Exploring the Crisis of Liberalism: Elijah Emery on Early Lasch, Part 2

I also talked about everything I thought was wrong , about two books I really like , and then we compared the differences between the 60s crisis of American liberalism and its context with the current crisis of American liberalism and its context .

And the only other thing I would add to that we didn't add in the last episode is the right wing response and crisis of liberalism is more profound than it was then too .

While there was a kind of reactionary right emerging , particularly in the south and the character of George Wallace and kind of racial populism in the south , more or less the conservative factions of both parties were okay with liberalism . They were just trying to deal with the problems of the financial crisis . Is returning at the end of the 60s ?

That isn't the same . Now there's a pretty strong and pronounced right wing critique of liberalism , and that actually does in the nearly 150 year trend of most of the American right just being liberals from another decade . So I think that's a contextual difference .

We didn't mention in episode one of early lash in the 60s crisis of liberalism , but we do need to mention today , because I do think that's a complicated factor in things that we only briefly touched on , with the fact that if you meet young reactionaries , they're really reactionary , but they are rare .

So , with all that said , though , let's actually get into the two particular essays that we wanted to talk about . One is at the end of the agony of the American left , where lash is kind of spelling out what this all has meant , leading up to the new left in the 1960s . Let's remember when agony was released . Once agony came out , in what ? 68 ?

While there are essays in World of Nations that are well read , I think that entire book is a banger , and why it's so good Even though it's like one off essays and reviews is structured in such a way to make an entire , complete argument .

And then the other one that I want to talk about , if you don't mind , that I think is relevant , is the end of cultural laissez-faire , which is also part of that . I think those are pretty much two pieces of the same argument .

It points us to the Fisher points that actually ended up happening and the cultural politics that ended up happening , rather than the cultural politics that Lash wanted the new left to point , you know , to go towards , though obviously he cared about birth , death and technology at the same time .

So he starts the essay I wanted to talk about in Agony of the American Left with this Daniel Bell quote from the end of ideology the ideological age has ended . That turned out not to be the case is the basic argument of the chapter the revival of political controversy in the 60s .

Like I do not . It's hard for me to conceive of a time where there is that much ideological consensus between not just parties I can kind of conceive that but factions of American life . Like that is really hard for me to put in One of the things that I talk about , like when , for example , right , when we will go ?

Well , we're the counterculture now , and I'm like no , you're not . Like this is just divided cultural status quo , like there is no real counterculture now it's been appropriated and resourced and and recapitulated culture , right .

So there's , elegant like you have niche subculture , sure , but like of which you are one of a thousand , my conservative friend , in so much that we have a political culture in America , it exists solely off of , often , pseudo polarization . So so you know , every administration increasingly justifies itself off crisis .

That was also common in the time period lashes writing about , in the time period of cultural controversy into the 70s .

Then there's the Michael Sandel period and Michael Sandel really kind of sees the end of this cultural controversy as like the ascendancy of the administrative state where we get the controversy but it doesn't really affect anything because we farmed everything out to subdepartments and the executive , that kind of run on their own and that we try to .

We try to keep these , like politics is , is the cultural controversies , but it's not actually that . It's also just administrating this giant political apparatus , and those are two separate things . And I find it interesting because we know that Lash was in dialogue with Sandel at one point .

It shows up in a couple essays , but we are back in the crisis mode and that is sort of this like we were talking about , you know , in the last episode . This continuity that kind of gets shaken up in 2007 , 2008, . But it's being shaken up by , like the administrative state effectively like like changes in the way we're operating the banks and the other .

It's not being shaken up in a way that , like clearly is predictable . That's why you you mentioned , like Lindsey Graham's calling for the nationalization of banks , would Bernie Sanders ?

It's a very weird time and it's interesting also how quick we forgot that like that is buried that weird time period of like three years in the early Obama administration , and then we go back to the politics of cultural division with the Tea Party on forward and people like , oh well , the Tea Party's just like , well , the Tea Party's actually kind of a return

to the moral majority shit too at the 90s .

