Chapo Trap House - 360 - Bernie Blanco Goes to Queens feat. Matt Karp (10/21/19)

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

We're joined by Matt Karp to discuss realigning the democratic coalition and Bernie Sanders' recent blockbuster rally in Queens. Check out Matt's piece in Jacobin here: here:https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/future-liberals-want-matt-karp-populism-class-voting-democrats

Hello, friends. It's your chap out for the week. We will here, as always. In this episode, I am between two mats. One mat that you already know, your beloved Christman. The other one making this triumphant return, it's Matt Karp of Jacob N. Princeton University. Matt, how's it going? I had a good therapy session today, mostly consisted of my psychologist showing me contradictory and ambiguous jeet here tweets and asking me to sort of make sense of them, one and the other. I find it very healing, restorative even. Well, Matt, this is going to be a Bernie heavy episode because obviously there was the rally

on Saturday that we all attended. Maybe you saw us there. Maybe you just saw the photos. I do want to talk about that and what it all means, but mainly... Come on, somebody. Yeah. Matt, I wanted to talk to you because you have an article out in Jacob N. that I thought was very good and interesting. It certainly got all the right people angry and upset, so obviously that appeals to me. But broader than that, this is Bernie's What's Up. You already know. More and more people are talking about it, or maybe they have to talk about it again because he had such a strong showing on Saturday and picked up those

endorsements. But mainly, what you do in your article, it's called Is This the Future Liberals Want? You essentially sketch out the past, present, and two potential futures of what the Democratic Party or Liberals are... Just two possible futures for American politics. But to get there, you sort of sketch out the past of the Democratic Party of showing us historically how we've gotten to the moment where we are now and why Sanders represents another different possible path than the one that we seem doomed to repeat. Not to put too fine a point on it, why Elizabeth Warren does not represent a different path from previous failures. Right. I've said this online, but I wrote

this article kind of from a place of ambivalence about, on the one hand, we've had a lot to cheer about in some ways from the political left in the last three, four years since the Bernie movement, for sure. We've had a lot of discourse wins in the sense that the Democratic Party and the national media are talking about seriously considering and are aware that there's a mass base for social democratic programs like Medicare for All, Free College, Job Guarantee, various other by now by 2019. We even have more ambitious sort of labor bills up for discussion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We've had a lot of progress in the sense that we're talking about these ideas and it's clear that people can't afford to write them off

or ignore them or pretend that they're marginal. In fact, they're polling most of them at around 60% or higher. So that's all to the good. The bad side and the undertow underneath all of this kind of, you know, this sort of triumphant narrative about the return of socialism or the sort of new, new left or all these, you know, the rise of the, you know, the Bernie Crats and the DSA and other social movements. The downside is that the sort of the political vehicle that could deliver any of these actual goods, you know, which remain in the short or medium term is still the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party itself is moving away from the historic force that has actually delivered any of these goods in the past.

That is a relatively, you know, relatively, not necessarily unified or united, but at least a aligned working class voting in the same party. And that's what the, that's, that's the voting coalition that produced the New Deal, et cetera, civil rights movement, where Democrats, the Democratic Party was never a worker's party, but it was a party that all the vast majority of workers voted for. And that's been being de-aligned since the 70s, and it's accelerated even in the last 10 years, even arguably in the last five years with the midterm race, the kind of Fairfax Countyification of the Democratic Party. And so even as we have more ambitious and more exciting sort of left-wing ideas on center

stage, we sort of lack or I worry that we, we is in the Democratic Party, which I guess I shouldn't speak for the Democratic Party, but I just worry that the voting coalition that seems poised to be able to, to sort of stand up for those, for those ideas that has the material stones to get them done is evaporating. So this is a real critical moment in some ways from that perspective. Well, you begin the article, you know, with something that I'm always, I always enjoy, your dystopias. You begin the article by talking about, it's 2040, RoboCops on every street corner of America.

Beating the hell out of poor Matt Dane in his head. Last flight to Elysium is going up and yeah, yeah. Um, 2040, presidential election. On the Democratic side, we have charismatic, exciting first term governor of California, Malia Obama. Representing the Republicans, we have former WWE superstar turned hooting, chud, shithead, AJ Styles. And this is like, Are you ready for it? And then, and this is, this is the vision of like, if things continue as they are now,

and there is no change, Sanders goes away, this fizzles out, or, or that rather more likely that energy is channeled into sort of acceptable Democratic Party, uh, can't Elizabeth Warren, sorry. Um, yeah, like, so, so how does that future come about given like where we are now? Like all sci-fi, good or bad, it's basically just a steroidal version of the present, right? So it's not particularly imaginative, but I think the idea is, if the Democratic Party continues to a la Chuck Schumer, replace blue collar workers with white college educated, either former Republicans, uh, or, uh, independence, et cetera, uh, it kind of goes the road of

Fairfax County. Um, no matter what the particular ideology associated with that move is, I mean, this is, was kind of a, an argument in the piece that, you know, in the, the first move towards sort of making the Democratic Party a white collar kind of knowledge economy, you know, new, you know, um, configuration was actually the McGovern era, you know, is actually, it was a left wing progressive movement, which was good on some stuff. It was good on, uh, relative to the Democrats. It was good on foreign policy. It was good on empire, et cetera. Um, but, uh, it was awful on labor. Uh, Michael Brooks told me that I didn't realize this, that, uh, McGovern was doing anti, uh, AFCA, AFCA, like fliering

as late as like 2009. Well, you know, I mean, he's still bitter about the AFL CIO, not dorsum, et cetera. Right, right, right. No, that's true. I mean, that was an ugly configuration then too. But the point is you can talk about candidates in terms of sort of their ideological positioning and by that logic, okay, we've got, uh, you know, we've, we've gone from Clinton to Obama to Warren, things are looking good. Uh, the Democratic Party's moving to the left, the Overton window, blah, blah, blah. Uh, but it, to some extent it's a, what I fear is that this is actually sort of an ideological cycle, uh, rather than some sort of, uh, profound

left-wing shift, given that, uh, you know, we've seen the party move with it's a, a professional class energy and the party move from McGovern, uh, to Dukakis and Clinton before we've seen that rightward shift. These are unreliable professional class and upper middle class voters are unreliable advocates, let alone, um, you know, uh, a political force to able to deliver, uh, a left-wing program. So going forward, even if, you know, if Warren wins or if Warren loses, whatever, if Warren is and consolidates, uh, the Democratic Party as a professional class party in, in which, uh, it's based in its identity, its leadership, especially it's, uh, it's, it's, um, kind of cultural and aesthetic style is dominated

