Navigating the Crossroads: The Tensions Between Radical Liberalism and Marxism with Jonathan Korman

Join us for a thought-provoking journey as we welcome the insightful Jonathan Korman to explore the evolving landscape of political ideologies. As a noted radical liberal, Jonathan brings a unique perspective on the tensions within liberalism and socialism, diving into how leftist circles are appropriating right-wing rhetoric to critique identity politics. We delve into the concept of "liberal socialism" and the left's role as a "loyal opposition" to modernity, all while reflecting on the works of post-Marxist thinkers like Gerben Thirdborn.

Our discussion spans the intricate tapestry of U.S. political history, unraveling the nuanced relationships between American communism, conservatism, and historical narratives from the World War II era. We shed light on the uneasy alliances within liberalism that can veer towards fascism, using examples from France to American political maneuvers. Moreover, we tackle the contradictions inherent in liberalism and socialism, their connections to fascism, and the obstacles in building a workers' movement supportive of progressive leaders.

The conversation takes a global turn, examining the complexities of Israeli politics, the hurdles of decolonization, and the challenges of governance within the Westphalian nation-state framework. From the crisis of expertise in Western bureaucracies to the shifting roles of social classes and capitalist dynamics, the episode offers a critical lens on the intertwining paths of fascism and modern political movements. This episode promises to challenge your views and provide a rich tapestry of insights on current affairs and political theory.

Chapters

• 0:00 Anti-Liberalism and Leftist Alliances
• 15:35 U.S. Political History and Reactions
• 27:12 Contradictions in Liberalism and Leftist Politics
• 41:10 Recognition and Analysis of Fascism
• 58:42 Biden's Progressive Paradox
• 1:15:58 Analysis of Israeli Politics and Conflict
• 1:30:59 Authoritarianism, Liberalism, and Historical Analysis
• 1:38:51 Discussions on Liberalism and Socialism
• 1:55:22 Class Interests and Technocratic Governance
• 2:04:22 Debating Class Categories and Economic Trends
• 2:08:02 Money, Currency, and Class Stratification
• 2:12:54 Structural Analysis of Social Class
• 2:26:53 Social Classes and Capitalist Dynamics
• 2:32:03 Evolving Marxist Analysis and Monetary Realities
• 2:42:23 Comparing Welfare Policies in China, US
• 2:52:13 Federalism, Neoliberalism, and Policy Dysfunction
• 2:58:00 Transitioning to Socialist Healthcare System
• 3:03:48 Issues With Free College System
• 3:17:17 Grasping With Marxist Ideology and Racism
• 3:20:56 Decolonization, Nationalism, and Global Governance
• 3:33:07 Crisis of Expertise and Democratic Collapse
• 3:40:46 Generational Politics and Elite Decline
• 3:52:16 Politics of Joy and Realignment
• 4:07:29 US Political Role in Gaza Crisis
• 4:19:55 Republican Congress Chaos and Governance

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to Bar and Block, and I'm here with a friend of me of the show, jonathan Korman, noted radical liberal, and we are talking. Well, for those of you who aren't familiar, korman's been on the show before. We did a live stream about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. It's been a while.

Jonathan Korman : 1:55

Almost two years yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56

It's been a while Almost two years, yeah when we were weirdly sympathetic to each other In some ways. The stuff that we were sympathetic on then we're probably even more sympathetic on now and that will come up in the course of this conversation, which I will call dipshit anti-liberalism, which is, I feel, torn between, I feel like a weird center between two extremes on the left right now, which is people who are so anti-liberal they're picking up active right-wing talking points to talk about a class, the PMC as opposed to the bourgeoisie, so that they can justify all kinds of weird allegiances now against identity politics so-called Not that identity politics isn't real, and not that I wouldn't say elements of elite identity politics aren't a problem, but I would even say you agree with me that some elements of elite identity politics are a problem.

Jonathan Korman : 2:54

Yeah, I think that's a place in which we are not the same, but we are analytically very similar, at least.

C. Derick Varn: 3:00

Yeah, I mean in our discussions online and even in our last that came up, that we have similar critiques. I probably go further than you, but less far than a lot of other people on the left right now.

Jonathan Korman : 3:14

Conversely, my friend Matt Maness, to a lesser degree, my friend Ben Burgess, have gotten on this liberal socialism kick, which I'm sure, John, makes you feel good but makes me angry in inviting me back, which I'm delighted to do, is, you know, we sort of succumbed to discussing our overlaps and failed to dive in as deeply as we had intended into, um, our interesting disagreements about how to conceive the current relationship between liberalism in its many senses and the left in its many senses, and wanting to sort of like I mean, I, I had hoped and I think I'm hopeful again today, that together we can develop a better vocabulary for talking about that relationship in a way that, um, at least, will be useful to me, um, and which I hope will be useful to other people I think about the post-marxist.

C. Derick Varn: 4:26

Gerben thirdborn uh, who is this swedish guy wrote a book um from marx, post-marxism and was kind of popular in the aughts and I think came out in the late 90s and he called called the Marxist a loyal opposition to modernity, meaning that we wanted a different modernity, we didn't want to undo modernity, and that because of that, we have an interesting relationship to things like productive forces, to classical and modern liberalism, etc.

C. Derick Varn: 5:04

Another thing which you and I share is this view that we have given too much of the classical liberalism to the libertarians and that it's a much more mixed heritage. Libertarian heritage is real, but that, unless you're a blood and soil monarchist or a Demastrite or a Spanglerian or something like that, that you, if you are in the United States and most prominently, if you're in Parliamentary Europe, come from something that is either part of or descended from the liberal tradition. Uh, that is such a broad moniker though when you really trace it out. I mean, it's basically all european and post-european thought going back to the 60th century, um that isn't actively reactionary and atavistic. Um, and even certain movements like fascism, you know, have a ambivalent relationship to liberalism, which I think is something that that you and I agree on, but would make most other liberals really uncomfortable, is just to say like fascism is not merely anti-liberalism either.

Jonathan Korman : 6:17

No, though I think it is integral to understanding fascism that it is an anti-liberalism, though, interestingly, in its manifestations in these United States, especially recently, it's in denial about its anti-liberalism. And here, like I think we're saying, fascism is anti-liberal in the sense of liberal, as in liberal democracy, as opposed to left-right.

C. Derick Varn: 6:59

Right, although I still maintain the Marxist critique that, with rare exceptions of when fascism gets too out of control, the right wing of liberalism is going to side up to it, and we see this in Macron siding with Le Pen's party to form a unity government against the ability of Mélenchon and the French Front Popular to be able to make a government.

Jonathan Korman : 7:12

Well, and that's a particularly maddening example, because there was a moment there where it seemed that the Macron, you know, segment of French politics was actually going to, you know, align with the leftists against the fascists, like there was a moment where it really looked possible, right, and we were all ready to be pleasantly surprised, and lo and behold, it's not going that way.

C. Derick Varn: 7:47

Now at risk of being that annoying leftist who's like well, we always assume liberals are going to pull bullshit, and that's usually right. I will actually say to you that I viewed that moment as an aporia, like I had no idea which way he was going to go, and I've had a lot more of that lately, where I'm like there's these dramatic choices that individual leaders are having to make yeah, and me going. I don't know what they're actually going to do, like I actually don't, and that's interesting. That tells you that, from the Marxist perspective, material conditions on the ground are different enough that it's harder to see what immediate interests are. I'll give you another example.

C. Derick Varn: 8:35

You and I were both I don't know if you thought this was going to happen and we can talk about the leftists who try to take victory for this but you and I both seemingly thought that we're going to have a hard time getting rid of Biden, a much harder time than we did, yeah, and it's one of those times where, yes, it was the donors, but the donors actually seem to be afraid of a variety of things. Now, leftist and left liberals together, I think, drew the conclusion that they're what did that? And I'm like well, you're part of what did that, but I would probably guess you're a small part.

Jonathan Korman : 9:12

Yeah, that's my read as well.

C. Derick Varn: 9:14

That they don't like. There was a chance that enough of you would set out in key states that it would be a risk, so they have to appease you somewhat, but that you are still more or less viewed as a captured demographic, and one of the things that we disagree on to bring it in here is what that means, because you used the term popular front the other day and I told you to get that word out of your, your liberal mouth uh, and I appreciated that that was um, I think appropriate, um, but I mean appropriate to the flippant way in which I was actually using popular front.

Jonathan Korman : 9:55

So for uh folks at home, um, I made a flippant comment about you know a lot of commentators on the Internet have said we are in this bizarre moment in which the big tent of the Democratic Party includes AOC and Dick Cheney Half serious, half joking.

Jonathan Korman : 10:42

I referred to that as a popular front and obviously there's the way in which that is. Democratic Party establishment understand Trump and MAGA as a fascist threat and therefore there is this awkward alliance of convenience in the effort to deal with the electoral politics moment that we have a election coming up in which you know like no none of those people want Trump to seize the presidency and produce unknown bad consequences.

Jonathan Korman : 11:13

And so there's this moment of alliance, which is popular front, like in some ways, because of the threat of perceived fascism. I think that's correctly perceived and I think it's complicated and worth digging into, but obviously also, you are right to fault that as no, that is not what leftists are talking about when talking about a popular front. Yes, of course, and the ways in which my sensibilities are liberal disqualifies me from, you know, being able to make a claim about that, and so that is a happy disagreement in my opinion.

C. Derick Varn: 11:52

I mean, here's the thing is the popular front, the united front and the no front stances are all stances on the left. United Front and the no-front stances are all stances on the left. I happen to be of the United Front position which, for those of you who are liberals, who are watching this because you came here for Corman, and for those of you who somehow missed this distinction on the left, which is an easy distinction to miss, the United Front is the policy of the Second International and the early Third International. The Popular Front was more or less invented in France, ironically, given the current Popular Front, although it was in different circumstances, to specifically fight fascism, after it was clear that their periodism, which was Stalin's adoption of the idea of social fascism and also no grounds towards liberals at all, was adopted from 1927 to 1934, 35, 36, somewhere in there, the French Popular Front ends up being endorsed by the Comintern, but it changes a policy that had preceded the Popular Front, which was the united front, which is you can work explicitly with socialist politicians who are not of your party.

C. Derick Varn: 13:08

You cannot form a joint government with a capitalist government. You are allowed to do oppositional things that would would help those groups, uh in a parliamentary contest. The problem that you have in america is that both to some degree, both the popular front and explicitly the united front assume um a parliamentary system of government. They just do uh like. The idea of an opposition party joining a coalition government is not something that can happen in the United.

Jonathan Korman : 13:43

States. Right, it's just mechanically irrelevant to America.

C. Derick Varn: 13:46

Right. This language is used in the United States because it's a hangover that we have from European Marxism's attempt to walk a very fine line in regards to electoralism, which they reversed in an extreme direction in the 20s and then reversed in the opposite direction in the late 1930s, and that was the high point of communist popularity in the West. The Communist Party in the United States was up to almost 80,000 members, minimum 70,000 during the end of the popular front. France and Italy saw explosions of new versions of the Communist Party where the old forms of the Communist Party were. Well, the old form of the one in France was suppressed during the fascist period totally and a new party basically emerges, kind of built on a myth of the old party um, that was emerging the popular front. And then in in the 1940s and france, you know, they get into resistance with the de gaulle's in 1936 and eventually this is adopted across the board, which is which allows for two things.

C. Derick Varn: 14:58

One is a Milotrov, molotov, ribbentrop pack I'm trying to not make that one name Aka. When Stalin decided he wanted to taunt with Hitler because he thought Hitler was a rational agent, and you know many people talk about the importance of Stalin's war planning in World War II. I think that's absolutely true, but I also think like that's a mistake of world historic proportions and it also led to accelerating Germany's ability to build up arms during the war, and that's an undeniable fact, even though people will try to deny it. That actually was a crisis for the American Communist Party. It was one of the biggest hemorrhages of membership in the history of the party, and that was only undone by the popular front, you know kind of emerging in the realities of the war, when the Democrats actually allowed communists to join the party, which of course was used against them during the Red Scare period when the Birchers started pointing that out.

Jonathan Korman : 16:01

Premature anti-racist seven forbid.

C. Derick Varn: 16:04

Yeah, and that's also when we get this kind of undercurrent of American conservatism that is suppressed by other conservatives actually during the war, that maybe it would have been good if we had let hitler kill stalin, which, you know, assumes a whole damn lot.

C. Derick Varn: 16:22

But yeah uh in a way, um, this position was kind of the crypto position of the quote isolationist during the war, I mean that's uh. And this position was also picked up by certain elements of the left and and particularly in France. And it goes weird because in the 1980s this leads to negationism, which is first the downplaying of the Holocaust, then it goes to outright denial. And the reason for this, some of it is nationalism amongst members of the French ultra-left who give up. Some of this is just people who are so opposed to the Popular Front that they literally go and say well, you know, the justification of it was the Holocaust, which wasn't really the justification of it.

Jonathan Korman : 17:06

Right, it's a retroactive justification for everyone.

C. Derick Varn: 17:09

Yeah, I was going to say it wasn't really justification for it. Justification was Stalingrad, really, but because of that, you have people kind of retroactively working from that, that myth, to another myth, which is um, well, maybe the holocaust didn't happen. It was all you suggest by concessions to liberals in the first place. So, and that's an extremely minority position for those of you who know, but this is why I think, this is why I talk about dipshit, anti-liberalism, because this is what it can lead to. And I think, for example, where I mean a lot of very big scandals have happened in right wing world in the last week, um, where you have.

C. Derick Varn: 18:03

So rob omari, you know, of compact magazines, conservative wing, like turning on tucker carlson, for, you know, empowering a guy that I used to know on facebook, daryl cooper, who I cut, you know, we cut ties with each other because I realized he was a spengarian, which in and of itself is kind of red flag, but it's not ultimately like, you can be a spengarian and not actually a fascist. You're a conservative, reactionary weirdo, but you might not actually be a fascist.

Jonathan Korman : 18:31

It's actually.

C. Derick Varn: 18:31

It's ambiguous, though has the tendency yes has a strong tendency to be that way. Um well, you know, this is something that I've noticed on the right these days is people hiding behind the German revolutionary conservative movement because they were anti-fascist, but only kind of.

C. Derick Varn: 18:50

But, some of them will then put actual fascist in that list. So they'll sneak in Heidegger or they'll sneak in Carl Smith, as if they weren't Nazis. So I'm like, oh, so Junger, heidegger and Smith, let's see, one of those is not a Nazi. Oh, and Evola, whose critique of Nazism is that it was not reactionary enough.

Jonathan Korman : 19:13

It was not fascist enough, basically.

C. Derick Varn: 19:16

His critique of fascism is like it doesn't reject modernity enough enough.

C. Derick Varn: 19:19

Basically, it's a particular fascism is like it doesn't reject modernity enough.

C. Derick Varn: 19:22

I mean like it's uh, you and I have but have a weird perverse tendency to read all these bizarre ass occult right ring books, um, so we've actually looked into some of these guys. Um, I know you have your black shelf somewhere and I have, like my file bank, but nonetheless there has been a tendency and I think we might even see this in something like the American Communist Party try to make a concession to these reactionary tendencies in American life that even go on so far as to pick up hunting and civilizational politics and something like almost blood and soil politics for America, even on the left. So you and I share concerns that some of this anti-liberalism goes way too far, but at risk of getting where we agree too much, this is also me giving you my issue with the Popular Front, no-transcript. And so, as opposed to Henry Wallace, who was much more explicitly on a detente with the Soviet Union and was totally willing to work with communists, he was sidelined for Truman, totally changing the trajectory of the party.

Jonathan Korman : 21:20

and then the party gets attacked by bircher for, like I would say 25 true, and sometimes liberals will deny that it was true, but like there were communists throughout the the roosevelt administration, because they were actively working with them, um, there were communists because the roosevelt administration was, you know, was very much tri-occur ocracy, right, like they were willing to try almost anything and uh, and so like if they didn't have reds on the team, like they were just missing opportunities to think of stuff, and I think that, look, you know, the the relatively welcoming qualities of the Roosevelt administration are neither more nor less than that.

C. Derick Varn: 22:07

There's two alternative histories about Roosevelt. On the left, there's Roosevelt as great crypto-communist savior. That is often popular in parts of the DSA and they wouldn't say communist, but like, or he was secretly a socialist the whole time. He was. I mean, he's not. Um, they often tend to conflate, interestingly, new deal policies with great society policies, as if they're the same thing, which is a big historical problem, because it's like you're talking about stuff that happened in the 60s or in the 50s, not in the 30s and 40s, but so that's, you know, FDR as great hero. There's also the FDR as great villain, something that I'm not totally on, but I do actually have some sympathies towards actually have some sympathies towards which was that he realized that if he didn't make some concessions to a workers' movement in the United States, that the Soviet Union and the Chinese experience which was going on in the Soviet Union there was a strong enough workers' movement to actually pose a similar threat in the United States. Even people who like FDR on the left, like Robert Brenner, point out this is actually this gets confused as a workers' politics, but it really kind of isn't. It's an administrative state politics and that, by subordinating the workers' movement to the Democratic Party really hampered its ability to act independently. Now my issues with that when we talk about the Popular Front is it gets confused in our recounting of American politics.

C. Derick Varn: 23:55

One, the communists weren't the first people who who formed the popular front with the Democrats. And the first one's weirder. I mean it was the populists in the South and the Midwest who were undeniably left-wing for their time. They were mostly as a mixture of labor, some labor and a lot of sharecroppers. Um, they go away for two reasons. Um, William Jennings Bryant keeps on losing, and also the other reason they go away is that the sharecropper base largely just doesn't exist by the early 20th century. So there's less and less people for them. So a lot of their members move into the Knights of Labor and into the Socialist Party, or they move into the Democrats or are they moving to the Democrats. The prototypical thing for America and I think people miss this because leftists in America tend to actually be weirdly European-oriented in their history that the first popular front is Williams Jennings Bryans going to the Democrats and throwing his lot in with them.

Jonathan Korman : 24:56

That's an interesting read. I see where you're going with it. Actually, you know what? Let me try to change the view. To me, that's an interesting read.

C. Derick Varn: 25:03

I see where you're going with it. Actually, you know, let me, let me try to me that's. It's not. That's what sets the idea of the democrats.

Jonathan Korman : 25:06

It's a progressive party because it doesn't make any sense before that yeah and um, and you can see the thing which is very characteristically American, that what white people in America want at large is social democracy, but just for white people. And that paradox blocks a path to anything that Europeans would recognize as socialism and creates all of the complexities of the last century of American politics and policy Right.

C. Derick Varn: 25:56

I mean, the German former leftist turned Nazi, werner Sombart, actually was pretty apt on this. We wrote about this in 1905, that the American working class, because of the gains of the land, had the real ability to invest, use land and get out of its situation. By expanding, those settler motives were a big offset of American class tensions. You can get people out of the cities, and when you couldn't do that, class tensions intensified. And he compared that to the German worker who at the time was drinking himself to death and you know, and the American worker was not, and he didn't just blame like, he didn't just say oh it's, you know, these social movements like the temperance movement, it's also like that. There actually is a reason to believe that you could do something in America. But it's based on a very dark premise which is taking more and more land from other people. It is a material project, real project.

C. Derick Varn: 27:02

Sombart uses that and eventually comes to a Nazi conclusion that the Germans have to do the same thing with the Slavs, right, that's. You know, he came to that separately from the Nazis, but that's what he did, you know. And then he ends up being a Nazi. So you know, I know a lot, of, a lot of the history, there's been a lot of focus on the liberal. Yeah, I know a lot, of a lot of the history. There's been a lot of focus on the liberal. On my part of the left as opposed to yours, there's a lot of focus on the liberal complicity and fascism, and I brought it up and I don't think you would deny it.

Jonathan Korman : 27:35

I have been sort of worried, though, that they have used that to hide the, the socialist leadership's, complicity and fascism, because so many people defected from the uh, from and I think that that connects to this, this phenomenon, where I like your coinage, sort of a dipshit anti-liberalism um, in which you know a lot of contemporary leftists will tell you, well, fascism is just the integral, defining, fundamental impulse of liberalism when it fully surfaces, and therefore that is why popular fronts are hard to construct, because ultimately, fascism is what liberalism really wants, and when fascism emerges, liberals ally with fascists out of ideological affinity, and that's just an utter crock of shit that misunderstands both what drives liberals and what fascism even is in the first place.

C. Derick Varn: 28:38

Well, this leads me to something that maybe we'll agree on, and then this will get us back to disagreements. Liberalism is a much more in its instantiation, a much more contradictory movement than people want to, than either side really wants to look at. You know Rousseau owning, you know someone like Dominico Lacerdo, someone who I have my own critique of, by the way, a pretty strong one but I will point out that, oh yeah, I mean, even someone is on the right side of history about indigenous people, so to speak, as Rousseau still owns stock in slave companies.

Jonathan Korman : 29:15

True, by the way, that's a true fact and Locke mounts a defense of slavery in baffling contradiction with his conception of universal rights.

Jonathan Korman : 29:26

He's a co-writer of the charter for South Carolina, yeah, so the worm is present at the core of the apple for a good long time. But I think, and this is where I think you and I have a meaningful disagreement. I think that contradiction really is a contradiction. And if you pursue the essence of what we can usefully call definitional to liberalism, ultimately you encounter that contradiction and any proper liberalism worth the name has to eventually recognize no, if all people are equal in rights and dignity, then slavery is bad, you know. Colonialism is bad, you know apartheid, jim Crow type social orders are bad. They're in fundamental conflict with core principle for liberals. But actual liberals are very, very good at tolerating that contradiction.

C. Derick Varn: 30:38

Well, I mean, I would take the Marxian proviso, going all the way back to the three principles of liberalism, and I do have a very. I mean, when Marxists talk about this it seems so contradictory that it's hard for a lot of people to understand. But you know we don't. Well, I shouldn't say this anymore. Historically we do not view capitalism as just bad, that the limitations of primitive communism are overcome by the productive forces unleashed by capital's growth tendency, but that if you don't get in charge of the quote chaos of the market, that that growth tendency will kill everything. So it's.

Jonathan Korman : 31:37

Which is vividly apparent to us in this long, you know, moment of uh late stage capitalism I'm hoping it's late stage, my friend uh, it's late stage.

Jonathan Korman : 31:49

I mean, I I am of the mind that it's late stage capitalism, because either we have revolutionary change which displaces the capitalist order, or do we have a material collapse, in which case the conditions for capitalism evaporate. So, one way or another, we're getting rid of capitalism, and there is a preferable way to do that, and recognizing which is the preferable way is one of the ways in which I like to claim that I qualify as a leftist, despite my despicable liberal tendencies.

C. Derick Varn: 32:22

Yeah, I called you a left liberal. I, you know, I see you there. I see you guys as wayward out of life, um, but I think that I mean. One thing that I can say about you and I just came up in our last conversation is I mean I was screaming for the heads of the DNC in 2016, like actively.

Jonathan Korman : 32:45

For all the reasons one would like. I don't entirely agree, but I get it.

C. Derick Varn: 32:49

Yeah, and I was also a bigger critic of the Bernie campaign than you, which is an interesting thing.

