Greetings, dear listeners. Earlier this week, Joe Biden was pressured to step aside to allow Kamala Harris to take his place on the party's presidential ticket. Joining us to discuss these developments is Freddie deBoer. You may have come across his writing on Substack. His latest book is called How Elytes Eight the Social Justice Movement. He is prolific and provocative, the best kind of conversation partner. After Biden stepped aside, Freddie wrote,
there is, quote, literally no democratic process from the Democrats. Is that strictly true? Shadi and I dove in. Before we get started, a reminder to head on over to WisdomofCrowds.live and consider becoming a paying subscriber if you're not one yet. And don't forget to give us a like and review on your favorite podcast app. With all that out of the way onto the show. So we have a very special guest with us. Freddie deBoer is, I think it's fair to say,
one of the most influential and talked about writers on the left. That's probably fair to say. And I've been reading your substack for a long time. Big fan, even when I disagree. And yeah, so let's get right to it. You're someone who is part of, let's say, the independent media ecosystem. So I just be curious, like, what is your assessment of the mainstream media right now? I mean, and you know, it should be noticed in the context of like what's going on in American politics,
not just like, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, obviously listeners and viewers will know this about Demir and I, but we work for the mainstream media. We're both at the Washington Post. So I think it's always interesting for us to hear how other people view what I guess we're part of for, you know, the media that press core, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. So I would say we're in a very interesting period and I would call it a thaw, a bit of a thaw, which,
you know, some people refer to this as like a post-woke moment or whatever. I'm not sure that that terminology is useful. I do think that media has dramatically changed in about four years. Since 2020, which was sort of the, it turned out to be the zenith of a particular vision of media as being handmaidens, members of media seeing themselves as handmaidens of social justice, where if you were not explicitly conservative, you were very likely to be someone who thought that
just sort of straightforwardly the purpose of media was to highlight injustice and to create a very particular form of social justice that is sort of tied up in academic politics and identity politics, etc. And I think that a few things have happened that would be really sort of important in a short, short order. The first thing I would say is that it would have been impossible for the 2020 moment not to have resulted in a great deal of sort of cynicism and exhaustion
because extremely large promises were made about what was going to change. I would argue that very little changed. And I think a lot of people sort of had a holy shit moment where they just have said, oh, right, like all of this attention and all of this yelling and all this emotion can legitimately lead to just about nothing if there isn't any kind of a plan, right? So that's just sort of a natural human reaction. But I also think that I hate to give Elon Musk credit
for anything. But his purchase of Twitter dramatically changed media. And I find it's difficult to get media people to acknowledge this because they don't want to admit that Twitter was a big deal
to them. And they don't want to admit that they've basically gotten got by Elon Musk. But the basic reality that I've been describing for 15 years is that, you know, if you went to any kind of like a college journalism lecture where a working journalist came in and gave advice to students who wanted to be journalists, they would always inevitably say, you have to be on Twitter and you have to build a brand, right? In that context, they would be totally
straightforward about that fact. It was just, it was considered and was essential to success in the business and the people who were able to be successful without having made
or Twitter presences were the exceptions that proved the rule. And what this meant is that, I mean, imagine any workforce in which you take that workforce and then you take in particular, like the sort of elite of that workforce, you shove them all into a room together and have them have all of their sort of casual professional conversations about what they do and what the purpose of it is so that they can all hear each other all the time. You create a permanent record,
right? Because unless you've set up some sort of auto-delete tweets persist. And you also attach a quantitative system through which peers can demonstrate how much they like or dislike what you've had to say. I cannot imagine a better scenario for enforcing consensus, for creating professional fear for making people feel like they can't stick their heads out. It, you know, people will tell you when you're being honest that being well-liked on Twitter was hugely important to getting a job
at many of these publications, right? And so you had that conditioning effect where even though not everybody in the industry who was sort of in the sort of left-aligned and in practice the sort of non-aligned media was left-aligned for a long time. Even though everybody wasn't a sort of true believer in sort of social justice politics, many, many people felt that like the costs of potential professional and social costs are not appearing to be down with social justice. We're
just too high. In the Twitter era where it was understood that you would tweet all the time. I mean, one of the things that I always think it's funny is, you know, I talk to these people and I say like, look, this is Twitter is very important. Like you clearly you think that. Let's say, oh, Twitter was never a big deal to me. And then you go and look at their account and they'd have
tweeted 50,000 times, right? Like you could literally look at them tweeting from the moment they got up and then more into the moment that they went to bed at night and you say, okay, this is a very strange behavior for something that you don't care about. But Freddie, what's changed though? You think like something's changed on this? I'm struck by what you're describing here because it
feels like we were still freaking in this world, no? And just to put a finer point on it, I mean, if we're talking about the moment that we're in now after Biden announces on Twitter that he is stepping aside and making way for a new nominee. And then I was, you know, when I was struck by how the pro-Kamala Harris sentiment kind of coalesced very quickly. And Freddie, you've been, I think it's fair to say, critical to put it mildly about how the media responded and to Biden,
Kamala Harris, the developments in the Democratic Party. So from that standpoint, how would you, how do you feel about the mainstream media in terms of covering Democrats? Yeah, I mean, look like I certainly that, like the fundamental sort of bent of the media is multifaceted and complex. It is certainly true, right? Just like if you went to the New York Times and you got people to honestly say who they voted for, I would be shocked if 5% of the people
into 2020 voted for Donald Trump, right? I mean, I would be shocked if it was even 5%. I'd be shocked if it was 2% quite frankly. Yeah. And pure quantitative terms of people who self-identify as Democrats and Esk Liberals. In both, yeah, obviously you have sort of left media like, you know, or left-aligned media like like the nation or whatever. But in sort of supposedly nonpartisan media like the New York Times,
there is just a massive bent towards sort of left-leaning perspectives. So, you know, the fact that they coalesce around Kamala, to me speaks less to sort of like this elite sort of organizing class sort of thing of Twitter is it's just these are people are freaked out and they've been freaked out. And this seems like it might be a light shining in from the darkness on
them. I do think it's important to sort of narrow down on this on this Twitter question because part of it certainly is that there is a fairly large section of people who have now self-selected out of Twitter because they can't associate with Elon Musk and have gone to various competitors like
I don't know like Blue Sky or Threads or whatever. And that is part of it. But you can also can't underestimate the fact that Twitter's algorithm has dramatically changed to favor those who use Twitter Blue, which is extremely uncool among the kind of people who want to be sort of, you know, hip media elites to pay for Twitter Blue. I can tell you I used to have a Twitter
account that just ought to was automated to just tweet out my posts. I didn't bother because the engagement was so horrific because the Twitter algorithm now forces, you know, non-Twitter blue tweets and accounts down so much. And so in many ways this sort of overarching conversation that allowed something like the Justine Sakao story to happen for example. Remind us what that was. Justine Sakao was a woman in I can't remember the year.
