How Zoran Mamdani Surfed Anti-Politics To Beat A Party Machine with the Rapple Report

A shock win feels like a movement—until the math starts. We dig into Zoran Mamdani’s ascent with a clear-eyed look at why voters broke for him, what “anti-politics” actually signals, and how a mayor’s bold promises get squeezed by bonds, taxes, and thin state capacity. The story here isn’t a fairy tale of revival; it’s a patient autopsy of party cartels in decline, activist narratives colliding with ordinary voter motives, and a political entrepreneur who read the room better than the machine.

We unpack the split between the activist layer and the broader electorate: one sees a springboard for a project; the other wants rent relief and competent delivery. That tension meets hard constraints. Cities don’t print money. They borrow or tax, and capital reacts. We trace why progressive mayors post-1950s hit the same wall, why LaGuardia needed Roosevelt’s federal cash, and why Dinkins and de Blasio serve as useful mirrors for what comes next. If national headwinds return—especially a Trump-era reset—does combat raise Mamdani’s profile while shrinking his room to maneuver, or does conciliation cost him the left while buying breathing room?

We also zoom out: unions that poll well but feel managerial on the ground, populism as a political strategy rather than a mass social force, and the broader void where anti-politics thrives. Mamdani’s early refusal to dignify culture-war bait showed how composure builds legitimacy in an era of institutional mistrust; later moralism was safer but weaker. The stakes now are concrete: visible affordability wins without tripping fiscal tripwires. If he threads that needle, he sets a new urban playbook. If not, the void stays open for the next savvy reader of the moment.

If this lens helps you see past the noise, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with the one question you want answered next.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Introductions & Why Mamdani Won

SPEAKER_03 1:21

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog and the Rabble Report. And I'm here with the rabble reporters, Joseph and Grant. We have a long history going back a while, and we haven't done anything collaboratively. God, probably since Emancipation's collapsed, uh, like six years ago or whatever. Um, so we're talking about well, we'll start off talking about uh momdani and move into uh our general re-coalescing, um, because my framework has gotten closer and closer to anti-politics, even though I'm probably more interested in politics than I was in the past. Uh, but I no longer think that our ways of handling politics is possible through the conventional means. And you guys, uh, this is what you do. Um, so I wanted to ask you two, uh, what do you make of yet another young political entrepreneur uh dethroning um a establishment hack? Um and we have to remember that Eric Adams was such a person not even that long ago. So um where you where where do you think we're at there?

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Story of our time, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Well, I guess the question is why do you think he won? I think if you untangled that from I don't know, all the uh I guess all the weird reactions to this, whether the the the the extremely celebratory or the the outright apocalyptic.

unknown 3:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Untangle that from why did the average person vote for him?

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Right. I mean, particularly when you look at the the demographics who voted for them, why did the average person under 45 in almost every borough but Staten Island go for him on margin? I mean, yeah, there were more conventional Democrats with with no primaries who did better uh on Tuesday night, but you know,

Voter Motives Versus Activist Narratives

SPEAKER_03 3:52

the a the average person who's not a DSA member did not who know know who Mamda um momdani was until what like three months ago?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Like probably once the primary, you know. But yeah, I mean it it's a pretty spectacular rise in prominence, right?

SPEAKER_03 4:18

Yeah, even for a New York City mayor, you know, like their think pieces on Mamdani coming out of Europe. Like I went one yesterday, you know. I that did not happen for Eric Adams. So well, what do we make?

SPEAKER_00 4:36

This is one of the reasons uh we were sort of excited to come on here, too, is that um, you know, obviously there is a difference between the passive Mom Donnie supporter or the person in New York City who voted for mom Donnie, uh, with maybe reasonable expectations, somebody who's on like you know, a left-wing voter, that kind of thing, and that message of affordability that he was going for. And then you have also, you know, I think you said it the other day, you're the man who knows DSA better than DSA knows itself, Derek. Uh, and there is this activist layer that sees this as a springboard for themselves, right? And so I think we're gonna get into why Mamdani won. I think we're gonna get into some of the myths on both sides. Obviously, you have the right with uh what we've called Mamdani derangement syndrome, right? This kind of red terror reaction to his rise as if you know Chairman Mao has just taken over New York City. Um, but there's also in a in an inverted version of that on parts of the left as well that are seeing this as really their triumph and their movement. And I think the anti-political lens, uh, which is sort of you know that decline of mass politics and the rise of this void in politics, um, it suggests maybe Mamdani is a smart political entrepreneur who was able to capitalize on an unraveling establishment. And maybe it's not their movement in terms of the DSA in a lot of ways. Um, so you know, I I think one thing we have to do though is uh I I think we're gonna end up sounding quite contrarian here, uh, no matter what, but who are we being contrary to, right? I think you know, your average Mamdani voter probably had their reasons that we can get into as well. Um, but from an anti-political perspective, we're definitely also interested in what is this faction that sees its future in this person and how's that gonna go? And if he had listened to them, would he have done as well as he did, really?

SPEAKER_03 6:56

Yeah, I mean, this is a this is an interesting question for me because I am interested in the DSA, I am gonna be more involved with them, but it's also an involvement out of almost anthropological interest. Um uh because um I've been challenging them on the scalability of any of their wins. Um and I I've talked about how they've had to de-endorse electeds, I've talked about the fact that their union campaigns are sometimes regionally successful, but they don't translate to anything nationally, like they they don't move the the national board at all. Um the net union density is still declining at the same rate than it has been. It doesn't matter how much people are salting Amazon and Starbucks. Um, I mean some of that is they don't seem to understand the scale of shops being so fundamentally different, um, which is not to say that people don't deserve unions, of course they do. Um, it's just that uh an Amazon warehouse would be a big win if you got it ever outside of New York. And um, but a Starbucks shop, that's what between 15 and 30 people per shop, and each one of them has their own their own union, or the the city has its own union depending on the local laws, and they can't even seem to get full contracts done after many, many years. Um, so when I when I challenge a lot of the DSA people on this, I get well, I mean, I you know, yesterday I got outright mass hostility. Um, I mean I did kind of troll them by comparing them to Moms for Liberty.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Um, but uh that was a good troll though. That moms for Liberty is bigger than the DSA. I mean, how do you claim to be the real movement and you're smaller than moms for liberty?

SPEAKER_03 8:59

But yeah, yeah, which yeah, they're like it's a set cult that can't get anyone elected. And I'm like, well, they took over school boards until recently. They actually do have

Anti-Politics And The DSA’s Ambitions

SPEAKER_03 9:07

more to show in educational policy, which is what they seem to care about. Um, they also screwed up their leverage totally, but arguably the DSA kind of has too. And when I I've said to other uh members of the DSA, like, okay, I'm with you, I want to be with you on this, I want to support you. Um, I want you to be successful. But I have the the question that I sincerely have is that almost everything you use, including some of your systems, are tied into the Democratic Party establishment. And that includes things like what happened with our revolution, which has created middle seat, which is now tied into David Hogg Leaders We Deserve, and and whatnot, um, which is just another, you know, um apparatus to get people into PACs and sell voter to collect voter lists from these politicians and then sell them to other progressive voters. And their biggest campaign was John Featherman, you know, and they're talking to Bernie, they come directly out of our revolution.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Groups people have never heard of that send you too many text messages. Correct.

SPEAKER_03 10:21

Um so you know, I I I want to to to talk about this though, because you also have people like uh uh Omar Fata opened the Twin Cities in Minneapolis and who kind of got wiped. Um uh like so the DSA's agenda um didn't translate downstream in that many places, at least on Tuesday night. Um it's also interesting because there's a lot of talk about the transition team, and there's a lot of talk about Lena Khan, who is, I will admit, like one of my favorite people in some ways from the Biden administration, but is a sign of like this weird vestigial Walter Mondale kind of uh like coalition politics from the 70s that Biden was trying to kind of do that had been sort of suppressed by DNC and Obama. And people are taking this as an anti-establishment pick. And I'm like, she was literally in the cabinet of the last president.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Yeah, I mean, the the populism part of the left populism in Mam Dani's campaign has diminished quite a bit since the primary victory over Cuomo. I mean, there were in a way, some degree of populism and even anti-political charge, I think, was sort of thrust upon Mamdani by circumstance. Um when you're running against, you know, Cuomo of all people. Um it's just a baseline reality that you are running against the Democratic Party's old guard unraveling and and kind of the zombie leftovers of that. But um, yeah, I I mean it's it's looking. I don't know. Joe, what do you think here? Because there's so much there's also so much we can talk about in all of that. Like Yeah, there's PSA's strategy, right? Like even the questions of does it work, does it not work? It's like what are they what are they trying to achieve? What does that relate to what any of us here want to see happen? Like all of those, like there's so much to to dig into here with all of that, too. But Joe, I don't know if you had any thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Oh, you mean like what is DSA trying to achieve versus Mam Dani?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Or I mean that's that's one way to take it, but just um it's something I'd like to ask you a picture, but no more than I needed.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

Well, I I don't know what uh what momdom is trying to achieve. I will say he gave a um a more ideological um speech than I was expecting. It made a lot of the DSA heartened, although you know the hardcore communists were still pissed because like even though he chose a Eugene Debs crow, he chose the most milktoast Eugene Debs crow you could find. Um, but the signals were picked up across the board. The other thing is like who's been weird about this and who hasn't? Like we talked about the DSA here, okay. And the DSA is increasingly in tax and it's a Ron. They're running a you know, you, us, we campaign with a big Z over it, you know. Um, but uh at the same token, um, you know, Mamdani's municipal socialism is not that different from the progressive agenda of the 70s and 80s. Uh it's not that it's it is different, but it's not that different from Bill de Blasio. Um it's and Bill de Blasio voted for and supported and endorsed Mam Dani. Um it's and yet even with the Trump apparatus throwing their weight on the scales for Cuomo, uh who of course immediately as soon as he conceded, did the normal Y left the left as if he was ever on it um uh uh think piece that they all do. Um the question becomes like, why couldn't Hillary Clinton be reasonable about this? I mean, they accepted they didn't like Dennis Kucinich, they didn't like Mike Ravel, but they weren't trying to drum him out of the party in the late 90s and the aughts. Like, and they would not have risked um throwing their weight behind an independent who was clearly bucking the primary system. Um and yet they tried to hedge their bets till the very last minute on this, which I think did make momdami more popular, frankly. Um, and who was reasonable about that? It was like former neoconservatives like Tim Miller and Bill Kristol and the people at the bulwark and the democracy, you know, the the former Republican democracy defenders uh industrial complex.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Like, yeah, I mean, Bill Kristol had a quote, and Bill Kristol, you know, this is an arch neoconservative. He worked for George H.W. Bush's uh vice president Dan Quayle. Um he he had a quote that was something along the lines of New York City gets to have a left-wing mayor. Which, I mean, if you compare that to how a lot of Republicans, and as you're getting at, centrist Democrats uh reacted to the initial Mamdani primary. Though there is also

Union Wins, Scale, And Movement Myths

SPEAKER_00 16:32

there are also these signs of conciliatory gestures from Mamdani towards this uh this part of the party. There's that that contested rumor that he did something for Hakeem Jeffries. Uh that like the uh Yeah, because there was gonna be a challenger to Hakeem Jeffries.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

I think he, or I don't know what's going on with that actually, but Mamdani was trying to pull strings to, you know, or try to sort of conciliate and be like, hey, don't don't run against Jeffries. That's the leader of the Democrats in the House right now.

unknown 17:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Everybody forgets about that. He's not exactly Pelosi, but um Yeah, I I think I do think that's kind of indicative, actually. Because what happens, and we saw this with AOC as well, that they the uh these ascendant like democratic socialists tend to try to integrate themselves into the uh party apparatus. More than float above or against it, really.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Yeah, there's there's this combination with Mamdani of uh weird overreaction levels of hostility in some camps, and then also this this kind of um really uh well, wait, why aren't you pissing these people off if you're anything radical? Uh on the other hand.