by the kind of needs and aspirations of this professional class is literally Elizabeth Warren in the quiet car, Elizabeth Warren returning a library book, et cetera, et cetera, then, uh, I, I think that accelerates the sort of de-alignment from, and the, the sort of the, the possibility of a united working class party recedes further and further from the horizon. So whatever the ideological makeup on the surface of this configuration is, uh, I think one, there are some real strict limits to what that configuration can deliver materially in terms of the legislation that it's going to fight for and, and, and win. And two, it sets up, uh, a kind of even more deranged right-wing populism with a kind of nationalist

white nationalist potentially working class base, uh, that, uh, is, you know, in mortal, locked in mortal combat indefinitely with this kind of professional class liberalism, that configuration, which is basically our configuration now, uh, if it just deepens and accelerates, it doesn't matter what the stated platforms of the parties are because these coalitions are going to produce, uh, the same politics that we've had for the last 20 years, which is, uh, frankly, not much improvement for the average American. Well, when you talk about, like, in terms of, you know, deliverables here and like in class voting, you know, going back, like, since the 70s, not just the Democrats, but like every,

basically every labor party in, in the West has been bleeding support from the working class largely because they have like shifted politically to, you know, neoliberalism markets and, you know, against labor or whatever, whatever you want to call it. But before that, like, how would you, like, how did class voting work particularly, like, in America and what were some, like, what were the tangible things it produced even given the rotten, racist Cold War context? Right. Yeah.

You don't have to romanticize the mid-century Democratic Party. That's sort of exactly the point. I mean, the Democratic Party was never a party of, was never really a worker's party. Uh, it played a big role in lots of places as any leftist would know in kind of, uh, undermining, uh, you know, left-wing labor movements, et cetera, et cetera, certainly the, you know, the McCarthy era, uh, was not a, a shining moment for the, the small D Democratic left. Uh, yeah, Vietnam, Jim Crow, complicit in all sorts of horrible things.

And yet, I mean, the truth is, we don't talk about this very much, but what are the, the basic rudiments of anything like a welfare state that we do have, Social Security, Medicare, uh, unemployment insurance, uh, the Wagner Act, which allowed any kind of mass unionization, uh, and the civil rights movement itself, uh, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, et cetera, housing rights, all that stuff, uh, was delivered by, uh, a Democratic Party, which was not a worker's party, but was a party in which most workers voted for. Uh, and you didn't have to be under that alignment where you're, if you were basically outside the South, which always had a sort of distinctive culture, obviously based on

a Jim Crow culture for most of this period, but outside the South, uh, if you were a worker, whether you were a mail carrier in Harlem, I say in the piece, or a miner in Virginia, or a farm hand, uh, somewhere in the West, you know, overwhelmingly, if you voted, you voted Democrat. And, uh, that meant that the, lots of Democrats, my example in the part is, is the, is Hubert Humphrey. You didn't have to be a, a politician of a tremendous moral character, a great virtue or heroic, uh, aspiration to deliver things like social security or to fight for things

or to sort of have a commitment to things like a strong labor movement and, uh, you know, national health insurance, et cetera, et cetera. If you read, I actually went deep at one point and got, I got a little drunk reading like, um, Hubert Humphrey speeches from the late 40s. And you know, this is the era that, you know, as, as one does, but there's a really good archive of the Hubert Humphrey archive of it's got all, I mean, he's in there like calling out scabs and I mean, he's speaking a kind of like, like I sort of a class war language. Even as somebody who was not, uh, I think he was like a pharmacist.

It's not like he was a sort of a horny handed son of the, son of toil himself. Uh, but he knew that his constituency, the Democratic party's constituency was worker. So even if he was a hack, and that might not be fair to Humphrey, he was good on civil rights. He took some strong stance. It's good on civil rights, bad on Vietnam. Exactly. Bad on some stuff too.

Bad on some stuff too. And he, he, he, the, the sort of default hack of the Democratic party in the 1930s or 40s under a class voting alignment or even the 1960s, uh, was, was, was someone who knew that their constituency was the working class and therefore the politics were shaped by that. We haven't had that since the late 60s. We've been moving further and further away from that shift. And so no matter the individual ideological profiles or various idiosyncrasies of Democratic

leaders since then, that's, those fundamentals haven't changed. And there's a reason, uh, I mean, this isn't just about party dynamics, but this is a huge part of the reason why Democrats since Carter, et cetera, have been unable and really unwilling to deliver anything on the scale of those mid century victories. I have to say it is amazing to me how people are able to totally embrace the wish casting about politicians personalities and not realize how they're really just celebrating their own powerlessness. Because when you spend time fixating on, well, this, this candidate, I think they're a really

good person and they returned their library books and they're epic, uh, and they have all of these personal characteristics. The reason that you're doing that is because, you know, at some level that once they get in there, they're not accountable to anybody. So you're totally at their mercy of their personality and their personal beliefs. That's what we have to do too. But if you have a pressure, if you have an actual organized pressure, uh, uh, movement along class lines with class interests, then you don't, it doesn't matter.

They could be a complete piece of shit because they know that if they don't follow the agenda, they're going to get fucking removed. We want more working class pieces of shit up there. Yeah. You just need like what we stand for, right? Some fucking, uh, yeah, ward healing shitheads. It doesn't matter because they're pressing the button that you are tolling them to press as opposed to having to like put everybody in the fucking sorting hat and figure out

which one's Gryffindor before you know who you can vote for because they have wizard powers and you're just a pathetic muggle. I mean, I mean, this is even more true in international terms. I mean, I would invite you to comment on the character. If you think about, I mean, of the, of the individual labor party members who voted for the national health service in, you know, under the ATLEI ministry, you know, like were they all heroic kind of wizards? You know, no, I mean, these are, they're, they're just probably, you know, obnoxious.

I don't know. I can't, I can't. Well, they're British show, you know, listeners of the show can fill in the gaps in their own minds there. We won't get into any ethnic flers, but they suck. They were pieces of shit. I'm sure. Oh yeah.

And that's why that's why when I was reading the article, the example of Hubert Humphrey stuck out for me like so much. I got, you know, like, yeah, it's kind of a zero, good on something's bad on others. But as you say here, and I'm just going to quote here, says, it's not a coincidence that even popular two-term democratic presidents of this era, elected by such deal-line class coalitions have proven unable or unwilling to push for structural reforms on anything like the scale of the New Deal era, even Aster facing the biggest economic crash. This is a great depression.

And like the idea is like even of that like rotten era of like mid-century American Democrats, because of like the class alignment of the parties, they were the ones that got done all of the things that the modern democratic party is still coasting on and still wants you to associate with a democratic party. And they're only the victories that of like the modern era are reliant on these like incredibly gifted charismatic figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But then again, look at the records of their administration versus what like, you know, even a shithead like Hubert Humphrey was willing to, not just get done, but just support.

Right. Right. It's paltry. It's paltry. And meanwhile, what you have, and we're, I mean, I'm sure this is where you want to go with this, but what you have is a kind of, you know, a media class or a kind of pundit class surrounding this, you know, Obama era democratic party that is like deeply invested in honoring and kind of trumpeting these achievements.