Was she the one on the plane, right? She was on a plane without an internet connection for like 10 hours. She was a, it turns out at liberal Democrats who work in marketing and she tweeted what was supposed to be like an edgy sort of anti-racist joke. It was I'm going to Africa. I'm about to get on a plane to Africa. I hope I don't get AIDS just kidding I'm white, which is extremely ill-advised. But I totally can understand that like she probably thought she was saying, oh I enjoy the privileges
of being white or whatever, right? And what happened is that she is literally on a plane without internet access. I think it was like 10 years ago now. And the biggest Twitter meltdown mass condemnation of anyone ever happened while she was in the air. And many people talked about sort of, you know, what you and you and you did discover what would happen, you know, and how funny that would be. Anyway, that sort of thing required a degree of coordination that I think is
is very fragile and that it has been broken in the current moment. As far as common goes, I mean, look, Democrats have a real problem with sorting through their belief that we live in a sexist and racist nation, but refusing to allow that to influence their decisions about who they nominate for office, right? If you believe that this is a sexist and racist nation, and if you ask commoners,
supporters, a huge support, you know, number of them will say, yes, that's true, right? If you believe that that's true, then it doesn't make a ton of sense to nominate a black woman, to be the presidential nominee for for the Democrats, right? Look, Trump beat Hillary Clinton,
and he lost for the old White guy. It was obvious to me that in 2020, part of what we were saying without saying it, part of the sort of gentle in agreement among liberals and Democrats were that, you know, we nominated an old White guy because there was an understanding that that was what was necessary to beat Trump. And, you know, everybody pretended not to recognize that that was what was happening, but that's what happened. Now, I should say, I'm not necessarily opposed to
Kamala being the candidate. I just want some democracy, right? There has been just no democratic process going on here. She has not received a single primary vote from anyone for this office. Everyone has cleared the Dex for her, and she's been anointed, and it just speaks to, you know, several generations of Democrats who have fallen so deeply into the party decides in ways that I think could prove electorally disastrous.
Yes, so you had, you had a shot, you just want to say, you know, I just want to, before we jump into this, just because I think it's, it's, this is the topic, I, I, you know, I think Shady and I both wanted to talk to you about it, but, you know, just to close the media conversation, I really don't want to like have this be just a media talk, but I guess what's striking to me to hear you talk about it, and I wonder, you know, I'm pretty new to working in the, in the MSM. It's only been
about a year and a half. What's been striking to me more than anything is how, it's not like everything you say about journalists and Twitter is correct. But what's striking to me is, is exactly how, like, little has seems to have changed on the other side, even with Twitter somehow
not being this coordinating mechanism. And maybe this is the way to start even thinking about this, this, this question of democracy and how, how this, this, this group thing came to be, because I, it's, there's something else going on here, because the, the kind of like, you know, mind-meled, you know, one, almost like, like, I don't know, herd mentality, like flock mentality, is alive and well right now, even with everything you say about Twitter being more or less true. Like,
Twitter is clearly not the coordination mechanism for any of this. And yet here we are, exactly what you're saying. You know, I don't know, Shady, like, this, this, you're, you're also sort of new to the, I mean, you've written for larger publications for a while, but like, you're new on the inside
to this. Is that striking to you as well? That like, like, you know, in fact, it turns out the Twitter, at least to hear Freddie talk about it, it's not, it doesn't, doesn't feel right to me right now on the inside, that that's at all, that it's all that relevant, you know? Yeah. I think it's harder to get canceled now on Twitter. I find that you can say more edgy things
and kind of diverge from the social justice consensus. And it's harder for people to do the mob thing and just swarm and get you into trouble or make you the kind of top main character of the day or the week. I think that's largely past. But, and we can get into this more. I do think that
it's striking to me the role that Twitter has played in propelling Kamala Harris. And what I've been seeing fairly non-stop in my feed the last 72 hours is pretty much, I don't want to say everyone who was left leaning, but the vast majority of left leaning folks on Twitter really just getting behind Kamala. I'm not saying it's coordinated. I think that it's actually more simple than that. They're so afraid of Trump winning understandably. And they kind of saw where the T-leaves were, sorry,
whatever that expression is, where the wind was blowing. And they're like, okay, Kamala's our candidate. That's what Biden said. The Democratic Party elites got behind her very quickly. She's what we got. So then let's just go forth and try to support her and be positive about her chances. But it's not Twitter, right? It's just reflective of some other sort of herd mentality. I guess that's what I'm driving. Maybe this gets us talking about the democracy question, right, Freddie?
Because like, it's, you're right. There has not been any process to do it. I thought it was like hilarious. Let me just pull it up. There's a, what was the quote that Chuck Schumer had? So now that the processes played out from the grassroots in the bottom up, we are here today to throw our support behind Vice President Kamala Harris, right? And it's pretty funny, like, but because there was no process, but nevertheless, there's some kind of manufactured consensus or real consensus.
What the hell do I know if it's manufactured or not? And I'll just quote something from you, Freddie, because I think that this, you wrote a short post, which was also an open thread, and we'll link to that in the show notes. And the title, I think, gets at this quite well. The title is so just literally no democratic process from the Democrats. And then the subtitle is something like the Democratic Party is existentially undemocratic. And I'll quote one of your lines
from from the piece. You say, quote, it's just incredible to watch it play out in real time. The Democratic Party totally abandoning even the fig leaf of democracy and how their party chooses nominees. They're not even pretending anymore. End quote. So you feel pretty strongly about this. And so just say, say a little bit more about how you feel about the Democratic Party at this moment. And I know, yeah. So yeah, I mean, let's let's let's go and do a little
older history and then a little recent history. So the older history is like, look, traditionally, the Republican Party was the more disciplined top down party, which the party decides. That was the old thing that was used to be said about Republicans was that the party decides that they were the old men in the back rooms, Mokinsagars deciding who nominees would be. And the Democrats were sort of the more sort of, you know, interested in democracy and a little bit crazier.
So I'm not sure if people know, but both FDR and JFK were the product of brokerage conventions. Right. So in other words, they came into the convention. It was not 100% sure who was going to be the nominee. But in 1968, LBJ has been rendered totally radioactive because of his escalation in the war in Vietnam. And so he, for that reason, explicitly says, I mean, more or less,
polls out of the possibility of being reelected. The establishment, the democratic sort of establishment choice is George McGovern, who is a moderate, who is more or less committed to pursuing LBJ's policy in Southeast Asia. RFK, Robert F. Kennedy, was actually running as an outsider before he was shot to death. So he's out. And then Eugene McCarthy becomes the lefty candidate, the anti-war candidate, the candidate that the young kids rally around a lot of similarities
with the Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2016. McGovern defeats McCarthy and then Richard Nixon defeats McGovern. And there was a widespread perception within the party that the chaos of 1968, exemplified by things like the Democratic Convention in Chicago, but the presence of protesters everywhere, that this had cost the party and was demonstrating that the Republicans had a more
efficient machine. Nobody has ever been inspired, nobody has ever inspired by Richard Nixon, but he was a consummate insider, etc. And I think you can look at that as being a seminal moment and when the Democrats decide, we're going to get serious like the other party, and we're going to really put our thumb on the scale for particular candidates.