SPEAKER_03 17:58

Yeah, it's it's a it's a tight rope. It it's interesting to watch. I mean I think it's all factional politics.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Yeah. Because he's coming in, yeah. Sorry. No, no, go ahead. I I think it's because there's something about uh well, Mamdani took everybody by surprise, right? I mean, that's sort of the uh the disruptive aspect of him, really. I don't think the left even expected to get this far, really. And he doesn't really come out of the traditional left of the Democratic Party in New York.

SPEAKER_03 18:25

No, he does not. I mean, to to put it in another uh a funny story that uh Bachkar Sankara repeated is that Sankara turned him down as an intern for the nation. Like, um, so you know, now it may that may be you know them building a political myth, I don't know. Um, but it came out of the horse's mouth there. But you know, actually, there's two instances, there's two events about the the kind of factional politics of the Democratic Party they think people miss because a lot of people think that there's a big what DNC um I don't know, Hydra Squid that that runs everything. And to some degree, I don't think that's completely false, but it's kind of misleading because the different a lot of the different factions of this interest also hate each other. Um, uh, you know, one of the things about politicians is I think people do not know how much they actually probably hate each other most of the time. Um and Obama's stance on this is interesting, and and so was some of admittedly, it was one NYDSA person. I'm not saying they represent uh the a vast opinion of the DSA, but it does, it was one of the things that shocked me about the delusion levels of this. Like, I'm not sad about Mum Donnie won. I mean, like, fuck Andrew Cuomo, but that's you know, that's why. Like, yeah, that's you know, that's why most of New York voted for him, really. Right. Um, I don't want sex past grandma killer, uh allegedly, well, allegedly kind of um to to be a mayor, you know. Um but it's interesting because oh Barack Obama has a couple made a couple of phone calls to Mamdanny, and there's at least a small faction of the New York DSA that took this as Obama bending the knee to the DSA, and I just I literally laughed out loud. Whatever you want to tell yourself, guys. Because I'm like, I think people only remember Obama as withered, we're beginning to turn against him, Obama. Um, and it took a lot of people a long time to start talking fairly frankly about Obama. I mean, one of the things that uh one of the uh the late friend of the show, Michael Brooks, and I gotten up gotten a tiff once when I said, like, look, I get that like you know uh you you you you think Obama's an imperfect politician, but you'll you defend him, whereas I don't. But I have to remind myself that in 2008 my Mike Ravel canvassing ass fell for it. It's the only time in my adult life that I voted for a major party candidate for the executive. And I have to remind myself of that danger, and also I talked about our revolution, but it was Obama's organization that set up the model of grassroots org stays around to continue mobilization, mobilization dies down, but guess what? Now you got a consulting firm.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Like that's a and that's actually a good thing to ask ourselves about how are these because I I think a big conceit of these campaigns actually is to um I think there's this idea that you will build a social movement out of taking public office, but it never quite works that way. And we we've seen people attempt this before, too, and or presidential campaigns attempt it as well. Um because I think I think that was a conceit of Bernie Sanders, actually, that uh you know that from the office he will uh he will mount like gigantic rallies and and pressure campaigns that'll make Mitch McConnell fold or whatever. I I think Bom Dani's hinted at setting up something like this too, actually, while he's in office, or if it hasn't been set up already.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

But right. You've got these political actors who don't have a mass social base. And I mean, maybe look, there's a little bit of a historical memory necessary here, like maybe they can turn out some big rallies or something like that, or uh within our kind of current context. But we're talking about, you know, certain politicians were able to ram things through in the past because of their ability to mobilize like mass social groups in society on a scale that none

Populism, Party Factions, And Conciliation

SPEAKER_00 23:32

of this even comes close to touching. Um, and so they and and so there is like obviously a gridlock and a stagnancy. Uh and so they make this kind of promise like, well, we'll build the social movement out of being in office, and that's how we're going to get past these kind of frozen barriers and and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

Well, that was always my critique of St. Bernie. Um, is that what I was being sold sold felt circular to me. Like I need a workers' movement to put Bernie in power so he can change the situation so that the workers' movement he needs to exist to get elected would then exist, but he can't do that unless he's already not just elected, but has a strong contingency of the Democratic Party behind him enough to make policy and not be a lame duck president. Um, and I just I was like, that's a perfect, that's almost perfectly circular. Um, and the other thing that I've said, and you know, this is unfortunately the sign of a successful politics, uh, particularly this day and age. But you know, there's been all this talk of elite capture, Freddie DeBore bought a wrote a book about elite capture of the social justice movement. Uh uh Fume Otaira wrote a book about elite capture of uh of identity politics, which I think was a little bit more uh a little bit too self-flattering about some of the nature of that. But I've been really noticing and talking about um seeing more and more people on the uh the the train of Sandersism, as Sandersm is no longer as much of a socially viable project. Um, and there's been a deliberate amnesia there. I mean, by amnesia, I'm not talking about amnesia from 2016, I'm talking about amnesia from last year. Like seeing uh Sanders as somehow opposed to Biden, he endorsed Biden early. Um the the Sanders movement has been becoming more and more something that you see in editorial groups coming out of people who have been forced out of conventional media jobs, but have all the credentials of scholars and media people that you would expect in those jobs. Um, people with you know JDs from Harvard and with multiple academic books from Oxford University Press, and who were just normie Democrats not four years ago or not two years ago. Um, and no one's like asking, can you control these people? Is there a social movement to stop the kind of shenanigans developing from this movement that it developed in the other movements are political things or whatever? I don't I don't know what we can really call them movements, to be quite honest, um, that have existed in the past. And when you point this out, the response you get from people who are heavily politically invested is hostility. Like, like when you go, I can't I want you to succeed, but quit saying you're a movement in a country of 320 million when you have 80,000 or 85,000, I think, at most, and that your a hundred thousand numbers was actually kind of trumped up and you never even totally hit it. Um, and even if you look at a force multiplier of like times four, that's still not a lot, um, which is interesting considering how much discourse it builds. Um and that's I think that's that's this weird sort of moment because if you and I look at like what we see as political movements today, if you see something like mass politics, it's more uh believe it or not, it was an end notes essay that I saw this in. They called it anti-movement movements or whatever. It was more anti-mass politics, like you see you see attacks on the political concepts itself. Um, and it's very hard to be pushing an agenda that is based on state capacity while you literally see that state capacity falling apart in front of your eyes, undeniably.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Actually, I I wanna uh Darrell, can you explain can you explain more on the what you were saying before, actually? Sorry, on um it was what you were saying before you were talking about the state capacity. Um anti-movement movements.

SPEAKER_03 28:51

The anti-movement movements and state capacity. So anti-movement movements are things like what what we've seen things that are organic, that are not like I don't know, no king's rallies with with with uh Walmart Airis is helping in the money, uh, with very limited time frames and all that. Um yes, they're huge, yes, they're all over the nation. They are also mostly over 40. I've been to a few of them to observe, and but they do, you know, we're not even talking about like millennials here, or I saw a lot of Gen Xers um and a lot of even boomers. Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just saying it's a very different thing than the instances that you saw spark the two BLMs. Now, I taught I've I in 2014 I said the Black Lives Matter was going to be captured by fairly elite college activists and funneled into Democratic Party concerns, and it didn't happen once, it happened twice. And it happened the second time so blindingly quickly that it was kind of astounding, you know. It it almost like erased prior history of like racial integration movements, and it and it came to this point uh where you had these things in the street, and I had people, you know, I remember talking to AM uh AM uh Gitlitz from from the formerly known as Antifather and now this wreckage. Uh, and he's like, We're gonna have riots like this in the beginning of the Biden administration. Like, no, you're not, you're not, you know, you're not gonna do that. And the reason why you're not gonna do it is because this politics has already been recuperated, totally recuperated. Um, and frankly, it went through the anti-movement movement to establishment thing to grift and I'm I don't throw grift around incredibly quickly after Floyd. I mean you you did make a few millionaires uh out of that out of that movement and you created some corporate DI policies while at the time right um you know they were focused on things like college enrollment um poor black college enrollment dropped after DEI programs were really pushed and in universities or the language was pushed um what replaced it was more fairly elite international school students uh economic diversity dropped so very quickly um so it was very clear to a lot of people that what they were promised as the political manifestation of this anger that erupted in these

Movement-Building From Office: A Circular Promise

SPEAKER_03 31:47

kind of anti-political movements um was redirected towards a fairly elite shell game immediately and thoroughly which is why people when people were surprised like oh why did so many Latinos and so many black men turn tail and vote for Trump and I was like are you stupid they didn't benefit from the last couple of years you you you said one thing you did a number you did another and you're surprised that people don't trust you i mean yeah a lot of people are having buyer's remorse with Trump in those communities absolutely the polls back that up um but that's again that's just people reacting to the negative capacities of of a failing political state it doesn't seem like it can do anything for anybody except you know if you look at the the big beautiful bill for example I mean that just seems like a cash grab just like a a looting of of public resources so why are people going to trust that right like and then why are you basing your whole project on just trying to get the executive control of those public resources and you know now at a municipal level where there's even bigger limits to it possibly being successful like the municipal bond market.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Yeah that's actually a good point too uh actually you you there's a lot to chew on but that one reading brand oh I'm thinking about the I'm thinking about the executive stuff right like it's a little bit afield but um when you mention this like constant obsession with uh contesting the executive and it's it is weird like people who are you know um claim to be on the radical left which also radical left is like a thing people used to self-identify as um but uh recently Joe said radical left and somebody thought he was a a Trumper because he said radical left. I think he's used the phrase so many times now that it's just like you hear it in his voice, I guess. But that was something people used to call themselves. I don't know. But um what was I saying? Yeah the emphasis um by Democrats by everybody talking about you know rising fascism and that kind of thing on on the executive well the thing is they don't actually propose anything to limit executive power because as soon as they get their party into office what do they need the unitary executive what does Biden do sign a bunch of uh executive orders what would Sanders have had to do sign a bunch of executive orders i mean a little afield of what you were saying but it's just something that uh that came to mind about like this this whole thing about uh you have these these political groups whether it's in the Democrats whether it's in the self-professed far left who want to basically engineer a social movement and I mean I don't want to throw it back into too much history here but when you think about the 19th century workers movement um it's a little back to front to say that socialists created that I mean when you think about what socialist intellectuals did in that scenario is they observed what was going on in society and clarified it. But this these actually mass movements were not conjured out of like political voluntarism. And when you look too like you were saying at sort of more of the things that I guess people would call spontaneous or whatever I mean probably the left uh that I knew um would call it spontaneous as a slur but um because they weren't in charge of it. But uh I think mostly when I think of anti-political movements I actually think more of uh the Yellow vests um and I think of uh 15M in Spain before it became Podemos which you know Podemos is left populism much more ambitiously really than than Zoran Mamdani and um that's that's one of the things too Mamdani I mean a lot of the things we're saying about there not being a movement maybe DSAers would say well we just elected Mamdani why would at this moment you say there's not a movement but we just did an episode on our show uh with our friend Tad about the declining like horizons of left populism through the 2010s I mean it starts at Sariza and that's kind of the high point I mean it doesn't really or or Pademos right like Pademos and Ceriza and then Corbin and labor which is already a waning right and Corbin is even vaguely in terms of populism right I mean it's it's it's definitely political entrepreneurship taking advantage of the void and the political establishment unraveling but um you know it it's and then Sanders 2016 right has a much more anti-political dimension than Sanders 2020 right Sanders 2020 is like this factional figure within the Democratic Party by that point. So I mean I don't know like the it's I'm a little I know I'm a little scatter shot here right but we're just we're bringing up so many different topics that you know focusing on particularly think about it as a movement um class doesn't isn't really a clear indicator in terms of voting for this election. It's it's empirically it's just not a for them to claim the workers' movement put Mamdani into office. I mean he had a very grandiose speech where you know like you said he's quoting Eugene Debs but Eugene Debs earned those words working for a a workers movement that Eugene Debs didn't see himself as the leader of that workers movement either.