Like it's not that being new , it's more right wing than the moral majority stuff was and also less based in reality because in some real sense , like the claim that the majority of the public was actually conservative during most of the baby boom was true and that has not been true since the basically since the 2000s , increasingly young people are not In fact

actually for as far as we know about voting patterns , that's where that's where the actual generation , generational difference in voting patterns emerges for real , and that is in the 2000s , whereas probably voting patterns were predictable off your parents . So I think that's OK .

Those are all interesting things to talk about , but Lash is pointing out that , like this , age of controversy doesn't actually seem to mean what . Yes , daniel Bell's right , the liberal consensus is over as an ideological apparatus , but the alternatives to it don't really actually catch on .

So we've talked about some of the structural problems that happened in the last episode , but what Lash really focuses on is that the new left and he says this on page 180 , both the strengths and the weaknesses of the new left derived from the fact that it is largely a student movement based on alienation , and it has an attempt basically to redefine the political

issues as personal issues , that the political is personal , which is a big distinction from the cultural politics of the earlier 60s , which defined culture as basically like a private endeavor and didn't put cultural politics in the realm of political discourse at all .

Unfortunately , what this culminates in in Lash's mind is the pivoting of the new left from something that could be transformed into something you know , into a real political movement with the limitations of any political movement , into basically like a bunch of alienated kids who are trying to prove their authenticity by doing more and more radical street theater , which

is the conclusion he really comes to by the time he writes . Culture of narcissism .

The new left , in this telling , becomes nihilistic , despite the fact that in 1968 , it's prior to knowing that they've been defeated , and he spends some time talking about the possibilities beyond this alienation , in the form of either leaning into the contradictions within the university that he sees , or trying to harness the professional class or the conscious constituency

of liberals by pointing out the necessity of an alliance , purely on a defense of civil liberties , between the left and liberals , which can then be used to , you know , hopefully turn forced liberalism to compromise with radicalism , rather than the other way around , though the post script to Agony of the American Left says that this has failed because it's written at

the 1968 Chicago Convention and it talks about how okay , our attempt to realign the Democratic Party in the form of the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns is over . It's kaput . There is now no way to maintain the American Empire under liberal auspices .

In this telling , which gets us now to World of Nations , and the unraveling of this and the period of on we and crisis that we said feel so familiar to us today .

I mean , again , I do think of , like the left that I came out of before I became a conservative , like the left of my teens that I was exposed to as a working class kid was like , tied up into the punk movement and arts movements and narratives about the 70s and and and you know , breaking out of your religious background for the most part tied up in a

weird shit like wicca , like and the person was political was like I think it was fully inverted by that point where the political was seen as pretty much personal and personal rebellion was was pretty key to it . All this changes in the alter globalization movement , a little bit around the battle for Seattle , etc .

But you know , prior to that , what the left was , a was it kind of a collaboration of personal special interest and or identarian politics ? And by identitarian I don't mean like yes , there was anti racism and that sort of stuff , but it was more . I mean like literally you're adopting the identity of leftist .

I sometimes wonder actually if that's where first encountered lash that would be hilarious .

You know , yes , there's radical Marxist books in this list but , like Tom Morello , ends up being just a standard bog , standard Obama liberal right Like , and Zach De La Raca kind of disappears . So I bring all this up because that is the left of the 90s , it's the left of people a little bit older than me , it's the left of people like Doug Lane .

It's tied up in the Zeme culture , tied up into these fragmented post 70s counterculture movements that were often quite strange and sometimes only on the internet , like discordianism , are , you know , the church of Bob , are these sorts of weird things . And then there was , like the Green Party left , which was , which you know , had a history .

It comes out of the failure of exactly what lash is talking about , but it's , you know , so thoroughly failed by the 1990s . It's like kind of a joke , even though it's a mass party in some senses it's you know , it's membership based is larger than the DSA at one point for sure , even though we don't talk about it because it doesn't really do anything .