I mean, we go back to Jonathan Chait, you know, liberalism is working too, but even why the Obama legacy, why Obama has built the legacy that will endure. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And then the subtitle was changed to why Obama has built the legacy that still matters or something like that. Yeah.

They literally had to change the subtitle. Yeah. During the Trump, but, but, but, but, but even people a little left of Chait, you know, like obviously Paul Krugman is notorious on this kind of stuff. But a lot of other, you know, sort of left liberals have become invested in this project of kind of pointing out the ways in which this coalition, this, in effect, the kind of Obama coalition actually is fighting for, both has in some measure, depending on who you talk to, has either delivered versions of progressive change that are, that stack

up with previous achievements or can just in the very near term do something like that. But if you look at the balance sheet, I mean, if you sort of zoom out and look at the politics of class, equality, poverty, and wealth in the United States in the last 50 years, nothing under the Obama administration, nothing changed. I mean, it's true. He did not aggressively pivot to the right in the way that Clinton did. So, you know, we'll give him a, what, a one and a half cheers for that. And thanks to the Tea Party, he couldn't do his grand bargain to cut down on that.

So, even, so his half-pivots to the center were, were, were, were, were, were thwacked away by the insane right. So, so, like he, but so, but we'll give him credit. I want to even be maximally generous here. He did not, he held the course in effect on the welfare state. He may even have, if you want to be really generous, added in some, sought to sort of bolster or tweak or sort of, in some areas, I mean, he expanded Medicaid, et cetera, in a means-tested way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but nothing fundamentally changed

in terms of, if anything, everything, everything got worse, 80% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, wages flat, poverty, the same working-class wealth, black wealth wiped out by the housing crisis, not remedied, meanwhile, banks, profit, banks and Wall Street swimming in profit and, and nothing changed. Nothing will change under this alignment no matter how bold and progressive its tribunes call it. Yeah. Okay.

So, like, you go over there, like, talking about, like, the people who are, who are most wedded to this idea that, you know, like, this, this new democratic coalition is, is so wonderful. Like, the people whistling past the graveyard, you call it the, sort of, the Patagonia Democrats as well. How do you refer to them? Like, could you explain that? Well, that's a Sunkara Kilpatrickism.

I have to, I have to shout out to my commissars on that one. But yeah. People who really love Patagonia. Basically. I mean, Judy Gemstone. If you will. The way I look at it is, is, you know, you could call it six-figure Democrats, you know, people making, and let's be honest, in some, in some municipalities, this isn't even very

rich, but people who are comfortable. If you're making six figures anywhere in America, you're not, you're not, you, you may be living paycheck to paycheck because you have a lot of built-in expenses or something, but you're, you're not struggling. You're not white knuckling it. You're not white knuckling it. I don't believe. You know, individual, sort of, examples to, you know, notwithstanding.

And I think the six-figure Democrat, the Patagonia, this sort of affluent professional class Democrat because it's not, I'm not going to get into the sociology here about, you know, what qualifies as professional managerial class, et cetera, et cetera. I'll leave that to the sociologist, but, but I think if you're, if you're making money, if you have a comfortable and reliable professional class or equivalent position in society, you know, the various, you know, Eric Levitz, well, let's just talk about him because he's the nice one. Yeah.

I like Eric Levitz. Like, of these people of, like, I guess, left liberals, I would say, like, I find him the most honest. I mean, like, everyone, Cooper, Eric Levitz, they're good, you know, whatever, I think they're good. They're the gallant to Matt Iglesias' goofus. But the argument, just to put the argument on the table if you want to get into that, is that these people actually will benefit from a sort of a modestly, a modest social

democratic program. I think that's probably right to some extent. And that therefore they're on board, according to polls, for modest tax increases in order to pay for things like improved healthcare, et cetera, et cetera. Therefore they're going to be up for it. We, you know, I think this is really weak in terms of, I mean, I agree that Democrats making $100,000 a year might be down for, like, rolling back the Trump tax cuts or whatever, you know?

Sure. But are they up for an actual pitch battle against the forces of darkness that are upholding our private, our for-profit healthcare system? I mean, that just seems, frankly, mental on the surface of it. And if you look at, you know, the way I go into it, if you look at, like, the, the, how things have played out on the state governments in, like, deep, deep blue states, like Washington state, the first thing they do is, is wipe out the possibility of tax increases. Because a lot of these people, not even just the $100,000 Democrats, but the $200,000

Democrats, the $300,000 Democrats, they don't actually, you know, when it comes to their own material interests, we see this in the, you know, especially in Manhattan with the kind of, you know, school, school politics. You know, when, when, when people's actual, you know, material interests are on the line, they don't actually have the incentive to fight for this kind of stuff when you take it out of the culture war context of blue and red on a national scale. So why on earth would we think that not only could they be potentially reliable allies, I won't even, why on earth would we think that they could be the point of the spear,

which is in effect the Warren wager, that they could be the point of the spear, the kind of most mobilized for, sort of activated force that is actually going to provide the muscle and the leadership to get this incredibly difficult, you know, this incredibly difficult job done. I don't see it. If you take the wider view, the longer view, assume that they are totally earnest, that they're for all this stuff, that they're not just saying it because it makes them feel like good people.

All right. It happens. You're in there. You're, you're, you're now trying to pass stuff against the will of this, you know, minority government that has these structural impediments thrown up to, to prevent you from getting anything done. What exactly, even if they're down for the fight, is are these people going to do to pressure actual power and capital?

What labor are they going to be able to withhold collectively that's going to grind the gears of the economy to a stop? The way that say the air traffic, or the way that say the flight attendants could, or UPS drivers could, or people who work at Amazon warehouses could, or UAW workers, or teachers, nurses, nurses. Yeah. I mean, I mean, that's the thing. It's like, it just, it just seems to me that there's a, there's a disc, you know, it's

nice to have stated, it's nice to have stated policy goals. But if you don't have, if you don't, in a way, I, the liberal move is always to say that we're the ones who are hand waving away all of these kind of structural obstacles to achieving the Sanders program, that Bernie will get in power and everything will melt away. Actually, literally no one has ever said that, I don't think. The issue, I think, obviously, they're the ones who are, you know, by, you know, the more honest ones, like, like, you know, progressive neoliberal owning it, candid neoliberal Dylan

Matthews is just like, no, she's not going to do that, she's not going to do Medicare for all, and that's fine. What she can do is nibble on the edges, get an anti-corruption bill passed, potentially with this kind of coalition. But you take the politics indoors and you work out the best deal that can be had with the Democratic Party that you have with your eye, who all have their eyes on the midterm. That's what, that's exactly what, that's all, that's all she could do. That doesn't involve tackling one sixth of the, you know, a system that takes up one

sixth of the economy in which huge vested interests are tied right, you know, wrapped in twine around the major advisors, you know, Nancy Pelosi's staff is basically all working for, as far as I can tell, is like, you know, they're all, they all have a cousin who works for United Health or Aetna or something, you know, like, if you think that this coalition can deliver that fight, you're crazy. So what's the Bernie platform, the Bernie program for achieving this stuff? It's not about getting into the room and making it happen in the first hundred days, frankly. It's just not going to be that way.

