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Classic Episode: James Pogue - Is the Trump Revolution Real?

Welcome to the show, James Pogue, expert on the far right and the rise of fascism in America.

So who’s this Chris Murphy guy? Chris arguably is the rightest man in American politics right now. He’s a Democratic Connecticut senator for people who don’t know and don’t get this joke. Look, it’s funny because I think people on the fascist far right that has now swept into a thousand years of authoritarian reign in America, like, they really hate this guy.

I’ll give the backstory. He reached out to me after I wrote this piece about the quote, rise of the new right or whatever. And I thought it was like a really genuine and interesting thing for a senator to be doing where he kind of was like, wow, these people are really thinking on a systemic level that we just are not. And they have what people used to describe as like political vitality stuff you don’t talk about in American politics anymore. But like the force of will, the force of group feeling that like Democrats do not have, which is obviously just completely true and something that was very visible when he did this in late 2022, I think.

And so he went on this crusade of being basically right, even if you don’t like his response, which was, hey, we need more economic populism and we have to break up monopolies and this kind of thing. He was like, look, American people feel no agency anymore. Neoliberalism is dying. If we don’t come up with something, this grand thing that people in politics talk about, this realignment that’ll see the working class. Basically, the socially conservative working class align with an anti-neoliberal intellectual class, whether it happens via left or right, this is going to happen in Western societies in general. This is the sort of crown of France that’s been lying on the table for a long time.

If we, the Democrats, don’t do it, Republicans will do it and we’ll be out of power for the foreseeable future because we’ll get blown out. Ironically, he was completely correct. Predictably, this one, him really no fans on the right or the left because nobody really likes to hear this kind of stuff. And of course, his entire project is now in the gutter because I don’t really know if Democrats can recapture that hope they had of being the party that would get the realignment.

Yeah, it’s interesting. Do they just, does the right just dislike Chris Murphy because he’s a Democrat? Or is there something about his project that draws a specific ire? There’s some people on the right who are still favorable to Bernie Sanders, right? I think the thing is, first of all, the right has gotten more right in the days since Bernie Sanders.

There was a moment where anyone, the core, now we’re already into philosophy, but the core shaping thing of American politics throughout much of, at least once you got into the industrial era up through basically the Cold War where everything got bifurcated through an inorganic to us lens of left and right. This sort of European thing that they had to do because they had organic elite systems that they had to, whatever, we’ll get into that later. But in the United States, like the battle has always been from people trying to overthrow an establishment, which often was an establishment coherent enough to have a capital E or at least competition within establishments, right?

Which is like later Cold War, everybody was the establishment. There was an establishment consensus. Everyone looked and acted the same. And then people like Bernie and Trump were so clearly not of that establishment that they appeared to each other to be allies, right? There was a very natural sort of breaking of the establishment that happened in 2016. People even talked about this. The New York Times wrote like the establishment is dead in 2016. That, of course, wasn’t true.

Democrats clung to the establishment, in fact, made a politics of defending what that establishment style had been. And so now if you’re trying to defend the priorities of the Democratic Party, the reason people on the right would look at a Murphy project is inevitably doomed. And Steve Bannon has actually said this to me on the record. The problem is that the goals of the establishment, in so much as they are maintaining the Atlantic system of alliances and defending Ukraine, things like that, in so much as they are, frankly, keeping the same set of freaking people who have been friends and went to freaking Georgetown, Duke, Yale, Princeton, and together in positions of high government, you can’t unwind neoliberalism or build a popular new democracy to replace this sort of technocratic thing that everyone hates so much.

You can’t really do that without being actively anti-establishment. And so they would regard Murphy as doomed. They don’t even think about the Bernie stuff anymore because, like, broad-based – you tell me. A lot of the Democrats who did really well in 2024, who ran against the red shift that you would see on the map with those arrows. Oh, this county went this much red, blah, blah, blah. The only real places where you saw a lot of those blue arrows going the other direction were places where people actually did not run on – spend a lot of money on social programs.

This is populism. Their populism was Rand Paul, Thomas Massey, Backwoodsy. It was like – I talked to Maria Glusenkamp-Perez, which, again, is like one of these people everyone loves to hate. But I don’t know, at least as far as my priorities go, she’s anti-military industrial complex. And she basically couldn’t get outflanked on that by her rabidly anti-Ukraine opponent because she was just as far on that direction as he was. She’s like into right to repair. She runs on all this stuff that’s, like, very local to her district but feels, like, anti-big government, feels anti-establishment.

This is what Jared Polis did where – Yeah, yeah. You probably like him. And Jared Polis, is he left or right? He wouldn’t – I was interested to talk to him about this because Murphy will cling to the – he’s – we on the left have to figure out a new way to speak to people who feel like there’s a spiritual board in their lives. There’s stuff like this. Polis is, bro, I don’t even care about right and left anymore. That stuff’s done.

And that kind of surprised me because the kind of anti-establishment constituency within the Democratic Party has traditionally been the Bernie left. And it has been the socialist-minded internationalist – we read Frederick Jameson and all the – the people who have read all the same books are all on some level downstream of Marxism, that kind of thing. That’s where the establishment – anti-establishment energy in the Democratic Party has always come from. Now I feel like it’s – I can never say a name – Glusenkamp Perez and Jared Polis and people like that who are just like weirdos, like a Democratic sort of version of Ron Paul or a Thomas Massey or something. That’s where they’re winning.

Yeah, there was a kind of energy. Maybe the last gasp of this was the sort of pro-Palestine movement, which really was – you would know better than I was, but from an outside view was like really brutally crushed by the DNC, by the Democratic establishment.

Yeah. Am I wrong? I was thinking about that. I was trying – independently of this conversation, I was listening back because I actually talked to not one but two uncommitted delegates at the DNC about what they were doing there and like what difficulties they’ve had. And my candid, honest answer is that DNC, like the rules and like all the stuff that goes into it, like all the different chairs – I rode on a plane back with the Hawaii chair. He called himself the last – Hawaii’s last DNC chairman because now the title is chairperson.

But I rode with this guy and he was telling me all this stuff about what they had done to get uncommitted delegates in and I was like, I cannot – unless I write this down, I do not understand what you’re talking about. But I’ll preview a piece I’m about to publish because on the floor when Kamala was accepting the nomination, the only visible sign of dissent I saw within the arena at the entire DNC was one guy in a red keffiyeh named Alex Gallegos, who was like a school board guy from somewhere rural in Illinois.

And he shouted out like, what about the weapons? So I found him afterwards and it was almost like comedy because – like black comedy because I was asking him like, what was your experience like? And he was like, dude, I’m so sad. Like I’ve never had this vitriol. Like the hatred that people displayed to me has just made me – it’s made every day like a torture. Like every day I just want to go home as soon as possible. Like this has been the worst thing I ever did.

And I looked up later and I think there was only like a few dozen of them, the uncommitted people, versus hundreds upon hundreds of the Bernie people. And they had done like really intense stuff to take over positions within the party. That guy who I read back with, the DNC chairman, he was the result of the Bernie wing basically taking over the entire Hawaii party and stuff. Like they did all this stuff and then it washed out into the uncommitted Palestine thing.

Not only was it – I don’t know how much it was crushed per se. What they talked about is like they wanted to have a single – just one single Palestinian person come and speak on stage. And they were like, and you can have an Israeli come too. We’ll give you that. And Kamala wouldn’t even give them that. And then you come now all these months later after, and you just see for all that energy, literally nothing happened. Like they just lost – like that movement did practically nothing.

And it’s really astonishing, honestly. Because I don’t think there’s a lot of eras in American politics when that level of student and organizing energy would have resulted basically in them being ignored. And the war that they were protesting, like being conducted in essentially the same manner as it would have if they had not existed. Like it’s unbelievable actually.

Yeah. The analog people were comparing this to was LBJ. Like the Vietnam War people got rid of LBJ. Like the most powerful politician, you know, arguably since FDR. And they just – they won. They like full on won. Like LBJ didn’t run for renomination. Like he was just out.

Yeah. Yeah. And arguably, I don’t know how much stock to place in the – in things like – I’m sure you saw the James O’Keefe interview with that – on the fake gay date where the deputy NSC advisor was saying the president is, quote, literally dead, quote, can’t sign his name, stuff like that. But I actually think the blob is just far less responsive to public pressure than a president.

And like the president is just not receiving – like he’s just not processing and taking in information in a meaningful way anymore. And so I actually wonder what the counterfactual would have been with like a healthy, with it Biden. I suspect he would have been much more responsive.

Yeah. What’s interesting is that the Afghanistan withdrawal played out in the other way where Biden – and, you know, once again, I’m probably less informed about this than you. But from my understanding, just from like stuff in the public, Joe Biden was really committed to the Afghanistan withdrawal. He faced the bad headlines and he continued going forward with it despite the bad headlines and completed the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Yeah. I hate to say it, but that was leadership right there. That’s a big L for a president to take. And in all candor, I know everyone thinks that he’s God here and now and untouchable. But I think Trump just wasn’t willing to take that L.

And for anyone who just heard, my dog just sighed very audibly. It wasn’t me. But the – you know, Trump 2016 was actually extremely responsive to public pressure, extremely responsive to public pressure in a way that I think marked that administration for a lot of shame, in part because he was responsive to public pressure from like a lot of different angles. And so it was like one of the things that led to the administration not being very coherent, not getting a lot done.

I think Biden, as you say, was like, okay, I’m going to do this. I will carry the weight. I don’t think, of course, he thought it was going to end up looking like it did. But like how many times do you pull out of nations at war under duress and have it look great? That’s part of, I think, why Trump didn’t want to do it. And Biden did him a great favor by doing it.

I mean, I don’t know, now this sounds like Joe Biden propaganda, but like, I don’t know, people kind of – this is the place for Joe Biden propaganda. What is Curtis’s thing? Reactionaries for Biden?

Yes, yes. It’s like the Curtis Yarvin thing. Monarchists for Biden.

Oh, is that? Okay, monarchists for Biden. Yeah, there you go. One thing I just genuinely really don’t agree with a lot of like right-wing populists, people getting ready to remake our foreign policy establishment on is like – In the modes of doing business that developed during the Cold War and after World War II and stuff like that, there is just a lot of learning that goes into knowing how to do complex international operations and things like that.

And there just is a built-in knowledge for some of these Cold Warriors about like how to do things and in fact how hard things are. That you hear some of these Trump people just come in and criticize what went wrong and all this stuff. And you’re like, man, I don’t know, like what are – have you ever personally organized a large-scale logistical operation? I’m not sure you’d be all that better at this. So I’m inclined to be a little sympathetic to that. And I’m inclined to be very sympathetic to the leadership displayed and just saying, no, we have to get out of here.

Because you can talk as well we should about the 13 guys who died and things like that. But those 13 guys died in part so that many more than 13 guys wouldn’t keep dying because we were just there because no one had the bravery to do it. Absolutely. That kind of leadership in some ways really wasn’t rewarded at all. And maybe that’s, you know, because of the rest of Biden’s presidency.

Well, yeah, let me speak to that actually because it will tie it back to Chris Murphy, right? Fantastic. Because the selling point of the Democratic Party at this point – so now I’m pre-staging this piece that hopefully people will read. It’s like – this is the New York Times, right?

No, this is – no, I’m pre-staging a Vanity Fair piece I’m writing that was set at the DNC and is sort of – it’s about whether the Democrats and stuff. And as you know, this kind of like Matt Iglesias level, like what should Democrats do to win another election? It’s just not stuff I generally care about that much. So I took it way off into the systemic weeds. And I don’t know how well the piece will work out, but the thesis of it essentially is just exploring this thing of – I suggest that now the Democrats simply are – the raison d’etre of the party is to represent what was that establishment.

What was the bipartisan establishment is now just the Democrats defending that thing. And that’s a reasonable organizing principle if your political message is not only are we the same party, but we are the same party that will demonstrate over and over that our technocrats and people who don’t really listen to you, the public, who wants to restrict immigration or stop funding Ukraine or whatever. We don’t allow that into our quote-unquote norms of democratic discussion because you’re all fascist and bad or whatever, but also because we, the technocrats, are just way better at running this thing than you.

And that was the Biden promise. Okay, you’re electrified by Trump. Watch. I just govern this thing. And I know how to govern this thing. And I’ve been governing this thing since I was elected at 29 years old after being a car salesman. A return to normalcy.

Yes. And the problem with Biden essentially dying halfway through his term was that became an impossible sell. It was like, not only are you representing this thing that all of us are pretty, pretty sour on, but we don’t know how to name it yet. That’s my sort of general take on where the American body politic is. But you’re bad at running it.

And so Murphy will tell you, and has told me on the record, that he views Biden as having been essentially like the first post-neoliberal president. And a Republican at this point, ironically, will be like, oh, going, not doing neoliberalism anymore is just the base case at this point for how to run a Western society. Of course, he’s the first post-neoliberal president, blah, blah, blah. Like, you need to do much more. We’re going to remystify this thing. We’re going into a golden dawn. All right, fine. It’s not enough for them, but for a lot of people, it probably would have been enough if Biden had articulated, look, there’s a name for that system that you’re all really mad about.

And we are taking big steps within this administration to do things about it. Even if you don’t like them, there’s a name for it. There’s a name for what Lena Kahn is doing. There’s a name for where I’m trying to go with the IRA, with my industrial policy, things like that. But there was no one out doing that stuff. And there was no one who, like, could pitch it as a national project. And so Murphy would be like, that’s the problem. You didn’t sell this as a vision.

And then you nominate Kamala, who, like, everyone likes to kick around now, to quote Richard Nixon. The tragedy of nominating Kamala was in a way that, like, not only could she not break from what Biden did, which would have been one option, but she didn’t know what Biden did. Like, I don’t think if you put to Kamala, and maybe this is ungenerous, but I don’t think if you put to Kamala or, like, the Uber executives advising her, like, this little click around her, that Biden had attempted to break with 40 years of political governing consensus and build a new political economy and this kind of thing. And that, like it or not, if you want to, all these people calling Biden, like, the great consequential president of our times, which is probably bullshit, but it would have been smart if Democrats would have been able to run on that legacy.

I don’t think Kamala was aware of what that legacy represented. So then you’re screwed, I think. And there was no message. And my editors keep pulling out that line from my piece, because they keep saying that’s objectively not true. She put forth policies. And I’m like, yeah, but there was no message. I’m sticking with this.

So that’s my big picture view of how that all came about and how the Murphy Project died, I would argue, in its infancy in a way, because they didn’t have the people around who could push that. And now their dream of realignment may well already be over. Like, the working-class thing may have already, that may be a Republican thing for many generations now.

Yeah, what’s interesting about the, we just need to communicate it better angle is, that feels kind of associated with the Matt Iglesias corner. But from your profile of Murphy, it felt to me like he really doesn’t come from that corner. So there’s this idea of like, oh, Kamala just needed to communicate better, Biden just needed to communicate better. And what I’m hearing from you now is that that’s what Chris Murphy was, is saying about the current moment.

But- Well, no, let, can I clarify that?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, feel free. Because, no, no, no, no, I passionately, passionately disagree with the, like, I think the greatest, the great, great, great flaw of democratic politics is the Obama technocrat idea that communication is key. Like, if you just communicate in the right way, like, that’s what wins elections, and then everything is solved, like, it’s all good.

Right, and that, in a certain way, that, when, like, inside baseball politics, guys talk about the establishment style, like, they’re so caught up in the establishment consensus of the post-Cold War, that actually, like, they talk about it as a messaging problem, not as a problem of politics being circumscribed by a narrow set of bounds of vision of what can be done. Even those guys are talking about it as a messaging problem, because they’re essentially technocrats who share the idea that politics is just a very narrow band of stuff that you can tinker with.

I’m definitely not saying Democrats who had just messaged better, reached out to Latinos a little better, done better ads, spent less money on the sphere in Las Vegas and stuff like that would have won this election. What I’m saying is, like, what Trump does is communicate a vision of rupture, of, okay, you don’t like this thing, and like, we can go into statistics about this, because people, there’s a certain kind of new rightish tech person who’s, don’t you see, the economy’s great, Americans live much better lives than they understand, everything is really great, that’s fine.

