Catherine Liu: Why The Left is Out Of Touch | 1Dime Radio

And if you demonize those people, and if you drive them to the right, and you, but you tell men like there's something innately wrong with them, you destroy a whole population's revolutionary potential. So do you think that's the factor behind the gender divide? No, no, no, I disavow that completely. But I think that second-wave feminism is, um, about creating a gender divide that leaves women in the white-collar world more competitive than men. If you look at socialist feminism, it's all about trying to create universal programs, working with men to create better conditions for the working class. PMC. Second-wave feminism was about optimizing workplace situations so that women could compete with men for the uppermost jobs.

You're listening to One Dime Radio. Become a patron at patreon.com to support the show and get access to extra content. We think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite, like you take off the glasses so that you can finally see the way things really are. When you talk about a revolution, most people think V, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary rust lies in the, in, in the principles and the goals that you're striving for, not in the way you reach them.

They call someone a relevant, by which they mean it's a person that holds that any view is as good as any other view. My simple response to that is, there's no one who holds that view. No one believes that every view is as good as every other other view.

Welcome to One Dime Radio. Today I'm here with Katherine Lou, author of the book *Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class*. Uh, Katherine Lou is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Uh, and I think, uh, your book was part of a broader array of books, uh, that sort of made me jump from the position of, there's something wrong with the left, but I'm going to ignore it because the right is a bigger problem, and, you know, the culture war is a distraction. The latter of which I, you know, still kind of agree with. Um, but then increasingly it became clear to me that, no, there's a serious problem on the left, and it's actually, it actually has a material basis. It has a basis in class itself. And, uh, your book, along with the work of Christopher Lash, was very instrumental in sort of clarifying this to me and really, uh, that sort of awakening. And, um, you know, many people say, is the, is the left too white? You know, is it too this? And I would say, it is too white. It's too white-collar, right? And that's something you talk about. And, um, I guess there's a lot of clarification there. But the, you're obviously of a PMC background yourself, right? Yeah. And I'm curious, first and foremost, kind of what led you to write this book? Because it's, it does, there, there you have a scathing critique in this, and it's a short, and I want to say to the audience, it's a short book. You have no excuse not to read it. Um, so you definitely should. But yeah, what, what made you, what was the kind of tipping point for you to write this?

The tipping point was probably, um, the 2016 election when, um, Hillary lost. Trump, Trump, Trump 1.0. Um, I've been sort of doing straight on intellectual history, cultural theory, critical theory. And I'd always been very critical of this, um, cultural populism in academic writing. I also became much more critical of the way that critical theory had given up on Marxism and, you know, embraced post-structuralism and postmodernity. But, you know, I think I was sort of in the closet about being a kind of died-in-the-wool old-school Marxist in terms of understanding class as the one motivating contradiction that can change the relations of production in a society and that can, you know, really oppress people and exploit the majority of people with an ideological framework that keeps the majority of the people oppressed and exploited and minority of the people profiting from their labor. And I'd always kind of believed this. But I have to say, like, I came of age during a time of total reaction against, um, against leftism. You know, it was the rise of the right, Reagan, and then Clinton. And I'm mostly, like, I tried to be very careful and, um, play the game, um, within academia and make, you know, good arguments and criticize cultural populism and the culture wars as a betrayal of economic populism. This was in my last book, *American Idol: Academic Elitism is, um, Cultural Critique*. And I'd always thought that we have to be more critical of ourselves within academia, our, our place in society.

The long background to this probably has to do with the fact that, you know, um, I went to China very often as a kid because my father was working at the UN. And one thing that I saw, you know, front and center with the Cold War was the reality of the Chinese situation and the Cold War propaganda that I was being taught in schools. And I got into really big trouble in my, um, AP World History class when I raised my hand and I said, "This textbook is just not true." It said the Chinese were like little worker bees filing in and out of factories, you know, in much the way that we characterize North Korea today. And, you know, China was a very messed-up place with the Cultural Revolution, everything else, um, going on in, well into the '70s. But when I raised my hand in class and objected to the textbook, my teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, actually said, "Kathy, you open up your mouth again, I'm going to put my size H shoe in it." Like, she literally silenced me. And, um, I walked out of the class and I said, "I'm not coming back in until you apologize." We had the counselor come in. My mom took my teacher's side because she's very authoritarian. And somehow we made it up. But that was a when I just thought, I'm not trusting anything, you know. Um, the ideological veil is something we need to throw off. But it takes a long time to do that when you're 14, 15, and no one's really supporting you and everyone's telling you, like, liberalism is good, take, you know, we, freedom is good, America is a democracy. I, I wanted to believe, you know. And you, you kind of have to.

This is a really long way of getting back to, um, my leftist roots. Also have to do with the fact that I am related to people who are workers, blue-collar workers. My uncle worked his entire life in a factory near Wuhan, in a city of 30,000 people outside of Wuhan. My aunt is a member of Unite Here Now. Um, she's a hotel worker in New York City. I challenge you now to find any, um, academic in America or Canada who has, like, working-class relatives within the extended family. I think that the class construction of academia and the liberal elites is more and more segregated and, um, more so than it's ever been. In fact, and that kind of economic and credential segregation is, um, as bad as, um, racial segregation or gender segregation, if, if we have that in our culture anymore. We don't really. So. But nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about it. So it makes, so I'm not saying, so the other thing that people don't understand about my, the PMC is it's not a moral judgment. I dislike the cultural, objective, um, ideological aspects of this class. But it's not like, oh, yeah, you're a white supremacist. It's a class position. And your class position can change. It's a position with regard to other people, other classes, and the means of production. We are very high-level wage work workers. We do not live on interest, except to the very top of us where we become rentiers, right? Where we live on interest. We make a living. We have to go to work. Our paychecks might be higher than the people on the bottom of the wage work scale. But this class and its dynamics with regard to the lower strata of wage workers has been super terrible and ist towards any kind of, um, social change since, as the Irreversibles would call it, the '70s, um, probably see around '72 when they noticed, right? You're referring to, right? Um, Barbara and John Ehrenreich's '77 essay where they said, like, the left liberal organ, political organizing spaces were more, were more and more dominated by credential elites. And if they saw that in '77, it's 100 times intense today. And now, like, I'll get, you know, I'm very combative, so I'll get into Twitter fights. It's kind of silly. I do it for entertainment. But people be like, "You're a Yale, you're a midwit Yale." And it's like, I went to Yale, so what? You know, make arguments about what people are, are saying, not about their identity. They're so trapped in resentment and identity that they can't see that, oh yeah, you're PMC yourself. It's like, this is a position objectively within society that I occupy. You occupy a different position. For me, what, there's nothing inimical or innately bad or good about our positions within society. The capitalist is neither bad nor good, but he does terrible, or they do terrible things socially to protect their interests and increase the rate of profit. So they are the enemy of the worker. Can we see that in a way that isn't like made into a liberal passion play? We need that kind of objectivity. Well, I get so upset though, reading about private equity these days. But you just have to understand their logic and how to stop it. But we can't. We're so caught up in culture wars that we're like, "Oh my God, they're so evil. Let's stop it." And all of this display, the virtue signaling that I'm talking about, has replaced any kind of like objective, incisive political action or analysis. Oh my God, I, I just, talks for so long about your simple question. I'm sorry.