SPEAKER_03 37:58

Not initially anyway yeah you know it it's it's um that transformational grandiose tone that the the Bamdani victory speech had I mean but but Joe please uh uh go on well I mean I guess that is kind of self-evident though I mean I what I will say is um you done an extremely high high turnout for a New York mayoral race um and it's even I would even say it's uh to his advantage the uh of him as a retail politician and figure that he had so much opposition because because this like Cuomo lost with a higher vote count than the last three winners of the New York mayor election seriously uh and I do think part of it's cromo hatred but part of it is m Mamdani able to channel that Cuomo hatred into something um and then and then send the the the voters out now on who supported Mamdani the the largest supporting group in in percentages I think was uh black men as far as like per capita but the largest absolute numbers is um white women um and the biggest two dividers was wealth not income which ties to age not role of production and i'll I'll tell you one of the things that I've been like furious with the DSA is the DSA uh is very scattershot on what it calls class in a similar way to the way like right wing populists who are who are clearly trying to take advantage of you are scattershot on the way they call class. So you know oyster farmers from Maine who own their own business and come from elite school backgrounds and have not have a wage earning job outside of the military all of a sudden are being framed in Jacobin magazine as working class and the people critiquing said oyster farmer for a stupid tattoo and signs of fecklessness as PMC there's no evidence that that ties that that that those things have anything to do about what's going on in Maine. And if anything it seemed like there was a coordinated last if effort to get volunteers and money into the main senatorial election by both sides because this is not really the normal thing that would make the national news um whereas Mamdani is is a different figure than that but how long can he stay that way there's two real limitations to ask yourself one people are asking me what I mean by bonds um there are two ways that a city can raise revenue cities do not have currency sovereignty they cannot print money themselves out of a pro out of a financial problem they are

Anti-Movement Movements And 2020s Disillusion

SPEAKER_03 41:07

necessarily limited to revenues that they take in from two things municipal bonds which is debt and taxes who owns most municipal bonds businesses all right almost every progressive mayor I can think of after the 1950s has met a hard wall on funding from the municipal bond market or from capital flight from it from taxation and New York is already a high tax market mumdani probably knows he can't raise that many taxes there um good luck trying to get any kind of city council or legislator to support some kind of I mean he he would need legislative help to to get this money anyway from upstate but yeah you know everyone compares him to LaGuardia but we can talk about laGuardia because LaGuardia had big daddy FDR bucks.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Right and it's interesting too because I've seen like people complain about uh or not not complain about this actually but in the in the New York Times uh there was a recent article about uh about how he won and it talks about uh him even sort of modulating his pitch towards skittish business leaders by saying he'll look for other revenue funds other than the tax hike but when I mentioned this to uh to some you know pro Mamdani people they I know it's odd the reaction we're just like no he he just said that once he he would never actually do that he's actually he's he's a very committed socialist and I found that that was actually a very odd assertion to me too actually because it's very obvious that Mamdani had to step away from being a left ideologue to get as far as he has right he's had to not be who he was you know five years ago or or even earlier which I mean I'm not even to me I actually direct more criticism at or uh skepticism or however I mean I try to remain analytically neutral but you know I I'm really a lot of the cynicism is in the supporters who try to have their cake and eat it too with him being like a radical I think he was he ran a clever campaign and and did what he had to do to win it and he you know probably if he listened to certain people on the left more he would have had a harder time winning. But you know uh Joe I I think you were also going to bring up like past New York City I I know I know both of you have been thinking lately about past New York City mayors uh from Derek has brought up Dinkins um and then Joe you you've brought up LaGuardia right like the federal funding element of this if you want to explain your thoughts on that well especially with Trump as the context right uh well LaGuardia uh who was basically the mayor under the New Deal he ran into serious problems like in his last term because you know funding dried up because of the war but it's not that he didn't accomplish a lot as mayor but it relied very heavily on having a a close ally as president you can see the problems now with Mandani actually when you think of it that way because who's president right and it's it's like he sort of if he runs in he's in kind of a catch-22 because if he runs into problems in terms of being able to accomplish things for affordability in New York then how do you maintain authority in the current Democratic Party is fight Trump right but if you're fighting Trump how does that affect your ability to work on affordability in New York City right well here's the thing too though can he avoid fighting Trump? Yeah I I don't I don't know I mean Trump actually um uh said some things of you know maybe we'll be nice to him maybe we'll work with him kind of thing I mean we'll see but yeah but right I mean well I mean the thing too though is it's not just that because I mean um I mean I could buy Trump like you know wouldn't want to destroy New York he if he didn't have to but I could buy he has like a a sort of like sentimental attachment.

SPEAKER_03 45:28

I mean it is it's his image yeah it's his city it's it he's probably territorial over it that's probably what it is yeah um but um I think the problem is that like can Mamdani really afford being conciliatory at all I mean that that's a great question I mean would how would not just the DSA but even how would like normie democrats react to that um the other thing is um if you look at Brandon Johnson not before the DSAers come at me my fellow DSA I guess uh not part of uh the DSA wasn't endorsed by the DSA but very much tried to run off that image after Laurie Lightfoot um came in with a sweep with the progressive singing his praises and within a year less popular than the worst period of Lori Lightfoot um variety of reasons for that but I mean the a bit a big one is he can't deliver he can't deliver because he doesn't have the city council on his side the bomb market's gonna say no he can't really tax it out what is he gonna do but the one thing that has raised both his popularity locally and his profile is ice attacking Chicago like yeah I mean there's there's that question of do Mamdani and Trump kind of uh work together as natural foils you know like is that is that actually politically convenient to both of them i i don't have an answer to that but i i i think it it would have to be really um i can't i can't avoid actually yeah no i i don't know how you can avoid doing this i mean if we look at mark carney in canada who has who he's getting tons of pushback from the progressives in the liberal coalition already but because having to make real politique concessions to trump because you know there's there's literal economic limits to the canadian nationalism um uh and people have said that carney's a disaster now and i've been like but what did you expect like he like you were unhappy with the party trump attacked him it brought up canadian nationalism uh whose primary distinguishing factor is not the US like literally if you want like even Canadian right wingers they have fantasies about when we're gonna go take their water and how they're gonna stand bravely against us like um I know I'm for part of my life as a dual citizen I heard this in the 90s um the the point I'm making is that that only works for so long but it does inject you with a a temporary brief like heroic stature that you just like promising on affordability in most cities um well you know some of these go ahead fails go ahead no it just fails go ahead some of these things also aren't really contradictions if you're just a person in New York City who voted for Mamdani to say I don't like the Democratic establishment I don't like Cuomo I hope he makes rent cheaper but as far as a lot of you know the left left activist layer um

State Capacity, Bonds, And City Limits

SPEAKER_03 48:57

you know they have an ideological investment in him they have a factional politics investment in him there's things they want to get for themselves as a aspirational far aspiration an aspirational political class you know um but it's supposed to be a socialist political class right so they can't make up their minds about whether they want to run the capitalist state right and so they're going to and they keep trying to do it and then there's a lot of problems that come up when you try to do that or compromises you have to make or those sorts of things. So it's sort of and and especially too Derek I think you were getting at this earlier we're living in such an era of hostility to politics and such an era of uh like mistrust of the state and institutions that it's quite a ship to tie yourself to as well all right well the thing is the people right now I mean even today what are we giving what are we getting right now is like uh we're watching the the priorly super injected all powerful steam world we have the authority of the state conservatives already start to flake out over what like getting their ass handed to them in a counter systemic off off year election season um where also the the observational and objective facts right now is that the trends in the country actually favor um freaky candidates and liberals uh on off-year elections a reverse of the the 20th century and and the first decade of the 21st um but seems to be the new normal now because of one baby boomers dying they're just getting fucking old people and two um uh the weird um politics around education and this is also something that maddens me because people talk about like the educating PMC but then you like oh yeah but if you're talking about anyone under under 45 or over 25 it's 45 of the population now if you go up or down it was easier to achieve wealth without high levels of former education up and I mean there was a brief influx of wealth into Zoomers about three years ago uh compared to millennials but that's already over and they'll probably never own anything ever but also they're a tiny generation so it's these political dynamics don't map on to what people are trying to say they map on to um this was also true with Corbin. I remember pointing out with Corbin in ways that really made people upset when I said look um there is a tie to wealth but the most predictive thing about whether or not you are a Chris Corbin supporter and labor are a Corbin supporter uh in in the general uh when they tried to take the government and failed with more support than Kirstomer took it with um is um age age was the number one predictor and then whether or not you lived in the area around London. So it was a metropole youth phenomenon and by youth we mean people under 45 because like people live a lot longer now but it's what it is. We're not talking about people under 25 because they don't turn out to vote in mass amounts although they turn out more than in the past um so that's interesting huh? Well I mean what why did that happen is my question because well I mean there's no with with labor new labor did come out of the fact that I mean even the British unions which are more powerful than ours but have been losing power for a long time um and the EU is unpopular and Corbyn would not take a clear stance one way or the other in his relationship to Brexit because theoretically before he became leader of labor he was a a left-wing euroskeptic but how do you run a party that is explicitly remainder with that politics you kind of split the baby constantly and piss everybody off um but yeah I mean we're we're we're going back into old Corbin Corbinism and people in the in the American left make a big deal I mean Chomsky's like it was conspiracy and they there was false accu accusations of anti-Semitism and I'm like yeah but that that was always gonna happen like um but it wasn't really a conspiracy like that's not like there was a real frustration with what labor was not doing and the only reason labor won under Keir Starmer is people got fucking pissed off at the conservatives like if that's why Keir Starmer won was able to establish a government with less support than when Corbyn lost with but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 54:27

Well that that does also show when they have these kind of I well whether it's kind of an astroturfed feeling no kings protest that technically has massive numbers uh on paper or you have you know these these movements I'll put movements in quote that orient around electing somebody and then they're gonna use the the bully pulpit you know to to create a bigger socialist movement.