But if you just actually look at the statistics of, like, how people view our system, and whether they have agency in it, they do not, in general, and they don’t really like it. And Trump was able to communicate, there will be a new system when I’m done with this thing. Like, give me a chance, and the system that you are looking at now will be different.

Biden actually attempted, we can disagree with whether or not the massive amounts of spending and the system that he was attempting to create were good ones. But he was attempting to build a new political economy vision for the United States. And he never told anyone outside of, like, people in D.C. that he was doing that. And that, I mean, you can call that a messaging problem, but it’s a problem of political vision. It’s a problem of bringing the nation along in a big project.

That’s not one of these David Plouffe, Jon Favreau, oh, we didn’t talk to the right slice of the populace the right way. This is a much bigger than a messaging problem, I think.

That’s interesting, because I think the critique from the right would be, yeah, you can say that we’re doing antitrust now, or we’re doing export controls, or we’re doing the CHIPS Act, but you’re just doing the same thing. You’re in the same regime. You’re still doing technocracy. This hasn’t changed. And that’s the kind of right-wing critique, right? They would contest the idea that Biden did govern in a new way. They would say that, actually, maybe you’re tuning around the edges, but you’re not really changing the things that matter.

And to be absolutely clear, I share that critique. And, you know, I’m attempting to be sympathetic to a political problem Democrats had, and I am attempting to basically do a thing I often fall into the role of doing, which is suggesting that not everybody, just because they’re on a different side, is your enemy. There’s a degree to which people are working towards much the same thing in all this.

I agree with you that what you would basically need – I agree with you, first of all, that the Murphy vision won’t work in large part because it leaves the same people involved. I think when all is said and done, if they really do, you know, big-scale firings of a lot of people, if they really bring in all of these people who are, quote, not of the swamp, if they really go hard on this thing, you might end up post-Trump justifiably calling this a revolution.

Like a real – elite replacement that goes far enough is a revolution. And I think people are at the point and at the mood in this country where they have been looking for a revolution for a long time in the broad sphere of things. Enough people are feeling that. And I think the Democratic – I think the Chris Murphy thing is basically, under that schema, the Chris Murphy vision is basically how do we stop a revolution by doing just enough of the stuff the revolutionaries want to make sure the revolution doesn’t happen, right?

I think that’s basically what they’re doing. I’m not super sympathetic to that. I’m just laying out why it is – Sorry, who is they? Like, directionality.

What’s that? Who is they? Does this include Chris Murphy?

Yeah, Chris Murphy, the whole – there’s a whole center – I guess people aren’t super, super, like, tapped into this. And I tried to critique this technocratic problem of center-left elites, essentially, in the Murphy piece. It was hard because, like, I couldn’t get enough people on the record to talk about the fact that no one will go on the record about this.

But, like, these conversations are really – I’m sorry, they’ve been happening a lot within the Democratic Party. Murphy is not some kind of unique figure except in that he’s the only one who’s decided to make political hay and he’s in a very safe seat. And he’s the only one who’s, hey, I’ll go out and buck the groups and I’ll just talk about this stuff. And maybe it’ll get me to be president someday, frankly. Like, maybe this is my lane to be president.

But within those think tanks, like, these congressional staffers, they are reading American Affairs. They’re reading me. They’re listening to all these – they’re listening to the same stuff you and I are listening to. Shout out to Marshall Kozlov, who brought me on his podcast and who actually introduced me to a lot of this sort of sphere of, like, realignment-style thinking and this sort of circle of people and stuff like that.

And it’s candidly quite big. Like, when I turned in my Murphy piece to The Times, my editor actually ended up texting me – nothing bad, but she ended up texting me, like, all this stuff about my piece by accident, thinking it was going to her brother because she was like, hey, I just got in this piece by – it’s about another one of these fucking realignment bros, all this stuff. And I was like, wait, why are you talking to me like this?

And it turned out that her little brother was a realignment bro, Chris Murphy stan kind of person working in a Democratic Senate office. And so a lot of this stuff has been happening under the surface. And that’s part of why I’m so critical about Democrats not really voicing it because it really seems like one of these problems of, well, that’s the kind of conversation only the smart people can have. We can’t really let you into this.

Sorry. Like, you’re not – this is not what we run on. We run on the David Plouffe style capital M messaging. But then once we win, we can get together in private and figure out how to govern. And that’s just not what Trump offers. Trump offers, you can come in and figure this out too. Hell, you can work for us.

Like, the number of people you’ve probably – I know who are not even necessarily that right wing, who have just sat down with the right person recently over coffee in D.C. and been offered a job is insane. Like, it’s real sort of Mr. Smith goes to Washington moment. And I don’t know, wherever you’re coming from, I think that’s got to be regarded as a positive thing for our politics. It’s a reversion to a politics that worked really well in this country for a long time.

There are all of these practical constraints in the Democratic Party. The idea of, like, form is totally locked off, right? Just like how the decisions are made, that’s totally locked off. I was really fascinated. And the thing that I really wanted more from your New York Times profile of Chris Murphy is that there’s a section where you quote him talking about the metaphysics of the political debate.

From his perspective, the Democrats really need to articulate a vision of metaphysics and of what you’re fighting for and what greater thing motivates you. And then, I think, doesn’t really do it. I’m very curious to know what the metaphysics is. I know this is going to get cut from a Vanity Fair piece, so I’m actually grateful to get a chance to talk about this.

The Democratic Party is not, in it, arguably the oldest act of political grouping on earth, coming out of the Democrat-Republicans in a split that then produced, of course, Andrew Jackson, who famously, everybody knows, like, he storms into the White House, develops the spoils system for his boys, very Trumpian. And not just Trumpian in the sense that people glibly put it, Trumpian in the sense that he devised a system that now Trump is sort of going back to, of large-scale spoils system, putting your allies in government, things like that.

And then, even on a metaphorical level, like, people make this whole thing of the time that Jackson storms into the White House and lets all his supporters drink and put their feet on the furniture and have a huge party and stuff. But, like, we can see an echo now in 2024 of Trump doing precisely that at this time. That’s what inauguration is going to feel like in some ways. And I say that because what were the Democrats doing?

They were the party oriented against, essentially, the WASP establishment, the Whigs, the blah, blah, blah. We go through various instances and iterations of them being the party against the interests of people who live in the leafy precincts of the upper Midwest and the Northeast. But, you know, this is why. The Martha’s Vineyards of their day.

Yeah. I mean, this is why. And then Republicans, because, essentially, the WASP establishment embraced abolition as its, like, organizing cause. And so, by the sort of early to mid-20th century, you have the absolutely absurd situation of people who are against that establishment, who are Democrats, who are both Southern segregationist whites and the urban Black migrants who fled the South to get away from those people.

But they both have interests that align with Democratic sort of non-Republican Chamber of Commerce establishment politics, right? This is the basic sort of core DNA of the Democratic Party. And then you have this sort of sudden gloss of leftism that comes in during the Popular Front era, during the Socialist era, as response to Eugene Debs, all these things.

And so the Democrats start to become the party of the capital L left. And the metaphysics at that time, speaking as someone who comes from the left, the metaphysics are there. If you grew up in the left as a millenarian project, you sing Solidarity Forever, which side are you on, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and all this stuff. And what is it? It’s a millenarian vision of a world that, through solidarity and toil, you can build.

And it’s a spiritual vision, even though it’s a materialist spiritual vision. And, you know, one argument that I’m increasingly sympathetic to is that, like, Murphy’s out here saying, like, we need to build a better world. And, like, we need a new metaphysics that will shape us and give us a national project and stuff like that. And the obvious answer is, okay, buddy, you need God, right? Easy.

And candidly, I’m sort of like, even if you want to look at, like, the motivating force of liberation theology, or a lot of what the American left, anti-establishment energy, what came from was, like, sort of immigrants banding together in not even necessarily Marxist solidarity, but, like, labor movement, ethnic, Catholic, religious solidarity. There’s a part of me just thinks that if you take God out of the equation, like, you can run on Stalinism for a while, but it really takes a lot of, it takes a lot of levers to pull to keep people, like, going behind it.

But with all sympathy to this sort of liberal left project, like, what you need there is actually that motivating force of the better world. That’s why I keep saying they didn’t even articulate a vision. Like, you need to sing Solidarity Forever and believe that it’s going to get you somewhere. And now Democrats, in their technocratic age, I had this amazing moment of watching Sean Fain, the UAW president, ask J.D. Vance out publicly on the stage of the DNC.

He’s calling him out. And he’s saying, because J.D. Vance’s family is from the area around Harlan County, Kentucky, where a lot of these labor ballots came from. And the most famous one is by Florence Reese called Which Side Are You On? Yes. So you know that song.

Okay. So Florence Reese actually met my dad because my dad was on the Brookside strike in 1971, the second Harlan County war. And he got shot at. And Florence Reese came up to him and patted him and said, you got to fight, fight, and keep on fighting. And then walked away.

But so Sean Fain calls out Which Side Are You On? J.D. Vance. And I thought for a moment that people would call back. I thought for a moment they might even sing it because at other conventions and other times that would have happened. And I thought in that moment, so I ended up calling the UMWA president, the head of the mine union that led all those strikes going back to the early days of Harlan County.

And I asked him and I was like, do they, they just don’t know the words anymore? And he was like, no. And I was like, but did they ever learn new ones? Like, what do you, what replaced this thing? You know? And I, he’s an old coal miner. I’m sorry. You wouldn’t think necessarily you’d have a lot to say on this subject.

But I think he accurately diagnosed that what they have is Lil Jon and people like that and essentially identity politics. And so then, really to sound like I’m defending Democrats, Lil Jon comes down and does this like ultra viral moment that has now been forgotten because the convention was so lame. But he does this moment that was genuinely politically infectious and felt, it felt like those moments that Norman Mailer writes about where there’s like a spontaneous explosion of like adoration and support for Adelaide Stevenson in 1964, stuff like that.

Like, he, Lil Jon comes down and he starts chanting DNC for what or whatever the song is. I don’t know. And then starts talking about how he was afraid of voter suppression and he had gotten Nakima Williams, who’s now DNC chair, to take him to vote. And then Nakima was talking about, okay, and Kamala, when she gets in, she’s going to defend our rights to vote.

And the crowd is just bump, bump, bump. Like it, the roof is about to come off and you’re like, oh, right. That’s the identity politics. The identity politics is the thing that gave you that motivational energy that gave you that, that force, that sense of metaphysics, that sense of togetherness and all that. And then I was thinking the whole rest of the convention, like they’re going to be screwed without that.

That’s going to, cause that’s what gave Joe Biden 81 million votes, all this stuff. The metaphysics, just to give one more example of that from the DNC. I was right there in front of the stage. This is a funny backstory. I, the two writers, the VF had sent who were like long form people were me and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

And. Good combination.

Yeah, I mean, I actually was, I, I was really, I would, I mean it, um, it was cool. But so Ta-Nehisi was going to profile Kamala. And so he wanted the floor pass for the last day. And we only had one floor pass and I felt actually really bad because I took the floor pass and was just there and it was going to hand it off to him. He didn’t get to the arena in time before they shut it down because they shut it down the floor three hours before.

So I was just on the floor and I couldn’t leave, but I also couldn’t give it to anyone else. So I got to see her. So I was right up at the stage and early into the speech, these old black women from the California delegation kept chanting Kamala, Kamala, Kamala. And like, you could feel like they were just excited, like a half black woman getting the nomination.

Like, this is our moment. Let’s be excited. And there were these floor managers that kept coming around and shushing them and making them chant USA because they wanted to do that whole Tim Waltz, we’re going to win the football dads, that kind of thing. And the result was that they didn’t cheer at all because they didn’t, they were there to cheer for Kamala, not to chant USA.

And I thought in that moment, oh, they’ve robbed themselves of their last quasi metaphysical energy. Like this is not going to work. And I was very, very convinced that Kamala was going to lose after that. I was just like, there’s no hope, but it’s easy to say that in retrospect.

Oh, man. Yeah. You’ve just seen the way like Mermaid talks about the labor strikes, the coal miner strikes. You know, of all of his work, actually, the Blair Mountain War stuff, because it’s so close to like my family history and interests and stuff. It’s the only thing I haven’t listened to. Just because sometimes something’s so close to your subject, like it pisses you off to listen to someone else talk about it. I just skipped that one.

But it’s funny you mentioned him because I was thinking a lot about, I don’t know why I was thinking about this, but I was thinking a lot about his blacks and Jews stuff. And it fits in a lot with this kind of tension in the Democratic Party of, oh, I know why I was thinking about this. Because I was rereading Reaganland and getting to the point where Irish Catholic ethnics start to shift towards Reagan away from the Democratic Party.

And like him or hate him, but Martyrmaid’s the only person who really talks about like how disruptive it was for those people to be the welcoming committee for the Great Migration. To basically have all of these communities in Brooklyn and Detroit and outside of Cleveland, actually inner city Cleveland and stuff like that, get so rapidly disrupted by a mass human migration that this is not gauging the rights or wrongs of anyone involved in this.

But Democrats really ended up with a governing class that saw anybody who was upset by that migration and the dislocations it caused as being the enemy. And you can really feel that now in the migration debate. Like it’s just the, once you say, hey, I’m not sure I like my thing. Democrats developed a governing ideology that said that’s immediately bad.

That’s immediately racist. And it just, it actually wasn’t really a solidarity thing. It was a like, you’re not our core constituency. You’re a suspect constituency. And I think that was a big mistake.

Yeah, it’s, if you want to look at the philosophical side of it, it’s a kind of ultra individualism, ultra classical liberalism of, it’s not even, it’s not even the individual diverse elements that counts. It’s the, it’s the, it’s the spirit that counts. That’s sort of like why I criticize it and like say that it, I think it really sapped the energy of the left in a way.

It actually is a fundamentally anti-solidarian view. It’s like, okay, yes, in the broad scale, this might mean that your community no longer exists. But why do you, a homeowner, care if another set of homeowners happens to buy on your street? You are making an individual decision about you and you are being racist by making that decision.

You’re actually not allowed to think of it as a, can we still have Williamsburg be Italian question. This isn’t like a white and black thing per se. I almost sound like conspiratorial here, but it’s not untrue that a lot of the ways that poorer black inner city communities in desirable metro areas managed to stay together and retain political powers through machine politics.

And then every single person who engages in a bit of machine politics ends up on a Fed watch list. They just come at them really hard for doing stuff that is the Eric Adams thing. Adams is a little outside of that machine in New York, a little bit, but it’s the scale for which they put a lot of people away for 25 years. And they did it in LA where there were these four, four Latino, long time LA polls who got like heard on an open mic talking in, they always call it the quote, racist, racist audio tape, where they made fun of O’Hawkins and Indians.

And they use some kind of like derogatory Spanish terms and stuff. Even people on that tape who didn’t say anything, who were just present in the conversation, got hounded out of LA politics. And so it’s not that anyone was specifically saying we are going to destroy the machine, solidarist community driven style of this politics. Nobody, it wasn’t a plan.

It wasn’t conspiracy, which is the way that the system works is like Kevin DeLeon over where I live, didn’t say anything on the tape, but to the activist groups and to the kind of like bigger democratic party structure. Like he became an, like an enemy that they weren’t really committed to driving out. And now he’s gone. And now there’s a Filipino who took his place.

And so like the whole like East side, the very traditional thing going back many decades, this sort of East side Latino power structure over here, like is gone. And again, I’m not saying there was a conspiracy to destroy it, but the way that the whole worldview works is fundamentally to just basically break those communities of power.

Yeah. And I don’t think it’s conspiratorial at all. I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting this now. This was something I read a long time ago when I was more interested in the kind of nuts and bolts of politics. But it’s like well-documented history that both the Democrat and Republican parties shifted very sharply towards a system of national politics and disruption of local party machines by both the DNC and the RNC.

And this was like very, this was like right after LBJ. I think either under Nixon or under Ford became official DNC, RNC policy to move power towards the national machine, towards the House and Senate committees and away from these local machines. It’s just, this is just a much bigger thing for the Democrats because ironically, I grew up in Cincinnati, a place that had a Republican machine.

But for the most part, these were the machine politics and the ethnic politics were Democrat things because it was their way of essentially building enough power, like building a power base that therefore you could do politics that didn’t fit in with the establishment thing. I mean, it’s just not to keep going back to that rubric, but that’s why you develop those machines. Under Carter, you can already see it, right?

