Alex Strekal:They were, they were. Maybe I'm being a little too kind to it in that way.
C. Derick Varn :I mean, I think the only thing that we have to remember is today, libertarianism is almost completely faded as a politics After Ron Paul tried it one last time in 2012,. It's been kind of over.
Alex Strekal:I mean it's ineffective and is never going to get anywhere. I mean it's a dead end. I concluded that a while back, pretty much by the time of 2010,. I concluded that I no longer wanted to be a libertarian and in some ways my entire output for five years on various blogs was just anti-libertarian shit, shaving off my own former beliefs and associations. But yeah, the movement is totally ineffective. And, of course, more recently there was the whole Mises caucus takeover and yeah, they still run candidates sometimes who are more like traditional, like social liberal, what I would call rainbow capitalists now, but basically socially liberal, fiscally conservative types.
C. Derick Varn :But I don't know and that's who won actually this last time when Trump and the Vamizas caucus and one of the last, let's say, reason magazine type libertarians went against each other.
C. Derick Varn :And the other thing that we forget is the people who are being defeated. Defeated. And it's interesting because this that you know that I remember in the early aught teens there were all these books about anne rand and I was like, oh, you guys write about her now, now that she's not that important, um, but uh, but she was a super dominant force in in the right from the reagan period, but also in the libertarian left. But what was interesting about the Rampalites is they opposed the Randites?
Alex Strekal:Yes, they did. Because Randian objectivists they were pro-war as fuck and pro-Israel as fuck.
C. Derick Varn :Right, they were neoconservatives in foreign policy.
Alex Strekal:Yes, yes, they were, and that is something I talk about in one of my later articles on this is that, yeah, and I think sometimes liberals and progressives don't have the best critiques of libertarianism because they're not privy to the different factions like this. You know, there's the paleo-libertarians and there's the neo-libertarians, who were more aligned with Ayn Rand Institute and objectivists, and they were more privy to neoconservatives. They had more of a neoconservative angle as well as being staunch atheists as well, which was very different as opposed to the paleo-conservatives, who were like anti-war and aligned with the or sorry, the paleo-libertarians, who were aligned with the paleo-conservatives and usually courted religious people a lot.
C. Derick Varn :And it's really weird to tell people about this now, but progressives often read American Conservative Magazine because it was the only conservative magazine and actually one of the few magazines at all. I mean, the Nation and Mother Jones were the other ones that were opposed to the Iraq War. Right, like, if you wanted to read anti-iraq war opinion before 2004, all right. Um, you were most likely going to read the american conservative under the auspices of uh, talkie um of talkie mag fame and pat buchanan, and then kevin williams, and kevin williams wrote a bunch of books that, and Ron Dreyer was part of it too, but Ron Dreyer comes later. Um, kevin Williams, but wrote a bunch of but I think it's Kevin Williams this is about. He has the most normie name ever. It's a Kevin guy who maybe it's Kevinson um wrote a bunch of books about the bush family that a lot of progressives read, and these people were also pushing a lot of like left-wingish books on american foreign policy.
C. Derick Varn :So, like chambers johnson's blowback, I read as a paleo-conservative influenced by libertarians, like and I try to get people to understand this because it makes certain weirdnesses that happen in the in the Obama administration around stuff like Counterpunch magazine make a little more sense, because that's when the left tries to do the same thing. But you know Coburn's making all these concessions to these nationalists who are also nominally anti-war. Nominally anti-war. Think about Alex Coburn's equivocations on Le Pen and him allowing Israel Shamir to publish at Counterpunch. If you guys don't know who Israel Shamir was, he was basically a Holocaust denialist from Russia and that was really turning people off. There was also this expose in Reason magazine against LewRockwellcom for their support of Gary North and Rush Dooney and the fact that they really were hiding neo-Confederates.
Alex Strekal:Honestly, it was difficult for them to ever even hide. But I mean, you could say there was an esoteric creed and an exoteric creed, where the esoteric creed, the exoteric creed, was more classical, liberal. You're talking about liberty and being against the state and just you know, pure individualism. And then the next thing, you know, yeah, you're talking to neo-Confederates and people who and especially due to Hoppe's influence like you were talking to people who kind of idolized European aristocracy too. It got weird in that way.
C. Derick Varn :I mean particularly in the Valmises world. Yes, and they would also call all Keynesianism fascism because of their relationship to the state, which, by the way, if people the Marxist Jehu people may not know this comes out of the milieu, just like me. And when you know that certain weird opinions that he has about, like abandoning the gold standard, is the beginning of fascism, makes perfect sense. It doesn't come from Marxism, although you can find it there if you really try. It comes from the fact that he came out of the Ron Paul movement. Other things out of the Ron Paul movement cryptocurrency, defunding everything.
Alex Strekal:Well, I was thinking in the back of my mind here, as far as we are talking about Ron Paul, like another part of his platform was ending the Federal Reserve, which in a strange sense you may think is counterintuitive for a capitalist ideologue to take up being against a big bank. But they had their reasons if you understand Austrian economics, going back to Mises about why they were against central banking. But that was one of the big hobby horse topics of them is ending the Federal Reserve too.
C. Derick Varn :Yep, and every now and then you will still see people who will confuse leftist, anti-finance capital stuff, which is usually suspect anyway. Not that I'm not that I'm pro finance capital, but if you think the problem with capitalism is just finance capital, that's usually a sign of other problems with stuff about the Federal Reserve and real money, which is kind of crazy. And I came out of that world, so did you, and we also went through this weird piece. There's this guy named Roderick Long. You were probably remember.
Alex Strekal:I knew he was influential on me for a second because he was associated with the Mises Institute, but he was oddly like the left wing of the Mises Institute, if you want to call it that.
C. Derick Varn :I mean he admitted racism was a problem, Didn't like Neo Confederates, didn't like supporting dictators abroad. I mean like he was anti-war, he was just a rabid anarcho-capitalist but did think racism and sexism were actual things, which in that milieu is rare. And then, around him Kevin Carson, then comes Kevin.
Alex Strekal:Carson, and that was to be honest. Like I have a lot of retroactive criticisms of Kevin Carson, however, I have to give him some credit. He was part of what led me and quite a few other people towards anti-capitalism towards anti-capitalism because he wrote these pieces establishing that capitalism is not a free market system independent of the state, that there is a certain relationship of the state supporting capitalism. Of course, these days I would go further and I would argue that there's no such thing as a. The concept of a free market itself is kind of an ideological shibboleth in a sense. So I would go further than Kevin Carson in some ways. But that was an influential thing. Through mutualism, or neo-mutualism, perhaps properly called that led people out of the ANCAP thing and more into real anarchism. Quote unquote.
C. Derick Varn :Right, so for me, around the same time, I've never, I was never truly an anarchist in the sense that I have never been totally against the state in immediate abolition form.
C. Derick Varn :This has always been like and again, this was true when I was a paleo-conservative I did think it would be better not to have a state. But I was like, eh, it'll be a billion years think it would be better not to have a state. But I was like, yeah, it'll be a billion years. Um, so, so it was. This was sort of my mentality about it. Um, I was uh and I had gotten pulled into this and and this you don't go into. But I think it's actually really important to remember why the why the anti-globalization movement became the alter globalization movement was actually what happened to people like me, because my first exposure to Pat Buchanan was I wasn't, I wasn't raised progressive 92,. My mother was a conservative Democrat, okay, and I don't know my father's politics. He was a con artist, so it doesn't really matter. But so that's my, that's my you. I came out of I. I was initially attracted to progressivism, but the Clinton administration gave me the ick, even when I was a teenager.
Alex Strekal:I don't feel like I ever was. I wouldn't say it gave me the ick, but I was a little bit too young to give a shit about Clinton. And I will say that intuitively. My experience of Democrats from the beginning of being politically conscious was that they kind of just seemed like used Carl salesman with a happy face.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah.
C. Derick Varn :As opposed to, uh, reaganite conservatives who seemed like defense dealers as used car salesman. It was kind of like like who was I dealing with and how were they conning me Was my attitude, and and um and the how were they conning me was my attitude. And the alternative politics even in the 90s was kind of libertarian or it was like this weird everything-in-the-kitchen-sink anarchism from Chomsky and whatnot. And this was another interesting thing, because your piece, we, you know I talk about Bernie, but I think there was actually a deliberate effort to pull in people like me when they encountered stuff like the battle for Seattle. What got me was I went to the battle of Seattle, I participated, I was barely 18 years old, it was my first trip to the West coast at all. I had saved up months of money to go and my experience of it was this weird fight with the cops and then the next day people declaring that we won because of some paltry concessions from the G8.
C. Derick Varn :And I remember thinking, even at the time, as an 18 year old who was barely political like you know, my idea of politics was like I don't, the Clintons gave me the ick and I think Rage Against the Machine is cool, but also what happened, but also what happened at Ruby Ridge was bad. That was my politics, like um, um. So I was like, yeah, uh, mumami of jamal and leon peltier, that shit sucks. They should, that shouldn't happen to them. Also, uh, I don't, you know, even if that guy, randy reaver, was a right nationalist and I still I'm not 100 sure he was what happened at Ruby Ridge is unforgivable and Waco was stupid. So that was my politics in my teens right, which is a very I'm not going to say incoherent mix, but I think it is morally coherent but ideologically all over the place.
Alex Strekal:Sure, that makes sense, because you didn't know what you didn't know.
C. Derick Varn :Right, right. And I never argued that like Randy Reaver or Waco was good. I just argued that killing children is bad.
Alex Strekal:Well, sure, hopefully, so Hopefully you did.
C. Derick Varn :And it seemed like there was, between the drug war and the proto war on and terror, a real police state threat.
Alex Strekal:Yes, and that was definitely part of the libertarian appeal was arguing against the police state and the Patriot Act and the erosion of privacy. That was basically and yeah, the rise of executive power that was handed to Bush, and the critique continued under the Obama administration about how they continued and expanded all of it.