Jonathan Korman : 33:00

That is interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 33:10

The reason why was, I think, confused people couldn't stop him outright. The best way to end Bernie was to actually make him govern without having a party that would back him. And there was this view that it would be more like Trump, that Bernie would move the policy in the direction of where he wanted to go over time. And I was like, well, the thing is, you need a workers movement to push on these donor classes.

C. Derick Varn: 33:40

You don't have that yet and your answer to that is circular. So if we get Bernie, we can have the workers movement to protect Bernie and make Bernie more viable. And I'm just like, but you need one to do the other to do the other, like it's circular.

Jonathan Korman : 33:58

And that comes out of the very weird dynamics of electoral politics in the us in the last couple of decades and the reasons why, like you know, presidential electoralism in particular has this enormous gravitational pull, which is simultaneously dumb for all the reasons you're talking about, but also unavoidable because of the high stakes of presidential elections under the current conditions in America.

C. Derick Varn: 34:26

Well, OK, this, this leads us to an actual difference between us is pretty substantive, you have. You have said you know you need professional politicians and I was like, well, I don't know, that's anti-democratic. You might need professional policymakers, but I don't want them to be the actual politicians, for all the reasons of the problems of creating elite, specialist classes and cast and there is a tension there. But this leads to a tension here too, because when I think about independence for these movements, I am often telling people, since I was probably 32 years old, because I did this, this third party bullshit in the past, I do not mean running a third party candidate for president first. I have maintained that I don't. I would not tell people to vote for Donald Trump or to vote for Jill Stein, or to even vote for Kamala Harris.

C. Derick Varn: 35:43

I've actually said vote your conscience on this. These people owe you nothing and you owe them nothing until they actually have power. So, with that regard, vote your conscience, have power. So, with that regard, vote your conscience. Just don't be fooled by it. Don't don't confuse that for them owing you anything, because they they kind of don't. And I get in fights with both sides of the dsa on the aoc question where people like aocs are traitor and I'm like, well, is she a traitor? Though she was never really with you, you kind of just threw your name behind her. Yes, she's a member of the democratic socialist, but like how many paper members of the democratic socialist are there? Like half of them, so you know, and and we're like, well, we have to hold her accountable, and I'm like I agree, but you don't have the position to do that, and what I mean by that?

Jonathan Korman : 36:38

where's your leverage?

C. Derick Varn: 36:38

yeah, you don't have leverage and you don't have the position to do that. And what I mean by that is Where's your leverage? Yeah, you don't have leverage and you don't have the ability to protect her. Like, if you want someone I mean like there is and this is where I think our real disagreement is is like if you are thinking you can build an electoral movement, even kind of grassroots, senator by senator, house member by house member, like they're trying to do with the squad, you also have to have an underground movement that either has the money or the people to protect them.

Jonathan Korman : 37:08

You need a whole bunch of capacities which, like you know, the left in the United States just doesn't have.

C. Derick Varn: 37:17

Right. The question is why they don't have them. I mean one. We can talk about the industrial complex. You and I are actually both critics of that. Yeah, but this leads to two problems. One is I think we have to control the experts, and I think you're like we need to listen to the experts. But the other is the reason why the executive branch becomes this flashpoint, and I don't know how recent decisions of the Supreme Court affect this. Actually, it's not clear yet. Is that Michael Sandel is right that we have been putting more and more functions of the government in the administrative state to stabilize government against its own polarization? Now, its polarization in America is weird because, with the exception of some elements of MAGA and I'm going to say some, because MAGA is also a broad MAGA is messy.

Jonathan Korman : 38:13

yes, it's very easy to think of it as a coherent movement when it is very much not.

C. Derick Varn: 38:19

No, it is the opposite of a coherent movement and I tell people the reason. You know, you'll hear people in NPR be like, oh, like, the Republican Party has never been more unified and I'm like it's unified in a demagogue that says opposite things in a speech so that they don't notice that people are opposed. That says opposite things in a speech so that they don't notice that people are opposed. And one of the things that the reason why project 2025 is such a a problem for for Trump, I think and I'm I am almost unique, and this is not that he means that it doesn't mean it, I'm not sure but Trump learned after all of his policy papers he ignored from 2016. He used to have a bunch of them on his website. I didn't do hardly any of them other than like trying the wall and shit, and, in fact, a lot of his more, and this is something I said to you that kind of pissed you off in the past, but, like a lot of his more inherent policies are actually just standard Republican policies.

Jonathan Korman : 39:14

Yes, but I think this actually this points to something that's very important to my understanding of MAGA and fascism and the relation between the two, and as someone with a long and wholesome interest in fascism and what the heck it is and how it works. And how it works, one thing that I knew intellectually for a long time but did not really feel in my gut is the way in which fascism is not really a policy ideology, and so let me introduce some vocabulary that actually I was hoping on this call you would help me to refine into a better form, because your political science vocabulary is significantly more sophisticated than mine. But, like I think we often get confused about the distinction between governance ide versus policy ideologies, like what things should we do with the instrument of government as our explicit instrument of social policy, and social ideologies like how should we conduct society, which is itself a political question. And fascism is a social ideology. It's a vision of the way society should be. It's sort of a governance ideology in the sense that it is a sort of fantasy of authoritarian governance, and it's a particular kind of fantasy of authoritarian governance and it is radically not a policy ideology.

Jonathan Korman : 41:10

Like fascism actually refuses a clear policy program and you know famously. Mussolini exemplifies that. Like you know you, mussolini gets asked well, this you know, this newspaper you know wants to know what your policy program is. And mussolini says well, my policy program is is to break the bones of the people at that fucking newspaper. Right, like and you. And this is the thing that was revelatory, looking at Trump is Trump's protean. Radical confusion about policy is, as you say, an instrument by which he quiets the internal contradictions in policy imperatives within his supporting coalition. But, more significantly, it's reflective of the deep fascist spirit of radical disinterest in policy questions. If we get our social sensibility straightened out and we purge the corrupting influences, if we rally behind our leader of profound insight.

Jonathan Korman : 42:20

Everything will just sort itself out and we don't have to think about policy. Right, it's an anti-politics in that sense.

C. Derick Varn: 42:27

Right, you get rid of. It is a. And let's get into why because we disagreed. I mean, our big disagreement was on Umberto Eco's Orr Fashion article, which I like, hate, hate and you like um you, yeah, you, you are not a useful definition of fascism.

Jonathan Korman : 42:48

It is a helpful diagnostic instrument for recognizing when you encounter fascism so what I would say.

C. Derick Varn: 42:57

That makes trump interesting to me, and one of the distinctions between you and I Is I've never called MAGA fascist, but, unlike my friend Danny Besner, I have said that it has fascistic elements.

Jonathan Korman : 43:10

Yes, and that's where I was not so long ago.

C. Derick Varn: 43:15

But okay, now I think MAGA as a whole has fascistic elements. There are fascists in MAGA. That is where I am at movement. Okay, I'm going to say one of the most inflammatory things I'm going to say in this interview that the anti-fascist movement, largely off of a weird conception of popular frontism which is part of why I said, get it out of your mouth Um, uh, ended up being the radical, um shock troops for Biden and for cult for a cultural notion of politics, particularly around BLM, where you had this opportunity for a very brief moment for real reforms. But the reforms asked for were both milquetoast and also too broad in the context in which they were asked.

C. Derick Varn: 44:18

For example, I am not anti-police abolition. I know a lot of people have become so in a long time. But I have always said the answer to police abolition is universal conscription into a civilian defense force which nobody likes, like when I'm like. No, if you get rid of cops, you have to replace cops. You don't just do that with social workers, you do that with everybody. Uh, subsuming those functions, and that's a big fucking ask. You're not asking it, so we can't do it. All right, so, um, and so you know, but the idea that you're going to get rid of cops by definingunding them, while they still have all their guns. That seems absurd all right.

Jonathan Korman : 45:00

Well, and, like you know, I, you know, I have my, my internet um litany where I say, you know, fire every cop um, no guns, um, but like, implied in that is, as someone who's a police, almost abolitionist, um, what you have to replace policing with, yes, does include, like you know, stronger networks of various kinds of social democratic supports, such that the conditions uh that uh produce the thing we are talking about when we talk about crime are reduced, et cetera, et cetera. But also also, like you you know, you do need homicide detectives, right, that's a thing you need in some form in your society. And part of my frustration with the vision of the sort of like popular left in these United States is there's a lot of hand waving about, well, the community will solve that. And I ask well, let's get a little more specific about, like what, your mode of governance is Right.

C. Derick Varn: 46:10

Also, the idea that communities are modes of governments and without fundamental, because there are times I'm like, okay, you want to get rid of police, but you're not asking us to rewrite the Constitution, which, by the way, we really need to do.

Jonathan Korman : 46:21

We really need to do. Right, I have a whole host of crank ideas about how to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 46:26

Right, and so it's just.

Jonathan Korman : 46:32

it seems to me like, yeah, I mean I, I want to bring back where you started with this, which I think is really interesting, which is okay.

Jonathan Korman : 46:41

So you have this moment of alliance between BLM as a critique of policing, which is right on the merits the critique is 1 million percent correct, right Agreed and like questions of remedies are genuinely hard and at the same time, we have this moment in which anti-fascists start to recognize Trump, trumpism and MAGA as fashy, if not specifically fascist.

Jonathan Korman : 47:24

And so there's this alliance that emerges, even though they're not really integrally the same thing, and part of why I'm excitable about being smart, about how we conceive fascism definitionally and recognizing the ways in which you know and recognizing the ways in which MAGA is recognizably fascist is we need a analysis of how fascism operates which is just better than what our current body of American anti-fascist organizing and movements are able to do.

Jonathan Korman : 48:06

Like anti-fascists in these United States have a terrific nose, like they can spot the scent very quickly and very well, but it's not actually animated by a sophisticated theory of what fascism is and, like you know, a lot of American anti-fascists have this, I think, sort of dumb leftist reading of well, fascism is just neoliberalism to the extreme, which is daft like that doesn't understand neoliberalism, it doesn't understand fascism, it doesn't understand authoritarianism, it doesn't understand MAGA. It's just, it's just wrong, it's, it's, you know, it's. It's barely even wrong, right, it's almost not even wrong, and that is a significant handicap in an environment in which we are dealing with live fascist movements. We need to be better than that.

C. Derick Varn: 49:02

You know I get. I have a friend of mine that's always attacking me for focusing on internet weirdos like Dugan, and I'm always like, well, it's hard for me to know how much influence Dugan has in Russia, although I will admit that, even if it's not Dugan, putin sure as hell is using a lot more Eurasianist language outright. Yeah, um, so whether or not that's from Dugan, I suspect it isn't. Um, that's irrelevant. And that that Dugan was already speaking that language, um, before it became popular, uh, but that, uh.

C. Derick Varn: 49:38

I went to the American, like the, the, the page on American conservatism, uh, on Wikipedia, and I noticed how fundamentally dramatically changed the references at the bottom of the article were. And so, instead of seeing stuff like Jess Russell, kirk and wind and all those people, evola was explicitly there, and so it became clear to me and also post-COVID, you see people like Aron McIntyre picking up Smith and Pareto and the Italian elite school, and also near reaction. One of the things that I can say about the period of what I would call the anti fascist high point, and you and I would agree that one of the big frustrations right now is it's not there, like whatever happened after BLM, that seems exhausted.

Jonathan Korman : 50:45

I think it's a little strong, but I see what you mean, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 50:48

Well, at least the explicit street movement version of it that we saw from 2019 to 2020.

Jonathan Korman : 50:54

Yeah, yeah, that moment is past.

C. Derick Varn: 50:56

It's way past. I would also argue that it wasn't particularly effective because it misrecognized the parts of that coalition that had staying power. One of the things that I had said that you know, you and I again, we're both. We are both. We've spent way too much time and we are writing literature in our lives. Yes, For different reasons. You're in a cultist. I'm a weirdo who studies that shit, but not for the reasons you're an occultist. I'm a weirdo who studies that shit, but not for the reasons you do well, I I also come to it by way of politics, right, um.

Jonathan Korman : 51:27

so I mean, I mean like really I was drawn into it when I was trying to understand movement conservatism and discovered the distinction between movement conservatism and the american far right and the sort of relationship between those and that's how I came to actually be interested in fascism is through the American far right. So I did get it sort of from two different sides, but not coming through a kind of leftist critique of the right as my lineage and understanding the right.

C. Derick Varn: 51:57

Well, I mean, let's be frank here, I didn't get it from coming from a leftist critique either. I was one of them, like not to the extent that I was ever on racial policies or anything like that, but that I was in the paleo-conservative anti-war movement.

Jonathan Korman : 52:14

Because it has its seductive qualities.

C. Derick Varn: 52:16

Right Still does, in fact it's come back. Those seductive qualities, right Still does, in fact it's come back.

Jonathan Korman : 52:22

Those seductive qualities have come back and the reasons why those seductions are dangerous. Is that much more apparent now?

C. Derick Varn: 52:31

But that doesn't mean that it's not seductive, I mean. That's why it's there. It is also clear that paleo-conservatives are no longer as allergic to power as they once were, now that Trump is involved. When you have people at the American Conservative talking about, well, maybe we need to get rid of term limits, which is something that they would have balked at even under Pat Buchanan's editorship. But what I was saying about that, though, is that, even for people who were white nationalist sympathetic in the nineties, like Sam Francis, they said that white nationalism was a dead project in the United States and it would just not work, that they needed to split off a coalition of professionals to fight other professionals, basically, and you needed a meaner, meaner class, middle-class to do that, and that would be a multi-ethnic coalition, probably one that didn't include a lot of black people, but probably one that didn't include a lot of Latinos and Asians, and I think the left, after the Floyd protest, did some rhetorical moves that actually played into that.

C. Derick Varn: 53:37

I'm not going to get too much into BIPOC, because I don't know how much I think these word choices really matter, but I did notice, you know, this pushback on Asian and Latin representationalism and people of color, and I get it with some like South Asians and whatnot, really you know.

C. Derick Varn: 53:58

Talking about it, I'm like you're the richest demographic in the country and you're the richest demographic for racist reasons. We don't let poor Indians come to the United States. Like, if you look at Punjabi, for example, punjabi immigrants in Canada versus Punjabi immigrants in the US, they're completely different social economic statuses, for example. So Sikh here we associate with wealth, whereas there a lot of like seek truck drivers in canada and that's the the result of fairly relatively racist policies of immigration. Um, but india has a lot of educated people and we want them. So you know, and there's a lot of that in the 20 teens, like leading a lot of this representational movement and there was a black pushback to that and talk about, you know, people of color's, anti-blackness, some from an athro-pessimist point of view, which I'm more skeptical of, but some which was just being honest about interminority tensions in a way that just they weren't often weren't during that time period, about interminority tensions in a way that just they weren't often weren't during that time period.

C. Derick Varn: 55:00

Yeah, but to me I'm like okay, but alienating the potentially largest demographic of color in the country, latin people, seems uh stupid, and for a variety of reasons, some of which I think are material. I don't think it's just this uh inability to do anything about the border one way or the other. The assumption that that Latin people wanted open borders was just not true, but they wanted meaningful border reform, which no one gave them. The fact that, because of systemic language racism, a lot of the, whereas a lot of African-Americans could go into federal and state businesses that actually had to live by anti-segregation rules in a meaningful sense, in a way that private corporations sometimes do, sometimes don't.

C. Derick Varn: 55:48

There was a whole lot of entry into municipal jobs in the Black community. It didn't happen in the Latin community because Latin people often didn't speak English and they definitely, given some of their questionable immigration statuses, weren't going to go for government jobs Right, which meant that there's a much larger, very, very petite but petite bourgeois strata to that group and that this idea that liberals had in the aughts and aught teens, that that meant demographic was destiny, was like. That's absurd. You need to look at the economic conditions of the different groups. They're not the same. It is weirdly kind of actually racist, but then they are. But when confronting that, they answered it with bipoc, which has a legitimacy in that the black and indigenous experience is fundamentally different than the latin and asian experience. Even there's, they've all been subject to white racism and white supremacy. The economic conditions are different. The, the what you came and came not with, were different.

Jonathan Korman : 56:53

Now, at that point it does raise the question like okay, well, if we're going to talk about different species of racism in american life, well then, don't we need to differentiate all of them and talk about the dynamics of all of the different kinds of racisms that we have?

Jonathan Korman : 57:11

um, but that is tricky to talk about and like and I don't like. I do not want to get into into two white guys talking about the true dynamics of racism in America. That's tiresome in the ways that are transparently obvious if you're paying attention, but it's complicated in that even most American conservatives casting a wide net for conservatism but like ordinary American conservative citizens right are racist in a whole bunch of ways. But they really sincerely conceive of themselves as opposed to racism. They conceive of themselves as opposed to a racism which is different from their sensibilities, which is a worse thing, which they do not have. And they are sincerely insulted when you accuse them of racism because they're racist. But they've just formulated their own fantasy conception of what racism is, which is not them.

C. Derick Varn: 58:28

Right. Well, I would also go and I'm going to really chastise the CRT movement, which is no longer really even that big on even the liberal left anymore. I think pretty much everybody's seen flaws in it. I was talking about D'Angelo's fall for potential plagiarism. It might be manufactured. It looks kind of legit, but also kind of not. The more I dig into it, it is real, but also maybe more superficial than it seems, which is often the case with books that are produced. Rush for a moment.

C. Derick Varn: 59:01

That isn't a defense of it. It's just an acknowledgement of real practices, which means that almost anybody can be opened up to it if they're not incredibly fastidious in their writing. This is to say, though, that my problem with Robin DiAngelo and Abraham X Kendi was multiple fold, but even in the and Abraham X Kendi was multiple fold, but even in terms of X Kendi, it said he thought it was confusing to talk about different types of racism, like systemic racism, bigotry, implicit bias and all that should be talked about as the same thing, and I'm like, and you know, at risk of being the off-white guy talking about this, of being the off-white guy talking about this, and by off-white just because I come from ethnically diverse, but I'm not a WASP. I was thinking like that's actually kind of a problem, because how you deal with all three of those problems and that's not even getting to.

C. Derick Varn: 59:56

All three of those sets have different subsets of different groups but are radically different. Like the way I deal with systemic racism. Uh can be actually it can be race blind in the way that I'm handling, say, poverty could handle a whole lot of that because you're equal, whereas there is no waistline way to handle bigotry or implicit bias. So it's, it's. But he, he flattened all those things and then would say that policy that was not explicitly about dealing with racism, even if it would net benefit black people, for example, uh was still structurally racist and I I'm like that's dangerous and absurd and that became a talking point for a few years. That's kind of gone away now and the DEI moment is kind of going away. We've seen this moment of progressive inclusion from corporations. They are getting tired of the pushback. It is not as profitable to them as it once was.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:02

It is also not profitable for them to just cater to conservatives. It seems to be profitable for them now to just be quiet. I bring that up because it seems to me, when we talked about this moment, about how a lot of these people ended up being the radical foot shoulders of the Biden moment is when Biden came into power, we had a year where Biden and I'm going to I don't know if you agree with me about this Biden is an interesting figure on the American left liberal stage because of his age, the American left liberal stage. Because of his age. He is a villain in his actual legislative record and I think even you would agree with that.

Jonathan Korman : 1:01:46

Oh, absolutely Well. And what's fascinating about Biden, if I can sort of like jump to where I think you're going, is you know, you know congressional, know, congressional. Biden right is, is the embodiment of the neoliberal turn in the democratic party correct? Abandoning the new deal logics in the face of the encounter with the success of movement conservatism and to the Dem establishment which emerges with this neoliberal consensus and an approach to American politics which faces the dominance of movement conservatism as the lodestar of the Reagan and post-Reagan era. Right, they say well, you know, the only way that you can achieve anything liberal in the, you know, democratic Party sense of liberal is to, you know to, to trim it down to size. Don't spook, you know, the racist white people who don't know they're racist, don't, you know, make the bargains you can with Republicans and they look at progressives as dangerous, ignorant children who do not understand how American politics work because they survived the bloodbath of the Reagan era where all of those people were crushed.

Jonathan Korman : 1:03:25

Right, and so they have very good reasons to think that progressives are just dangerously irresponsible. And of course their moment of political imprinting is the 80s and 90s Right and the world is different. And then what's double interesting about Biden is President Biden does not completely release that neoliberal Dem establishment sensibility, but he lets go of a lot more of it than any of us could have anticipated Right. And that has not registered with like Dem progressives, much less the left.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:02

Right. So, and I want to get into why, because I think, I think his age is actually specific here. He is one of the enactors of what we might call the DNC or, if we go back to his earlier incarnation, the Atari Democrat policy. But he is not actually of that generation. He is not a Gary Hart Democrat.

Jonathan Korman : 1:04:22

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:25

Which means his instincts are coalitional, unlike the the Clinton era which was, which was actually a radically not coalitional, at least within the Democratic Party coalition movement. They'd make concessions to racial groups, but only really couched enough. And we have to remember, clinton actually did have some Southern base. I mean, the 2000 election seems to have wiped out our memory of the fact that the Dixiecrats were not all Republicans yet. They weren't all Strom Thurmond. A lot of them were, but they weren't all Strom Thurmond. They all became Strom Thurmond with the Bush administration, which is one of the reasons why I found this stuff very problematic. What I would say about that is that what we see now with um, with Biden, is it throws everyone off because we've forgotten. They used to do car, used to do that, although Carter was one of the great neoliberalizers I mean, he's really even but even from the executive perspective, he begins the process that Reagan accelerates, yes, um, and yet he also did throw bones to even parts of the new left in his brief tenure as president. He's the last president to operate that way, really, did not he? He was concerned with proving that he was not really going to be what he campaigned as, which is, uh, uh, someone who was a drastic departure from the clinton era consensus. We see this from him bringing, kind of honestly, the most reactionary parts of both the clinton and carter administrations back into power in his first cabinet, even so far, you know. I mean, like he gives Gary Hart, you know, an ambassadorship to China.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:28

But in this misrecognition of the moment, we see Obama as the beginning of something new, and what he really was was the end of that era of politics. Biden comes up and he's a coalitional player. He knows that that era of politics is ending. He is not. I don't want people to think you'll hear like oh, biden is the most progressive president since FDR, and I'm like, no, he's the most progressive president since LBJ and that's damning with Faye Price. But his instincts are spread out. So he'll like appoint right wing people to this, make concessions to right wing people for that, but he'll also be actually enforcing antitrust law, which no one has done since Carter. Right, like, uh, yeah.

Jonathan Korman : 1:07:10

I mean, like on a lot of the quiet good governance stuff. Um, the Biden administration has been surprisingly good in a way that you know, I will admit, is hard for me to register because people like you and I are radicals Like that. Stuff feels like small potatoes, but it is also significant.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:33

Yeah, this is the paradox of Biden for me. This is the paradox of Biden for me. I will admit that he has done good things for the, for the NRA, even though he's also betrayed it at moments, but he's still. He's done more good for it than anyone hasn't translated to the labor movement being reborn, despite what people have tried to tell you. There's no evidence for that. But it has been like, oh, we're not just going to ignore all of labor law. Like, oh, we're not just going to ignore all of labor law, yeah, like we're not going to reform it to be more progressive, like we kind of promised to do and we never actually do. But that's partly the legislature's fault, so we're going to do this in.

Jonathan Korman : 1:08:07

LRA.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:08

He's also, however, the suppressor of a legitimate rail strike and not really modernizing rail labor, which is unforgivable for a coal labor president.