SPEAKER_03 54:58

Well Corbin injected all these people into the labor party what did it amount to it wasn't enough right I mean go back to Podemos and and Sereza and left populism in environments where parliamentary systems are more favorable than anything in the United States with histories of stronger less than we have that won full complete government and crashed and burned I mean yes you have Giannis Verith talking about the great betrayal of of uh of Seriza but the thing is would they have been able to actually build up an industrial capacity fast enough to float their own currency as a smallish state that could be strategically shut out of trade with parts of the EU now there are a lot of people who still say well that what the the austerity imposed under the Troika was so bad after they'd made that threat that they should have just gone ahead and done it. And I might even agree with them but the thing is that means there was no way for them to win because they would have paid for also I mean like if they had gone out and they were still as poor they would have also paid for it.

SPEAKER_00 56:21

And and these are not pro you can't build industrial bases and countries overnight like you know for the Trumpist who actually if they believed any of the bullshit out of his mouth should be learning that right now I I see somebody uh do you mind if I jump into a comment that I see from the live stream I think somebody said I don't know I think there's an opening right now for something people are more mad than they've been in my lifetime just my opinion I'm not sure if that's referencing uh you know because I've been in the conversation so I haven't been able to follow the comments or or what have you maybe that's part of a larger conversation people are mad.

SPEAKER_03 57:03

But just we agree.

SPEAKER_00 57:05

Assuming that's a response to the things we're saying right like I I wouldn't disagree that there's an open that there are openings right

Chicago, Brandon Johnson, And Deliverability

SPEAKER_00 57:12

that that the decline of mass politics this opening up of the void um that there have been these kind of openings um I think if you think about it politically there's interesting questions about okay so why has right wing populism been more successful than left wing populism in terms of exploiting some of these um in terms of political entrepreneurs, right? Why has that been more successful in general? But I also think right like when people think about opportunities I think oftentimes they're they're thinking about it in a very old way like wanting to bring the 20th century or even the 19th century and how that all looked back from that. But like to go back to an earlier point I started making about what's going on right now, what era are we actually living through right? We're seeing the end of the kind of political party cartels of the post-World War II political order. We're seeing the rise really the return of anti-politics um and what does that open up in the future? I think probably some pretty interesting things potentially but if your reaction is just this kind of rabid political opportunism to try and claw something like the old politics back I don't think that's comes from studying society or how capitalism's contradictions are coming out right now. I I think that's um I I think that like stuff like what left populism even is trying to do is entrepreneurial. I think a lot of the far left is more interested in representing the working class than the self-representation of the working class and I'm not even sure that this stuff today looks like the 19th century workers movement when it does come back right with it it'll that's the thing too it'll like the people with the actual agency over history in in those that sense are going to be the ones who choose what it looks like. Right. I mean and and we have to make decisions about do we you know do we stand with it?

SPEAKER_03 59:26

I I think that's more so there there's a couple of things that we have to to deal with one um when it comes to regulations there's actually less regulations for for things coming out of like and I don't mean like health regulations environmental regulations but like just the amount of foresight to like I don't know work with the government and do a business at the state level in China than the United States or Europe. Like so a nominally communist country uh has less business regulations than we do even though they have more control over those businesses um the other thing that that I think about when we talk about this is my friends most people who are proletarians i.e wage earners aren't in productive roles because they've been largely automated the are the I I talk a lot a bit about this but the organic capacity of capital is very high right now meaning there's a ton of fixed capital and and I'm gonna speak now in normal terms there's a lot of tech that means you need less people to make money to do a job now that lowers profit rates but you can still get high revenues from it um and that means that the power of the workers like you know someone's telling me let's all go And general strike, I'm like, okay, you you general strike at every retail place across the country, would it bring down US capital? No, because 90% of even consumer spending right now is in the top 10% bracket of income. Like, you are not relevant to the majority of capital, either in production or in consumption. Um we've never existed under those conditions before. We have no idea what it means or if it's even sustainable. I don't know that it is, but that is where we are right now. Um, so you know, these myths, and I think the general strike was mythic anyway. I know people get mad at when I say this, but like general strikes have never been what they've said they were gonna be, and they're almost never actually general strikes either.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

Um, but beyond all that, um, I guess we could talk about Wymar, but that's such a rabbit hole. I won't go there.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:47

Right. I mean, uh, beyond all that, then you also have the fact that these institutions are fragmented and piecemeal, they're public-private, they're easily corruptible, they're easy to get people into bureaucratic niches and squeeze, and the general public knows that. And then the third thing is that you have to address is like you guys can tell me all the time that that like we get we win, we get people elected, but if you ask people that I live with in Utah, all right, why they don't trust politicians or why they vote right wing. Um, I have gotten people just told me flat out, oh, we like a lot of the progressive stuff, but they never do it. Um, so I just don't trust them. And uh my church likes this guy, so why not vote that way? Or this will help my local business, so why not vote that way, or I don't vote. Like, you know. Um and and what we've seen is we've had more and more voter mobilization. I mean, like like people complain about oh, so many people in the US don't vote. More people vote now than they've ever voted, and it doesn't look the way people have assumed it was going to look. Um, I mean, it still slightly favors Democrats, but like there is this assumption that it would favor Democrats overwhelmingly and eternally, and yeah, and forever, and it's just not forever, all of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:21

Well, and and it it reminds me too, right? Like, okay, unions poll pretty well, right? Still, but do people see them as a vehicle for their interests anymore in practice? Or do they kind of assume that it's gonna be a a cluster if they actually like try and do union activism at their workplace? And and do they like I think a lot of these things, um and you talked about a ton of economic complexity that that uh people face right now. Um I think,

Age, Wealth, And Class Misreads

SPEAKER_00 1:03:57

and maybe this is a little, you know, our show is about anti-politics and society, right? Um, I tend to think that anti-politics is the way that the contradictions of capitalism are being expressed in our era. In in terms of like an actual antagonism, at least, not to say there's nothing going on economically ever, um, but we are in a period of social quiet in that sense, right? Which doesn't mean listen, nothing in history lasts forever, too. I think people get very um people get very uh narrow about like projecting the time they're living in onto kind of forever. But um but I do think whatever happens economically, I think anti-politics is sort of a feature of modern capitalism rather than something that's just like like populism, for example, right? Anti-politics can express itself technocratically, it can express itself through these kind of social movements. It can there's all sorts of ways that this kind of all bubbles up uh and is and is manifest.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:06

So that's a good point too, Grant, because to mention that there that social movements now that do happen tend to be expressed anti-politically. But I think this also might get it even why the labor movement won't fell into trouble ultimately.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:21

How do you think?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:22

I mean, I have a suspicion of where you're going, but but you said that like you know, social movements now they tend to be expressed anti-politically. We mentioned 15M, we mentioned the L Vests, those are good examples. But um does this have anything to do with why you you don't have workers spontaneously organizing into unions anymore?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:43

Oh, or when they do their new unions completely not currently existing ones, are there unions in other areas going into areas that they don't sectionally normally represent, like the UAW being desperate enough to go into TAs?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:58

Um, like public sector unions as well on the left, right? Which isn't they abandon those workers or anything, but the I mean I think the sense classically was that private sector unions were the bulk of things.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:14

Yeah, no, the what we have what we've seen since the 70s is the public sector unions have stayed steady for a variety of reasons, including that they're more ironically, they're weirdly more industrially based uh industrially like structured because they're in large institutions with large institutional capacity. Uh, so you get lots of people very quickly. Um, although that is kind of changing. Um, but it leads to like this awkward thing that, like, for example, uh the two largest unions in the UAW, uh, not in the UAW, and the AFL CIO uh are the two teachers' unions and then police unions, which leftists have no idea what to do with, because there's no way the AFL CIO is gonna kick them out since they're like the third largest sector in the and they're larger than probably all the private sector unions put together.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:18

Um, this is an interesting comment. Sorry, uh anecdotal don't anecdotally, people not in unions are as distrustful as unions as they are politicians.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:29

I would say one of the interesting things I can tell you is people like the idea of unions right now, but they still don't trust joining them.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:40

Yeah, actually, I know that labor union leaders tend to pull pretty low, not as low as politicians, but I'm I'm thinking it's like mid-20s in terms of being seen as trustworthy by the public.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:50

Not great numbers. I I would also say that's true, that's probably particularly true actually in the union. Like, we don't like our leadership by and large. Like, um, I always talk to DSAers about this. Like, I've talked to them, like, you guys always go like take McAlevy, and you take McAlevy to think that if you go into staffers and the staffers operate as this lever between politicians and the unions that you're like this big power broker, and you might be kinda, but the thing is the rank and file eventually starts to hate you because you make more and more compromises with local politicians to do that. Um, and you don't all and and by the way, staffing is the least democratic part of a union, right? Like, I can't tell the in my union there are these things called Uniserve. They're they're they both are there are legal protection, but they're also like our lobbyists, right? Guess what I have no control over as a rep. I'm a rep, I'm not even a rankifon member. I mean, I am a rankify member, but I'm not just a rankifon member. I can't do anything, I have no say in who the Uniserve is. They're not presented to us, they're presented to like elected leadership who supposedly represent us, but we have to beg to get anyone to run for elected leadership. No one wants to do it. I tried to I tried to take a step back for a year as a rep and just say, I don't, you know, I don't want to run this year, and my my people beg me to do it. Like they wouldn't let me quit. Um uh so I mean I could, but I'd be like, I'd have to, I'd have to be like, okay, well then you know, well, we might not have it like my sh my my uh local part of my uh school district might not have any representation if I don't do it. Um and you know that I say that because I know how the unions work, right? Like I'm in them. I work with organizations to coordinate between unions through worker centers. Like I do like I know a lot of people think I'm just a blow-hard armchair on the internet, but like I do a lot of this stuff, and it's amazing how much the union is, and also the structural problems with the union, uh they're not super democratic, uh, even though they try to be. I mean, they're just like uh my union does try to be, we vote on stuff, but um there's all these capture points. There's the fact that certain uh just because the way we're structured, elementary school teachers are overrepresented over high school teachers because of the because they're they're smaller shops, but they get more reps. So high school teachers get pissed off about that. There's a thousand things about actually dealing with the union that, like, if you go to Jacobin magazine, they're never gonna say anything about it ever. And a lot of them are, you know, like a lot of them are in unions. They're in like the writers guild or the teachers' union for colleges. You know what they do? They pay their dues.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:09

I mean, you know, and first of all I should mention I'm I borrowed that that point I made about public-private sector unions. Uh, I I took that pretty directly from the guest on our last uh rabble report episode. But um broader point about unions, too, that I think Joe was getting at, and that what you're saying is kind of reinforcing, I think they're seen as um managerial parts of capitalism. And I'm not saying that everybody in them is like I'm not saying that every everybody is going, I'm not joining a union because it's a managerial part of capitalism.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:44