C. Derick Varn :The Obama administration, about how they continued and expanded all of it. Yeah, and you and I were interesting because because you and I knew each other during this time period and we're still searching for an anti-systemic politics.
Alex Strekal:Right.
C. Derick Varn :And we can come back to Ron Paul for a second, and the weird milieu, because this Ron Paul libertarian stuff, it does maintain itself up through the first half of the obama administration, I do believe, like it's still a, it's still a dominant thing and it is not yet re-readed to, um, the, the conservative, the, the kind of proto-patriot, proto-maga movement. And I bring that up because, um, today, a lot of people will tell you the Tea Party was astroturfed and it was after the fact. But the initial Tea Party was actually and I know people are going to have a hard time remembering this a protest against George fucking Bush. And then it moved to a protest against.
C. Derick Varn :I remember as a libertarian that?
Alex Strekal:yeah, some of my libertarian friends got into the Tea Party. I never did. I was already moving left libertarian by that point, basically. But yeah, it was a little bit more organic than a purely astroturf thing at first. I think that's probably true.
C. Derick Varn :I mean well, the founders even condemned it. I think that's probably true. I mean well, the founders even condemned it. Remember, like in 20, like by the time of the of the midterm takeover in 2010,. Like the original OG 2006, 2007 Tea Party founders were like no. This has been an interesting thing because the initial Tea Party didn't seem. It seemed to come out of the Ron Paul part, but it very quickly moved to a resurgence of the moral majority.
Alex Strekal:Yeah.
C. Derick Varn :Of the 1990s.
Alex Strekal:I think that's what put me off of it. It was just like OK, this is just a conservative thing.
C. Derick Varn :Right, the Ted Cruz's of the world and the Michelle Bachman's and Sarah Palin's and all that and I'm like, oh, this is like a joke form in a more in a more openly racist form of the bullshit I saw in the moral majority in the 90s against Clinton, right. What I find interesting about that is that if we'd have really been aware and you and I were actually in a position to do it and I kind of kicked myself in the ass for not realizing it at the time about where the Ron Paul movement was going, we would have seen how easy that would have been to happen. But since we came to it in a search for an anti-war, anti-systemic politics, it was really cut off from both the Clinton era Democrats of my teen years and the Reagan slash, neo Reagan, neo conservative of the of the Reagan and Bush W years. George Herbert Walker Bush is a different breed. He was more of a Nixonite in a way, but that I didn't want anything to do with either of those politics, right, they both seemed like weird baby boomer bullshit that I didn't want to have to deal with.
C. Derick Varn :And um, and I remember you know, you and I met. I think you probably met around 2006 because you were. You were heading libertarian left and I was heading uh that sounds about right.
Alex Strekal:you know, I would pinpoint it around 2006 and you you said yeah, I've actually looking way back through my Facebook messages. I think I jokingly sent you some message like Marxist, Marxist, Marxist. You were becoming a Marxist Right and I was. I was effectively becoming a social anarchist.
C. Derick Varn :Right, no, no Way back there. There's been. There was antagonism between us, so I think.
Alex Strekal:I think it was half jokingly, though, but yeah.
C. Derick Varn :I was kind of proud of you, but yeah, but it's very interesting to look at the libertarian road and where it went, because we should have been able, from what we saw with Hans Hermann Hoppe and the weird paleo conservative stuff and the weird relationship with Pat Buchanan and all that, we should have been able to see that a large part of the libertarian movement was very open towards radically statist, radically anti-market stuff if they got pit in a corner.
Alex Strekal:I touch on this in my most recent piece, where we start talking about Trump and the alt-right.
Alex Strekal:And what I did personally see firsthand around the 2010 period is there was this shift where people who formerly were like right-wing anarcho-capitalist types they did suddenly. First of all, they were talking to certain people who were like white nationalist types and there was a certain degree of entryism going on for sure, where white nationalist types were framing themselves as anarchists and pulling people their way. They sort of resolved their cognitive dissonance of like, since they were getting into racial politics and nationalism at the same time, trying to be anarchists, and there was just this weird cognitive dissonance to that. And I was one of the people arguing against that, like how could you be an anarchist while arguing for nationalism? And the way that some of these people resolved their cognitive dissonance was to let go of the libertarian label and just go more, mask off with a more nakedly authoritarian approach. And that was kind of the birth of the alt-right, before it was called the alt-right. A lot of it, in my opinion, came from not necessarily paleo libertarianism, but certainly like the racist wing of that.
C. Derick Varn :So I can just confirm your suspicions directly, richard. Uh, richard Spencer, I knew about him from him being the arts editor of the American Conservative Magazine before he started working with the National Policy Institute, mpi, which is unfortunately in my home not my hometown that I grew up in, but the hometown I was born in, augusta, georgia, hometown that I grew up in, but the hometown I was born in augusta, georgia um, uh and uh, which is basically the mpi, is a very uh, soft sounding. There's nothing scary about the national policy institute. It's been right, nationalist from the beginning. It's basically been a nazi front for forever.
C. Derick Varn :Um and um, I remember learning about me. I remember learning about it because one of the things that was very weird and you know, and something that maybe should give people some pause Um, I was very familiar with the Frankfurt school when I was a paleo conservative, believe it or not, I've. I kind of had a boner for Adorno even when I was a conservative, which I think is not totally surprising, and I knew about Paul Gottfried as early as 2004, maybe even earlier.
C. Derick Varn :So I saw the formation of this attempt to, in America, build the equivalent to the french new right in in europe. And for those of you who don't know, the french new right is basically a form of post-fascism. I mean it's, it's a mixture of national bolsheviks, radical traditionalist uh, former former Nazis and Lepinites right, like that's what it is. Um, and they were working their way through the weirder parts of the American anti-systemic counterculture. So if you have been into something like Farrell House Press, uh, which was, you know, just a countercultural thing, seemed totally cultural um, you would be exposed to maybe Alain Desbois on paganism, or the weird neo-folk music, some of which I aesthetically still kind of like, even though I don't, you know, I don't really rock its politics at all. I don't want to give them any money, but there was a lot of these like thinly veiled. We're not Nazis but we are kind of fascist. Maybe we kind of think Oswald Mosley was cool, our national syndicalism was cool, our Strasser was cool.
Alex Strekal:What I remember was encountering people who was like you would. They would have hitlerite revisionism videos. They would have um videos attacking martin luther king from a racist angle, not just some leftist critique or something um oh yeah, they would have like bircher shit too. Yeah but they were also talking to anarchists and, like some of them, even like tried to frame themselves as socialists.
C. Derick Varn :Troy Southgate, a former former member of the British National Front who moved to the United States and wrote for Green Anarchy magazine in the 90s, because before they realized who he was, it was the founder in the in the late aughts of the national anarchist movement.
Alex Strekal:And that was one of the weird things that was contentious at the time. Yes, the national anarchist thing, which I guess was more of a British thing, I suppose. Right, I didn't even realize that British and West Coast.
C. Derick Varn :That was the thing.
Alex Strekal:It was British and then they moved it to the Bay Area.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, that part I knew the Bay Area thing, but I didn't know until later that it was kind of a British thing actually. But later that it was kind of a British thing actually. But yeah, that was one of the controversies and since I was with the left libertarians at the time, there was this big like and there was another guy named Keith Preston who he flirted with the National Anarchists though I actually had a weird encounter with him recently and he claims that he only ever was like on the edges of them and never really supported them.
C. Derick Varn :I guess but whatever he also edges of them and never really supported them, I guess.
C. Derick Varn :But he also flirted with uh, with the alt right explicitly running stuff on the alt right readings of carl smith, and, in interfacing with uh, with a group called new resistance, which used to be american third position for those of you who don't know, that's explicitly neo-nazi. It is. And, uh, they were at the time also the people running the friends of juse in America. So I bring this up because when people talk about MAGA communism they think it like nothing like this has ever happened before. But on the fringes of this Ron Paul movement and on the fringes of the very, very far left and I don't mean to be a horseshoe theory, but this is true there was a lot of this weird shit coming off in the anti-war movement, um, and when I said I signed the houston manifesto, uh, this was forever ago.
C. Derick Varn :It was encountering these guys when I was on the paleo-conservative right. That scared the shit out of me, that pushed me into that direction. And and then by 2000, between 2004 and 2006, I was like trying to figure out how to reconcile myself to practical politics and opposing the Bush administration and even like maybe voting for a Democrat for the first time in my life and in this pool of anti-systemic politics. I think people think it's new. They're talking about the great transitionary period or the great realignment. What I read reading your stuff is like there's been an attempt to do realignments in American political life basically constantly since the 1970s yeah which seems so it's been nonstop Go ahead.
Alex Strekal:No, that's correct, although I'm not sure my critique's quite. I don't quite touch on it as far back as the 70s perhaps, but certainly I do focus on it's relevant. You know the 90s and the fall of the Soviet Union. It's also relevant talking about the anarchist movement, because post-left anarchism especially became a thing in the 90s.
C. Derick Varn :Which is different from post-left whatever the fuck the post-left is now, I know it's a different meaning.
Alex Strekal:There's like three different meanings of that now, I guess, as I've seen you say yeah, there's the post-left anarchism, and then you could say post-left Marxism, I guess.
C. Derick Varn :I would say post-left social democracy, because most of them are social democrats and I consider the OG post-left or the anti-left of capital left communists. So because they would always talk about needing to distance themselves from the left, about needing to distance themselves from the left. You could see this in both the Bordigas movement in Italy and the weird milieu around post-socialism, our barbarism, the group, not the polemic in France and around places like La Vieux-Pont, which I'm totally probably mispronouncing, but the old mall bookstore.