It's going to be a longer protracted struggle. And the thing about it is, is that like the secret move, the last move for guys like Iglesias and these dudes is that, is that they are at the end of the day, just cannot contain their contempt for the, what they see as Pollyanna ish fantasy of the Sanders program. They imagine that they look at, they look at the reality of American politics as it existed their entire lives and they say, do you think you're changing anything fundamentally about this dynamic? You were delusional.

And so therefore that's why, you know, they'll pile up any bullshit to justify undercutting Sanders. But at the end of the day, a lot of it boils down to their, their wonkish contempt for anyone who would attempt to reconfigure something that in their minds is eternal. But what I would say to them is, you know what, there's no guarantee that it would work. Bernie could get in there and it could be a failure. I don't know. None of us know yet, but what we do know, and this is not to be argued and none, not

the single one of these motherfuckers has ever been able to, to argue against this point is that the current system assists, assuming the current coalitions, assuming the current dynamic between the parties and going forward with it, will by definition not change anything and will only lead us to a fucking apocalypse. I don't want to derail this conversation too much, but this is actually reminding me of what may have actually been the most blackpilled thing we heard in Iowa, which is one of the lower tier guys going up and saying, if you elect me and get me in the White House, you will never think about me.

Michael Bennett said that. Michael Bennett said that and you're going to not even know his president. It just like that is the idea is like you get the guy, I get a hard boy nice in there. No, that's and then it disappears. Politics disappears. He's running for to be the captain of the Titanic. I'm going to show up at the cabin for meals and I'll say hi to everybody and I'll shake hands with the kids and then you won't hear from me until the fucking boat is in the water

and that is the promise made explicit that that under this program, this center program, nothing will ever happen and nothing can happen. The thing is we know we're in an unsustainable course, so if nothing happens, then it's all going to go away. Anyway, right? There is no stability in your in your stable two party, however, at best it's it's thatcherism at best that's it and at worst it's actually making, which is at least an ideologically coherent program.

There is no alternative and at worst it's a kind of just literally, you know, a deeper failure of kind of making a limits of making the limits of your imagination, your political credo, which is just unimaginable to me anyway. I mean, like, you know, shit, as long as we're talking about, I mean, like, why the fuck not? Matthew Glacius is like the perfect example of this type of person because he is someone who has spent his entire career contemptuously and smugly punching left and like trolling the left as this kind of wonkish contrarian.

And now, to be really clear, he started out by being a 100% war blogger, war on terror, clash of civilizations, Islam versus the West, let's topple Saddam, let's topple Iran, let's just do it. His role model, his expressed role model, when he first started blogging, was fucking Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundant. Yeah, he was, he was, he got put on by getting the coveted Instapundant link. Long time listeners of the show will remember who Glenn Reynolds is. He's disappeared from public consciousness now, but before, you know, Twitter and social

media, he was one of the original blog hawks and is a literal genocidal madman. But like, what's so funny about you, Glacius, is he spent his whole career punching left, but like the thing is, to maintain a purchase on a liberal audience, he keeps having to apologize for past fuck ups, like, you know, the Iraq war, or maybe slightly less dramatically. Different countries have different standards of safety, and that's okay, like after a factory collapse in Indonesia killed like, Bangladesh, Bangladesh killed like 300 people, 3000 people. So he keeps having to like revise and like, you know, sort of do these like disingenuous apologies for past positions to maintain his purchase on a liberal audience, but never sort

of like cons to the fact, or I'm sure he does personally, like internally, that like he's still shitting on the people who are always right and continue to be so. And like the thing is now post 2016, that like all of these people, their perfect dream of Hillary Clinton was exposed as a total failure, and the real beneficiary of that election outside, you know, Donald Trump and the fucking Republican Party was Bernie Sanders, who has now as we're seeing in this 2020 campaign, completely shifted the conversation of like, what is the acceptable policy, like what are what is the agenda for a Democrat running for a national office.

So they're all they're all pretending now that they're on board for all of that. But for some reason, they have all of these, I don't know, concerns or caveats about Sanders and the people who support him in particular. And like, they're still finding a way out of this. And I'm sorry, they've settled on Elizabeth Warren as the way to like untangle that knot for themselves and everyone else. Guys, I think you can I go contrarian corner here for a minute. Yeah, still you guys are being a little too tough on Matthew Eglacius.

You know, as my grandfather would say, I think he's a gentleman and a scholar. And we've talked about early period Eglacius, the fierce unfettered uncucked, you know, former blogger. But I think we shouldn't neglect middle period Eglacius of the the sort of money. This is what he was a business expert. The money box Eric. I was actually reviewing the record and I'm just, you know, from, you know, the sort of specifically sort of second Obama administration, Matt Eglacius, you know, the author of such

posts that, you know, I, you know, we know we're going to be reading this stuff for years to come. American markets hypothesis says America is poised for better tacos. You know, I got to say, he's kind of right. Tacos have gotten better. Why? I've noticed that. Yeah.

Why Marco Mario Monti is the Lieutenant Commander data of the European Central Bank. Go off. Wow. He's actually the lore of why Obamacare exchange implementation is going to be the best political rollout since New York City's up progressive up zoning. Okay. All right. I admit I'm I'm amalgamating a few I was he was cocaine sold in metric units.

Matt Eglacius wonders yeah. I was a victim of the knockout game. I was a victim of the knockout game. Yeah. Matt Eglacius is a victim of a knockout game on a quiet evening, leaving Megan McArdle's house friend of the show as one does privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Our hobbit's human city should sell land to the highest bidder. Oh, don't forget my favorite actual Matt Eglacius columns where he begins how to think about

a mass transit strike. And here's how I think you should think about these cases. Imagine that you woke up one fine morning to find yourself as the head of your metro areas mass transit agency thought experience about a strike. Imagine waking up as management. This is how we should all think about strikes. Wake up and be the boss dear penthouse. I never thought this would happen to me, but I found myself in charge of a medium sized mass transit system.

Six annoying things about Roy Rogers is new chorizo breakfast wrap six things. Can you say that? That was September 17 2013. I mean this was politics. You guys remember the blogosphere. Sure. This was the Golden Age. I mean, and this is I think we're going to have more of this to come potentially

in a in the doldrums of a second one administration favorite Eglacius idea was you should. They should auction off hotel. They should auction off restaurant reservations to the highest bidder because it's not fair. It's what if people want it more? They should be able to express their preference by being willing to pay for it. We need to deregulate barbershops. Oh, yeah. That will improve pizza quality in up zone neighborhoods in I never get one.