So I say all this to say like it's not that there was no left during the 90s . There's , you know , the Gen X left . It's not that it didn't exist , but it was super fucking fragmented . And that seems to be a symptom of what lash is talking about here , like what , what , what ?

What if you've given up on a class narrative or any kind of collective narrative ? What's going to hold you together other than , like , temporary interest groups and cultural affiliations and pretty much nothing ? What do you ? What do you take on that Like ? Because you know I'm trying that to read this also in light of like lashes , like I mean .

It's just like if you're a part of these groups you'll be drawn to the left . This ended up not happening but it's , you know , students , the conscience constituency of liberals , possibly professionals , black people , ethnic minorities , poor . You know it's the usual hodgepodge which has not succeeded in becoming , you know , a natural constituency of the left .

But what doesn't happen is what lash calls for more explicitly in World of Nations , which is the foundation of a new party to educate these groups and collect their support . And so there's nothing .

There's no place for people to go beyond zine culture and beyond temporary sectarian organizations , because there is no mass left politics following , you know , certainly , the defeat of McGovern in 1972 , up until , like you know , maybe the Jesse Jackson campaign , but like it's pretty absent , and Jesse Jackson himself is not as successful in reshaping American politics more

broadly as even Bernie Sanders , who's not particularly successful at it . So , basically , you know where is there to go Nowhere because nothing has been built .

And in the first case , you know , in the William Jennings-Briane case , that doesn't even seem like the obvious part of you try to take over , like you know it feels like maybe you go into the Republicans , the radical Republicans or almost socialists anyway , like that's only 20 years ago at this point , like it's , but that's not where they go .

That's kind of an accident of history and local politics and religion , because it is tied into William Jennings-Briane's Christianity . And we talk about the real shift with both the progressives , you know , having changed the Democratic Party to where it's not just a reactionary party , it's reactionary but also not simultaneously , and that's also true for the Republicans .

So it makes some more sense and with roles , about being in power , the New Deal , the labor movement already being kind of headed in that way anyway , and then the popular front happens and consolidates the left continuing along those paths , with the exception of some Trotskyists and some very ultra leftists . Okay , that's a thing .

Then we hit the attempt in the late 60s , which was what Lash's said , definitively loses and can't really be tried again by 1970 , through four-ish .

And then he talks about , you know , the culture of narcissism which we are trying not to bring too much in , but it's sort of his explanation of what happens next and the fragmentation of Fordism and what that means culturally in the long 70s and by the long 70s we really mean 69 through like 1982 . So that means , you know , to me I'm left with this .

Well , of course , the Gen X left was the way it was , and particularly when you add things that hadn't even happened yet into it , like the fall of the Soviet Union , the rise of the Atari Democrats into the DNC , into Clintonism , and then also happening across the pond and kind of happening in Canada , all at the same time , you know , or roughly the same time

, although in Canada it took really true dough is the figure that kind of is their Blair and he seems like he might be in power forever . So who knows ?

So , but it does definitely that happens across the board in the English speaking world and in some ways it makes sense from the world Last describes at the end of the New Left period that that's what would happen even before we get to culture of narcissism where he's trying to go into this psychology of it and the extent in which the depoliticization happens

Because I don't think he totally sees like the weird left of the 80s either catches him off guard a lot .

He doesn't see the left collapsing as absolutely as it did I mean and in so much that like he , like he gets , he kind of abandons Marxism , for example not that he was ever hard Marxist , but he was a loosely speaking one , from what I can tell , until the 80s .

Because like he's , like these transist groups that still exist are always bringing the working class like they're just explaining everything in terms of false consciousness and these other people are basically saying these people are stupid and conservative and we shouldn't deal with them and their problems aren't real .

The problems of it , you know the crisis of progressive education , the credit like they just like . No , that's not real , it doesn't affect . You know , it's not important . The breakdown of the family is not important .

He doesn't use that language by the by the 70s , he does use it in the 60s , but it very much seems to be the case , you know , like . Well , all this is clearly failed and he , he , you know , his next projects in the middle period , I think , indicate his trying to deal with that .