There's a lot to pick apart there, but I think for the audience, right, it kind of, I think we should demystify parts of the argument at a time. Because one of the rebuttals I always see to the PMC thesis, which I find very annoying, is when people say, "Well, isn't it, isn't that just the?" So this is the Marxist rebuttal, which is, "Well, it's not really an economic class because they're wage earners." And if they do accept that they're different from, like, um, you know, working-class people, they'll say, "Well, isn't that just petite bourgeoisie or maybe labor aristocracy?" And I would guess it's kind of closer to the latter. But I, I guess maybe what makes the PMC you distinct as a, uh, class sociologically and economically? Because, correct me if I'm mistaken, the way I understand the PMC, it's not just literally the class position that's a major component of it, but it's also sort of a mode. Because students, uh, tend to exhibit a lot of the tendencies of PMC individuals. And I went to school with plenty of students who, uh, you know, they work multiple jobs, they would be, uh, servers here, baristas there, but would exhibit all of the tendencies you would see with PMC people. But in a very literal sense, they're kind of working class, but in a sociological sense, they're closer to the PMC. And I, I guess all that's kind of, I would be curious for clarification, because I think people think that you're making a very, like, rigid class identity argument when you're not. So I want to give you the chance.

Right, right, right. So, so it's an ideological position with regard to wage work, right? That you feel like you are part of a vanguard, enlightened group of wage workers who lead, who are thought leaders with regard to the majority of the population. And this is something you're taught in college. So even if you're a barista and you've been to like gender studies seminars, you're like, "Yeah, you know, I have pink hair, so I'm just more enlightened than you are. I'm just more fluid about binary oppositions than you are." Which is like, I think the most identitarian vanguard PMC position you can take. But one of the things that has happened is that the ideological machinations of capital have gotten more complex. And I think that's why I'm committed to Frankfurt School, um, analysis. And people, the, the orthodox Marxists don't like this very much. But the Frankfurt School analysis of the culture industry is one way of understanding why there hasn't been a revolution under capital, because there's an ideological reproduction of, um, the status quo. You know, let's just use that big left phrase. And that, um, that ideological reproduction takes people and, um, and fits them like gears into the machine. So, one thing that you, we could say about these people you're describing is that their identification is with the values, are aspirational with the values of the PMC elite. So even if they're doing this work that, you know, characterizes them as service workers, I don't know if they're blue-collar, they're as they're aspiring towards like getting a job at a publishing house, in an NGO, getting becoming a freelancer for, you know, a liberal ad agency. Just, their aspirations are to move. This is a transitional moment for them. And so they have to espouse the values of this class they are aspiring to enter, because they have the credentials. Your generation has been screwed, because the, the barrier to entry to these white-collar jobs are more, more pronounced. Maybe not in Canada, but in the United States, it's harder and harder to get those jobs. So we have an overproduction of college-educated people who are underemployed, but who identify with the values with which they've been inculcated in their elite liberal arts classes, humanities classes, which have become, um, sites of the transmission and reproduction of, um, this kind, this PMC ideology, which I want to go back to, which has to do with optimization of, um, labor processes, maximization of profits for the bosses, and optimization of identity to fit into the ideological hole. And management of so such profit. So you'd say, well, how does that have to do with, like, um, um, let's say a human rights lawyer and a finance bro? Well, both of these kinds of work, both of these kinds of jobs are about manipulating symbols and numbers and can be done on a computer without any kind of physical intervention into the real world. So when the farther away you are from that physical labor of serving or of making things in the factory, the more you're intellectual labor is valued, especially if you direct it at managing other people and processes. So when capital was less complex, the kinds of people who man, managers and foremen within the family firm were on the factory floor, the foreman representing the capitalist to keep workers in line and production in a, um, to discipline the work rhythm and to keep production, um, working smoothly. And the clerk would be working with the family, um, as a lawyer, almost marks, as a family servant. These two functions, the foreman becomes the engineer, and the family clerk becomes the lawyer of the finance year, the manager of the MBA. And both of them serve the capitalist. And this class, our class, still has that function. We break out from the rest of the workers. We use our skills to serve the capitalist class. And because there was so much social mobility in the second half of the 20th century into the first half of the 21st century, um, a lot of working-class people became middle-class white-collar workers. And a lot of white-collar workers, not a lot, but a tiny but significant number of them became billionaires. So almost all the holders of private equity who are billionaires today were not in their, um, it, they were not born into money. The people who are born into money are hidden away, the real trust fund people, the real rentiers, the real feudal lords. We don't see them. The prominent people who are the holders of capital right now, who are dynamic and using it, like Elon Musk, like Jeff Bezos, like, um, Leon Black, Steven Schwarzman, they can also say, "We worked our way up. It was our smarts that made us this way." The holders of capital who are behind this, who really inherited wealth, as Tom, Thomas Piketty has shown, they still hold the greatest amount of wealth, but they are hidden behind, you know, huge, um, financial organizations and instruments. But the creation of this new wealth with private equity and with people who are really able to maximize profits by doing purely financial transactions during this period of financialization, they have accumulated so much capital that they have bought every single aspect of government and the PMC. They have bought the PMC, basically. And this can happen through their foundations, like, um, the Getty, which controls a lot of funding in the West. Where I am, Mellon has a huge endowment, $400 billion. They can't even spend it down enough, but they control humanities funding. The Guggenheim, the MacArthur, W, um, all of these sort of left-liberal foundations, they control cultural life. And they come out of the accumulation of incredible amounts of wealth during the first half, first part of the 20th century. And now we're seeing that replicated in super PACs and dark money funds, but also increasingly in foundations. Like Jeff Bezos says he's going to give away $146 billion. He should have never been able to accumulate that $146 billion. But if he goes into an industry and gives them a billion dollars, it doesn't help or an NGO, it distorts that entire world, makes people like aspiring PMC people just like go, go into a piranha feeding frenzy to try to get that money.