Jonathan Korman : 1:08:17

It's unforgivable and also surprising, since Biden is actually a train nerd.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:22

Yeah, I mean, the whole thing was like-.

Jonathan Korman : 1:08:24

I remember when he was elected, I was like, well, at least we're going to have good rail transit policy. And it turns out that that's one of the things that Biden has not delivered.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:37

He did calculations in the in the inflation act. I was just listening to Adam twos go into the specifics of this, but they were trying to balance off what he had to give to the right of the democratic party. The mansions of the party, uh, literally off of sneaking a very small scale green new deal into the net to the inflation act. Um, that was all carrots and no sticks. Uh, and look, I get it, because you do have people like cory bush, who became vulnerable to attacks from apac partly because she over insisted on the sticks being in that stuff yeah um, without be.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:16

and look, I'm not against sticks, but i'm'm always like if you're going to raise gas prices, you got to figure out how to get working people to work and you're already in an environment with the cash flow. There's no way around that. And pretending that like, oh, we can just do what Europe does, but you haven't built Europe's transportation infrastructure like at all and it's harder to do in the United States, will admit that we're much bigger geographical area. I mean right, there are mechanically.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:43

There are mechanical challenges and there's institutional challenges, right, enormous, and um, and I'm just turning that ship around, it takes time but the other element of biden that I've emphasized rhetorically and I the reason I'm talking to you about this is the one people realize that I realize this is a much more paradoxical thing to realize is that it was also a normalizer of a lot of Trump policies yes, some of which are quite bad. Yes, because they were hard. Like the moment immigration got even kind of a little bit sticky. He trailed Trump as an immigration and, as I said, he didn't get any credit for it. Like I'm like he trailed Trump as an immigration and, as I said, he didn't get any credit for. Like I'm like you think that people are going to give you credit for it? No, that you're just giving them the space to start demanding. Like, with it, we shoot all the immigrants at the border, regardless of who they are.

Jonathan Korman : 1:10:29

Like it's just well and this is the thing that I don't understand. Because, um, because Americans, it doesn't take much to convince even conservatives. Well, part of the resolution of American immigration policy is you have to have a clean, fair path to citizenship. Right, People actually want Americans, even super racist Americans want a clear path to citizenship for people who want to be dedicated Americans and it seems like the easiest political sell you could possibly sell.

Jonathan Korman : 1:11:13

You're trying to figure out how you're going to set it up going to set it up and, of course, the problem that Biden has faced is that any attempt at immigration policy good, evil or sideways was just going to face opposition from Republicans, because they wanted to deny him the victory. They wanted him to deny them the victory because Trump asked them to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:34

Right, I mean so, even when he's making concessions to Republican.

Jonathan Korman : 1:11:39

There's no gain to gain there, it's just bad policy. And that to your point about the coalition politics. Biden's skill and intuition for coalition politics, which is in many ways admirable, is just counterproductive in trying to resolve immigration policy in any kind of sane way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:00

And the other thing about him is he's a Zionist, which I think unfortunately and I know this is an unpopular thing to say on the left, but while most Americans do care I mean, even conservative Americans are beginning to really worry about what's happening in israel. Um, to the palestinians, not just, you know, to the israelis. Trump's hyper support of israel actually is a flashpoint in their own movement and, weirdly, is leading to resurrections of bizarro forms of anti-sympathism we haven't seen in a while. Um, and I do blame israel, israeli policy, for that, as much as even the right uh well, I mean, israel's policy is monstrous, right, right.

Jonathan Korman : 1:12:42

The attack on gaza really is genocidal absolutely and um. And you know, biden is sympathetic to israel because he is old enough to remember the time in which Israel was in fact weak, did in fact face existential threats, and he can't shake that sympathy which makes him unwilling to confront the Israelis as hard as one would have to in order to do anything meaningful about American complicity in supporting Israel in this nightmare moment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:21

Right, and I also have the unpopular opinion that part of them are afraid that if they didn't supply Israel with everything it asked for, that Israel would still do this policy anyway, which would make America look weak.

Jonathan Korman : 1:13:35

I know that is a I think that is definitely right about how the administration is thinking Right. And it is plausibly right about the physical universe. Like I mean, I think it was incumbent upon Biden to deny all support to Israel by January, when it was clear that the Israelis' fever was not going to break. They really were just going to end up in this forever war of murdering Gazan civilians.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:08

You can call it a war at this point.

Jonathan Korman : 1:14:09

I mean like, yeah, it were Hamas, but most of the people are killed, yeah, well, and actually that's an embarrassing slip of the tongue on my part, because I try to avoid using the word war war because I think it is misleading in understanding what's going on. Um, and at the same time, like the, the, the left, um has largely lost the plot where, like the attack on gaza is a nightmare, it's genocidal, and the manifestations of opposition to that have managed to exaggerate the actual horrors, which is very impressive, like taking horrors that bad and finding ways to exaggerate them, finding ways to see the ordinary horrors of military conflict as if they were totally novel, finding ways to that's a big accusation, Jordan, Can you tell me?

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:05

Jonathan, can you tell me what you think? They're exaggerating?

Jonathan Korman : 1:15:11

So number one I think it is a mistake to read Israel's action as an attempt to kill every Palestinian in Gaza. That's just not true. If they really wanted to kill as many civilians as possible, they would be killing a lot more civilians. They're killing a lot of civilians.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:34

We haven't seen since World War II dude.

Jonathan Korman : 1:15:38

Don't get me wrong it's a nightmare and the scale and logics of it are genocidal, but it is not an attempt to kill everyone. A because we know they could kill more people if they were really determined.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:53

And.

Jonathan Korman : 1:15:53

B. You can see it in all kinds of decisions that they're making. What is Netanyahu's logic? It's the same as it has always had, always has been right. And this is actually and this is the other half of my critique of sort of like the exaggerated fantasy of the left about the evils of the Israelis right, what the Likudniks held power for 20 years and only just now got around to the genocide they wanted to do. No, it is actually a response to October 7th. And that doesn't mean that it's justified it's not, but it is in fact a response to October 7th. And if you're a Likudnik, what is October 7th? It's a demonstration that your security policy for Israel was a sham. The fantasy that you could just wall off Gaza and engage in military policing from the outside and get the Palestinians in Gaza to just shut the fuck up and not bother us anymore. Right, it was always an insane fantasy. It was always brutal, it was always absurd.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:59

No, it was a slow genocide versus a fast one too.

Jonathan Korman : 1:17:02

Well, and yes, it's a genocide in the broad sense of genocide, and the broad sense of genocide is important to grasp, but that's different from trying to kill.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:11

No, they weren't even trying to kill every Palestinian. They were trying to chase them out.

Jonathan Korman : 1:17:15

Right, well, but like they didn't even want Gaza, like the Likudniks pulled settlements out of Gaza because securing them was too difficult, they were like we just want the problem to go away, we want to do as little as possible, right. And so every time there's an incident, we're just going to bomb Gaza a little bit to teach the Palestinians a lesson. And it seemed to the bonehead Likudniks like that worked well enough, until their policy was a demonstrated, catastrophic failure. On October 7th, right, where, no, they had not secured the safety of Israelis, they had done the opposite of that. The only thing they could think of immediately was a brutal counterattack, in the stupid terms they imagine.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:25

The other thing that it does is it distracts from the West Bank, and they can.

Jonathan Korman : 1:18:29

And it distracts from the West Bank.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:30

yes, Right, the settlers can finish their business in the West Bank and there will be no more West Bank. I's that. That seems to me explicitly part of the goal. I mean like, okay, what I thought you were going to push back on is actually something that one of my critiques of the left narrative about this, which is to read this all as a project of post-european jewelry and totally in the terms of herpsil, uh yes and and I I do push back against that there's this reading oh, this, this was always the dream of Zionism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:00

It is to some degree part of it were.

Jonathan Korman : 1:19:03

Well, and I mean like, let's not be naive about the history of Zionism, right? Yes, the Zionist movement, from the very beginning, included a large element that did in fact want an expansive territorial claim. They were going to purge the territory completely and they were not just willing but enthusiastic about vigorous use of violence. That is unmistakably a component of the long Zionist tradition, but it's not definitional to Zionism and it's not definitional to Israel, as demonstrated by the fact that Israel was perfectly happy to have this absurd quasi-sovereign West Bank and quasi-sovereign Gaza and would have been happy to leave that shitty condition forever. They did not see a need to seize and occupy those territories. In fact, the lacudniks, who most embody that element of the zionist tradition, like their plan was just to get the existing palestinians to shut the fuck up, um, and have a secure Israel inside the Green Line.

Jonathan Korman : 1:20:20

I think the Olympics regard the settlers in the West Bank not as people who they want to support, but an instrument for controlling Palestinians in the West Bank. Which they also saw in terms of Hamas, and that's why the Hamas bargain is there, and so the left critique we are finally seeing the unfolding of the necessary logic of Zionism is simply wrong. It's just not true. Hmm, and maybe you disagree about that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:54

I do disagree with that, but my critique about the left on this is a couple of things. They have gone so far as to start denying that Hamas was supported by the Netanyahu government, which is just factually wrong.

Jonathan Korman : 1:21:09

Which is a weird thing for the left to do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:11

Right, and they seem to be doing it to make Hamas more explicitly heroic. And I'm like, look, if I was in Gaza right now, if I was Palestinian, I would have sided with Hamas as soon as the shit went down.

Jonathan Korman : 1:21:26

But Hamas are bad.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:28

Right Hamas are bad.

Jonathan Korman : 1:21:30

We have to recognize that part of the picture here is that Hamas are bad, they're bad and they're opposed to all of the things that we love.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:40

In so much that Hamas is moderated, which it has, believe it or not. I've read all its charters. Now it has done so from pressure from other Palestinian groups, from other Palestinian groups, and a lot of the Hamas leaders are hiding out in other countries and not actually on the ground right now, which is why they're being assassinated in ways that risk this being broken out into another, much larger war. But the other things that are misreadings is while israel is in a settler colonial power, there's no doubt about that, but reading it as just the current situation, as just one of european settler colonialism, is 10 kinds of irresponsible yeah yeah, it's just wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:32

Um, the mazrahi, who are in many ways amongst jews, a subjugated group, um that you know they're poor, they're the people forced out of iran, yemen, etc. Um, they're a large number of. They're at least half, if not more than 80 percent of of israelis who do not have a second pass. But you always hear this brought up like 80, like 20 of israel just leave and I'm like okay.

Jonathan Korman : 1:23:00

It's mostly the most prosperous Ashkenazi.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:02

Right and a lot of them have left. I also pointed out the people and it's actually what we've seen is the Mizrahi see this as a more existential battle than the Ashkenazi do.

Jonathan Korman : 1:23:13

Let's be clear like how did we end up with so many Mizrahi Israelis? Well, there was a population transfer, right, it was a population transfer from all of the Arab countries where there were pogroms in all of the Arab countries. The Mizrahi migrated to Israel. They are now the Israeli.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:37

Uh, at least plurality, um I think they're an out and out majority now majority.

Jonathan Korman : 1:23:44

It's close, if I remember correctly, but I could be wrong because liberal ask can honestly have largely left israel.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:49

So it's, it's like um, I mean, people were like, oh, we're forcing boots in the ground and I was telling I was actually arguing with donald parkland about this I was like you don't know enough about israel because, yes, you have, and a lot of them have already left. A lot of liberal zionists have given up the liberal zionist project yeah yeah, and so, and you know, you might think liberal zionism is impossible.

Jonathan Korman : 1:24:10

You, I know you don't, I kind of do, but but at the very least liberal Zionism faces a deep internal contradiction it needs to wrestle with.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:19

Right, so so, so, there's no way around that. But this idea that they could all just go back to Europe or the United States, we'd have to let I don't know, millions of Israelis, millions of Masrahi Israelis with no past with Europe are the US at all into those countries, and what kind of force do you think they would be? Most Palestinians do not actually see their future anymore. They don't actually think they're going to get rid of all the Jews from the land. They don't. I mean, even Hamas seems to have taken that out of the charter. From the river to the sea does not mean ethnically cleansing.

Jonathan Korman : 1:25:21

Well, I mean, that's part of the problem with the slogan is it's deeply ambiguous. Most people who say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free are not imagining a purge of Israeli Jews, Like they do not imagine that as the future that they are advocating for. But there are unmistakably people and I think, actually the authors of the slogan that is what they want, that is what they imagine, that is their dream, and that ambiguity is a serious problem in just grappling analytically about well, what the heck is the way forward? What is even a conceivable way forward, much less a desirable one.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:07

Well, I don't know. I mean the PLO. I don't think when they adopted that phrase we're actually thinking about expungeable virtues, but yes, when Hamas picked it up.

Jonathan Korman : 1:26:19

So I happen to have read the PLO charter, which is very instructive. Ok, and, and the PLO charter says well, you know, our plan is a democratic, secular state of Palestine, inclusive of all of what was British Mandate Palestine. That would be an Arab nation and Jews would be welcome to stay as guests. Well, and like you can imagine the conditions of that, were that dream to be realized.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:59

Well I mean. The thing is, though, that, like the PLO, abandons that pretty quickly.

Jonathan Korman : 1:27:06

Well, and I think like that was never entirely sincere and like we're in this strange moment in which, yes, hamas has has had to moderate for a host of reasons, and I will not pretend to have an informed opinion about how true that is to the true essence of what real Hamas really is. I don't know that, anyone knows that and I sure as heck don't pretend.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:33

No, I don't know.

Jonathan Korman : 1:27:34

I know that most Palestinians feel like they mean it, but that's all I know, like and um and I like a lot of advocates for palestinian liberation, um are righteous and sincere and liberal, uh, in the sense that they imagine, uh, you know, a lib dem state of palestine, uh, which is secular and inclusive and probably social democratic too and social democratic and um, and and therefore um, you know, former israelis, um, the, the jews of the of the future dream state of Palestine would be equal citizens within an Arab state, fundamentally Arab state.

Jonathan Korman : 1:28:24

And you know there are worse things to dream of.

Jonathan Korman : 1:28:28

But also also, we know that there is enough surviving Palestinian animosity toward Israeli Jews, for the best of reasons for absolutely valid reasons that it is very difficult to imagine getting from our current point A to a point B in which, yes, we're all living happily together, and I think you know. Another thing that American leftists are just like deeply delusional about is well, there was, you know, an Arcadian state in history in which Palestine was a beautiful land of harmony, which was then destroyed by the imposition of Zionism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:10

What are they talking about? The Ottoman Empire?

Jonathan Korman : 1:29:15

Oh yeah, right, why, like that moment never existed and it is a beautiful thing to aspire to and in my heart that is what I would aspire to out of my perfidious liberalism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:28

Well, this is something I've noticed about the adoption of you know, and I want to be clear, when we talk about the lefts that are not liberal, not all of them are mine. Some of them are people who are basically what I would say indigenous romantics, which I do think has a place because it gets us to take indigenous issues seriously. Marxists historically don't actually. I mean they kind of do, but not really like they do in other nations when they're trying to like no liberation generally.

Jonathan Korman : 1:30:00

Well, fundamentally people are all the same and right, and I well, I don't want to get into some reactionary horseshit about you know, uh, you know, oblut and boden essences of peoples, like there are cultural differences that people care about right and they're real.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:14

I mean like, and it's actually a problem for mar, for Marxism, because Marxism wants to be universal and particularistic on this issue, it's a problem for liberalism, because liberalism wants to be universal and actually I was going to say it is actually our liberal origins that instigate this conflict, because what I will say, that where you and I agree is Marxism is a development out of liberalism. I do not think it is just liberalism process. I think it negates elements of liberalism because it negates elements of property.

Jonathan Korman : 1:30:40

Yes, Well, and again, I you know I'll, I'll ask you again my, my core question what is the name for liberalism without property?

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:50

Probably socialism Like, but the thing is liberalism without property is unrecognizable as liberalism for most people.

Jonathan Korman : 1:30:59

Well, but you got all the other stuff here, you got. You got rule of law, you got due process, you get universal rights.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:02

You, that means even stalin believed in rule of law, believe it or not. That's why he had sham trials. We don't even have sham trials, we have sham. We have sham prosecutors. We don't have sham trials. Like you never get a sham trial in america, um but it's dark sibling.

Jonathan Korman : 1:31:16

That is dark, um, but it is no, I'm sorry, stalin. Stalin did not believe in liberalism. In that sense, stalin was a fucking dictator.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:26

He's a dictator, but he believed in rule of law no, no, he did not. No, stalin was authoritarian right, stalin was pure power politics and you know, and veryologist which is, you might see me as one, though, after this conversation.

Jonathan Korman : 1:32:01

You're being a little apologetic in this moment, but I understand that you're not fundamentally a Stalin apologist.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:05

Well, I mean, I think that my point about the rule of law, at least from Stalin's yes, he was an authoritarian, Absolutely.

Jonathan Korman : 1:32:14

And I would say, definitionally, authoritarianism and rule of law are in opposition.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:19

See, this is a fundamental difference. I don't see that at all.

Jonathan Korman : 1:32:24

All right, well, let me make the case so you can shoot it down. Rule of law is in opposition to authoritarianism because it says there are structural limitations on how power can be exercised. And authoritarianism says where there is power, power simply should be exercised, and is opposed to institutional limitations like rule of law, like checks and balances, et cetera, et cetera. Liberalism says you need to create structural impediments to unfettered exercise of power. That is the liberal case in part. That is part of the liberal case that I want to retain in our glorious socialist future which we will build together, socialist future which we will build together. And Stalin is an authoritarian in the sense that, well, yes, right, he was an institutionalist in the sense of constructing institutions and enabling them, but those institutions were always instrumental to the exercise of power rather than a mechanism for limiting, constraining and shaping the exercise of power.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:36

A mechanism for limiting constraining and shaping the exercise of power.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:39

Okay, so I would agree with you about that, but I do think Stalin took Soviet law seriously, in that he was not breaching Soviet law, the powers invested in him as the head secretary of the soviet union and there was another. I mean theoretically there was checks and balance. I'd say very theoretically, because the, the, the workers councils elected a fucking president, like, and that was not stalled. We don't remember one of the funniest things about, about the soviet we don't remember who the presidents were, right, like, like, because the secretary, the general, well, and I would say that was, you know, like uh, paper liberalism which was worth the paper it was printed on um, you know, we don't talk about the presidents of the soviet union at all.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:28

We talk about the secretary of the soviet union, because party rules, which were made democratically by the politburo but the politburo was very small had more say than the rules that came out of the Duma or the Soviets themselves. People think that the Soviets were abolished in the Soviet Union, like the workers.

Jonathan Korman : 1:34:45

They were not. They persisted forever, vestigially.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:52

But formally, but formally.

Jonathan Korman : 1:34:55

But they did not constrain authoritarian exercise of power.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:59

Absolutely not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:00

They didn't constrain it either later on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:02

But one of the things that you know, one of the things I pushed back on like the Yuzov Chino, the purges are the red terror which is pre-Stalin is that in both cases, but the Soviets unleashed its social forces that they could not control, like and like the extent of the Yusuf China, the purges is not just Stalin, like putting out quotas, which he did, and he did have trials, but also that, like, people started getting revenge on each other very quickly and basically the construction of the law made a defending yourself against those accusations very hard to do, particularly in the context of stalin's fear of war with the uh.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:46

Actually he thought it was going to be a word, but not uh, germany, which is people will pretend he was playing fifth dimensional chess, and he was. He. He was preparing for war, but he was preparing for a different war, um and uh. He was preparing for war in some ways that are hard to justify. Like I don't know, like I'm afraid of the japanese, I'm gonna move all the soviet koreans to kazakhstan, for no reason uh, um and stuff like that Simultaneously authoritarian, brutal and bad judgment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:19

Yes, Right, Are people like Stalin to this? I'm like he also ethnically sorted Central Asia and Eastern Europe which nobody, including the fascists, could have done briarly and I would say all of that is exercise of authoritarian power, and authoritarianism does not necessarily mean, is not necessarily simply autocracy.

Jonathan Korman : 1:36:51

Power and local. You know local forms of power and you know authoritarian exercise of power, not by individuals but by, you know, groups that are coordinated. The defining characteristic, to my mind, that makes authoritarianism in opposition to liberalism, is that where there is power, there are no checks on the direction of its exercise, whereas a liberal order attempts. You know, in Madison's phrase, right, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If government were composed of angels, no checks on government would be necessary. But if men are to govern men flag for sexism, like, then we need to constrain the government from acting in authoritarian terms, like. Madison doesn't say authoritarian, but that's what he's talking about. He's like I want to prevent. I want to have a government that's strong enough to do the things it needs to do, but which is not unfettered in a way that produces the dysfunctions of authoritarianism, both in terms of creating good policy and in terms of, like brutality. So what we need is a liberal order which has institutional checks on the exercise of power.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:06

But what I'm going to remind you, though. What was he so interested in protecting?

Jonathan Korman : 1:38:11

Well, and part of what he was interested in protecting was the most anti-democratic possible thing right, which is the institution of slavery.

Jonathan Korman : 1:38:20

The institution of slavery, and even when it wasn't that, it was the institution of landowning wealth and the institution of landowning wealth, yes, but again, the idea of self-limiting institutional structures, right, is integral to the liberal vision and that's one of the things that I want to retrain in my socialist dream and it's one of the things that I'm frustrated with the left being naive about and sort of doing hand-waving about what the modes of governance are and what the forms of governance are.

Jonathan Korman : 1:38:51

I want, as like forms of governance, modes of governance, a liberal order which is democratic, it's democratically accountable, it's limited, there's transparency of law and and I do not hold up existing liberal democracies as exemplars of that principle fully enacted no, all of our problems are with the ways in which those principles are mortifyingly incomplete, but the direction of the principle and this is a place where I think you and I have friction the direction of liberal principle, excluding the principle of property rights, is good because, as a general rule, the doing doing liberalism harder points in the direction of justice oh boy, all right, you just mentioned the j word um, uh.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:50

So for those of you who don't know, um, I uh don't believe in the j word um like at all. I think any talk of justice is mostly talk of revenge. But, um, I suspect that you and I actually have similar goals in a lot of way, in that, uh, my interest for class, uh liberation is also in the interest of uh, liberation of things, of social reproduction and of things that I do not think, and this is why I'm not a class reductionist, that's why what people say I'm a crass premises, which is, which is different, that I don't think you get rid of sexism and racism totally by just getting rid of social classes. But as long as sexism and racism exists, there will be a tendency towards social classes, which is why I think you have to deal with it, and I don't think it's easy to do. I don't think I am not one of those people who thinks, oh we, just if we drop out of property, racism will go away tomorrow.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:48

I, frankly, racism is a modern ideology, but the root human, let's say mental techniques that allow for racism is kinship bonds, and misconstruing or construing kinship bonds, broadly or narrowly, and the societies that construe kinship bonds narrowly also tend to invent, to become more and more ethnocentric. All societies are kind of ethnocentric, I hate to say that, but they just kind of are. It's the anthropological truth. But the ones that construe kinship more narrowly tend to be more ethnocentric. They are more afraid of outsiders polluting their bloodlines, and so while that is not inherent to the human species, I mean people from Marshall Solon, I could just list.

Jonathan Korman : 1:41:34

But the capacity for bigotry is there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:37

It's there, right. Which is then?