If you look at, for example, Gary Hart, who was undone by the monkey business scandal or whatever, but he was someone who was threatening to the Democrats because he was seen as an anti-establishment or anti-democratic establishment candidate, and very conveniently he is found in this weird sex-boat ex-capade, whatever. So the Democratic Party has become over time less and less sort of genuinely sort of open to grassroots democracy. In 2016, we sort of see all of this
come to a head. For a long time people said, oh Biden didn't want to run in 2016, he felt he was too old, right? We now know that that's not true. It's been repeatedly reported that Obama essentially strong-armed Biden out of the race. And in fact, it has been suggested that Obama chose Biden in the first place in 2008 because he figured that Biden would be so old that he couldn't possibly run for presidential election in 2016, which is funny and multiple dimensions.
So anyway, Biden has shown the door, and we now know it has been repeatedly reported that. This was a moment of great resentment for him that he thought that he could make a good president. And that part of the reason why he dragged his feet about getting out of this race was because of his continued his lingering anger that he had not been given the opportunity in 2016. Well, it turns out that muscling him out of the way for Hillary was not a good idea, right?
I feel that in media, in how we talk about history, in how we talk about politics, there still has not been a real reckoning with what Hillary Clinton fiasco was, right, which is from the day she appeared on the national scene as Bill Clinton's first lady. Hillary Clinton has been a wildly divisive politician. She has had some of the highest unfavorables
in the history of national public political polling in this country. She was always saddled with a huge number of people who hated her, including people who were sometimes democratic voters, and this ended up sinking her in 2016. That was ignored by pretty much the entire party. As I can tell you from personal experience, those of us who pointed out this extreme vulnerability that she had, were repeatedly accused not just of sexism but of racism, which is some pretty
wild, transitive thinking there. Well, with the racism charge B with Hillary, though, that was a little bit difficult. The claim was always the heart of the Democratic Party is moderate black voters and they favor Hillary. Therefore, if you point out Hillary's political vulnerability, you are opposing the interests of moderate black voters and you are therefore racist. And I mean, I was in the middle of this for months and months, so, you know,
and she lost, right, because she was always deeply unpopular. And Trump is also deeply unpopular. It's important to always remember that he himself has wildly high unfavorables traditionally. And the thought was always, if you just get a conventional Democrat in the race, that Trump should be easy to beat, right? And unfortunately, fortunately, Hillary Clinton was not
a conventional Democrat. And listen, you can argue perfectly fair to say that a big part of the reason why she's so despised by so many people is because she's a woman and then because of sexism misogyny, I wouldn't disagree with you. But ultimately, it doesn't make a difference if what you want is to get votes, right? And so where we are right now is we are living in the shadow of the decision by the Democratic Party to from the very beginning, Treetheal Recland, as a presumptive
nominee, to continue to use things like super delegates. So if people are unaware, they've changed the super delegate system to sort of defang them a little bit. But Bernie Sanders won every county in West Virginia, but barely earned any more delegates at all than he'll reclint him because these super delegates in West Virginia pledged themselves to Hillary Clinton, right? So it's
just a flagrantly anti-democratic sort of structure. And you can also see, for example, in 2020, it was widely reported that when Bernie and Biden had become the clear two sort of worse favorites for the Democratic nomination, Obama took it upon himself personally to pressure Pete Buttigieg and other less or candidates to not only drop out but to immediately endorse Joe Biden, right? These are the kind of things that Democrats do. They just seem to not understand,
right, that part of the purpose of a primary is to reveal weakness, right? Had there been an actual primary in this year. And yes, technically there was a Democratic primary, but it was such a joke that, for example, Florida just canceled the primary. Just like, oh, yeah, we're not going to do that. One of the biggest and most politically influential states in the country.
If there had been a primary, there is no way that Joe Biden makes it to July, right, as the candidate for the Democrats because his infirmity would have been revealed, etc. And we don't have the apparatus right now to reveal Kamala Harris's weaknesses and let us know if she's the best candidate. And we look, this is a woman who has never earned a single vote anywhere other than California. Freddie, I'm totally on board and I think I'm pretty sure Shady agrees with you. I'll let
him speak for himself on the questionism mechanism for revealing weakness. I mean, that's obvious. The only thing that strikes me about the narrative, right, is that, you know, as someone, like I really, I don't know, I find myself just critical of things and not really feeling like I'm part of any team or really pushing on any side, but like trying to like look at what happened to the Republicans in 2016 is that precisely they didn't have the kind of party that could have put the
an end to Donald Trump. And I would just put it forward, we have this sort of tick as Americans to just be like democracy leads to better outcomes. And Trump was a Democratic candidate. He was the choice of the people in the Republican Party with catastrophic results for all sorts of things. But arguably within the logic of democracy, not really catastrophic things, it's the will of the people, the Republican electorate has spoken half of our countrymen have spoken
repeatedly to elect this man. Now again, you know, I one can get into sort of like meta questions, or not even meta questions, higher order questions about, you know, is that the right thing? I mean, I think ultimately part of, you know, the joke of our podcast, or at least the title of our podcast, was in the crowds, you know, we started around the time Trump was was elected. And that's that's
that's very much the joke. No, no, we wait, wait, wait, we didn't start. No, we started at the tail end of the Trump era, no, regardless though, but that's the ongoing joke, right? Though is, yeah, is the wisdom of crowds. Here you go, people crowds. This is, this is your man, you got this. This is, this is the, the will of the people right now. And largely, you know, it was also a reaction to a lot of the, the, the dirty tricks and the nonsense the Democrats were
saying, denying the Democratic legitimacy of Donald Trump. So I personally always have sort of like a, like a, like a bit of a, like a negative reaction to people valorized democracy, just like quad democracy. Like there's, there's, there's good outcomes, there's bad outcomes. And even when you, when you, you know, you have preferences, and I think Shady has preferences for Bernie Sanders, I don't really have much of an opinion on it, but it's a preference,
ultimately. And I have to say that watching the fight with Joe Biden as someone again, I don't feel really strongly myself as a Democrat or anything like that. On the one hand, I was thrilling at Joe Biden attacking the media and being like, how dare you try and throw me out, like really got me excited. But at the end of the day, I'm also really impressed with what Nancy
Pelosi was able to do, just like to knife the guy and get him off the stage. Like, is there any way that Republicans could have done that would have been, I don't know, at least a sign of the health of the party. And there's something to the, the, the idea of a party in a democracy that is important, right? And like, so I don't know, let me, let's just use that as my, my pushback on you on this. Talk a little bit more about like how you think about this question
of democracy. Is it just instrumental? Is like a testing ground? Because I'll grant you that. But is there something else like a moral valence here for you when you talk about it? Well, for Tavashir, there's a moral valence. Second of all, look, I'm someone who has told Bernie Sanders voters over or over again that, you know, you have to accept that Bernie lost, right? Two things are, are, are, are both completely true, right? Which is that the party did everything
in its power to nominate Hillary Clinton in 2016. The party did everything in its power to defeat Bernie Sanders in 2020. And those things had an effect. And also Bernie legitimately lost two primaries. And if you're going to be an effective agent of political change, you have to be a realist and you have to look at the world and understand that. You would hope, right? That if we're being cynics and saying, well, democracy is in everything and the outcome is what
matters. And that would result in the candidate that's most likely to beat Donald Trump. And I don't think it's Kamala Harris. Again, she, she has never earned a vote anywhere other than California. When she won her first, her initial election as the attorney general in, or she'd be at the, the district attorney in San Francisco, she won by less than 1% as a Democrat in California. Okay? Like, she, so she's just not like a politician with a great track record of success.