One is dealing with the crisis of the family , and that's where , that's where I'm , like , both the most and the least sympathetic to him .

At the same time , I think what he's describing as a crisis of the family is very real , and I think what he's describing as the kind of feminism that actually ends up winning by the 70s is also very real , something that , like radical feminist now we'll call white feminism , but you know , really should probably be called bourgeois , middle class feminism , because

it's not just white , the , but again , the reason why I'm less sympathetic to them is he's got this weird trans historical notion of family that , like he thinks is anthropologically justified , which absolutely is not like , and that's that is one of the points where I think people accusing him of having some conservative instances are actually correct .

Like and I've talked about this at length in his to Koon essays it's like become infamous because that's where he like breaks with the left . Formally I guess that's an 88 . Right , but he's also right that the left given up talking .

I mean like it's hard to put ourselves back into the 80s left , but like even the sectarian groups that are around so by the time you get to the 80s anti revisionism as morphing into like malice third world ism , so it's like totally we only care about shit elsewhere because the are working classes utterly reprobate .

They're being like features within the like , more like pro Biden and less pro Biden , wing of like the progressives , and then they're being like a third world as tweeting group on campus basically . I saw that too , and I help found and then was expelled from for being to revisionist . So funny .

It's just tied with powerlessness , I think in large part , and that I think people like I think you know lash is right that you know a lot of his writings about the work ethic that and discipline and the need for compelling work and compelling , you know , a compelling politics that people want to take care of themselves and if they're not given the chance to

take care of themselves on the left in the context of exercising Real power and real politics , they'll do it in the context of , you know , pretty meaningless power and meaningless politics in the sense that it can affect anything , but you have your ideological purity and your cohesion and your internal progress and the idea that you're keeping something alive and you

might be , I don't know . It just hasn't blossomed out of any of these groups into a broader society ever in the United States , which isn't to say that it won't , it's just that I don't think it's particularly likely .

And one of the things about like third world is that there's a lot of symbolism for that , and this is not to say that there's not parts of third like third world is description of reality that haven't been true in the past , but it's funny because , like , by the time it comes up in the 1980s , it's already kind of not true .

Yeah , if you want to talk about super exploitation and all that , that definitely exists , but it's not going on the way that they're describing it . Labor aristocracy isn't broken up on national lines , it's really broken up on corn , periphery industry lines and regions , and it's even within the same country , etc .

And so , like this is not super explanatory anymore , but people are really attracted to it because they still think in terms of states and that's the irony of World of Nations . To actually want to talk a little bit about that title , because that title is not obvious .

I don't know if you've ever read this , but he has a reflection on the title where he talks about how Vico was trying to bring about a technology of like politics , almost in the same way . And he writes this thing about Darwin and Marx also .

Wait , I'm digging this up . It's like one page . Okay , it's a little longer , but basically he talks about how like Marx will get we'll get to this some other time , because I'm not , it's not , it's not as communicable as I imagined . Oh no , no , no , here it is right here .

So he has this like reflection and he has this little like sentence , as Marx once wrote when he noted the need for a critical history of technology that would do for human culture what Darwin's work has done for nature's technology .

And would not such a history be easier to compile , since , as Vico says , human history differs from natural history in this that we have made the former but not the latter .

So I just think it's such a that little like hint about or not hinted it's an explanation about what he's thinking with the title is so great that he's looking for in Marxism a technology of history , that that he's applying here in his own way to civil society as raised originally by Vico , even though of course he's so anti , positivistic and critical of

technology . I guess he means it here more in the sense of , you know , technique . Technology yeah there's a complete aside . It was completely irrelevant to the topic .

And it it does seem interesting to me that , like one of the center pieces of the book or the piece we're talking about , that they are the alternate to liberalism , and then there is revolution , obsolete piece . Those are the two steps , the center of that book , like literally the center of that book .

And Part of the problem that the left has is how to conceive of itself , not just when it's lost its national product , you know it's , it's kind of , it's kind of a national politics and collective , collective project , but also that it , like this idea of a transnational left , is both more possible because of communication and less possible because the strength of

states . And and that's in the background of all this .