Yeah. Like that's sort of like the urban answer to learn to code is well, just deregulate all of like the home businesses so everyone can be a bartender or I mean, everybody can be a barber. Everybody can do nails. It's like, well, everybody can do nails and everybody's a bartender, then it's not going to cost anything. But you know, but like I've seen Eglacius like say recently like, you know, I'd be fine

with Sandra's as president. You know, I'm rooting for the guy like, you know, what does it say to you? He just likes you. Well, yeah. Yeah. No shit. Yeah. But like, what is this idea that like, like, like people like, like Matty and his ilk

are pretending to be on board for this? Like, well, like, I know he, I know he got pissed at you for the article. He just kept going off and be like, you know, I'm not going to pretend I'm not mad. I am mad. Matt, Matt Karp, you know, badly misstated my argument. Matty Glacius. Yeah. What did Matt, what was his bone of contention with this article?

I mean, I actually can't remember because I can't, I don't know. I was blocked. Yeah. It's actually amazing. He was a Kafka-esque experience to be sort of realized that you're absorbing insults from some kind of like distant account that is like constantly showing up as like, you're not allowed to see this tweet or whatever this tweet is hidden. And people just telling me in like sort of indirect ways like, oh, Matty Glacius just

came after you. Oh, and I'm like, how do I even, anyway, whatever. I'm obviously a Twitter version because I don't, I don't have an alt. I'm not able to sort of, you know, so I sort of actually know the substance of, you know, of some of his critique. I don't think there was much. I don't think he read it, to be honest. I think he said something like this Jacobin two-step, blah, blah, blah, like Bernie will

magically make healthcare appear or whatever, which is not the argument. Well, I mean, for people like Matty, there's a whole cohort of them now, yeah, like they talk about like the Jacobin line or whatever, and they're all, you know, like they're, again, they claim to be for like a social democratic vision or like the politics of Bernie Sanders, but they find every way conceivable to question and doubt the actual movement that he has created, the people who support him and him in general. And it's like, and what they've done is like, there's a whole group of people, and they're very salty about this, that are very, very invested in the idea right now, that there

is absolutely, like Warren and Sanders are totally interchangeable candidates, and that anyone like, you know, you or us or whatever, who tries to articulate that there is a meaningful difference between them, they do represent a real ideological split in the Democratic Party are, you know, they're bullshitting, they're being paranoid, they're being hysterics, and like what's worse, they're damaging the hopes of, you know, the millions of people who want, you know, Trump out of the White House. And not just an ideological split, like this is now I'm remembering some of the assumptions of the critique, I think he just like handed the hand of the ball over to like my console

who was like quibbling with the data or whatever. I mean, it's not just an ideological difference, it's a difference in this coalition, the same question that like the piece is sort of based on this idea that what is, is if there is a path forward, because there may not be, I mean, we may be have to just accept nihilism on the class alignment question. But if there is anything like, anything like a path forward to rebuilding a working class party or a working class movement or a working class led sort of vessel in American politics, it's so obviously the Sanders movement.

It was, and you know, they looked at, they sort of took issue with some of the polling cross tabs. Oh, under 50,000, you know, under the $50,000 year, Warren has equivalent support as Bernie. Yes, Warren has started to pick up across the board, it's not the case that every rich person supports Warren, every poor person supports Bernie. But what is clearly the case is two things that is dramatic and overwhelming in the evidence. The higher up the income chain you go, the more enthusiastic and disproportionate the Warren supporters get, and among the, among low income people and working class people

who are engaged at all in the politics, Bernie is disproportionately stronger. B has the support of not just potential voters, but donors, volunteers, people getting involved in the democratic process. It was actually really wonderful how right after this came out, we stumbled at the Twitter sort of discovered that database where you could sort of measure the individual job occupations of donors to the campaign. And you just saw all these sort of ridiculous numbers where, you know, Bernie, Bernie has of the, you know, Bernie's overwhelming support from teachers, nurses, retail workers, drivers,

bartenders, all the way down the line. Something like that comparable to Elizabeth Warren, usually two, three, four, five, eight times as much of the support. So the idea that there's anything like, and even Consul had to be like, well, yeah, Bernie does have overwhelmingly larger support among, a much larger support among blue collar workers. It's just, that's what we're talking about, an activated working class, not just a working class that will show up and vote Democrat because the alternative is fascism. What we're talking about is a working class movement of people in a lot of occupations

who aren't comfortable affluent six-figure Democrats getting engaged in this process and trying to, trying to move the ball for their own material interests. That's the, that's the only way forward. And to pretend that there's not a difference going on here between Bernie and literally every other candidate, Warren included, whose numbers look just like Buddha judges on this, on this front is either blindness or actual just mendacity. My favorite thing on the, the, the, the jobs and professions question was that on the top for Elizabeth Warren was both psychologists and psychiatrists.

And I saw someone being like, well, what do they know that we don't, you know, as I said on Twitter, she is killing it among characters in New Yorker cartoons. Number one choice. I would want my therapist to be a Yang, a Yang gang guy. I feel like he would, he would just, he would give me the unvarnished automated truth. You want to, you want to do more listening to fucking Billy Eilish and just taking Perkisette. I just think, oh you fucked this shit, man. It drops hard truths, man.

He tells American workers that they're going to be roboticized. Well, the therapist, you know, I mean, like they, they have a reason to because they're going to be replaced by like Voigt Conf machines. You know, like they are, that profession is going to be automated too. Don't, don't get it twisted. The other hilarious take on this is, Hey, who we're talking about, this person's name is like again, like a Felix character, like Cresca Grunch or something. Tamara Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I was just just someone I saw. She's just saying like,