But she also, the reason that she's never won a vote anywhere other than California is because she dropped out of the 2020 primary before the first vote was cast because it would have been so embarrassing to remain in the race where at the time that she dropped out, she was pulling at 8% in her home state of California and was consistently fifth or sixth among those candidates. And this is a person I'm now being told is so obviously the choice that to contemplate
a someone else must be based on sexism or racism. I mean, look, if it was just the old, you know, the old guys in the back room smoking cigars, then Josh Shapiro would be the, or Bashir would be the candidate. Or even like, if we want to stick with the California liberal guy, Gavin Newsom, who is someone who I have a kind of inherent loathing for, but who I just trust in this moment, in this political moment, in this United States,
against this opponent I would trust more. But you just said it right? Like, if it was like a back room deal, it would be those guys. So what's going on here? Like, you know, it's her turn again. Like, I said this, I said this in a piece months ago, which was the dilemma for the Democrats is that Biden is probably too informed to win. Kamala Harris probably would be like six or seventh in terms of people that I
would pick prominent Democrats in terms of the prominent Democrats. So I think I have the best chance right now of winning the presidency. I would certainly not put her in the top three, right? But I said the problem is that trying to remove a black woman from that spot would destroy the Democratic Party. Because in the party, as it's currently created, again, you can, like I said, 2016, Hillary Clinton is a white woman, but racism was used as a cudgel with which to beat her
opponents, right? This is a really deep and big problem that liberals have, which is that they have become so enamored of using charges of bigotry, charges of racism, charges of sexism, etc. As like their go to weapon in sort of intra coalition fights, that you get into these scenarios where the potential for just total destruction within the party is through the roof because everything is so nasty. 2016 was a brutally ugly thing for the Democratic Party to go through,
right? It was an ugly, ugly primary, which created a tremendous amount of animosity that persisted for a long time. And if you're going to have fights about things, great, but you'd like for them to be more than, oh, you're a Bernie Bros. here racist. Okay, can you say a little bit more about
the Trump side of this? Demeer's point that we might, if democracy within the Republican party leads to someone like Trump getting the nomination, then isn't that an argument, at least in the case of the Republican party, that you do want a stronger party and you want less grassroots input and you want an effect, a more authoritarian party that can impose its will if the people can't
be trusted. How would you respond to that? I would say that I think we have to start with the fact that, look, Donald Trump is a monster and I hope that he dies of a massive heart attack for election day, but he's not the worst president of my lifetime. Certainly not. George W. Bush is vastly worse. Totally. I mean, obviously, I get that W. Bush had like an extra four years, but still, if you look at the mass damage that was done to this country and on so many different fronts,
and like you just, you keep picking through different things. And so there's like obviously like the horror of Iraq, there's the the, the, the, the, worthless wiretapping. There's senteng a bunch of guys to a torture prison on an island without any of that due process. There's the federal government sitting on its hands for three days while thousands of black people drown in this creates of New Orleans. And there's also lots of policy stuff, right? You complete inability to
predict and do anything about the financial crisis. No child left behind. Easily the worst piece of educational legislation in the history of this country, et cetera. That was a guy who's Yale educated and who comes from a political dynasty and who doesn't mock a disabled reporter on the speech circuit who doesn't talk about grabbing women by their pussy's, et cetera, right? Like
Jeff Bush's candidacy was thankfully a joke. It's a question, you know, I think it's an open historical question of sort of Donald Trump's monstrousness, but it's, that's matched by a real incompetence on his part. I mean, I think it's important to say Donald Trump said over and over again that his signature legislation was Obamacare repeal. And he couldn't even get it past his own party, right? Congressional Republicans killed his Obamacare repeal, which he said was his signature
thing, right? The only thing that he really pulled off was a massive tax cut for the wealthy and for corporations, which is what Republicans want to do all the time anyway, right? If Jeff Bush comes in, you know, you got to understand, remember, like Jeff Bush in like late 2000s, he was seen as a Republican dynamo. He was the smart one compared to his brother and he
was a wank. If he had come through with his comprehensive plan to crush teachers unions across the United States, if he had come through with his comprehensive plan to a gut social security and Medicare, to essentially eliminate Medicaid, all this stuff is in his platform. You can find it. He could have been worse, right? So I just like the idea that like, okay, democracy brought us this bad option. Democracy brings us lots of bad options, right? But I don't like, I don't
really know that the alternative is any better, right? And what about the argument that George W. Bush is bad as he was and I'm very sympathetic to your perspective on this because of the rock war and the Patriot Act. And I've said as much, but George W. Bush was not, I don't think an existential threat to America or American democracy, the way that Trump appears to be. If we're just going with the kind of, I actually don't think that Trump is an existential threat to America. But if you
did think he was, then obviously he's worse. Because he threatened something deeper than just bad, bad and disastrous policy outcomes. Yeah, I mean, look, like the discussion of January 6th really annoys me because I think that it is a example of exaggerating the risk of something that was already really risky and bad, right? In other words, that like, by exaggerating what was happening or could have happened, you in a weird way minimized what actually did happen.
So all those people deserve to go to jail and I'm glad so many of them did. Donald Trump does her to go to jail for it. It was really awful. It was not actually a real threat to the operational integrity of the government of the United States. Like I think a lot of Democrats now say things like, oh my god, we were this close to like, you know, and it's like like the generals in the, like they think the joint chiefs of staff was going to be like, oh, yes, sir,
I saw him for the nukes, you know, like you lost the election. But you know, you can't coup without a military. That's a thing. Even if they'd actually killed Pence, it wouldn't have mattered. That's really what it comes down to. But yeah, and it's also clearly the case that a lot of those Yahoo's that went in there had no idea what they were doing. Of course, right? Like, you know, I mean, look, the democracy obviously, preserving democracy is important.
But like George W Bush got into office because for Supreme Court justices decided that, five Supreme Court justices decided that he would be, right? Like in other words, like, his presidency was predicated on a naked power grab by the conservative justices, which no one at the time were now believed was anything other than E. Zargai, we're going to give him the election, right? So in other words, like, you know, democracy is always hanging on by a thread, right?
I'm not meaning to suggest that there aren't unique sort of threats related to Trump. I do think that the fact that he is not in office right now makes the potential for, you know, inauguration day 2025. I mean, I think that makes me a little bit more, may feel a little bit more safe because just literally the Democrats are in the administration right
now, where he was in the administration then. I just don't, I just think that like, it is in a weird way giving Donald Trump too much credit to call him like a totally unique figure in world history as people tend to do. I think that he is a, you know, a bargain basement demagogue, Huey Newton, of which we've seen many times. And he just exploited a incredibly bad decision made by Democratic, the Democratic Party in order to get into office in 2016.