Jonathan Korman : 1:41:39

exploited by the emergence of racism and sexism and all of those other bigotries that we're familiar with in a sort of like social justice context, and and they're resilient systems, like you know they are. You can't just switch them off. They are truly systemic and very, very hard to address.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:03

So this is where I'm going to like. I am a believer and this I was actually told that I was a bad Marxist for this but I am a believer in internal checks on policies and imposing institutions.

Jonathan Korman : 1:42:18

So you're my kind of liberal, it turns out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:21

But I am also a believer in the dictatorship of the proletariat, which I interpret in a very particular way from Hal Draper. But it is in the fact that I do think that the political rights of property holders have to be suspended and that I do not necessarily, or even primarily, mean that we just execute them, I mean that they don't have Tempting as that is on a bad day.

Jonathan Korman : 1:42:51

Yeah, it's a bad road to go down.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:53

I think it's a bad road to go down.

Jonathan Korman : 1:42:55

I think it's both evil and stupid, so let's not do that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:59

I think you know that there is a truth that I, that I believe in you don't maybe that handling socialism will necessarily lead to civil war, that civil war should be as brief as fucking possible, because one of the things that I think you learn from the Bolsheviks is social exhaustion leads to revenge, and that will eventually undo your society. I don't care who the leader is and this is something that I think MLs get very mad at me for being like well, you just think it's like a bad leadership problem, but like, why did you get Khrushchev in the first place if you have such a problem with him? Like I don't know All the other?

Jonathan Korman : 1:43:37

good leaders were dead Gosh. How did that happen?

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:39

Why? No, it's just like it, just so that, that attitude. But I mean, I guess one of the things that you and I will get to that I think we need to talk about is the, the weird radicalization of social democracy into a kind of faux ML narrative. And I say faux ML because people aren't connecting up to any state for this or not, any socialist state, anyway, it's not, it's not like when the CPUSA had an active relationship with the USSR, even like this is not from actually experienced socialists, they'll say it is. They'll talk about china um, but china's not giving the directives that I see um.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:26

And they'll talk about vietnam without acknowledging that vietnam is in a geopolitical conflict with china constantly, even though that doesn't, from the ideological perspective, doesn't really make sense, because China and Vietnam have survived by being liberalizing communist societies, and I mean that in the market sense, not in the social sense, although even in Vietnam, more than China, even in the social sense With China, there's been some social liberalization in the last decade under g, believe it or not. Although it's, it's not entirely obvious, it's a very much. It's a much more complicated, very complicated, yes, um, varied by region greatly, and also I feel uncomfortable talking about it because I pretty much believe if you don't speak mandarin you can't really comment on it.

Jonathan Korman : 1:45:12

But I will also say most part of why I say it's complicated is because I know I do not understand China Right. I understand China just well enough to understand how profoundly I do not understand China.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:24

Exactly Me too, and I have Chinese people come on all the time and talk to me about it. But I also will listen to Chinese apologists for the state. Frankly, tell me stuff and neither one of them seem entirely accurate all the time from what I'm seeing from the outside, but one of my weirdly most controversial statements was like China is the most responsible capitalist power. Because that pissed everybody off, because I called China a capitalist power.

Jonathan Korman : 1:45:49

Oh, that is mightily perverse.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:07

And it's one of those things that's not quite true, but it's pointed at a truth, yes, which I don't think it actually really was, which is state capitalism is actually more true for China, in that the state is literally a shareholder in a lot of the businesses. There's so many different ways. When we talk about Chinese co-ops, I'm actually always amazed at how many different ways they're structured. It's very hard to generalize about them. It's one of the things where I'm like well, most of the people talking about this are full of shit, because the more I learn about it, the where I'm like well, most of the people talking about this are full of shit because the more I learn about it, the more I'm like, oh my God, this is way more complicated, it's?

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:42

really complicated. Also, china is big, so there's different things in different places and it's very provincial in that the provinces work very differently from one another too. So even in regards to things like we talk about, like zero COVID policy, but the various Chinese regions did not handle that all the same way, and so, like it's, it's interesting.

Jonathan Korman : 1:47:00

So uh, well, okay. So so let me ask you this question about, like, if, if liberalism includes private property, um Mm, hmm, my mind. One thing I do think I understand a little bit about china is like chinese elites genuinely conceive of themselves as democratically accountable. Yes, because they genuinely fear popular revolution and see that as a form of democratic accountability right um in a way for us to conceive, looking at them and saying, no, you're not democratically accountable.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:57

I actually would. I mean, this is one of the things where, like when defendants of China hit us at the weakness of our own democracy, they have a point that we underestimate democratic apparatuses in China, particularly at the provincial and local levels, which are real, there's a lot of moving parts. Right levels, which are real, there's just a lot of moving parts.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:17

Right, but the moving parts actually do, weirdly, empower the central government and there has been a consolidation, and I mean someone has left, as Mike Davis was quite worried about, even though Xi's program from him was largely undoing some of the worst excesses of the Deng and Xi men regimes, and I think that's actually true. Like there's social democratic programs implemented under Xi that have liberated rural poverty. That was ignored from 1982 when Deng came to power and undid a lot of the Mao apparatus all the way to basically through Hu Jintao, who knew it was a problem and was talking about basically Red New Deal, which I laughed at because I'm like, so like we're just at, I we're in a communist country where we're bragging about doing what capitalist countries did in world war ii so.

Jonathan Korman : 1:49:07

But well, right, well, and this gets into another vocabulary problem, like a minute ago, uh, you know you were talking about social democracy, like a minute ago. You know you were talking about social democracy where, you know, social democracy in the eyes of most leftists is sort of like, you know, the compromise of social insurance as a way of staving off a socialist transformation to public ownership of the means of production, right, means of production. But actually that's a useful bit of vocabulary because we can decouple the question of socialism, that is to say democratic control of the means of production, from social insurance, where you can have crappy social insurance and full on socialism with public control of the means of production. And you know, you can see that in Soviet years, you can see that in China, et cetera, et cetera, where it is possible to have a capitalist order with better social insurance than a socialist order, which then the socialist, then a conceivable socialist order, that has bad social insurance.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:21

Yeah, it is.

Jonathan Korman : 1:50:23

And social insurance is part of what you want for any form of meaningful liberation.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:31

Right, but you don't. I mean, one of the things is what the social insurance is intended to do. Who wills it? And so that question is when? When Xi says, for example, that he doesn't want to institute a large direct subsidy to Chinese workers because it might make them dependent, I don't think he's actually totally out of line with the Marxist tradition, which is neither good nor bad. It's actually something.

Jonathan Korman : 1:51:05

No, I mean the Marxist tradition wants all workers to be stakeholders in the general political economy and in the polity.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:12

Right and they do not want them to be dependent on anyone else. However, one of the problems that I have with post-Marxist, leninist conceptions of dictatorship of the proletariat is I tend to view it they tend to view it as dictatorship for the proletariat, as opposed to dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a different thing. The suspension of the political rights of the bourgeoisie, from my mind, is a very temporary thing, and the reason why it's temporary is we don't want the bourgeoisie, as a class that's very important, to exist. That does not mean that we want to kill all the persons who were, who had any, or the bourgeoisie now yeah, it had any, because we just want them to not be the bourgeoisie anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:00

And if they try to take the power back, then then, yes, we might have to suppress them by violent means, but, like in general, that is not the goal. In fact, the argument was angles makes this argument. He was wrong and I don't normally call angles wrong, but he was wrong that this would be relatively easy to do and not that bloody because, um, the bourgeoisie at the time was a relatively small class and as soon as the proletariat. Now it is ambiguous whether they meant all workers or just industrial workers. It's a whole different question. It's a big part of the Second International. It's a big social question in the Second International about who's real proletarian, who's not. It's never really solved, uh, still isn't to this day.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:39

You venture in the socialist Twitter and watch our weird debates. Right, try to make the worker, holy shit. Um, right, you get weird people who are like the petite bourgeois count as workers, but Starbucks, for instance, don't, even though they literally make a literal physical commodity you literally can see right there, um, but uh, it nonetheless um, uh, those weirdnesses aside, um, and weirdnesses about productivity. They also weirdly read marxist saying being productive to capital is somehow just inherently good, so that we should valorize people just because they're productive at the capital. Marx explicitly says a teacher who is productive at the capital and a teacher who's not, they do the same job. Just one creates profits for the capitalists because they're at a private school and one doesn't. It's like he actually makes it socially neutral.

Jonathan Korman : 1:53:31

The work is the same and the wage relation is the same.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:34

The wage relation is the same. The relation to capital productivity is totally different. But it's because one's private and one's public, so one's dependent on tax funds, according to Marx. We can get into like if MMT changes that or whatnot It'd kind of be under discussion today, but that's part of the thing you have to address or one is not dependent on tax dollars, but they're both actually dependent on the general wage front and on capitalist profits, not more or less. One is productive to those profits, one is not, but that's all it meant.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:04

But somehow it became this huge fucking category recently after the Bernie failure to like, oh, we need a class to explain why these educated liberals ruined everything for us. And look, as a person who gets really mad at educated liberals, and particularly the snooty ones, I love shitting on them too. Some of them are a strata of people, but not all of them. As well as what I pointed out, it's like you see, these attitudes, self-defeating attitudes, like all across the board, which led to people, I think, think motivatingly, and this was where you might actually agree with me come up with new class categories to put people that we normally thought were clearly workers into some weird new class, um, so that their social tendencies could be ignored?

Jonathan Korman : 1:54:53

um, yeah, I mean that's complicated, like because, like you know from a, you're liberal, you social tendencies could be ignored.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:57

Yeah, I mean that's complicated because, like you know from a, You're liberal, you don't think about these class things as like fine-grainly as Marxists do, but still.

Jonathan Korman : 1:55:06

Well, so actually actually like I have a long, a ridiculous long blog post about sort of like my personal taxonomy of social classes in these United States, and I think I've got 11 of them, but they're answering.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:23

They're answering a different.

Jonathan Korman : 1:55:25

That's answering a different question really, than one is answering in Marxist class analysis in asking okay, well, what are the class interests that drive the?

Jonathan Korman : 1:55:37

You know the political economy and the political order, but the sort of like cultural dimensions of class as part of the social machinery of American life are also not divorced from that and part of what you're reaching for is okay.

Jonathan Korman : 1:55:54

So you know, a lot of Anglophone leftists are wrestling with the problem of how do we think about this.

Jonathan Korman : 1:56:01

Thing that we talk about is the professional managerial class which exercises a form of power and which has an investment in the capitalist order which creates frictions with the people who we would generally think of as the proletariat. Yet at the same time, the PMC are subject to the same wage relation and are in that same place of dependency which produces weird complicities with the capitalist order. Right, how do we think about that? How do we think about that and you know part of my, you know political dreams that I think you are wary of is, ultimately, I think, governance is hard and under capitalism in the professional managerial class and that creates a tendency toward a bunch of self-dealing and a bunch of accumulation of power in the hands of that class, which is bad for all the reasons that we know that it's bad, and we need to figure out a way to build a set of relations and institutions that prevent that accumulation of power, and that is a hard problem of relations and institutions that prevent that accumulation of power, and that is a hard problem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:24

So I would say that you think I would be against you in that, but I'm actually. I think I'm not an anarchist in the sense that the modern anarchist and this is unique to modern anarchism, by the way, classical anarchism does not have this element that just tries to say that we, we will literally flatten out difference, not just distinction. There would be no everyone's going to do everything at the time. I have a view of class equity that does admit to the need for expertise. However, you want to limit the cartelling of expertise dramatically and you want to make these functions not a class in the fact that they are not inheritable. Nor is it the only thing these people do, which does require trade-off. I will admit it requires a trade-off and specialization.

Jonathan Korman : 1:58:16

And I would further underline part of that is some kind of mechanisms of democratic accountability in which you have technocratic governance experts accountable to the polity at large in some way. That is not simply management by plebiscite but is as radically democratic as that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:42

So one thing I would push back on, though, is I think technocracy is a harder problem than you seem to, in that I think, once you have a technocratic class A, it tends to try to inform itself as to an oligarchy. Naturally, you don't disagree with me about that, but I I mean but I.

Jonathan Korman : 1:58:59

I agree with you about the problem. I uh probably but that's a conversation worth having uh, the other.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:09

The other issue that I would say that's a huge problem for for this is that but while there have been China, china's collective period, which is right after the Cultural Revolution, is a period where they actually did try to do some of this stuff, where, like you, could trade off specialist hours for general work hours and stuff like that without currency exchanges and it kind of actually it did like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:35

If you look at, we always talk about china as a miracle. It lifted the people out of poverty, but if you look at what lifted people out of rural poverty, this is what did it. It's not what dung did. What dung did risk lifted urban poverty, but also created massive inequity, like even more massive than the united states, which I don't think people realize. That has only been curtailed and gone below US Gini coefficients since about 2015. So it really is a project of Gini.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:03

And I was trying to explain. I know why Gini is popular because he reduced inequality in China. He did, and how he did that was reinvesting in the countryside and relaxing some of the travel restrictions and a bunch of other things, but he also consolidated power in himself in a way that makes Mike Davis concerned about it. So just so you know, some of us lefties are concerned about a bonapartist tendency emerging in China, where there kind of actually wasn't one after Deng and until Xi, which is why you see all these weird Deng Jiists, because Xi himself does not want to dismantle Deng.

Jonathan Korman : 2:00:45

And this again is like the difference between policy and governance. Right, they do not resemble each other in policy. They do resemble each other somewhat in modes of governance.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:56

Right as opposed to the. The malice period which was both and it's hard to describe this, but I'll die on this hill was both more radically authoritarian and more radically democratic simultaneously, in a way that probably makes it hard for everyone to deal with that is, I think, a good provocation. Yes, um, because I do think there was real democratizing at the local levels in a very radical way in the 60s and 70s in China.

Jonathan Korman : 2:01:25

Only in comparison to the world before.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:27

Right, or even in comparison to like the 50s in the early CPC and the PRC, cpc and the PRC.

Jonathan Korman : 2:01:35

I think that's a demonstration of the ways in which you can have a democratizing movement which is not necessarily liberalizing in the sense of preventing authoritarian exercise of power and is not liberalizing in the sense of protective of universal rights. Right, you have this era in which, like, there is enormous capricious exercise of power, enormous violation of what we conceive as fundamental rights, of what we conceive as fundamental rights, and at the same time, yes, in a weird way, democratizing. And that's actually, I don't want to say it's the same thing, but it is parallel to the ways in which the fascist fantasy is pseudo democratic right. The fascist fantasy is, well, you know, all the true people of the nation are in this together and our political divisions will dissolve in our, you know, in our solidarity as a people. So there's a sense in which it's pseudo-democratic in its vision, but radically illiberal and radically authoritarian all at the same time.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:08

I mean, I would totally agree with that. I am also, however, a proponent of the democracy before liberalism thesis, which I do think is real, and it is not always radically authoritarian.

Jonathan Korman : 2:03:22

Absolutely, absolutely, and I think that's I mean, I think that's why you need the formulation of liberal democracy, because that cocktail is a very particular thing and you can have many modes of democracy which are not liberal democracy, pseudo-democracy and even ugly democracy, by virtue of having the liberal components, except for property to act as a counterweight against those problems.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:06

I mean. The problem that you have, though, is like what Darmian and Nicholas said. What's not wrong here is when pushed, I'm not going to say all liberals, but most liberals with power, will normally end up defending property, and that's that's not. I'm not saying you don't acknowledge this. I wanted to get on your class categories. I actually digged it up. This is very old. You wrote this in 2007. And it's funny because I have actually gone through, because some of these class things I never, never. I was gonna do my various theories of social class episode, and I went through them like chronologically, and then I realized it was a bigger fucking project than I was even like ever going to be able to it's an immense question, yeah uh, because I I hit, like you know, a lot of stuff, uh, the the various center classes, um.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:55

But this brings us to one thing that I think you might be sympathetic towards of me and why most Marxists will call me a revisionist. But while I'm not a believer that the PMC is a coherent class, because it has no coherent definition, its original definition is just related to educational level and the cartelling around that, and it ignores the fact that so many jobs they didn't use to require a degree that were still white-collar, now require a degree as an arbitrary entrance, and thus the meaning of a degree has fundamentally changed from an aaron reich wrote that initial air uh uh essay with john aaron reich, john aaron reich to now, which she but the people who picked up that category increasingly vulgarized over time, and also in which it pretends that, like, somehow there's this massive industrial proletariat in the United States, which is just not true.

Jonathan Korman : 2:05:47

Which of course there is not.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:49

They make up 15. If you include management, which no fucking what these guys would would do, they make up less than 15 percent of the population. Yeah, um, uh. If you look, however, under dependence on the wage, labor as the primary form, so this would take out a lot of the high-end managers. All right, because they actually survive off of dividends in a big way, uh, but there was a when when dividends began became less profitable. In the 1970s, we saw a movement towards higher compensation packages, so the wealthy in the United States really were paid out of capital investments directly up until 1970.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:26

After the crisis in 1970, despite all the financialization, what we actually see is bigger and bigger salary packages for these people, partly because the dividends became and yes, there's more people getting paid in stock dividends, that gets expanded, but also because stock dividends become more and more volatile after the 1970s and the first major profitability crisis of modern post-industrial capitalism. It's interesting now, though, that you'll agree with me about that, as a liberal, but many Marxists who have decided that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall isn't real and I admit that it's more complicated than it is written about in Marx it really is, but I actually do still think for asterisk, real physical commodities on asterisk, there is a tendency to write about them, which does cover a lot of things.

Jonathan Korman : 2:07:23

Right, and this is one of the ways in which, like you, read Marx and it is uncanny how well he understands those dynamics at that very early time Right. That, of course, course proved to be very resilient dynamics in how, the things that he doesn't see.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:41

One of the things he doesn't see that's important is he accept adam smith's account of the emergence of of money. He and modern or hyper orthodox marxist will still repeat this as if it is true and not just a hypothetical proposed by smith off of scant evidence that it emerges from barter between individuals, which it absolutely does not, which is just so.

Jonathan Korman : 2:08:01

Story that just turns out to be false. It's just false um, and then money is much weirder than that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:06

I mean, I like the contrary, the mm tears. I also don't think all money is government money and some emitters will admit this. But like, like I'm like, currency is at times not the primary form of money, because no government is powerful enough to impose it outside of its borders right now. That's not true.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:25

Like and so we're in a weird special condition which has lasted a long time, but it is a special condition yeah, and it's a special condition, canes, weirdly, and you know, canes is one of my, probably one of your heroes, one of my enemies. But Keynes does have An oddly brilliant idea To deal with this, which was a national bank currency, an international bank currency which was not tied to any one state. Right, but no country wants to give up that policy sovereignty If they're not forced to. So it's, it's kind of a it's where.

Jonathan Korman : 2:09:01

Well, and we went through this long. We have come through this long period in which we asked the dollar to do both things at once.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:05

Right, which also meant that the Federal Reserve, which is removed from democratic oversight, explicitly became a kind of quasi-government for the entire fucking planet.

Jonathan Korman : 2:09:15

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:16

Like not just the United States, but, and then you have the European solution to this, which people always think was just ideology. I'm like no, their elites couldn't agree. Because they didn't, they limited their currency sub-remedies so no nation in that coalition could get an advantage on any other, except they allowed it for Britain. And then, when Britain gave it up, we saw what happened Britain became Argentina because all they really had was investments. Off of leveraging that difference.

Jonathan Korman : 2:09:44

Yeah. Which was also my critique of Corbyn which people I'll asterisk that, as I think it's more complicated than that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:55

but for purposes it is more complicated than that, but for for like making my point, it's To your point.

Jonathan Korman : 2:10:01

Yes, it's a useful approximation of what happened.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:03

Yes, I well, the other thing is like that. I pointed out that the the period, that of labor that Corbin really wanted to try to return to in a new way, before people come at me that Corbyn really wanted to try to return to in a new way before people come at me I know he was trying to do it in a new way was at the end of the empire, when Britain still had a lot of that imperial stock left and that was helping them in their production cycle. That doesn't exist now.

Jonathan Korman : 2:10:28

Right, what do you do with that window of opportunity, as that is slipping away and it turns out, of course, as is usually the way, like no one was prepared to think strategically about?

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:41

that Right? No, they were not. And that celebrates racist tensions in Britain, although they're different racist tensions from our racist tensions. I always like to point out that like it doesn't always look the same as in America.

Jonathan Korman : 2:10:56

The whole structure of it is different and it's very easy to get confused.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:01

Right, we don't use the word Asian as a slur, which is not to say that we don't have racism. Against Asians? No, we don't.

Jonathan Korman : 2:11:13

It's just structured in a very, very different way.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:15

Who we even refer to as asians is different, like when we say asian in america it's almost as if these racial categories are socially constructed, but who knew um.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:27

But but to get into your point about, about this and what makes me revisionist regards to marxist, marx assumed that all classes were going to be subsumed into two great classes. All right, that kind of happened. But what was not envisioned, I don't think, was the stratification within those classes to the extent in which it was allowed to get those classes, to the extent in which it was allowed to get, so that from the Marxist perspective the working class is actually remarkably broad. It probably in the United States, includes technically about 60% of the country. That is not the way liberals use that term. Liberals tend to use that term as just not college educated.

Jonathan Korman : 2:12:13

Actually, I was going through this and and um, but we did not see coming the stratification of knowledge within that class well, and I think you detected skimming my little post about social classes is, you know, I conceive the professional class as people who earn a living by knowing a complicated thing about doing some kind of mental work Right, Some kind of knowledge and skill that enables a kind of mental work which is inaccessible without a significant investment in developing that knowledge or skill.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:55

And that is that is a very particular kind of moat which produces a set of interests in politics. So what I was going to say is I like I talk about the rational core of the PMC theory. I reject the PMC theory overall for being incoherent, because including everybody with a college degree in that A, it's a much bigger category than they pretend and sometimes they pretend this is. It's this mass of of people who are against the common man.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:25

But I'm like, well, from your definition on education, it's 50 of the population yeah 40 of people with BAs, 60% of people with some college education Right, and if you include all white collar jobs in that they have credentialing at all, Even if they're not BA credentials then you're way more than 40%.

Jonathan Korman : 2:13:53

You're something like 60, 70% of the population, of the population, um, and I would say like part of what you're talking about is like there's a lot of white collar jobs where, um, where they're not professional in the sense that I was talking about you may have to have a college degree as a form of, like cultural credentials you don't really need it though like, but you don't.

Jonathan Korman : 2:14:12

But there's no knowledge that you got in college. That is a gate to the work that you're doing. If you are, you know a salesperson or you know many kinds of manager in corporate America. You know you need to learn how to do the things in the context of a working environment, but you're not bringing a large body of complex knowledge and skills that enables you to do that. That's not what you learned in college.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:40

This is why I don't talk about the professional managerial class. I kind of buy into Eric Owen Wright. I have a lot of problems in the book where he articulates this. I'm actually doing a book study group right now where I'm tearing it apart but he does make a point that I think is bodily speaking. True, there are two economic movers in the united states of real, of the grand array of history and as a proletarian, and the capitalist. But the structuralization of the capitalist class, which is something people are like oh, we need to radically dispose the capitalist class, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like can you tell me who they all are? Like, yeah, you know you're Elon Musk and you know you're obvious for NTAs and your government dependencies and these famous people. But can you tell me who actually owns capital? And I'm like no, you can't, because it's structurally owned and it's been deliberately diffused in a lot of ways, in ways that, like Marx and Engels, actually thought would be the groundwork for how you would seize things and start to deliver socialism, believe it or not.

