A People’s History of the Mets: Urban Planning, Labor, and Radical Politics with A.M. Gittlitz

Why are the New York Mets the ultimate team of the working-class underworld? Author A.M. Gittlitz joins the channel to discuss his new book, Metropolitans, and pitch why leftists should actually care about sports.

In this episode, we dive deep into the Mobius strip dynamic of sports, mass culture, and radical politics. Far from just a corporate monopoly, baseball has a long history as a battleground for popular power and control over our collective leisure time. We trace the lineage of the Mets from their 19th-century amateur roots through the turbulent 1960s, exploring how the team became an anti-elitist symbol coded in direct opposition to the financial elites of the New York Yankees.

We also unpack the dark side of New York’s urban planning. Discover how "Master Builder" Robert Moses manipulated transit infrastructure around Shea Stadium to intentionally cut off public access from marginalized communities—shaping the geography of fandom we still inherit today. Whether you're a die-hard Mets fan or a Marxist skeptic of mass sports, this conversation breaks down the beautiful contradictions of a middle-class game captured by billionaires

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

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Welcome And Why The Mets

C. Derick Varn 0:50

Hello, and welcome to Arm Vlog. Today I am with Andy, also known as AM. And we are talking about his new book, Metropolitan's New York Baseball Class Struggle in the People's Team. And I am gonna try to let Andy pitch me about why I should care about baseball.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

I wouldn't do that to you. Okay, good. Now, Andy.

C. Derick Varn 1:34

I did not know a lot about the Mets until actually following up to your book, but I will say I have historically never in my life trusted a Yankees fan. And weirdly, your book about the Mets kind of solidified my distrust of Yankees fans. Now where do you think that comes from? Well, for me, it was always like, why are you, you know, why are you always rooting for the for the obvious team with a shit ton of money? Like it's you know, and some of it comes for the fact I was a Braves, I was an Atlanta Braves fan when I was a kid, particularly when the Braves weren't any good.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Rest and beast said Turner.

C. Derick Varn 2:20

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

But here's the thing when the Braves were bad, the Yankees were also bad. So they could they could put that argument right back in your face.

C. Derick Varn 2:29

Fair enough. When the Braves were better, the Yankees were the most expensive team on the planet. So right.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah, more so the Cubs, but yeah, they're this punchline for Conan O'Brien or whoever, and like maybe the Mets would be good one year, the Cubs would be the punchline, but it was they would go back and forth. Like it was there for most of their history, they've been synonymous with being hilariously bad, as they are today, despite having I think the second highest payroll in baseball or the highest. Because you're right, they're not by any means the worst team of the last five years or anything. They're probably the worst team of like the last 300, you know, uh the last 162 games. But but really, this comes from they're an expansion team in 1962. They were one of four expansion teams. The whole expansion of the major leagues was actually orchestrated to create the Mets. The other teams were kind of a byproduct of it. The uh brand tricky and the Little New Deal administration of Robert Wagner and and Robert Moses wanted the mets to happen, and so they kind of strong armed baseball into doing it by building this municipal stadium and accepting four new teams. The AL expansion teams came first, and they actually had a pretty good expansion draft. So those teams started off like kind of in the middle of the pack. The National League saw what happened in the AL and said, oh no, no, these new teams are not gonna have any good players. So they manipulated the expansion

Expansion Team Origins And 1969 Shock

SPEAKER_00 4:53

draft to make sure the new teams, which was the Mets and the Houston Cult 45s, later the Astros, would be really bad for a long time. And indeed, the Mets were the worst team in baseball history in 62 when they started, and they stayed among the worst teams in the National League until 1969 when they had this miraculous messianic World Series championship. And this was in a year when the new left was falling apart, but the Mets were sort of embracing the last moments of the new left, like uh being against the war in Vietnam, having some kind of middle-of-the-road civil rights attitudes. And so this the story of the Mets in the 60s is kind of like the story of the youth movement, the counterculture, the politicized baby boom, and the new left. And that's kind of the premise of the book, but it's also kind of why people love the Mets and hate the Mets because, in a way, it's these unresiled resolved feelings that we have about the 60s and the new left.

C. Derick Varn 6:02

Well, it it that's interesting to me associating the Mets with the New Left. I did not know until I read your book about Tom Seaver's 1969 declaration against the Vietnam War, which you know may be the most dramatic political statement by a white athlete, period, much less than baseball. Hard to think of another one. Yeah, why do you think modern baseball players generally don't speak out about well, not just international issues like Gaza or Venezuela or Iran or the Iraq war or or but also on politics in general, and they do seem to be more hesitant than other athletes in major arenas, like football and basketball, I can think of very politically active members. I can't think of that many politically active baseball players.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Yeah, and the ones that we know about are like like Noah Syndegaard, for example, is he's become a big Trumpy. A lot of yeah, it seems to be like the most common story is a an ex-major leaguer becomes really into Trump. And there's a few counterexamples, like it seems like Francisco Lindor likes Zoran, at least his wife does. And there's rumors that he's kind of has the same politics. But yeah, it's it's a really important question. It's really one of the main questions I was looking at in the book. And the easy answer is just you, there's so much pressure on you, historically in baseball, but to the in sports in general, not to speak out like that. You know, players don't even want to be honest about why the why things are bad with the team, you know. They don't even want to be honest about why they lost the game or something like that. They kind of give you this same pablum. Because especially in New York, you're gonna everything you say is gonna be fodder for the tabloids and this mill of, you know, you have to everyone needs to write a hundred articles about every little thing an athlete says or does. So they're they're very reticent to say anything, especially politically, because you know, we know what happened with Colin Kaepernick. And I think the reason that that happened to him was because it was he he he takes that action in a moment when things are starting to ebb with the the Black Lives Matter social movement. But if you look at 2020, you have players throughout sports kneeling like Kaepernick, BLM written on the mound and in the end's end zone, all of all of that kind of stuff is like almost mandatory in sports because it comes in this moment of like this this height of social struggle, the George Floyd Uprising, which we talked about last time I was on the show. And so in moments like that, it's safe for athletes like LeBron or Dominic Smith on the Mets to speak out and even take action. Like the Mets had this walkout in 2020 after the Kenosha shootings. So in I argue that if we want athletes to be fe feel comfortable speaking out politically, it's up to us fans to make the conditions right for them to do so. And this was the case in 69 when the black athletes in 68, 6, 67, like Muhammad Ali, Karim Abdul Jabbar, the Olympic runners, had taken so much heat. And in 69, the Moratorium Day Committee was trying to make the anti-war movement look more normal, you know, with more churches and centrist politicians involved. And so it was a good cause for Seaver to attach himself to. They basically created a movement for people like Sieaver to join, ex-soldiers, ex-Marines, to kind of make it look more normal. Another answer to this question about why baseball players don't speak out so much and why athletes aren't so political in general is because increasingly US-born athletes are from the middle class. And this was true in baseball a little earlier when you saw this massive decrease in the amount of African Americans playing baseball. There's a lot of black baseball players from the Caribbean, but very, very few left who are African Americans. Most American-born baseball players are white and from the middle class and grew up with this, with the privilege of having very expensive professional training. So that's the kind of politics you're going to get from these people. And this has been basically true historically throughout baseball history in the 20th century, because of the the um the minor league circuits, the farm system was purposefully based in the ex-Confederate states to make sure that the players that were coming up didn't have ideas about unionizing and liked this idea of baseball as this capitalist monopoly or whatever. And really the only break in that is after integration, when you have this influx of black ball players who are the best ball players in the game. And so that's why that's also a big focal point in the book, is that when the second generation of black ball players is maturing in the 60s is when you see this really political moment in baseball. And there's definitely corollaries for basketball as well. I think this is why basketball has become a much more became a much more interesting sport for a time, because athletes were more free to express themselves and speak politically. And that was because it had successfully become a black sport. I but I all although I think even now we're starting to see a counter tendency to that, where a lot of US-born basketball players are also from the middle class, and you're getting a lot of foreign-born players replacing them as well.