C. Derick Varn :We were all home yeah probably mispronouncing, but the Old Mole Bookstore, yeah, which was a, you know they would talk about like the problems of militancy and like how communists needed to distance themselves from both, you know, from the left, and this moved in a lot of those circles, not in all of them, but for example, in France, la Ville Tom got associated with negationism, which was the Holocaust. Wasn't that important to the Holocaust? Didn't happen to. A lot of us are regional bio-nationalists in France now in the 1990s and aughts, so I. It was interesting to me because we'd seen this before and in the 90s I had actually been really interested in the post-left anarchism debate.
Alex Strekal:I remember I mean there were some interesting. I mean it means a lot of different things.
C. Derick Varn :Right.
Alex Strekal:To a certain extent it means like green and primitivist tendencies actually.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, except for Bob Black, which is sometimes green and primitivist, but other times he's a special person, other times whatever. But I do remember the primitivist controversies and you know, if you were in the Pacific Northwest, from the Bay Area all the way up into Vancouver, canada you had to deal with bioregionalism, which was often represented by leftists. But that was Troy Southgate's entrance into the whole thing and he was also associated with the post-left movement. And then you had Zerzan and that love of the Unabomber who rejected Zerzan for being too leftist. Then you had Derek Jensen and what is it? Ukraine resistance, which would, I mean, like if you were a leftist in college in 2004, you encountered that stuff all the time. It was like it was Derek Jensen and John Serson and Ward Churchill from the indigenous end of that, and all that stuff was very alienating to me.
C. Derick Varn :I can understand that Chomsky I liked. But the thing is that I was going to bring up is you could endorse most of Chomsky's foreign economic I mean foreign foreign policy stuff and be a libertarian. And in fact another weird thing about about Lou Rockwell dot com and the Ron Paul movement they liked Chomsky's books on foreign policy.
Alex Strekal:They sure know them. Sure what Like, and even like, maybe manufacturing consent in some ways. As far as critiquing the media, even though they might not share his anti-capitalism, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
C. Derick Varn :And so what I find interesting about this is when I have joked kind of sort of that this Ron Paul stuff was a precursor, a real direct precursor to the Bernie movement.
Alex Strekal:It was I mean they're both forms of populism. It's just a right-wing populism and a left-wing populism, if you want to simplify it.
C. Derick Varn :And they're both actually representatives of like 60s and 70s countercultural politics that went dormant for generations, like because you know Ron Paul, you know, came up in the in the 70s around the Rothbart movement and Bernie comes out of the, the OG McGovern Rainbow Coalition, but you know, actually a socialist Well the other thing, that.
Alex Strekal:The other thing I want to say, comparing the two, is you know both of them from what I remember. With Ron Paul, like especially when I first got into him, he did seem he had that public perception of being the one guy within his own party who was like saying the unpopular things that no one else would say. And it's the same thing with Bernie. Like Bernie had this reputation of being like oh, even though he was an independent, I guess, like he was basically like, in effect, a Democrat critiquing the shit out of the Democrats.
C. Derick Varn :And we have to remember that Ron Paul was not always a member of the Republican Party.
Alex Strekal:No, he was a Libertarian, he was a Libertarian Party candidate.
C. Derick Varn :That's correct. So I mean, mean, even the idea of entering the other party to tear it apart actually began on the right, which, which you know I don't think seth ackerman, the writer of the ackerman plan, like had any knowledge of that, but it's funny because it converged in both scenarios just a decade before on the right, before it did on the left. And, uh, a lot of people were surprised and kind of terrified, um, when a lot of this libertarian shit got into occupied, because another thing that's kind of been forgotten about was that this rom paul leftovers they were involved in occupy and trying to do that too. I mean even up to and including the weirdest elements of it, like Alex Jones.
Alex Strekal:Another thing I would say relating Occupy to this is, in a way I think I talk about this in my second article like what you're talking about is actually a three, three article run.
C. Derick Varn :And the second article.
Alex Strekal:The second article and the second article touches on Bernie and the so-called alt-left, which is sort of a weird term I never used, but I took it up and it is notable that I'm right here for a second.
Alex Strekal:Oh yeah it is notable that Bernie in a way took up the rhetoric of Occupy, the whole 1% thing. It's basically Occupy's rhetoric. He didn't have the. Occupy might have been more of an anarchist thing, but in some ways although maybe not explicitly but what I remember of Occupy is maybe this is, I know, my friend, just that we both know who's an anarchist is going to hate me for this.
Alex Strekal:But what I remember of Occupy is my dad suggested we go to an event for it. But what I remember of Occupy is my dad suggested we go to an event for it. I went to one in downtown Cleveland and it was just some strange random person barking platitudes into a microphone and we got bored and went home. But apparently there was another part of it that was more like people were actually doing these sit-in things and then the police state got sick against that. But you know, people were doing these little autonomous, zone-like things that I didn't see. That I didn't see. But the point I would make is that, yeah, this whole rhetoric about the 1% versus everyone else Bernie picked that up and that came from Occupy before him.
C. Derick Varn :Right. Well, I mean, this was the thing People have made a lot of hay about how the right populace were able to steal the thunder out of the left populace. Because because the right populace were more anti, anti administrative state than the left populace. Off Bunga Bunga crowd says it. Alex, uh, um, from off Bunga Bunga has even come on my show and stated that critique and what I've actually said. This kind of interesting, as this indicates that they're not Americans and are also younger than us, because I'm like, well, but a lot of that stuff actually came out of right-wing populist movements before that.
C. Derick Varn :Anyway, I mean, um that anyway, I mean the Trump as weird demagogic appeals to everything I had been seeing developing since he quit being a Democrat in the 90s. And I mentioned this because one of the biggest anti-Trumpers that I knew, who always would accuse me, since I was a Marxist, of being a secret Trumper personally, was actually a Trump supporter in 2000 in the Reform Party. So it's a very funny thing how a lot of this went. So my search for alternative politics parallels to yours. Shortly after, around we met, I got involved with the Mike Gravel campaign.
Alex Strekal:Okay, that was one of the. I do remember the Mike Gra, mike revell campaign the 2008 one, not the 2016 one.
C. Derick Varn :No, and he was one of the people who, yeah, some of the libertarians.
C. Derick Varn :He had this overlap between libertarians and progressives, kind of yeah, he wanted a left, like when he failed to win and failed badly, uh to win uh anything in the Democratic primary. He took his ball and went to the Libertarian Party and was like maybe we can move the Greens and the Libertarians together to oppose war and to oppose the security state. And I didn't go with him because I was like they're going to pick some weirdo like Gary Johnson. And they did something even worse. They picked a former neoconservative conservative who saw the way. I mean we're talking about Bob Bob Barr, Bob Barr.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, I remember Bob Barr was a neoconservative signer of the Patriot Act, who turned against it in 2008 and became the libertarian candidate in 2008 against the Obama administration.
Alex Strekal:That's a weird one.
C. Derick Varn :And yeah, it was very weird and it was kind of it kind of pissed off everybody.
Alex Strekal:Yeah.
C. Derick Varn :Because the left libertarians were alienated. The paleo libertarians didn't trust him because he was a former neoconservative and the Randian libertarians didn't trust him because he had recanted his position on the Iraq war. So it was like nobody was happy with that dude. But I guess because he was a name and because he was associated with the Republicans, they ran. Him was a name and because he was associated with the republicans, they, they ran him. So I jumped on at that point.
Alex Strekal:I jumped on the obama campaign because I really did not trust hillary clinton, sure and um, uh, speaking of, anti-war and hillary clinton, like from what I remember, like she was basically promising to bomb iran. Oh, yeah when she ran against Trump and I instinctively knew people who, like they, weren't necessarily libertarian Some of them were. I knew some people who were like progressives actually, or originally Bernie supporters, who became Trump supporters because the Trump was framed as an anti-war candidate. I think that's incorrect, but he was framed that way vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton being such a warmonger.
C. Derick Varn :Well, I mean, this is the thing, clinton, hillary Clinton's foreign policy was actually even in some ways more neoconservative on foreign policy than her husband's, and I was opposed to that pretty dramatically, and so you know, so was people like Doug Henwood, but you know a lot of people on the left after Trump won really ran in the other direction, but this is jumping way ahead, yeah it is jumping ahead.
C. Derick Varn :But in 2008,. I had been flirting with Marxism for a long time, but I was still coming out of this long for a way into paleo-conservative world, and the biggest influence on my economic thinking before 2005 was actually Joseph Schph. Schuppenter not, oh, wow, so so uh, even even the, the other austrian they would, they would refer to him sometimes right, um, yeah.
C. Derick Varn :Well, the thing is they would read him and like, even go like this is why we need to oppose democracy, and other people would read him and be like this is why we need to oppose democracy. And other people would read him and be like well, this is why social democracy is inevitable. It's a very weird thing.
Alex Strekal:It's funny you say that because Hayek actually has a similar status. I've seen some of the Austrians attack him as ultimately selling out and being a social Democrat. Well, at the same time, you see liberals and and progressives attack him as the ultimate you know, evil capitalist guy.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah well, you and I talked about this in around 2012 and 2014. I was really influenced by the thinking of Philip Mirowski, who very clearly painted out that neoliberalism is not what the left said it was and it's also not what the right said it was. The left said it was and it's also not what the right said it was. In fact, the thing that was really distorted. Distorting about it is they kept on pretending that, like von mises, you know, totally laissez-faire capitalism is what neoliberalism is and that's never what it was. Um, it was about, you know, public private markets, which von Mises thought was basically communist. That's right.
Alex Strekal:No, I mean he had the term interventionism as an intermediary thing, but he pretty much would call anyone who was an interventionist a socialist.
C. Derick Varn :Right.
Alex Strekal:And there's that famous, you know quote of him, you know running calling everyone a socialist in the Montpirlin society, or whatever. And calling everyone a socialist in the Montpirlin society, or whatever.