I think vice president of Demos where Elizabeth Warren's daughter is on the board. Yes. Right. What's that like? Tamara Groot. She said she was like, you know, I'm for Warren, because like, you know, she she's got a better chance of winning and she's got a better chance of building a multiracial working class coalition. And it was just like, Bernie Sanders is running for president. You know that, right? Like, he's literally doing the thing that you are saying only Warren can do. And here's what's been interesting to me. Like, we talked a little bit about the rally to begin with. And like, obviously, there's so many ways in which this entire class of people puts their thumb on the scale for anyone other than Bernie, but now clearly Elizabeth Warren is to

both pretend like Warren is like, I've seen people on TV say like, Elizabeth Warren is the only one out there that's talking about healthcare like we should talk about it as a human right, or misattributing Bernie's best quotes to Warren and several news articles and leaving them uncorrected. But more than anything is just like to ignore Bernie Sanders is to ignore like, again, the rally, you know, New York Times covered it on what, page 29 on Sunday's edition. And like, that is actually like, it's not it's not the outright lying. That's the most effective, like the most insidious way in which these people, you know, work their ways, work their magic is just ignoring Sanders entirely. Because in a way, it's a kind of, it's an admission, it's a quiet, literally tacit admission that these

ideas are popular, they can't be contested. When you when you go up there and say and just like sort of howl no we can't, your Amy Klobuchar and you're polling at half a percent, you know, that's that's where you go. So you can't take them head on. So what you want the best possible outcome is to sort of have a version of the ideas that floats without the coalition or without the kind of organized, frankly, anti anti anti anti anti institutionalist populist energy that goes along with the Bernie movement that would render the Demos and the think tank worlds of think tank people of this world, if not irrelevant, you know, we can bring them back in as adjuncts, but would render them less central to any kind of left political project. And that's what they're

that's what that's where they're dug in. It's about where their own relevance stands. And under Bernie, they're not the center of the action. Under Warren, everything goes through them. Well, you know, what do we talk about them like let's let's talk about the rally. We were all there on Saturday. Like I said, I'm sure you saw photos of it. It was the single largest turnout for a demonstration political demonstration of this campaign season. I think it passed Kamala's campaign announcement in Berkeley, California. It's, you know, it blows away even shit like Trump does. This is 26,000 people in Queensbridge Park on on Saturday to come out for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her endorsement of him. But like the whole point of this was,

you know, I'm back post heart attack. I'm energetic. I've got the strength to got that baboon heart in there. I've got those stents and it's like my high, you know, my my my arteries are just like like a freeway at like four in the morning just blazing down the fucking clear eyes. Full heart can't lose. Yeah, exactly. Doing it. Honestly, that's what it felt like to me. And honestly, I I just felt so much fucking love on Saturday. It was great. Like the people there were wonderful. It looked like fucking everything that like, you know, we should hope for it looked like New York City. It looked like what we want, you know, as a future for this country. It was a it was very diverse and specifically intergenerational, which I found very interesting. There were

multiple families around us that had two, three generations of people clearly. I saw a lot of sort of like white haired older parents and they're like, you know, maybe 20 something fail sons and daughters. And then I saw a lot of young parents with very young children there as well there with your fail son. Just like God, we've got to get socialism. Gotta get socialist. I gotta get socialist. I gotta get socialist. I gotta get you out of the house. God damn basements. It was it was beautiful. I got there a little late. And so I was in that long wraparound line where there was a line to get to the line to get to the line. And it was amazing just looking out at 20,000 people who are all showing up at a 26, maybe even 30,000. You know, if you count the

people who couldn't get in showing up basically, you know, for a reason, you know, on a Saturday morning in Queens to sign up to fight the billionaire class. I mean, it was something that reminds you if you're wrapped up in the online world where you just think everything is, you know, your brain is melting over like a Nate Silver tweet or something. And you just are like, the world is bigger than that. You know, it's actually bigger. There are flesh and blood people here who who are fighting for this, who are with you. And I mean, you know, it's one of the best feelings in politics actually to be in that space with all that energy. Yeah. And Bernie was lit. He was strong. He came out to back in black, which was very cool. And I'm sure a song he's

never listened to in his life. I like I think he just listens to like Pete Seeger. In my mind, he's just listening to the classic like Union songs actually never heard. He's never heard a song with an electric guitar. I did see an interview with him where he showed a lot of love to Abba. He was like, well, I mean, come on. You got to recognize. He was like the record of hits that they put out in the seventies. Incredible. A raft was only made possible by the nurturing bosom of the Scandinavian welfare state. But no, Bernie was was really good. And he is I gotta say, like he gets a wrap for people like John Fave star for being kind of a one hit, one trick pony. Oh, really? Oh, class again. Oh, wake me when you have something new to say, you know,

which is of course idiotic because that's really the whole game. And that's what you're trying. You're beating that drum for a reason. You're trying to wake people up. But I still find that when I've seen him now a few times, there's always some line that kind of like gets me. And this one, it was at the end when he says to the audience, he's like, look around you, you see somebody that you don't know. And you promise to fight for them as hard as you fight for yourself, fight for somebody who has student loans, even if you don't fight for somebody who doesn't have health care, even if you do. And I mean, that is the only only thing we have against concentrated capital is that that principle being put in action because they

have literally everything solidarity and numbers. That's it. Yes. They have everything else, which is why any, any attempt to, to fashion some political movement that is premised on, yes, like a elite brokerage is doomed because it's going to get subsumed into the machinery because that's what it's there for. Bernie, Bernie got a big endorsement on, on Saturday too, right? Michael Moore finally came out. We were waiting for it. He also proposed a, I think he proposed a literal invasion of the island of Manhattan. He gave me this line too after the election, how New York produced Donald Trump, New York is to blame for Donald Trump. If he were a New Yorker, he, he would, you know, he would have to almost

self-immolate because New York is responsible specifically Manhattan for all of the ills. I mean, in a way, he's not wrong. No, that's true. You know, I mean, you know, New York did produce Donald Trump and New York has reaped, you know, Manhattan has reaped the benefits of this entire, you know, the entire neoliberal era that we've been talking about. Oh yeah. It's just a big, fancy playground for, for rich people and more importantly, their idiot children. No, and like, it was actually all the more poetic because, you know, Queensbridge Park is like, you know, offers this beautiful vista of the Queensboro Bridge, but also like all of Midtown and like you can see off in the distance, Lower Manhattan, like these,

you know, gleaming towers, like the new 140 story, you know, residential buildings that are like two thirds empty. Matt, you said like these buildings, like I said that there, there's a floor with 11 Bengal tigers walking around. I said there's a floor only for Falcons. Yeah. So there's a balcony floor. There's a floor of fucking ski dues, gold plated, like four wheelers. And it's like one board Saudi grandkids just doing donuts or he's like, he's on the top floor doing real life fortnight with a bunch of homeless people. Ruby encrusted baby strollers gifted by Ellen DeGeneres. Yeah, various. Yeah. Lesser Rembrandt's and Vermeer's used to store blood money in physical form.