It's not something he writes directly about , accepting the piece about George Kennan , but it's in the background of all these essays , and so you know , I kind of , as we talk about the crisis of liberalism , one of the things that we see right now that was not Really at play in the 1960s was a call for a new nationalism , like a real new nationalism , you

know , like a return to the old God style of nationalism that was not I can't think of . Even even George Wallace wasn't really doing that . Yeah , yes , white supremacism was definitely , but even white supremacism wasn't really white nationalism , interestingly enough , like because in some ways they didn't need it .

Honestly , another thing that like lash never , we didn't , we never get the lash really right about , is the effect of the immigration changes of the night of the 1980s , which are done by Reagan , which is kind of ironic given the long spectrum of American politics . Right , but Like he's , I think he's dead before . That's really a major Johnson .

Huh , they're started by Johnson , yeah , they're really , but they're really accelerated under Reagan , like that's when the numbers Well , he does it dramatically right . I mean Because John Johnson gets rid of , like the racial quotas and whatnot , but like a minute , like the immigration regime .

The immigration regime fundamentally changing does not actually happen till the 80s . Um , and what does that mean ? Like ? Because that that's . We can't deny that that's a big driver in the current crisis of liberalism . It's what drives a lot of the great replacement conspiracy theories .

But it's also driven a lot of like , let's be honest , there's a whole lot of triumphalism assumed for about 15 years in the Democratic Party for it that a less white America necessarily meant that they won , which is actually where the great replacement conspiracy theory came from .

It was like the literalization and conspiracization of less of like , less of like liberal rhetoric , and I don't know that people really want to deal with that . But it's true like and you first see that the first place , you see that is actually in the David Duke campaign .

And then it really accelerates at the end of the Bush administration , particularly once you know Bush's own party pushes against his attempt to do another Reagan and be the person who actually does immigration reform .

And you see this massive backlash , that that backlash is part of what leads to tea party , although there's also the last gas of evangelical politics and the tea party and some other stuff and just some racism , but some other stuff too . There's also tax protesting . That's part of the early part that fades away and and stuff like that .

And then you see the Republican Party and they were like that and they were tax protest against the Republican , by the way , and people forget that part of it , but that it's so interesting to try to when we try to like we talk .

I talked in beginning and in some ways , like I have thought that this fails like the 70s Administration I have actually said that like over and over and over again like this feels like the way everyone describes the 70s to me and yet it feels like the 70s in reverse For me .

I felt like like we went through Like the Bush period , which was like a Nixon period , and then we had , then we have like A Kennedy who didn't die , and and and and and Obama , and then we have like the new left , but from the backwards .

I Remember even like I used to joke about it right before occupy used to call it like the search for a new , new left .

That's the odds , progressive norm of like air America radio that generated the , the original majority port , and TYT .

Anyway , yes , we'll talk to Marxism , talk to left-wing scholars , but like they're Democrats and we all know it , and this like Ravances Marxism that left me in the past , and this like Ravances Marxism that like is like well , yeah , but you know their aggressive parts of Stalinism , that's the best part .

Like the best part is when we , during war communism , they reimposed the family and banned abortion , like , and I'm like okay . And also racial nationalism is good , just like , not just for white people , though , everybody gets one , and I'm like okay , I feel like there's a mr Show sketch from the 90s making fun of the very proposition , but whatever .

And so when you kind of realize , when you realize that , and you look at now and you go okay , like is this in some strange way , like the end of a cycle that actually began with our grandparents , with lash like . Is this cycle ? That long is it ?

It was all the younger baby boomers who were kind of , who weren't really part of the new left anyway , but they had that mythology and they kind of came of age in the 80s and did a little bit and then fell back for two whole decades or three old decades really , and then you know who comes to lead the left .

Now this whole new loop will left is a bunch of fucking 80 year olds , like I mean , in some ways , literally it's the same age as the 80s . Like I mean , in some ways , literally it's the same people . Like the fact that , like all these categories I talked to you about this with PMC PMC comes from this time period .