Like Carter, probably the first president, not even probably, I think, inarguably the first president to really be the president of the, to use the going phrase on Twitter, of the groups, the capital G groups. Carter believed really, really strongly because he had been convinced by liberal activists and stuff that America was facing the energy crisis, right?

So it was like Carter- It was peak oil.

Yeah, it was peak oil and, you know, he was, everybody was going to wear sweaters and he watched from a heated box. And I think he watched the, or his family watched the inauguration from a solar powered heated box or something. And it was all of this stuff. And it was, this is back when the establishment really was like still a kind of thing. It was almost like the heyday of it.

Whereas like the establishment, the DC establishment of Catherine Graham and these kinds of people, the pearl wearing party going country club people, like this was their heyday. They had just crushed a president. Like they had just destroyed Nixon. And then what they got for their labors was this, these like bumpkins from Georgia who were like bringing in lib activists, like lecture them and take away their inaugural balls.

Like they didn’t even call them balls that year. They called them parties and stuff. It was a real, they hated him. And I don’t really know where I’m going with that, except that I think that Carter was this guy who supplied a lot of what he didn’t really know about national politics through basically listening to a lot of these groups.

And this was, that was a big shift. A lot of the other people looking at someone like the Kennedys or Johnson himself, they didn’t really need their advice. Even if people were, even if the groups were forming or this was, there’s a huge amount of pressure from particularly civil rights groups and the Johnson administration, things like that.

Like Johnson didn’t need to ask for help to know how to govern. That wasn’t really true of Carter.

Yeah, yeah, that, that, that makes a ton of sense. Something I’m really intrigued by to go back to the, to go back to the point about Martyrmaid and the strikes is that I think that like it wasn’t necessarily, wasn’t necessarily religious, although some minors were religious, wasn’t necessarily Marxist. Although certainly many organizers were Marxist, but there was a kind of metaphysics to that.

And I think it’s, and I think it’s a metaphysics that’s embraced by Daryl Cooper, by Martyrmaid, and to an extent by JD as well, the kind of coal miners strike metaphysics.

Yeah. And it’s just very strange to me that it’s not, it’s not, it’s not a left-wing thing. Why did that metaphysics leave the Democratic Party?

Well, just to sharpen that point a little, I, I would say it was, I would say that movement in part, like what actually ended up destroying it was the fact that it had to become left-wing. But I would dispute a little bit the idea that it wasn’t.

So like the UMWA charter was published in 1910 or something in 20 different languages, Czech, Polish, all of the different sort of middle European, Southern European languages. There’s a large black contingent. You can still go to Harlan County. I forget. Oh, it’s in Lynch, Kentucky.

In Lynch, Kentucky, there’s a place called the Eastern Kentucky Social Club where every year they still have a dance for miners and their families who left the coal fields. Because when coal blew up, which was planned demolition by two parties, but when the coal fields really, really were getting bad and people were leaving, like Greyhound would have five buses leaving every day and one bus, if that, coming back.

People were really fleeing. But there were a lot of black people in that. And the salience of the number of languages that manifesto was being printed in is indicative of the fact that both in Harlan, in the coal fields, in Southern Pennsylvania, in places like that, and further out in the great Ludlow strikes in Northern Utah and things like that, the railroad strikes.

A lot of the energy was coming from Southern European and Central European leftists, people who are really shaped either, especially by anarchist thought, right? So that’s why the Wobblies, which still exist, the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World was their real name, were an anarchist union.

But like when you speak to the metaphysics, like I grew up singing, I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you are me. It says, I, but Joe, you can’t be dead. I never died, says he, right? Paul Robeson sang this at Carnegie Hall. It was this huge moving moment and American scandal because it was this communist black guy singing about a white guy who was murdered in a labor strike out in Utah.

And it felt to people like this swelling metaphysical force of solidarity that had melded with international leftism to present a danger to established societies all over the world and they were going to overthrow it and all this stuff, right? So some of it was this kind of organic American labor thing of Samuel Gompers and these guys, right?

And some of it was this internationalist, millenarian lefty vision. And Democrats managed to bridge that, particularly in mid-century when you’re just like doing really well and energy is free and like you represent 50% of global GDP. You can let the commies in and give them the stuff that they’re asking for and point towards a better world and actually it’s like getting there.

And then the great sort of like labor capital compact begins to dissolve in the 70s and we never get back to it. And not to sound like a Marxist, but the analysis is basically right. Like the compact broke down and Democrats were like, which side do we pick? And they picked capital.

And so like when you ask where it went, like it went there. Like they didn’t, those people that had given them that energy, they just stopped listening to. And all of those people had gotten rich, right? And not through leftist means. They had gotten rich through labor capital compact, but also just through a drastically rising living standard that just was happening at rates that no one had ever seen in human history.

And then they’re all moving to the suburbs. They’re doing their white flight and they’re, they’re betrayed on two levels. Metaphysically, like metaphysically speaking, there’s a betrayal on two levels because the shaping force that they would have had both in the Northern industries, the factories and things like that, the auto plants.

And in the coal fields and in the more like extractive unions and stuff like that, like you have a force of community, a force of communal, you could call it ethnic solidarity, even for the Scots-Irish miners who had been there for hundreds of years. Communal, let’s keep this thing together and make sure our community is taken care of.

And millenarian international, my caring for my community means caring for a North Vietnamese peasant. For a while that worked, but then Democrats stopped caring about those communities, first of all. And second of all, they stopped believing in the project.

And the result was essentially to say, look, we got you rich. We navigated this febrile time. And one often forgets that America was a lot more violent and insane and divided in the 60s than it is now.

Oh, so there were daily bombings.

Yes. Really, not to make this all about Martyrmaid, the Martyrmaid Jim Jones thing is a really, really great, like easy way into understanding like how crazy and divided and frankly, like close to war the United States was in the 1960s.

And Democrats essentially wound up by the year, essentially by the time of Clinton, saying, look, we navigated it. We brought you through those stormy waters. We made you the richest society in the history of the world. We won the Cold War. Like now we’re just going to manage this thing.

And now I’m saying boring stuff that everyone knows about how technocracy developed. It’s almost, you almost have to be sympathetic to them. You almost have to be sympathetic to those people who reached the end of history and thought, why are you knocking on my door? Like, I know how to do this. Look at what I’ve given you. Go away. I’m sympathetic to that in a certain way.

For all of the critiques of the Reagan, of the Reagan administration, everyone has to admit like, you know, but he did do this little thing called winning the Cold War.

Well, and that’s, I mean, that’s another, you have to give it to him, you know?

Well, and that’s another thing that I think really has to be discussed here is that, like, the Vietnam War did something really, really confusing to people where it was like, you know, in a certain way, like, not to repeat it, a very J.D. Vance talking point here. But, like, America’s ruling class that emerged out of the baby boomers who came out of that generation of Vietnam War protesters and stuff, if you put them in a behind a closed door and you knew that there was no mics on, they don’t like America that much.

They imbibed a thing of America’s bad, and a lot of people of great significance and power in the Democratic Party were, like, in some way, like, really confused and saddened and left adrift when, like, the Soviet Union went away. Because it was, if you are a leftist, there was this idea that, yes, the millenarian thing is coming, and we can work within the system to hasten its arrival. And it won’t be totalitarian here, it won’t be evil here, but there’s a vision that we’re getting towards.

And then the Soviet Union blew up, and much more so than, I think a lot of people were able to kid themselves and be blind about the reality of it. But then after it fell, you really couldn’t do that. And it just sapped a lot of people, if any will, to do anything different than the quote-unquote establishment style.

So returning to Chris Murphy. Okay. He was recently in a bit of press attention, and of course these things are, like, kind of fake. But he was recently criticized for being too sympathetic to healthcare shooter Luigi Mangione. You know about this case, right?

This is okay. Chris basically said, we have to look at some of his concerns about the underlying health insurance system. And, you know, a lot of people basically condemned him, saying, you shouldn’t give credence to a murderer. We have a very strange relationship to political violence right now. And maybe that’s a good thing.

I would like to not be bombed. I would like to have fewer bombings. And especially in D.C., I would like to have fewer political terrorism attacks, please. But, but, I think the actual point here is that there’s, of course, an alert to violence. There’s always an alert to violence. And I don’t know where it fits into all this, into the metaphysics, but it really does seem like people are kind of asleep about this, are not really taking this seriously.

Well, I mean, America made a decision a long time ago that we weren’t going to let the state have a monopoly on violence. When you say, like, it’s my, it’s my constitutional right to keep a firearm in my garage to shoot somebody who’s stealing my lawnmower. That is me saying, the state in this country does not have a monopoly on violence. I’m allowed to do it, too.

And we have, you know, we struggle with where that falls, right? And so there’s a version, like, it’s not, it’s a weird, we treat it, we treat political violence, essentially, like we treat, like, pop. Where it’s like, it’s allowed, but not legal.

Yeah, I mean, we’re allowed to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. We walk around with shirts that say, like, obedience to God is killing tyrants, or whatever, however that phrase goes. That’s part of our makeup, and that’s why we keep the guns, honestly.

I’ve probably said this on this show before, but, like, my, like, radical gun control solution for America that would solve every problem and be fine is that every adult male is legally required to have an AR-15 and know how to use it. And no one is allowed to have a handgun.

And because the point of the Second Amendment is that the people have the right to political violence as a check against tyranny. The problem with guns is that we have 38,000 people who kill each, who kill themselves with a handgun that was just left around the house, or they do a bank robbery, or they do gang stuff and whatever.

So, that’s my long, sort of, like, big picture thing about this is that if your whole thing is, no, Luigi was bad because he did political violence. We never support political violence. You’re candidly, like, not a serious person. Because, like, would you have said that about the IRA? Like, maybe? You know, but then people go, well, that’s a little different because of this. Do you say that about war? War is political violence. War is the application of violence to achieve national ends that are political. So, you’re not against political violence. I’m sorry. Unless you’re a fucking Quaker, you’re not.

What we, as a national society, have to figure out is whether the exercise of violence that Luigi used was watering the Tree of Liberty with the blood of a tyrant. Was the guy a tyrant? Now, that’s the real conversation people are having. When people get on Twitter and say, you endorsed murder, I hate you, I guarantee you there are murders that those people would endorse. Unless they’re an actual pacifist. Or unless they paradoxically and un-Americanly believe that the state should have a monopoly on violence.

To me, the question becomes this kind of national divide on the question of who indeed is a tyrant. And what I think we have seen, and there’s this really funny moment, because it’s just been funny to watch these guys take L after L after L, where it’s like, the Iglesias types who are like, no, don’t you understand the economy is good? Like, we live in a period of unprecedented prosperity. And it’s like, you can look at those metrics, man, and say that over and over and call everyone but you crazy over and over and over.

But the world just keeps moving in directions that, if they used your heuristics, would not work. And so whatever you think, whatever your data says, call me in six months and see if the world moved in that direction that it suggested it would. And it just keeps not doing it. And so then you see the Iglesias being like, look, nobody even likes this guy. Most people are really reasonable. And then you get these polls where it’s like, 20% are just completely in favor.

And think about it. Because a hefty 10% of American people polled will frequently not even admit to a pollster that they support Donald Trump. So, that 20% that was fully for Luigi and then there’s a much larger sort of maybe it was good contingent. We can add a lot of percentage points to that. This is going to sound like now I’m defending Luigi. I really don’t know what I think.

But I do think that if you have such large portions of the American body population, in so much as there’s a people in the United States who think of themselves as on the left rather than just like Democrats, almost uniform support for Luigi in that segment of society, then you have a revolutionary ferment forming. You have a group of people who have decided, rightly or wrongly, that people like healthcare executives actually do represent tyrants and it’s time to start killing them.

And if you’re going to get mad at Murphy, literally, I’ve read his words, you’re going to get mad at Murphy or Elizabeth Warren or any of these people for saying, look, this is happening, this is how people feel, then I think you are doing yourself a disservice politically. And you’re also potentially removing a very important American political motivator off the table.

Part of why our democracy works so well, actually, is that frequently we get people in positions of high power who are actually pretty responsive to the threat of revolution and violence from below. That’s, again, part of why we have the guns. Like it or hate it, the New Deal was a concerted, bit-by-bit effort to prevent either a communist revolution or a takeover by Huey Long. Absent the threat of looming revolution, you didn’t probably have the Roosevelt regime.

And I don’t mean whatever, I’m not going to get into the whole, was the New Deal a good idea thing now. But as far as it descended through the memory of American politics and allowed for the continuance of democratic government and things to work out for decades after it, it was a grand success at preventing a communist revolution and figuring out a new system.

So, are you really just going to say these people are crazy? That’s not how we do this, actually. I hate to break it to you, but part of the pressure system we use is seeing when people will engage in violence and they decide certain people are tyrants. Yes, this is the perfect point to raise. Because there’s an interesting point earlier on that I’m not sure I agree with.

The United States and gun control. The United States has more effective gun control than 1920s Europe. In 1920s Europe, people were just shooting politicians. Yeah. I mean, they were, they were as well in the United States, just to be clear. Yeah. There was a lot of, yeah, but gone. Or, I’m saying, like, current day U.S. versus 1920s Europe, right?

And I think philosophically, your point is absolutely correct. Philosophically, we really value individual liberty, Second Amendment, using firearms as a check against tyranny. I absolutely agree with this, you know, philosophically, historically. At the same time, there’s a pattern in modern political life that I think is very detached from that, that assumes no political violence.

And has assumed no political violence for several decades now. I think clearly since the 90s, since Clinton, at least if not earlier. There’s just this assumption of like, we’re not doing the assassination thing anymore. JFK is well behind us. That might be wrong. We did see the assassination attempt this time. But that was at least a perception for a long time.

Well, let me argue a little against that for a second. Because, so, political violence in the days of rage. Credit to where it’s due, but go listen to Daryl Cooper on this, because it’s just really good. Or read Days of Rage. But by the time you got to the political violence in the 1970s in the United States, it was so deep that literally, not even joking, like, left-wing, guerrilla-style politics is still what is the defining ideology of all of our national prison gangs.

Like, La Familia, the Black Guerrilla family, stuff like this. It was like, you can’t kill it in prison. So it’s still there, lingering on. But when you had these people, like the Black Guerrilla Army, going through New York, killing half a dozen cops, putting the city on complete lockdown, things were getting to the point of craziness. Here in LA, the Symbionese Liberation Army having its shootout in Watts. It felt like war, you know, and this is what people came up in.

This is what Bill Clinton came up in. This is what my dad came up in. This is what all these boomers, like, they grew up in that stuff, and they were tired, right? And then they had to do much like the PLO and much like the Irish Republican Army would do. They had to do an accommodation with the hated terrorist state. And basically, America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Right, right, right. But we did negotiate with terrorists, right?

We gave them all positions at the University of Chicago, right? And so, Bill Ayers. And then you can go, I mean, God, right? Now I’m really sounding like one of these right-wing guys, but some of this is so intense and so baked into our society that I really don’t agree with the conception that people in power thought that this went away. I think they were very, very aware of it and actually preternaturally disposed to being really, really revolted by it.

And I’ll get to examples of proving that that’s true. So, Barack Obama’s first political fundraiser, where was it? Do you know? It was one of the Black Panthers, right? This was like a controversy. No, it was in Bill Ayers’ house. It was hosted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. People who had committed major acts of terror on American soil. And his first political run was against Bobby Rush, who was, or no, his first congressional run was against Bobby Rush, who was a Black Panther and who was elected to the United States Congress.

So, yeah, we accommodated these people. We brought them in. I don’t think you could be unaware of the looming threat of something like it. And so you get to the point when, for example, like the EL up in the Pacific Northwest starts bombing, starts bombing U.S. forestations. They burned those car dealerships. You probably weren’t even born when this was happening. But they burned these SUV dealerships and stuff. And the arm of God came down on them.

You cannot believe what happened to these people. Put away for 30 years for stuff that you wouldn’t even catch time for if you had done in 2020. And the reason for that was that the federal surveillance apparatus is extremely, extremely responsive to political pressure. And people at the Chamber of Commerce, like, big business people, were really, really worried that political and environmentalist political violence would kick off a kind of anti-consumerist, anti-growth, anti-development movement in this country.