So, as you alluded to with Thomas Piketty, he, of course, makes this distinction between the, uh, merchant, right, which is sort of what you seem to be describing just now, and the Brahman left. And I don't recall you actually, uh, citing this in your book, but I do, I have heard you talk about it in interviews. I think I read, I read it after I finished the book. Right, that makes sense. Yeah, because they, they really complement each other, those two studies. Because of course, Piketty shows that really, like, part of the big shift, the big political realignment we're seeing is an educational divide. And yeah, these two camps, I guess, broad camps, the Brahman left, the merchant right. Um, I'd be curious for you to elaborate on that a little bit and like, what exactly the, the, why that choice of words even is, I guess, illustrative for this phenomenon.

So for, uh, who's looking at France mostly, and, um, a bunch of different Western democracies, Western democracies. But the, um, the analysis of the French taxation system is what allows him to understand, um, the question of how, um, R is greater than G. The interest on accumulated wealth for the past 250 years is greater than growth. So if you are a rentier from the, if you inherit money from the, that, if you have wealth in the 19th century, that inherits in that moves through your family, the rate of interest, interest on your wealth, um, grows faster than the rate of growth. And so this keeps a kind of almost feudal set of, um, wealthy people in power. And then he, he talks about how the Brahman left, though, as part of this, um, world, has, um, solidified and become a caste-like system. Using the term Brahman, like for the Brahman left in Piketty, these terms is no longer even a class, it is a caste that reproduces its wealth, its social capital, its financed capital in through, through the generations. So there is almost no moving them anymore. There's no dynamism. Their power is completely, um, a fortress-like, um, protected. And so in that sense, like, he says he's not a Marxist, and he's making this observation. He's become more and more left as his career has gone on. But when you have a caste system like this, how do you overturn it? The class dynamism of capital has to do with, um, the changing positions of the petite bourgeoisie versus the proletariat versus the lumpen proletariat, the grand bourgeoisie, and, um, the capitalist class. And all of these are moving parts within Marx, because he's seeing capitalism move so dynamically. What we, what Piketty might argue, and a lot of people have argued recently, Yanis Varoufakis and Jodi Dean among them, is that we're evolving into a state of capitalism where we've become, it's become, it's reverted back to that feudal order. There's an, there's no dynamism anymore. There's just these fixed, um, strata and these, and these fixed groups within capital vying for supremacy. And their power can't be shaken, um, by any kind of, I think, um, Piketty, he really, he does feel like it could be shaken by electoral processes that would change the taxation system, because he's really studied the taxation system throughout the Western industrialized countries. And he says there can be redistribution if the government works properly in its way. So that is a non-revolutionary, redistributive set of policies that happened after World War II. In fact, the power of old capital in Europe was broken by World War I. The interwar period was a period of great financial crisis. And it was World War II that really broke the power of the old capital, capitalized families in France. And then their fortunes, after a dynamic period of economic mobility, were reconsolidated, yeah, within the social mobility of the, what the French called the, the 30 glorious years, was really a set, was really facilitated by economic and taxation policies that were abandoned after neoliberalism, um, triumphed. And I think what's most interesting about those two categories, Brahman left, merchant right, is the sort of sociology of it all. And the big question, right, is why I didn't even talk about the merchant right. Like Trump would be a member of the merchant right, right? Yeah. Yeah. Or Pierre Poilievre in Canada, who's sort of the likely, most definitely going to be our next prime minister, for sure. No way. No way. Yeah, yeah. And okay, Trudeau, because Trudeau is like the embodiment of of the Brahman left. Well, I don't, is he? This is, um, kind of where I, I want to get at some contradictions actually. Because there is a kind of way in which I've seen leftists cope with this phenomenon by saying, "Well, that's liberal, not leftist." But the line gets very blurry, uh, in the contemporary left when we see a lot of characteristics of the Brahman left that are shared both by like status quo liberals, even neoliberals who might be like third-way type people like Trudeau, and then the NDP. Who, the NDP will be more radical, supporting taxation policies that even Piketty would probably support, except they will have all these sort of, that I'm really struggling to use the, to pick the correct terms here because I want to deconstruct these terms after, but, you know, woke language. They'll have a lot of characteristics of the PMC left. So I, wait, tell me what the, so Trudeau is not, inde, you have to, don't you have to explain this to me? Okay. So the NDP are to the left of Trudeau? Yes. They're like a social democratic party that is, okay, was a neoliberal party up until recently. They started going back a little bit to their social democratic roots, but they have all the Brahman left characteristics. Like they, I mean, and they're all, they're totally PMC, like, in terms of their literal makeup. It's all of them are, you know, from the academy, from professional NGO places. And, you know, so like, I think Pi, I don't use that term, um, Brahman left, because of the problems with translating that into the Anglo-American scene. He's talking about like the, um, um, Left Bank leftists in France, you know, the Socialist Party leftists who all went to the same exclusive schools and they call themselves leftists. But like, so that that works in the French situation or Continental Europe. I really think, um, it's better for us to call them the Brahman liberals here. But this is the question, because when I think of a Brahman, a Brahman leftist or a PMC leftist, I think of Elizabeth Warren, who might be closer to the liberal side of things, but I also think of AOC. And, uh, people always like to, there's a obviously a clear difference between someone like Bernie Sanders and AOC in terms of their, uh, popularity. And some people want to excuse this as solely due to sexism or racism. But I think it's also to do with, you know, the way she lectures, the way she talks, in this very kind of talking down on you, that is very indistinguishable from Warren, in my view, at least in terms of their mannerisms, even if they, even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might support policies that are actually like pretty much similar to Bernie Sanders, but in her, like, her style.