Jonathan Korman : 2:15:41

And it turns out, socialism does not emerge from your 401k.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:45

Yeah, no, sadly, but that was sort of the idea and that's also why I'm not as like. Co-ops are great, I'm all for co-ops, but they do not solve the problem of capitalism.

Jonathan Korman : 2:16:00

Nor do they solve the problem of democratic governance in a socialist order.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:04

No, they do not like at all. But I do think where I'm sympathetic to your view of class is the stratification of the social classes within these classes, and also where mark simsa have been wrong um, the assumption that the petite bourgeoisie were just going to be immiserated away. Um, what we have learned is no, the the big capitalists will reinvent I mean partly what neoliberalism did. All right, what the two things that it did uh was was, uh, financialize a ton of stuff and in and in the case of doing so, created these pernicious public private partnerships where the profits are actually directly from the government there, yeah, but you're made to participate in a market where there really wasn't one and it's inefficient to do um right.

Jonathan Korman : 2:16:55

Well, and the fantasy of getting both best of both worlds turns into the nightmare of getting the worst of both worlds, like we see this in medicine, and and then.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:02

And then you know privatized monopolies like Comcast where, like no, we have just as bad rating lines as fucking socialists do. I don't know what you're on the. So there's that, and that is different from, from laissez-faire capitalism, which a lot of leftists in the 80s and 90s did not recognize. They thought it was the same, which was funny because the libertarians you and I both know this knew that it wasn't the same and they were fighting amongst themselves about it, right like um. But the other thing that it did which I did not, uh, know until my friend nico villiel really brought it out to me was incentivize small business to return. So what we discovered? That, as almost a safety valve, big capitalists actually will create small capitalists as a buffer, which is not something we think about, because we're also seeing these groups pursue monopolies, but they want these small capitalists to be dependent on them. So if you're Amazon, if you get rid of the small business, your monopoly brokerage actually starts to be damaged.

Jonathan Korman : 2:18:15

That's interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:18

And that's not something I've seen talked about a lot.

Jonathan Korman : 2:18:21

Yeah, like I'm. I'm wary of a certain kind of, you know, vulgar Marxist teleology in which, you know the, the masters of capital have a cunning master plan to create this buffer like that's.

Jonathan Korman : 2:18:40

That's not I don't think, I don't think this is a master plan, I think is an accent, but instrumentally, yes, having, um, you know, uh, what? What? Uh? Financial services. People call the mass affluent class, um, the millionaires next door who have small businesses and are in this weird position. That is hard to think about from a Marxist standpoint because, on the one hand, yes, they're holders of capital and they are profiting from the value that they extract from their workers, but, on the other hand, they do not have the security of the people we think of as the capitalist class to just sit back and let capital produce rents which enable them wealth and power. No, they are in a constant scramble and they conceive of themselves as hardworking workers for good reasons, right.

Jonathan Korman : 2:19:43

And actually, if you go back to my class, blog post there's a reference to the Michael O Church system for understanding class, which is really, really interesting, and he says part of why we're confused is we think of there being this sort of singular, linear ladder of classes, and that is misleading. And I agree with him that that's misleading. And his formulation is well, there's a labor ladder, there's a gentry ladder, which is analogous to what we're talking about when we talk about PMC in the broad sense, and then there's an actual aristocratic ladder.

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:20

Which I would say is a proof of a problem in Marx that was pointed out by Arnold Mayer.

Jonathan Korman : 2:20:26

Yeah, I see where you're going with that. And at the top of the labor ladder are the small business owners who have the sensibilities of the labor class culturally and who understand themselves as in a place of needing to labor in order to sustain themselves. They actually do work. They actually, for the most part, work incredibly hard. They work so hard that they're unable to think about anything else. Right, hard they work.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:04

I mean, obviously they work so hard that they're unable to think about anything else, right, um, and therefore they think that their, their wealth is emergent from their hard-working virtue, right, and not their ability to hold even small claims on capital. Uh, which? Um? Look, I'm also sympathetic to why you push back on me with my they. It created a buffer class because that sounds like I thought that the big bourgeoisie knew what they were doing. I don't.

Jonathan Korman : 2:21:20

I think it's an emergent property yeah, I, I just wanted to name it, but, but I also want to agree with you in that way. I think that is a useful analysis to see that, yes, it creates this buffer, which is part of why it is enabled and encouraged by the, the power among the truly rich.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:38

And this is where also the petite bourgeois class, more than the larger holders of capital, are actually more hostile to the state because their profit margins are lower and the tax burden actually hurts yeah.

Jonathan Korman : 2:21:51

And they're directly confronted with the challenges of the regulatory state.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:55

Right, whereas the large scale people can hire out for dealing with it. They have specialists who just deal with the challenges and they can construct them to actually limit their competition.

Jonathan Korman : 2:22:06

Now, both sets of capital holders are delusional about the regulatory state where, like, all they can see is the ways that it's approximately inconvenient for them. Right, and so they have kind of like the flying car fantasy that, like when you imagine the flying car, you imagine you're the only person who has one, rather than a world full of flying cars. The small capital holders of small business, their fantasy of release from regulation is really one in which they're the only ones who are released from regulation and therefore they have the advantage of being able to do their business more easily, not recognizing that actually, of course, that's a systemic change that changes the conditions and everyone is then unregulated and it produces conditions that are ultimately bad for them. But they can't see that far because they're so close to the proximate work that they do.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:00

So I'm with you and in America I think Michael Land, who I think is a kind of centrist, reactionary, vaguely Republican guy people get him confused with William M. William M is a world theorist. Michael Land is the old editor of the New Republic.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:17

He wrote this in the last war and he points out that the battle seems to be with the working class is just, and he treats this, and so does Peter Turchin and a lot of people in that world, and so do some Marxists. Now, actually, where the working class is like this mass that you appeal to, sometimes with vulgar conservative talking points that you don't really believe are something maybe you do believe it, I don't know. Um uh, that you project these 1950s talking points onto because you pretend they're still hardhat workers but they're essentially a dormant political actor. They don't make that many.

Jonathan Korman : 2:23:51

Well, and the people you're speaking to like to fantasize that they are the hard hat workers of their imagination.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:58

Right, or that they're yes, or that. I mean, michael Lind doesn't fantasize that, but he likes that people do. I mean, and that's that's one of the problems, like he thinks like, oh yeah, the actual working class in America is just barely above the underclass and there's reasons to believe that.

Jonathan Korman : 2:24:16

Now yeah, you know, yeah, I think that's fundamentally true.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:20

Like a large, a large portion of the American, a larger and larger portion of the American working class, is lumpenized, and that puts them in one of your class categories, three classes, which is the low working class, the four or the underclass. Yeah, I would refer to that as lumpenizing, lumpenized and fully lumpen. I like that. People don't like me sticking the Marxist categories. You can call it a lot of things. You can call it a precariat, the true poor and the underclass.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:48

The problem that Marxists have, though I mean, if we're completely honest is we have a sympathy for the poor and the underclass and oppressed peoples, but we don't actually see them as a political subject, and people miss that, including most modern Marxists. We don't think that, because you are victimized, that is why you are a political subject, and that's different, and I don't think people get that. So what I'm talking about is the three conditions of why we thought the working class was a revolutionary political subject. There was three reasons. One, society was being stratified and people were falling into one or the other, and there's this temporary lump in class. It wasn't temporary.

Jonathan Korman : 2:25:27

That's a different problem.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:29

But that was the idea that you were either going to be the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, and it was going to be pretty clear either going to be the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, and it's going to be pretty clear. Structuralization of capital and the expansion of wages as a way of remuneration changes that pretty dramatically.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:44

Furthermore, the availability after the war for a brief period, of semi-productive property, which is your house, which you semi-own through bank loans, also conflates that, because it makes you interested in property values in a very real way, yeah, but in a way that actually you can't generally both use and valorize. By that I mean you can't live in your house and use all of it and also make money off of it, right?

Jonathan Korman : 2:26:10

it's not.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:11

It's not productive capital in no, it's not productive, which it would some people get confused because they're like oh well, it's it's which it would. Some people get confused because they're like oh well, it's it's, uh, it's capital, make it well. From the marxist perspective, if it's capital in the, in the capitalist perspective, you can't use it as an asset. But we don't view it as capital because it's not productive of anything. Most of the time, and when you and when you make it productive of something you're, you're, you're a rentier like um, so. So if you're not renting your house out, for our perspective, just owning a house doesn't make you a property owner in the sense that we're concerned about property right um, uh, the.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:51

But so there's that, there's the. The working class had the ability to reproduce it. Everybody was being forced into it and the working class had skills which, if it banded together, would be enough to reproduce society, which other classes do not have. And capitalism would have created enough surplus for this to happen. And workers are close to that, so they could seize it easier.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:14

And the socialization of work in factories in specific, and this is a big problem now even though it didn't require high levels of education, it required enough education that could be seized on and the workers could educate themselves and potentiate themselves in that way as well. So that was the idea, and that the socialist movement was not organic to the working class. That was a debate between Marxists and anarchists. We realized that we were often not workers and that we had to merge ourselves with them. The problem of the 20th century is after World War Two, the lumpen haven't gone away, but who makes them is different. But who makes them is different? Um, the, the nation-state's relation to capital is unclear, and I haven't talked about that, but like it is both that's a big subject, yeah it is both a product of capitalism and its internal regulator, which means it often stands against capitalists.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:11

But for capitalists, you know it's, it's uh, it's a complicated system and there are other class interests that are not dominant. But when, when leftists try to say they're not represented at all I'm like no, they, they want to let, they want to have those people kind of have a state at the table as a release valve until it's hard. That's like. That's like the Fordist thing at the table Like uh, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:41

We don't mind and there's a cultural dimension here that, like, is really complicated, where you know, people get culturally invested in the nation state for all the reasons that they do Right. There is also the problem that the aristocracy never completely, totally went away. It goes back and forth between being capitalist and being not totally run away. It goes back and forth between being capitalist and being not Celebrity. Culture really baffles this, because that's a form of wage rent-seeking that no one saw coming at all.

Jonathan Korman : 2:29:08

No Marxist imagined that was possible. Well, and that's part of my system of social classes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:12

I know the nouveau riche, which are a capitalist class, but they're new versus the old nouveau riche, who have more accumulated wealth, and this is often not talked about Like these are your classes. I'm looking at them right now. Intellectuals are a whole different problem. I don't want to even get into that, but like-.

Jonathan Korman : 2:29:28

A familiar problem.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:29

Yeah, it has been a problem forever because they kind of move but they're intellectuals, tend to be quasi declassé in that they tend to have patrons but like they're not really classes of themselves, sometimes they're patrons of state, sometimes it's a lord, sometimes it's whatever, sometimes it's a capital.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:45

a lot of times now it's a capitalist, but you, you know, you have a patron, um and it's worth differentiating because there is an important cultural distinction between the intellectual class and the professional class so one thing I think that the marxist view why and the reason why I mentioned eric owen right is he says the marxist view in the broad mechanism, capital is true, but we have to admit that most people don't experience class that way, right, like and that. Um, there's also, you know, to get I'm gonna get into technical marxist stuff here but the alienation from the worker from other workers because of the competition of workers leads to, uh, maybe more internal dynamics than marx thought was possible.

Jonathan Korman : 2:30:31

He did recognize that even in his earlier writings that it was a problem yeah um well and you pointed to that in the example of like, you know the way the factory workers become bound to their colleagues by the circumstances of their labor Right, which then engages them in the logics of capitalist competition. They do not want their business, their industry, to be compromised, because they see the way in which their livelihood is directly dependent upon it and see themselves in competition with other workers because of those dynamics.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:08

Right, particularly workers from other countries, which is the big push on the whole Marxist internationalist dream. And both from outside of Marxism and from within it, post-stalin, there's this tendency towards social patriotism. You see it, from Dominica Lo Certo to the mega-communists, and those aren't the same thing, those aren't the same people, but they're making a similar argument, driven by similar dynamics. Yeah, it's a post-Stalin dialogue that the international sphere is too compromised by imperialism um, although I don't know why that would lead to being soft on fascists, but whatever, uh, by imperialism, and thus national development is super important. But then how do you get out of the national development? Because national development implies class collaboration and not just between people who are like in these what I would call, you would call classes, I would call social strata, but like, yeah, still are real differences, and I mean I might even go more than you, like.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:03

I think there are real differences in sectors of based on the decline of the factory models of leadership, which is why, ironically, marxist mode of organization still work for government workers so much and like work for government workers so much is because they are highly centralized in organic capital forms, because of the nature of estates and their relationship to that they also work in areas that used to be industrialized but those have been turned their services, like gabe renant talks about, like in the midwest, where you see where these factories are gone, but now they're replaced by hospitals, because the hospitals used to serve the factories but they don't anymore. They're now just basically the only job sources. Um, and it's really pernicious way. That's actually hard for us to fix it. It it is actually part of the block towards socialized medicine that no one wants to talk about.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:03

Um, that, uh, that I created a lot of middle-class jobs for formerly working, for formerly blue collar working class people and make that distinction here. Yeah, um, and then the lumpenization of the blue collar by making their work really, really, really unstable and that increasing, particularly in working class men, to like massive drug addiction and stuff like that, which people sometimes think that I'm like shaming the working class.

Jonathan Korman : 2:33:30

No, I'm gonna say, like the middle class consequence of you're saying it's a consequence of conditions yeah order yeah, americans are also drug addle.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:40

It's just that middle class americans have ways to deal with it, the working class americans don't. We don't tend to die from it as much that's about right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:47

Um, it's just fundamentally kind of the morbid truth behind it. Uh, so in that sense I'm not as hostile to you as a lot of people think, in that I do think Marxists have to look at the material reality. And one of the things that I've been kind of frustrated with is I think there's been a tendency to do the opposite, to like try to force things back into pre 1940s conditions, to talk about it as a miseration is happening, but a miseration that does not look the way that we like, the way we predicted it, so it doesn't follow the political patterns that we wouldn't want it to follow, particularly in the United States.

Jonathan Korman : 2:34:24

So let me offer you a provocation about that. So I will sometimes say, like the, the way in which I am a Marxist, like a lot of liberals, a lot of filthy liberals say well, the Marxist program fails, but the Marxist analysis of the contradictions of capitalism is immensely valuable, of the contradictions of capitalism is immensely valuable. And then I would go a step further, and I think this is not characteristic of filthy liberals, like I thought the wrong turn is Leninism. Leninism is authoritarian and, like the system of Soviets, in an attempt to deliver a democratic form of governance to go with socialist policy in early Bolshevik Russia, just turns out to be a bad idea as a structure of governance. It just collapses into the authoritarian core of Leninism. That then produces Stalinism, then produces Maoism, and you get all of these authoritarian communisms which are bad.

Jonathan Korman : 2:35:45

And so if we are to recover the analytical power of Marx, we have to reach back to before Lenin. But then we have the problem that Marx's program is also useless. And so how do we recover those analytical tools in a way that's useful? And I think that's the thing that you're grappling with in talking about. Well, it turns out like Marx's model of class is worse than useless in, you know, the contemporary world, for all of the reasons that it turns out, things just unfold in a different way. So if we're going to reach for the Marxist analysis in our socialism, for its value, how do we recover that in the face of the things that Marx could not anticipate?

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:35

Well, one thing I say we have to look at the real conditions of money, because money is a power relationship, and this is where I think MMTers are both right but naive. Mmt is just a generic description of how a fiat currency works For the imperial court. Asterisk on that. Broadly speaking, true.

Jonathan Korman : 2:36:55

No, I mean they understand the fundamental insight from canes that money has its own dynamic and, um, and it's very easy to be naive about what money is at scale, and don't do that, be smart right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:10

But they're often very like oh well, we can, we can get around like class. Uh, you know class this stuff because we don't need to tax them. So I'm like no, it's also about power. No, you can say you don't need to tax the wealthy to get a full employment and they're still not going to want full employment because full employment is a bigger threat to them than taxes are.

Jonathan Korman : 2:37:32

Yeah, because that means that there's no labor market to speak up and you can't well, and there are a host of political and instrumental reasons why you want to tax the wealthy, right, you know, yeah, and they'll admit that like, oh wait, okay, we need to tax the wealthy some to limit their power, blah, blah, blah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:47

But like I'm like, well, it's more than that, um, but the but, the the fundamental thing about marx is this idea that everything comes from commodity money because it was a dominant form of money when he was around and it was. I mean, that's the thing is. It really was Gold, was the de revoir, because they were not really strong. Nation states outside of, like Asia and the British Empire, where it was dominant, traded in script and in fiat forms of money, even in the American colonies. And when it wasn't, the government couldn't establish the money, which it couldn't in the US or Canada until almost the 20th century by the way, it was after our Civil War and I think it was literally almost the 20th century in Canada to one one centralized formal currency. That happens way.

Jonathan Korman : 2:38:39

There's a reason why it happens really, really late yeah it's really like the 19th century, the late in the it after the civil war, because it didn't exist like and and, like you know, all all kinds of cranks are delusional about how this happened, right, like the gold bugs and so forth. Like I, are just delusional about how money as we now have it emerges from money as we once had it. And you know again, asterisk imperial court, you know, in the things that resemble Westphalian nation states. Yeah, we're in a Keynesian world where money is defined by government.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:20

Money is defined by government, and if you are a government that's rich enough to compel trade with you and you have enough internal productive resources those are two very big caveats you can set terms, and if you're not, you kind of have to unofficially peg to a currency that does so. Um, that's where I think m and p go wrong. The other place I think they go wrong is what I've talked about. It's like just don't realize that class antagonisms is not just about bad idea. You know monetary ideology.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:52

It's like there are a lot of moving parts um, uh, but you know, every now and then you'll meet weirdo marxist gold bucks because they just, uh, they don't want to deal with this, um, and well, and gold bucks are all people who are like I don't understand money and therefore I want to change money into a form that I think I understand.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:13

Yeah, gold, which you know it has, has real value. Oh yeah, why? I mean like I can explain to you why. Why metal like soft metals like gold and silver and electrum were used for currency in the ancient world when exchanging between cities. Because you can melt them down and reuse them.

Jonathan Korman : 2:40:32

You can melt them, you can break them up, they don't corrode like. They have all of these advantages and I, like I and that you know, the crypto lunatics are speed running through the the history of of gold-backed money and discovering why it doesn't solve your problems it's like oh, it's hyper deflationary. I'm like yeah, yeah, yeah it is, and it turns out that's bad for reasons that we've known for a century.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:58

Right, it's good for bullshit speculation, but it's terrible as a fucking currency and so like. So you know in this sense. So what does that mean, you know, when we talk about our tensions, what does that mean for us today? Well, one of the things for me is that the Marxist project, in so much that it failed after Bernie, has retreated into inverting anti-communism for reasons that I don't think are not necessarily totally unhinged, like they were lied to about a lot of what was going on.

Jonathan Korman : 2:41:38

Yeah, it's historically contingent and formed by circumstances.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41:42

And then you have people who just don't know enough, and Putin's also shut the archives, so it's hard to even prove it to them. And so you look for another historic thing and instead of being like, well, let's try something that hasn't been tried, they're like, oh, let's do something that worked in the past, ignoring, of course, that Mao's project was fundamentally changed by Deng, in a way that neoliberals like and that's ignored by leftists who are Dengists.

Jonathan Korman : 2:42:09

Complicated yes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:42:10

Yeah, and again it's. It is complicated but it is not. It is, I'm going to say I don't know, man, I there was no reason for Dung to end, for example, rural schooling for girls, which he did. Yeah, um, you know, like, the extent of that market liberalization. I think people like it was further than the West. Um, uh, they, they, they were, they were liberalizing things. We don't, um, yeah, like china just now has the beginnings of like a health welfare state which they kind of had for the very poorest kind of before.

Jonathan Korman : 2:42:51

Well, and this is one of the ways in which it's very hard for us to think about China because, apropos of social insurance, their social insurance order is so different from ours in so many ways. Like the sort of the vulgar comparison is it more social insurance or less is useless.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:13

It's just radically different.

Jonathan Korman : 2:43:15

That, yeah, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:16

It's apples and oranges right and um and so like, when I'm like, in some ways, I don't have the welfare state that like sweden has, and it's when we over, when we overextend what sweden has, a lot of times, um, in other ways, they do have social stuff that we don't deal with. Some of it, some of it will actually probably become more problematized as the people who remember the collective period are dead, which will be soon. Um, but uh, there were things like moving intellectuals to the countryside, which people thought was just punishment and intellectuals perceived it that way. But I'm like, yeah, but you're teaching people skills that were formerly concentrated in cities by our capital, which is a problem we have here. Like, I mean, it's really hard to talk to liberals who want to, who want to electoral strategy, and be like you have to take federalism seriously instead of just wishing it go away, because to get it to go away, you'd have to take it seriously.

Jonathan Korman : 2:44:15

Well, and I mean apropos of like a little throwaway comment about how we both want you know, a constitutional convention is like those fundamental problems of federalism Right, like it's just. American federalism is so strange that it makes policy setting really hard and there are many alternative paths. That would be a significant improvement.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44:38

Right, let's not just. I mean I think people even underestimate that it's actually a money drag that, like we have so many different levels of government, we have to pay for shit multiple times and like it hides how many taxes we pay. In some ways we're not actually as untaxed as the, as the Europeans I mean not in all ways. There are ways where they pay higher taxes. They also get better benefits for it, frankly, but we're taxed higher than we realize because of the 85 different ways we tax and the various different regimes for that.

Jonathan Korman : 2:45:08

And then we have to remind ourselves even for federal elections, which made sense when the states thought of themselves as sovereign entities, entities which they aren't after the civil war and kind of never were and if I can be a crank for a moment, I think one of the unacknowledged ways in which we are taxed in these united states, um is enormous personal administrative overhead oh yeah which has been deferred on to individuals in a way that is actually difficult to explain to people in other countries because it's so bizarre and we have an enormous cultural blind spot about it and it is part of the sort of like pseudo anti-government impulse, harnessed largely by conservatism, which the left does a very bad job of talking about, when in fact it is natural territory either for the left properly understood or the left broadly understood to also include the filthy liberals of the Democratic Party Right Like we should be addressing that and we don't really have the vocabulary for it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:46:17

And this runs straight up into another liberal tendency that you might defend and I hate, which is our tendency towards bureaucratic means testing and the increasing bureaucratic.

Jonathan Korman : 2:46:33

No, in this, you and this is like a way in which I think again, liberalism, properly understood, comes to the rescue against liberalism, as in the Democratic Party is like liberalism likes universalism, and that should extend to policy wherever possible. Right, you want to do universalist policies, if only to eliminate the administrative overhead of all of the means, testing horseshit.

C. Derick Varn: 2:47:02

Right, which also I mean. One of the things about the administrative overheads is we foisted on individuals. It also means that, weirdly, even when we're trying to prove who is good and deserving, you're going to need people to help navigate the system to do so, which means creating more and more bureaucracy. I mean. One of the ironies right now is again communist China quotation marks and capitalist America quotation marks, all the less quotation marks.