And they pushed the Bush administration. This is stuff that, like, I think, like, Jacob Siegel, but like, this is stuff The Intercept went hard on back in the day. And so there are documents that show this, but they went hard on the Bush administration early in its days, right? Because all of these bombings and stuff were happening under Clinton.

And they, the FBI made it the number one, number one terror sort of threat that they mobilized towards. And that was because of the mobilization of political interests from the business community saying, like, no, no, no, no, this has to be stopped now. And it was right at the time when the surveillance state was sort of getting underway, right? So all of a sudden, these anarchists start to be very, very, they didn’t really know the power of the informants. They hadn’t learned the lessons of the Black Panthers.

They didn’t know any of this stuff yet. And so they all got put away, most of them. And then, for example, like Clinton, Clinton did in ‘96, he did the Grand Escalante, Grand Escalante National Monument, just outside of the Grand Canyon. And there was political violence there. The ranchers rose up, they seized parts of the monument. And he was really worried about that. That was how a lot of the things that would then go into being the kind of surveillance apparatus systems that would catch up the patriot movement, that became the Oath Keepers, that became all these militias and stuff like that.

That started kicking into high gear under Clinton. Because he saw, like, oh, these people are going to rebel against me if I keep doing this environmental stuff. And so he was very, very nervous about that. And then you can fast forward, of course, to where I sort of come in, where I’ve now been personal witness to three standoffs conducted by armed men telling the federal government that they can’t do something, and that they, like, won each time.

And they’re all, like, with the exception of the people who then went to January 6th and tried to do that, all of them are free. Like, they just did armed violence against the federal government. And under the Obama administration, they were able to succeed. And it really freaked people out. Like, it really, and it represented even more than that, a funny inversion, under which the environmental groups became intelligence gathering arms of the federal law enforcement apparatus.

Because they regarded the ranchers out there in their own turf, the turf where they’re all fighting. They regarded the ranchers as a separate power base that needed to be destroyed. Yeah, there was that end of period, end of history period where we thought all this went away. But honestly, there’s a difference between the propaganda of that mass media era that was so rosy and, I don’t know, the term I always use is smooth.

You just never really saw a ton of…you can go back and watch Meet the Press or Washington Week from that era or West Wing or something. And it’s just fantastic, in fact, like how little political maneuvering space there is, how little difference there is between the worldviews and the ideologies and things like that. But in the hearts of people, that just still wasn’t true. We just had much more effective propaganda systems.

Yeah, yeah. Or maybe it disappeared for the elite. It disappeared if you’re in like, SF. But it was definitely not wiped from history, wiped from the earth. And just, I know I keep beating this drum, but I think it’s important. This is a lesson I learned as a younger person, right? But part of why it disappeared from SF was because SF was just went through a period.

Yeah, it was just, it had been so violent for so long that the people who ran SF were like, the one thing we don’t feel like fucking dealing with now is that. So let’s just get a consensus and make sure this doesn’t come back. That’s a big part of all of this. Because that’s why my parents hated the anti-WTO protests. Why? Because they were just like, this is what always destroys us.

We always try to fight, and they always come down and kill us. They were just like, this is bad tactics. And I, of course, didn’t agree. But I think it’s important for people who are coming up in younger generations to remember, like, part of why that establishment consensus was so rigid was that it was like the parents trying to protect the kids. They were like, we’ve seen the evil. We don’t want you to grow up with this bullshit.

Yes, I absolutely, you know, I could not agree more. And there’s always this element of, and I think this is actually what makes it attractive to Cooper and to a lot of people on the radical right as well, the idea that this is a way for even the most deplorable of people to always have a say.

Yeah. I mean, and I think, I mean, I have personally benefited from it, right? Like, I spent COVID in far northern California. I didn’t have to mask. My life didn’t shut down. You know why? Because guns. Because that was full on. They were in the state system. That was part of what was part of what made life so crazy up there during those years was because the government of Shasta County voted to participate in the color-coded, tiered California system.

And even though under that system, like, the county didn’t have transmission rates high enough to justify masking or any shutdowns, the fact that the county had voted to participate in the system kicked off like a spiritual rebellion. They were like, no, you are betraying the values of these people up here. Even though we are in California, we have different values. Do not do this.

They did it. And there was a rebellion. And the militia succeeded at basically running proxy candidates to take seats on the board and become the majority. If they had not, they were talking about going to war. And do you think under those circumstances, the state of California is going to send health inspectors to shut down people’s bars? Absolutely not.

So, like, that worked. That was just, they just said, if you do this, we’re going to do violence. And the government was like, all right, you do you. So, it’s definitely there. And it’s definitely, like, I mean, it’s unfortunate, actually, because I think the Times, not to single out the Times, which is an employer of mine and a newspaper that I will, I said this on Good Old Boys, and I’ll say it again.

I actually think the paper’s been really good recently. Boy, that kind of New York Times worldview, it just had so much trouble admitting that something like the threat of violence could influence our statecraft that they don’t even really know how to write about it. They don’t even really know how to discuss it because they’re stuck in this thing that like, no, no, it can’t. It can’t. We have such a functioning, perfect system now that if these guys are actually influencing statecraft, like, it’s somehow giving them too much credit, somehow giving power.

Yeah, it’s like, it’s giving reality to this thing that cannot be real because if it’s real, then everything we understand will be fake too. And like, what do we do? It becomes a real battle for these people, for the end of history type people. And I don’t mean the Clintons. I think they saw us emerge into the end of history and understood what it meant and understood, you know, the great thing about the Clintons is they’re willing to kill people.

We are ending history. We are here to do what it takes to end history, people. Exactly. Yeah. You know, history is over, and I’ll take a thousand-year nap, and it’ll still be over, kind of. Exactly. That was the Clintons knew that if you wanted to keep history ended, you had to kill a lot of people to make sure they stayed that way.

Yeah, exactly. So, I don’t know if that answers the question fully, but that’s my experience of it, is that the reality of it has been there, and it’s been extremely active. And that there’s just a certain kind of, like, sort of, like, propaganda-minded inability to actually admit its force.

Is that something that is managed? Is it something that the editors or, you know, administration enforces at the New York Times? Or is it just, like, it’s just, like, the people there, it’s just the selection? I mean, you can see the quality of the paper is, like, it’s just dramatically better and, like, more responsive to reality today than it was under Dean Baquet.

Like, now that it’s under Joe Kahn, so there’s a degree to which there’s a conscious, sort of directional motivation that emerges from the top. On a broader scale, when we’re using the New York Times as a synecdoche for, like, broader American media and like, what that worldview is, like, there’s some kind of, like, middle ground between the Curtis Yarvin Cathedral conception of it as being sort of unorganic and undirected.

And then the kind of, like, more conspiracy-minded, like, we’re being fed something. Like, I see it as a kind of middle ground between those things. I think there’s a sort of way in which like people who are aware of how a cathedral hive mind style media system works are very, very good at kind of giving it direction.

And so you can even see this in, like, to take a really example, like, a really narrow example that’s less fun than the big picture stuff we’re talking about. But, like, where on earth did the joy, energy, and unity memes come from? And why did every single piece about the Democratic National Convention contain the words joy, energy, and unity? And like, somebody did that.

And like, I didn’t get that memo. So it was really funny because I’m like, sort of somehow downstream of that. I saw it emerge. And it was just very funny, of course, because there wasn’t that much joy or energy in the room. There was a lot of unity. I’ll give them that. Like, there wasn’t a lot of joy or energy. And so, like, you’re just sitting around wondering, like, why is this reporter who I’ve just seen bored out of his mind, complaining about how nothing’s going on, complaining about how this is the deadest convention he’s ever been to.

And then they go off and they’ll do a TV spot or they’ll file something and they’ll talk about joy and energy. And I’m just like, wait, what? How did that happen? Like, what? Like, am I missing something? I just mean, like, there’s a degree to which that stuff that people say is true of like, there’s so much feeding of lines and narratives and stories about what is happening in the country to journalists who are like, frequently, like, brain dead.

Like, just speaking about the TV people who really set a lot of the tone, like, they’re just not that interested. They’re just sort of like, hey, tell me what’s going on in the country. And then they have an established set of people who tell them. And then they go. And then downstream of that, all the newspaper reporters suddenly have to write to the mood of a country that is being set via conversations between establishment people privately and big media executives.

Via private Zoom calls. Yeah, that’s all happening. That’s all completely true. And that’s not even that surprising, right? That’s not different. And, you know, right-wing people will suddenly say, like, oh, God, I’m I new. Like, okay, sure. But, like, Nixon did this, too. You know, like, this has been – Eisenhower did this. This is not some kind of like the Democrats and the media have always been hand in glove and blah, blah, blah. Come on.

But, like, yeah, there’s just really, like, I think to keep it in the frame of the conversation that we’re having, once you got to reporters being Gen X, like, this was the end of days. Because Gen X, like, really – they grew up in this like, thing of like, everything’s just fine and boring and nothing will – they’re the true like, nothing ever happens people.

How old is Fukuyama? He’s 72. So he is a boomer. Fukuyama is, in fact, a boomer. But – Okay, but that’s my point, actually. Like, Fukuyama is old enough to have witnessed history end and identify the point at which it did. Like, he actually has perspective on the end of history. But the problem with Gen X is, like, you come up and like, these people who have been through all of this craziness – these people who’ve been through all this craziness are suddenly giving you stories that are trying to keep everything together.

And all you’ve ever done is watch Wayne’s World and have everything be completely fine. And you grow up in a world where you just believe everything is default fine. And it’s really surprising and uncomfortable and just doesn’t fit your frames when things are not fine. And that, I think, is like, really where you get this kind of – it’s kind of just like, brain dead, unwilling to consider possibilities, unwilling to believe that anything could change, like, media system that then we’re now like, seeing a massive populist rebellion against.

There are so many places we could go with this. This was something I wrote down when I was listening to your podcast with Marshall, which was – he was saying, and I think you agreed with him, that some of the high-level Democrats know, right, like, Jake Sullivan knows. I think that’s one of the people he mentioned, that they really have to do something, that they really have to change. They really have to do something about the realignment.

But the kind of mid-level, like, the Xers and the Millennials, they just don’t know. They’re just not even paying attention. Jake is young, in fairness. Oh, interesting, interesting. But go on, sorry. I think the broader point stands, yeah.

Yeah, but, like, maybe it’s distributed by elevation rather than age. There are a lot of people at the mid-level and at the cultural level who just do not get it. And the big question is, can the elites pull off the realignment? Now I’m going to say I think you’re giving the boomers too much credit.

Like, I think people who were involved in this stuff at really high levels, like the Clintons and things like that, like, they just have a really useful perspective on what actually, like, statecraft and great power competition really means. Because, like, Madeleine Albright was there. The great problem is that they end up consumed now with going back and playing the hits because, like, they’re picking up the violin from when they were in college and suddenly being like, look, Russia’s our great competition.

Like, we know how to do this. Let’s roll. In terms of like, can the elites – the boomer age elites pull off another squeeze act? Like, we had mentioned jokingly monarchists for Biden. I have occasionally been guilty of looking inside of like, what I personally hope out of an election and just thinking, like, you know, it might have been fine if Clinton won because then we could get four more years of just like, people really getting a glimpse of this system working as it’s supposed to and like still not liking it.

And then come up with like a pretty good sort of broad-based national consensus about what to do. And I kind of honestly almost thought that Harris, like, just get somebody who really doesn’t even understand what this thing is but is given to us as a really highly competent manager of it. And then if it keeps not working, we’ll have societal consensus about, okay, now it’s time to discard it.

So I was bullish on the idea of a Harris candidacy in a weird way because this is what we’re really talking about. Like, the end of history is not just like, America has a really narrow set of potential domestic choices to make about policy. The end of history is like, war is over and the Atlantic Empire shall reign forever.

The thing is, you can’t really put that genie back in the bottle just because Europe literally can’t defend itself. And like, in order to make Europe capable of defending itself, you have to change European social contracts. Like, you can’t just suddenly decide, like, oh, France is going to start paying for its own defense.

Like, France can’t afford to pay for its own defense without changing the social contract between the French elites and the French people. So you’re going to have to do that. Or you’re going to have to literally openly become a vassal state of the United States. Because like, the Trump people, like, it’s almost like you could, like, European elites could actively supplicate Trump and be like, look, there are good reasons for you to keep underwriting our security. These are them.

Going to need Greenland. Yeah. Like, exactly. Like, what do we get for it? Like, this kind of thing. But so barring some kind of compact that resets an American-European deal about like how we defend them and what the alliance looks like, then Europe has to kind of chart at least a bit of its own course.

And in order to chart at least a bit of its own course, it has to change a large part of its social contract. So already European elites are screwed. Like, I’m sure maybe somebody can find some hole in this. Lay that out a little bit more for the audience. How does Europe need to change its social contract?

Well, okay. So you want to get, you know, everybody talks this big game of we’re going to get up to 2.5% GDP spent on our militaries. Okay. That sounds great, right? The Keir Starmer came in to power in Britain, promising that. The French have been promising it. The French, you know, who of course have been losing their sphere of influence day by day. They have been promising to get there.

Estonia, the Estonian Prime Minister, Katja Kallas, who was like the most bloodthirsty militant in all of Europe, was just made into the new sort of European diplomacy defense chief figurehead person. And she’s been calling for 2.5% from all members for a long time. But how do you pay for it?

So, like, France already is in that same situation the U.S. is in, where they pay more on the interest of their debt than they do on their military. You can’t raise taxes in France because the country will erupt. You can’t cut social services in France because the country will erupt. So, where does the money come from?

Sorry, I just don’t get it. Germany, last year, Germany stopped even saying that it could supply weapons to Ukraine because it didn’t have the money. Britain, if they want to get to 2.5%, I forget what the exact tax mechanisms are, but like, you know, their banking sector, it will take one push to have that entire thing move to Paris or Frankfurt.

And so, like, there just aren’t a ton of levers to keep in place the social system like the social welfare systems and the tax rates and the levels of military spend that you would have to get to for Europe to defend itself. That’s sort of what I’m saying. And, like, something’s going to have to give there.

And then once you’ve started tinkering with the European social contract, you think those elites are going to last long? Like, I don’t. Do you think that system is going to last long? Like, the actual political systems? Like, France is what? On the Fifth Republic? Like, they just…

Wait, like, do they stop having elections? Does it become, like, you know, actual monarchism? I mean, France already is a monarchy, essentially. Like, it’s already, like, an extremely centralized system with a huge amount of power weighted into a presidency. And then, like, a long tradition of basically people just coming in and saying, like, look, look, look, democracy is a little too messed up right now. We got to do some other special stuff, right?

So this is not even far out from France’s political traditions. Like, their current iteration of the republic was created by de Gaulle during a political emergency. Do I think something like that will happen down the road in France? Absolutely. Honestly. It might happen next week. They don’t have a government.

And in Germany, you know, how long do you keep the AFD out of power? And like, what is the mechanism for keeping the AFD out of power long term? Like, what’s the political vision and alliance that could do that? Like, I don’t know. But, like, you know, I’m not an expert on European politics per se.

But, like, it’s just you can kind of look at the math and the political problems that that class of people, who is arguably a much more entrenched elite than we even have context for, they’re in a world of hurt. And then in America, if you want to take that same question, arguably half of our governing elites, such as we know them, have already been overthrown.

Like, the quote-unquote establishment of the Republican Party, like, that becomes this kind of misnomer. Or like, this becomes this like easy shorthand that people use. And it just means like the Republicans who aren’t Trumpy. But it actually means something much more important. It means something – it means like Republicans who shared the post-Cold War bipartisan consensus were overthrown.

They lost power. This is how it works when you have a coup. This is how it works when revolutions happen. It’s also how it works when systems of power change via democratic means. Like, your guys, your patronage systems, your team, your staffs, all those people, they lose jobs. They lose money. They lose influence. Their kids don’t get into schools that are as good. Like, a whole thing happens.

Yes, I know people down the block from here who are like out of a job are like posters, are like sub-stackers now. Yeah. You know? Yeah, seriously. Like, and like, I mean, it becomes generational. Like, I would – there’s a reason people fought him so hard, right? Because it’s like, oh, you’re not the deputy undersecretary of the thing anymore. Like, and the people writing your kids’ recommendations to Princeton, now they’re sub-stackers.