Okay. So one of the things I think that, um, she's much more willing to concede ground on, and this might be because of her generation or something, is that, you know, she's more willing to give, um, um, space to identitarianism. For instance, like before she won her election, before Trump was elected, she had her, um, pronouns on her bio on X. And then she took them off. So there's, there's an old left thing where Bernie Sanders never did that, right? And he just always had this kind of like message. People around him tried to adapt to these, um, liberal identitarian, um, rituals. And he just didn't do it. He didn't do the land acknowledgements. He kept talking about like universal programs, the people versus the power. He was, you know, sort of, he's sort of unmovable on those points. And that's why we, that's why I feel a lot of people have been criticizing him. But I just feel there's kind of like, um, perpetual gratitude towards him. Because getting back to writing the book, I feel like Bernie Sanders' campaign made me realize like, there is a public space for the discussion of class. And that space has been closed down by, in large part, academia and even leftists, like, you know, prominent leftists. And we need to bring back this language of analysis, because the American working class is so objectively in trouble. And Bernie Sanders really spoke to that. And he was such a dangerous figure, everyone had to get together in the Democratic Party and suppress him. So that's another reason why I think I was able to write that book, because I saw his old left, sort of loyalty to universalism and as, um, powerful and potentially popular, and popular too, right? Not just powerful. It was a mass politics that really, um, came up and gave me hope for the first time in my life since two, since the financial, since, you know, I was a kid because of the financial crisis. We were all ready to remake capitalism. Obama didn't do it. But we had this figure of Sanders who seemed to really represent a kind of old materialist politics. And so when you get, so this comes back to AOC. I think I don't want to think of it as a generational, as a pure generational thing, because I think that's a really simplistic way of looking at things. But I do think that the ways in which your generation and her generation were educated, really, um, makes PMC values like part of the contract that you have to sign to get your credential. And, you know, you invisibly sign it, and then you have to like break that contract to get out of it. Like, I will speak this language. I will, um, say that class is just one other category of like race and gender and sexuality. I will never, um, you know, um, put class first or something, you know. So, so there's a, you're not consciously signing on, but you sign on to this. And, and there are many rewards in America for, um, towing that line. And I think that's what that's what makes it, uh, also really striking is that there is the, the professional managerial class presence in the left was for me most felt after Bernie's defeats with, um, DSA and the evolution of Democratic Socialists of America. And how, um, its politics immediately became a kind of niche PMC, like, had a PMC mode of being. Well-intentioned, you know, well-intentioned young people who, um, you know, believe that it was their role to protect, to center, to raise awareness. And we're very divorced from any questions of material, um, gain that one could work for, even in like, and I'm just going to also say power, like in local politics, like how do you create power in local politics? It, this was not interesting to anyone. I hear that New York is better now, you know, the Brooklyn DSA is much better. People are much more practical about, you know, creating, um, policies that, you know, work for working-class people. And then you show that you can do these things. A lot of PMC politics is more about like displaying how vanguard you are. Exactly. Yeah. This is the part of the whole problem we're discussing that I think is the one that I think ruffles a lot of feathers. Because I did a whole podcast before, uh, with Dave from Theory Underground and with, um, another gentleman whose name just kind of laps, went out of my memory, but it was on the professional managerial class. And one of the responses we kept getting was, "Well, you know, that's identity politics. It's been co-opted by the elites, by the establishment." And what we really need is real intersectionality. And I noticed in your book, uh, you also critique intersectionality. And I think this is the division that to me is more interesting because it, as it pertains to leftists, because a lot of leftists cope with this by saying, "Well, see Hillary Clinton, their kind of wokeism is phony wokeism. It's phony identity politics. And what we really need is this grassroots race, class, gender popular front of the vulnerable, whatever you may call it." And, you know, but they kind of have that same, like, they, the working class tends to be find them just as out of touch, as the, uh, well, I'm going to focus on that word, vulnerable. And that is the fetish, yeah, of liberals and PMC. They fetishize vulnerability. They reify it. And they make it seem like, "Oh, we're helping the vulnerable. We are vulnerable. We can save people." No, a real working-class movement emphasizes strength. And I'm so, uh, sick of the vulnerability fetish. You know, my God, we're all so need. No, no, that's not leftist politics. That's liberal politics. If you fetishize vulnerability, that's liberal politics. Yes, we need to protect the health of all Americans because, and I don't know about Canada, but Americans are abused by big food and big egg. This country is sick. RFK Jr., like, as crazy as it is, he realizes that it's industrial agriculture that's made people so sick. But the thing is, to fight against it is not to emphasize our vulnerability, but emphasize the strength and numbers that can actually make a change in the organization of big ag. It feels so desperate when we're all alone with these ideas or trying to round up a group of people and make and ally with them. Yeah, people, they love micro and niche, um, pro, um, projects. And this is what's just making me so depressed about, um, left-liberal politics right now. Is that this fetishism for vulnerability? The book that I'm writing, that I wrote about trauma, is going to come out with this much more clearly articulated. But the very notion of political subjectivity has to change in order for us to be able to build a anything that looks like a revolution. Because if you're going to be fetishizing each other's vulnerabilities and demanding recognition from each other all the time so that you become mutual etiquette police, you will never ever change a goddamn thing. You have no idea how powerful capital is. And if you're going to be like, "Well, asking for recognition because you're vulnerable," you are screwed. And they screw you already. And you are screwed about the, um, about the, um, the creation of any kind of strength or autonomy or agency through solidarity. That has to be remade. And, you know, what I'm not optimistic for this generation, your generation, or the next. They were screwed by Coronavirus. Like, how are we going to actually produce a kind of comedy of people who find strength and ambition together, a collective ambition to change the world, rather than individualized grievances that collect as a set of grievances for which we demand recognition? Vulnerability was actually the word that was the critical word here. Very well said. You articulated kind of my gripe with this phenomenon way, way better than I could have, uh, because I remember sometimes arguing with leftists on what I thought would be common sense ideas. Like, for example, like, uh, open borders in a global capitalist economy is a very stupid idea. And it would be kind of a wet dream to people who would want to exploit cheap, uh, legal migrant labor. And then they were saying, "No, the idea of an illegal itself is a fascist concept." And you, and, um, and I was thinking, but like, okay, even if you believe that, one day in a hypothetical communist world, you want to get rid of borders and nations, okay, whatever. You know, as a political strategy right now, it's a pretty silly idea to emphasize open borders. And they said, "But we need to, we can't give up on the vulnerable." And they're more vulnerable. And you hear this a lot with the issues like trans issues and all kind of different issues where, so I have like, I'm very libertarian on like those kind of issues. Give up on the vulnerable. Yeah. Well, it's like, I, I had an argument with a sort of PMC leftist once, and I said, "Okay, like, why not take the strategy of, you can be pro-rights, but maybe don't like, put the most fringed trans issues on the front of your platform and talk about that more than the issues where you might have popularity on?" And they said, "No, that's seizing ground to the right. And that is going to damage the vulnerable." And I, my God, most of my trans friends really hate the fact that the liberals have weaponized that issue in this particular way. So when you pretend to speak for the vulnerable, you are taking the most PMC position. Because when a true mass politics comes to being, or when the revolution happens, it's only because of the strength of the masses. And not people going, "Oh, peasants, you really suffered." Is like the inspiring thing about Mao's revolution, about Lenin's revolution, was the power that people saw in themselves reflected in the mass, in the masses, and in their ability to change things. A lot of things didn't change in both, you know, Bolshevik Russia and Communist China, but there certainly, you, you liberated like 300 million serfs from serfdom and 800 million peasants from absolute dire poverty and debt to landlords. So there was a whole reorganization of the productive forces of a population and a re, and there was redistribution. It didn't work out perfectly, and it's still in process in China. In Russia, it's all oligarchical now. But, um, when you think about like a class war, you don't wage it by saying, "We have to, um, you know, be vulnerable and then expect other people." It's like a blackmail when you say, "Oh, yes, we're protecting the vulnerable. And if you criticize me, you're criticizing the vulnerable." That's like the total liberal blackmail. It's like, no, we have to find strategies to build mass politics, putting strength on strength. And, you know, what you were saying about common sense is that PMC vanguardists hate common sense. They hate it. They love, uh, they love this word, heteronormativity. They hate heteronormativity, right? They hate normativity. But the other thing I was thinking about was that in the most extreme cases, they want to punish you for a perceptive response, like stimuli responses. They want to, this is why it is an etiquette straightjacket, is that they want you to feel completely inhibited when dealing with other people for fear of offending them. It's really truly horrifying. Yeah, because we live in such antisocial times already. But if you are going to create a new net of etiquette when which you can catch offenders, then you just give up on normal people, ordinary people who are just either trying, who are trying to survive and who are looking for some kind of social bond that will make them feel less alone with regard to all the powerful forces that are working against them, from our food waste to our work culture to our healthcare system. Does that tie into academic anti-elitism a little bit? Because what I find interesting is in academia, it's filled with a lot of people who are against stuff like standards, education standards, or teaching aspects of history because they might be offensive, offensive to the vulnerable. As if black people are, are so not intelligent that they would, uh, you know, can't look at a Jefferson statue without, uh, being traumatized. It's so, it's so infantilizing and almost kind of more racist sometimes than what they think that I, um, was looking at when I wrote, um, *American Idol*, was that there's kind of, um, anti-canon animus in the, um, academy. Like, we have to destroy the traditions. We can't look at the Enlightenment. We can't read the classics because we can only read like what's popular and edgy as part of our political expression. Is that when you looked at the emancipation of the African-Americans and the establishment of African-American schools, there was a real, um, bifurcation where Booker T. Washington wanted people to have vocational training, but, um, people like W.E.B. Du Bois and other, you know, will you say, like, bourgeois elite African-Americans, they wanted training in the classics. And they wanted, like, classical humanities education along with scientific, speculative, thematic education for African-Americans. And not just apply, like, what we have today, like computer science. You're supposed to just get that job, or business. Like, the, the aspirations that the PMC elites thought people wanted was just like things that were relatable and court relatable. That was not a grassroots aspiration. That was something that came up with, um, the rise of, um, this kind of niche liberalism. That there is this human civilization is everyone's legacy. And keep people in a state of ignorance with regard to human civilizational achievements, like Newtonian physics. That is the most insulting thing of all. There's nothing about physics that is, you know, oppressive intersectionally. Everyone should have access to objective reason, scientific method, and its history. And I think that by fetishizing both vulnerability and irrationality, we're doing, um, people who are already oppressed and marginalized a huge disservice. Like, we shouldn't be so bogged down in this kind of, um, um, non-normativity that comes out of this Foucault fetish that people have. And just, and think about like established norms. You can criticize them, but you have to know the laws of physics. There's no way of subverting that. I mean, when you get to quantum mechanics, you have to have known Euclidean physics, Newtonian physics. Um, I read some more recently that the most translated book into African languages is the Bible. And the African elites are saying, "This is how you keep us down. We need science. We need scientific translation. And we need scientific, um, text being translated into all the different African languages." But you keep translating the Bible because all these evangelical Christians and missionaries, they have grants, translation grants, and they keep translating the Bible for these various tribes. And it's like keeping people in a state of irrationality, in a state of, um, religious subjection. That is not good. And it's the same thing, I'm sorry to say, for you Canadians and your fetish of First Nations. First Nations were deprived of their land, deprived of their dignity. But there's nothing like absolutely, um, beyond criticism about maintaining this kind of irrationality in a worldview that is deeply mythological and superstitious. And the other thing is, you know, um, that has real serious problems in terms of gender equity. So what we, what, um, the white person's fantasy of the indigenous religions and this kind of caretaking of the land has to do with is a fetish of non-development, pre-industrialization, pre-Enlightenment world. And to cast them in that world means to deprive them of the objective achievements of scientific progress. I know I've alienated all these Canadians. You're probably, no, no, no. This is the silent majority of Canadians agree. And even look, not even the silent majority, even some of the PMC people. I remember when there was one academic, he's the guy who wrote that not-so-great book, in my opinion, on how fascism works, Jason Stanley. Yeah. On Twitter, he made a very common-sense tweet saying, "Look, people I talk to in the space, all of us see a problem with this kind of like wokeism." Which I kind of want to see, ask you a little bit about how you might define, because I notice it's a little bit of an ambiguous concept, but we kind of like have an instinctual idea of what it is. A lot of us. And he was saying, Jason Stanley, that, you know, a lot of us privately hate this stuff. And it's had a terrible effect on the education system. But we are afraid to speak about it because you'll have people in this very competitive PMC educational space where it's really hard to get, uh, jobs as a professor, everyone stuck as an adjunct. And, you know, good luck getting tenure, right? It's very hard. So someone will, people who are competing for these positions will be so quick to, you know, participate in a cancellation, right, or sort of denigration of another character so that they can, uh, you know, kind of ascend or, you know, get rid of competition. I guess that's a subconscious motivation, I think. But he was saying that, and I view in Canada too, tons of people think the same thing. There's a kind of very phony, um, land acknowledgment culture, in, in which it's all about guilt, it's all about trauma. Meanwhile, we still build, uh, pipelines on indigenous land and don't even, a lot of indigenous communities, like in BC and Alberta, don't even have access to clean drinking water. So it's a total disgrace. Like the government's not even, the governments aren't doing actual anything, uh, for the people they are supposed to, uh, represent. But if you, this sort of PMC, uh, kind of pro-mac culture, it's like weirdly filtered into parts of the radical left, I notice too. What is one of the most disappointing things is when I meet a Marxist and they say, "Well, you know, Canada and America, their settler colonial countries, they just need to be totally Balkanized and land back completely." I mean, it sounds like a straw man, sounds ridiculous, but these people do exist. I know. And they kind of say, "Well, the idea of even having, like, a to any sense of like unity and nationhood, it's, it's bad. And you can't do that because you're of bad things you did. You can't, you can't even appeal to pride because you should feel guilty about everything." And it's, uh, definitely had a negative effect. But I guess I was going to ask, um, some about moral relativism, but I guess wokeness, since we're on it, how do you define wokeness?