But no, they're not thinking about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:45

I'm not saying that's like a conscious thought, but they are very baked into politics, and there is in some cases almost an HR-like quality. I mean, it's better than that, but there is an HR-like quality, but especially the way the big unions are now sort of so politically integrated and were often, you know, it's just uh why was the head of the AFT going to Ukraine during the Biden administration? Right. They're kind of just political figures now, which was not really yeah. Joe, was that something you were kind of yeah?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:27

I I think that's that completely nails it down, actually.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:30

Right. And and when like uh I see Boshkar Sankara telling me that I should like we should hope Sean Fain runs for president of the United States. I'm like, I don't need Sean Fain to run for president of the United States, I need Sean Fain to grow the fucking UAW, which is in a field that's declining, so he should really figure out how to get into other areas of the auto industry and start figuring out how to fight union battles in franchise markets. That's really hard to do, so they haven't pursued that, right? Like it's like when you see what the UAW has pursued outside of the major auto industries, is like not anything related to this. And the other thing it means is now that all now that these unions aren't representing like clear sections of industry anymore, there's jurisdictional battles all the damn time. So the unions are also poaching from each other. Um and you like is the UAW or the government,

Why Unions Feel Managerial Now

SPEAKER_03 1:13:27

are the government workers going to try to represent the TAs? Because technically speaking, if you're at a public school, the TA is technically a government worker. Um uh in fact, in some of these, some of these areas, um, you have people doing pre-majority union to try to build unions up to like get union membership, but you have different people working for different groups competing with each other. Um uh we've also had um uh you know, like the AFT has tried to raid NEA UEA post out here during COVID, um and and stuff like that. Um, and then it led to it it led to uh like the some of the UEA leadership doing things that I I don't want to talk about, I don't want to slag on my own union, but like that hurt union members to stop that raid. Um, and it's just and it led to membership decline. Um, we actually during the beginning of COVID, we saw a massive increase in people wanting to join uh the union, and by the end, we had actually gone down numbers. Uh the only thing that has to talk about the anti-political mood, you know why we're doing good right now. They tried to ban collective bargaining in Utah, and now like people are interested in joining again. Um, and so uh that's the dynamics here. And I I just I don't see people talking about it. Honestly, and if you base stuff off New York, where unions are like part of the city infrastructure governance, it's a completely different dynamic um than other places. Um, and not always one that's loved. I mean, look, I would if I was like a carpenter or something in a heavy industry, I'd much rather be in New York than Utah, I tell you that. Um, but uh at the same time, it's not like people necessarily love the union leadership. When people come out and say, well, you know, it was Ronald Reagan who convinced everyone to hate the unions, the stats don't back that up. In fact, if you go back and read stuff from the Atari Democrats like Bill Bradley in the 1970s and 80s, they were actually talking about like how union leadership was getting paid out of stock dividends and stuff, and why that was going to lead them to be able to get people to to go around the unions as a power broker in the Democratic Party and not be concerned with them anymore. Like, that wasn't coming from Reagan, that was coming from people studying what was going on in the unions themselves as the Mondale coalition started to die. Um, and there's just not been an honest reckoning with this outside of people who really know the union movement, and there are people in the union movement who are really talking about this, they talk about the problems with business unions, etc. etc. But then again, it's like, okay, you talk about business unions, you're the CPUSA or the IWW, right? Um, what what victories have you had? Like, that's the other thing is people go, okay, well, at least these guys can give me insurance, you can't even do that. Uh, what do you got? Burger World and some prison unions? That's great. You're actually doing something which you didn't do from like the 1970s to the 1990s, but like your track record isn't so good. Um, and it's very small, it doesn't scale up. And so, you know, people say I'm just black pilling them, but I'm like, if you don't know this stuff, how can you how can you possibly want to revive it? And that's why I think a lot of this stuff does come down into pure anti-politics because people are mad and they don't want to take it anymore, and it leads to a very volatile politics. But the people who like put a lot of weight on left populism, you want to get sad, go back and read Mark Fisher talking about Sariza in 2014 and 2015. Like, it is depressing. Um, like he's literally like talking about Sariza is like the possibility of joy, and you're just like, oh my god, the Harris campaign, isn't it? Well, yeah, that I actually pointed out the Harris the Harris campaign really did sound a lot like these left populists in the Corbyn coalition talking about things in 2014-2015.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:56

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned too blackpilling and doomerism and like the ineffectiveness of the kind of old forms, right? Um, I think anti-politics is kind of what saved me from being blackpilled in a way a lot of the leftists I was, you know, used to uh speak with like it's interesting because I actually probably ended up with more optimism in kind of a long-term socialist kind of or at least Marx. You don't hate people, yeah. And and and so I and like it was that simple, but it's that the anti social element of the the left, you know. Um yeah, that that was I didn't really vibe with that for lack of a better word. But I I think because of anti-politics, it's it's like um, you know, it's not just about liking people too. It's like I think there was a sense, you know, the what Marx called the real movement, right? Like, oh, the the like basically everybody I used to talk to um, you know, when I was more involved in the socialist left, is was kind of on this like the real movement is dead, everything's over, nothing is happening, what do we do? Type of black pill doomerism type of thing. And I'm like, well, actually, guys, if you like look at what's going on, there are things happening in society that you can extrapolate from, right? And they might not be the most convenient for building your pet political project, right? But that maybe that should, you know, you could think about that and think about your role in the world and what what is actually the role of a socialist intellectual anyway, and and that kind of thing. Uh I I mean I I don't find these things blackpilling. I mean, look, I'd rather probably, you know, if I worked in one of these industries, I'd rather be in a union than not. And I don't disparage, you know, the cost, like, I mean, I wouldn't downplay the cost of living crisis, for example, but really the cost of living crisis, I mean, that's been one of the few economic issues that has had salience recently electorally, and it's because people with an anti-political bend can, like anti-politicians, can basically use it to portray the establishment in a certain way, right? Like the establishment, it's a wrecking ball against their incompetence and their alienation and that kind of thing. It's not always talked about purely in this way of like solely economic uh as an issue. It's it's often actually tied to kind of the predominant theme of our age, this political class element. I don't know. Joe, does that make sense does that mirror your experience at all?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:54

Or yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. And I think like the Mamdani campaign at its best tied the two together.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:00

Yeah, I mean, I think that's why the primary, um, one of the reasons the primary went so well. And I think one of the reasons he did get the freak out that he did to the extent he did, get Mamdani derangement syndrome. And the like, and I think the pathologic pathologization of the public that the Republicans were doing about Mamdani voters actually mirrored it, was almost their version of you know, deplorables and that kind of thing that liberals were doing 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:29

Um mutually constitutive negative feedback or positive feedback loop, if I'm actually being scientifically correct, but about negative imagery. Um, and you know, uh you this point that you guys make, one of the things that that worry me when people get super into politics, particularly when they get, I mean, I've had people tell me they get into politics because they want hope and they want community, and I'm like, oh god, this is like the worst reason to ever touch anything political. Uh, you will it like because people will betray you and it'll it'll hurt.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:01

Um I get scared when I hear people talk about community now.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:06

Um uh, but you know, one of the things that I I've told people is like until people politicize things in a certain way, um, I generally think the public was was going in in ways that progressives more or less liked.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:27

Yeah, I mean, you we we used to have an idea for an article that was basically called is the public fascist or is the public reactionary or something like that, like in the the height of Trump term one, we were thinking about this. And it's just like, okay, empirically, you just look issue by issue, and okay, no, the public does not hold these views.

Public Mistrust, Turnout, And Quiet Social Change

SPEAKER_00 1:22:48

Like, there's there's just not a basis to think of like, and you even have these right-wing populists in Europe sometimes doing well precisely as actual, like, like there are polls of nationalist sentiment that show it going slightly down in some places where the right-wing populists do well. And I think that also connects to our idea that like populism is not necessarily a movement out of society, it's a political entrepreneur strategy, just like technocracy and and these other things. Agreed. Um, you know, but that also means you actually can't pathologize the public as like reactionary, because it if you are now admitting that the things that you consider reactionary at least are um are not actually a product of I don't know, some rising social movement in the streets, you know, paramilitary groups, Weimar Republic stuff that blatantly isn't happening. Um, I mean, but but it's it's very hard to get um even the left, which aligns itself with social emancipation, to trust um the public, you know, in any way. There's the the dimensions where they talk about um anti-politics or the dimensions where they talk about limiting the power and privilege of politics or or things like that, almost exclusively economic. Um, you know, they'll talk about money in politics, which is about as easy to talk about as family values for a politician nowadays, right? Like centrist Democrats talk about money in politics. But in terms of, I don't know, and these these are even limited forms, right? But referendums, term limits, these kind of things, you notice left populism is not really drawn to platforms emphasizing um things that would be probably pretty popular in that respect, right?

unknown 1:24:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:48

Why would they?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:48

I mean, the public voted for Trump.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:50

That and exactly that's kind of the full circle here is because they're pathologizing the public, and oh my god, my opponent wins sometimes. It must be the evil reactionary masses. Um and and oftentimes they have to inflate these things.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:05

Um why all these people of color are actually somehow secretly racist against themselves, multiracial fascism and all that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:16

Um it's interesting too, though, because like you see that with um you see that with the Malm Dani reaction, really. But you you you've seen this, I think, with a lot of yeah, Clinton freeze, he's in the 90s. You had um you had Obama derangement syndrome, you even had Bush derangement syndrome.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:33

I think we talked about that. I mean, Bush, I will always say Bush was the most socially destructive president of my lifetime, but there was a kind of like Bush was gonna cancel the next election type of thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:44

And oh yeah, no, you remember Robert Roof wrote a whole book on it, like yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:47

Did you know that like half of Democratic uh vote, I think half of Democratic voters in the mid-2000s, I forget the exact quote on this, but about half of them believed that Bush said 9-11.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:00

Uh 9-11 true for some switched political valences in the late uh in the late aught. Um, but yeah, it was it was endemic on the left. Another thing that was endemic on the left was uh the 2024 election. I mean not 2024, because I'm getting old and all years are the same to me. 2004 was a stolen election. Um, you know, uh Greg Pallast, journalist at the time for The Guardian, made kind of a temporary career out of that, out of promoting, you know, uh uh basically conspiracies about Dybolt machines. Um and uh that has come back. I like you know, we uh and I'm not saying that you that you should not be paranoid about about electioneering, but like the thing is right now, uh you to talk about an anti-political mood, neither partisan faction in the country trusts that the elections are clean. Neither one.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:01