Like, your kid doesn’t get into Princeton. And then, generations down the road, like, you become – you go back to being like a ruled instead of a ruler. This is real stuff here. And Democrats – Democrats have resisted that much more effectively. And they welcome it in some of those refugee elites, right? Like, Liz Cheney is like, desperately clinging to a position within the ranks of the American oligarchy and stuff.

And it’s like – but there’s not even really anything for her to do. There’s not enough jobs. There’s not enough stuff to fill her. I follow her. Do you think she really would have gotten a job in the Harris admin? Yeah, for sure I do. I really do. Yeah, I really do think so. I think that was the whole game there.

I was there the night she lost that Wyoming congressional primary. When Dick Cheney came, it was one of the most surreal things ever. And they were really – their staff was really mean to me because they could tell I wasn’t like – I didn’t believe in her epical fight to save the Republic. But I still follow her daily updates on what Liz Cheney is doing. It’s called something like the Grand Cause or something. That’s her organization.

Goodness. But that’s the – you’re fundamentally at that point basically a substacker. And what are all these Democrats going to do? Like those boomers that just lost, who represented the sort of establishment mindset within the Democratic Party.

Like, how old are they going to be the next time that they even have a chance to come into government? Like, it could be 12 years. It could be 16. Yeah. These people might be out of power for really for a long time. We always say this, too. Assuming – and, you know, perhaps I’m naive. Many of my fellow journalists would call me naive. But assuming that we have elections again, one thing is just people make so much of these shifts.

And the shift within the functioning of the state that Trump is going to effectuate, I think, actually is meaningful in a real – it is a real event in American politics that will mark a before and after time. That’s completely true. This thing of like, oh, there’s been a preference cascade that will allow Republicans to rule for as long as they don’t screw this up. We’ve heard this a million times.

Like, people thought after – yeah, I don’t buy it either. Yeah, people thought after Lyndon Johnson won ‘64. Like, there would be a – people thought after Obama. People, they always say – they always use that phrase, durable governing majority, blah, blah, blah. How long is it durable? It’s not very frequently. It was basically just FDR, right? FDR actually did it. FDR actually got it.

Yeah. He won the four elections. That’s a good point. Yeah, that’s a good point. He kept on going. Yeah. But he – that was an exceptional period of history. Even more exceptional than some of these others. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, this is part of the silliness of the end of history. For us as millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, whatever, who just grow up with this kind of heuristic of like, either things really happen and they’re such a huge deal or nothing ever happens. It’s like, normally just stuff is happening a little bit all the time. And like, you would just be able to process that and understand it and understand that systems are – like, our system is surprisingly durable, but in general systems are not that durable.

And FDR is the only one who really had a combination of epical shocks and war that made him into somebody governing through a period of exception. I don’t really think the rest of it – in the long scheme of history, like, it was just shocking how stable and easy everything was for America throughout the 20th century. The long 20th century.

You said it would be like a real regime change. What actually happens? Curtis characterizes a regime change by, you know, you wake up and you live your life differently. And he says there hasn’t been a regime change because Trump got elected in ‘16. You didn’t really live your life differently. Maybe you got a small tax cut, but it was fundamentally the same.

Yeah. Is he saying that about this time too, though? I don’t know what he’s saying now. Before the election, he was – he endorsed Kamala, right? He was kind of pessimistic about Trump. I – well, I mean, I have a couple things to that. If you were just a random person living in Leipzig, you know, the day the Stasi went away, how different was your life?

And how long did it take for the governing systems of East Germany to be dismantled and then replaced and everybody to figure out and figure out what the uniform that the guy doing the water that comes to your house, what uniforms are you wearing? Like, is he wearing a different hat? What are the forms he’s signing?

Like, you know, this stuff takes a long time. And, I mean, we – Trump isn’t even in power yet, right? So – Oh, yeah. To me, like – I forgot about that. I – yeah, honestly, like, people frequently just literally forget that. They’re like, wait, he hasn’t done anything yet. And you’re like, what?

To me, I think like we’re witnessing today – I just saw this, like, right before I was logging on to talk to you, so I don’t even know what’s going on. But, like, you see all these, like, Democratic senators or Congress people talking about Elon Musk, like, walking in and like, you know – Killing the CR.

Yeah, making demands of Congress. Like, this is happening as we speak. One of my private theories, actually, is that just like a lot of what comes down and whether or not like the golden dawn of American dynamism that people keep thinking Trump’s going to institute actually works out now just like kind of hinges on the relationship between Trump and Musk.

Because I think there’s a pretty decent chance that they have a falling out and that that doesn’t work. And then absent him, do you kind of just, in general, retreat from the entire project of remaking the American government and draining the swamp? Can you keep the right people in there who like really have their eye on the ball and are really willing to go pretty far and do stuff like that?

And like, if you can, like, if you can, then you probably are going to have something like a regime change. If in six months, Doge has done nothing and like in 2016, the figures through whom the kind of remake the state and counter elites all right? So, like, now, much more than in 2016, you have people who are consciously, consciously, and like, one might accuse you and I of being amongst these, are consciously like set up as counter elites to replace people who have failed to do the job of the elites who were doing it before them.

And in the actual administration, that is going to flow in large part through tech people, this kind of like new, like big-time counter elite that can replace both the financial muscle and the kind of like big-scale vision of how to run things that was banking establishment, things like that, people who staffed everything before.

And as you and I both know, like, Peter Thiel was tasked with this in 2016. And it just like really quickly from the get-go didn’t build into much. And very quickly into the administration, Bannon was basically had the side of his head blown off by a repertorial ambush. Thiel was out.

Blake Masters was out. There was no Balaji Srinivasan. I’m not sure if I’m saying his name right. But he’s not coming in to run the FDA, as people talked about. None of that was even close to happening, really, even though it was mooted. Now, I think if you could keep people in place for a while, like a lot of that stuff would happen.

Probably if either of us, probably if half the people listening to this podcast called the right person or just went down to Palm Beach, like CV in hand and said, what do you got for me? They’d find you a freaking job. Because like, they’re like, hey, we need the pirates and the weirdos to come in here and do this stuff. That is elite replacement.

I’m sorry. You can be really cynical about all of this. But a lot of people from the Bay have come in and taken on senior roles that the people they’re replacing are not going to get back anytime soon. I think I agree with that on a philosophical level. On a practical level, it’s kind of hard to internalize all at once, right?

Yeah. I’m not trying to oversell the singular importance of Elon Musk in all this. Basically, what I’m saying is because Musk has actually become a figure of singular importance in a way that I, at least, and I think very few people really foresaw, now I think a lot of this just like hinges on their relationship because he’s already siloed off this huge amount of power and influence.

And because the rupture between them would be really financially, media-wise because Musk has such reach, it would really, really hamstring the administration. Yeah, that just makes me seem it’s really unlikely. It’s almost like a divorce, you know? Like, you know, you have all these people who I think are really loyal to Musk.

Like, what happens to David Sachs if there’s like a falling out between Musk and Trump? Is he no longer A.I. czar? Is he, you’re fired, you know? Is he gone? This is what I mean. So you have two very volatile personalities who are very, very into their own egos and very, very skeptical of having other people in charge over them or having separate power bases around them.

And you have to have that relationship work. That’s why I’m sort of like hinging it more than I normally would on just that relationship. I was surprised that if I was designing the administration, I would have not let this take shape the way it has just because I would not have wanted so much that they were trying to do to have to ride on that relationship.

The thing is, it’s not designed, right? It’s not. Things just happen. There are two strains of the new right. Maybe more than two, but we can divide it into two for convenience. There’s the kind of tech right, and then there’s the kind of like populist right of like Bannon. To some degree of Sorob Amari and Compact, although it’s not exactly the same as Bannon.

What happened to like the populists from the first time around? You mean being the Bannon people? Yeah. Oh, I mean, I think they’re broadly speaking in power. Both Tucker and Steve Bannon, you know, like people who, if they had asked, I would assume could have found themselves places in government, elected not to take those places.

I will tell you behind the scenes that they don’t need those places. Like, I was talking to a guy who had lunch with Bannon a couple days ago, and he’s not even like a Trumpy dude. He’s just an expert on a subject matter that people involved in intelligence would, he’s just at a level of knowing stuff about a certain intelligence thing that you’d sort of be interested in.

And Bannon was like, what do you want, like, special advisor to X or whatever? So, clearly they have a role. I’ve been asked this, not accusing you of it, you’re much more sophisticated, but I’m asked frequently, like, why Bannon doesn’t have a role. And I’m just like, what are you talking about?

It’s just his own carved out little thief. And, you know, him, JD, Tucker, Don Jr., you can make the list go on. They’ve got their wing. And there’s spots where they’ve won fights, and there’s spots where they’ve lost fights. And like, the tech people, I think, have their wing.

To me, I don’t really think they’re that far off from sharing a lot of basic views. The questions that I think are going to really start coming up to add a kind of another axis on, I’m not sure how many axes we’re working with right here, but to add another axis on the sort of, like, where does the new right fall and which part of it are you in? Like, you can see a tension in the libertine new right, which exists both –

The barstool conservatives? Well, that, but, you know, this whole kind of thing of, like, I’m not right wing. I’m just like anti-establishment. Like, you can include Rogan, Dimes Square, a lot of the tech energy, the barstool people. You have this whole kind of libertine, drugs are fine. We don’t want to undo the sexual revolution. We like Trump because it’s rock and roll and cool and like, then people who are like, no, if we’re going to do this, you have to get married, bro.

This is not, we’re not about smoking pot. So, to me, like, that’s going to be the big tension, is actually like, what is the shaping worldview of all this? Like, do you have a shaping spiritual worldview of this? Is the new right fundamentally like, when people talk about the new founding, is that a Christian new founding?

Or is it just American dynamism? That’s going to be, I think, the bigger problem. Because like, Bannon and the populace, I guess, I guess you’re speaking from knowing a lot of like founders and stuff who would be like pretty anti-union and things like that, maybe. I think that’s one aspect.

Another aspect is that Bannon’s philosophy, I talked to our mutual friend Ben Tiedelbaum about this, is one of really skepticism towards progress, and even like not just social progress, but technological progress. I see what you’re asking. Like, he would see, and actually, there’s a lot of this, of what’s seen rightfully or wrongfully as transhumanism on the kind of tech side of things that conservatives are incredibly skeptical about. Yes.

Yes. I see now. That’s a, that’s a.

Like, there are people who are kept up at night by Neuralink.

Yeah. Would there be a media? This would be nice if we had a media that would actually get to this fundamental problem.

But, yeah. Okay. I see what you’re asking now.

Yeah, that’s a huge tension. To do some pro-New York Times propaganda, there was a good, it was more so about the populace and the labor side of things, but Ezra Klein had Emily Jashinsky on and had a really good conversation about this as well.

But, yeah. Oh, I should listen to that. There’s a pro-New York Times propaganda.

Yeah. I like Emily a lot. She’s really cool.

Okay. All right. So, let me do some Luddite propaganda here. Let’s do it. Let me speak for the Luddites, and let me speak for why I actually think this is more easily resolved than you think.

Okay. Luddism, in the colloquial sense, it’s a word I oddly have a lot of trouble saying, colloquial sense, is taken as this kind of Ted K, pure anti-technology, right? That’s not what Luddism was. Luddism was a rebellion against the use of technology to take agency from people who made money off their labors.

So, when you instituted that system of weaving in those mills, you were destroying a craft-based system that allowed people to live in their own homes and control their own destinies, right? And the issue with, I would argue, if you are a tech skeptic like me who’s not an anarcho-primitivist, the reason that you would be that kind of Luddite is not to say technology is bad and it has dehumanized us, which I do actually think.

I think the technologies that we use currently are very badly designed and are not helping us achieve the best out of our human natures, right? And I would argue that a Tucker and a Bannon is probably less on the train of pure Ted K anti-technology than they are skeptics of, and justifiably so. I assume you would agree with this, too.

Like, the attention-based internet that we use now was horribly designed. And, like, there’s a reason why things like Erbit crop up as, if nothing else, an attractive idea of an alternative because you have different incentive structures that would then allow this thing to serve you rather than capturing your attention and ruining your freaking brain as it has done mine.

Basically, if you talk to Peter Thiel, who is, in some circles, like, would even be regarded as a tech skeptic because he is critical of how many technologies have developed in recent years. And he views them as things that need almost like a, I don’t want to speak for him, but I think he would probably believe that it needs to be something like a societal project to make technologies that serve us rather than make our lives more distracted and miserable than they are.

So that’s my bull case on this. This is my bull case on Trump in a way. Because I think the fundamental thing is that, actually, our technologies are so, our communications technologies are so bad and so detrimental at this moment that the kind of thing of uniting a nation behind a project or revitalizing our lost dynamism or whatever is just incredibly badly hampered by our technological systems.

And they’re just, like, it wouldn’t be that hard if you have everyone in political power and everyone in power in Silicon Valley basically now talking to each other to try to find a way out of this. This is an incredible opportunity and a real bull case if you are a tech skeptic or a person who bemoans our lost dynamism.

So now I just did really intense Trump propaganda, but I actually kind of believe in some of that stuff. And I think it would have been really tough to do under a Democratic administration. So I don’t know. It just sounded much more hopeful and rosy than I often do. But I think there’s an opportunity there that is not inevitably some kind of natural tension.

Yeah, you trust these people. You have a really high opinion of these people.

Wow. Well, I’m just saying that’s the bull case. That’s the bull case.

I don’t, look, I just, I gave you a bear case just before where I was saying that I think probably Elon Musk will be out in six months and none of this will work. I’m just saying that in terms of resolving their differing views on AI and tech, I’m not, yeah, I don’t know.

I’d be curious to know what James Poulos thinks about this. I would be curious to know what some of my fellow tech skeptics feel about this. But a political project that includes many people who want to remystify life in the world and want to, you know, I don’t care if you’re atheist or not.

I think we’d just be in a better world if more people had a personal relationship with God, just like, or something, something to take them out of the material, like, hive mind world we live in now. If you have an administration that has the power to do a lot on the tech front and is shaped by some of those differing and maybe dissonant views on the idea of progress, like, that might be a best-case scenario, honestly.

When he was on the show, and I think in his book as well, Ben Tiedelbaum was like, Bannon almost doesn’t have a philosophy of institutional improvement or institutional diagnosis. It comes from traditionalism that once basically liberalism is burnt down, the natural order arises spontaneously.

And so you don’t have to plan for it, you don’t have to build it, it just happens. And so at least my interpretation of this is that he was really skeptical that Bannon has any plans of, like, here is the thing we are going to do that positively changes the world.

I don’t really know, so I completely defer to both of you on this, but I just don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I agree with that. I understand what he’s saying. Ben is speaking from a philosophical standpoint.

I think factually what you’re saying is, and what he’s saying is completely correct. The thing is that, like, my earth theory of a lot of how this ends up playing out in the American system is that, like, people’s philosophies just don’t matter that much.

Like, is Barack Obama a Marxist? Honestly, yes, I think. Like, or at least, like, when he was elected to the Senate, after having come up in those worlds, reading those books, like, his worldview was probably basically a Marxian.

And in certain ways, an anti-American worldview, like, all that stuff. Yeah, you can argue that he was in some ways a third-worldist, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s completely true. I think if you start giving somebody the opportunity to pick who goes to state, they stop being a Marxist real quick. And, like, the thing can inform your thing as you start exercising power.

And that’s sort of the evil genius of the American system is it co-ops people incredibly well. And I think it co-ops Bannon really well. You can have this ideology of traditionalism and, like, you know, you can read Evola all you want. But, like, you don’t not have a theory of what systems could do if you are making – I know for a fact that he’s helping people pick who goes into government.

So he clearly doesn’t think, let’s just burn all this down, right? I think for him, you can’t really do anything. Every macro guy, like, listening to this is going to get offended if I talk in too much detail about it.

But, you know, Bannon’s thing really is this kind of obsession with the concept of the American empire. An obsession with the dollar system and obsession with, frankly, like, the way that capital markets work and, you know, the way that we basically just subsidize bankers for processing money that leaves our country at the expense of people who work in it.