Because I think that's just the white right-wing myth. No, I don't actually ever use that term. You know, I don't. I, I think it, like, um, it's a really problematic term. People try to criticize it, go crazy. I've been reading, um, Norman Finkelstein's book, *I'll Burn That Bridge When I Come to It*. And it's a critique of wokeness, but I think it drove him insane. So I, I think that, um, it's better to call it like, um, hyper-subjectivity, hyper, hyper-identitarianism, or hyper-subjective, um, reason as, um, the governing principle of all social interaction. Like, everything is about your subjective experience of your own vulnerability when it comes to like a social situation. I'm sorry, it's, it's not very, like, uh, doesn't trip off the tongue. But I also feel like it's, um, about the reification of identities as such, and the human resource management of difference. So this is, so I try to put it back into like a managerial workplace issue. Wouldn't virtue signaling be like, I see like your discussion on virtue signaling as the main aspect of, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Let's call it performative virtue signaling then. Performative politics. Let's call it pure, pure performative politics. Yeah. And, um, some, some people say that's also a right-wing bogeyman. Virtue signaling? But you're, you talk a lot about that. I mean, why matter? I don't care about, you know, what I'm trying to figure out actually, Tony, is how to articulate the position of the anti-liberal left. Because being anti-liberal makes people think, "Oh, you're, you're just a right-winger." But we have to have an anti-liberal left position on things. That's what I'm trying to articulate. I'm, I'm even critical of that too. Okay. I guess it makes sense in the American context, because in the American context.