He's very dangerous, but like, you know, we got, you know, we can't defend democracy by, you know, minimizing democracy. Well, so let me, let me sort of pull on the thread, right? So, you know, it's, it's what you said about just in, I think your last answer when you're saying that, you know, if we did have a small group of party grandees, they may not have selected Kamala Harris
because you have a small group that can scheme on these things. And again, any small group and, you know, a shot is on, on the editorial board, like, you know, on the opinion section, I know what we're publishing all the time at the, at the post. And it's, it's, there's like a staggering amount of consensus of small groups of people saying that Kamala Harris is not the best candidate. And yet, you know, you said, Demir, you would say in the opinion section, the consensus
is that she's not, it's, you would say it's, it's quite critical. No, I mean, I think, well, I was about to get to that because it is interesting just, you know, talking to colleagues at the same time because, you know, I, I guess what I'm getting at is that there's something, there's something interesting going on. And this sort of building on what I was saying about Twitter, not being really an organizing principle. And it's just like pushing back on what you said, Shadi,
that like Twitter is playing a role in legitimating Kamala. It's not that. There's something else is going on that like is, there's a consensus that has been built, maybe manufactured, maybe as you said, Freddie, it's like a kind of fear or Shadi, maybe you said it was a fear of like the alternative. And so like now this, this desire to come together. But, but, you know, again, if, if this was truly undemocratic, if you really had the kind of decision making,
you would probably have a different decision. That, that like they're these forces and fine, Freddie, it's like, you know, like a kind of, I don't know, political correctness, you know, like an unwillingness to risk having a debate about race and identity inside the party fears of,
you know, having too much of a divisive process. And so, you know, it's this. But I'd say that, that nevertheless, even if there's not like a primary process on this, there's a kind of manufactured or real legitimacy to or a popular, again, I'm not sure if it's manufactured or real, but there's some kind of popular upswelling within the Democratic party behind Kamala Harris.
Now, like when I think about democracy, in general, I, I, I think of it more in terms of manufacturing legitimacy, rather than something that exists like the people and that there's a will there that that's somehow captured. I mean, I think those are metaphors for manufacturing a certain kind of or or or conjuring up a kind of legitimacy to it. But what's striking about about the
Harris thing is that like, you know, you get like three people like on a on a podcast like this. And, I don't think any of us are particularly convinced that Kamala Harris is a great shot here. And I imagine that like, you know, Nancy Pelosi is not a moron and and she has some idea of like what's what's winnable and not and yet and yet here we are. And so, you know, it's it's it's not exactly like this was the backroom deal that brought Kamala Harris something else is at play here.
And I wouldn't I wouldn't I'd be I'd be hesitant to say that it's not popular in some sense what that she is on top right now, right? I don't know unpack that for me. Is it isn't there some sort of tension between between this like on democratic thing and the fact that like there seems to be a consensus right now around her and it's some excitement around her at this point. I mean, I would just like sort of enough that just earlier you said that
Nancy Pelosi shanked Joe Biden, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, which would imply that she has perhaps more sway than me, right? Like that, you know, in other words, like, look, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes. Some people have asked why isn't Gretchen Whitner taking her swing? Why isn't Josh Shapiro taking his swing? We don't know what the sort of arm twisting going on behind the scenes might be, but again, we have specific examples of that kind of arm twisting
in the party's recent history. So we know it's a thing that happens. It's also, you know, look, maybe Gretchen Whitmer said, okay, I'm going to go for this, right? I think I'm a better candidate, right? You know, I come from Michigan and like I can represent the core of the of the country and I can quell some of the, you know, whatever. It is very possible that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and, you know, some of the other Poobos sort of made it clear and said, if you do this, we will
fuck you, right? Like, I mean, this, I mean, that is a thing that happens in politics all the time, right? There's, there's a lot of sort of, I mean, it's, you know, like I mentioned LBJ before,
he was famous for this, Tip O'Neill was somebody who was known to do this. New Congress is a guy who was, been described one of his vulnerabilities is that he wasn't actually very good at sort of at forcing his coalition to do everything that he wanted, etc, etc. But, you know, it would not surprise me at all if a lot of that was happening, you know, Barack Obama was a unique figure in American politics in, in, in every way. Um, he could have on that day or the next day said,
I believe that we need a new direction. We need a clean break from the Biden administration because the most obvious attack the Republicans are going to have throughout the rest of this thing is you were there Biden was asleep at the wheel. We had inflation. We had immigration problems and you were right there, right? Barack Obama could have said, all right, I'm putting my back, my support behind whoever, right? I'm putting my support behind a peep-bearded judge and um, and that I think
was the one opportunity. I think to, for someone who to really do it, but again, that just speaks to the fact that the Democrats have a small set of old wise men who have vastly disproportionate influence in the party and as much as a fucking clown car as the modern GOP is, the fact that they like don't have that kind of internal discipline means that candidates like Donald Trump can emerge and shock the world. Yeah, so I think there's, I'll just offer a couple maybe I'll, I'll turn to
explanations. I think when it comes to someone like Obama, he's never going to do something particularly bold or risky. That would go against his very, his very character and, and temperament. And I think there's also Gretchen Whitmer. When she's considering whether to put her hat in the ring, she's probably a thing to herself. Do I really want to be seen as the person who prevents a black
woman from having a shot at the presidency? So I, I think some of this comes from a self-preservation instinct that these are people who care about winning, but they care just as much about preserving the party. And look, I don't, I wouldn't want to take this too far and some of it might be subconscious, but I think there could also be a preference for unity over winning. That, and,
and because you can't guarantee whether Gretchen Whitmer will win. So, and then there's a risk that she will tear up these identity politics, fissures as we've talked about in the Democratic Party. Race and gender will come up and that's going to make everyone feel uncomfortable. And this is a very risk averse party. This is a party that, you know, they're not like the Republicans in that sense. I mean, going for someone like Trump shows that you're bold and you're willing to take a
very big risk. And that's why the Republican Party in its Trumpian form, I think, stands a chance at being more transformative and consequential than anything the Democrats will be able to offer. No one will think of Obama, Democratic Party as consequential or Obama as one of the most consequential presidents in American history beyond the fact that he was black. Huge leap, the shotty, huge leap. No, I mean, sorry, huge leap. It feels like there because it's
not like, again, it's not like the party wanted Trump. The Trump destroyed the party and took it over. So, I mean, I think that's, that's the important thing. But they were will, but in the end, in the end, yeah, Mitch McConnell like showed up showed that he had no spine, no balls. And like, basically, he didn't dain't to impeach him when they could have and just like stop the national nightmare there. But that to me is again, is a, is a sign of like no party and just basically
cult of personality around Trump at that point. They're the only thing that Democrats have a party, but they're not bull. Well, they only think how they use that party as a credit. To, right. Like, I mean, what you were saying there about like, Gretchen Whitmer is like to use that old Twitter, like, you know, what was it? The Twitter meme, like, let's try some game theory
here. And it's basically the revealed preferences that Democrats don't really think Trump is a, is a threat to the Republic that the revealed preferences clearly, you know, it's not a great year to be running as an incumbent like Biden hasn't done a great job. He's not like super popular. The policies, you know, however much they praise him for being a transformative president actually aren't pulling that well. So might as well have the Black Lady lose, not stick my neck out for this,
be a team player, suffer four years of Trump and then an easy victory after that. Like, most Democrats, yeah, and this is where I 100% agree most Democrats or at least democratic elites don't actually think Trump is an existential threat. They use that rhetoric to accomplish goals and to rally the base. And I think that even Biden himself made this clear and his interview with
George Stephanopoulos a couple of weeks back. Stephanopoulos asked him, well, what if what if you don't step aside and you run and you run, you stay in the race and then Trump wins and everything you fear comes to pass. And then Biden says something just like totally blasé like, well, at least I'll know I'd have given it my best shot. And that's not what you say when you think there's an existential threat to the Republic. And I guess we all know this in our bones. I think that four years
of Trump will be really bad. But most of us, especially on the elite level and the Nancy Pelosi, the Chuck Schumer's and democratic strategists, they're going to be making good money. They're going to be doing resistant stuff. They're going to feel alive because they're fighting against the threat of fascism. And then they're going to live to fight another day in 2028 and life goes on.