C. Derick Varn :Right. So you know, I come out of the Austrian world and Schopenhauer was part of that, because he was an Austrian economist but he was not a von Mises economist. I learned a lot more about him. He was more aligned with the German historical school and the social democratic read on him is actually probably closer to what he actually thought. But he wasn't necessarily happy or sad about it. He was more just like. This is the likely outcome that's going to happen. It's neither going to be good or bad. It's you know there's tradeoffs here led me to be at first a kind of soft, like almost isolationist. Uh, soft I, I want to say nationalist, although at the time I was also. I was also, I consider myself a conservative, anti-racist. You can see how, like I was never going to survive in that milieu, right, because it's just like um, um.
Alex Strekal:So you know I mean, especially under the first, when obama came into a power. I would say that you know what became the alt-right brood, partly, as you know, naturally as a reaction to the for him being for the first black president. It was in the racism, stuff was inflamed and, um, I would say that, in some regards, yeah, I mean, how could you not come into conflict with those people when they were pretty much out in the open by that time, anywhere?
C. Derick Varn :because this is an interesting thing about the difference between the 90s and and aughts with these groups and then obama forward, uh, and the rise of the alt-right. This is a good transition point. Those motherfuckers spoke in code when I was coming up.
Alex Strekal:Okay.
C. Derick Varn :You didn't talk about white nationalism. You talked about human biodiversity which was taken from it.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, race realism was later. Human biodiversity was interesting because it was both race realist, but it had taken its name and ideology from a left-wing anthropologist, and so one of the things that the far right was doing at the time was trying to code themselves as coming out of left-wing stuff so you couldn't recognize what they were. Another thing that I remember both Hoppe and Paul Gottfried although in Paul Gottfried's case it's legitimate and Richard Spencer all did was claimed to be right-wingers who were against cultural Marxism but were highly influenced by the Frankfurt School.
Alex Strekal:I was going to mention this. Actually, hoppe, literally, was a student of Habermas.
C. Derick Varn :Right. Oh, here's the funny thing Hoppe was a student of Habermas and Gottfried was a student of Marcuse.
Alex Strekal:I didn't know that part.
C. Derick Varn :Wow, and Gottfried actually took over the uh for a special episode, for a special issue, telios magazine, the formal old magazine in the eighties and nineties of the Frankfurt school, and ran a European new right all devoted issue to it under the influences of paul piccone. So, like I, I say the reason why people talk about red brown shit and I've always been like well, it's overstated, but it's real, and people like, oh, no, it's not real. Now a lot of those people are like oh, it's very real. You used to tell me it wasn't real, but I'm like it's also way older than you think. Like this strategy goes back because when you're looking for just an alternative politics I don't believe in horseshoe theory, I don't know, but there is a way in which anti-systemic groups, both left and right, borrow from each other.
Alex Strekal:In the 70s, for example, leaderless resistance, which we now associate with neo-nazis right, that was developed by like anarchists in the 60s, like a new leftist um well, I was going to say like, if we want to go even further back, like syncretism almost inherently was part of fascism in its original form, was it not Absolutely?
C. Derick Varn :Absolutely. I mean not so much. It's complicated in the German case because the Strasser side lost so badly and Hitler was basically a capitalist developmentalist, almost a proto-neoliberal. But when it comes to like the italian in the spanish case, um, it's the. The phalange is more more traditional reactionaries, but with some concessions to left-wing economic developmentalism, um, although they ended up being kind of just standard capitalist ultimately. But the italian fascists were full of fucking former socialists they pulled. Largely their ranks were from the maximalist faction of the.
Alex Strekal:Came partly out of syndicalism right.
C. Derick Varn :There's two things the maximalist faction of the, of the socialist party of Italy, which, and then the national Syndicalists, as opposed to the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Yes, those were the two major bases of leadership, not of membership, but of leadership within the fascist movement that combined with the denuncio types and the futurists to build fascism. And that syncretism was there from day one. You're absolutely correct, um beyond, I mean. It's why, like debates about whether or not fascism is left or right, always ends up getting you know. Yes, obviously it was more.
Alex Strekal:it was more right wing than left wing it was right wing, but I think it opportunistically used left wing things is how I tend to put it right.
C. Derick Varn :Um, and I tend to think it also opportunistically borrowed left-wing things is how I tend to put it Right. I tend to think it also opportunistically borrowed left-wing ideas. Here's the thing Neoconservatism stole left-wing ideas all the time.
Alex Strekal:I mean, didn't they originally come from the Democrats anyway?
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, they did, but let's talk about what they did. Reagan used Saul Alaskalinski as a way to spread his message.
Alex Strekal:Oh okay.
C. Derick Varn :So Reagan, like my conservative professor of philosophy who was involved in the Reagan campaign I'm not going to mention his name. He was a weird right-wing Hegelian. He actually gave me Saul Alskalinski's book when I was a paleo-conservative and told me to read it and he actually said this doesn't work for the left they think it does, but it doesn't.
Alex Strekal:but it really worked for us and and also we can denounce it while using it and okay and maybe this flat out like so so as an appropriationism of things that failed for one camp but that actually works for years.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah Right, they also talked about. I mean, he told me that the Birchers use Leninist sales as their main structure.
Alex Strekal:Here's another thing I will point out Rothbard himself.
Alex Strekal:I can't remember the article, but he actually makes an article where he praises Leninism in structure or in form. Where he praises Leninism in structure or in form and he actually, in a sense, when you look at the way he frames anarcho-capitalist propaganda in this particular article I can't remember the name of it, but he literally advocates that the right-wing libertarianism movement frame itself as what's the term I'm looking for, right opportunism. So he actually uses Leninist frames of reference, sometimes in the way that he formulated anarcho-capitalist propaganda models, and it is a propaganda model. There's a famous quote where he pretty much admits to inventing it, almost to deflate true anarchism. It is kind of like almost an insincere term that he came up with. But yeah, I just wanted to bring that up because there are some strange parallels, actually not necessarily in content but in form, between the anarcho-capitalist propaganda and Leninism actually.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, I know I. I mean this is the thing. Leninism actually is very effective for marginal politics. That's militant um. I've also pointed out that in asia a lot of the right, a lot of the asian right, including uh park uh, the former dictator in the 70s of south k, and every person who's ever been in charge in Singapore into the muddle of the, of the, the, the early Obama period, because a lot of, in a way, obama is a, is a figure a lot like John Kennedy, and I don't mean a lot of people meant that like as a praise, I actually meant it as a damnation okay uh I kind of figured yeah, um, kennedy was a person that people projected upon immediately.
C. Derick Varn :Um, he was, uh, a pretty rabid anti-communist who may or may not have calmed down about it towards the end of his life. Uh, I've heard all kinds of theories, you know, and everybody from Marxist-Leninist to Birchers want to claim that his that right before he got killed. And the reason why the quote CIA killed him unquote was because he converted to their politics. So he's a he's, he's a cipher, and Obama was a cipher too.
Alex Strekal:And I was going to say I mean, I get why you're making this argument, because you know Kennedy has this reputation as being the super charismatic guy who everyone loved and Obama ran on. Really an empty platform, but just the pure platitude, symbolic platitude of hope and change. Um, and then went on to like violate everything the progressives wanted and they went to sleep. Um, right, that was exactly it.
C. Derick Varn :like violate everything the progressives wanted and they went to sleep. Um, right, and that was exactly. And you and I remember because this is one thing we shared is we were always like shocked at how quickly everyone dropped the anti-war pastoring. But then I was also shocked. I remember gary wills, who was a conservative who became a liberal because of the iraq war and he was. He wrote this thing in 2012 about like the Afghan buildup that that Obama was going to do, and he was like we've been betrayed. And I remember just going and saying to you know, I actually I think I wrote something to him that he never responded to. Why would? He didn't know who, it was when, where I was like in what way were you betrayed? Barack Obama said he supported the Afghan war Right Now. I supported him tacitly in 2008 because I thought maybe he would be a de-escalator in Afghanistan and Iraq.
C. Derick Varn :Right, that was my hope, right, and he wasn't fucking hillary clinton, sure, and? And then I remember immediately being called, being called sexist for that, so it was like not a great.
Alex Strekal:uh, my, my, uh, weird, I mean that that whole thing was abused with hillary clinton, where, you know, anyone who opposed it for any reason was called the sexist, of course right, right, and again in 2016,.
C. Derick Varn :it was especially, oh my God, but it was uh and people who want to know how I voted in 2016,. I didn't. So, uh, I tried to um people.
Alex Strekal:I mean, people are really going to hate me for this, but I've never voted in a presidential election. I've been tempted to, but and maybe you could point your finger at me and blame me as like oh ha ha ha, trump happened because of you, but where do you? Live I'm in ohio it is a red state but I'm in cleveland, which is like a blue island of a red state yeah, maybe I can blame you for it.
C. Derick Varn :If I was a progressive, yeah, I mean, look, I might, except for 2008,. I might as well have not voted ever. I tried to vote in 2016. What happened was all the voter laws shifted and it was very hard to get a ballot through in Georgia. So I just I know my ballot wasn't counted, so don't blame me.
Alex Strekal:Honestly, though, like I've never so much taken the moral argument against voting which some anarchists take up which is a little silly to me, um, because it's almost maybe not down punching, but like blaming the powerless citizen for their own oppression, like, ooh you're, how dare you oppress your neighbor by voting? Like? I don't buy that so much.
C. Derick Varn :It's not like. It's not like. If everyone stopped voting, the government would just go away.
Alex Strekal:No, it wouldn't. It wouldn't, that's absolutely true too. It'll just punch you in the face anywhere. So it's like okay, whether you voted for it or not. But I approach it more as just from a cynical, practical perspective of just like oh, none of these people can enthuse me very much, and I know how I've seen enough cycles of things fail for me not to be enthused.