Right , it's a problem of this time period .

It's , it's a concept that is dropped you don't hear anyone but Adolf Reid talking about it for like 40 years and it's picked back up around 2017 to explain the first Bernie loss and then really catches on after the second Bernie loss Right , but in some ways it feels like we're just going through this shit backwards Like and and then yeah , like I always talk

about , okay , all of American generational politics are bullshit , except for the baby boomers . That's a material reality in the United States . It has to do with the post war boom . It literally changed .

Every fucking institution in our society was built for them and their other narcissist , and they kind of got the benefit from both neoliberalism and fortism and no one else did like , not both of them .

The weird thing that I find about it is that A lot of people who oppose working with the Democrats under Obama , off of the lessons that they supposedly learned from the time period lashes writing about supported it under Biden , and that's a harder thing to explain .

And if this whole like green capital thing succeeds in dramatically reshaping the political economy of you know , of America , something different might happen . I don't know , I have no idea . It's going to take work . It's not going to be like a natural result of just like changing populations , but there are new opportunities possibly . I don't know , I have no idea .

Personally , I think the reason why people have switched from not wanting to work with Obama to want to work with Biden is probably just because of the trauma of of Trumpism and the fact that they're so despondent about the possibility of an independent left doing anything .

not a thing .

It's weird , because I've had arguments with like platypus people around this where they're like well , the Republicans still talk about how they believe in liberty and whatnot . I'm like no , they don't Like you're . You seem to be talking about the Republicans of 10 years ago .

He would pick up that stuff if it suited him kind of superficially , but it was not the primary goal of what he wanted to do .

It was not clear what the hell was going to replace it , which is why the actual Trump administration , not the , not the one people like Christian Prenti want to clean up , you know , and I , like some of Kristen parentheses writing totally against everything he says , but this , this review reviewing Trump yeah , trump had an aversion to war .

He actually do think he had a personal version of war , but he also did not have enough of an aversion to keep the last bastion of the worst into the neocons , the worst end of the neocons , out of his cabinet .

Like he replaced paleo conservative , anti war people with John people like John Bolton , yeah , which also tells me that Trump's lizard brain couldn't figure out what even his , like the GOP wanted as a compromise to stay in power .

I pervert zero , but still , yes , I am a , I am a and if I get , when I try to quit coax , I drink fizzy water , I drink down with a fizzy water podcast . I'm down with a fizzy water and I like tea , but like I have discovered that I still drink copious amounts of stuff , now that I don't really drink alcohol that much , it's just like . It's like .

No , I still have the habit , but it's just , it's no longer as debilitating .

We have no idea what the fuck is going on right now . So , for example , I have been pretty good at predicting elections for most of my life . I predicted Obama , I predicted Biden .

Actually , the only part of it is I didn't predict Georgia , which is funny because it's my home state , but I and yet more than any other time in my life I feel like not only do I feel like we're going back to a like 60 , 70s era , like short term presidencies for a variety of reasons .

I also have no idea how it's going to play out , but it really does feel like a black box , like all these baby boomers . Standards and institutions and stuff are really falling apart .

things . I think that's true in the international scale too . Like oh Bricks , whatever Like Bricks is not actually even trying to replace the transatlantic super state . And maybe that's good , maybe it's you know , maybe that's terrible , but it's happening . We don't know what it means . Our Fukuyama episode .

Yep , we'll come back to this because that'll be important in our Fukuyama episode , but it's like . So we have this undead liberalism that like is in crisis and we've been talking about it being in crisis since the end of the Bush administration .

Really , right , think about Fried Zikaria , like the you know the crisis , the multi polarity in the crisis of the post American world . Like , which is a liberal book , you know , and that's predicting a crisis of liberalism because of geopolitical reasons and the change of world markets . But that's in 2007 .

And we've been kind of stuck in this zombie world where the center that we keep on predicting is gonna die and has no organic base . Like this is what's so interesting about now . The center before had the largest chunk of American political support , really did , even in the 90s and the beginnings of the office . It started to slip at the late 90s .