I mean, I don't know Freddie, like, so that democracy and like, manufacture consent, like, is that is that a credible theory of the case of, of, you know, where this consensus is coming from? Just like cowardice and like self-serving stuff and maybe even serving up Kamala ready to lose. What do you think about all that? Real quick, let me make a distinction. Like you were saying, like the Republicans didn't want Trump and he emerged despite them. I was saying that the
conditions that will out for that are good because they allow for it. Like, you know, but let's be clear, the Republicans in 2016 didn't want Trump because they thought he was certain to lose. Right? None of the rest of the shit that they cared about. Okay? I promise you Mitch McConnell was not like, oh my god, grabbing Pussy, they thought that he was going to lose. And that was why they wanted a different, different candidate. So fair point. Now they think, know that he can win,
although he won without the popular majority. And, you know, look, here's a story that I think is like the very minor thing but very telling, right? 2016, like I said, the primary battle between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was particularly nasty, particularly among the sort of young, very online activist class of the time who were impressionable, you know, a lot of people
predicted, oh, there's going to be Bernie to Trump voters. And reality ended up like significantly more than 90% of people who voted for Bernie in the primary voted for Hillary in the in the general. So, but there was a vacancy. I think it was the DNC chair. There was a vacancy as the chair of the DNC. I think that's what it was. I might be wrong, but and many people said that Keith Ellison would be a great pick for this. And he became sort of
the presumptive guy. And the thinking was, well, he's a black Muslim from a traditionally been a swing state and a very a guy with great leftist credentials, who among other things had predicted Trump's victory before anyone else did. And it was sort of seen by many people within the party as a sock to the left of the party. It was sort of seen as like, okay, we're going to give the left of the party something. It's a mostly ceremonial role, but that's okay. Like,
this is the whole point of this is sort of men fences. We know for effect that at the 11th hour, Barack Obama came in and used his influence and strong arms Tom Perez, who's an Obama loyalist, and was a far more centrist figure than Keith Ellison into that position. And you say, okay, well, what people who sort of would defend that would say to you is, well, it's just a symbolic
job. It doesn't really do anything. I don't have any power. Why do you care? But of course, the response to that is if it's a symbolic job, and it's been widely understood as being a way to try to pull these engaged lefty activists back into the party after a very nasty primary fight, why not just give it to them? And I think the reason why is because I think Obama is quietly a guy who loves to throw his weight around. It's like that George Clooney editorial. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, it is. I have to say is totally bizarre that an actor had one of the most influential sort of bits of public engagement on this hugely important national issue. But of course, the reason it was important was everyone knew it was actually coming from Obama. And in the weird chains of like, I don't I can't have my hands on this directly, but everyone will know it's me. But just really sure that absolutely it was it was it was I'll back I'll back
Freddie up on this complete. Let me just ask you Freddie, like for me personally, like I said, I don't feel like I'm a party guy, but this made me such a Biden fan. Like when that damn thing came out, I was like, beat him down, Joe, beat him down. Do not back down from this crap. And I can imagine that's like really what was stewing inside Biden, because who is this like Hollywood pretty boy coming to him and doing this sort of crap. And he knows it's Obama behind that.
That's been like more or less reported out by political shoddy. So it's very strange. So I don't know. So a charm that I like to use a lot is K-Fabe, which for those listening if they don't know what K-Fabe is in professional wrestling, right? The outcomes are scripted. You don't say that wrestling is fake because those guys are actually hitting each other and getting hurt and it's very dangerous, but the outcome is prescripted. They know who's going to win, right?
K-Fabe is this notion where the wrestlers know that they are engaged in sort of a deception, right? The audience also knows that it's a deception. I think one of the great sort of misconceptions about wrestling is people think that like the average professional wrestler fan thinks that it's all it's all real. Now they know too that the outcome is as brief sort of a pre-determined. But K-Fabe refers to the sort of mutually agreed upon deception, right? Like where
both sides sort of like mutually say, okay, I know this is this is you know prescripted. You know this is prescripted, but we are going to mutually maintain the illusion that it's not. And K-Fabe is all over Washington, right? And so for me like this the sobama thing where it was clearly important to the Obama people that simultaneously that they're being like
there are no no explicit direct sort of Barack Obama's name is on it. But for it to have the power that it has, it has to be seen as being a missive from Obama world, which is just so bizarre, right? It's like we need everyone to know, but we can't let anyone know that we're letting everyone know that we know, right? It just makes makes my head hurt. On the issue of Obama, obviously you're quite
critical of him and his legacy. What do you think Obama actually wants? You said that he seems to have this sort of he takes pleasure in throwing his weight around and he has this killer instinct even though he seems like you know not a very political guy. So but in a way he is very political, obviously. How do you sort of take stock of what he wants to make the party into? What really animates Barack Obama at the end of a day from your perspective?