C. Derick Varn :Well, it's interesting If people were to look up my voter record in Utah. And you can't really look it up in Georgia because you don't declare party in Georgia, you have to. In Utah you can declare party if you want to, but what you actually do every year was declare what ballot you wanted and that was it. But in Utah you have to register as a party to vote in their primaries, at least in the GOP one. Actually you can openly vote in the Democratic one. But I have changed my voter registration like five times since I've been here to vote strategically, locally for union stuff.
C. Derick Varn :Okay, um, and even my dad who was like he was pretty much progressive liberal, but he voted for republicans on occasion, for strategic reasons actually yeah, I mean, well, if you're only voting down to, if, if you're a leftist and you're voting down, taking on everything you're captured, you're a captured member like, so you what? You just fucking be a normal fucking center of the road democrat anyway, because that's what you're really doing. Um, uh, but uh, my point on that is is uh, I don't. I think I voted for a republican once in my life, but it's it's still like. In 2008, I voted for first mike revell in the primaries and barack obama, and I, I I told you I immediately, uh, regretted my vote and I wanted to go back into anti-systemic politics and Then, as the recession was happening, obama didn't do anything about it.
C. Derick Varn :It's not that he did nothing, but he bailed out the banks and didn't restructure it in a way that helped people. In fact, every point of inequity that we saw that got exacerbated from the Reagan and Bush years went gangbusters during the Obama years. This is not really dealt with. The the inequality in in the United States went crazy, um, in the recovery under Obama even more than under Trump, and that was something that I think really threw a lot of people. That I think really threw a lot of people. But when I was reading your piece on Trump and then, bernie, I kept on thinking about Dan Carlin. People who follow the podcast the Verse and the broader know that Dan Carlin's an old history podcaster, used to be a political podcaster, was originally a libertarian, not of the variety that we're talking about, but, uh, maybe a cato white.
C. Derick Varn :He was cato, but also like he was for immigration restrictions and immigration reform. Um, but uh, not uh, but he also. He was not one of these deport people. He wanted like some kind of way for people who were already here to.
Alex Strekal:It was a very like in the middle of the spectrum somewhere.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, and he was for a long time. He was opposed to public sector unions and then Wisconsin scared him. But what's interesting about him? And I bring him up because Trump depoliticized him and I bring it up because he had been a person who kind of been on. He wasn't all the way on the Ron Paul train, but he was kind of on the Ron Paul train. He wasn't on the Bernie train, but he was supportive of it in, well, 2016.
C. Derick Varn :But at least as an alternative to politics, maybe it can change the Democratic Party. But Trump scared the shit out of him and he basically left political commentary when Trump won and just did historical commentary. And the reason why I think what happened was what you describe in your, in your three pieces and I'm going to link all of them in the episode. I'm going to let you talk about more of it. But basically he realized that Trump really was a demagogic, anti-systemic politics, that he had gotten part of what he wanted and he didn't actually want it because it was actually worse, and so that makes sense, because in a sense it's true of Trump.
Alex Strekal:It's like he. He was a alternative politics that actually won in a sense, except it was worse. It made things worse.
C. Derick Varn :I mean, and here's the thing, like you know, I always find it interesting what people were afraid of trump, like uh, frenemy of the show douglas lane, and I used to argue because he was afraid that, like steve bannon and the paleo conservatives were going to run some right-wing keynesian scheme and we get like fascism or whatever, which is a far cry from where he's at today. And what I said to him at the time was like A, that's not possible. And B I mean in some sense the MMT schemes have been run by Republicans since Reagan. But the other thing that I was pointing out to them was that Trump's, you know, and, and Scott Horton, of all people, I had him on my show, I followed him since I was a right winger. He's from the anti-warcom days.
C. Derick Varn :I remember he used to be an anti-Trump or I think he's now on that bandwagon. I don't, I don't know. I haven't talked to him since I interviewed him when I first had him on my show here. It was one of the two right-wingers I've ever had on. But one of the things that he and I both noticed was Trump would say everything to everybody and I was like you can listen to a Trump speech and you can hear a neoconservative and an anti-war and a pro-war and an anti-police and a pro-police.
Alex Strekal:See, that's the thing I didn't pick up on until a little later Just the degree to which Trump really is like a Rorschach test in a sense, because yeah, right now, for example, he's positioning himself as super pro-Israel and trying to cater, trying to pander to Jews. He's trying to pander to black people as well. He's super pro-war, but like he tries to position himself as like in paleo-conservative terms in some ways.
C. Derick Varn :He's super pro-war in Israel, but not. I mean, I will say this he seems to be war-averse for Americans, but he has no problem with other people fighting wars.
Alex Strekal:So he's a proxy of wars yeah, Right.
C. Derick Varn :So when people are like, oh, he's different from Obama, I'm like dude, his bombing campaign and his drone campaign.
Alex Strekal:Didn't he do something with Libya?
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, intensified. He also assassinated a key figure in Iran, that's right, that's right.
C. Derick Varn :That's right. But my point about Trump is, yeah, compared to Bush or Reagan or the neoconservatives, yes, he's a relatively peaceful president, even compared to some Democrats. I mean, I'm not going to lie about that, but right now, for example, if you're trying to vote on palestine, he's no good. Yeah, good fucking luck picking anybody like um, because if you know it's going, you know, we know where trump's gonna go. On that like he's, he's actually he's especially himself as more pro-israel than the democrats.
C. Derick Varn :Yes, right, which is one of the things about him, is about the search for alternative politics. Is we already know that he's willing to make concessions to neoconservatives? Because he did. He motherfucking put John Bolton in the State Department. You know, one of the biggest ghouls of the Bush administration.
Alex Strekal:And what we're seeing right now is, you know, the part of the alt-right who actually is super anti-Semitic is opposing him because he's so pro-Israel. And the people who actually are hardcore white nationalists are like why are you not just saying let's ban immigration for all non-whites?
C. Derick Varn :I mean this is a funny thing, Like, apparently, apparently, for all non-whites. I mean this is a funny thing like, uh, apparently, uh, uh, and I I don't say this as to dismean, to demean or defend them, but both angela nagel and richard spencer were joe biden people. Um, so yeah, because because uh, b Biden maintained the Trump border policies and you know, I think Spencer has come out against Trump for his Zionist stuff, but so I think Candace Owens may be heading that way too.
Alex Strekal:She does, she gets. I guess, though, he's not a political figure. Kanye West does this weird gambit where the Jews aren't the real Jews.
C. Derick Varn :It's black Israelism, but weirder.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, it's really fucking weird.
C. Derick Varn :I don't even know how to describe it things that your piece on the on the bernie and the trump scenario is that the bernie bro accusation kind of felt like in hindsight that it was a weird self-fulfilling prophecy that, like liberals, chastising certain relatively priorly unpoliticized people for supporting Bernie ended up making them moving to the right more attractive. That's part of it, I think there's there's.
Alex Strekal:There's truth to that, and I do. I personally knew quite a few people who, like when they were originally Bernie supporters with them, when it was clear that Bernie not only lost and got kneecapped, but especially when he would turn around and like kiss the ass of those who kneecapped him, in a sense. And this, this is something I kind of agree with Jimmy Dore about.
C. Derick Varn :Actually, Me too.
Alex Strekal:And then they were like OK, so he's like betrayed us and Trump won. And Trump was running as a populistist too, although more incoherently than Bernie perhaps. Um, they swung to Trump. They swung to Trump, and I've even saw someone go from being a Bernie supporter to like a dark enlightenment type.
C. Derick Varn :I saw multiples of that. I mean, this is the thing I worked with people. Uh, I'll talk about it since he's now dead and I've talked about it in public. Paul Shetler was a friend of mine, good friend, who had come out of the the post left anarchist world into the occupy world and he had helped me publish. In fact he's the person that put me in contact with Mark Fisher and actually commissioned the article on Russell Brand and he had the series of debates between me, jody Dean, michael Rettenwald and Sam Chris. I like to point out that almost all of those people have been canceled by somebody. Those people have been canceled by somebody. So Jody Dean for a stance on Palestine, sam Chris for sexual misconduct. Michael Reckonwald for well having a public breakdown and becoming a reactionary.
Alex Strekal:He did have a public breakdown, yeah.
C. Derick Varn :Right, yeah, and I guess people have try to cancel me too, but it's, it's um for uh, for a variety of things, um, but none of us really stuck, because most of it was flying, I mean I, I if you, if you want to put it a certain way, um c4ss tried to cancel me yeah, well, this is a weird thing about c4ss, right, you and I I was never a member, but I remember, in in 2010, when I was first moving abroad still following them and noticing how many of them have moved from like the roderick long form of left libertarianism to something more like traditional perdonist mutualism.
C. Derick Varn :Yes, and you know, they've gone through the carson gate and a lot of them are like, uh, you know, moore's, they were no longer anti-marxist, in the same way that a lot of them have started out as that's true to a point that's true, to a point I mean, some of them still are, but oh, but if you were to.
Alex Strekal:If we're talking william gillis, he was actually always super anti-marxist and super anti-communist. And what happened a little bit later I think 2012, and later he took over.
C. Derick Varn :Ah, but go ahead no go ahead.
Alex Strekal:Um, but yeah, from what I remember, it's true there's certainly an element of truth that there was this. Kevin Carson was kind of a door opener for people, and so was Sean Wilbur, and it was Sean Wilber who was actually like a Proudhon scholar who would do nothing but talk about Proudhon.
C. Derick Varn :He still does and I remember those guys also being like and I went like I don't talk about it much because I hate them on the rare chance I encountered them on the internet. They're some of the most annoying people in the world, but Henry George was a figure that I was initially attracted to in 2005, 2006.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, and you do get some people taking up Georgism too.