C. Derick Varn 11:29

Well, it is interesting you bring that up. Both the ex-Confederate states, as I am from an ex-Confederate state, I was born in Georgia and lived there for the first 20-something years of my life.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

And we all When I say ex-Confederate, by the way, I'm referring to you know the first half of the 20th century. This is when the farm system was developed. So I'm not saying like anyone from Georgia today is an ex-Confederate or something. No, no, I'm not

Why Baseball Players Stay Quiet

SPEAKER_00 11:58

when baseball's major demographic was produced, that they it was uh it was from the that population.

C. Derick Varn 12:05

Well, I I mean it's important to point out though that that and this is not me pushing back on you, but this is more me filling this out. The ex-Confederacy was under industrialized, and and so that's one thing, and it was and it was the breaking point of union expansion. They basically died at the lower Appalachia. And you know, like public sector unions in my home state are still illegal outright. Like there are lobbying organizations that are tied to unions in other states and professional organizations in other states, but like you cannot collectively bargain, which is always really funny to me when I hear like uh economists complain about like the teachers' unions in Georgia, and I'm like, they don't exist. But anyway, the but also the it made it a flashpoint for integration. So my high school, the yeah, I went to Jones County High School, and which is outside of Macon, Georgia, and it produced two early major players. One was Terrence Gore, who's lesser known. Yep, and the other was Willie Green. Um so so yeah, it was it's not a bad history. But basketball coach? Huh? Willie Green the basketball coach? Will Willie Green the the uh the player in 1989 who used to play for the Reds.

SPEAKER_03 13:41

Oh different Willie Green. Okay.

C. Derick Varn 13:43

Different different Willie Green. He was from my high school, and we weren't even particularly good at baseball, actually. But baseball was kind of a white sport even then. It's not so much true at the Little League level, but by the time you got into the high school, it was getting paler and paler. And my high school was 50-50 as far as the racial divide, so which is actually pretty rare.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

So it was how white kids tended to like baseball and black kids tend to like basketball and football. Correct. I mean, historically, this is this was the case. I mean, black people played baseball because it was America's sport, but there was never in and there was the Negro leagues, but it you know, Paul Robison breaks the color line in football in the 20s for a reason. It's because that's that was a much more popular black sport for a number of reasons, and then yeah, there's this brief window when baseball could have become a more black sport, but it's kind of just stayed structurally racist.

C. Derick Varn 14:52

Yeah, it and it's fascinating that it has, I mean, because I agree with you. We always considered baseball to be kind of a a prissy sport to be to use a kind of problematic term. And while everybody, I mean, I do mean almost everybody in the 80s and 90s who had the ability to do so, and it was really cheap, so almost everybody did, was joined Little League, where I was where I'm from the sport was associated with more well-off people, even in the southeast. And I've always found it interesting because you know, there's it goes the opposite direction for almost every other sport. If you look at the other sports, particularly the dangerous sports, football, boxing, what do you see? Off white immigrants, then black and Latin dominance, and it pretty much stays that way. And baseball never followed that pattern, and yet it was really a big part of southern culture because they seemed to focus a lot on us, and we you know, I never really put it together is because we had no real concept of unionization of any of any mass amount. I mean, you know, even when I was in in my 20s and making Georgia, I don't think I know of a unionized job.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Uh like ironically today, that that's that farm system, and but and I I try to make some, you know, the I don't my my power levels are not high enough to do this the way it should have been done by like a Mike Davis or something like that. But I tried to make the point that like the farm system develops in these ex-Confederate states as a result of the industrialization being based in New York in the first half of the 20th century. And of course, this changes, and this is a big change in the sport as well, with more teams going south and going west, like the Dodgers and the Giants. That farm system is developed by Branch Ricky, who's the manager of the Cardinals. He later goes to Brooklyn, becomes the manager and owner of the Dodgers. He integrates baseball because he recognized, you know, he did have some progressive politics as well, but he recognized that the labor pool that baseball was drawing from was becoming tight because of the generalization of his farm system in the 30s. So he wanted to open it up to new demographics. He wanted to hire these amazing black ball players and also Latino players and Japanese players. He even wanted to turn internment camps into player production camps too, at the start of World War II. After the Dodgers, he has this kind of absentee job in Pittsburgh and is lecturing about anti-communism and his integrationist achievements through the fifth through the 50s. And he begins worried that baseball is becoming less popular than the football because football is more telegenic. Baseball is decreasing the number of teams that the minor leagues retract by hundreds of teams in the 50s. Baseball teams like the Giants and Dodgers, like I said, are and the Braves too, are moving from town to town. So at the end of the 50s, he joins up with the New York City, like the social democratic New York City, to try to form a new league called the Continental League, that some writers have said have some vaguely communalist or socialist principles behind it. And through this effort, the Mets are created. So there's there's this direct through line through uh, you know, the farm system, Jackie Robinson, and the creation of the Mets. And it's all through Brant Tricky, who's you know, a really incredible guy to read about. A bourgeois revolutionary.

C. Derick Varn 19:04

I mean, Brand Tricky's interesting. I, you know, Robert Moses showing up shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did when I was reading your book. Because I just, you know, I associate Robert Moses with Fordism and urban planning for that time period, and also like whether he's a hero or a villain of American history depends on my mood that day. But him being so crucial to sports in New York both shouldn't have surprised me, but kind of did. Can you talk about Robert Moses' role in the sport and his relationship to the Mets, like in specific?