You know I think that I bet in 2016 when he was leaving off for 2017 when he was leaving office. I bet he thought to himself, I'm so excited to just go fishing and to not be a part of this. I think it's real, real hard for these people to leave the stage. I think when you have that much power and that much influence, it's just not easy to not have it anymore. And I think that he does like playing Kingmaker. I also think that we can talk about this as a big picture like
actual policy, like the direction of the Democratic Party. I surprised some people when I say this, I think that I've said repeatedly that I think Joe Biden is the best president of my lifetime. Oh wow. Yeah. Because that look, that bar is very very low. That's like the smartest of the three studious kind of like that's true because I guess none of us
have been alive like all that. I haven't been along that long. But look, it's very it's it's Biden has come in and has fundamentally changed the Democratic Party's relationship to the industrial state. Right. So the kind of sort of like like just getting the federal government to pay money to build chip fabs, right? Like that sort of thing. It's really dramatically challenging
the sort of globalization consensus that was happening for a very long time. I mean, look, just his COVID relief bills and you know, the COVID relief bills have dramatically expanded American public investment in all manner of things and have gotten to sort of the government involved in the economy in a way that many people assume would just never happen. Freddie, but you would then agree. I mean, just to build on the fact what you said about,
you know, Trump and the Republican Party. I mean, Trump opened those doors for Biden. He broke the consensus on a lot of this stuff and shattered it and he was just incompetent to be able to do anything about it. So Biden, who's a, you know, a party man and knows how to how to wear the pull the levers actually knew how to pull the levers and transform the Democrats on it, right? Yeah, I mean, look, it was it was a combination of a lot of weird things. Trump makes this possible because like he so
he took the politics and shook it in a way that like a kid shaking an ant farm, right? In a way that sort of made things possible. COVID, you know, I mean, COVID just provided the, I mean, COVID happening after the great recession, the financial crisis, great recession and the extremely anemic growth that we had for a long time and a lot of wonky people had absorbed the lesson that
we needed to have bigger stimulus, etc. But we're left with a thing. I mean, like if you just look in terms of his executive actions, executive orders like the, the did read to which he's expanded the the powers of certain environmental regulatory agencies or whatever his NLRB National Labor Review Board, which is hugely important to people and unions is the best there's ever been the most
pro labor we've ever had, which is really saying something in 2024. Anyway, if you look at all that your Barack Obama whose presidency was defined by being cautious by small, I'm sort of doing small more things, but you know, I mean, I always said that Obama's greatest political liability was he
was addicted to being reasonable. You know, particularly in the second term, he would get into all these scenarios with the Republicans where like, you know, they would be burning him in effigy and then he would be like going out of his way to like, but I'm the most reasonable man in the world, right? And the thing is it's like he never grasped that that didn't do anything for him, right? But like
nobody gives a shit that you're the most reasonable person in the room, right? And I think that, you know, I wouldn't surprise me if sort of the, he sees the sort of the Biden presidency as sort of a challenge to sort of what he did. I mean, look, I'm glad the affordable care act insists, right? And it's better than it was than the alternative. It had, it was true and it's always been true that it was functionally identical to a plan put together by the Heritage Foundation,
which is a conservative think tank. And they worked so hard to reassure the insurers, the private insurance industry that it would be a windfall for them. And I think those are just two very different sort of approaches to politics. And you can look at like if you look at my lifetime,
I was born in 1981. And you have the sort of sort of rightward turn among Democrats, epitomized by Bill Clinton, who, you know, I mean, in the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dull repeatedly camped, could complain that Clinton had stolen his agenda, right? Like that's that's how far he had moved. And like Biden, you know, from where I'm sitting, was a repudiation of that, which he could get away with because he was an old white guy,
who are just assumed to be moderate. But I sort of, yeah, sorry, right? No, and it's sort of funny and retrospect that Biden would always would often say things like, I'm the most successful president or Democrat since FDR, even inclusive of FDR. And I guess it didn't always dawn on me that this was a dig at Obama. And I wonder what Obama was thinking with this idea of Biden as the second coming of FDR and how that made him feel about, you know, his own
legacy. So there's definitely something going on there. And I guess it also helps me understand something that I found a little bit puzzling at the time when you saw people like Bernie Sanders and AOC and Ilhan Omar spending so much of their political capital, supporting Biden when everyone was moving in the other direction. They were like the Biden dead enders. I mean, Bernie was writing in New York Times op-ed in the final days of the Biden era. And I'm just like, why is Bernie doing this?
Well, so, so, I mean, but, but, Freddie, I do want to, because I still haven't, I mean, I think you have sort of put your cards in like about a Biden being transformative. But, you know, again, like, my politics are different from the two of you guys. But, but like I said, I totally got what Bernie was doing. But not in terms of like ideological affinity, but basically because he saw, like, it's the same party that screwed him twice. So he's not going to sit and watch them do it
now again, like watch the machine do it just like they did it to him. So I just, I read it, I don't think Bernie's a fool. I think you probably saw the writing on the wall. He just wanted to stick it to to Nancy and the machine a couple of times on the way out. Yeah. I don't know what you think about that, Freddie. Well, I'll just add something about Gaza, which I wanted to say that I, that's also it made it like doubly odd to me to see someone like Ilhan Umher. And I presume AOC,
although she's been more careful about what she says publicly. If these are people who think that Biden has enabled a genocide of Palestinians, there's just something weird about being like, oh, yeah, he's enabled a genocide against Arabs and Muslims, but actually he's the right person to be our nominee. There's also just like a sort of fundamental incoherence there. But don't you think that the genocide Joe thing is as much of a talking point as end of the Republic Trump?
I mean, no, no, no, I think no, I think. Yeah, actually believes that the rest of them don't like they're just like, well, you know, more injustice on a long history of injustice in there. Not, you know, what I mean, like anyway, but go on, Freddie. Yeah, I mean, it may simply be that, you know, they called up Jamal Bowman and asked him about his, you know, I mean, like that,
that it became clear that like the already small squad might get even smaller. I mean, look like I don't, you know, from my perspective, you know, like just like Israel is the one issue in American politics that never gets better from if you have my position. I just don't like, it's been reported of various ways in which Biden has tried to pressure, you know, who, and it appeared to have gotten nothing out of it. And they just might have calculated that like there's just no, there's
just no more juice less to be squeezed out of that lemon, right? Like that not supporting him over Gaza doesn't get you anything. I also think that though, like, look, I mean, I'm not sure if you'll break this way, but they may have calculated that it's a weird moment because they supporting Joe Biden is not directly opposing Kamala Harris. And so they thought this could be a freebie, right? In other words, you throw, you throw all the support behind Biden. If he survives, great,
maybe you've got a little more capital. If he doesn't, you haven't like directly gone after the next candidate, you know, and it's certainly, and again, it's just like it's pushback symbolic pushback to the people who, at least for Bernie, I can't imagine he doesn't have as much resentment about this as now Biden does as well. Like these people are, are like, at least it has to hurt and you
have to just be embedded about it. I mean, look like the, I'm trying to think of what it was, was it maybe it was Axios or whatever multiple places in the last year have, you know, discussed the understanding that Biden was in fact extremely unhappy about the fact that he was pushed out in 2016. He was the sitting vice president and a popular administration. He had a pretty decent approval rating with a uniquely vulnerable Republican candidate.
And if he, you know, he could be serving at his second term right now, in which case no one gets a shit about his age, right? And like, you know, I think if you read the T-Lease, I mean, it's just funny because for like eight years, I mean, the story was just like, oh, you know, Biden, he just didn't think he wanted to serve in other ways, you know, like that wasn't, he didn't see
that as his sort of, you know, his mission in 2016. When I think that the 2008 primary between Obama and Hillary with particularly Rancoris also involved a violation of those codes of whose turns it was and that Obama felt that in order to sort of preserve the integrity of the party and to keep everybody happy, he had to ensure that Hillary was the candidate in 2016. And, you know,
I just think Biden was really, really unhappy to have been pushed aside in that way. And I think winning in 2020 sort of was his way to say, hey, look, I'm four years older and I guess, and I beat Trump, you know, what would have happened four years earlier? And yeah, I, you know, I wonder if there's no love loss between him and Obama. Yeah. Yeah. I do want to ask you, Freddie, about a little
bit about your own politics. And we're sort of getting getting at this with your, with your sort of the fact that you like Biden and his economic policy more than the alternatives. You know, you, I think you've described yourself as a Marxist before, I know if you're still,
you know, doing that. And I don't know exactly what you mean by it because, you know, sometimes people will say that their Marxist, but what they, but it's a little bit more complicated and obviously, anyway, I don't want to speak for you, but I'm curious how much of your own economic commitments play a role in how you assess Biden and the post-Biden democratic party. And,
yeah, maybe just stay a little bit. How do you self-identify now? Sure. Yeah. So look, I mean, um, to the degree that I, that I avoid self-identifying as Marxist now, it's only because I don't want to have that conversation again. Marxism is a dead religion, right? Like, and, and no one is more aware
of that than me. At the core of all of it, right? I think that everything I'm doing is motivated by Marxist principles, but like it is so that the actual sort of affirmative political agenda of Marxism is so far from, you know, reality right now that I just tend not to see any point in sort of asserting it anymore. I will say like, look, I am off, like I have been, been, been often been
called things like a contrarian leftist or a heterodox leftist, whatever. I don't think anything, heterotruses, anything heterodox about anything that I believe to do to me all of the pieces of the things that I believe and talk about are just natural expressions of my of things. It just so happens that they're very different from what a lot of people think. I hear what I'll say.