Jonathan Korman : 2:47:59

The administrative overhead of doing development in China is lower for a business than it is in the United States, which Francisco as like the nightmare condition of progressive governance, and 95% of their complaints are horseshit. But they are right that the administrative overhead of just doing anything in San Francisco is preposterous and it is a drag on the ability of society to function.

C. Derick Varn: 2:48:17

Well, this is why when I tell liberals to look at what liberal stuff works, I say look at new york and not california. And people are like what do you mean? I'm like new york still has remnants of its fortis infrastructure. That does do away with some of this personalized administrative overhead. California never had that. It never had an industrial base really, it had an extract, an extractive base. It has a completely different history, but it shows up in there.

Jonathan Korman : 2:48:38

Say what you will about Michael Bloomberg, I love. He becomes governor of New York sorry, not governor mayor of New York City and he says why the fuck is there not a hotline you can call to tell the city something Right? And he actually solved that problem. He's like well, you know, in tech we have a ticket system, so if you ask to have a pothole fixed, you can call later and ask if there's a plan. And you just call one number and there's hands of professionals so that individuals don't have to juggle it right. That is the kind of thing that, uh, both uh, liberals in the profound sense and liberals in the filthy democratic party sense should be getting behind. Um and uh and near. As I can tell, the only person who cares is, you know, my girl, elizabeth Warren of all people I was gonna.

C. Derick Varn: 2:49:45

One of the things I was gonna point out to you, though, when I think about this Fortis framework, is it is weak in some ways, so, but it is also if you look at the way California handles homelessness. Some of that's weather, but a lot of it's not weather. They throw, and it's not that they don't throw money at it. They throw massive amounts of money at it. They throw it at NGOs to do it in a non-governmental way. California, I mean, does it indirectly, in the neoliberal but also quasi-socialized way that we'd expect from a post 80s kind of policy.

Jonathan Korman : 2:50:15

Well, and the core problem in california is housing policy right, exactly, um, but that's all of the other policies shitty in the way that you're talking about, but let's not forget that the core problem in california is housing policy but you have the same problem in new york and they handle it dramatically better because they are willing to say well, we'll just.

C. Derick Varn: 2:50:37

we'll just literally pay the rent for people and do it directly, like we used to in the forties, the fifties and sixties. However, here's where it becomes a problem and a vulnerability, since it is at the local level. On a federal scale, if you're a stunt governor from California and not California, texas, california is is one of the. There's a reason why california isn't targeted by the by this in the same way, and I'm trying to get people to talk about like, california has sanctuary cities and blah, blah, blah, the, the, but the right does not sit, ship, uh, immigrants to them all right, right, one is they really can't make the argument that california doesn't eat the cost, because they do. Unlike New York, they ship it to northern cities.

C. Derick Varn: 2:51:19

The other thing, though, that people haven't noticed is that, in this Fortis framework of the city of New York, particularly Black people have often benefited from this.

C. Derick Varn: 2:51:33

If you throw a bunch of immigrants at it and they're technically homeless when they get there, they're entitled to these things that they use to treat homelessness in the city, and this can be sold, and even by certain Democrats like Eric Adams is sold as an assault and a need to undo these Fortas programs because they're unfair.

C. Derick Varn: 2:51:53

And then it is perceived by the black community as a way to get rid of programs that benefit them, which turns them on immigrants, which has been part of why we have seen some not a lot, it's overstated, but some movement amongst Black men in particular, even in Northern cities, towards the GOP in response to this immigration crisis. Because this Fortas infrastructure, since it is not at a national level, it's vulnerable, and I'm going to say something that is going to shock people. The conservatives are pernicious as fuck here, but they do have a point on one area the federal government sets immigration policy, but they do not pay for it, and that's one of the pernicious things about American government, in particular, when you talk about a federalism. We have set up our government constitutionally and through some reforms around the administrative state to be a killing machine and an insurance program.

Jonathan Korman : 2:52:51

Yeah, well, I mean the old joke like the United States doesn't have a government, it has a pension program and an army. Right, and everything else is rubble. Right, like those are the big ticket items. Everything else is just like marginal.

C. Derick Varn: 2:53:07

Right. I mean, when we talk about like yeah, the schools need federal spending, but it's like what? Like maybe like 10% of their budget at most, the thing that people don't realize, like oh, we don't have to tax for this, I'm like, yeah, but we've made sure that most essential services are at the state level. The states don't have currency sovereignty, so you do have to tax for it, which means it has a completely different dynamic than the military, the social insurance and stuff that you really kind of don't.

Jonathan Korman : 2:53:36

And this is the paradox of American conservatism is is the way they leverage this problem of federalism is they? They defer administration of a bunch of these policies to the states where they have opportunities to break them right and then that leads to where it leads, to direct confrontations.

C. Derick Varn: 2:54:01

Like, uh, attempts to just redesign, um the the student loan program to be more fair ends up being legitimate grounds for lawsuit because of this, because of the state administrative levels and the neoliberal stuff that we've allowed to develop. Like it doesn't make sense to me that there are fucking for-profit surfacers for direct federal loans. Like it doesn't make any sense to me Right, I mean.

Jonathan Korman : 2:54:26

That's a perfect example of like the neoliberal nightmare of the public-private partnership, which delivers the worst of both worlds.

C. Derick Varn: 2:54:39

And in Biden's case it's actually led to total instability there. That's even turning people against that, because right now, if you're in the same program, you don't even know what your payment is and you can't leave because it's frozen or because of courts and you can't change it and you don't know what's going on. And, yes, they've deferred it for you now, but you don't know what's coming down the pipe at all, meaning you cannot even predict what your payment would be. And I hear conservatives valorize this in some weird way and then, like for like, they defend the PPP loans as being productive and I'm like. There's no evidence that most of them were at all.

Jonathan Korman : 2:55:08

They're not getting paid back and the liberals of the Democratic Party then have political ownership in the eyes of the public, of the policy, when in fact they've abdicated control of the implementation of the policy such that they allow the opening for sabotage of the policy which they damn well should have predicted. And so all of the dysfunction which emerges at the execution level is blamed on political leadership at the policy level.

C. Derick Varn: 2:55:49

And we see this not just there. I mean, we think about the ACA, which has in some ways been great, in other ways been terrible.

Jonathan Korman : 2:55:58

Better than before.

C. Derick Varn: 2:56:01

I mostly agree.

Jonathan Korman : 2:56:04

Category is better than the organic trajectory that we would have had without it. Yeah, I agree, I will agree with you, but catastrophic in countless ways, right? And painting us into a corner in which it is difficult to improve the policy, either mechanically or politically.

C. Derick Varn: 2:56:25

Which is, I hate to say it, but I predict it, I think everyone paying attention, predicted. I think everyone paying attention predicted and funnily enough to give Barack Obama a little bit of credit he knew this but thought hubristically, thought the poison pill would be able to be fixed by later Democratic administrations.

Jonathan Korman : 2:56:42

Yes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:56:42

That's the hubris part.

Jonathan Korman : 2:56:45

Much as you know Johnson imagined. You know Medicare would just eventually get extended to cover everybody.

C. Derick Varn: 2:56:53

Right and would not get get extended to cover everybody, Right, and would not get into this weird pay service. And I will say it was ironic that you know people used to talk for Medicare for all, turning their blind eye to the Biden administration reducing Medicare payments at the exact time we needed the opposite, because it actually has encouraged people to leave the medical field to now that we have like really terrible wait times and I know this because I'm dealing with it personally, like I have insurance and I still can't see a doctor incredible systemic breakdown.

Jonathan Korman : 2:57:23

Um, well, and I mean, like you know, if you want to get serious about you know policy about medicine in the united states, like you get into this really twisty territory. Well, like you got to break the back of the AMA.

C. Derick Varn: 2:57:35

You do.

Jonathan Korman : 2:57:37

And how the hell do you do that? A gun, see, this is where. And you resort to the gun because it is politically challenging, right? I mean, that's the temptation of that fantasy, is it? Well, it's so politically challenging that I will. It will just resort to magical force.

C. Derick Varn: 2:58:00

um, which is not an answer magical. It is an answer and it's an expression of the legitimate frustration uh, my friend, we subjugate classes of people all the time in society. It is an answer. It's not an answer that you like. It would be a disastrous answer, like, look, I do think killing all the doctors would be a terrible idea.

Jonathan Korman : 2:58:25

But you cannot improve medical care by killing all the doctors. No, I mean like if I was king of American medical care. Medical care I would train 50 times as many doctors and then I would have 80% of them wash out.

C. Derick Varn: 2:58:42

I would do what they do in Canada for teachers, even though I don't love it. Or I would do what they do in Mexico. You can enter medical school much earlier the equivalent of after you're done with your associates. Um, it's mostly paid for by the state and you have to work at. Okay, admittedly, mexico's socialized medicine critics are shitty. Uh, I've been to them. I can actually vouch they are shitty. We don't talk about mexico as an example of successful socialized medicine for a reason. But they do actually like okay, you do this work for us and uh, we're gonna pay for your stuff and you can still do your private practice. I'm not sure that I would want them to do their private practice, but I'm not. I'm actually not opposed in a transitional program. Uh, to socialism. Like, would be, like we pay those people slightly better than we pay other people until we achieve socialist parity. And it's irrelevant, because we need them and I think we need to fuck a lot more nurses to like tons.

Jonathan Korman : 2:59:42

We need to power them more, we need and we need to radically transform the way medical education is done because of all of the ways in which medical education in the United States is deeply screwy and and we need to. Well and like a part of the dream of having 10 times as many doctors is like, we have an entire medical system which, you know, treats doctors as the bottleneck precious resource, and that's absurd. Let's not do that.

Jonathan Korman : 3:00:18

Right and to our larger point. This is the kind of policy challenge which our existing political order is ill-equipped to address.

C. Derick Varn: 3:00:28

And I would actually say even the socialists don't really talk about it that way. They talk about Medicare for all. There's two parts to that One. What do you do with the massive medical apparatus that exists at insurance and in billing and coding? I heard one person talk about it from the burning campaign One.

C. Derick Varn: 3:00:46

And they had an idea, but even I was like that idea is absurd. We're just going to turn them into a medical concierge service to reduce the administrative overhead. And I was like, fine, but you don't need that many of them, right, don't need as many of them even doing that, as you have right now.

C. Derick Varn: 3:01:00

Well, you got to transition those people into other industries somehow right, um, and one of the things that we are in right now is we're in a weird and I don't think liberals are honest about this. Some of them are also. You know the blue MAGA people. You're not one of them, but you know who I'm talking about. Yeah, who thinks that, like, oh, we can just have, like progressive reshoring on green stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 3:01:23

One of the things that comes out of the work of people like Phil and Neil on my side of the equation is, like, you underestimate the efficiency of automation. Yeah, both of automation. Yeah, um, both in national development, in which case not every nation even needs to produce this stuff anymore, because it wouldn't be viable in the market. It would flood the market with cheap materials if every nation did this. But two, also, we can't go back to 1950s level production standards. Um, we'd have to deliberately make our economy inefficient. And why the hell would you do that, particularly when you're talking about a time period where we're using too many resources anyway yes like so what's your answer to that?

C. Derick Varn: 3:02:00

and smokestack socialism will not work? Yeah, um, and that's something that I don't see answered. So I'm like okay, we want to socialize medicine in the united states. You have to deal with this middle strata apparatus that frankly, helped a lot of people color and stuff, get particularly women, get jobs for their family. Those are the people who are the billers, colders, uh, servicers, uh, imagist, you know, yeah, like if we stream, no it was a huge service industry in the administrative layer and yes, it's incredibly costly too.

Jonathan Korman : 3:02:37

Yeah, it's incredibly costly. I mean that is most of the incremental difference in the real costs of American medicine versus medicine elsewhere. And it's colossal waste and like from a sort of grand socialist perspective. Well it is. It is wasteful to deploy that much human effort and talent into a pointless administrative process. Those people should be doing something fucking useful.

C. Derick Varn: 3:03:07

But doing that kind of transformation in the economy is just very difficult to do in the economy is just very difficult to do, Right, but and you and I know that, but that's when, when I'm like, when people talk about Medicare for all, which I support, but I'm like you have to have a better vision of that than just we're just going to turn on Medicare, turn on the Medicare button tomorrow, Like we really do, Right?

Jonathan Korman : 3:03:26

that's step one.

C. Derick Varn: 3:03:27

Yeah.

Jonathan Korman : 3:03:27

That's the easy part actually.

C. Derick Varn: 3:03:29

Yeah, we really do have to deal with all these layers we need, and also right now, when the stuff we're talking about doctors and nurses, medicare for all does not fix that by itself, does nothing. Not against free college, but let me tell you I'm gonna sound like a neoliberal here, I'm not gonna lie. Let me tell you about what I've seen in countries that implement free college, but without massive funding, funding forces. What that ends up doing is elites go to the free college because it's so competitive to get into um, and then you actually and you see this in korea, you see this in some latin american countries where, like, if you get into the best schools they're free, like, but only the rich get into them. Even in Germany, which has a much better system than what the kind of flawed ones I'm talking about, that still predominantly happens, right?

Jonathan Korman : 3:04:30

There's a particular way in the United States that because we have a cultural blind spot about social class. If you ask people questions about social class, they immediately start talking about education, because we use education as the mechanism by which we mediate our real processes of social class. And if you have any socialist sensibility at all, well, okay, you want to disrupt those class relations, which means that you need to disrupt the way that education mediates social class. And the bonehead liberal fantasy of free college is well, if we give more people college educations, that will result in more professional class jobs.

Jonathan Korman : 3:05:24

Because of this weird delusion that we have from the long era immediately after the Second World War in which that appeared to be true, the long era immediately after the second world war in which that appeared to be true, we had the development of, you know, this uh, large white collar class, um, and we simultaneously had this program of sending more people to college.

Jonathan Korman : 3:05:46

For a host of weird, you know, historically contingent reasons and because of the history in which social class was mediated by education, we just sort of created this alignment in which all of the people who went to the new public colleges became the people who did these new white-collar jobs. It produces more white collar jobs that produce not in the Marxist sense but in the vulgar sense, you know, bourgeois, middle class economic life conditions, right. So we had the superstition Right. That's part of the impetus behind free college, which I also support for all of the reasons that it's good. But you have to break that relation between social class, economic mobility and education in the course of doing that, because it's a thing you have to break on the merits anyway, and if you don't, then you get a death spiral of consequences from free college education that produces a bunch of bad outcomes.

C. Derick Varn: 3:06:59

Well, the other thing is we're not really dealing with the fact that federalized education in the United States is, by and large, kind of shitty and getting shittier faster and faster and that most of the liberal fixes and I'm going to sound like Freddie DeBoer here- are God help us all. God help us all. Freddie's a friend of mine, but we disagree profoundly on a lot of stuff, but this is not one we do.

C. Derick Varn: 3:07:18

I do admit that tests are racially biased because they're in a particular language. Totally true. Two the testing regime has largely hollowed out education. Yes, Also true.

C. Derick Varn: 3:07:43

However, our responses to removing tests are actually worse than what they're replacing. Yes, significant amount of wealth to be even to engage in rightly to do? Um, they are. They become a code for class and since they've been instantiated now I do not think this is causal, before people misread me, but since they've been instantiated economic diversity, which was never particularly higher colleges, has dropped dramatically, even from what it was. The other thing that's done it and uh, I'm going to sound like a conservative here is is the pushback on Asian admittances, because Asians were often from working class backgrounds who came up into schools.

C. Derick Varn: 3:08:22

So, whereas Black scholars correspondingly tend to be richer than even their white counterparts when they go to elite universities, etc. So we're not dealing with it from that end. Um, and affirmative action diversified the elites, but it didn't diversify it in terms of poor black people. Um, it enabled the black bourgeoisie and, uh, which was mostly petite bourgeoisie, to integrate itself, which I'm not even saying was bad, honestly like no, as far as it goes, it just does not address the entirety of the problem that you want it to.

C. Derick Varn: 3:08:55

Right and it's a particular flashpoint and we've seen American education is objectively shittier now than it was 15 years ago at all levels.

Jonathan Korman : 3:09:10

Yeah, I want to push back on the implication of a causal relationship between the patterns you've observed and that other pattern Like they are certainly entangled, but it is not simply the same thing.

C. Derick Varn: 3:09:35

No, but I do think there's a causal relationship, but it's not what you think. Relationship is that we realize that the cost of not having good grades and what in this meritocratic system uh means that we should grade, inflate and do all these other things to reduce. I now I want people to know I'm against number grading. I don't want a number grade at all.

C. Derick Varn: 3:09:46

I'd rather just give an accounting of your skills at the end of the course all right so people don't come at me but, um, but it has led to this thing where we have the number grading system, but it's no longer valid. So you know what the people use to sort is your fucking zip code. Yeah, and colleges can deny, they do it. But if you look at the acceptance, even if they don't mean to do it, they're doing it. So when you so there's all these like liberal.

Jonathan Korman : 3:10:21

Well, and I would. I would say this another way like the dysfunctions we see in higher education A you didn't say this, but you were talking about it indirectly Rest on problems in primary and secondary education which we don't know how to address. In B, they reflect a devolution of the mission of higher education into being nothing other than this mechanism by which social class is mediated, which produces a whole bunch of dysfunctions. We don't know what higher education is for, we're not prepared to even talk about it, and so you know we charge. We try to push the lever of correcting inequities mediated through class by just pushing on colleges to solve it for us, and that does not do what we want.

C. Derick Varn: 3:11:19

No, I mean it's not. And I could go into the teachers unions, which I think are more or less good guys but have real problems, particularly in areas like where you used to live and in New York.

Jonathan Korman : 3:11:36

I could go into a lot of these things yeah, I mean, school teachers want good things, but they are put in a position in which their unions as actors cannot actually pursue those good things, and so it creates all of these weird side effects right um, which means that you're even in states where they can collectively bargain.

C. Derick Varn: 3:11:55

unions end up being largely lobbying things, which makes them seen as an objective appendage of the Democratic Party in most areas Some places like Utah, they're an objective appendage of the moderate end of the Republican Party. But whatever, that's just a fact. They actually tell us to register as Republicans.

Jonathan Korman : 3:12:11

That's really weird.

C. Derick Varn: 3:12:13

Well, because we have no effect on that, on the Democratic Party matters for Salt Lake City. But even if we had a non-gerrymandered state, it would still be 60% GOP. Weirdly though, in Utah that leads to a de-radicalized GOP, kind of Like there's a radical GOP that sometimes gets tough and there's a non-radical GOP that sometimes plays ball with the right. It's a. It's a very different dynamic than what you see in. Uh, the western states gop is actually very different than the southern states gop, where the gop doesn't have a moderate buffer.

C. Derick Varn: 3:12:43

Um, oh yeah, I could say, that's weird uh, and so, like, desantis, which is in a objectively purpler state than Utah, is way more firebrand than anything you're going to see out of here and I bring that up because I do think socialists need to deal with that and the other thing that I think that you and I might agree with is neither socialists nor liberals have a realistic role of policy at all.

Jonathan Korman : 3:13:12

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:13:13

And that's a huge fucking problem. That's like, um, particularly in the us, where, if you like it or not, even though these are low population states, you have to deal with federalism to fix federalism. So like I don't necessarily see why, like all these areas would I know a lot of them are more petit bourgeois. That's one problem. We talked about that earlier. We would actually agree on that problem, that's a lot of. Trump space, by the way.

Jonathan Korman : 3:13:40

First approximation, yeah, the farmer.

C. Derick Varn: 3:13:46

Look, I know that the small family farm has gone the way of the dodo, except for niche production for farmer's market and high-end weird cuts.

Jonathan Korman : 3:13:56

It lives in our cultural imagination.

C. Derick Varn: 3:13:58

Right. I mean the yeoman farmer was always a bullshit American category that we're really attached to. I mean it was dying by the time we became attached to it. Even here it was kind of stived off by the absorption of other people's land, but nonetheless there's a limit you got troublemakers, you just send them out and try and get them to try and farm the desert exactly, yeah, go, go fight some indigenous and farm the desert.

C. Derick Varn: 3:14:26

Have good luck. Um, uh, the the. You know that imperial experience is kind of over now, but it's interesting there's. I thought about some things that what you and I are both radicals but we both get frustrated with other radicals for this. Like I get really frustrated with the way we talk about, like land back. I'm not against all forms of land back. I want to be very clear on that. But I also realized that people use that term because it appeals to a broad variety of indigenous uh perspectives, some of which are like outright nationalistic and others are just like well, if we, you know, no one owns land and we have our rights back, we're not going to kick you out.

Jonathan Korman : 3:15:04

Like like, there's a huge spectrum there, right, yeah, and there would be also in response to what fucking historically and again like like it's a poetic lever for talking about the I know you hate the word justice, but like the profound need for justice for the people we are talking about when we talk about indigenous people and and the language of land back is a lever long enough to address the scale of injustice we are talking about correcting, but it steers directly into these Blut and Boden myths that you do not want to touch. The term indigenous derives directly into Blut and Boden mythology and I am prepared to set that aside in service of whatever indigenous people need to do in order to get some frickin' justice in this nightmare world that we have built. Like I am not going to give Indigenous people a hard time about their choice of vocabulary to contains a worm at the center which you do not want to bite into.

C. Derick Varn: 3:16:41

It's a blood and soil myth. I mean, like indigenous people by and large don't view it as that ironically, but it so easily becomes that that it's not even funny.

Jonathan Korman : 3:16:49

No, indigenous people speak on the language of indigeneity because it works Right. Funny, no, the language of indigeneity because it works right, and for fuck's sake I do not want to begrudge them anything that works right and at the same time, I do recognize the language of indigeneity like leads us directly into myths that are very, very bad well, I mean, it leads to this image which we saw in some liberal imaginations and it was specifically liberal, jonathan.

C. Derick Varn: 3:17:17

Um, even though it's picking up on, one of the weird things that maybe both you and I get mad about is like people borrowing from traditions without realizing the implication of mixing the traditions. But, um, uh, who were like? Oh well, you know, if the zoo rose up and killed us all, I would have to like I'd hide, but I wouldn't fight them, and I'm like they would never do that because that would be fucking suicidal, because you might not do that. There's no way that I don't know, even excluding the 18 to 19% of the Black population from this, that you'd let 2% of the population kill off 60. Right, or remove them to who the fuck knows where. Like, and that is a, and I remember someone's like well, we mean lamb back, we meet everyone going back to their. I heard an anarchist say this in straight face on a fucking radio program john, that we all go back to an indigenous homeland. I'm like where the fuck is mine, yeah where the fuck is mine like, like half like, do I send my arm to?

C. Derick Varn: 3:18:14

do I send my arm to Scotland, the other part to Bulgaria, another part to fucking North Africa? Like what the fuck is that and when?

Jonathan Korman : 3:18:20

exactly? Was the date when everyone was where they belonged?

C. Derick Varn: 3:18:24

It seems to be 1492. That everything is frozen at 1492. Which you know has some very unfortunate things for some groups of people. But you know, I'm just saying like it is and I'm going to say this like I'm going to get people calling me a liberal for this on the left, but I'm like Marxists didn't have a good answer for this. Marx has some weird notions of race. He was not a biological racist in the genetics way. He does seem to have been kind of a geographical racist.