And there's truth lawfare as well. There's there's that now there's this mutual cycle of lawfare. Uh yeah, you know, you'll have uh uh Lula and Bolsonaro uh on a hamster wheel putting each other in prison, um type type dynamics. Um but you know, I I I see one of the comments said, this all seriously underestimates the incoherence and flexibility of the public. I mean, I do think it's the if we want to talk about the public under capitalism, right? Capitalist society is a uh market society is a war of all against all. It's a fragmented um thing, right? There's not one general will of the public. That's actually how this state society, state civil society uh cleavage, uh this antagonism between the state and civil society emerges, you know, this this conflict of the general and the particular, that kind of thing. There's a good book about that called Marxist Critique of Politics by Gary Teeeple. Um, but uh there are, I mean, just empirically though, there are trends of social liberalization that we can look at. And I think there were other things we could look at as well to say we're not looking at rising fascism. You know, I tend to think that like um is a is a mass politics phenomenon. Um you know, maybe I'm getting a little off track here though. Joe, you were talking about Clinton crazies, and I actually love that term.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:29

Uh yeah, you have plenty of unhinged conspiracy theories thrown at the Clintons in the 90s. Um it feels like every president kind of gets actually Biden didn't get derangement syndrome, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:39

It's not because it's not a Biden derangement syndrome. No.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:41

Well, everybody assumed he was senile. I think that's why. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's weird. I don't think the right even took him seriously enough to have derangement syndrome for him. They had, I mean, they had derangement syndrome, but it was more generalized, like everybody in politics now. I do wonder if maybe that's just a general trend, really. Um, that you can't like read your uh I there has been a radicalization, I think, among the highly politically engaged. Not only the public, really, but among the highly politically engaged, not really in a left-right sense, but uh in terms of how they relate to society and even relate to like other political factions, I would say. Um so among that, you know, that silver of highly engaged, you will get something like, again, the the the these crazies or derangement syndrome, blank derangement syndrome.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:32

I think political class radicalization is also an interesting point, right? Because we think of radicalization usually in left-right terms, but um I think you can see a kind of radicalization of the center. Yeah, the center crazy years. Uh there is a like the conspiracism that when I was a young we liberal I associated with Fox News, right? Um is is just as prominent on on, you know, I mean there is a a universal, I would say, tendency in politics towards conspiracism now. Yeah. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:09

I mean, like, like people who listen to Rachel Maddow getting really mad about Marjorie Taylor Green kind of does amuse me. Um, so it particularly now that we're when people are like, what do you mean she's changing? You know, and I'm like, well, honestly, she's riding the vibe shift, uh, which is thermostatic. It's

Populism As Strategy, Not Mass Movement

SPEAKER_03 1:30:27

responding to like the fact that you can't really pretend that what the GOP is representing is anything anti political anymore. Um, and so uh, you know, I mean, she sounds like uh weird, like like conspiratorial, but kind of Kind of center lefty populist right now? It's it, you know, but that makes sense if you if you are not it you when people talk about incoherence, I'm like, okay, but you're a product of the same society. Do you think you're coherent? Seriously. Like, like, you know, people comment about me. Uh, like, how are you ever like I've said my values haven't changed much from when I was on when I was on the paleocon right to now? I'm less nationalistic. That's really the difference. Um, and like I hate capitalists the same amount, I don't trust banking the same amount, I'm not a fan of wars the same amount. Like, uh, I I actually believe in in the working class about the same amount. Like it's it, you know, and I'm like, it's it's even kind of consistent. Um, in some ways, right populist rhetoric feels more deceptive to me because I've been over there, but I also kind of feel like a lot of left pol, like left populist rhetoric is pretty damn deceptive and usually self-flattering. And like, I personally, you know, think if like if my politics makes me feel good, I should like just about me, particularly me over everybody else. Not me as a part of this like vibrant social you know, social thing trying to insert itself politically, uh, but me as just like I am the smart guy leading the room, and people will say, Oh, Varn, you're always criticizing everybody. Yeah, but I'm like, I've been wrong, really wrong about some things. Like, I have miscalled some things, I have trusted the wrong groups, like like you just if it flatters you, you have to start questioning that. And the one thing I've seen, we we have seen this with people who get so frustrated that people don't do what they think is coherent that they start to hate the the the people they want to make part of their political subject, and if you do that, um I don't know how you can uh convince people to trust you when they can kind of smell on you that you don't like them.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:09

Well, I guess that's a part of the issue with a major aspect of politics. I think our uh departed friend, the piping shripe, wrote about this. A major aspect of politics is treating the world as an ideological construct, right? Um I I I think that actually very much explains how the left operates in an ironic way. You would think the same people that you know claimed to have read marks would have taken seriously on this, but Grant, what do you think?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:46

I'm like, I'm also thinking about Marjorie Taylor Green, because we've got our whole thing with you, me and David talking about what her role is now and that kind of thing. That's like buzzing in my head, but that's a whole different uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:56

I haven't settled my opinion on that yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:58

Yeah, yeah. Um but um I definitely think to what Derek was saying, um, and and what you were just saying, there the antisocial quality just permeates every faction of politics now. There is just a general, like kind of um a sense of the public as kind of the barbarians at the gates, right? This inscrutable kind of um uh mystery that's very dangerous. Um there's you know, from the establishment, obviously they view attacks on themselves as attacks on democracy itself at this point. Um now that the populist right is in power in America, um, they do the same thing that the Democrats were doing. Um, you know, the you had the establishment, like we are democracy, basically, these these cartel parties that um were kind of falling apart. Now you'll you know, if you have populists in power, they are democracy. We are the better democracy, and an attack on us is an attack on democracy. So um I don't know. I I I just I think that um especially if you're on the left. I mean, look, if you're on the right and you don't like people, I guess that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:38

Yeah, I'd love to say it's actually sort of uh weirdly ideologically consistent.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:42

It's coherent, but what's interesting is the left simultaneously will preach like workers' emancipation, um, but it's always on their own term, on the left's terms, really. And it's always kind of you know, the left is many, many generals, very few soldiers.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:02

Um and um I think why we do this too, like why the left might be more interesting to critique as a section of politics is it is that that that contradiction seems a lot more central.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:15

Yeah, I mean it might seem right right. Like I think people uh can bristle at the fact that we you know focus more of our criticism on the left a lot of the time, and but I think that's because that contradiction, like you're saying, between their stated aims of human emancipation, you know, at the maximal, um, and what you see in practice is just much more um I don't know, compelling to needle.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:42

Um, not like that though, but I mean it was the first, the right didn't crack in terms of its social base first. The left did. Yeah. I think there's a reason for that.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:53

I mean, go on. That's actually an interesting thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:55

Well, the decline of the labor movement, more or less, right? Uh the and and of course, the right social base also kind of declines, you know, in uh you know, as the workers movement declines itself. The the business class is far less politically united now than it used to be. Even in the 80s, you saw signs of that as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:12

And then you have these lingering parties. I mean, our era is much easier to understand when you invent that too, because you have these old piping shrike, uh, who his work is unfortunately kind of hard to um find, but we can try and get some PDFs out there or something. But um, he has this thing about like, okay, you have all these parties defined by labor business politics, right? And then that social conflict, I I won't say goes away, but something that social conflict is no longer defining of politics, let's say. Um and yet the parties that were implemented to represent that social conflict are all still there. And so what do they do, right? And so, of course, now we're in an era of that like like we didn't move on, right? You'd think that the parties would then become defined by something else.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:05

Um yeah, maybe this is a way to give a broad spectrum, much larger than Mum Dani or just our characters of the left, about what we think is going on here and how you and I, you two and I came back closer together. Because I noticed the way you guys categorize these political movements roughly line up with the way I categorize the American republics. Uh, and and this is kind of how I understand it. It's partly from Michael Sindel. There are the thing that I work on in my head that Michael Sendell doesn't is I think there's there's economic reasons that correspond with these these republic shifts. So um in the early you know, 19th century, 18th century, you have this nascent expansionist, admittedly settled colonial repo uh republic movement, um, that is very localist, very diffuse. Um, even the federalist,

Derangement Syndromes And Political Radicalization

SPEAKER_03 1:39:08

you know, who are at who are actually advocating for federal power, um, are admitting that like these go up through relatively smart communities that are basically within like one or two jumps of Dunbar's number, and people know each other and they're voting up scale and this knowledge thing, although excluding large parts of the population. I'm not denying any of that. I don't want to over-romanticize it, but it was a case that people making these decisions made these decisions with people that they knew and communities that they lived in and pushed up, not down, to a very weak state, right? Like kind of what Angle's talking about, right? Right. Um, then you have the consolidation of you know of a bourgeois revolution in America. For me, it's consolidated in the Civil War. Um this leads to a larger state. You have the development of big capital, you have this industrialization process that had been going on in England for like 150 years at this point, um, but now being brought here because we're we're literally stealing their technology. And um, but it requires more political apparatus, but it's still operable and relatively coherent community models. Like, yes, it's uh you know, the industrial bourgeoisie, and it's offset by the expansion westward and by more sort of low colonialism, blah blah blah. I mean, I mean, all these things factor in together, and that sets you to about the beginning of the 20th century. Then you have this need to establish and solidify this capital control, right? And this really corresponds with. I mean, and I I think Lennon's not wrong about this, this development of kind of monopoly capital and state competition and creates these massively strong states that can also boss these industries around, like it really can boss these industries around. We can talk about how like, yes, the state actually touches more people's lives today than it did in in 1920, but the state had more power to tell its stakeholders what to do all over the place, um, because of the imperators of intercom uh of intercapitalist wars. Then you have the rise of the Soviet Union scaring the shit out of people, you have this um kind of mass workers thing that that develops, it's organic. Um, it fails in the United States about three times, but it gets bigger and bigger every time. Um, and you have this massive shift towards executive power at the end of the wars, which led to the ability to set up what we could now call an administrative state that ran on competence. Go back and read Burnham when he talks about the managerial class, he's not talking about people who have degrees, he's talking about people who have skill sets. Um, and that that hits a crisis in the 60s. Uh, and that's why the courts step in because there's literally not really a way to hold the country together politically in the same way anymore. So you would now have this administrative apparatus literally settling political problems, right? But this leads to a kind of frankly, uh, overdependence on the administrative apparatus for like progressive liberalism on everything, and we see a shift in the state form then, too, to people don't really trust this technocratic leadership by by the 80s, all right. Um, and we have people start writing in the 80s about a in the late 70s, even about a crisis of democracy. This corresponds with a crisis of profitability and capital, all right. Then after that, we increasingly have legitimization by crisis similar to what we had in the beginning at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, but kind of backwards instead of a very strong state, you have a state that's everywhere but fully controls nothing. Like they're they're they're invested in with all these private sector private actors that you can't control that have spiraling costs that they can't rule back. I mean, today, if I want to ask if you want to ask someone who can run a budget, who can run a budget? Are you gonna ask someone who runs a Silicon Valley company or someone who runs a municipal government because the municipal government actually has to make the ends meet and can't go do stock buybacks and fudge valuation to get more debt to write off on their tech, like it's a very different set of disciplines, but the only thing that can seem to draw anyone in is anti-political because the only seem the only thing that people seem to justify the politics is in the crisis. Now, let's flip to what you guys said. I'm gonna let you explain this, but what you started talking to me was like the rise of mass politics, which comes out of crisis. We have to admit, why there's mass politics in the beginning of the 20th century, it starts emerging after fucking mass slaughters and a century of war in Europe. Like that's not small. Um, mass consolidations of states that couldn't consolidate for 200 years. Um but it doesn't last very long. Like it lasts a generation. Really, that's like the era of mass politics that everyone's obsessed about is what 20, 30 years? Like, um I I guess it kind of begins, and you could argue that it begins with the with the Bonaparte sentencies after Napoleon, but like as like full scale, like everybody in Europe's involved. That's an early 20th century thing. Um then you have these catch-all parties that don't mean anything, particularly in America, right? Like, I mean, LaGuardia, the socialist, was a Republican. Um, you know, uh uh Joe Biden, as late as 2017, I saw him speak uh here in Utah, and he was lamenting when he would sit down with civil rights leaders, but also sit down with prom Thurman. Like this was his sadness that we didn't have these broad coalitional parties that didn't believe in anything coherently, it was just regional voter blocks. Um, and they they were sad about the ideological sorting that came after Nixon. Um and and the thing is that one of the interesting things about the Democrats' instinct is while they are in some ways a more ideological party, they've been also the most resistant to just admitting that they're ideologically sorting. Um, but that leads to cartel parties where you just vote party line and you don't have a choice and you're locked in, and you don't they don't respond to you, you respond to them. And that seems to be ending now, too. All right. So did I did I characterize your understanding pretty fairly?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:18