No, but no, we actually, we hung out with Michael Moore for a little bit after the rally, but I would just say a slight critique of our friend Michael here when he was on stage, he got the crowd going in a chant to be like, they say Bernie's too old. What I say is too old is student loan debt. So like, just say too old that he got the crowd chanting too old and I'm just like, no, no, it doesn't look good on TV. I'll tell you who has coronary artery disease, the American economy, too old, too old. They're like, no, no, cut his mic. Cut his mic. Nina Turner came out. She, she, she took a couple shots at Warren and Biden, which I really like came out hot. Not the least because she was wearing a leopard print outfit with the like

of quite of a Victorian trench coat. It was very, she was kind of steampunk. She looked like the dang Joker. She also, you know, we were in Queens. So she was like, you know, this, this brings to mind LL Cool J. Don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years, which is, you know, very, very good line for Bernie Sanders, but I think she could have pushed it a little bit further and just been like, you know, if you elect him, he will be doing it and doing it and doing it well for you. You know, you, uh, he can't live without his radio. Uh, you can't live without healthcare. So maybe, uh, get on board this Medicare for all shit. No, but I saw a lot of people, uh, the line that people were getting again, angry at, and this is another we've talked about before,

the assumption that again, this door only swings one way weirdly. I mean, odd how that, that works out, but the assumption that in a primary competition between different candidates, um, um, attacking another candidate or saying anything slightly salty about them is like completely beyond the pale. And what she said about, uh, Elizabeth Warren, which is 100% true, is that, uh, she, she had the chance to run in 2016. Bernie even asked her to do it and she didn't because she didn't want to challenge the ascendancy of Hillary Clinton or go up against or risk the damage of what happened to you for crossing the Clinton family. And Bernie Sanders did it. And guess what? He's reaped all of the benefits of that now. And in 2020, Elizabeth Warren

is going to, you know, show up again and say like, Oh, I support all the same things. And it's just like, you had your chance. You had your chance and you blew it. You blew it. And he, and then Bernie did it instead, even though he didn't want to do it. And he built up this thing, uh, largely just because of how awful the Clintons are and how much we're all sick of them. But like it also by his, the virtue of his ability to have clear, uh, you know, to clear agenda that he articulates clearly, uh, appeal to people based on their class interests. People think more importantly than anything, people actually believe what he says, which is untrue of basically every other politician is that like people think, yeah, he's not full of shit, which is basically nobody else has going

for them, including Elizabeth Warren. Uh, and then yeah, he used it to become one of the most popular high profile politicians in the country. He, he, he, he, and then you know, he's going to run again in 2020 and she runs against him. Yeah. Why would you do that? Well, Matt, just to your point earlier, if you really cared about this stuff, you would get on train with the guy who built the fucking thing. And this underlines our point about individual, you know, sort of virtual and values of politicians and why we are in the position of needing to sort of have actually played the game that everyone else is playing. We do need a hero because we don't have a, we don't have a party that can produce good hacks. A street wise Hercules. So we need,

we need to build that. We need to like, we need to build that from the ground up. So to get there, the wager is that the labor movement isn't coming back on its own. You know, it's great that we've had a, you know, the red straight strike wave, red state strike wave. It's great. It's optimistic. We're not teachers just this past weekend. Absolutely. Everything on Bernie, but Bernie is part of the moonshot here. The idea is, look, things haven't been going our way structurally for a long time. And so therefore we don't have these institutional forms that can leverage our politics. We actually need somebody who is uniquely committed to this shit. And Elizabeth Warren just, frankly, just doesn't pass that test in terms of her own, leaving aside the structural issues,

just in terms of her own commitments, given that that's what we need, frankly, because people will point out, they will say, you know, it's very naive to think that Bernie is going to be able to do all this stuff, you know, either from the snarling centrist, right, like Eglaceus or from the far left, saying you're absurd. This is foolish to think that this president can do this. No, I can't, but I'd say that any, any road map towards a decent future and away from barbarism of Sanders presidency is a necessary precondition. It I cannot see it anything good happening without that as the first big step in a series of, of course, a series of steps, but it's the first one and I just don't see anything happening absent it right now,

right, right. Exactly. I do want to talk along those lines about the AOC endorsement. Yes, because in a rare moment of, you know, chrismatic optimism, I just remember you turning over, turning to me as they embraced on stage and going, that's it. That's the left and it was a powerful moment because now as we're talking about building coalitions, that is the bridge between generations. Yes. What if Joker, except he got the girl. Yeah. And it's just Bernie, the, the, the unreconstructed old leftists, the guy who synthesized the old and the new left and then refused to fucking, you know, bow down and was willing to steal cable and run for mayor fucking Vermont and run, run for governor on like the Liberty Union ticket

in order to maintain his vision and not become one of these creeps. And then he got AOC, you know, who was inspired by him to, to, to stop, to run for office at 29 or whatever. And then the huge gap in the middle are all those people, all those Gen Xers who grew up in the Tina Thatcher world and for whom it's literally impossible to think of something else. Like they are conditioned the way that people are in the fucking Orwell. Like they cannot even imagine a world existing outside of the structures that they were introduced to their whole lives. And that's why Buttigieg is their avatar avatar of that. Yeah. I just about the AOC endorsement as well. I mean, I know over the last few months, she's been in there for a while. We were waiting for the endorsement

to come to happen, wondering if it even was going to be, it's possible to have started to feel a little cynical about her place and role in this like the superstar of the left in Congress. But the way that she did her speech, the way that she came out and not just an endorsement, didn't talk about her, but talked about how at every point in her life and her family's life, that the one person American politics who is struggling to make her life a better world was Bernie Sanders. And that everything that she is, her whole thing is, is him, is directly due to him. I found very powerful and enthusing to me about her place and accepting the baton from him. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's a lot of question about her AOC's real

agenda or like real preferences or whatever. But the fact of her being basically, you know, in Congress by herself with very little support system among the Democratic Party, I think you get back to the question we said earlier. It's like at the end of the day, we should be able to build a system, build a pressure group and build organization whereby her desires are beside the point. It doesn't matter what she thinks in her heart. And she is the potential when people say Bernie's done nothing. I mean, like she's, you know, we were saying she's the most famous bartender in America, right? She is the working class person, whatever the complexities of her background, you know, she is the working class

person who not only, you know, sort of, you know, pressed a button every two years for a Democrat or whatever, but not only volunteered and, you know, I think worked her ass off for Sanders in 2016, but then got involved in her own race and just against incredible odds against ridiculous odds. The number three, I mean, whatever, we all know this, we don't need to rehash this. But it's actually, it's like she's become such a fiend phenomenon that actually like the sheer unlikeliness, the thing that got me in her speech was when she was like, in February 2008, like, you know, like February 2018, I'm like, I was a bartender. It's like February 2018. That's, that's like a couple of weeks ago. You know, I mean, it feels like she's been around forever,

but she is just, she is only, you know, two years ago when Chappos started, you know, whatever it was, three, you know, she's longer than that. Exactly. We're all just getting old and sad and, but, but she, you know, that, that whole story, that is evidence of something that Bernie is tapped into that is larger than him, that she absolutely is a part of whatever her own, yeah, her own ideological project. I'm not, I'm not sure about, but she's absolutely a part of that. And I think I, I, I am very inspired by her making this call in this moment with the campaign on the ropes, with the heart attack. That, that story got to me. And I don't know, I was, I was super stoked to see her on the stage. And, you know, if you will engage with me in this, you know,

you know, it's quite a fancy, a slight hypothetical here. I think it says everything. Can you imagine what would have happened if this weekend, the squad, Alexandria, Elan Omar, Rashida Tileb, like, you know, the three of the youngest, brightest, most exciting women in Congress had come out and endorsed Elizabeth Warren. And then Warren had turned out 26,000 people to a political rally for her campaign. It would have been, the race would have been over. The talk of every morning show. It would have been, it would have been a news story all week long. You'd still be reading about it. And like, there'd be op-eds being like, should we cancel the, the November debates? Not only that, but like the, the pressure on Bernie to drop out would be immense.