I mean, that stuff’s true. And I think that until you get into government and you really have a chance to start seeing what explodes as you pick apart that system or as it just starts to fall apart naturally, the dollar as the reserve currency, we will see how that all plays out and we will see how much agency the United States has in terms of trying to keep it as the reserve currency or whether indeed we as a society actually want that.

That may shake out in a few years and doesn’t even – there’s ways around it. I don’t know. But I think he really feels like until you get in and start playing with the levers and seeing what explodes when you pull the wrong one at the wrong time, like, he just doesn’t really know how to do his stuff.

And I don’t think many people do. I don’t think if you want to end the dollar system right now, I don’t think there’s a person alive who could tell you with great confidence how to do it and what would happen.

So I genuinely don’t know. So I say this out of curiosity, not skepticism. Like, what is Bannon actually trying to do in the new admin?

I mean, candidly, I don’t know. I need to go to D.C. or Palm Springs. Full disclosure, I’m currently – I hope I don’t get canceled for this or any other podcast.

I’m negotiating a contract with the New York Times right now, and I just signed a contract with Vanity Fair. And so I’m gearing up after the most intense year I personally have ever lived, and I’m trying to gear up to go to D.C. and Palm Beach and start really delving into this stuff.

But my girlfriend’s there now. I don’t even know which one she’s in, one of them. And it’s just been so crazy. Like, we’re not even together for more than three days at a time, like, this whole year.

But that’s a long way of saying, candidly, I really don’t know. Because I kind of took a few weeks off and just had been breathing and trying to figure out, like, what the next move is and, like, where to push.

And in all complete candor, I kind of didn’t want to be in Palm Springs because I kind of – like, people keep getting offered jobs. And it’s just, like, a weird compromising situation for me to be in.

And so that’s a long way of saying – Hold on, if they let you run the Department of the Interior, would you really say no?

Well, no. I’m going to put this on blast for any major Trump donor who’s listening. What – the thing that I was thinking about is, like, because I spent my formative young adult years in Mauritania and then recently went back and I’ve been doing all this work on the Sahel and stuff.

And we should let you run Department of State. Well, no. I was like, maybe I should be ambassador to Mauritania. I was kind of like, maybe I should be ambassador to Mauritania because it’s always, like, a civil service – or a foreign service job.

And it’s like, I won’t be a part of any of the stuff the administration does. I’ll be off in the desert, just trying to do the best I can for everybody, you know, just trying to help people in the desert.

And there just isn’t anyone in the world who cares – and there are hardly any Americans who care about Mauritania in the way I do. So I was – there was a part of me that was like, is that even a possibility?

But there’s a long way of saying, I don’t know what Bannon is up to. I don’t know – you see Tucker going around, you know, doing all these media appearances and, like, his profile is so huge now.

And they’ve got to be having a ton of fun. Everybody’s off at that TPUSA, like, America Fest. I bet it is like Coachella for people who went to Duke. I bet it is just crazy.

And I bet they’re having a lot of fun. And Bannon views his role as fanning the flames, as keeping the kind of peasants, as he says, on fire and raging against the machine and understanding what the machine is.

And I think he is gearing up for a role that probably will be very important if you care about the populist thing. Like, you’re going to need him because you’re going to need him to be essentially what the religious right frequently was for Republicans in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

Where it’s like, you can hit a button and mobilize people and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We put you in here. You got to do that thing you said you were going to do. Or, like, you can’t – you know, Bannon, I think, is going to occupy that role as the cop and the guy making sure that people who really went out for this person, like, put him up as a Napoleonic figure in the history of this nation.

And if they start looking like anything like what the 2016 administration did, sorry. I think Bannon views his job as being someone who’s capable of mobilizing forces to push them back to what he believes they want on this time.

And which, of course, is what he believes they want in 2016, too. But he – I think he gave them a pass.

In 2020? Yeah. What did they run on in 2020? I don’t even know. That was so weird. Because if you go back and look at the ads, like –

Keep America great.

Yeah, keep America great. America’s great now, don’t you think?

Well, I mean, if you couldn’t – like, the one thing about Trump – Lomaz just wrote this on his substack. So this isn’t – but, like, I almost think that everyone in America can kind of agree that it was good Trump lost in 2020.

Because for people on the right, it’s like a hero arc of him returning. For Democrats, it’s this way of saying, like, okay, whatever we have been telling ourselves – and like, Jon Favreau just wrote this. He was like, whatever we told ourselves about why we lost in 2016 and why we won in 2020, like, the story no longer applies.

Like, we cannot keep saying it was a bunch of white supremacists and then we were able to mobilize a diverse working class coalition and then beat him, and then that reset everything and we’re back to normal.

Like, now we have to have the reckoning. And I think in the broad run, that will be good for Democrats as well. So, like, in a weird way, like, 2020, it was great that Joe Biden worked at being a figure they could just toss in and win and then do that neoliberalism.

I think the Trump movement would have been – this dream scenario they have of now we fully get to hit the reset, now the preference cascade comes, now all of this, would have been impossible if Trump hadn’t lost in 2020.

So, you mentioned you were following the group’s discourse, you went on Marshall’s podcast and maybe introduced you to some people I have gotten acquainted with.

Do you know about the Abundance Liberals?

No. Oh, Marshall didn’t tell you about this? Okay.

No, no, but I wanted – yeah. It’s like the permitting reform, like, GIMBY, like, we need more technocracy. The Matt Iglesias wing of the Democratic Party.

You know, my girlfriend has such a – her and her friend, because we – her best friend lives over on the west side of LA, which is like a true stronghold of that kind of person.

And they use a catch-all term that means much more than just about bike lanes. They call them transit weenies, which I think is just such a good signifier for that realm of Abundance Liberal.

Like, they’re just all sort of, like – they’re always talking about transit. They’re always, like, really skinny. So, anyway, they call them transit weenies.

That’s amazing. But you’ve not really heard much about –

Well, no, I mean, I’m heavily exposed to, like, the idea – I mean, I’m heavily exposed to their ideas, if only because I’m interested to know what the forces at work in American politics are.

Sorry, what was your question about them?

Yeah, I was just wondering if you had an impression of them, because they’re – they’re one side of this fight of, like, what’s the future of the Democratic Party look like?

It’s weird, because we talked about how we need these metaphysical changes in the Democratic Party. But really, the debate that’s having now – that they’re having now is, you know, do we need the neoliberal projects, Yimby bike lanes, and permitting reform, which are probably not terrible ideas?

Or do we need, like, democratic socialism? Do we need Medicare for all? But that’s the conversation that’s, like, the mainstream version, right? Sorry, I was just wondering if you had a context there.

Yeah, I’m so glad you asked this, because this is basically, like, I just – I absolutely destroyed my mental and physical health the last week trying to figure out a way to write a piece about Democrats that did not fall into this frame.

Because I think fundamentally, it’s – like, to me, watching this, and I’m getting a little bit of the sense from you just reading between the lines, it is flabbergasting to me that this is the conversation that people are having.

Oh, absolutely. I just find it so unbelievable, because first of all, I hate to say it, but so I talked to a guy who’s working on building a left-wing populist alliance to counteract the sort of Bannonite right-wing populist alliance, which is probably a very difficult project to be involved in.

But even he, I put it to him, and I was like, would Bernie have won this year? And he was like, absolutely not. No.

And I was like, so should Democrats have done more economic populism, left-wing, democratic socialist stuff? And he was like, man, if anybody tells you that that would have been an answer that could have won this election, they are kidding you.

And this is not because he was saying they should have been more moderate, right? And so there’s this insane thing in the group’s discourse or these abundance libs or whatever, where then all the abundance libs, who are, by the way, basically all Gen X, right?

They’re all people who have this, it’s not unique to Gen X. I think some of them are younger than that, but yeah.

All right, fine. But the big ones have this thing that is like, it’s not unique to Gen X, but it is the defining Gen X ideology, which is just if everybody was normal, things would be fine.

They’re always just like, if you were just rational, things would work out. And like, this is the Iglesias thing. This is sort of the governing ideology of a lot of what is supposed to be heterodox media.

It’s basically like, if you were just like a normal Clinton-style Democrat, you guys would have won. Just like do less woke stuff, like be more logical, let’s do more permitting, let’s let growth keep going at 2.8 to 3.2% and ad infinitum, like everything will be fine.

This is America. This is like kind of their shaping thing. And so it becomes for them, politics becomes for them, a problem of not what is our governing vision and what is wrong with this system, because they really don’t allow for the possibility of the system itself being wrong.

And oddly, neither do the progressive left wealth redistributionists. They’re like, if we just redistributed more wealth, everything would be fine.

The thing that they both share is actually an unwillingness to look at, quote unquote, the swamp, an unwillingness to look at like why people are alienated from politics in a broader systemic way.

And so this, you know, avowedly, like highly left-wing guy who I was talking to who was building this populist left-wing thing, his argument, and I think it’s exactly right.

And I think this fundamentally goes back all the way to Murphy, because Murphy actually will entertain this a little bit. His fundamental thing was, you need to give people agency, and you need to figure out a way to get into power in a way that allows you to govern as an anti-system incumbent.

So you are running to drain the swamp, which he said left-wing people should do. They should embrace that. It’s the most popular, enduring message of our times. Run to drain the swamp. Offer a different version than Trump’s version of draining the swamp.

And you can do essentially what Morena has done in Mexico, which is like when two crushing electoral majorities seize the levers of state, change the state in ways that are broadly popular. I don’t, I’m not saying good or bad.

I’m just saying just as political efficacy. Change the ways that the state functions in ways that are broadly popular. Make people feel as though they have agency within the transformation of the state.

And you can rule for a long time, and you’re running against the system on the platform of changing the system. This is what Trump did.

This is, and then the Democrats basically like, the thing that you’re talking about, that dynamic between should we have done more giveaway free money stuff, or should we have built more bike lanes and celebrated America more, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

The thing they share, and it’s flabbergasting, is a consensus that the system itself is fine. And I just don’t understand how in an election that was a massive visible rebellion against the system as it is, that this would be the lesson they take away.

And it appears to be the one that they’re going to take away. It’s just astonishing to me. I think a lot of the motivating logic is just like, if the system’s not fine, we might as well just be Republicans.

Like, that’s, you know, the conceptual…

Well, this is the trap. This is the trap. Sorry to stop you. But I mean, this is the trap I’ve been writing about this entire year.

And it’s flabbergasting because, like, my year has been completely exhausting, because every time I do one of these things, it goes crazy viral. Not because I’m some kind of smart guy.

It’s because you just point this issue out, and people immediately respond to it, like, really with great excitement. The trap is that what Democrats have done by becoming the party of the establishment and status quo, and even their own critical activists not looking at the possibility that system-level reform needs to be happening.

Like, if you become the party that is so deeply tied to defending the status quo, then everyone who doesn’t like the status quo is Trumpist by default. And so you’re exactly right.

It’s not just like become Republican. It’s like, I don’t have a home if I don’t like this thing without going to Democrats. And then you have RFK go over, and three days later, you have highly paid people in Democratic think tanks writing papers in the Atlantic about how good industrial ag and seed oils are.

And it’s like, that, it’s not a conspiracy. But the level of responsiveness to any threat to anything that feels like some kind of systemic upset or something will send Democrats into paroxysms of defending the stupidest stuff on Earth.

And I just, I mean, I don’t want to call myself, like, super smart about how this election was going to play out. But, like, I was just sitting here talking to my editors being like, you guys have no idea what is about to happen because you have no idea what the trap you’ve drawn for yourselves is.

And I think it’ll be hard for them to dig out. How could Republicans screw this up?

Aside from the Musk breakup?

Well, the Musk breakup is indicative of… How could they go too far? Is there a way they could go too far?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you’ve probably had people on this podcast who advocate invading Mexico. There’s that. I think the DOJ stuff, the DOJ stuff, could get insane.

Like, if you are, we’re already seeing them doing things like suing Ann Seltzer over a missed poll. Like, that’s a very Banana Republic weird thing.

Yeah, the First Amendment protects running the polls. I said at the time, this is a garbage poll. You don’t just go out there and be like, everything we learned in the past eight years about response bias, I just don’t care about that anymore.

You don’t do that. It was a terrible poll. However, the First Amendment protects, like, just god-awful polls. And indeed, constitutionally, there’s nothing wrong with a private citizen suing someone who did a poll and then losing in the courts.

But if the Department of Justice is doing that, like, we’re left with two options. We’re left with the option that the Supreme Court will step in and attempt to resolve the problem.

And we’re left with the kind of worst-case scenario, which is the Supreme Court doesn’t do anything. But then, in the event that the courts do come in and stop some of this stuff, say they stop firings, say they stop some, you know, U.S. Attorney General going after the New York Times, and then Trump just says, no, arrest him anyway.

What happens? What happens? Who do you, what, who are those agents listening to? Everyone steals this quote from me now. But I was the one who found that the first time that J.D. said that thing about, I hope that we basically do a Yarvanite-style fire everybody.

And if the courts say no, stand in the breach and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. Well, okay. What happens if that actually comes to pass?

Because J.D. is on the record as having said we should defy the courts. That is the end of the Constitutional Republic. Sorry. It just is.

You can, and maybe you’re just talking on a podcast and it’s all good. And I allow for that possibility. I allow for the possibility that lots of leftists who say we have to blow up the Capitol and kill all the capitalists, like, when they get elected state senator, they stop talking that way.

And it’s not actually reflective of what they’re going to do. I think that’s a normal way to look at this. And Democrats have failed frequently to do that.

But what if he was telling the truth? And they’re just going to defy Supreme Court rulings. And they’re just going to say, well, the National Guard’s going to listen to me, so I don’t care.

I mean, best-case scenario is that’s political suicide. And just like after Jan 6, it becomes like the kind of thing that makes you, at least for a time, politically anathema.

Worst-case scenario is, like, that actually works. And like, then what? I don’t know. Do you have an idea of what happens if, like, they just start defying the courts or something?

Like, because I’m not… it’s not as though they haven’t literally talked about this.

I don’t know, man. I don’t, you know, I, to me, like, Matt Gaetz seems like someone who would defy the courts. Does Pam Bondi seem like someone who would defy the courts?

Not really, but it’s not, I don’t think it’ll be her making those calls.

Fair enough, yeah, yeah.

That’s not what it’s really about. I mean, the idea is that you have an attorney general who will basically do whatever the president says.

And it’s unfair. It’s like, to steel man the Trump position here, like, you could argue, like, Merrick Garland would say, I won’t do everything that a Democratic president would tell me to do.

And that’s broadly speaking true. The bounds of things that a Democratic president would tell him to do are so narrow that it would be very, very rare that he would need to defy them.

Trump’s bounds are much larger. And so the challenges of an attorney general to weigh what is undue authority and what’s breaking norms and things like that are going to just be like, a lot heavier to weigh. But they serve at the pleasure of the president.

So, like, there’s going to be situations where it’s like, do it or get fired. Do it or, I mean, go to jail? They’re talking about a lot of intense stuff.

I’m not giving a super clear answer here. But it’s because I think the number of different things that people have said on the record about what they could or hope to do when they get in that are just nakedly unconstitutional is such a long list that we can’t even really go over it here.

And a lot of that, I think, is like one of these things. Take Trump seriously, not literally.

I’m willing to indulge that. But, like, I don’t know. Some of these picks have… Vance never seemed to me like that kind of guy. Vance seemed to me like a pretty consistent person.

He seems like someone you take literally.

Yeah. So, that’s the question, you know. As you know, I’ve spent a great deal of time talking to J.D. Vance. And the truth is, I don’t know the answer to these questions about Wiccan.

Yeah. I just don’t know.

Okay. So, are we getting the rage, the, you know, retire all government employees? Are we getting the red Caesar?

Well, I think that, yeah. I mean, would that say, okay, take that seriously, not literally.

Yeah, I think we are. Like, there’s nothing in particular wrong with a large-scale clearing out and reset of the federal bureaucracy.

And there’s nothing particularly wrong with this sort of, maybe he’s not Caesar, but a De Gaulle-like figure, sweeping back into power and saying, like, people have lost faith in the institutions of state. I’m going to reset them.

Like, I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with admitting that, directionally speaking, those two things have kind of… They’ve either come to pass or we’re standing on the precipice of them.

We’re probably not going to get fire all government employees, but we’re going to get something directionally like that.