I think that I believe that fundamentally, you know, if you want to go to your base to term in superstructure, meaning that economics underlies the various cultural and social understandings we have of the world, which we then tend to have a tendency to believe are what actually moves the world, right? One of the things I find very annoying about present politics is there is a contingent of lefty and liberal people, including many in the media, who will constantly
insist that support for Trump or the reason Trump won in 2016 was simply racism, right? In other words, that it is motivated purely by interpersonal victory and they want to deny the salience of the mass deindustrialization that this country went through starting in around 1970 or a little bit
after that. I think that that's wrong and I think that chickens came home to roost in 2016 in the form of a country that had a vision of mass shared prosperity that was largely built on the existence of manufacturing and industrial jobs that did not require a college education and that enabled people to live middle class lifestyles. Those jobs were systematically destroyed through the sort of Reagan slash Clinton slash et cetera, zest for globalization, the demise of the
paraphril all NAFTA, et cetera. Those jobs were destroyed and you can go to those communities. They look like they have been through a world war. They are filled with people who are only able to survive because of bullshit disability claims who are addicted to fentanyl who are living in not the sort of groovy kind of multi-generational like healthy families thing but who have to all
squeeze into one house because they can't afford to not do. Hillary on election night, she needed Michigan and she needed Wisconsin and she got neither because of the great deal of anger in those
places and by the way she didn't campaign neither in those places. She went to Michigan twice and not for months near the end of the election she never went to Wisconsin which is a perfect symbol of what happened to the Democratic Party which was an abandonment of a whole host of people who is sort of economic way of life was seen as being contrary to the new deal which was we are going to be a globalized economy and a knowledge economy and everybody is going to get a computer
science degree at Stanford and go be a coder. And so like this is far removed from my sort of core philosophical politics but it is an expression of the idea that at the base of politics there is people sort of relationship to their immediate material circumstances and those are economic circumstances and the Democratic Party became the party of people who thought that that way of life was passe they did nothing to protect those people and they paid a deserved
political price. You know I mean like I'm definitely not a Marxist and I've done my share of reading on it and what I've always liked about that literature and I think this shot a UNI disagree on this a lot is basically it's both like having sort of a materialist appreciation of
the world but most importantly a materialist appreciation of politics that's why I mean I think it just cuts through a lot of the sort of stuff which I think is inherent in liberals and quite frankly is this idea that ideas matter rather than like material relations I mean you know you can
like build your criticism however you want off of that and build a kind of world and the kind of political project that you want of it but I mean for me it's always been that appreciation of power that like you know a good Marxist materialist understanding of it is kind of indispensable for
understanding politics. Yeah and in this sense I'm very much not a Marxist since I've often argued that people are primarily motivated not by economic or material interests but by identity culture religion and the sort of intangible motivations but that can perhaps be a conversation
for another time and obviously these different variables interact in complex ways so it's not it's never that simplistic but you know as we just wrap up here I want to you know push you on one thing because so you know in a sense we've had the last four years as a rare experiment in
left wing economic policy or at least economic policies that are significantly more left wing than we've had at any times in our in our lifetimes but yet it doesn't seem to have been particularly popular at the end of a day with the American people and we know you know obviously historically high
disapproval ratings for Joe Biden there doesn't seem to be much popular appreciation for so-called Bidenomics how do you read that and obviously four years is not a lot to go on and there's a lot of other factors here and it can just be as simple as Americans really don't like inflation
but do you see this as offering up any kind of negative judgment on the broader project that you're part of and namely no left wing economic policy and left wing industrial policy more specifically so one thing I'll know is like look like many people will tell you that it had an happened
for COVID Donald Trump would have been reelected right but then again like COVID I mean I you know I'm of the opinion that the stimulus efforts were the smaller part of the inflationary problem we've had the bigger part has been the supply shocks that we've had and I think one of
the things that like completely separate from partisan politics that we have to learn is that we've built all of these networks that we think are robust and it turns out that they're quite fragile right so like there's the sort of like that the Houthi is can just decide and all of a sudden
you know the price of things jumps 12% or whatever because they're firing rockets but also we just saw this you know this cloud strike computer failure right which is we think this is the robust network and it's like whoops um but you know there's a chance that like if not for those supply
sides problems we don't have the inflation problem that we have and no one's talking about getting rid of Joe Biden because he has a you know 70% uh approval rating who knows um look it takes time okay so Obamacare was deeply deeply unpopular for the for the first few years uh after it was
passed um for the first five years it pulled very badly um because it's a big huge complicated uh bill which many different pieces that sort of interlock and people sort of have to live within them uh for those things to uh to make sense to them um now like Republicans have kind of quietly
stop talking about repealing it i mean i'm sure you know if if if Donald Trump gets a super majority or whatever then you know it's gone but um uh that has really been sort of taken off with the agenda right um did you look at social security and Medicare again like i you know
some people poo poo the fact that Donald Trump said that he wouldn't cut social security and Medicare i think that absolutely was politically relevant in 2016 a Republican saying i won't cut your your social security or Medicare Paul Ryan did a great job of keeping Obama from having
any kind of agenda but i think Paul Ryan was an albatross around the Republican Party because he was a doctrinaire anti-atitlement program person and those programs are really popular right so there's got to these things have to be grandfathered in right i it's too late obviously in multiple
ways for Joe Biden um i do think that like rather than thinking about a specific policy that's gotten ignited as sort of enacted right now to think like if we in it really do have this vigorous investment in uh reindustrialization if we do start to onshore things again um in part because
the rising wages in other countries uh has to sort of depress the degree to which it's you know financially attractive to move job over there uh and if we really are which you're probably avoid calling it like a green revolution or a green new deal but if we really are investing
in electrifying many parts of the grid that's the sort of thing that might not make a particular politician look particularly good right now but that over time that gets worked into the fabric of the country in the way that Obamacare has been worked in the fabric of the country in the way that
social security and Medicare have been worked in the fabric of the country in which they become popular they become impregnable in that way okay well that's uh you know a semi optimistic note upon which to end or at least uh the like good long long long view i think that's a good always a good
way to end uh wait when you have my when you have my politics all you got is the long view brother so amen to that well thanks so much Freddie was a pleasure to have you on and um yeah until next time people will continue reading your sub stack and again we encourage our listeners and viewers
to subscribe to Freddie DeVoeur's sub stack if they haven't already it is always thought provoking and provocative and probably will make you uncomfortable some of the time and healthy embracing read exactly yes healthy embracing is a good way to put it Freddie thanks a lot thanks for having