C. Derick Varn :Right, right, and you believe in the non-aggression or the non-coercion principle, but you realize that John Locke is full of shit on how we got property in the United States. Henry George is appealing to you, right, because you're like, oh, we can own property, but we can't own land. That's right Another thing.
Alex Strekal:I found weird about George's, though, is some of them are like it's almost like a single-issue politics, like yeah, they believe in the single tax, but they're also conservatives on every other issue, like I've met that kind of Georgist too.
C. Derick Varn :Right. Well, what is interesting about Henry George himself is like Henry George and Marx were competitors, but like Henry George, marx upon his death I could see that right, so like when you actually go into the history. And I remember this was a gateway drug for me out of paleo conservatism, if we talk about classical liberalism, and I would realize how many of those classical liberals were socialists, like they were like a lot of marxist socialists like um.
Alex Strekal:So I just realized that like, oh, classical liberalism is a much more broad and weird thing it is and the way I've come the way I've come to think about it is, you know, it's it's kind of internally split between its elitist side and its socialist side, or it's a galaterian side, let's say right and basically marxism pretty much erases its egalitarian side from history.
C. Derick Varn :He just does it after Marx and after LaSalle, which is the other form of kind of state socialism that emerges. I don't think Marx is necessarily state socialist either, but you know what I mean.
Alex Strekal:I do want to partly agree with you about C4SS but also push back, because I ended up being critical of them in some ways. But it's true that a lot of them started veering leftward. Some of them got into more social anarchist territory, but my longstanding critique of them always was like they would do that and yet still be allied with ANCAPs and Libertarian Party people. Or they would propose syncretic philosophies.
C. Derick Varn :trying to put Ayn Rand in conversation with Marx, they would propose syncretic philosophies trying to put Ayn Rand in conversation with Marx, like Skia Berra did that Right. I remember that was a weird tendency. It's like we're going to reconcile Ayn Rand with Marx. I'm like you can't do that.
Alex Strekal:That was my critique of them. Ultimately was like okay, you guys sound like you have one foot in the door of social anarchism and your other foot you're still in caps there because I'm in your other foot.
C. Derick Varn :You're still in caps. Well, the reason why I wanted to talk about the spectrum alternative politics with you is not just to like you, and I are one of the some of the few people who agree that bernie is actually a precursor to trump, but also a post cursor to ron paul, even though his politics I do not think are this, would ever have been that way. Like, like the anti-political mood which led to a search for for an anti-systemic politics was has manifested on both the left and the right, and one of the things that you and I agree on, against the way most liberals and leftists talk about this, is that the right has been fragmented since the middle of the bush administration and trump has not fixed that. He's just papered over it by being a demagogue, like there is no coherent ideology to you know, you and I have gone back and forth about whether or not we would consider trumpism fascist, but I told like he's a demagogue in such a way it kind of doesn't matter.
Alex Strekal:Well, what I would say is that I mean, I get into this in the most recent article is, in a way, the thing with Trump is that he became someone for people who probably actually are fascist, to project their desires, their sick fantasies onto, and so, in a way, the concern was with Trump, was less Trump than some of the most radical wing of his supporters, and I do think that Trump himself has escalated power. Don't get me wrong. I think Trump has escalated things into a worse direction and I do think that, like, there are aspects of his politics that you could probably call neo-fascism. But the other point I've come to make is that, in a way, you just can't do traditional fascism in the US because it's such an it's such a not egalitarian but cosmopolitan society, relatively speaking, right. Someone like Trump inherently has to pander to Jews and black people.
C. Derick Varn :Well, this is. This is one of the things that I pointed out to people about why I was never afraid of white nationalism, because the white national, the old white nationalists themselves and I'm here I'm talking about sam francis. Sam francis said that white nationalism was a dead politics in america because demographics, and that what you actually had to do was create a meaner, middle-class counter elite that would serve white interests but also black and brown interests, as long as they were against immigrants. So that strategy was staked out by a white nationalist who got kicked out of the national review for his politics in a, you know, in a document that was around on a floppy disk in the 90s.
Alex Strekal:And I do want to point out that, like some of the people involved in the paleo-libertarian camp that were pretty right-wing, like they would, I saw back then even they would selectively ally with Black nationalists sometimes. Oh yeah, they would actually have some latino allies, um. So there is an almost inherently incoherent nature to it, where entryism is part of it, I guess as well, and like, yeah, it's, I don't know. I, when I look at the alt right now, I do see it as more incoherent than I originally understood it, because it's like you know, they have gay people, lots of atheists too. So you can't, you can't just like tie every single right wing cultural tendency together in one big thing. It just doesn't work. So it ends up splintering. Inherently, it ends up splintering.
C. Derick Varn :Right, I mean what we see. If people want to see this look at European far right stuff. They don't agree on shit.
Alex Strekal:Like, and I even remember like, yeah, the TradCon. I remember the people who were like pretty much white nationalists. They had conflicts with traditional conservatives but they would ally with them as like their people on the ground, kind of.
C. Derick Varn :Right, well, yeah, I mean, see David Duke in the Republican Party, david duke in the republican party, right, uh, even in the reaganite period, right like that, that wasn't totally unheard of. Um, and I guess one of the things that your, your three pieces, got me to think about, other than both of our mutual political histories, when we talked for an hour and a half, but in a way that almost um, but in a way that I think should put things in perspective for those people who really want to do alternative politics in the future.
C. Derick Varn :One weird shit like MAGA communism is not new. No, it is absolutely not new. And it's not just LaRouche ism I noticed you and I have not gone back to LaRouche which is probably the first or, you know, the largest of the weird hybrid movements, although in some ways, the neoconservative movement, which did outreach from Skip Jackson Democrats into former Trotskyists and former Maoists. People always drop the former Maoist part and it's interesting. This is an interesting side note number of people on the on the marxist, leninist left who have picked up paleo-conservative talking points and conspiracy theories about, about neoconservatism is pretty stock.
Alex Strekal:It's pretty like there is an overlap.
C. Derick Varn :There is an overlap yeah, I mean it's it's, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of.
Alex Strekal:I even noticed it myself in some ways where, like you know, in some ways, like when the whole Ukraine thing happened, like I don't know, I kind of have mixed feelings about it. But I found myself in some ways like leaning on these critiques of the US imperialism and but then when I thought about it I'm like, wow, this is like these talking points I'm seeing from the left, like it's the same thing as what the Ron Paul people were arguing, it's the same thing.
C. Derick Varn :This is. This is one of the things where people always go, like, you know one, a lot of these hybrid people want to, you know, win me over, cause, like you know, in some ways I'm a figure from there, from this, you, literally I'm, I'm one of the people who track from right to left and that's so fucking rare, uh but to um, it's why I smell it on people sometimes, and people who don't even know they're doing it, because I'm like, oh no, I've done this before myself, right, I? I remember what this was like, like um, like when I ended up in, you know, pat Buchanan, lou Rockwell, ron Paul land. If I told you what I believed now about like American foreign policy imperialism and what I believed then about American foreign policy imperialism, they would be pretty damn close to the same, Pretty similar, and I feel similarly about myself, even though I wasn't necessarily paleoconservative.
Alex Strekal:I feel like I see a parallel in. I'm much more of a leftist now. But I see a parallel there where it's like, yeah, it's much the same thing. Maybe some of the framings are different. Maybe for the libertarians it's it would better be. You might better call it, you know, a capitalist anti-imperialism or something, but it is kind of a capitalist anti-imperialism.
C. Derick Varn :One of the things you point out in your second article. I guess we've been kind of soft on the burning people, but you pointed out that there is an implicit nationalism in a lot of those people that they don't ever fully embrace themselves but it opens the door for people. You talk about that a lot. So you want to talk a little bit about that, Because I do think that's important.
Alex Strekal:I do think that the methodological nationalism of a lot of social democratic policies like pretty easily go to well, I think I read something you yourself wrote in criticism of Barbara Einreich not Barbara, I'm Catherine Liu rather in which you pointed out that a lot of her politics is basically just soft nationalism well, I mean basically what I said.
C. Derick Varn :It was was like it wants its Fordism back.
Alex Strekal:And yeah, that's correct, I did see that.
C. Derick Varn :And Fordism is an inherently nationalist project. People so like it's not a hard nationalism, it's not, it doesn't. I mean Henry Ford was a hard nationalism, he was a fucking Nazi. I mean literally. That's not just me disparaging him, but if you look at where Fordism ended up, you don't have to be, you know, a hard right nationalist or even a right-wing nationalist at all, but it's methodologically nationalist in a way that makes it possible for you to see that. And one of the things that you and I have both quietly been talking about is how much nationalism is on both the left and the right anti-systemic politics right now yes, and, and although it's a little easier to argue that like Biden is obviously a nationalist, or Heather Cox Richardson is obviously a nationalist.
Alex Strekal:And I had a whole article on her too, but that's its own story. But that's something that's much easy, very easy for me to point out. But I think people go silent on that too with me, where it's like hey, like, have you noticed that Biden is actually like positioning himself as us nationalist? It's just liberal nationalism, basically.
C. Derick Varn :Well, I mean, what is the difference between Biden and Trump's policies? There are some substantive difference. They're not entirely the same. I don't want to pretend that they are, but on immigration and on tariffs in regards to China, the difference is are you working with the administrative state or are you pissing it off?
Alex Strekal:Yeah, but all those things are remarkably similar. And there's, just like in the rhetoric, there's this desperation, you know, relating to China and Russia, of just you know. It's this competitive international politics of you know. How do we keep the US on top? That's all they're concerned with, basically. How do we keep America the number one economy in the world? And they're still kind of failing.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, absolutely.
Alex Strekal:As far as Bernie, though, I mean, didn't he advocate kind of protectionist policies?