People keep trying to suss out the shadow influence of Curtis Yarvin over the administration. People are always asking about this, you know? And it’s like, well, it’s just right out there to see.

Like, they’re not going to do exactly what Curtis says because Curtis is a theorist. But have they learned from Curtis? Yes.

How is this complicated? I mean, I think there are a lot of people who just think rage won’t happen, right? Who think that mass scale firings will either fail or they won’t even try it.

So I think there’s just people who disagree on actual actions. They just don’t think it’ll happen. I just, I think it’s a question of mass.

Like, it’s a question of what we mean by mass. Like, I think there will be a lot of firings in a few pretty key agencies and they’re going to see how that goes.

I don’t think, like, we’re going to walk into the Department of Interior. We’re not doing the Vivek thing. We’re not firing half of government employees.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, maybe. I don’t know. But no, I don’t think, like, they’re, I don’t think they’re going to come into Interior, like, in the first week and start just peeling off lists of anonymous people they haven’t even talked to and just being like, you’re out.

I would imagine, and I’m just taking this from sort of things that I’ve kind of picked up from Bannon. Like, I would imagine you sort of go in to key places and look in the first place for your enemies.

So, like, you go, like, it just seems like you would want to watch DOJ first. Because it’s like a lot of what they took from 2016 justifiably was this government is staffed with enemies and a lot of the enemies are in places where they can really do me harm.

So, you’re going to look at where Tulsi, like, what Tulsi’s going to do. You’re going to look at DOJ. You’re going to look at the three-letter agencies in general.

Well, that’s not what Curtis said, right? Maybe that’s closer to what Bannon said.

Right, right, fair, fair, fair, fair. But Curtis says, like, straight up, like, that won’t work. He straight up says, like, no, you have to build the agencies again from scratch.

You have to fire everyone and, like, have Musk start a new, you know, start a new agency that does the same thing, right? He says the Bannon approach won’t work.

Right. I just mean, like, you know, Marx says that you have to tear everything down and build a new worker state.

And then socialists get in in some country and they decide to actually just do health care and, like, build social housing and work from there.

Like, I think the kind of, the situation is pretty analogous. Like, they’re not going to do Curtis stuff. It doesn’t mean they’re not informed by Curtis.

They’re going to try to do Curtis’s stuff within the bounds of how they see it’s possible.

Sure. Monarchism at home.

American monarchism at home.

Yeah.

Peter Thiel had this line of, like, the left has no individuals anymore.

Right. He was talking about, like, the Biden replacement and then him just bypassing the primary process and so on.

And that, to me, would indicate that the left just doesn’t correct. It gets trapped in this conversation, trapped in this fake conversation, on and on, and there’s just never a correction.

Where if there’s a kind of left-wing elite theory, almost, if there’s a left-wing situation where someone can take charge, whether it’s Chris Murphy, whether it’s Pelosi, and actually redirect and say, we’re doing this now.

We, the Democratic Party, we’re doing this now, and actually move everyone along, move all of those, like, mid- and lower-level people who don’t really get it, move them all along, then that’s much more optimistic for the Democratic Party.

And it shows that it proves the point that they do have agency.

Which one of those scenarios do you think, you know, is actually going to happen, is more likely to happen?

Well, I’m always resistant to people who don’t have a ton of social interaction with people on another side politically.

Making vast judgments about the personalities of those people, you know. Part of the problem with what Peter just said there is, like, well, of course, it seems like they don’t have any individuals anymore if you just, like, don’t meet that many of the individuals.

So some of it is that, and I think what he’s speaking to is very true, though.

Like, this kind of thing where it’s like, everybody’s this like replaceable drone person who kind of says the same thing all the time.

And you had this reckoning that in 2016 you had again where people went, like, oh, our party is too much this, and like, maybe it was this, and like, maybe we really need to listen to these people who voted for Trump, right?

And as everyone listening to this knows, like, that was in the space of several months quashed.

And basically, we got in the sort of world of liberal to left media a thing of saying, Trump won because of racism.

And if you don’t agree with that, then you are bad, and you’ve said the quote wrong thing, right?

And now we’re doing, again, this thing in the Democratic Party of them having a reckoning about whether people are allowed to, using another one of these really lame, like, catchphrases that Libs always use, like, whether you’re allowed to say the quote wrong thing, right?

And everybody’s saying you should be allowed to say the wrong thing anymore because it’s making them all boring and stuff like that, right?

Whether that lasts, I think, will depend on whether or not Trump overreaches.

And if Trump governs in some kind of way that actually seems like it might be a continuance of American democracy and might, in fact, actually hit some reset buttons on some things that really haven’t been working very well,

I think that preference cascade that the Marc Andreessen’s talk about is going to accelerate to the point that that kind of like individual leader in the Democratic Party not only can emerge, but almost must emerge.

Because in order to attempt to win and gain power for your friends, like, you’re going to have to start breaking the walls.

The problem is, like, their bench is not great, in large part because almost in like post-Soviet situation, like, everybody’s just been on the record for 25 years saying stuff.

If we do accept this as a new dawn, as a break, a break in the conversation, a moment of preference cascades, a moment where like previously unutterable things became truths.

If we accept this as a little bit of a revolutionary moment, then everybody like in the Democratic Party has been stuck saying the pre-revolutionary moment ideological stuff in a very narrow lane for so long that establishing credibility on that front as you enter into the new world is going to be very difficult.

That’s why I like the like, Marie up in Washington, the congresswoman I was talking about, and Jared Polis and things like that.

Because like, they’re just emerging in part because they’re in the West.

And so you have this kind of like anti-authoritarian, woodsy, hippie, RFK-ish vibe that just sort of suffuses life out there.

There are people who I think could credibly establish themselves as against the governing thing without falling into the abundance lib versus like sort of like semi-brain-dead redistributionist progressive thing.

And so, like, will they step forward? I think it would be cool to have Jared Polis actually run for president.

I actually think that would be like a really interesting test case for American democracy.

But like, other than those people, some, maybe Murphy, maybe, I don’t know.

There’s a lot of these people who think that they’re truth-telling by being aggressively moderate, which is very different than what we’ve been talking about here.

Like, it’s very, these are people who are like looking around the spectrum and picking and choosing.

The people who are like, and these are the loudest voices, as you’ve pointed out, the people who are tacking to the middle and thinking, I will be really loud and stand in a contrarian manner by tacking to the extremely moderate middle,

they always end up in a really stupid trap of not being middle at all but being establishment.

And they end up making common cause with the Liz Cheneys and stuff.

And it’s a kind of politics that revolts people. And yet, it seems to be, like, I don’t know, a fairly large chance that it’s what they’ll end up adopting.

In which case, I think there’s no hope.

Yeah, it’s really interesting because it seems, it’s a lot easier to imagine the right failing than the left succeeding.

Yeah. Maybe you say there’s no hope, but if the Musk rupture happens or they invade Mexico or they do all sorts of possible stupid shit, then it’s pretty easy to imagine Dems winning in 26 and then 28, right?

And like, the same, and then, like, Trump, Trump is, we finally beat Trumpism or we beat Vanceism, you know?

Yeah.

And it just keeps rolling. I mean, you give a lot of credit here to both the strength of the system as it is currently ordered and potentially, like, too much credit to Trump.

Like, there’s going to be all kinds of shenanigans. I watched that campaign.

Like, they won so big that none of this had to come into play. But like, they were so ready to contest stuff, like, in a way that would have sent America into wrangling over every single vote in counties all across this country for six months or something.

Like, they’re going to do a lot of stuff, electorally speaking, that just makes it a lot harder for Democrats to win.

I think I could be wrong. Maybe that’s, like, and like, I’m not even saying some of this stuff is necessary.

Writing this down for the clips as we speak.

That’s sort of, like, part of the Trump playbook, right? And they view it as something that Democrats have done for a long time, too.

I’m not giving some kind of, like, value judgment here. I just think it might be 2028, like, the electoral landscape might just look really, really different than we understand it now.

And indeed, like, Democrats, if they haven’t figured out some kind of, like, broader response to this thing, because it can’t just be let’s go back to normal.

I think normal, there was a DNC, a guy running for head of the DNC just now, who was saying, quite astutely, this was a good message.

He was saying, like, we’ve been calling for things to go back to normal. The problem is nobody likes normal. And so we’ve been losing.

And okay, fine, somebody running for head of DNC is now capable of making that pretty basic connection. So that would be probably a good sign for them.

But as far as like the party itself and indeed its voters, because they have really, really been stuck in such a narrow band for so long, that the trouble is it’s very hard for people to get through primaries.

It’s very hard for people with new ideas to get through primaries.

And I talked to a congressional candidate at the DNC who was saying, like, he ran on a kind of left-right populist thing. And if you polled his district, he was doing better than any of the other Democratic candidates against the Republican in this purple district.

But he just couldn’t win the primary because, and this is his quote, he was saying, people who watch MSNBC just were too big of a constituency and they were too immediately repulsed by him.

And so you just can’t get him in and then they lose the district.

I mean, even this framework of, oh, we need the talent pipelines. Oh, we need the bench. Sort of the best we’ve got.

It’s sort of moving in the right direction, thinking about these things. But on the other hand, it’s kind of like the Curtis, Curtis Jarvin thing.

You know, if you wake up in 2028 and like the DNC is just functioning like the old DNC, but they’re just like operating on different parameters.

They’re looking for different people, but the hierarchy, but the org chart is just the same.

Like, does that work? Does that, is that in any way meaningful?

My argument here has been that, no, it’s probably not meaningful or like it doesn’t work.

The reason it wouldn’t work though, it’s like a dramatic, it’s a really dramatic actually illustration of like what breaking down of like media control and like giving people good books to read can actually do to a human mind.

Because a lot of Republicans have just become like much more aware about like how states work and just like history and stuff like they’ve been forced to confront things and then think about things in a new way.

Like that, that was part of them having to bend the knee to Trumpism. They had to like actually become broader thinking people.

And I don’t think that’s like an impossible thing to do for the Democrats.

I guess what we’re circling around to and haven’t said is the real solution to the problem is finding not a bench and it’s not looking at Chris Murphy as are you our savior, which indeed maybe is.

I don’t know. I mean, it could be work out for me if it was, but like.

Let’s do some, let’s do some Chris Murphy propaganda.

Chris Murphy is the state here. I’m just trying to, I’m just trying to get everybody I spend a lot of time with and write about in a profile to then assume high functions in the state.

I feel like this is just a district I’m trying to.

Your district’s pretty good so far.

Yeah.

So, but I’m saying like what we’re circling around and not really saying is like what they need is somebody who breaks the mold.

What we need is what the Democrats need.

And like what in fact we need as a nation in a certain way is just like a democratic Trump who could come in and just be like, okay, it’s over.

That way a business is done.

This thing is moving on. You’re coming with me or you’re against me. Let’s go.

And of course they had that opportunity in 2016 and did not take it.

You know, one of the great things about people emerging into world historical roles of destiny is that they’re often like lying around right where you least expect them.

But that’s part of the role is that you can’t expect it at the time.

So like who’s that person and is there some person who would be willing to take on that role in the Democratic Party?

I have no idea. But we would have never thought it would have been Bernie in 2016.

I wouldn’t have. And Trump was different because Trump was playing around with this for a long time.

People just never took it seriously. But I think we may be entering an age in which like people have an opportunity to be capital G great men again.

And like somebody might take that chance.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you said, yeah, we don’t know who.

Man, I want to know who it is.

But yeah, I do think it’s hard to. It’s hard to figure out.

It’s Zuck. It’s Zuck, man.

Zuckerberg. He’s going to step in.

As a Democrat? Is Zuck going back to being a Democrat?

No, I don’t actually think so.

He’ll be president. That would be the funniest.

That would be the funniest. There are like a lot of people in like certain populist think tanks who would just like love to run against Zuckerberg.

That would be like their dream.

Like they would. They have so many pages. It would just vindicate their entire philosophy.

Zuck versus Trump would be amazing because the entire campaign could just take place at UFC fights.

Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

If we can’t say who, can we say where people who take charge of the Democratic Party is going to come from?

It’s going to be the tech left. Is it going to be some kind of populist crowd?

Is it going to be the academic left? Like where is where is the great man of the left coming from?

In a certain way, like my entire political project, my whole life in the sense of being an Americanist, but like not being, not coming out of the left, but coming out of like a patriotic left or something.

And like, you know, like the kind of politics that are shared by people who had Bernie stickers, then Trump stickers and drive Toyota Tacomas and live in Montana.

And like a sort of like a sort of TR ethic of we can serve this nation, but we also have a forward-thinking, progressive vision.

We are a muscular, outdoor, outward looking nation. We are not a nation ruled by plutocrats.

We are not a nation ruled by anyone.

We’re the bully or whatever.

And there was a lot of people who ran in Montana on that kind of platform, like all over the West.

And like, this is just maybe my own aesthetic or cultural bias or something like that because this is sort of those people are my people.

But like, when I brought up those two people who were two of the like, maybe three or four Democrats who were held up as unique successes in this election, they’re all coming from that milieu.

And so I guess what I think is that it will come from a TR kind of a reset of what it means to be progressive, a reset of what it means to be maybe like left wing or whatever.

I’m not sure that term is going to obtain much going forward, but it’s going to come from that tradition of bully, positive, Americanist, but like caring about the greater social good, making the U.S. Forest Service, that kind of spirit that made the U.S. Forest Service.

I think that’s the kind of like public spiritedness that Democrats like still want to retain, but then meld with essentially like a culture that is appealing enough to voters that just doesn’t make them look like lame honors students.

Like that’s the problem. They just look like lame honors students.

They have no sense of humor. They have no sense of spirit, no sense of, they’re terrified of violence.

They’re terrified of all of these, any little danger they’re always trying to regulate out of existence.

Like you will get people from the West. You just don’t care about that.

And I think that would be really attractive to American people. Fantastic.

I hope so. That would be a fun election to watch.

It would, yeah. It could really make Vance look like a Yale grad.

Well, that’s the thing, right? And they really failed to do that because they were too nervous to say the wrong thing.

You need those people who break that frame.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Thanks for coming on the show, James.

Yeah. Thank you for having me again. I learned so much today.

This was really fun. I really appreciate it.

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This is an experimental rewrite

James Pogue: Welcome to the show, everyone. Today, we have James Pogue, an expert on the far right and the rise of fascism in America.

Host: So, who’s this Chris Murphy guy?

James Pogue: Chris is arguably the most right-leaning person in American politics at the moment. He’s a Democratic senator from Connecticut, for those who might not get the joke. The humorous part is that the fascist far-right in America really despises him.

Host: What’s the backstory?

James Pogue: He reached out to me after I wrote a piece about the so-called “rise of the new right.” It was refreshing to see a senator engaging in such meaningful discussions. He expressed concern that these far-right figures were thinking at a systemic level that we simply aren’t addressing. They embody a kind of political vitality—something Democrats seem to lack these days. You could see this clearly in late 2022.

Host: So, what’s his crusade about?

James Pogue: He embarked on this mission to advocate for economic populism, arguing that the American people feel a lack of agency, and that neoliberalism is crumbling. He emphasized the urgency for a grand realignment in Western societies—essentially predicting that if Democrats don’t make changes, Republicans will swoop in, and we’ll face a long period out of power. Ironically, he was spot-on. Predictably, his views garnered him no supporters from either side because no one wants to hear these uncomfortable truths.

Host: That’s fascinating. Do conservatives dislike him simply because he’s a Democrat, or is there something about his views that particularly angers them?

James Pogue: Well, first of all, it’s important to note that the right has shifted even more right since Bernie Sanders’ time. The fundamental structure of American politics has often been about the struggle against a coherent establishment. This typically meant that people were either trying to overthrow it or were part of it, and that disagreement often blurred the lines.

Host: That’s definitely evident.

James Pogue: During the late Cold War, things were so homogenized that everyone, regardless of their side, seemed to share the same establishment consensus. Figures like Bernie and Trump were unusual in their departures from that consensus. It’s noteworthy that in 2016, people were declaring that the establishment was dead, which ultimately wasn’t true.

Host: So that brings us back to Murphy.