Yeah. And like, you know, perhaps even not unjustifiably so, but like, I mean, the fact that they, that they endorsed him and the way that the media has chosen to cover it in the barest news way possible, whether just like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorses Bernie at rally and Queens this weekend. A politician assembled a crowd of some size in a baseball field in Queens. Like, there's no, like, there's no further like meta analysis or opinion about it. Well, no, there is. It's that you know, actually, endorsements don't really matter. That's it. That's it. Or why? I mean, I saw the CBS this morning thing where it was, it was actually probably the most favorable bit that they got. It had an interview with Bernie and AOC talking and like the reporter, like kind of in this baffled

with this baffled expression on her face says, why would you support this old white man? That was amazing. And then they take it back to the studio and she's like, and she said, you know, and she's, I don't remember what AOC's answer was, but she was like, you know, and she said she did. I don't, you know, it was just like, that's water. That's just water. Just in comprehension at this, at this concept. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. But what I would say is, okay, on a more pessimistic, but underneath that on this sort of, you know, you know, all gloom, all doom, no gloom kind of mindset here. Even if Bernie loses, I think what this, this also matters, even if he doesn't actually, you know, hit the lottery and get the delegates and get the momentum and ride the

lightning to this nomination, which by the way, he totally absolutely will. But in the extremely unlikely event that that doesn't happen, I think this AOC endorsement means for one, the, and the squad endorsement, because I think to lead will become, will be coming soon. It's the emergence of, as I think Megan Day and maybe others have written, a sort of a coherent left project that will sustain under Bernie throughout the primary. There's no way he's going anywhere for a long while. And then we'll sustain through after the election, no matter its outcome, as a kind of at least that some sort of independent force that has a distinct identity that can exert a pressure from the left in mainstream politics, but also continue to build

sort of an effect towards working class power and politics, which I think is a project that continues regardless of this election, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess just, just to wrap things up here. On Saturday, you know, just being in that park, seeing Sanders, seeing AOC, but like more importantly, seeing all my friends, seeing all the people I love, together there, I had an amazingly fun time, but like, I did feel, I did feel hope, which is a dangerous thing, but you can't live on it, but you can't live without it. And I just got to say, I, you know, this is a, this will be nothing new to listeners of the show. But there is no other choice. If you can, if you could have been like, you know, awake and

seen what happened in 2016 and now see it again in 2020 and are on the fence about Bernie Sanders, I just, I don't, I like, there's no hope for you. That's it. That's it. Hey, no mind list. I got a list. I got a list. I'm putting people on it. You cannot see a few flirting with Warren. You go on the pay no mind list and then guess what? I pay you no mind. A lot of people say they have a list. Well, I actually, I actually have a list and it's a fucking pay no mind list and you go on it and I pay you no mind for the rest of your life. You can't support both of them. You can't pretend that like, Oh God, can't they both be president? You know, or just like, or just all of this, this hemming and hauling or whatever. It's like you're on board for Bernie or you're not. Yes.

And you can be on board for Bernie and not criticize Elizabeth Sanders or any of the other Democrats. If you want, if you think that that'll, you think that's more productive. Elizabeth Sanders, should we have like a dynastic merit? That's how we would have settled this in medieval friends. Jane, sorry. No, that's it. I will not, I will not do that. Yeah. You know, we have to protect Jane. Yeah. I mean, to me, to me, the, the pose of indifference or a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B at this point is tantamount to an endorsement of Warren. I mean, frankly, I mean, just within, within the, in the extremely like sort of narrow, blinkered, frankly, sad universe that all four of us inhabit on the left, on online world, there's no question that that kind of pose

in this space amounts to a task and endorsement of Warren from my perspective. And I'll tell you why is because if you are adopting the position that they are both interchangeably good and like they believe all the same things, there's no, like, you know, if they're interchangeable, that is a explicit endorsement of Warren, because you were saying that if that is the case, then it behooves you to vote for the woman and not the older white guy. And she's younger. She, you know, by six years or something. Yeah. She has various other, you know, she, you know, she, she has more pull, she has more pull within the Democratic party, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're all these, if you don't actually believe that there's a

fundamental difference in ideology and coalition in trajectory, then of course you would vote for Warren. I mean, it's ridiculous. If you just think what we want is a progressive Democrat, then, you know, you're, then, then, then Warren's the answer. But I mean, she's not the answer. Yeah. I mean, it's at the end of the day, she wants a better Democratic party that's more fair and sticks up for the little guy more than it currently does. But it's clear and Sanders sort of has to soft pedal this because, you know, he is running for president as a Democrat. But I think it should be clear that like he understands that the problem is the Democratic Party. Which is why he never joined them.

I thought it was very telling after the debate, they, for, for some reason I sat there and I, I put on the, I did put it on mute when, when Pete Buttigieg, Buttigieg was, was interviewed, but I actually watched a lot of the post game interviews on CNN. I thought it was sort of revealing with Warren on Medicare for all. I mean, for, I mean, there are a lot of ways that we should be wary about Warren on Medicare for all. For instance, the fact that she doesn't work it into her stub speech like ever, but leaving that aside, the way she's sort of, the way she tends to answer these questions when she's pushed sort of from the media, especially about, about, you know, ambitious economic programs, she'll give a line about how we need to change this. And then

she'll immediately pivot to, as Democrats, we need to fight the Republicans who are perpetuating this unjust order. It's, it's a reduction of a class or an economic polarization to a partisan polarization. And that is, that is absolutely part of a significant difference between Bernie and Warren and part of Warren's project to sort of turn everything into Democrats against Republicans. Maybe that's a smart move in, in, in, in terms of primary politics. Maybe Bernie should do that more, whatever. But it's clear that this is the sort of the future of politics under Warren is just Democrats against Republicans in the same, digging into the same trenches that we already have that have produced the outcome that we already see. Right on. Well, I think that's the good

place to end it for this week. Let's thank Matt Karp once again for coming out. The article is in Jacobin. All right. Cheers everybody. Bye. Anyway, here's back in black. I want you all to take a look around and find someone you don't know. Maybe somebody doesn't look kind of like you. Maybe somebody might be of a different religion than you. Maybe they come from a different country. My question now to you is, are you willing to fight for that person who you don't even know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?