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah, so Moses, of course, I sort of he sort of enters the story

Class Race And The Farm System

SPEAKER_00 19:53

with the creation of the of the first World's Fair in in 1939, because this is when federal funds and the WPA are used to clear out the so-called Valley of Ashes and Flushing, where Shea Stadium and now City Field would later be built. And this particular area was really important to Moses because it's in you know, Flushing Queens is right in between Manhattan, you know, the center of the cosmopolis, you know, the the old urban conception of New York that Moses wants to, you know, destroy and rebuild in various ways. And then the Long Island Shore, where his first project, Jones Beach, is. And he's you know, he always wanted to build highways between the two, but he also the this concept becomes an entire new vision of urbanism, where the there's a cosmopolitan, kind of democratic, technological, you know, wonder city Futurama core surrounded by these idyllic suburbs. And this this is this is how Moses portrayed the future in his world's fairs. And he's he's able to do quite a lot of work in this direction during the New Deal. By the early 50s, these New Deal funds are shoring up. New York City is the manufacturing capital of the world after the war, but this is that stature is decreasing rapidly year by year. Urban, you know, j uh factories are closing up, going on Moses highways, out of town to less unionized places, places with less overhead. White people are moving to the suburbs, decreasing the tax base. The areas around Abbott's Fields and the polar grounds are blighting, ghettoizing. Margaret Moses doesn't care about baseball, but he recognizes that those teams leaving New York was revealing the contradictions of the world he was trying to build. The fact that racism like the these uh marginalized racialized areas were were not being resolved by clearing slums and building housing projects. In fact, these housing projects were deeply underfunded and causing the this new moment of anti racist the the early civil rights movement to start turning its face towards New York, claiming racism in New York, right? And so one superficial way Moses could deal with these uh this uh crisis of de industrialization of white flight. Etc. And keep his product on track was by building a stadium in Flushing because he didn't have the funds anymore to build anything else. He wanted to build this big pulp, this big park that'd be like the new central park, like linking the two worlds of the suburbia and the cosmopolis. But he wasn't going to get that money because there were still these Tammany people on the board of estimate. New Deal funds were gone. So to so to do it, he he funded a public stadium and used that enthusiasm for baseball, that crisis that New Yorkers felt when their baseball teams left to get that money, to build that stadium, to convince Major League Baseball to put a new team there. That team was the Mets. He was able to do the World's Fair as well, which was like building this whole temporary Disneyland in Flushing. And this was his fine Robert Moses' final act was providing the city with these two things that they really loved, but in the end, we're complete disasters.

C. Derick Varn 23:48

Well, I mean, it's interesting about the uh about the disaster. I mean, I knew about the Valley of Ashes because I'm an English teacher and I used to always had to go dig up what it looked like to explain to people what the hell's going on in the Great Gatsby when it is mentioned, because it's a very early 20th century phenomenon that is maintained in literature and New Yorkers know about it, but most of the rest of the country is like, I don't, you know, it's something they encounter in a book in 12th grade. What is interesting is it it makes this development kind of even more dialectically paradoxical because A, you know, Robert Moses' last great success is also ultimately a failure, but B it is ultimately an attempt to gentrify what was kind of a wasteland. There's a reason why flushing was called the Valley of Ashes.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Well, it was gentrification is not really the right word. It's it's in a way it's worse than that. Because if you look at a map of where City Field and Flushing Manows Corona Park is, it's they're surrounded by highways, and there's highways going through them. So they're really just cut off from those working class areas nearby. And that's I think part of why he liked this area, was because it was people were living there. I write a little bit about these kind of squatters that lived there in the early 30s, but for the most part, it was like what Fitzgerald writes about in The Great Gatsby, it was like auto shops and junkyards, and so that was a good place to try to build something and build highways around it that would kind of make it accessible. You know, you know, Moses wasn't the kind of segregationist who would say we'll put whites only on a sign of a park, but he wanted to be accessible to people with cars. And if and so this was a very middle class oriented vision of a kind of hair invoke social democracy, right, that Moses had. Yeah, you'll get, you know, you'll see some Mets stuff, but there it's not exactly the basis of the Mets fandom. The basis of the Mets fandom is is largely the middle class from other areas in the city.

C. Derick Varn 26:28

So how did the Mets get the reputation of being kind of the people's team? Because when we talk about this history, that isn't an obvious thing. And I'm glad you talked about the de facto segregation. One of the things that I being from the South and thus subject to the Civil Rights Act in the way that New York is not, is that when I have been to New York and been, you know, and driven around it, it is a way more segregated city informally than you would expect it to be outside of very key places. Like the Bronx isn't that way, but like and the school system is the most segregated in the country. That's uh yeah, it's because it's not even because neighborhoods, it's because of the testing regimes used to move people around. And I've always found it interesting because in some ways that was more effective in the 20th century than explicit segregation, which could be more easily, you know, stamped down on. Whereas, like Moses was one of the pioneers of like let's build this so the right people have access. We're not gonna say that other people can't have access, they can show up, but it's not gonna be easy for them, and and that's that seems to be effective. But the the Met's reputation it as a people's team seems to both transcend that and also is also in a strange way kind of a a bizarre joke. So, how does that happen? And and how does it happen despite Moses' vision and all this development?

SPEAKER_00 28:15

Well, the the the first way to answer that was marketing. So Branch Ricky, knowing the Mets would be so bad those first years, told the team's owner, Joan Payson, you have to have a lot of colorful gimmicks to attract young people to the team, attract a new generation of baseball fans to the team. You can win over the old Giants and Dodgers fans by hiring some washed up veterans, but you got to get the kids in by making this like a colorful team. So they have this comic book aesthetic that combines the Dodger Blue with the San Francisco uh with the Giants orange, right?