Like liberal means like progressive, big government, uh, sort of like pseudo-progressivism. But I, I also think in the more like Enlightenment liberal sense, there's a lot of it. Actually, I think that is part of the problem of what we've lost. Like, I think a lot of the moral relativism and a lot of anti-small-l liberal, not big-L.

I see. Well, yeah, I get what you mean because like, I'll have people I meet who I think I agree with, they'll be like, "Yeah, yeah, you know, these these [ __ ] libs, uh, you know, they'll be against them." But then they'll kind of have that same sort of like, um, you know, "The US should be Balkanized. America and Canada, there's all a bunch of settlers." Uh, and they'll give up on the working class and kind of implicitly or explicitly endorse a sort of fetishized third-worldism. Which, uh, you know, it sounds like Stamman, but I've, you know, I've, the more communists I've met, the more I've seen that. And that's when I really realized this was actually a problem. It's not just a matter of someone not being radical enough. Some of the radicals are totally have this sort of mind virus. Also, yes, yes. Well, we can't use those terms anymore. Okay, anti-liberal leftism for you. Okay, they've had, you know, anti-woke left, anti-identity.

I just feel like there's, yeah, I, I'm with you on the wokeism being a difficult term because of the right. The right kind of will use it to incorporate just like any kind of left-wing politics, any kind of social justice politics. And they will sometimes, not always, but sometimes, actually be against like progress of the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Uh, whereas a lot of people, I don't think mean that. But, uh, the problem is, I do think the term is important because leftists so often sweep it under the rug. We'll say, "This is just a right-wing attack, and we don't need to deal with this." But it's really hard to find a master signifier to tie all these phenomena that you... Does that woke do that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe.

No, no, no. I, to go where the M, like to figure out this is not, yeah, it's not my, um, project right now. But I think the best thing to do would be to look at how it's used, um, historically, like where it comes from, how it evolves, um, uh, you know, how it functions as an anti-class, um, strategy within the left to police and put down class problems of class. Because the thing about the settler colonial argument and the Balkanization is that it totally takes out any idea that there might be classes within the settler population, people who never got very much from being a settler and who are, who work for the profit of the capitalists who settled. And so that, like the elimination of class distinction within the, um, um, white, within whites, even that is, um, I don't know, like you want to call that wokeism? I, I, okay, you know, I'll, I'll concede that. But I just think it's reactionary. There's nothing liberatory. There's nothing critical about that position when you erase the class distinctions like that, right? And you make it into just one, um, you create a demographic that is iniquitous, um, without making a class distinction. Like it, when you think about women, think about like second-wave feminism, for instance, you know, like the fact that they were working-class women, they totally ignored. And that's how they produce this kind of like woke feminism.

You talk a lot about it's not like it's not a battle. Like I'm gonna have, I, Norman Flin went so far in that book. I, I kind of agree with him. But, um, I, I think, I think it's so bad the way that it's come to dominate institutional, personal, and political relations, this kind of hypervigilance about offense. And if you want to call that wokeness, that's okay. That I just think it's, it just really sucks. And it really is a kind of liberalism, and you're right to say small-l liberalism, that wants to adjudicate difference over material contradictions. And it's like a very complicated way of saying that, but it's the only way I can figure out how to confront it. I see it.

No, um, the other thing that, you know, in a more analytic way, I could talk about is that within this kind of woke interaction, the super ego is a totally PMC human resources manager, right? Exactly. That's the PMC mode. Like, in the sense that people who aren't actually, you're pleasing that person. Yeah, yeah. Who are you pleasing? Who are you, who are you talking to when you take that red-lip position? Yeah, they say words, we need to be united, we can't seed ground to the right. It's like, we, this big other of like, yes, a left. And who's part of this imaginary left? It's a very, it's almost like a PMC cathedral. I mean, this is, I'm careful, that sounds like right-wing arguments, but in, is there not, is that not exist? Right? Like, I didn't think this existed because the PMC, this is kind of brings us to distinction between the right and left PMC. I kind of went to a school originally that was sort of right-wing PMC or centrist PMC. It was very like technocrat, managerial, policy analysis, like center. Oh, the line go up. And that's why homeless people need to still be homeless, right? Whereas I didn't quite see the problem with that. The left was like in the academy, of this sort of like hyper-liberal, hyper-progressive, woke left, whatever we want to call it. I didn't see it was a problem till I went into grad school where I actually wanted to like study with Marxists and and stuff like that, right? Whereas, oh, I was very surprised to see all that. And I was like, oh, there's some of this stuff I've heard about about the left in the, them. True. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, uh, okay, so about the, we're talking about rejection of universalism. And that's part of the reason why I tend to prefer like hyper-progressive as opposed to hyper-liberal, just because so much of the left today is very illiberal in terms of literally handling contradic. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. But also, you talked so much about the, uh, rejection of universalism. I kind of want to, you elaborate on that. Why is that actually a bad thing? Because moral relativism, uh, is traditionally usually been critiqued by the right. Like the right usually critiques moral relativism, like Leo Strauss, for example. But why is that actually a problem? Uh, because some people will say, well, Foucault and Nietzsche, they say that, you, it's all about power. And that's true. What would you say to those people?