James Pogue: Exactly. When you defend the priorities of the Democratic Party today, it’s hard for right-leaning individuals not to view a project like Murphy’s as doomed. Steve Bannon has mentioned this to me—they believe the establishment goals are outdated and out-of-touch because they revolve around maintaining the current systems, like alliances and foreign policy objectives, rather than addressing the grievances of the people.

Host: So what are the Republicans doing right today then?

James Pogue: It’s an interesting question. The populism being embraced right now isn’t about traditional social welfare programs. Instead, we see figures like Maria Glusenkamp-Perez appealing to working-class interests while rejecting large government systems. This local approach resonates with anti-establishment sentiments.

Host: You’re suggesting that this might be a new model for left/populism?

James Pogue: Yes! It’s a stark contrast. Take Jared Polis—he’s pragmatic. He seems uninterested in rigid ideological lines, focusing instead on local, practical issues. This is surprising because traditionally, anti-establishment voices on the left came from the Bernie crowd.

Host: Absolutely, it’s quite a shift.

James Pogue: Now we have figures like Glusenkamp Perez and Polis offering a different narrative. The vibe feels uniquely different, almost akin to a left-wing version of Ron Paul.

Host: And what about the pro-Palestine movement?

James Pogue: The energy around it was crushed by the Democratic establishment, and I think you’d agree with that sentiment.

Host: Totally.

James Pogue: I’ve been thinking about the DNC recently, too. I spoke with individual delegates about their experiences. The bureaucracy and rules there can be pretty convoluted. I remember riding back with a former DNC chairman from Hawaii who offered a rather bleak view of the inner workings.

Host: What was his take?

James Pogue: He expressed that despite efforts to be vocal, dissent was stifled. I witnessed this first-hand during Kamala Harris’s nomination acceptance speech. There was a lone dissenting voice in the crowd, demonstrating the level of apathy among the more progressive elements attending.

Host: That’s heartbreaking.

James Pogue: It truly is. The movement surrounding progressive activism seemed to dissolve without significant impact, despite high levels of organizing energy.

Host: That’s stunning—all that enthusiasm, gone unnoticed!

James Pogue: Right? Even though there were attempts at activism, nothing actionable followed. It speaks volumes about the disconnection between grassroots movements and the Democratic establishment’s priorities.

Host: It seems like a troubling disconnect.

James Pogue: Yes, and historically, even in turbulent times, strong grassroots movements would stir considerable change. It’s unusual to see such fervor ignored.

Host: Many anticipated the Vietnam War movements would also generate similar effects.

James Pogue: Completely. There was a time when such political tensions could lead to monumental shifts, yet now, we see an apathetic response from leadership.

Host: Right. And we’ve seen this pattern repeat itself lately.

James Pogue: Precisely. The clamor for change didn’t generate the outcomes people were hoping for, especially regarding war and international relations.

Host: It feels disheartening.

James Pogue: It really does. And like I said, the energy in political movements today could yield substantial results if only the voices in power were more receptive. Yet, it feels like we see a real wall of disconnection—a crucial aspect of political engagement that has disappeared.

Host: What do you think is the solution?

James Pogue: Well, it’s complex. There needs to be an acknowledgment of the underlying currents within political movements. The ability of individuals to engage meaningfully can lead to transformative change when those in power listen to the language of dissent and allow for necessary conversations ahead.

Host: That’s a profound point.

James Pogue: Thank you. It’s a challenging environment where perspectives shift, but the need for influential change has at its core the revitalization of communication and understanding from leaders—something sorely lacking today.

Host: Absolutely. There’s a lot to unpack here, and we’ll need to keep this conversation going as events unfold. Thanks for sharing your insights, James. James Pogue: Yeah, exactly. I’m not sure if that fully answers the question, but that’s my experience. The reality has been there, and it’s been extremely active. However, there seems to be a certain kind of propaganda-minded inability to admit its force.

Host: Is that something managed by the editors or the administration at the New York Times? Or is it just a reflection of the people working there?

James Pogue: I mean, you can really see a difference in the quality of the paper now compared to when Dean Baquet was in charge. Under Joe Kahn, it feels like there’s a conscious direction coming from the top. On a broader scale, if we consider the New York Times as a representation of American media, I think there exists a middle ground between Curtis Yarvin’s view of it as unorganic and undirected, and the conspiracy-minded take that suggests we’re being fed narratives.

Host: That’s interesting. Can you elaborate on that middle ground?

James Pogue: Sure! People familiar with how a cathedral-like hive-mind media system operates are often effective at steering it. For instance, consider the bizarre trend where every article about the Democratic National Convention mentioned words like “joy,” “energy,” and “unity.” Who decided that?

Host: It’s funny how that seems disconnected from reality.

James Pogue: Right? It was amusing because the atmosphere at the convention didn’t really reflect those sentiments. I witnessed a reporter who’d clearly been bored out of his mind complaining about the lack of action, and then he’d turn around and report on joy and energy. It felt surreal—like, am I missing something?

Host: It’s odd indeed. This highlights how narratives can be different from the actual scene at events.

James Pogue: Exactly! There’s a lot of feeding of lines and narratives to journalists, many of whom seem detached. The TV personalities who shape the tone often appear uninterested, reaching out to a specific pool of contacts to get their news. Then, newspaper journalists have to align their stories with this mood created through conversations between establishment figures and media executives.

Host: So, it sounds like this has been a longstanding issue?

James Pogue: Yes, and it’s certainly not surprising. Right-wing folks might express outrage, but, historically, both parties and the media have been conspiratorial. Nixon and Eisenhower did similar things, after all.

Host: Interesting point.

James Pogue: When Gen X reporters emerged, it became the end of days. They were saturated in a culture where everything appeared fine and boring. They are the “nothing ever happens” generation.

Host: How does Fukuyama fit into this?

James Pogue: Fukuyama, being a boomer, witnessed history end and can identify that point. In contrast, Gen X journalists grew up thinking everything would always be okay. When faced with real chaos, their worldview crumbles, leading to a media system that feels brain-dead and resistant to reconsidering possibilities. This is a big part of the populist rebellion we see today.

Host: It sounds like you feel this disconnection permeates a lot of current political narratives.

James Pogue: Absolutely. High-level Democrats, like Jake Sullivan, recognize the need for change. Yet, mid-level folks, particularly from Gen X and Millennials, often don’t grasp the situation.

Host: What’s the implication of this disconnect?

James Pogue: It raises the question of whether the elites can successfully navigate a realignment. The boomers in high positions may have a perspective on statecraft and great power competition, but they often revert to addressing past issues rather than dealing with the current realities.

Host: Do you think they can enact necessary changes?

James Pogue: I’m skeptical. They seem too focused on sticking to outdated playbooks, picking up where they left off in their youth, which prevents them from tackling today’s problems head-on.

Host: And in the context of global politics, do you think Europe will have to make significant changes?

James Pogue: Definitely. The discussion about increasing military spending, for instance; how will European countries fund that? Countries like France and Germany are already stretched thin, and it could deteriorate their social contracts, leading to potential unrest.

Host: How do you foresee that playing out?

James Pogue: They’ll face significant challenges. For example, in France, the current political structure is centralized and can react poorly to even minor changes in governance.

Host: That’s a concerning situation.

James Pogue: It is. Countries like Germany are under pressure to keep far-right movements at bay, which is getting increasingly difficult.

Host: So in the U.S., how does this relate to the broader political landscape?

James Pogue: In America, we might already be seeing half of our governing elites being overthrown, especially as traditional models of bipartisanship fall apart. The establishment factions of the Republican Party are not what they used to be; those who adhered to the post-Cold War norms have lost their influence.

Host: That sounds like a major shift.

James Pogue: It is. When a coup or revolution occurs, it leads to a significant reshuffling of power dynamics. For those in power, losing jobs, social status, and merit while seeing their influence wane can create a substantial generational impact.

Host: It’s fascinating—illustrating how power structures can change so rapidly.

James Pogue: Exactly. Look at Democrats; they’ve managed to maintain their hold while welcoming some displaced elites. Figures like Liz Cheney are desperately trying to hold on to relevance, but the power and positions aren’t sufficient to accommodate them.

Host: Do you think there’s any hope for those displaced elites, or are they essentially finished?

James Pogue: If they miss this opportunity, they might be out of power for a long time. It could take many years before they can return with any influence.

Host: This all leads to questioning the very fabric of American politics.

James Pogue: It does. For many, the aspects that once seemed stable may shift dramatically, resonating with people keen on systemic change. The rise of new figures and movements signals a real potential for transformation.

Host: And how do you believe the next elections will reflect these changes?

James Pogue: Assuming we have elections again, the transformations initiated by Trump will mark a turning point in American political history—a clear before-and-after moment.

Host: It will be intriguing to see how this unfolds.

James Pogue: Absolutely! There’s a serious ongoing conversation regarding Trump’s potential and how different figures are positioning themselves amidst the changing dynamics.

Host: What are some dynamics you’re observing?

James Pogue: Take, for example, the relationship between Trump and Elon Musk. It’s essential for the future trajectory of American politics. If they have a falling out, it could derail many of the ambitions they’ve shared.

Host: You’re indicating that their partnership is critical for the political structure going forward?

James Pogue: Precisely. If their alliance falters, it may significantly impact the administration. The competition for power, especially between two influential minds, could create new challenges.

Host: That’s a compelling perspective on the interplay of relationships in politics.

James Pogue: It is, and it’s genuinely unpredictable. You have bold personalities that thrive in this environment, but it remains to be seen how they will navigate conflicts.

Host: I see potential issues arising here. What about the new right?

James Pogue: The new right consists of both a tech-oriented faction and a populist branch, reminiscent of Bannon’s influence.

Host: So the populists are still in power?

James Pogue: Broadly, yes. Figures like Tucker Carlson and Bannon hold considerable sway. They’ve carved out distinct lanes that allow them to operate effectively without needing formal titles.

Host: That’s fascinating. Are there struggles within that movement?

James Pogue: Yes. There’s tension between those who embrace traditional values and the more libertine aspects of the right that reject the idea of a disciplined cultural foundation.

Host: How does that tension manifest itself?

James Pogue: It presents questions about the foundational values of the new right. Are we discussing a return to Christian values, or simply American dynamism without a deeper moral anchor?

Host: Right. It poses an essential question about direction.

James Pogue: Exactly. The future of the right hinges on its philosophical direction, especially at a time when the political landscape is shifting in unpredictable ways.

Host: It sounds like there’s lots of potential for conflict and change.

James Pogue: Absolutely. The new right is grappling with those tensions, and as they evolve, their choices could dictate the future trajectory of the political landscape.

Host: Thank you for sharing these insights, James. It’s been a compelling conversation! James Pogue: You don’t do that. It was a terrible poll. However, the First Amendment protects, like, just god-awful polls. And indeed, constitutionally, there’s nothing wrong with a private citizen suing someone who did a poll and then losing in the courts.

Host: So what are the implications if the Department of Justice is involved in something like that?

James Pogue: If the DOJ gets involved, we’re left with two possible outcomes. One is that the Supreme Court steps in to resolve the issue. The other, which is the worst-case scenario, is that the Supreme Court chooses not to act.

Host: And if the courts do intervene, what does that look like?

James Pogue: Well, let’s say the courts halt firings or prevent the Attorney General from going after the New York Times, and then Trump just says, “No, arrest him anyway.” What do you think happens then? Who do those agents listen to?

Host: It raises a lot of questions about authority.

James Pogue: Exactly! I remember when J.D. mentioned that we should basically do a Yarvanite-style purge. If the courts say no and then someone stands up and says the Chief Justice has made a ruling, now let him enforce it—what then?

Host: It sounds dire.

James Pogue: When people, like J.D., say we should defy the courts, that directly threatens the Constitutional Republic. Maybe they’re just talking on a podcast, and it seems harmless, but if it turns out to be true, that’s scary.

Host: So you think there’s a possibility they might act on those statements?

James Pogue: Honestly, yes. They could defy Supreme Court rulings and say the National Guard will obey them instead. The best-case scenario is that such actions lead to political suicide, akin to the fallout after January 6.

Host: Worst-case scenario?

James Pogue: If it works for them, then what? I can’t help but wonder what happens if they just start defying the courts.

Host: It’s a concern that’s been brought up before.

James Pogue: Sure, and while I don’t specifically know people like Matt Gaetz, I do think he seems like someone who would consider defying the courts. But what about Pam Bondi?

Host: She might not, but it seems like authority will play a significant role.

James Pogue: Right. The idea is that you’ve got an attorney general who will do whatever the president says. Merrick Garland, for example, wouldn’t act just on what a Democratic president told him.

Host: It’s about boundaries, then.

James Pogue: Exactly! The boundaries of what Trump would ask his attorney general to do are far wider than what a Democratic president would. Thus, the attorney general will face intense pressures to comply or risk job security.

Host: It sounds like a precarious situation.

James Pogue: It is. Some of the people in power are setting up a scenario where they could literally be told to act or face serious consequences, including going to jail.

Host: Are we seeing nakedly unconstitutional ideas being discussed openly?

James Pogue: Yes! There’s a long list of those ideas that I can’t go through in this conversation. It’s complex, but I think the notion of taking Trump seriously, but not literally, applies here.

Host: It sounds like there’s a mix of rhetoric and possible action.

James Pogue: Absolutely! Some of these candidates seem quite grounded—like J.D. Vance, for instance. He strikes me as someone who is pretty consistent in his views and is someone you can take literally.

Host: So do you think they want a sort of political upheaval?

James Pogue: I think we’re edging towards a place where people might genuinely call for a radical change in government.

Host: A massive reset, you’re suggesting?

James Pogue: Yes! There’s nothing inherently wrong with a large-scale clearing out and reset of the federal bureaucracy. A figure, whether a De Gaulle-like one or something else, could sweep into power and say people have lost faith in the institutions of the state.

Host: So we’re on the precipice of something significant?

James Pogue: It seems that way! We’re likely looking at some degree of purging, if not in the literal sense, then directionally speaking—turning things around.

Host: What about the influence of Curtis Yarvin?

James Pogue: People keep trying to figure out Yarvin’s influence over the administration. They may not do exactly what he says, but they’ve certainly learned from him.

Host: So you’re suggesting that the administration is inspired by him, even if they don’t follow his exact model?

James Pogue: Exactly! The discourse around the idea that mass scale firings wouldn’t happen is prevalent. There are people who don’t think it’s even on the table. But I think we will see significant changes in some key agencies.

Host: Right, but not going on an all-out firing spree?

James Pogue: No, I don’t think we’ll see something as extreme as firing half the government employees. It’ll be more strategic than that.

Host: It sounds like targeting specific areas.

James Pogue: Yes! They’d likely focus on departments perceived as enemies, like the Department of Justice, where they feel past administrations have left dangerous elements.

Host: So it’s about prioritizing where the enemy is perceived to be.

James Pogue: Exactly! Looking at agencies where they believe there are people who could harm them politically.

Host: And Curtis Yarvin has suggested a complete overhaul, right?

James Pogue: Right, he argues that you need to start from scratch, fire everyone, and rebuild. But practical governance tends to involve compromises and cannot be as radical.

Host: It’s analogous to historical precedents.

James Pogue: Yes! It’s like Marx calling for a complete teardown. But when socialists have gained power, they usually adapt to focus on governance. They might not go the whole route that Curtis suggests.

Host: So, what’s your stance on how to move forward?

James Pogue: I believe they’ll try to adopt Curtis’s ideas within the limits of what they feel is politically possible.

Host: And where do you see the left heading?

James Pogue: The left is stuck in a position where a radical reset might be necessary, emerging from a new progressive framework that appeals to a broader base.

Host: Fascinating perspective.

James Pogue: Yeah, and you’ve got to consider the essence of where these new leaders will come from. A figure with a new vision could thrust the left back into relevance.

Host: That’s a refreshing take.

James Pogue: Exactly! It’s crucial for the left to stay spirited and not project an image of being overly cautious or establishment-focused.

Host: That makes sense; they need to connect with the grassroots.

James Pogue: Yes! They need someone who breaks the mold and reflects a vision that is spirited and engaging—something people can rally behind.

Host: It would be exciting to see that shift occur.

James Pogue: Absolutely! It would add a new dynamic to the political landscape, making elections worth watching.

Host: Thank you for this engaging discussion, James!

James Pogue: Thank you for having me! I really enjoyed it and learned a lot today.