Branch Rickey And Baseball Modernity

SPEAKER_00 28:57

And they have a fun jingle, and you know, Mr. Matt comes in '64. So there's like it's like a cartoon team to some extent, like appealing to families, appealing to kids. But then the narrative that they went with in the sports press during their first spring training in 62 was that the Mets are the people's team compared to the Yankees. Because the Yankees at this point were still kind of in a dynastic moment, although it was declining because they had failed to integrate in the 50s. So they had they ended up having a bad 60s, but in 62, they're still a very strong team, but they have a much more conservative, button-up, suburban fan base than than they do now. So a lot of people hated the vibe at Yankees games. It was too boring for them, it was too stodgy, right? And so the Mets were branded as this anti-team to the Yankees, where you can go out to the park and you can cheer and be loud and have fun and be annoying. And they did a number of things to kind of encourage this with marketing, but really it was the fans who made that happen. This this idea of the new breed of baseball fan who filled the polo grounds those first two years and then Shea Stadium in '64 had an incredible sense of humor, an incredible DIY spirit. These were a lot of them were beatniks and you know, greasers, and folkies and lefties. And then along with their parents, they they totally changed the baseball business. Like after this, a a lot of baseball teams have to start shifting their business model to try to do something more like the Mets, because this is the 60s, you know, the baby boom is this huge generation who's coming to maturity, and they have they've got money, they're starting to work. So the Mets were really the first team to capture that kind of popularity in a mass way. And as the 60s go on, they're outdrawing the Yankees, right? They win the World Series in '69. They're expected to be a really good team after that, and they're better than the Yankees. So all of a sudden, more Mets fans, uh more New Yorkers are into the Mets than they are into the Yankees. And this stayed that way until the late 70s when the Mets are really bad again. The Mets become more popular in the 80s. So there's moments when if we define the people's team as just like who New Yorkers tend to like more or who they're more interested in, there were moments, including in the 60s and in the 80s, when the Mets really were the people's team. That's not really true anymore with that definition. So I think what I explore in the book is that there's different ideas, you know, the people's team is a very political term, right? And there's different ways of understanding what the people is. And if we talk about the people as like who do New Yorkers like the most, we're talking about this kind of cross-class alliance that naturally the Yankees are going to win because they brand themselves as the elite team. They brand themselves as the team of the elite. Donald Trump visited their clubhouse last year. They had a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk. Steinbrenner and Trump are very similar figures. You know, Steinbrenner called himself the boss. Yankees fans love the boss, right? There's this aesthetic connection, this marketing that the Yankees are the ruling class team. Whereas Mets fans, because they're losers, because they hate the Yankees, they tend to have this kind of anti-authoritarian, anti-authoritarian attitude, right? This kind of new left attitude where they kind of veer more towards this conception of the people as the losers, the underdogs, the downtrodden, maybe the proletariat, right? And I actually trace this, these two ideas of the people back to the very first New York baseball sports rivalry between the Gotham's, who were the elite branded team that played in the polo grounds in 1883, and their rivals in the working class Coded American Association, who were actually called the Metropolitans, the Mets. And that team was marketed towards the working class, and they had this like manufactured rivalry. Both teams were funded by Tammany Hall, and they were combined in 1885 into the the Giants, right? So I trace the Mets back to this very early, you know, Ur moment of that kind of politicized sports rivalry branding, and say this has you know always been a function of trying to vent class tensions in some way. And I still kind of conclude in the book that that's what it is today, sort of poking fun of at the people's team idea in general.

C. Derick Varn 33:41

Hey, I was gonna ask you about like the idea of the safety valve and using sports and marketing sports to certain classes of people. It seems to be a less effective safety valve today than it was maybe a hundred years ago, but it does seem to be pretty real. And it does also seem to be a big a big thing in New York. You don't have a history of even other fairly large cities having this exact dynamic in the same like sport. Like I can think of Atlanta, there are different sports associated with different classes and and whatnot, but not two teams that are basically pitched at two different levels of society. What about New York do you think like necessitates that kind of class mitigation? Oh, yeah, other cities in the United States have it. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

I mean, I'm just tempted to say it's the biggest city, you know, it was the most important city in it in the United States first century. The political machine that was built there became the dominant political machine of all the US cities, right? Robert Moses's blueprints for rebuilding New York become the blueprint for re rebuilding the entirety of the United States. Roosevelt's in New Yorker, right? Trump's in New Yorker. So I think there's always the uh the the kind of culture and economics and lifestyles that are developed in New York become so important for the rest of the country and the rest of the world. I mean, you go around the world, people love punk and hip-hop and street art, right? This is all stuff that comes from New York in the 70s. Baseball was invented in New York in the 1830s and 40s by uh middle class New Yorkers who worked on Wall Street, you know, professional class New Yorkers. So I think that model was I I don't I think would probably exist other places in in different ways. I mean, America has such a depoliticized sports culture in ways compared to the rest of the world, largely because baseball is so depoliticized, but we see it in New York early because it

Robert Moses And Building Shea

SPEAKER_00 36:07

actually developed in New York. The professionalized professionalization of baseball developed in New York. Uh, the first paid stadium was actually in Williamsburg, and Tammany was a big part of professionalizing sports because they were giving city workers no-show jobs so they could spend their whole time being athletes. This is what what these two things lead to the rise of the sports spectacle in the United States, and so yeah, why why has it happened in New York? I guess because New York is just the primordial ooze for everything else. And I think other cities, other places do chase these rivalries to some extent. But yeah, New York's kind of the best at it, although it's not necessarily the best rivalry, but there's I think putting class onto that rivalry is kind of a natural inclination for New York because there are there has been this like kind of genetic history of doing that with everything because there's so many leftists here.

C. Derick Varn 37:07

Well, I mean that's I mean, there are tons of leftists in New York, and I've always been fascinated by that too. I mean, even today, if I was like, if I combined all the New York boroughs together, probably dropping the Bronx. So I combine four of the New York boroughs together, that would be my largest market, and not just by proportion to the population. I have very little love in the Bronx. Most left in some have very little love in the Bronx. I don't have a lot of I don't have a lot of love in Staten Island or Long Island either. The my my base tends to be Brooklyn unsurprising to anyone.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

I love Manhattan though.

C. Derick Varn 37:59

There's nothing wrong with Manhattan. Oh, it's better. And I am culturally an East Coaster, even though I'm a Southerner, so the longer I've been out in the West, the more partisan I am for New York, particularly in the great New York versus LA rivalries. New York's and New York is interesting to me for some key things. And when you talk about like harem folk quasi-social democracy, it is interesting. Part of the reason why I think there is such a New York left is that even with the bankruptcy of the city, its social safety net from the industrial part of the 20th century has never been completely gutted. Whereas if you compare it to the to the metropoles on the west coast, they've never had that social safety net in the first place. They were developed later or earlier, but they tended not to be industrialized in the same way in the same time periods that New York was, and didn't didn't have the same Fortis policies. And you can just see this in the way the cities are set up. Um safety nets are you talking about specifically? Well, I mean, for example, you guys have better like the New York way to deal with the homeless, for example, is a lot more effective than the NGO zation that you see in California, and that is a byproduct.

SPEAKER_00 39:21

You mean having just having a lot of shelters?

C. Derick Varn 39:25

Yeah, having shelters and having shelters that are also historically were originally developed by the city first, even if they were privatized later. Whereas in LA, there's no history of that at all. I mean, it's been it's been neoliberal from when they started dealing with it. So you just see a completely different pattern. I mean, some of that's also that in in New York, if you don't have good shelters, people freeze to death, and in LA and even San Francisco, that's not as given to happening.

SPEAKER_00 39:57

But as a result of that, a lot of people go out west to be homeless, right? But yeah, I I I I have this understanding of history, and it's not comparative to other cities that that social safety net is like one of the winds of you know, the depression-era struggles, and then the austerity regime when New York City goes broke, so to speak, in 74, is this kind of bourgeois reaction to that of like, okay, you've been raising the bar of in in terms of what citizens of cities should expect for too long. Now we're gonna punish you for it. And the blight that hits New York City in the late 70s is like this warning to the rest of the world, the rest of the rest of the United States, not to follow suit with that. It's basic, you know, it's it's like it's like disaster austerity, but it was caused, you know, by the by the financial class taking over the city.

C. Derick Varn 41:04

Yeah, I think a lot about that, but I also the comparison is interesting because if you compare it to the southern and the western cities, there's just no history there. There's there was you even in losing, you still have more than the places that never had it at all.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Okay, I'll take your word for it.