Now it's like 10% of the population and only rules because nobody else can really dominate anything . Like because there is no dominant counter tendency but it's actually a minority position in the electorate and that that's a real like . That's a really . That's some weird like King shit , I mean . Like you know what I mean by kingship like oh , this is a .

This is a singular faction that's able to dominate because it plays other factions off of each other , like not because it actually has an organically strong base , or even a strong base in the government like it has a permanent veto , you know veto slot over what goes on anywhere in the legislative state at the national level .

than a Tory government , like in Fact they're kind of argue , like where the real conservatives and I'm like Order and do tax cuts right . It's just like . It's like okay , so You're just arguing I mean , it is kind of like Clintonism again .

Like you're arguing Our Blair is from the British perspective , that , yeah , we the the Corbin experiment lost so bad and only came to power by accident anyway that we're just never gonna do that again .

But also like , if people think America's poorly run Britain is a shit show , like its inflation is way higher than ours , it's unemployment is way higher than ours . It has no real industrial policy to speak of . It like Doesn't even clearly have clear trade partners of which it can clearly integrate with anymore . It's not good , you know .

It's like oh , yeah , we're like America needs British goods . Really it's , I Will take your tea , I guess I Mean it's not . It In some ways actually is kind of the model for what the worst case scenario of the United States could be .

And and in some ways I'm also interested in the fact that we don't really know what's gonna happen in the United States , because on paper , from a material standpoint , we're still set up pretty good .

That's the thing like yes , we're having crop problems , we're having less than other parts of the world , yes , we , we are having troubles with the , with the with reorienting . But we have a huge trade network with friendly with friendly country neighbors in both directions . That's really highly integrated .

Yeah , it's like something's happened in the fragmentation of the baby boomer culture . That's like made it impossible to run our fucking society and and In that sense , like I Do have to take , I have to take lash to bring it back to lash in a very real way . So what seriously , that this cultural stuff is not just like an epiphenomenal superstructure .

It is very much tied into the structure of material life in a way that you cannot ignore it , and if you do , you're going to be horribly wrong .

I think Obama will be probably our only Gen X president he's not technically gen X .

level for some reason , and it's the reason , on you know , in some sense , why we're trapped , or at least it's something we're trapped in .

But on a on a side note , I don't think if the dismal place is gonna last a lot longer , I just think any left that still exists is gonna have to be pretty open to just being honest and saying we don't know what the hell is going on , because all of our priors are shot right like and I also think I want to flip this by you , though One thing , one

thing that platypus did actually instillate the means . They once challenged me to say you'll see people pulling to earlier and earlier portions of the left . Now I also challenge them and say I think we'll see the rebirth of weird Stalinism , for people to differentiate themselves with the DSA as a manifestation of their own alienation and powerlessness .

Once Bernie inevitably loses which I was right about , but they , they told me to look at you'll see people go further and further back . So you'll see , you know , and I think that's been true too so like people , like we're gonna revive the

left . When you know Kowskism was the O'Kowskism pre 1917 Marxism and this was also a tendency of the new left was like oh , let's go back to like the first international or whatever . Like we want to go back to the period before this all Got ugly and hard to deal with and actually involved real states and whatnot .

I Think we'll see a little bit more of that before it's over . Like I think that's even true in this . Like current attempt to revive the people's party and some weird left-right alliance , because I'm like we're going back to the 19th century . You don't have any of the same class base at all . Like what it . Like Where's this coming from ?

Because you seem to be confusing cultural positions with a class-based position , like in a real sense .

And then we'll , you know , use some figures to justify those vibes . Um , and I think what you got to do is you got to just learn to love the vibe .

Um , though I can say that because Because I'm uh , you know , I'm I'm just very aware of the fact the left lost , um , or the type of the left that inspired me to get into the left in the first place , you know , five years ago , or six years ago , whatever Is over , and there'll be something at some point , but in the meantime , we just got to ride the

wave .