Jonathan Korman : 3:19:02

I don't know Marx nearly as well as you do, but there's definitely that note of.

C. Derick Varn: 3:19:06

There are peoples who have conditions particular to the places they occupy, as part of just materialism, right, right and and so um, it may have like we have to grapple with racism like we have it in these united states no, it's hard for us to do and it's always been hard for it to like, like and I'll admit actually the first really attempt to do it was during the stalin period. That's like one of the weird um caveats about soviet foreign policy during the stalin period is it was good on american racism. It's kind of inconsistent. On russian racism, though A little bit Stalingrad, back and forth about being a great Russian nationalist and not.

Jonathan Korman : 3:19:59

Actually I thought it was cleaner and then I started really reading the archives and people who do scholarship archives and I realized no, he vacillates wildly after World War II and then in the post-war era, after World War ii, of course in cold war conditions. There's this weird alignment in which, um you know, marxists become aligned with, uh, post-colonial national liberation projects yep, that becomes our primary, that that is our primary way of spreading.

C. Derick Varn: 3:20:32

And what what I out is? Okay, it worked for getting red flags in the air, but very few of those countries outside of Vietnam, which is Vietnam, and Cuba, which are the most successful and the others we don't want to talk about DPRK and Cambodia.

Jonathan Korman : 3:20:49

A little awkward, those examples.

C. Derick Varn: 3:20:52

Or all the African states that abandon socialism like very quickly.

Jonathan Korman : 3:20:56

Um, it's like shut up, don't mention that which, again, I'll raise my hand and say it's because of a failure to address modes of governance and I mean also a failure to really deal with the, with the contradictory nature of decolonization, and I say that because that was not like.

C. Derick Varn: 3:21:18

You look at the decolonization debates around Chinua, achebe and Nigeria and he's like no, we have to use nationalism, even though nationalism is not our indigenous tradition, it's not from Africa. And we have to use English because otherwise we break down in sectarian opposition between each other.

Jonathan Korman : 3:21:35

And he's like we are living in this increasingly westphalian world. What the fuck are you going to?

C. Derick Varn: 3:21:39

do right, and so he's like, and you can try to decolonize your mind all you want, but you live in a world of nations yeah and I think that's actually fundamentally true. But it's a real problem, like because capital is not a national project, even though people, even on the left right now, really want to imagine that it is. Um, and I know it's an international project.

C. Derick Varn: 3:22:02

It's always been an international well, I would say it's in fact a transnational project yeah, uh actually it's probably a better way to phrase it yeah, um, and it's always been that um, which is why it was dependent on colonialism and all this other stuff to happen, I mean. So that's not an easy problem to fix, to put it mildly.

C. Derick Varn: 3:22:31

And again, like we have blunt tools for even talking about right and what we see today and we didn't and I think this is post bernie, but I actually think it was implicit in bernie there is a I might say the rational core of the bernie boat critique is there was a kind of national revitalization. That wasn't, that didn't look at the uS's role in foreign policy all that particularly clearly in the Bernie movement. And then when that failed, people started projecting like, oh, if we were just better with these. You know multipolar.

Jonathan Korman : 3:23:04

And.

C. Derick Varn: 3:23:04

I don't go into multipolarity because it's like it's an imperialist description of reality, right.

Jonathan Korman : 3:23:12

And the language is is troublesome there uh and it comes.

C. Derick Varn: 3:23:17

Its history is way more tied into empire than people like or want to deal with, and it's true that most people promoting multi-polarity do not think that they are promoting multiple empires, but that's what it is um, and they also don't like it when I point out that the multipolar period in modern history was 1890 to 1910.

Jonathan Korman : 3:23:42

You know, I don't know how much you follow Timothy Snyder. Oh, he's a dreaded guy.

C. Derick Varn: 3:23:48

But yes, go ahead, tell me about. Timothy Snyder.

Jonathan Korman : 3:23:50

Make my audience mad about it. Well, it's bad. Um, uh, I snyder says something, has an interesting provocation about the westphalian order where he says to his european admirers he says look, you guys have this story about how european nations are old and wise and the 20th century taught you that war is bad. And so you are abandoning your imperial colonial ambitions because you're wise, and returning to the organic Westphalian nation state polities that are the true nature of European political organization. And I am here to tell you, says Timothy Snyder, that is a crock of shit.

C. Derick Varn: 3:24:44

What has happened no, this is actually true, so I'm not going to just-.

Jonathan Korman : 3:24:46

Yeah, this is a crock of shit, that A. You didn't abandon, um, uh, you know. You didn't abandon, uh, colonial imperialism because you're wise. You abandoned colonial imperialism because you failed at it, um, for all of the reasons that you failed at it. I mean, you abandoned war, uh, not because you're old and wise, but because what actually turns out is the Westphalian order is unnatural. It never really existed. There is no true organic nation state to return to. These were always the seats of empires. They emerged in the context of colonialism, and so they need to be integrated in something larger. And you've built the something larger. It's the EU. And so you just got to be honest about the fact that there is no true Westphalian order to return to, because it always required international and transnational relationships in order to function. And, for fuck's sake, just be honest about that.

C. Derick Varn: 3:26:03

Yeah, I mean, I would even go so far as to say, like the idea of European nation states is very old also ignores how bloody consolidating those nations were. It's not like all the germans just happily went wrong with bismarck, or that all the italians just happily went along with garibaldi, uh, or that they allowed all their micro nationalities to just you know, I mean like in germany and italy are your obvious counter examples.

Jonathan Korman : 3:26:29

But that's even true of you know france, or it's even true of you know France or Spain.

C. Derick Varn: 3:26:33

It's incredibly true in France and Spain. I mean, actually the issue, the reason we use Italy and Germany as the obvious counter examples is because they're modern enough that we have more documentation of what happened. Yeah, whereas if we go back to the reason why I mentioned 1492 is not just because Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that bullshit it's also because that's when the beginning of modern nation-states really starts in Europe and it's consolidated in the Westphalian order. But you already see it in England and Spain from pretty early on. And France struggles, and actually its history, on consolidating that is particularly gross and bloody, but since it's tied into sectarian wars, we don't often recognize it as that Right. Well, you have to know that history and bloody, but since it's tied into sectarian wars we don't often recognize it as that right.

Jonathan Korman : 3:27:14

Why do you have to know that history in an intimate way that americans don't? I will easily grant I I do not understand it well enough to be sophisticated, for damn sure uh.

C. Derick Varn: 3:27:24

But I think a lot of marxist and leftist approximations of this have been internationalism is hard, so let's do left nationalism, um, and then like but we don't want to do left nationalism of the bad, uh, um, imperialist type.

C. Derick Varn: 3:27:44

So if we're just like, nicer to these other powers and recognize them as equals on a samuel huntington level of civilizational politics, which is where, which is where dugan gets it from and where they get it from? They get it from Dugan, but it's, it's, it's this weird left version of Samuel Huntington thought that it's like well, we can just break this up into civilizational Brock's, but civilizational Brock's aren't racist guys, so it's just like, and, and I will admit, like, if that's your vision, you're gonna see a lot of people immediately, when they realize that, liquidate back into more liberal notions and we've seen this actively people flirting with mlism and then, as soon as they like, hit that part um, and that's not I. I don't think that's inherent to Leninism, actually, but it is inherent to the way it's kind of played out in post-Soviet spaces, because so much of it is based off of the Chinese experience, and the Chinese experience was a multinational national consolidation project.

Jonathan Korman : 3:28:49

Yeah, China is big enough that the integration project that that, like Snyder would say, is integral to the fantasy of the Westphalian state Well, I, china is is big enough that integrating China, china like the rest of the United States.

Jonathan Korman : 3:29:14

I mean, the United States, united states, is absurdly big right, and and and that's part of why we have the strangeness of our federalism, which we need to figure out a way to refactor.

Jonathan Korman : 3:29:25

But, like um, it would be nice to hold these united states together. And this also contributes to the thing I was thinking about a minute ago as we were talking about this right, with the end of the Cold War. Right, we had this moment where you know, the United States as hegemon was an acceptable solution to the transnational order. That was good enough for a lot of players that they were willing to accept it as the least worst option. And then, with the end of the cold war, and behind and and lying underneath that, the erosion of the circumstances that required the cold war order, um, with the united States as Western hegemon, like all of that had eroded but like the only vision the United States could have in that moment was well, you know, being hegemon was really nice, that was cozy for us. So let's find a way to hold on to that, which is just dumb. It's dumb because the the conditions of you know the united states as hegemon circa 1970 just don't exist anymore.

Jonathan Korman : 3:30:41

And trying to perpetuate them like right or 1960 right like yeah, um, like I. Trying to perpetuate the conditions of 1960 is a hopeless endeavor and counterproductive even for the United States, which is why we have this like pseudo isolationist impulse which surfaces in weird forms in MAGA. It surfaces in liberal politics.

C. Derick Varn: 3:31:10

Yeah, I mean we just don't know what to do with ourselves Like I see liberal policy people like we need to do a Green Marshall deal against China. I'm like you're not going to do a Green Marshall deal against China. It's just like, first of all, to catch up on the technologies you'd have to cooperate with China and, second of all, the other attempt at a new Marshall Plan, which is China's Belt and Road Initiative, has washed up on the complexities of geopolitics, particularly what Russia ended up doing, which I don't think people noticed that it kind of fucked up the Belt and Road Initiative pretty badly.

Jonathan Korman : 3:31:48

It wasn't the only thing that hit the Shurinkan debt crisis, and other things have done it well and, and you know, having, you know, a century plus of robbing the thing we're talking about when we talk about the global south, and robbing those folks blind. On the one hand, like the, the imperial core has a colossal moral debt to correct all of the fuckery that has impoverished billions of people, um, but on the other hand, they're never going to trust us to do it, because we did that in the first place like they, they won't trust us to do it.

Jonathan Korman : 3:32:26

Um, when the better angels of our nature have made efforts to correct it, we've completely, completely fucked it up out of sheer incompetence. In addition to the malice, that is also part of the equation, but, like, even without the malice, the incompetence is killer. And so, like, what is the thing that you actually do? Nobody has an answer for that, and I still feel the weight of the like moral obligation. But, uh, lacking a an actual plan for what to do, I'm stumped yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:33:01

No, I mean like I'm like, okay, we're gonna do investment and like we want to do parity investment with china. But the thing is, one of the things I pointed out is like when it comes to the western powers in africa, the United States is only a power in CENTCOM and AFRICOM. It's not really a power in like economic imperialism. That's France. We don't really fuck with Africa that much in any way, form or fashion, like we kind of you know we could.

Jonathan Korman : 3:33:26

We could put you know 20 million Americans in uniform and send them out to build trains. It's a thing we could do.

C. Derick Varn: 3:33:35

I and send them out to build trains. That's a thing we could do. I don't know if putting them in uniform would be received particularly well, all right.

Jonathan Korman : 3:33:40

Well, don't put them in uniform, put them in jeans and have them build trains all over the world.

C. Derick Varn: 3:33:48

Here's the thing. Here's another thing that you and I haven't talked about. At the heart of this, though, we also have a democratic collapse crisis going on. Uh, yeah, and it's kind of particularly hard now because the baby boomers, with the pensions, are done, uh, are they died? Uh, they've already retired, and now we're in the lower end of younger baby boomers, who mostly have 401ks, who are not prepared to to retire. Yeah, um, which, by the way, is a good model for the rest of us, who aren't going to be able to retire either, but they're also getting. They can't do a lot of the work anymore, and so we'll have some gains in productivity as these older workers leave, although, again, how much and so much of this is automated is actually very hard to say.

Jonathan Korman : 3:34:33

Well, and as we've seen, like in every institutional space I know, except for conservative politics right the boomers have vigor, management skills in doing a whole lot of things that create enormous institutional challenges in every space.

C. Derick Varn: 3:35:03

So this gives us to. We have we've been talking for almost four hours and I know there's there's, we'll have you back on the show again. There's a. We'll have you back on the show again. It won't be another two years, We'll probably be like six months. Um, because you and I have interesting conversations and people already suspect that I'm a liberal and the answers I'm not, but it's weirder than you think, Um.

Jonathan Korman : 3:35:23

I am happy because this is fun. I'm happy to like have you smack my liberal nose with a newspaper a few times to demonstrate to your audience that you're not me. That's fine with me yeah, no, it's, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 3:35:36

Although people are gonna say you, you gave him too many concessions, I can already tell you it's gonna be in the comments um, uh, it wasn't last time, but we'll see I was very pleasantly surprised, I gotta tell you like, uh, the last round was very warmly received by your followers in a way that I did not anticipate, which was a strange comfort to me. I know that there's going to be at least two people calling me PMC, but that's going to be no here, no there.

Jonathan Korman : 3:36:07

I will gladly plead guilty to that.

C. Derick Varn: 3:36:10

I don't know what it means. It's funny, though, when they're like oh, you have PMC cultural. I'm like dude, I come from blue collar background, in fact, barely blue collar. I myself, however, I'm not one of these people like, say, mark Fisher, who views social classes where you're born. So I don't claim to be a paradigm of the productive working class or some bullshit like that. I'm not blue color at all, um, but I do come from that world, uh, the. But there are two issues where I think we you and I might have tensions, where I sound slightly conservative one I think liberals have systemically protected, uh, bureaucrats and technocrats to the point that bureaucrats and technocrats are no longer good at their job, um, that they're incompetent, and that the last that we have, the, and that this is favored baby boomers to get into generational politics a little bit to the point that baby boomers can use that as an excuse to not step down right, because they're right that the people beneath them are incompetent and they've worked damn hard to make sure of it.

C. Derick Varn: 3:37:16

Yes, and they have done a damn good job at making sure of it. Despite all elite educational institutions, we kind of know that they haven't really done their jobs.

Jonathan Korman : 3:37:27

That is a whole conversation of its own, in which I think we would have lively agreements and disagreements.

C. Derick Varn: 3:37:32

Yes, yeah, I mean we'll get into that. I think one of the things we'll talk about is these institutions in another episode, but I mean I do think, broadly speaking, even liberals distrust elite educational institutions in a way that they did not 10 years ago. Like no one is getting mad at Tim Walz for not going to Harvard, where, like that, came up about Barack Obama as his major talking point, which which he went to Harvard kind of, but he actually went to.

C. Derick Varn: 3:37:58

Oxygen College. It was primary point of education, but anyway, so that mystique is over, even on the liberal left. The left doesn't know what to do, that we kind of always hated these institutions, but we've also, like, infiltrated them. So what are?

Jonathan Korman : 3:38:12

we supposed to do? Right, there's complicated ambivalences there.

C. Derick Varn: 3:38:16

Yes, because there was the post-new left, post-new communist movement long march through the institutions, and so we do have radical. I mean, to this day, some of the most vulgar Stalinists are actually professionals.

Jonathan Korman : 3:38:28

There aren't as many of them as the right thinks, but they do exist. They do exist.

C. Derick Varn: 3:38:32

There's more of them than there used to be. There's less than the right things there are, yes, but I think Tim Walz like nobody's calling Tim Walz out for not coming from an educational institution.

C. Derick Varn: 3:38:41

So we are seeing changes there. It's actually being pointed out as a point of pride that he's not rich, which unheard of. He's probably the first not vice presidential candidate I know of and one of the few not rich governors. So like that is an interesting change, and while I don't think it's a deep change, I do think it's significant but not deep, but it is important. But I do think we have to deal with the fact that one of the problems that we have with the experts is the experts have seemingly been particularly incompetent lately, and so, while I'm not totally disagreeing with you that expertise is needed, I might disagree with you that experts are needed as a category. But expertise is needed and we'll go back and forth on what that means over what that means.

Jonathan Korman : 3:39:33

But I agree with you that in the last decade or so there has been a collapse of belief that expertise is either necessary or possible, and that has enormous political implications which, on the one hand, as you say, emerges from the failure of the elites that claim their elite status on the basis of expertise but, on the other hand, is dangerous, because hard things are hard and you need expertise.

C. Derick Varn: 3:40:17

Yeah, I mean, I think it leads people. If you're against expertise, which I think a lot of it's actually a lot of worker expertise exists already, but I will admit that, like I would be hard pressed to turn over a nuclear power plant to the workers because no one entirely knows exactly how it all works, except for a few very select people. And there's good reasons for that, for national security reasons and others. But it still leads to a very bad situation, one that I just don't hear. People just admit how hard it is to untangle enough Like so but the. It is to untangle enough like um so but the. The other side of that is where elites have effectively created nepo, nepo babies that are almost aristocratic, like in uh, there are leftists complaining about that.

C. Derick Varn: 3:41:07

I call it pmc on pmc violence. But there's a rational truth to it in the sense of you know, uh, because most of those people who talk that way are from that class, are from that strata, is what I would call them. But yeah, um, but I would say that there's also this sense in which, like david graver, who was, you and I need to have an episode of david graver one day, because we both don't like him, but I think for radically different reasons different reasons different reasons, yes, but David Graeber did say one thing that I think was true is that elites in the West not just conservative ones, all of them have been systemically protected to the extent that they really kind of aren't elite anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 3:41:45

They don't actually have the expertise, generations down, which baby boomers, as you said, have categorically seized on and not stepping down. Yeah, like, the emperor wears no clothes because Biden is a senile weirdo, but there is a sense in which, like, also there weren't a lot of people who were obvious to replace him, which is why he got the nomination in the first fucking place.

Jonathan Korman : 3:42:09

Yes, place yes, and that's because of a large generational political process which has, I mean, specifically failed to cultivate Generation X leadership.

C. Derick Varn: 3:42:27

No, and you know, I also think that's why Generation X despite what my friend Conan Neutron will say whenever I say this as they age, has become from apolitical to outright reactionary. They are more reactionary than baby boomers. In almost every poll I've read.

Jonathan Korman : 3:42:37

I mean, it's complicated because there's structure, but at large there's a smaller generation and they're not the internal structure of Generation X has a bunch of crazy shit going on in it, but yes, as a total cohort. To the degree that it is useful to talk about a total cohort, yeah, I, I, our generation, are uh, stupid reactionary assholes with extremely shallow conceptions of politics dangerous and then millennials are, like a, not just do-gooders with also shallow conceptions of politics, and who knows what Gen Z actually believes, because they're five or 29.

Jonathan Korman : 3:43:18

So-, you seem very young to a geezer like me, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 3:43:23

So it's, and I don't have hope in generational politics. One thing I will say is I draw these generational cohorts out. I think in the United States they're somewhat meaningful because of the post-war boom, but really that means that the only real generation is the baby boomers, like millennials exist, and that we're children of the. Well, I say we, I'm in this weird gray space. I guess I'm technically. Now it's officially. They've officially bracketed 80 out of out of millennials, but for a long time it was a question yeah, um, so that also tells you about the nature of these generational categories.

Jonathan Korman : 3:44:02

As their edges, no I mean they're, they are limited instruments but, um, but where they have some utility, they have some utility. They have some utility and I kind of like your observation that the only real generation in this sense is the boomers, who have characteristics as a cohort. And, of course, usually when we're talking about generational politics, we're really talking about white people in America specifically, and often, often, we're really talking about college educated white people in america.

C. Derick Varn: 3:44:36

um, and and with boomers. It's interesting because we are also talking about a wealth that was broadly shared, except specifically to black and indigenous people. Yeah, um, and even black people had some access to it, depending on where they were at.

Jonathan Korman : 3:44:57

Yes. But, I mean, there is a way in which black boomers are distinctive and have a unique experience relative to other black generations generations.

C. Derick Varn: 3:45:10

Yeah, they do, I mean and and they, but they also. They have experienced the decline in real time in their immediate children in a way that boomers right, like what?

C. Derick Varn: 3:45:21

yeah, white boomers, like have just not had as direct that an encounter until very recently, it's like in their 80s, and they barely care so like and they're not equipped to understand it for all the reasons right um, I mean I, I I don't want to say pity the poor boomer, but like there are some things where I'm like they don't understand this, for structural reasons too, like, and they kind of think that we're going to get their wealth, so it still benefits us, except they're not thinking about the reverse mortgages and the hospitals which are going to suck every last dime out of them anyway. So, like it will have ended up being a great generational bottleneck where only a few millennials benefit from it. And then you have the way and this is a perverse incentive of progressive policy, and I know I'm going to get pushback on this but the way in which having fixed mortgages in the united states, where interest races are not shared like they are in europe, um, uh, means that we have massive wealth gaps that are effectively arbitrary based on time.

Jonathan Korman : 3:46:26

Yeah, um, it's bad in europe, but it's way worse here because, like, when they raise the, the interest rate for europeans, that is diffused out in a couple years amongst even people with fixed rate mortgages, because all right, I mean like to your point right, the the, the fixed rate mortgage as a policy choice has a whole host of nightmarish policy implications, but there are also a handful of very good reasons for it.

C. Derick Varn: 3:46:56

Yeah, we didn't want.

Jonathan Korman : 3:46:57

You don't want people getting kicked out of their houses.

C. Derick Varn: 3:46:59

Right, you don't want people not being able to predict what their house costs.

C. Derick Varn: 3:47:03

Yeah, but then we've deferred that on to everyone who can't develop home equity Right, which now yeah, it's crazy where, like a, some middle class that's living on 1990s cost effectively as long as their children are grown, and some middle class who have, who need to make over two hundred thousand dollars to live a, to live a lifestyle that tick, but even as late as 2018, only eighty thousand dollars to do, yeah, and you know that's not getting into the astronomical increase in the cost of childcare, yeah, which is now more expensive than university. So it's and I do think liberal policymakers have talked about this but have completely failed to address it. They have talked about it. It have completely failed to address it.

Jonathan Korman : 3:47:57

They have a cultural blind spot. You can't talk to people about it Like you need to reframe the entire discussion, which is a thing that, like liberals have Well, the Democratic Party establishment have absolutely punted on doing right. They have long accepted that they can't. They believe they cannot frame, reframe the terms of policy discussion, and so they have accepted these things and just stayed away from these third rail questions where you know there's a ticking time bomb of policy, but you can't talk about it in proximate politics, so they're cowards about it. I agree with you about that.

C. Derick Varn: 3:48:39

Yeah, the other thing I guess I would ask you we kind of agree, although we're going to need to have another show about why there's been so much deep evolution of expertise amongst the elite classes or elite subclasses, whatever you want to call them amongst college college educated people, why college is increasingly not a predictor of success unless you're at elite colleges, which unfortunately already code for being wealthy, although they also do more noblesse oblige in other colleges, which is also weird.

Jonathan Korman : 3:49:17

And then the other elephant in the room. Well, it's because it's some very weird cultural politics too.

C. Derick Varn: 3:49:20

Yeah, and the other elephant in the room which would be on the scope of conversation today but we need to talk about sometimes, is the fact that many of these colleges, including public ones, are basically walking investment mechanisms.

Jonathan Korman : 3:49:29

The education is not even primarily what they make money off of the education is not even primarily what they make money off of, um, which does indeed have something to do with the failure of colleges to perform their mission, whatever you conceive of their mission as being content because it's not how they make money right. They have no incentives to pay attention to that. They have every incentive to ignore it.

C. Derick Varn: 3:49:53

It's like you have this institutional investment brokerage that just happened to have started out, educational institutions and ironically it was the Palestine protests that made that obvious to a bunch of people where it wasn't before.

Jonathan Korman : 3:50:07

Oh, that's really funny.