C. Derick Varn 41:24

There are some like there are like tons of grants and and whatnot, but for example, if I'm gonna be homeless, for the weather, I'd rather be homeless in LA. But for like an actual way to get out of the situation and probably rather be in New York, you know where I don't want to be New Orleans, Atlanta, Miami, Dade, almost any place in the former Confederacy. There are some places out west that are better, like Sissy used to be, actually. We we for a while ran a system of uh providing homes that was even roughly based off the the mid-century New York model that we abandoned about 15 years ago and now we have massive homeless problems. But and unlike you know, California, winter here is deadly. But it's just interesting to think about sports as being a nexus for seeing that scant. You know, just like if you look at like the history of sports and class, you can figure out a lot of the racial and and immigration history of the United States, and particularly if you look at boxing, but it is interesting baseball's place in all this for me when I think about baseball and not just the Mets, because baseball is not an expensive sport to play, its equipment is not outrageous, and yet you are absolutely correct that with the conception of a period of integration, baseball has primarily been not only a white sport, but it's it's been an upper, you know, it's like in the south in the southeast, even though baseball was common, we all played it, we didn't actually care about baseball in high school. What we all wanted to be was in a college football team. Not even an NFL team. We all wanted to be in a college football team. Or you wanted to be a wrestler or whatever. And if you looked at class watching of sports, uh football had a much broader class base as some people who would go watch it, and and in the South, particularly college football.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

But yeah, this is this is what I argue is that baseball is America's pastime because it's a middle class sport, it was invented by the middle class, it structurally represents the middle class view of the world with this like switching between technical defense, you know, the production of outs, and this chaotic offense, you know, this simultaneous fetish for the technical rationality of capitalism and disdain for it, and the fear of proletarian violence and freedom and disdain for it. That's what baseball is. Switching those teams and feelings in perfect and trying to keep them perfectly balanced. And that was how it was conceived of, I think, you know, subconsciously, but possibly consciously by the people who invented it. And that's what it Kind of literally turned into when it professionalizes, when you actually get wage earners playing the game after the Civil War. A lot of them were first generation, second generation immigrants trying to get a slightly better job than carpentry or working in a steel mill or whatever. And so then as a spectacle, you're literally just seeing people at work in this like ideal social factory, right? And so and the ideal audience for that, the demographic they've always sought is the middle class demographic because they can pay more for tickets, they can go all week round because they don't they have more time off work, right? So baseball is a middle class sport and it's a battle for the soul of the middle class. And the Mets are so remarkable because I think they tell this story of the team that kind of brands itself as this kind of proletarian coded team, as like the new left imagined it, right? Whereas the Yankees represent the ruling class.

C. Derick Varn 46:01

Well, I mean it is kind of interesting to think about this then as like the Mets as the underdogs also indicates the class basis of the new left, which is losers, yeah, losers, downwardly mobile, like like the millennial left, a term I've come to hate, but nonetheless, the last will become first, yeah. The but they're not truly last, though, they're more downwardly mobile. They were in the 60s, but yes, now, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

Yeah, so it doesn't it it doesn't all this stuff like doesn't really work today. That's why I say it's like the sort of genetic memory of the 60s. What's amazing is that even though the Mets now have this highest payroll in baseball, they have this richest owner in baseball who is vowing to spend and turn them into the Dodgers and the Yankees, like getting making the playoffs every year, winning several World

Branding The Mets As The People

SPEAKER_00 47:02

Series. In the years where they have that highest payroll and they're expected to do really well, they flame out in humiliating ways. And the year where it they were rebuilding and weren't expected to be a winning team was 2024. And that's when we all had all of the wacky Metzian fun. So I think that character is still there, even if it's on life support. Either by just becoming a pure embarrassment, which is kind of what's happening this year, or by becoming the people's team again in some weird heroes arc that's yet to be foreseen. But of course, we, you know, I imagine it happening as like, you know, concurrent with some kind of proletarian revolution. Or at least it would be good for the book if it did happen.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

I think a lot about you know how fast sports can turn on their own.

C. Derick Varn 48:01

Political engagement are myths. And you you mentioned, for example, the the 2020 walkout exhibit at City Field, which was like there for a second. I don't know, like it wasn't there very long, and it was scrubbed like it never existed. We had a lot of that out here too, not you know, not so much with baseball because we don't have a major league baseball team in Salt Lake, but we had a lot of sports stuff that had victims of police shootings around the area, and with one or two exceptions, they were all kind of a race between 2021 and 2023. I find that interesting because this also happens in academia. Like, you know, academics will talk about how great they are with protests, but then you look at what they did in Gaza and what they did in the 60s, and you realize that they're full of shit and they're actually celebrating the protest they actively suppressed. But the nature of academia means that that actually takes a lot longer to happen than it does in sports. Whereas sports can just erase this stuff, you know, like overnight and just pretend like it never happened at all. I mean, if Colin Coppernik hadn't made the news, I don't know that we would even remember that.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

Yeah, I mean, because sports is so deeply in tune with the you know, the social consciousness of the United States, right? Like, and and the big test of this, you know, when I, you know, the my argument that sports is political and has some political role is really, I think, proven or like the the keystone of that argument in the book is 2020. Because how do we first realize in the United States that the pandemic is here and it's real and our lives are going to have to change as a result? When the NBA playoffs are canceled, because players on the Utah Jazz are the first to have PCRs and like, oh, we all have COVID now. So sports is canceled. This is when people realize that something has to change. And then when does everything kind of go back to normal when they have these bubble seasons and sports is back on TV, and you can keep watching the NBA playoffs and baseball's back. And so that's why I think that 2020 walkout is such a powerful moment because it's part of this wildcat general strike throughout sports after the Kenosha shooting, where it's entirely conceivable that LeBron James, who is kind of the self-appointed or widely identified leader of that strike, he could have come out and said, like, hey, all the workers in the United States should go on strike now. We're gonna strike until, you know, Black Lives Matter or we abolish police, or you know, whatever. You know, I don't know what he possibly could have demanded, but I think the best way for there to have been a general strike in 2020 or the George Floyd uprising, like moving towards a like to the next revolutionary level, would be something like that, would be an athlete, not a politician, not a leftist. No, no one gives a shit about what those people call for. But LeBron James saying, like, hey, no more sports until XYZ, that would have been huge, you know, and he had the power to do that in that moment. And Obama talked him out of it. He said, No, go shut up and dribble. We have an election coming up, you know. We'll we'll convert the sports arenas into polling places, and and that we'll defeat racism that way by defeating Trump, right? And that works, you know. You know, the Biden narrowly won, and I think LeBron may have had a hand in that, right? Because he's he's that pop, he's the goat. So I this is to say that, like, look, sports is clearly very important, and what athletes say is very important. But then, you know, if if LeBron James came out right now and said, like, stop the war in Iran, everyone would probably tell him to shut up. Well, maybe not that one, but maybe not LeBron, maybe LeBron could get away with it. But like, if I don't know, if Aaron Judge said it. Well, Aaron Judge could probably get away with it. Anyway, it's very difficult for an athlete to be taken seriously politically in this moment, but I think the conditions you know, cause because like when athletes speak out, it seems like oh, things are getting serious. Like, even the athletes are saying something, even ball might be might not be on normal schedule. It's kind of an important bellwether, right? You see what I'm saying?