You know, I I've kind of wanted to go back actually on the mass political party. Uh but I guess maybe that does maybe that is a fits and starts thing. I mean then the American political parties uh I think they've always existed outside of the, I guess, the classic framework that we think of with mass parties with, you know, yeah, they're over to the European mass parties, actually. But right, and they're kind of like they're they're like these, they're very porous, like semi-state institutions, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:46

Like they're written intellectual. I think of I think of one of our one of our central texts that we recommend for understanding some of uh the decline of mass politics. Uh, you know, it's about Europe, uh ruling the void, is about the European Union by the Irish political scientist uh Peter Mayer. And um I think yeah, the United States is is weird uh in terms of its party systems. I mean, I think you can actually take the stuff Mayer talks about and the stuff we're talking about maybe more broadly under this kind of shorthand anti-politics, which is about like party system decline, like some of these things that come out of comparative politics, even, you know. Um but um I think of mass, I probably do think of mass politics as coming largely out of like

From Mass Parties To Cartels To Void

SPEAKER_00 1:47:47

I might put it a little earlier. I think we probably agree about the peak, perhaps, in terms of like like when it's sort of fully saturated um you know in Europe. Um but I think like you're seeing the nascent formation of mass politics with I guess the workers' movement, you know, in the 19th century.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:14

Even like universal suffrage, I would argue.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:17

Yeah. Um is it fully kind of formed? No. Um, but yeah, I I would agree also with the part where you said that um it's very brief, right? Like the default in capitalism is actually this um uh this mistrust of politics and the kind of view of it as this alienated separate sphere that we're seeing today. You have this tiny blip of mass political participation, um, you know, kind of born out of these institutions in some ways that the that the working class and other um, you know, that that the working class had sort of established in ways, um, or that were established to represent, quote unquote, um, their movements um in various ways, or to represent like denominational things like Catholics and Protestants or stuff like that, too. Um but yeah, it is very brief. You have the mass parties, and then after the world wars, you have um what uh you mentioned the catch-all party. That's a term from Otto Kirschheimer, who was in the Frankfurt school. He's very perceptive, right? Like if you read his old stuff, talking about um like no longer do parties try and represent distinct social groups in government. Now the parties are part of government and they go out to I uh and that that's also part of Peter Mayer's cartel party's idea, right? There's a little bit of overlap um because the catch all party develops into the cartel party. But like af basically what I'm trying to say is like a little take the little jargon out of it a little bit. Um, after World War II, you no longer have parties that seem like mass membership organizations out of society. Now they are going wherever they can to different social groups to try and get their votes. They're more appealing to a kind of general will of the public type of thing, which is of course an abstraction in a lot of ways. Um this also corresponds eventually to these more managerial ways of understanding the public, like voter demographics and you know, brand marketing, messaging, campaigning in that way. Um and then you get the party cartels, right? Which, you know, no matter how badly or betrayed you felt by your, you know, these parties, they would they were locked into government and they very much mirrored each other's programs, they protected each other, um, you know, they worked to keep third-party contenders out. And I think what's really feels volatile and interesting about our era is of course that that is what's kind of falling apart about the post-war political order, and which always, you know, it's uh it's um American hegemony was always a more conditional, soft kind of thing in a lot of ways. Western, but across Western democracies now, you really you see this this kind of unraveling.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:31

Um it is very inherently unstable, too, really, because it's not like populist parties didn't exist pretty much at all the same time that these parties morphed into cartels.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:42

Yeah, and now they were incorporated though more cleanly. I mean, like you think about the incorporation of uh the William Jennings Bryant faction into the Democrats or the incorporation of the Goldwater faction of the conservatives into the Republicans. Um, whereas today you can't you you do kind of feel like any political movement um to become a legitimate faction in one of these cartel parties is to do this weird thing where you're both attacking it and defending it simultaneously. Um where like, you know, I I used to comment on this with the dirtbag left. I'm like, you know, ironically, they're constantly attacking the Democrats, but they've also gotten people more wedded to the Democrats and like pretty much anyone before them. Um, if you like listen to progressives and and people in the 90s and aughts, and they want to walk away, and now they say they want to walk away, they're saying the same critiques, but like it's a faction within the party that's constantly moving up. Similarly, I mean, people are like surprised about Fuentes and this weird, actually quasi-paran fascist bullshit. But uh, that's what they've been doing is running an like an insurgency on the insurgents in the par in the in the Republican Party, and they learned that from movement conservatism itself, which did the same thing in the 80s and set the agenda. I mean, basically, all electoral politics in the 1990s was responding to that. Um, and so it's like we think of this as new. I mean, Obama, we think of him like the ultimate DNC child, but go back to to 2008. He was not, he became that, but he didn't start that way at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:29

And people forget original Obama and his appeal. I mean, he was the you can go back and watch the uh the Obama in 2008 was harder on Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders in 2016. It it had an a very technocratic anti-political bend to it. Um this is something um Joe pointed out to me and and showed me some old clips, and I was I was kind of astonished, right? Um, but some of Obama's original appeal, right, is hard to remember because I think we all remember second-term Obama, who was still popular in ways and charismatic, but I think diminished from his height pretty substantially.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:16

Um I mean, we have to remember that that you're like right before second-term Obama is when Occupy Wall Street starts as a response to Obama, which you know, uh for a lot of leftists, I was like, that's like year one of their political consciousness. Um, so uh I I do think it's hard to remember what 2008 was like and what what he was running as, particularly in the primaries. Um I mean, you know, I also remind people that Bush, who I thought of as a major insurgent candidate, was also ran as like this centrist milk toast guy in 1999, too. And people forget that. So that yeah, he ran as anti-Washington, basically.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:58

Very few politicians don't run as anti-Washington now. I mean, I I do I do wonder actually like how much of that is like what you're saying is probably in relation to uh it probably does relate to the breakdown of the parties, actually, and and the rise of anti-politics. Um I even want I mean, I I'd have to think about the dynamics of it a bit more. It's it's provocative actually to ask that, but um even something like you know, the rise of Goldwater, I think that was even directly relating to something changing in society pretty fast. Absolutely. Like it was it was a sort of political class retrenchment strategy, I think, because the right how to figure out a uh an identity what its identity will be as yeah, the civil rights movement and the 60s in general really coming to a head. I don't think you really have that type of thing now. I I guess what the the political class is reacting to is it's reacting to anti-politics, but not in a very coherent way, and not in a I think and of course in a more structurally deficient way, because the parties have broken down so much as well. What do you think, Brand?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:08

Well, um, first off, to your theme about um everybody's an outsider president now, um everybody since Carter except Bush Sr. and Joe Biden, which is interesting. Both one-term presidents, both one-term presidents. Um, and and I think that's that's a very interesting thing to observe, right? We have an episode about Carter um from back in the day as well. It's a it's a beast, it's a little long. But um what what was the other thing you were you were asking me about, though?

SPEAKER_03 1:56:43

Me or Joe?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:45

Joe, you it was about the you're talking about Goldwater, the reaction to the civil rights movement.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:54

And then um uh the the fact that what are they responding to now, though? Like, I mean I guess I guess a political class, I mean, to the the old establishment, really, I should say now. Um, how do they incorporate populism?

SPEAKER_00 1:57:09

It doesn't feel like that's what's really I mean, I guess Well, weirdly, they also do like to think of they kind of think of anti-politics as just

Obama’s Anti-Political Aura Revisited

SPEAKER_00 1:57:18

populism, but like everybody's making populist appeals now, including the mainstream politicians, like Kamala Harris was a very personalist politician in almost a like a Trumpy way. Like, I won't, I won't not, I don't think she had as anti-political a bend as Trump, obviously. Um, but in terms of that development of like the personalist politicians thing, 100%.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:42

Um me pointing out that her like her slogan sounded just like Sharesa, like what what Mark Fisher was saying about Ceriza was um which I did went at the time, and I'm like, that's weird, like straight up weird. Because yeah, you want to talk about somebody who I think was invented by a political machine almost in a laboratory, it's Kamala Harris. Like, but but I agree with you, she was very, very personable, very, very like this weird non-partisan populism that never actually works. Uh, like we'll get together with all these, you know, with the with the Republican democracy saving complex that also set up all the levers of the state that's currently being pulled, but we're not gonna mention that. Um uh um, you know, like yeah, which even led to weird stuff. Like I pointed out recently finding a clip of Bernie thanking the Cheneys for their defense of democracy in 2024. And I'm like, well, you know, it wouldn't have been necessary if you never did the Patriot Act in the first fucking place. But like, you know, it this kind of stuff is is like ubiquitous.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:54

It is actually interesting that uh I guess we did get into that in our episode, didn't we? About uh the left seems to have issues attacking institutions when they're in power as well. I wonder how much that relates to what we're what we're talking about here, actually, that ability to incorporate or not.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:09

Can you elaborate a little bit? I think I know what you mean. The left has issues attacking institutions when institutions.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:17

Yeah, yeah. Um actually, did I even yeah, never mind. Forget the last part. I was trailing off, but um yeah, no, they they have problems attacking political institutions, right? Um and you don't really see that on the right. But you can see it is very strange to see Bernie Sanders, you know, praising the Cheneys. I'll say that much. It doesn't feel very populist, it doesn't feel and it's obviously not very anti-political.