C. Derick Varn :like Trump? Yes, he did. I mean Bernie is not a nationalist in the sense, but that his social democracy is is protectionist, it's it's. It is not properly speaking. Even classical social democracy, um, uh, it is kind of a post 68 Harrington, all right.
C. Derick Varn :The guy who first argued for left populism after Max Shackman ended the SPA was Michael Harrington, and it was before the DSA even fucking existed. It was when he was justifying trying to get on the McGovern campaign between 68 and 72 and going back into the Democratic Party. At the very moment the new communist movement was was kicking up. But the new communist movement, like a lot of the weird return to sectarian leftism that you see today, exhausted itself incredibly quickly. The reason why I found your three essays so interesting is I wanted somebody who didn't believe in horseshoe theory to still point out how this anti-systemic politics was not just a left-wing phenomenon and that the left and the right have been stealing from each other this entire fucking time. And if we build back, we can see it in smaller and smaller movements after the new left and the new communist movement dissolved in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Alex Strekal:Yes.
C. Derick Varn :And once you see that all of a sudden the trajectory of American politics makes sense, once you add in one key world historical event, which was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, that changes a lot, doesn't it Right?
C. Derick Varn :Right, it changes almost everything and it's also, I mean, weirdly. I also think it's why, for example, vulgar Marxist-Leninism is so popular right now, because people realize how much bullshit they were sold by anti-communist Cold War rhetoric. But then they just invert it. Then they invert it, that's correct, they invert it.
Alex Strekal:Another parallel that I bring up in these articles is the nostalgia factor, which is that for example, in the case of Bernieism he appeals to nostalgia for the FDR days. In the case of Trump, it's America first. It's kind of a similar time period really.
C. Derick Varn :I was about to say it's actually it's the FDR days as understood by actually living in the 1950s?
Alex Strekal:Right, I get what you're saying. I mean it's the FDR days, not as understood by Gabriel Coco, who I cite as having a critical spin on that, but, yeah, as understood after the fact through the liberal consensus, right, right?
C. Derick Varn :And, it's weirdly, trump is also.
Alex Strekal:And he's looking in a way, it's the isolationism pre-World War II period that he caters to.
C. Derick Varn :Right, but he likes that, but he likes the economy of the 1950s too, yes, that's true.
Alex Strekal:But without the policies per se.
C. Derick Varn :Right? Well, the thing is, though, Trump is not a neoliberal. The weird thing about Trump is he empowers these people who want to take away all these social benefits, but he himself is not inclined to do that.
Alex Strekal:I will actually say that. I mean he's kind of inconsistent about it.
C. Derick Varn :Right? Well, he wants to keep. This is the thing with the demagogue he wants to keep them in a coalition. But he knows, if he actually gave them what they wanted, it would collapse their popularity in America forever.
Alex Strekal:Well, the main inconsistencies I saw is, you know, he sent the big fat socialist checks out before Biden did, and the protectionism thing, which is, if you're a free market libertarian like that's a big no-no.
C. Derick Varn :Right.
Alex Strekal:That's a big no-no, right, that's a big no-no, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure I would say that he's. He's like super interventionist necessarily. I mean, he still is cool with you know a lot of things that are somewhat similar to reaganite policies, I guess um, but he is more protectionist and he, in some ways yeah, he is willing to intervene in a way that, like the libertarians, would totally reject.
C. Derick Varn :Absolutely. I guess this actually leads me to ask you another question what do we? What do we see now? I mean, one of the things about Bernie that you don't get a whole lot into but that I actually think is pretty substantive is the the the social democratic left was more up on him in 2020 than they were in in 2016, um, mainly because, I mean, he was a more known factor, but at the same time, um, he lost worse in 2020 than yeah, he did, and jimmy door, you and I have talked about this Like I think Jimmy Dore is guilty of a lot of the stuff that we're talking about.
C. Derick Varn :incoherent fusion.
Alex Strekal:No, he's super incoherent and like he caters to mostly a conservative audience. Really, if you look At least now.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, he didn't used to.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, at least in the last four or five years.
C. Derick Varn :But my point about him is he wasn't wrong about Bernie and the squad and he was onto it early and I'll give him credit for that. Sure, the issue that you have, although I would say that, like he kind of sees it as sheepdogging, I see it as sheepdogging, but I don't think it was intentional. I think that they really somehow think that they can play this gambit.
Alex Strekal:Maybe not with A aoc but with a lot of other people.
C. Derick Varn :But at the very least it's saving face, right, right, um. But one of the things I wanted to ask you about is what do you make now that both trump and bernie and all these people are more or less establishment figures? I don't see how they're anti-establishment politicians anymore.
Alex Strekal:No, they can't be Right.
Alex Strekal:What is his position technically now? I guess there was this big thing where, from what I remember, biden promised to integrate him into his administration and integrate his policies, which mostly didn't really happen as far as I could see. And in the case of Trump, like yeah. I mean, how could you say he's an anti-establishment guy? When I mean part of my whole take on him? Is that like yeah, it makes a certain level of sense to say that he was an outsider because he hadn't he had not previously had political office and you could say that he was an ill repute, even among capitalists. However, he is still within the economic system, an elite, and he talks shit about Jewish capitalists. But that's just his competition. But he's functioning just like a career politician. Really, when you look at him, especially in his in his most recent campaign, it's like yeah, he's, he's just a career politician, and I've even seen videos from right-wingers who are like they think that he's um, he's been taken in by the deep state right, so it just always have.
C. Derick Varn :If you're Confederatorial inclined, you would explain it, and for me, this is the problem of anti-systemic versus independent politics. All right, you and I are both critics of the way a lot of these people have made concessions to the Democrats, despite the fact that you know we disagree on certain people. We agree on a lot of the stuff that you get. You know we disagree on certain people, we agree on a lot of this stuff, but you and I both are like well, you know these people who are liquidating these left, these leftists who are liquidating themselves into the harris campaign. This is deeply embarrassing. Yeah it is embarrassing.
Alex Strekal:I mean, oh my god. I mean the same people who would have accused me of being too liberal four years ago. In some ways, now I get to accuse of being too liberal. This is weird.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, it's deeply embarrassing and it's it's pretty deep in the DSA and and I kind of actually think one of the dangerousness of anti-systemic politics versus independent politics is easy to think that you can go into these organizations and regimes and just like make them better because you got the right person in there, and I guess, I guess that I guess that goes to a lot of what my cynicism towards electoralism has always been is just just, yeah, you know, let's, let's, let's try to invade the party.
Alex Strekal:I mean, even when I was a libertarian, there was these weird arguments of like, yeah, let's, they would try it with the Republicans. Like yeah let's, let's do entryism into the Republican Party, and that's kind of what Ron Paul was.
C. Derick Varn :Exactly.
Alex Strekal:And what happened with Ron Paul? Like he had, like what one percent of a chance to win.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, I mean? I mean Bernie did One thing. We have to admit that Bernie and Trump went way further than Ron Paul.
Alex Strekal:They did, oh, they did.
C. Derick Varn :But Ron Paul actually did sort of set the game that they, whether they meant to or not, that they used Right Rebranding towards younger people disaffected by politics, using very good sloganeering. A lot of sloganeering, yes, Appealing to foreign policy so that people don't pay attention to your domestic policy although Bernie didn't do that, to be fair to him.
Alex Strekal:But I think there was a lot of that in the case of Ron Paul and there's been a lot of that now no-transcript. He kind of is a progressive, but it's like all of a sudden people are like doing pure vibes politics, from what I see.
C. Derick Varn :Absolutely the politics of joy.
Alex Strekal:It's just like joy and it's like. This just reminds me of Obama and I try to remind them, like what happened then?
C. Derick Varn :It's Obama, but less, but even. But even in some ways more cynical, because Harris did poorly in her in her actual primary. Because when she has to face off between the contentions between Democrats, it shows where the faults in the party line are. If you skip the primary process, the faults in the Democrats aren't exposed, like and I think this is going to be a weird time Like she's only two points ahead in the polls, which is better than I predicted she'd be, but it's, you know, and I would say now odds are in her favor, but barely.
Alex Strekal:Barely. But no, you're probably right. I kind of try to stay away from predicting things, because we've seen things swing around.
C. Derick Varn :Oh, I've been so wrong lately because everything's so fucking weird.
Alex Strekal:Things swing around quickly, but no, yeah, I think you're right that there's been an uptick for her.
C. Derick Varn :I mean, at this point I could easily see a comet just taking out both candidates or something and like us having to start from scratch. Sure.
Alex Strekal:And I am seeing that. You know there's a lot of infighting in the Trump camp, apparently Tons.
C. Derick Varn :Well, the thing is a month, six weeks ago, trump had been the most disciplined I'd ever seen him, and as soon as Biden stepped out, he lost the fucking plot, like. I mean, when I saw that failed assassination attempt, at first I was seen him, and as soon as Biden stepped out he lost the fucking plot, like when I saw that failed assassination attempt, at first I was like he's won the election.
C. Derick Varn :Me too. And then the RNC. You saw him pivot strongly away from Project 2025, which I don't think he ever fully endorsed anyway. You people know my stance on that, yeah.
Alex Strekal:I pretty much agree with your stance on it, although I will say that, like the upshot of it does seem to be that, yeah, they, they, they want to. Trump wants to cement his legacy permanently in some way through other people is what it seems like.
C. Derick Varn :And other people do believe it. That's the thing Like Trump doesn't, but there are people that he wants in his coalition who really do mean some shit in there.
Alex Strekal:The two biggest concerns I have with Trump's current campaign is he does seem to want to give the religious right everything they always wanted.