C. Derick Varn 52:28

No, I definitely see it, and it's interesting that sports is different in this regard, precisely because of its depoliticized nature, than say DI initiatives in Hollywood, which like yeah, yeah. People in Hollywood care about that shit, but like nobody else really does. Like, and and we and everyone expects like actors to have a bunch of political opinions that everyone will then summarily ignore. It it's it's like expected, kind of. Whereas you're right, when if you see a bunch of athletes taking the stand on something, you're assuming that it's serious enough and there's real risk because athletes don't do that. And that I it would have been interesting to see what happened if they'd have done more in in 2020 in regards to because what we did get was the more Hollywood version of that, and then no one cared.

SPEAKER_00 53:26

Well, I think you know, I think people wanted to get back to normal, including the athletes, right? So that was an expression of the moment. But the very fact that, like, you know, Jacob Blake being shot at a uh being shot in the street causes these riots and causes athletes to stop playing as a result, shows the power of that moment. And though these moments are gonna come again. And so I guess part of the intervention of the book is trying to get baseball fans in general, obviously, mostly Mets fans will read it, but trying to argue for sports fans that, like, first of all, the history of the Mets kind of shows us the importance of the fan culture to the team, its character, its results, and all this stuff. And then and then also, okay, so maybe we're wasting all our time on sports and sitting here watching rooting for sports teams, and we're making fools, we're making ourselves into fools, rooting for these corporations and all this stuff, and we're being a marathons and all this stuff. But yeah, I mean, what else are we supposed to do, right? Like, we're supposed to go riot or write our congressperson, okay, fine, but realistically, there's not much we can do, and so we're all kind of wasting our time in various kinds of fandoms, including like leftist fandoms for various kind of sects or thinkers, or you know, what have you. And so, as long as we are spending our time in the sports fandom, just remember what side we're we're really on when it comes down to it. That's kind of my message in everything, right?

C. Derick Varn 55:02

Yeah, I've gotten very uh very frustrated with the fandoms thing. Like the great recent thing is like who is better, Chomsky or Michael Parenti, and Chomsky's now been discredited because of his defense of Epstein in the Epstein files. And you know, you got the Parinty people saying, Oh, it looks like this proves Parenti was right. And I'm like, Well, Parenti was right about some things and wrong about others, and also this is a terrible way to adjudicate truth, like picking two popular writers who you had a fandom with in the 90s and who you popularized, and neither of whom are really honestly particularly rigorous when it comes to the state.

SPEAKER_00 55:44

Yeah, but what is that really about? What is Parenti versus Chomsky really about? It's about Stalinism versus Trotskyism, and Stalinism versus Trotskyism is the exact political relationship between Yankees fans and Mets fans. Yankees are triumphant, they've they've always won. They're gonna win again, trust me. And you know, Trotskyism sucks because you lost. You got you got your ass kicked. You guys are goofy losers, you're Jewish and you're gay.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 56:21

And the way I would frame that is that's just a very middle class way of looking at the world. Sorry, everyone involved. I mean, the I mean the irony that's transparent is like, well, the Soviet Union is still gone though. Um and it doesn't seem to be coming back. So, you know, unless Putin's got the the little switch that they told us about in the Simpsons where the Russian Federation flag that's this drops his colors and everything's red again, and and Linen raises from the grave. I just don't see that as mattering.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

I agree. The Yankees empire is over, it's time now. It's it's Dodger globalism, techno-capitalism time.

C. Derick Varn 57:06

Yeah, yeah. It's the Dodgers are the winners. God, yeah. I guess this is the place where we can really talk about how this connects to your other work. Because uh when when I first read that you were writing a book on the Mets, I was like, what the fuck? That is not obvious to me. Huh?

Sports Rivalries As A Safety Valve

SPEAKER_00 57:27

What that's what I wanted you to say. I mean, it's hilarious for me, too.

C. Derick Varn 57:35

Do you think there are links between your first book on Pasadism and this book on the Mets?

SPEAKER_00 57:40

Oh, it's like the same book, dude. It's like structured the same, it's kind of told in the same way. The difference is like the Posadis book is really a biography of this guy and his movement. And then the Mets is the Mets book is a little bit more of like, you know, it's a more of a personal, like, I'm looking at this thing that I like and why do I like it? But I both are have the same method. I'm I'm taking this like popular thing that people know about and like they see it on the cover of a book and they want to pick it up and see what it is, and explaining my politics through it. You know, using is you know, using the mimetic quality to write about like the history of American labor. That's what this book is. It's about the history of American labor, it's about my fascination with the new left, right? Because this this book comes out of this longer thing I was doing, researching the 60s and you know, reading all of these Yippies and feminists and civil rights movement people talking about the Mets, thinking like, okay, maybe there's a story here that like these guys like the Mets, I like the Mets, like what like what is that?

C. Derick Varn 58:55

You know, yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it I it's interesting if like you were to ask me if like I was gonna write a pop culture book, I would probably actually write it about the long 70s and for similar reasons, but because I'm probably interested in a different period of the same thing. So I'm fascinated by like the question that I feel often doesn't get asked about the 60s is what the hell happened to to all these people in the long run, which your book does actually get into the And that's that's exactly what the Posadas book is, too, because like the Posadas are a very important movement in the 50s and the 60s, you know, they're part of the Cuban Revolution, they're like leading major unions and struggles in in South America, and then at the end of the 60s, they turn into this bizarre subculture, right?

SPEAKER_00 59:45

And so that I compare them with the ufologists, like this bizarre subculture, and try to understand like what it is about Trotskyism and ufologists have in common. Like, what's this messianic weird belief structure that they have, this vision of the future that depends on this revelatory moment descending from the heavens? And then I just do the same thing with Mets fancy, the same thing. It's all Benjamin.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:16

That's that's that's funny. So the this is uh your version of the arcades project. Which is interesting, though. I mean, I do think maybe leftist I should be very careful with this because as soon as I say this, I think about the Jacobin culture page and start getting sick to my stomach. But I do think leftists should look for the the lipstick traces of class conflict and class culture in popular culture because it's there, but it's not there directly. It's there in the history of punk, it's there in the history of the music scenes, it's there in the rise of hip hop. I mean, it's even there today when like you think about like why aren't there you know, god is thinking exactly about the the jackham and culture section section because they wrote this whole thing about how did you see the Ramones thing they wrote?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:14

Yeah, that was oh no, what was it? Yeah, the Ramones one, yeah, that was really bad.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:20