C. Derick Varn: 3:50:09

And I'm like, because I'm like that's why they're so mad about it, Like it's not even about the Israeli donors, it's about the fact you're opening the fucking books at all, um, because it looks real bad, wouldn't you do um? So it's right like.

Jonathan Korman : 3:50:24

That's just the proximate example in which the, the university, is institutionally compromised in its participation in all of these um financialized systems of fuckery and okay. Well, we have this acute example where it's attached to a genocidal nightmare. But that's just the sexy example. There's a million unsexy examples.

C. Derick Varn: 3:50:50

And every city in which a major university exists, they're the number one landlord, like Columbia and NYU, own more of New York real estate than any other group. It's insane. And then and this is why-. They're also totally implicated in this healthcare boondoggle that we mentioned too. So go ahead.

Jonathan Korman : 3:51:10

Well, and I feel like we're queuing up all of the big hard policy challenges in the current American order where housing, education, health care Right and those set aside the question of socialism.

C. Derick Varn: 3:51:32

Right, we're not even getting this.

Jonathan Korman : 3:51:33

like this is all stuff that, like this, is just my making capitalism livable project yeah, well, but if you like, if you're going to open, if you're going to open the can of, like, grand scale policy questions that you do when you ask about socialism at all, well, you end up with talking about these very particular things and also agricultural policy, like we touched on a little bit. All of those are badly broken, whether you want to disrupt the liberal order or not.

C. Derick Varn: 3:52:06

Right, and I guess this brings me to my biggest frustration, and I'm writing a piece on Mark Fisher for something right now me to my biggest frustration. And I'm writing a piece on mark fisher for something right now. Um, which he was one of the people who talked about the politics of joy way back in the day of the corbin campaign, uh, which I have very jaundiced views of, considering that he also tied that into his own mental health and we know how that ended. Yeah, he literally kind of saw this as a way out of the mental health problems that he had. Um, and I'm not saying that he was entirely wrong about the way mental health is classed. I actually think he has some insights there.

C. Derick Varn: 3:52:41

But clearly, if you were putting all your hope about your, your personal mental well-being on the Corbyn campaign, I'm not saying that's why what happened to him happened, but you can't ignore it either. But that seems to be where the Harris campaign has gone and it has largely been positively received because, frankly, I think people have have missed, like they understand that fear motivates people, but they have. They have misunderstood that, like liberals get exhausted by currently being told they're always going to have to be afraid of democracy all the time because there's also no place where that ends Like it's not, like you just win this election and that's over.

C. Derick Varn: 3:53:21

So you've seen this pivot to the politics of joy on the Harris campaign and I in a bizarre sense think that we should be, that this is both good and bad. That it's good that they're moving away from just oh, we're just battling Trump all the time and that's all we're fucking doing, but it's bad in the sense that it's an aestheticization of politics, away from all these three forms of policy in terms of just social vibes, which is social policy kind of.

C. Derick Varn: 3:53:51

And I'm not sure that that, like it, might get us through this election. And I, you know, I put mild odds on Harris, but very mild, because Trump I would have put it on Trump, but Trump's Trump was running a particularly competent campaign. The assassination attempt he did very well and then, immediately uponiden being removed, was totally lost, right he.

Jonathan Korman : 3:54:14

Just I did not know how to respond um and has been largely quiet since then.

C. Derick Varn: 3:54:19

In a weird way, and his proxies which is a mixed blessing, like yeah, um, but his proxies have been really fucking up, like both jd vance and tucker carlson and all that have not been, oh my god like you know I, I it's, you know it's.

Jonathan Korman : 3:54:33

it seemed for a long time that Trump could survive infinite unforced errors, but it turns out, maybe not so much.

C. Derick Varn: 3:54:40

Yeah, there might actually be a limit to it. We'll see. We don't know, and I still this election is so close that I don't want to call it. But if I was just looking at the electoral map I'm like it's going to depend on two people in Pennsylvania and it slightly goes to Harris, like you know and like, why should that be our condition?

Jonathan Korman : 3:54:58

But here we are. But, like I am a lot more hopeful than I was a couple months ago, when.

C. Derick Varn: 3:55:05

Oh, if Biden stayed candidate, I was like we're just done.

Jonathan Korman : 3:55:09

It was really dire and like the Harris campaign is fundamentally like. The fundamental pitch of the Harris campaign is remember how bummed you were that you were forced into this decision between these two. You know these two frustrating old men. Well, we fixed that and Harris stands for goodness and niceness and we're not going to get too particular about it.

C. Derick Varn: 3:55:41

It's like the Obama campaign and the Lori Lightfoot campaign.

Jonathan Korman : 3:55:45

Yeah, weirdly it is. You know the fundamental Obama pitch and people like you and me are consequently anxious, because we know that the Obama pitch was, in fact, an immense lie. It was not an escape from the dynamics of politics At that time. It was, in fact, ultimately an embrace of the dynamics of that era. It was the last true flowering of the dynamics of that era, and so, like we were deeply psychologically betrayed by the Obama pitch just being a complete fabrication and nobody. Anyone who tells you that they know what the policy agenda of a Harris administration will be, anyone who tells you that is full of shit Nobody knows.

C. Derick Varn: 3:56:37

No, I don't think Harris knows, even on stuff like, for example, how is she going to deal with this loan stuff that she's talking about? Like, during the administration day she was to the left of Biden, but prior to it she was to the right of Biden. Like it's, it's.

Jonathan Korman : 3:56:55

And Biden having turned out to be so full of surprises, right um who?

C. Derick Varn: 3:57:01

knows I mean biden's going to be interestingly remembered, I think in retrospect, as one of the worst but most interesting presidents.

Jonathan Korman : 3:57:12

I mean like if, if 2022, biden had been president in 1994. I would have been delighted. That would have been, you know, like a tolerable, soft, progressive Democrat vision that I could have gritted my teeth and lived with and been like, uh, maybe this is the best we can do, um, and and that would have been a huge improvement over the long, you know, reagan era, which extended through Bush, the elder, um, and so like by the. You know, the Biden we have now would have been a great figure for that moment and awkwardly, moderately, pleasantly surprising. Biden is just the wrong person for this moment, which is a moment that calls for profound boldness because we're in a massive realignment of American politics, calls for profound boldness, because we're in a massive realignment of american politics.

C. Derick Varn: 3:58:16

I feel like we've been installed realignment for a while. I mean like, in some ways, we've been in a stalemate since the clintons and yet that that, that inability to fully realign away from the reagan politics, actually defines the next 20 years like it's.

Jonathan Korman : 3:58:31

It's um, well, I mean, I, I would say like a clinton even candidate clinton, I remember, I'm old enough to remember candidate clinton was a capitulation to the, um, the long reagan era, the long liberal era I would agree with that, which, as you wisely pointed out, actually starts with Carter Right. So the long neoliberal era displaces the long New Deal era and we are in a realignment at least as profound as the opening of the neoliberal era. And I think it is in fact as profound as the opening of the New Deal era. I think it is as much a crisis as the 1930s were. And the real precipitation of this crisis is that the lodestar of the neoliberal era was movement conservatism and its embrace of neoliberalism and the way that it sold that to, you know, unreflective conservatives and the movement conservative coalition, never made sense, never made sense.

Jonathan Korman : 3:59:43

It didn't make sense in terms of interests. You know, conservatives were nostalgic for Reagan because he had this ability to make it feel like it made sense Right. No one else was ever able to do again Right. And then, by 2016, like the movement, the movement conservative coalition is all cracked. But it's just like held together by gravity and Trump. Trump shows up and just tapped it and the movement conservative coalition disintegrated. Even if he had not won the nomination, even if he had not won the presidency won, he would have broken the Movement Conservative Coalition, which would have then forced a realignment, at least on the scale that Reagan did with neoliberalism um, reagan did with neoliberalism and the and the, the, the. You know the Republicans, um, uh, you know the. The music hasn't stopped. They're, they're all running around trying to make sure that they, they don't end up without a chair when the music finally does stop.

C. Derick Varn: 4:00:46

The Democrats have not registered that they are in this moment of real alignment, no, and it's funny because they also don't register that the conservatives are in disarray and that's why they're lining up behind this incoherent Trumpist politics. Like people don't seem to realize that like look at what they do, even amongst Trumpists, when there's no Trump in the White House, in Congress.

Jonathan Korman : 4:01:31

They've been a completely ineffective congressional leader.

Jonathan Korman : 4:01:32

Yeah, and I think the appeal of you know the Harris moment to like the broad left is like it feels like any change at all.

Jonathan Korman : 4:01:34

Right, because Biden represented like the endless grind of the neoliberal era, even though he was a weirder figure than that. It felt like Biden was just clinging to the politics that Democrats had used to navigate the long neoliberal era. And Harris, at the vibes level, feels like a break from that and a look toward a positive vision. And it's a vague positive vision. It's just we're going to have some joy, we're going to get some things done, we're going to be fundamentally decent a little bit, and isn't that refreshing? And after this long moment, that is refreshing. But it's not enough to build an electoral coalition or a governing coalition or a policy program and who the hell knows what comes next. In that, if the Dems had any capacity at all, they would be offering a clear positive vision so that the next two generations would be a dialogue about whether that policy program is good, dialogue about whether that policy program is good and they're often hoping vibes and we're hoping that they're going to sneak in a policy vision, but Harris is avoiding it like the plague.

C. Derick Varn: 4:02:42

I mean actively.

Jonathan Korman : 4:02:43

Well, and if I was king of the democratic party, I would. I would do the same thing. I would say, for fuck's sake, during the campaign, stick with the vibes. The campaign, stick with the vibes and like day one when you're in office. We need a real policy vision of like okay. So here's what we're really going to do and here is our vision for the next two generations of American life.

C. Derick Varn: 4:03:08

And I do not know and I'm not saying it's impossible, but I do not given what little I know about Harris and I know a lot compared to most people but Harris is not a figure with a long figure in elected government she has. You know, her career is more as a government functionary in the prosecutorial sense, which is not the primary job of a president president um so from the bay area during her era as a political figure in the bay area.

Jonathan Korman : 4:03:39

Like I, I'm a long time harris hater, um, but the harris campaign has been more right than I believed possible I have been surprised at how well they've played all this.

C. Derick Varn: 4:03:53

They have played a bad hand really, really well From the farthest ends of the left, but I don't think that those people actually know how to suitably push back on them.

Jonathan Korman : 4:04:05

And there's just no telling what comes next.

C. Derick Varn: 4:04:09

And also when pressed they're like Jill Stein or something and I'm like that's not a realistic counter vision to Harris. You're right about Harris and the genocide. I'm not even disagreeing with you about that, and that's not something we can easily forgive. But you also are like I don't know. And you're like well, Trump is public policy is worse, it's stated and it's worse.

C. Derick Varn: 4:04:32

It's worse on every level, including on gaza and and, and the idea of trump as the isolationist, anti-war president which he sometimes still throws some hate to, gets really shown to be bullshit.

Jonathan Korman : 4:04:45

On gaza in particular, yeah, and because I'm like what he would allow to happen would lead to a bigger regional war, and so you know if you're like no, no, I mean, we got incredibly lucky while he was president, um that the rest of the world held their breath, and when he did stuff that should have escalated, they were like, well, let's just not do this now, for fuck's sake right but like you can't do that forever.

C. Derick Varn: 4:05:13

And I think I think I mean people are going to say you're being Sultan Harris. I'm like no, harris isn't able in genocide. I'm just going to like say that explicitly, yeah, and if you don't want to vote, for her.

Jonathan Korman : 4:05:26

I'm with you on that and, as a matter of campaign strategy, I think it's the right thing for her to do If you don't want to vote for her.

C. Derick Varn: 4:05:35

Well, I mean, the reason I'm very nebulous on that is his popular opinion is actually not in her favor, but it's not a popular opinion that matters very strongly.

Jonathan Korman : 4:05:55

I mean like people don't like it, but it's like point 15 on 0.15 on their concern. People who are rightly concerned with Gaza vastly overestimate the American public support for their position.

C. Derick Varn: 4:06:06

And I would say this, where I also think people are right that the public is no longer so blindly in favor of Israeli politics, even amongst baby boomers, but that, but that does not mean what I agree with you. I think it doesn't mean what people think. It means.

Jonathan Korman : 4:06:23

Like I'm just like no Americans are not ready to break the American alliance with Israel.

C. Derick Varn: 4:06:27

No, and even if they're like, oh, we should put more pressure to end this and this war should be over.

Jonathan Korman : 4:06:37

They're not going to be like, oh, we need to get rid of the zionists, because it's like that's not going to. Yeah, well, and I have, like you know, I have, uh, you know, uh, lefty acquaintances who you know, for months have been telling me biden could solve gaza with a phone call. You could just tell the israeli everybody told that too and I don't, and that is so delusional, and it's delusional because you want it to be true.

C. Derick Varn: 4:06:58

Well, it's just like the people who tell me Hamas is winning this, and I'm like in so much that they're surviving. They're winning, sure, but there's no way.

Jonathan Korman : 4:07:04

I mean Hamas are getting what they want, but what they want is actually not the deliverance of the Palestinian people in Gaza, that's for fucking sure.

C. Derick Varn: 4:07:14

But not that one. But.

Jonathan Korman : 4:07:18

but what I will say is that OK, actually let me be a little more specific, since I I got a little over my skis. There it is. It has been in the interest of Hamas for the ongoing attack to continue. Their long term aims are better served by, which is why, like we, like you talk about ceasefire negotiations, but, like the Likudniks and Hamas, neither of them really want that. So it is very hard to get to that place, that place, without something changing, which it inevitably will. But in the meantime we're really screwed.

C. Derick Varn: 4:08:00

I mean to be fair, though it doesn't help that Israel assassinated the moderate Hamas leader who was willing to play ball Like don't get me wrong, I am.

Jonathan Korman : 4:08:12

I am not. I am not taking any culpability off the shoulders of the Israelis and I'm not taking any culpability off of the United States Again, like we had a profound moral responsibility to completely wash our hands of support for Israel. For, you know, since the new year, at the latest Right and in this tactical moment, in American politics and in the conflict in Gaza, there is no percentage for anyone. Even if you are all about, we need to end the violence in Gaza, we need to protect the Gazans by every means we have available.

Jonathan Korman : 4:08:55

Harris taking a strong stance cannot help with that at all. She's not in a position to make anything happen, so the best thing she can do is to steer clear of the issue as much as possible, which is shitty because she has a moral obligation to do better as candidate. But there are so many other things going on. There's nothing to gain, even if we fantasize that Harris, secretly in her heart, is a champion of Palestinian liberation and is just waiting for the chance, which she's not. But if she were, I would still tell her to stay away from the issue now, right, just for a couple of months, and then you can act, because there's no way to address it that doesn't form a wedge in the Democratic coalition.

C. Derick Varn: 4:09:47

No, I mean that's the problem. Is AIPAC is going to be an issue, no matter what? Yeah.

Jonathan Korman : 4:09:52

AIPAC is going to be an issue, you know, all of the all of the Dems who have deeper sympathy to Israel are going to be an issue. Um, and you know, frankly, the movement for Palestinian liberation is never going to be satisfied by anything she does. Nothing will be strong enough, Right? So what is there to gain by working the issue hard? Steering clear is the only thing she can do, which is miserable.

C. Derick Varn: 4:10:22

I mean, as I have pointed out to other people, I'm like outside of china, doing some superficial talks about a unity, a unit uh, unity government between hamas and Hamas and Fatah, and all this and you know, nobody has really put that much capital on ending this, Like Iran's been kind of sort of the only people to do it. Even they have been way more sedate, partly because I think they're looking to leverage this and not responding to Israel as a way to get us back on the deal, back on the nuclear deal with Obama.

C. Derick Varn: 4:10:55

That's my suspicion. But so I mean, like my point is like, okay, you're absolutely right about America's role in this and Western Europe's role in this. You're absolutely right, correct, and I mean I would even argue that this, the longer this goes on, the more we're going to see resurgence of anti-Semitism shit that you and I care about. We care about Palestinians a lot, I really do. I don't want people to think that I think you know the fear of anti-Semitism is worth as as as worth Palestinian lies. My argument is like the longer this goes on, the more anti-Semitic propaganda is going to work, because we really let real grievances that are absolutely fair and moral and right spiral out.

Jonathan Korman : 4:11:37

And it creates an opening for the worst people in the world to demagogue and sound plausible to people who are not well informed. Right and the left does not have clean hands there. Let me tell you what.

C. Derick Varn: 4:11:53

Well, I mean, this is one of the things I was going to tell you, like when people keep on telling me Hamas is going to win on the left, does not have clean hands there. Let me tell you what. Well, I mean, this is one of the things I was going to tell you, like when people keep telling me Hamas is going to win on the left, and I'm like a political victory because it's going to generalize Israel off of the death of what? Half a million Palestinians, what?

Jonathan Korman : 4:12:08

kind of victory is that?

C. Derick Varn: 4:12:10

Like that's a pretty fucking shitty victory. Yeah, like like that's a pretty fucking shitty victory. Yeah, like you know and nobody, you haven't got a single like to really solve the problem that we were talking about earlier. You need to get like a multinational coalition with, like Russia, the United States and China being willing to play on the same side. Yeah, good luck with that, but overseas transition, that's not going to happen. Yeah, so, like you know who does this exactly?

Jonathan Korman : 4:12:37

Yeah, who will bell the cat? And again it would be good if the United States of America, like, withdrew support from the Israelis, materially and politically. It would help to force their hands, but it wouldn't force their hands fast no, that's, that's what you and I agree against a lot of leftists is.

C. Derick Varn: 4:13:03

I don't think it would happen overnight and that's why you haven't had a reagan phone call like they did in beirut.

Jonathan Korman : 4:13:08

Yeah, the 80s, like I like well, I mean, I this is another thing I did a blog post about where I was like, you know, we can only cut them off once. You, only, you only get one of that card, and and I think it was wrong for Biden to try and keep his powder dry and keep that in his pocket, because now we're in a moment where you can't use it. It because now we're in a moment where you can't use it, um, but um, now that we're in this situation, you only get to play that card once, and now is not the time to do it. And and it's, and it's nightmarish that um, playing that waiting game happens while people are dying horrific deaths, but it doesn't change the dynamics. The dynamics are still true. The card is not useful now and it's the only one we have.

C. Derick Varn: 4:14:05

Well, that's a good. I mean, I guess we end up ending on something that I said that you probably don't even disagree with me we just might disagree whether it's good or bad is that we are stuck with a cipher campaign from a change candidate who's also attached to the currently ruling regime. So it's.

Jonathan Korman : 4:14:23

It's like the least imaginable democratic legitimacy alike. It's awful.

C. Derick Varn: 4:14:30

Yeah, this is, in some ways, the worst of all worlds, and it does come out of baby boomer humorous, which is in some ways the worst of all worlds, and it does come out of baby boomer hubris, which is something you've been pointing out. And when people from outside the United States would be like, why do you talk about generations like this? And I'm like this is why.

Jonathan Korman : 4:14:41

This is why what you're seeing right now is why this is why it doesn't explain everything, but wow, it is very relevant. He's a silent gem, but still, still, he acts like a baby boomer. So, like well, and I'm amused that of course, uh, you're probably going to publish this conversation right about the time where we know how the election shakes out. Um, so, to the people of the future, I, I, I apologize for my pessimism about, uh, about the Harris campaign ever becoming more substantive, but I hope that that move actually works and next time we talk, we can actually start to daydream about, like, what a better policy world looks like, either through electoralism or through a more profound politics. Wouldn't that be nice?

C. Derick Varn: 4:15:35

Yeah, my last comment is uh, project 2020, uh, 2025 is a fucked up document and, uh, I don't know that Trump ever took it entirely seriously. But it does actually tell you what a lot of his base thinks, so you can't totally discredit him for it, but he likes his demagoguery way more vaguer than that, which was my point that I was trying to make earlier.

Jonathan Korman : 4:15:55

And Project 2025 makes the contradictions kind of obvious, but Well, I mean 2025, project 2025 is the rival forces of the long movement, conservative alignment, trying to negotiate what they will get in the next era, hoping that um hoping to take advantage of the fact that trump is not actually interested in policy. Um, hoping that he will just use the ideas that are lying around and that, in the jockeying that emerges around that, they will be able to get more of what they want. And the contradictions are made visible in the Project 2025 document.

C. Derick Varn: 4:16:45

Yeah, I would. I think that's absolutely correct. But I will say that my challenge for liberals and leftists leftists, deliver fucking program that's meaningful, that isn't just nostalgia for something in the past, that's specific to our current timeline, that also doesn't end up being crypto reactionary. That's the other thing I'm going to add to it. Yeah, please. And that's my challenge, not just to Marxists, it's to all leftists. And my challenge to liberals is like why don't you have a Project 2025, motherfuckers.

Jonathan Korman : 4:17:19

Yeah, what the fuck.

C. Derick Varn: 4:17:20

Like even an incoherent one. Like you have no clear vision of shit beyond fighting Trump, and I hate to tell you the man's almost fucking 80. You're not going to get another generation off fighting.

Jonathan Korman : 4:17:36

Like Well, you're not gonna get another generation off fighting. Like well, you are gonna get another generation of maga at least.

C. Derick Varn: 4:17:39

But we don't even know what maga past trump looks like yeah, we don't like. If anything, it looks like the the battle for maga is manifested in like turkle carson being like well, maybe people who run soft interference for the Third Reich are not that bad. So you know, it's just like well, ok, you're freaking, like when you're freaking out both so Rob Amari on one end and David French on the other Like it's like something that's gone horribly wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 4:18:13

Right, so Right right, which is how you get the not popular front we have now um, yeah, it's just like when you have so rebel minds, like when, like a month ago, he was like, well, maybe trump is an answer for the working class, and now he's like I don't know, man, and I'm like, I'm like, okay, uh, you guys have lost the plot, your, your internal contradictions have gotten and, uh, have gotten too high even for your own people, and maybe trump can survive it, but trumpist can't, and so there's going to be a battle for what it is. We've already seen people misplay that because DeSantis tried to be the successor to Trump, but in some ways he's just too mean even for Trump. So it's just going to be interesting to see where it goes.

Jonathan Korman : 4:19:11

I think that's a good topic to queue up for next time we do this. What does MAGA look like after Trump?

C. Derick Varn: 4:19:21

After Trump, because we're going to have to deal with it one way or the other. We either get one more, guys, I hate to tell you, the idea of a Trump dictatorship lasting several just seems to be to break the statistical odds of survivability at some point. So, like um, I'm just like, even if he got rid of term limits, you might get two more trump administrations before he's just too old to do it. Um, so we'll see um, but we, we do need to talk about that because I don't know. I think it's like. I think that the chaos of the last Republican Congress makes it clear that it's not a clear.

Jonathan Korman : 4:20:02

They're, they're, they're unable to to form a governing policy agenda at all.

C. Derick Varn: 4:20:09

Yeah, they're barely able to form a coalition to even pretend to do that, like we're. Anyway, we've been talking for over four hours, so we're going to hear.

Jonathan Korman : 4:20:17

All right. Thank you to anyone who has actually managed to listen to us this long, and thank you, sir, for inviting me to do this. It is a delight, as ever.

C. Derick Varn: 4:20:26

All right, thank you, bye-bye.