Yeah, I think I've done a lot of critique of Foucault and Nietzsche because, um, Foucault really wanted to replace the Marxist paradigm. Nietzsche does a, has a great critique of Christianity and, um, the Christian will to power. And, you know, really, um, tries to create a kind of a sense of positive sovereignty in a time of, um, industrialization and standardization. And his worldview is purely aristocratic. And that's very appealing. As Foucault is very appealing when you think that you can just talk power, that's power, you can identify power and denounce it. Nietzsche has this aristocratic sensibility. It's about creating the sovereign agent. Um, for Marx, there are objective situations within history that have to do with material struggles for supremacy with regard to the means of production and the means of subsistence. These are objective things that can't be reduced to my subjective experience or power. Um, in fact, Nietzsche, from a monarchist point of view, could be understood as a bourgeois, brilliant mind was trying to create a kind of Superman and, um, escape from the standardization that he saw coming through, um, the rationalization of work in the capitalist workplace. So that is very appealing because we are all being punished by this kind of increasingly regimented, disciplined workplace. I mean, since the 19th century, our work is more surveilled, our, um, our freedoms are less and less, um, possible. And the two of them, we're thinking about as kind of freedom, right? The freedom of bondage and sadomasochism, sexual perversion, non-normativity with Foucault, maybe, and Nietzsche, pure aristocratic will to power that renounces Christianity and the virtues. Totally appealing. What Marx was looking at was the fact that for most of human existence, the working class, the peasant, not even the working class yet, the peasants, the majority of people, had short, brutish lives. The conversion of the means of production within agriculture and industrial production produced both new forms of oppression, but the possibility of liberating people from short, brutish lives. And within the Enlightenment, one of the things that had to do with scientific observation, it wasn't, and they used this and, and, um, experimentation was the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, which changed the survival rate of children from before vaccine to after vaccine in an enormous way. And also improved, um, the lives of women because they didn't have to give birth to so many children so that one could survive the, that process of rationalization and scientific method did not come out of nowhere. It came out of certain principles of experimentation, objective observation of phenomena, and rationalization. That rationalization has turned into instrumental reason, so that we use it to extract profit and oppress people as much as possible. But none of these things are possible without the exercise of objective reason and an, and an agreement between human beings that we live in a shared reality which can be observed and measured. And that is universal. The universal exercise of reason and the scientific method doesn't change if you move from one latitude to another. Gravity is still gravity, light still operates like light.

I think, to sum up in one sentence, the kind of difference between the non-universalist left and, I guess you could say, aspects of the classically Marxist left is the new left is all about difference as such, like a fetishization of difference. Different things are different. And, you know, they're against the grand narratives that Marxism has. And even if, like, we are to accept, which I don't really, but even if we were to accept that the postmodernists or post-structuralists, be more accurate, I guess, are true or correct in, like, that aspect of like being truth being really hard to nail down, it's a total disaster politically. Like, it's the worst political strategy imaginable. I mean, you tell people like to not have any kind of grand narrative, to be against sort of common standards. Instead of a sort of universal, um, grand narrative, you go for this intersectionality, which I'm sympathetic to those folks because they will add class to the equation, unlike the, you know, Hillary Clinton neoliberal identity politics people. So they at least talk about class. But they do it in this way where it's like, they feel every time you mention class, you have to mention gender, you have to mention race, you have to mention all this. And, and if you object to that framework, they think the argument you're making is that you were saying we shouldn't care about race and gender. Which is, you know, I don't think that's the argument you're making. No, no, no, no, not at all.

But I do think that we're, we're in a dark moment. But if you think about things in a more epic historical manner, the life expectancy in China in 1900 was 30. That was before the Chinese, the first Chinese Revolution. The life expectancy in the United States was 37. The United States now has seen a period of time when, um, its life expectancy as an industrialized nation has gone down. That was only the only time we've seen that happen is in Russia in the breakup of the Soviet Union. So in terms of public health and public well-being for the masses, there's been incredible accomplishments in the 20th century and the 21st century. And I don't know if you want to call that a grand narrative, but there has been an epic amount of transformation in terms of the liberation of the majority of human beings on Earth from absolute object poverty. Now, there is absolute object poverty in great parts of the world. But Marx really felt that capitalism would unleash the productive potential of human beings so that we could give everyone the possibility of enjoying the leisure time and the life conditions of the bourgeoisie. MH. And that could only be done through the transformation of the productive powers that capitalism unleashed in the 19th century. And yes, there was terrible colonialism that allowed for exploitation of all the, um, all the, uh, British colonies, they were the main, um, empire of the time. But if we want to be anti-imperial, we can't trust ourselves to just be micro, um, niche types. We have to have a bigger plan and a bigger vision. So it's not even, you know, the difference thing I'm just tired of. But it's not even that in terms of, um, the historical narrative, it's not even grand narrative. You know what's embedded in Marxism and historical materialism is an epic view of the human struggle for liberation.

What do you mean by that, exactly? Like epic, expanding thousands of years about the transformation of different modes of production from, you know, um, from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to feudal to early mercantile, first industrial revolution, second industrial revolution. Like that's an incredible view of history that everyone should understand. We're all part of it. MH. To post-industrial capital. Do you understand what I'm saying? Then? Yeah, it's [ __ ] epic. We're talking millennia of history. It's not just this past 100 years. But we've got to understand our position in that. And we don't because no one has any, um, historical imagination. And capital has wanted to destroy it. And, you know, what this is my problem with a lot of Fury heads too, is that your, the understanding of history is extraordinarily shallow. You know, what makes his, and the way history is taught is extremely boring. But if you think about it from an epic struggle for dignity, for liberate, for mastery of the world, it's [ __ ] epic. What we've accomplished, it's amazing. We've survived this long. I don't know that we'll survive much longer, to be perfectly honest. But, um, it's pretty incredible. And instead of being like, "Oh yeah, we're just settler colonials, we're so bad," that's white supremacy. It's like, let's look at this as part of a human struggle to liberate people from abject poverty and subsistence reproduction of the systems of life to a kind of leisure and intellectual, um, autonomy and agential, um, mastery over their world. So let's take something of what Nietzsche wanted and free everyone, not just like the exceptional few, but free everyone from the, um, oppression of work, discipline, and standardization.