Yeah, that was terrible. The most recent thing about how Poptimus couldn't kill rock was also going on.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

Are they what I mean? I know it's not AI, but what are they doing? The this their standards have really sunk.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:36

Well, I I I do think you can only say nationalize the dating app so many times before you run out of an article. Yeah, I I think I I think a lot of it is that if you were gonna look at Jacob and they're also no longer in the vanguard of what's going on, even on the quote unquote right wing, and I'm using quotation marks from my audience before they get mad, of the DSA is a Democratic Party, people who want a softer split or a softer watch off, that they're not even in charge of that anymore. Who is it seems to be more NGO types and then groundwork, which is a caucus, and oh, so labor notes? No, I think it's more a lot, I mean a lot of them are even former like Geese Magazine, former people out of the S the CPUSA who've decided that the DSA is the way to do the popular front. There's there's in there's just a lot of NGO holdover people, Justice Democrat people, that sort of thing. Jacobin was associated with a particular caucus that doesn't really have as much influence these days. It is what it is. I guess not to get too inside baseball on it, but it it is interesting to see where that happens because I'm always like I think about an article that Sam Chris wrote back when he was still like a rising star in left-wing punditry, and he wrote this thing about how like wouldn't Game of Thrones be better if it had a positive vision for the future. Hello, kitty.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:23

Hey, sorry, the kitty wants to say something really fast. This is the Pat talking, not me. Have you read Sam Chris's Substack recently? It's really good. Yeah, I do I do read it. Wow. Hey, hot's sake. That's enough mic time for you, kitty.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:45

But was basically like what if Game of Thrones was was left or and had a positive vision for socialism? And I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever read. But I do think we need to do this more with popular culture because it the idea that popular culture exists in this vacuum art or it can escape the lot the class logics of which it is produced for, even if it isn't produced by it, does seem to me to be important. Uh I don't know, I'm torn on it though, because I also don't want another thousand Mark Fishers launching and writing about movies. So what's your take on that, Andy?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:29

I like uh, you know, I like the Baffler.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:33

I think the Baffler is pretty cool. I like what they're doing. I subscribe to Jacobin for a while, and I kind of I like some of their you know web stuff, obviously. Like I've worked with them to some extent, but stuff in the magazine is really boring. Like it looks great. The graphic design's brilliant. I love what they're doing, but it's so boring. You know, I'm not even like it's super interested in crit like if they if they would just express their politics in a fun way, I would stand it. But I guess that's what I'm really looking for, is like I want everyone to do their thing really well. I don't know how you describe that. Like don't be a hack, Aristotelian or Platonic or something. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I want Ristrics to be the best anarchists, I want Stalinists to be the best Stalinists, I want Soc Dems to be the best Soc Dems, and I just support everyone in being really good at I want Mets fans to be the best Mets fans, you know, and I don't really think the differences that we have in this space, you know, are really too important.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:44

I think about that a lot. Like people have often noticed that I'm very careful when I talk about like Marxist winning of them, even though I'm obviously like not a big Stalin stan.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:00

And I hate them, but in terms of like the podcast world, I don't need to go to war with them or anything. I I hope I hope they do a good job, but it doesn't really matter.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:13

Well, my point, I guess, is similar in that if it's gonna matter, it's gonna be by accident. And it's not so much about the politics as they understand it, but do they produce something interesting that we can develop further? Um, you know, I'll give you an example. You like J Sakai, I am middling to to liking J Sakai, like I think there's major problems, but I also think he's worth reading.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:40

Sell is influence on metropolitans, right? You know.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:48

Yeah, settlers is hilarious, actually. And then I, you know, I think some of

2020 Strikes Pandemic And Athlete Power

C. Derick Varn 1:06:52

his later work is even is actually much better, but like nonetheless, there are some real ugly things that any leftist needs to deal with with settlers, even if they don't agree with its like framework premise of like, you know, this like Maoist nationalism that's also just totally racialized. But there's there's good stuff in there, and I think we all are better even when people who don't share my politics do smart things, whereas I think we all are worse when even people who do share my politics do I'm not even gonna say dumb, uh lazy things. Like, and I I've been very I have been concerned lately that a lot of left-wing punditry, and I don't just think it's Jacobin, I think we see this in all across the spectrum of ideologies, has gotten a lot lazier. I mean, I I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:50

I'm I don't want to call anyone out in specific, but like there's just a lot more well, I think across the media space that was forged since Occupy and Bernie, there's a lot of burnout, and there's a lot of I don't know, bidonification, maybe just like I would not senility, but just people spinning their wheels, people who like don't really have new ideas or like know that their ideas are inadequate, but are aren't particularly inspired to argue for something else, and so everyone's kind of just like situation monitoring, right? And I think to a certain extent that can be healthy, right? As long as you're being sincere. So maybe Jacobin's going through that. The problem is I think like Jacobin will never really change, right? Because they're not, you know. I think what's good about our current is that we are really focused on what the proletariat actually is, the real movement, right? Which is always changing and always developing. And I think Jacobin's interested in setting up a very specific kind of government. That's like regardless of the current moment.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:05

And yeah, they have a very specific vision of unions, which, if I'm completely honest, has no relationship to unions historically or unions as they exist right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:17

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:20

I and I I do think about, for example, many things to get frozen. I mean, I not to pick on Jacobin, I like to think about Mother Jones magazine, right? Radical magazine out of the new left was started in San Francisco in 1976. But in the 90s in particular, it gets associated with basically the Progressive Caucus and has not veered too far away from that, except sometimes to spite the other left publications like Jacobin. Whereas if you're doing like sociological work, if you're interested in like the proletariat, or you're just interested in political economy, like you know, that sort of thing. Like, what's the economy doing? People will sometimes listen to me talking about things in the political economy from like 2019, they'll find an old podcast and I'll like come out with me now. And I'm like, well, economics are always changing. So if I mention a G uh Gini coefficient from 2016 and a podcast in 2018, and you think that I think that that is binding in 2026, you don't really understand how economics works, and everything I say is provisional basically to the moment that I say it. Yeah. And I think we, you know, that's interesting. I want to ask you the last question, and this one is kind of based off of the this discussion. Since you've done so much about what happens to these groups and stuff after their high point falls out, and and almost all of them is like their high points to the 60s, then they have other high points later in the you know of the Mets, but but with Pasodism, etc., you have these weird detours. Do you sometimes feel like now that we're like more than a decade away from Occupy Wall Street and the quote unquote millennial left, which was actually as a lot of generaxers too, and so that's a confusing thing, but is really in a different moment after the Biden administration, even the opposition to the Democratic Party, which was really, really obvious, even in the you know, the the people who were more tied to it in the 2010s, kind of like people who were really hostile to the second Obama administration were really milkedast in the beginnings of Biden. It took Gaza to really stop it. Do you feel like you're learning anything about how we can handle this burnout? Because I do feel like we we we the millennial left is experiencing burnout, and zoomers are already being crushed and live in an even more fragmented media environment, and they're a smaller generation. What can we learn from the 70s that we can use to like maybe not flame out in the same way?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:26