SPEAKER_03 1:59:49

No, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:50

I mean, watching maybe this is a little bit I this kind of low-hanging fruit, right? But obviously, watching the the Democrats, you know, my age, right? Growing up um at the time I did, I just remember it was so formative, the Bush administration, as this destructive thing. I mean, I I remember like we're anti-war. That's that's what we're about, right? Like, of course. And um, to see too, like these old establishments losing power, they're they're equating that basically to the end of democracy, and it's and it's worse than illegal wars, and it's worse than all of these like things that have happened in the past. I mean, um, but I'm I'm noticing too in the comments there's a little bit of a conversation pivoting back to momdani. Um You know, and maybe we can maybe we can wrap up by um by bringing this back to where we started in some ways. Um is there anything we kind of want to address about Mamdani? I saw one that was he did start out at less than 1% though. Um 11 months ago, he wasn't a serious contender. Yeah, I think that's a fair statement, right? Like Mamdani was um we even so we did an episode about the Democrats and the kind of sorry state of the opposition. Um, and we brought up Mam Dani um when he was out in the wilderness polling at 1% outside of Brooklyn. And I mean, not knowing much about the guy, I thought he was just gonna be another left populist dud, basically. Um and as soon as you started hearing what he was actually saying in the primary, there was like, oh, there's some potential here actually. But um yeah, I think I think the unique quality of the race actually injected his campaign with a certain anti-political dimension. He also had some slick marketing, okay. I mean, he worked with some marketing agencies that had some good brand development work and all of this too. Um, but but hey, that that's really only a contradiction if you're um if you're you know uh a communist, right? But I I I think um he got he got almost against his will, he got the the anti-political superpowers from how much people freaked out about right you know the unraveling of the the establishment. You know, he's kind of lucky with Cuomo as the as the foil there, uh kind of the perfect foil for that. Um but yeah, I mean there this there's a question in the chat too that I think both of you are probably interested in. Um is he a LaGuardia, a Dinkins, oh de Blasio, or something else?

SPEAKER_03 2:02:53

Well, uh I will tell you that the one comparison I've gotten the most pushback from people in the DSA when I've talked to them about this is mentioning a Dinkins. And I've been told that the DSA was basically in a whole new organization after 2015 and has no relationship to that DSA of the 80s. And I just point out the reason why the DSA is so powerful in New York is it's been a caucus effectively of the Democratic Party in New York for uh two generations, actually. I mean, like, because the DSA got helped get deacons elected in the rainbow coalition period, uh endorsed and everything, um uh with 5,000 members, but they were mostly in New York. Um now, you know, uh, will will uh Mondani uh be Dinkins? Well, the thing is if he does what certain you know people that I often agree with on the left about other things want him to do, uh he might because what Dinkins got totally undermined by the police union and by the municipal bomb market. So, like he was kind of a failed project. Um, will he be a LaGuardia? There's no federal sugar daddy for him to be a LaGuardia, there's just not. Um, will he be a de Blasio? That depends on how much the Yimby coalitions get him. If his voting record and who he's appointing is an indication they already have a foot in a door, but there is still pushback in that field. Is he something else? I I don't think we can know yet. I mean, he's not like he's a figure that some people in the DSA told me about a year ago, and then I saw really come on the the the stage uh like eight months ago, and now like they're talking about him all over the planet. So uh um, you know, I I was even watching some weird dude in Australia like uh like spam my substack because I wrote this very like measured, like Mamdanny is gonna be what what people can incentivize him to be, blah blah blah. Uh, but we should feel happy, you know, uh that we that Cuomo lost. And uh like I got some weird Australian leaving like spam things about how Mamdami was gonna institute Sharia law. Um, so like um it it was and I was like, you know, with enemies like that, even I kind of like you, um, but I don't know what he's gonna be. Like, I I don't I really don't know. But here's the thing as long as it's up to just him, the incentives for him to become a normal political, like all these people usually become, are super high. And that's really

Can Parties Absorb Populism Anymore?

SPEAKER_03 2:05:47

uh all I can really say about that.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:49

I don't think the pressure is kind of forcing too as well, especially if he's dealing with somebody like Trump.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:55

Um, but also um, because I mean what else can he do really? Um that being said, uh somebody was bringing up uh one of the things he mentioned uh was anti-corruption. I mean, he he did play on anti-political themes, I think, especially earlier in his campaign. I think I think he started it started to attenuate later on, though. One of the things I thought was actually like quite like actually quite disruptive, really, or like yeah, or quite like not politician, normal politician, like uh was how he dealt with say racist attacks early on. Remember that video where he's like, you know, they some guy on Twitter told me to go back to Uganda. So I am.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:35

Yeah, so yeah, but it was a brilliant data, actually. It's a it's a good line, and I think it has that kind of um uh raucous anti-political quality to it in it.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:46

Right, and I think the reason why it's anti-political too is that it doesn't it's uh it kind of throws a culture war away.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:53

Yeah, it's instead of doing the culture war political response, which is how dare you. Which is what he did later on, and that's kind of a big problem, you know. Mamdani, you know, he had these these people telling him go back to Uganda, and he was like, I am in Uganda, I'm visiting my family, I'm coming back though. And like that is way more well, it's it's it's also one of the reasons I think it it works too is that it avoids pathologizing the public, right? You're not inflating your opponents as representative of the dark forces controlling society and that like everybody is because one of the things about Obama that he Obama was not an anti-pop uh sorry, Obama was not an identity politics candidate, right? No, Obama was very confident that America would elect a a black president, and and I think that was part of his success. Um you know, Mamdani being dismissive of I mean, and the Islamophobia at the end from Cuomo, crazy. I have like the desperate AI slop of the late Cuomo campaign. We haven't talked about Sliwa, that would be kind of fun too. But the late um the GOP being a spoiler, and um but but like um late Mamdani, and look, I'm not I'm not trying to hate on the guy for being offended about Islamophobic remarks, but he did take much more of that conventional politician kind of outrage? Outrage stooping down to their level, kind of I want to say stooping down to their level, actually. That's not quite the way to put it, but like feeding it or kind of riding off of it, uh it's hard to explain. But I I do think that the that the I'm going back to Uganda and then I'm coming back and I'm gonna win the mayor election is a much more effective or much more anti-political approach to something like that. Because, and it's not really about morals or anything like that. I'm just saying, as a from a political strategy standpoint, it makes your opponents look ridiculous.

SPEAKER_03 2:09:09

Yeah, it makes them look it makes them look fragile and weak and petty and desperately. Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:09:15

And and that's yeah, that was all this charm too, actually, that uh that he was kind of this non-flappable candidate. Obama had the same thing. And the more the more chill you look, the more crazy your opponents look when they act like that.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:27

Right, right. And that was one of Obama's flaws too, late in his administration, or kind of when he got stuck, he would become more moralistic.

SPEAKER_03 2:09:35

Mm-hmm. No, he yeah, I remember late Obama was very finger finger waggy. Um, and the other thing I think a lot about what when we think about what the Democratic Party learned with from Obama is basically let a thousand Lori Lightfoots bloom. You know, uh, which is which weirdly is the wrong lesson to take because it isn't confident. Um uh and you know, if if people want to like actually the the thing is though, I mean, we've been talking about the like uh I don't want to go on forever, and uh bringing up Trump as as uh anti-political comp political figure, uh uh is a danger that but the thing is once you're in office, um it is hard to maintain an anti-political figure. Why do people both demonize and love Huey Long? It's because you didn't have to deal with what he actually did. Why do people both demonize well they actually didn't demonize? Why does everybody have a fucking weird myth about John F. Kennedy? Because he didn't live that long, and we don't really know what uh what a developed Kennedy administration would have been. Like, um I I don't think it's I don't think it's a surprise that like if you look at QAnon and all the weird shit, uh, but like even even on the left and the right, I got the the biggest promo I've ever gotten ratioed for uh on on X, it was back when it was Twitter, was me saying that hey, when you pretend that JFK was somehow a secret communist and he got killed because he was gonna like end the the the uh the the attacks on the Cubans or something, you're structurally making the same argument as the Birchers but with a different set of content. I got ratio and I realized, oh, people really have hope in this dude because they didn't have to watch him rule, right? So, and you know, that's the hard reality with these anti-political figures, is like um if they are left to their own devices, as basically become retail politicians, of which Mam Dani um will is an excellent one. I mean, I I can't, I mean, like he is one of the he is like I do see him as like a Lula. He like he's gonna be one of those out of nowhere, real fire, like not even a fire brand, but like stuff will roll off him. But what will people take from it if stuff doesn't happen that they want and they can't incentivize that? That's where a lot of the rubber meets the road. And um you know, I don't know what social forces are gonna do that yet.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:24

Uh and if they are, um uh I think that's sort of where um I think it that ties into what we were saying before, actually, when it came to uh I think this conceit that you can like build a social movement out of office, and it's never worked that way historically. And I think it does get things topped to bottom or really back to front.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:46

About understanding the past.

SPEAKER_00 2:12:49

Yeah. I also think to to some of what Derek is saying, like when anti anti-politics, you're kind of playing with fire as

Personalist Politics And Institutional Power

SPEAKER_00 2:12:57

a political strategy, um, anti-politicians who um lose their anti-political authority, um tend to face quite some punishment. Um that would be the case, especially like to the extent that somebody like Macron in France, uh President Emmanuel Macron, was um anti-political in that he started his own party and kind of broke up the old parties, at least, uh very technocratic approach. But like he is also the person who, in a sense, like spawned the yellow vests, which also kind of gets to the distinction between anti-politicians who are often or always, depending on who you ask, uh political actors who are taking advantage of the particular situation that we're in, uh, versus anti-politics in the broader sense of the society versus politics conflict that L. Marx wrote about.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:05

And um that's quite a different thing. I think it expresses itself differently. I don't think I don't think there's clear lines, right? Like, because I do think that some of what's happened with anti-politicians has been part of the kind of secular real movement of society in its own way. Um maybe. But uh I I think um yeah, there there is a there is a distinction there, right? They they hit these limitations um within the state.

SPEAKER_03 2:14:39

Yeah. Well, you know, um, I've really enjoyed this mutual conversation. For those people who want to check out the RABA report, you can just click on it. It's in my thingy, you can go straight to their channel. Uh, there's lots of stuff, it's a different framework than I normally talk about, but it's one that I think is helpful at getting some of your head around what we're seeing right now. Um, you know, I even reconcile it with programmatic politics because programmatic politics is actually an attempt to control and limit politicalness, but uh, but one that's often imposed, which is the problem with the way a lot of people try to do programs, is they just try to like cook up on ideology in their heads and get enforced on everybody, and that almost never works. Um, or at least not without a fuck lot of violence.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:28

Um, so yeah, maybe we could talk about the uh the measures of the Paris Commune as our kind of our ideas around it someday.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:37

But uh we should come back to that someday.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:39

I know we gotta wrap.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:40

All right. Um take care. People follow, you find link to their show on YouTube and the thing, their newest show, uh, but they're doing a lot of stuff. Those of you who may have listened to you if you've heard Grant's voice before, uh there's a podcast that I was never really a full-fledged member of, but I did show up and talk to you about right-wing literature a lot back in the day, uh, like seven or eight years ago. Uh, and that is uh Swamp Side Chats. Grant was one of the Swamp Side Chats people.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:16

Uh so I'm not Canadian. Yeah, and he's not Canadian. I'm sorry to disappoint the people in the comments.

SPEAKER_03 2:16:23

Aren't you like just a New Englander?

SPEAKER_00 2:16:25

Like I am from, I'm actually from they're gonna hate me even more in New Jersey. Um Joe is the New Englander.

SPEAKER_03 2:16:36

Um and I'm the Southerner. All right, and uh who lives out west. All right, guys, see you later.