Very well said. I, I think one of the best examples of that epic history, like works of epic history, is Neil Faulkner's "The Radical History of the World." Uh, a book that I'm not quite finished yet because it's enormous. But it's, I love the way he tells history because he tells it through a Marxist lens, but it's very detailed and it, it's very rigorous. And it's kind of a, it's the antithesis of the problems I've had of the ways leftists have taught history recently with these kind of, um, certain tendencies I've seen come out of postcolonialism, which will say that Marx's view of history is ethnocentric and completely, um, like good example actually is certain academics who have sort of tried to, or not even academics, certain journalists, some one of which you mention in your book, try to portray the American Revolution as actually like just a counterrevolution by slavers and nothing else. With out of impact it was. And, of course, looking at history in that, for not very historically accurate view, but in that sort of view, divorce from any kind of narrative of its global significance, it undermines even that Marxist narrative. And some, a lot of the times they'll explicitly say that they'll say, well, you know, this wasn't, you can't view this progress if it had some dis-emancipations along the way, if it, if black suffered, you can't say that, uh, there was nothing that there was anything progressive about this event, right? They, they have to look at, like teaching history in this activist way that is more about reducing how much pain you cause people or how much pain you think you, uh, you, uh, might evoke in telling that history than the actual accuracy and holistic significance of it as a whole, right?

Yeah, it's a kind of anachronistic application of woke politics onto the past. And that's part of the ahistoricism and the historical amnesia that's promoted by, um, like woke retellings of history. Want to use woke or, you know, liberal, neoliberal, or ever, like really bad, really bad neoliberal PMC modified, um, views of it. But that is been rewarded by that view. That bad history has been rewarded by a lot of the most powerful cultural agencies in America and about Canada. But, you know, in America, it's like, yay, that's that's that's good history. It's like telling a story of micro, um, micro experiences and, um, making, uh, claims about grievance that, um, you know, work on PMC white guilt. And, um, we need better history, or this, we won't have history as a, um, um, as a way of understanding the present any longer. And then we'll just be sleepwalking into the future and embedded in infernal repetition, which is, I think, what we're going for now. I can't, the way that the, um, the Democrats are so trapped in their technocratic authoritarianism just makes me think, oh, we're going to cycle through populism and technocracy, tech populism and technocracy. There doesn't seem to be a way out. And the only way to understand the cycle, I think, is to step out of the whole thing and see a longer historical progression.

I have so many funny things I want to ask related to that, but we'll save that for the back room. Uh, the last question I just want to ask for the public segment, real quick, is because I forgot to ask at the beginning, was the difference between, is there a right and left PMC? Because like people who come out of the academy, for instance, and people who might work for corporate advertising might have very different worldviews. And even engineers, people work at engineers at Google, for example, are kind of PMC, but, you know, there's something kind of different. Like, I think a lot of the PMC that we're talking about is very much the academy and NGO world. But I'm curious, you know, you know, all of, um, the banks and everything, they accepted a lot of these, um, identitarian categories. The right-wing, um, man, right-wing managerialism wants to give space for, um, a kind of explosive entrepreneurial sensibility that is like Teal or Musk, you know. And they still, they still need, they still trust expertise and they still need their credentials. But they want to break through this bureaucracy and this kind of like, what, you know, they think of as this, um, oppressive managerial, um, regulatory state that's suppressing this explosive inventive, um, carnivalesque figure that, um, Trump has become. Like, they enjoy life, they understand, um, um, they understand, um, risk-taking. And the left liberal elites are just embedded in this regulatory dynamic that's all about suppressing their, um, their creativity and their, um, their explosive future-oriented, um, accomplishment-fueled ideas. But this, you know, capital-fueled ideas. But both represent two different faces of like, um, um, proposing that capitalism is the best mode of, um, human production.

So within the PMC and the regulatory state, you have like the credential institutions, the media, academia, which are really being questioned right now because of COVID, because of Trump, because of all the corruption that is taking place. But they say that they can preserve within this regulatory machinery and the credential machinery a market-free space that has professional standards, like professors and doctors and lawyers, you know, that were free from, um, the marketplace pressures. It was absolute [ __ ]. We are completely oppressed by the rules of the marketplace now. But that we create a better, kinder form of capitalism because we protect certain kinds of expertise from the depredations of a marketplace that is managed for maximum growth. Then you have this idea on the right that you just have these geniuses who have, you know, these, um, tech ideas, engineering ideas, you know, X, Tesla, eBay. And they're just creating wealth and they're creating dynamic growth. And, you know, they're, they're delivering information to us in all these different ways. And they're subverting and they're reacting to you all the time by putting down the left PMC through this, you know, um, um, right-wing dynamism. And Trump has become their avatar, right? Like he's this sort of rules breaker and just this sovereign agent. And he's gonna, you know, [ __ ] things up and [ __ ] up the government. And because that's the best way capitalism works is if you just let a few individuals unleash their potential and their ideas. Step back, let the losers lose, let the winners win, let the winners take the most stuff. And it's still a mode of management. It's a mode of management that minimizes regulation. But somebody's still managing these engineers and these workers in terms of workflow and everything else. It's just saying that this mode of management for the dynamic, aristocratic, libertarian visionary is more efficient for capital. And the left PMC is like, no, our pseudo-regulatory liberal institutions, that's the best for capital because we are democratic. And the other, and we represent the democratic institutions. The other side is like, no, you guys hate the people, which is somewhat true. And we really represent the spirit of the people. They're going to come into a lot of problems because MAGA and as we've seen, the tech billionaires have different, um, interests. But so far, they've made an alliance. The Dems, I don't think they understand this out of pure hatred of the liberal left PMC. Their politics are about the pure hatred of, um, the left liberal values that have been dominating hegemonically in academia, in the government, in NGO world, in, um, media, in Hollywood, in journalism. They've had a lot of power. And the people, and the people on the bottom who [ __ ] hate them. And then there are like a couple of billionaires who realized we can weaponize this hate. And it's worked. And the, and the Democratic puns are like, I don't know, man, you know, Pete Harris's numbers were pretty high at the end of the thingy. And we, we, you know, really focused on seven states. And her numbers really went up. And those seven swing states, they have no idea how much people hate them. But you see, it's only, it's because it's because she's a black woman, she's a woman of color. And and people in America are just too backward to accept that. And what do we do with that? Nothing. But we'll just say that as an excuse. Doubling down. This is why we're just going to cycle between the regulatory state and this like kind of free market tiering.

But actually, it is 2:30 and I have to get to cooking. Okay, let's do 10 minutes of, um, behind the play all. Yeah, we'll transition to the back room right now. Uh, if you're not part of the back room already, you know, we get, you get access to tons of very interesting conversations. Um, and you can, it's cheaper than a price of a Starbucks latte. So stop buying, stop buying that [ __ ] and become a patron of One Dime Radio. My only hope is that when enough people become pessimist, then out of despair, somebody maybe does something. But, you know, why I also like to be a pessimist? Because it's the only way to have a nice life. If you're an optimist, then always bad things happen and you are always disappointed. When you are a pessimist, then you look around, okay, they are bad. But from time to time, something nice happens. And you, as a pessimist, you are a little bit glad all the time. No, you are listening to One Dime Radio. Become a patron at patreon.com to support the show and get access to extra content.