C. Derick Varn :Well, except for a total national abortion ban, that's the one thing he doesn't want.
Alex Strekal:Okay, but he's basically promising them, and I think the liberals took this a little out of context. When he's like you won't have to vote again, he's not saying that he's going to abolish voting, but what he is saying is that he'll give the religious right so much that they won't ever have to worry, basically in future elections. And the other part is like he does seem to be promising some libertarian wet dreams like abolishing the Department of Education and the EPA and shit like that.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, and in the epa and shit like that. Yeah, um, I mean, I I think that that's that's all. I think the epa threat's actually serious. I also ironically think, like them talking about uh, how much of a um, uh, pro worker party they're going to be in, you actually read what's even they've said, not just what's in Project 2025 about unions. It's like, dude, you want to take us back to before. It's not just before FDR, it's before 1890. Yeah, pretty much you know so.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, they're talking like going pretty far back on labor law.
C. Derick Varn :yeah, oh, they want to completely do away with child labor protections. They want to make federal labor law optional at the state level. That's pretty wild.
Alex Strekal:But I do agree with you that Project 2025 is a wish list for neocons, paleocons and libertarians in the religious right that are all kind of incoherent. They can't possibly implement all of it If we collapsed, the economy and the military would take over.
C. Derick Varn :I keep on telling people this.
Alex Strekal:I do understand why people are concerned about it, but it is kind of like the rhetoric of like, check out Project 2025. It's going to end democracy. My other cynicism is eh, we've. And my other cynicism is like we don't really have democracy anywhere.
C. Derick Varn :Right, oh yeah, um, absolutely, and yeah, I think, uh, I think that leads me to to a good place. You and I think we would argue that we need an independent politics and right now I am not telling and maybe you would, but I'm not telling people right now that we never need to be electoral.
Alex Strekal:I'm not telling people that either. Actually I'm not I'm very cynical about it, but like, either, actually I'm not, I'm just very cynical about it, but like I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to a properly constructed workers party oh, no, and I, I don't mean like a labor party in the, as far as the watered-down version they haven't I mean like the labor party of like the the early 20th century, yeah, I mean like.
Alex Strekal:I mean like a real. And you know, I kind of think the idea of workers' councils is pretty nifty, but that's its own story. But I'm not 100% opposed to electoral politics, but the only thing that would get me excited about voting would be something like that.
C. Derick Varn :A viable Labour Party, which I think we could only build if we both look. And this is such a fucking liberal cliche which I think we could only build if we both look. And this is such a fucking liberal cliche, but it's actually kind of true here, globally and locally at once and for go, just trying to skip all that and just go directly to national politics. Because one of the things that I noticed is people learn the wrong lessons from the issue and localism of the Gen X and boomer, you know post new communist movement and the hippies. They just like, oh, we just need to take over the executive. And I'm like no, you got to build an administrative state apparatus. You have to build local things of power. You have to have multiple coalitions.
Alex Strekal:You need like yes, yes and that's the other thing I wanted to emphasize is that, like, even if you do electoral politics, no like you have to do a tons more things that aren't electoral right, you can't just do canvassing for fucking candidates sorry, right wing of the dsa.
C. Derick Varn :Um you, you really have to build. Just it's not just reviving the union movement, which, honestly, like by itself, it's okay, it's not a bad thing to do.
Alex Strekal:No, it's not.
C. Derick Varn :It doesn't lead to much, and I know that's probably an unpopular thing to say, but like labor union, bureaucracy kind of sucks and both union bureaucracy kind of sucks and both like and like.
Alex Strekal:Here I mean, let me try to square this out, parse this out a little, because it's like I'm pro-union but I am a little cynical about them too, because I've experienced the only unions I've ever been part of were run by conservative guys, or at least like liberals, who were just kind of nice guy union guys who were way too friendly with the corporation anyway and didn't help me at all right a little cynical about that I have seen like in the teachers unions.
C. Derick Varn :I have seen good teachers unions. They're mostly in the midwest but uh, they kind of suck.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, I just remember when I was working at giant eagle like there was this union guy and like when I actually had a legit complaint and I called him, he just like met me in the office with the boss and like played nice guy and did nothing and, during COVID, a lot of the unions actually. This is it was during COVID were actually.
C. Derick Varn :Probably, if I'm completely honest, I had better luck with HR because they were more afraid of being sued, and that's a very damning thing. And that's not all unions. I think that actually has led to the Democratic Union movement and trying to seize the unions from a lot of these old nice guy people. But the problem that we have with that is in the tale of the two Sean's as I said to Sean of, who is not one of the two Sean's, I mean Sean O'Brien and Sean Fain Sean Fain of the UAW, who kissed the ring with Biden way too early, and Sean O'Brien, who kissed the ring of Trump. And it's just like I think Sean Fain has way more tactical independence than Sean O'Brien does, to be completely honest. But the thing is that neither one of them really truly needed, um, for the larger labor movement to kiss the ring. Yet they need to do. I mean, they're probably gonna have to do it one way or the other, but it seemed they both seem to do it kind of prematurely and in different directions, and I think that's something you have to sit with.
C. Derick Varn :And then when you see, like you know, leftists who call any any labor union who has to deal with a republican, a fascist, and I'm like dude. Labor unions locally have to deal with republicans all the fucking time. I don't know what you think happens. It's clearly you've never actually been involved in a union or a union back um, and so you know this idealization of it doesn't really help it. And uh, I think also the labor movement has to be larger than this, the formal unions it really does. And so, uh, this is not me taking a totally anti-status stance. Like I said, we have to do what we have to do at a local level. But like, um, just to be clear I know Sam's not going to love hearing- this.
Alex Strekal:But like, um, just to be clear, like, just to be clear. I know sam's not going to love hearing this, but like, I'm not sure. I haven't like, hung my hat on identifying as an anarchist for some years, but I do still use anarchist frames of reference. I'm still inspired by some of it in the way I think, um, but I'm much more like I've caught up on marxism a lot more. In a way, I describe myself as trapped between anarchism and Marxism.
Alex Strekal:To be frank, which may sound funny to people, but I'm kind of I feel trapped between anarchism and Marxism. But as far as like, yeah, let's press the magic button and abolish the state, that's long gone. A thought of mine.
C. Derick Varn :That's long gone. A thought of mine, Well, I mean, I don't even think that the uh, the sam, you speak up for those of you who listen to sam kangaroo. I mean, he's an amateur. He doesn't really think we can just press the button. No, I don't think either.
Alex Strekal:I don't think he thinks that either, um the funny thing is almost no anarchist.
C. Derick Varn :I know it does that.
Alex Strekal:What I worry about, and what you and I have talked about, is there's also the opposite, where you're just a social democrat anyway, so why call yourself an anarchist, right?
C. Derick Varn :it's like. It's like you're an mm tier. You voted for bernie. You endorsed the democrats. Why are you a fucking anarchist again?
Alex Strekal:speaking of roger long, he actually had an article I think I linked it in one in my one of my pieces calling chomsky an augustinian anarchist. Over that, because it's Democrat and he always tells people to vote for Democrats. He's good, he's good for foreign policy analysis and he's good for labor history and things like that, but it's like he basically is a social Democrat and I think that a lot of anarchists since the sixties have been like that really where it's just like you're basically just a social Democrat.
Alex Strekal:democrat anarchism is just kind of a radical aesthetic, or like maybe people like Vosch who think that it's like yeah, maybe a thousand years from now we get to have an anarchist society which, by the way, is a further out anarchist claim than even Marxist would make yeah, but. I don't believe, as I've told you before, I don't believe do we call him Vosch or Vosch, however you pronounce it like. I don't believe, as I've told you before, I don't believe do we call him Vouch or Vosh, however you pronounce it Like.
C. Derick Varn :I don't believe he.
Alex Strekal:I never was convinced that he was an anarchist, and especially once the Biden administration came in. I'm like, whoa dude, like you just sound like a neocon or something.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah it's, we're in a weird space. Well, I would tell people to read your three pieces. I'm going to link it down and I hope it gives your Substack some eyes.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, I just started it last month, so it is like a slow crawl. I'm just getting used to this Substack thing and what I noticed about Substack is like it is mostly people who are like professional academics and media people who have much more followers than I'll ever hope to probably have.
C. Derick Varn :Well, substack is a way for people who have lost their job in traditional media to maintain. I can see that too.
Alex Strekal:I can see that too, but I'm approaching it as, just like you know, I've been out of the game of blogging for a while. I used to have a YouTube and I no longer don't, but I have been a writer. But like, why, just like, put it under the void of facebook when I could have like a proper article format place to do it at?
C. Derick Varn :well, the interesting thing about substats is just, I'm like okay, so it's slightly better than wordpress, um, but since it has an email mail out to it, it's more efficient and you and it's monetized better, but it is. It is weird, because I'm like I used to do wordpress too. Yeah, me too I was a blogger for a long time, um, I I only completely gave up blogging in 2021, um, and that's because, like, if I'm gonna write, I should probably just write a fucking book.
Alex Strekal:Um so I don't know.
C. Derick Varn :You're working on one yeah, I'm working on a book. Um, it might come out one day. Um, so, uh, I'm actually working on three books a book of poetry, a book on cholesterol ashes in the back burner and then a book on. And then a book on weird figures in the last 25 years. Uh, to get resurrected on the left.
Alex Strekal:So I mean I'm talking about now. I mean I've written so much and I I I'm a fast typer and a guy who writes a lot that like I probably could have written a bunch of books by now. But as far as the Substack, like, yeah, I just view it as a better platform than me winding on Facebook, essentially.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, I'm hoping that the decline of social media for print, even in the case of X, leads to a return to decent blogging, even if it's on Substack, and hey, I've only been doing it for a month and I've already pumped out six full-length articles and they are like 20 to 30-minute reads according to the estimates Yep, which is not exactly friendly to our current social media environment, but it is what it is.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, it is so people should check it out.
Alex Strekal:Yeah, and I encourage people to check it out. I'm sure you'll link it and everything there.
C. Derick Varn :I will, okay. Well, thank you so much, and people should watch your Substack and take care, good talk.