Yeah, learning from the 70s, that's a good question. Probably not one I can answer with baseball, but no, I I've always liked the the correspondence committees, that kind of thing, like trying to stay in touch with the working class, trying to follow actual proletarian struggle and trying to write about it. Like if you've got nothing else, just be a recorder for the struggle and put things in your words and document it. You know, may maybe no one's even reading it, but at least you're documenting it. Because when we have our politics, you know, our specific kind of reading of Marx, which like makes us a small minority among Marxists who actually believe in proletarian revolution and proletarian struggle. We have a very unique way of seeing things. And like for all the shortcomings of our milieu in terms of making a bigger impact in the world or whatever, you know, we saw we saw and recorded things that no one else saw. You know, the the confusion that people have about the George Floyd uprising, for example, or like the shame that people have about it is the result of their like confused disavowal. And I think our tendency wrote about that the best of anyone else. And that helped me write this book. That helped me have this insight about how important sports is in the United States, right? Which I'm not, it's not like some weird connection. I think it it really is true that sports was a very important part of like how crazy 2020 was, right? And so we just have to see things the way only we can see it and try to record it and express it and get it on record. That's like the minimal thing we can do, I think. And you know, try to stay open-eyed and disillusioned and not fall for all the obvious tricks that we've seen over and over again because we have that experience. Yeah, that's it. Not very exciting, but you know, we we're in a lull and crazy shit's coming, you know. Yeah, I mean like this for the rest of our lives. The the class is gonna be moving again, that's for sure.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:40

I I think we're at a time period that's even a bigger time period of upheaval than the 1980s, which was a pretty big time period of upheaval. And I like this idea that we have to record things down now because I I think a lot about, like, for example, the long disillusion

Burnout After Occupy And What To Do

C. Derick Varn 1:14:58

of the Black Panthers. When it was happening, no one was following that anymore. No one cared about it, everybody was kind of embarrassed by the by you know, from Watts to Bobby Seal doing whatever he's doing in the 70s.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:14

Which left tendency was has done the best work uh in this century of explaining the the high point of Black Panther theory, which was intercommunalism, viewpoint magazine. Yeah, would anybody be talking about intercommunalism besides like a few small post-panther sects if it wasn't for that? I mean, not enough people talk about it anyway. My point is like we took the Panthers seriously in a way that liberals and Stalinists can't, because all they see is the aesthetics, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:15:50

I think this is actually very important, but it's also very important that we had the primary material because people wrote it down for us to study now, even if nobody was reading it when it was written. I guess this is my like, you should still write this stuff even if you don't feel like you have an audience. I mean, because you and I both know, for example, Black Lives Matter is went from being the the hottest thing you could write about to no one wanting to write about. Occupy five years after Occupy was similar. Like, no one wanted to touch that. We all just wanted to move on to the Sanders movement or whatever. I don't say we all, because you and I didn't, but but you know what I mean. I think we're starting to see people who look back at Occupy with a critical eye now. And I think probably in five to ten more years, we'll see the same thing about both the waves of Black Lives Matter, particularly the Floyd wave that everyone seems embarrassed about today. And I think I I think that means we have to remember that we're operating not just for ourselves, but for an audience that's probably 10 years old right now and may not even be reading our stuff, but we'll be listening to it on predigested my podcast or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:03

Um yeah, that's that's part of my strategy of the book, is like, all right, I'm gonna write something that I know is gonna do well with like DSA Mets fans. But if I do it right, this will be a cult Mets book that Mets fans are always gonna read, you know? And it it'll be this one version of Mets history that people can refer to and sort of base their fandom on. And you can do that with other stuff too, right? The Postasm book was attempting to do that with people who are into like memes, uh like alien memes and that kind of thing, or ufology. And so we could always try to find you know an audience to proselytize to. This is like a classic leftist thing of you know, either becoming a professor and doing that to the captive audience of children, or you know, picketing some, you know, or like leafletering outside some factory or something like that. Right? Yeah. As the hippies did outside a Mets game.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:07

That's that's kind of a great way to end it. I wanted to tell you what your book reminded me of, uh, as a way to think about it. And I do mean this as a compliment. Have you ever read CLR James's book on cricket?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:18

Yeah, I mean, that's a big inspiration for the book, of course. I I I talk about its its insights in the the introduction about the uh I shouldn't skip the introduction. It's it's no it's no coincidence that you you see the rise of all these professional sports leagues and all these mass sports spectacles at the same time as these democratic revolutions in Europe and in the United States. And that was the kind of central guidepost of of where I took the historical inquiry of this book, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:18:56

And I guess it also has the the the other effect is it gets people like me to care about certain sports. Clr Janes had me caring about cricket for 35 seconds, and you had me caring about New York baseball for half an hour.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:09

And now two hours. It's more fun than beyond a boundary.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:13

It is actually, but but I was trying to fit when I was reading uh CLR Jane's book, I was like, why is cricket so big in India, other than it was part of the Raj? But anyway, thank you, Andy. What projects are you working on right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:32

Oh, I encourage everyone to check out my podcast, This Wreckage. See Derek Varn is a frequent collaborator of This Wreckage. And yeah, check out I'll be I'll be doing a bunch of dates coming. When does this come out?

C. Derick Varn 1:19:46

Uh, it'll be coming out in July.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:51

All right, well, yeah, the the soft cover will be coming out. Uh, so yeah, follow me on Instagram and Twitter if you want to see me in person. Talk talk baseball with me, and then I also have a book about anti-fascism I'm supposed to write this summer. Uh, so I'll hunker down and do that at some point.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:10

Yeah, as soon as I get back from my trip up in your neck of the woods, and we are gonna probably hang out over the summer, and that will be after this is released in the end of July. I will be doing some stuff in Woodbine. Um split will have already occurred. Yeah, I mean, you know. You your section to the left. I mean, our I mean, we're on the same section of the left to some degree, but you're more associated with this. Do you post anarchists split all that much?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:40

I mean, it's just I think everyone just goes to their their couples or their one-bedroom apartments at this point. Um there's not a lot of anarchist groups left, you know.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:50

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:51

I'm not a part of Woodbine anymore, for example. So yeah, I'm I'm kind of between actual organ, it's kind of awkward because like in my bio it says organizer, which was true when I wrote it, but now it's really not.

C. Derick Varn 1:21:04

So uh well, this is my last year as a as a union rep myself. I will be the assistant rep next year, so I feel you. Oh, all right. Thank you so much. People should check out this wreckage. I'm often there a lot, and Andy and I even wrote a reflection on 2020. Yeah, two years ago. We should we we should revisit it. Yeah, we should actually sometime talk, maybe update what we think we missed. All right, take care. All right, let's go, Matt's. Buy my book. All right, bye, Andy's book. Bye.