Chapo Trap House - 470 - Mothership Connection feat. Derek Davison & Daniel Bessner (11/9/20)

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

We’re joined by the Chapo Foreign Affairs desk of Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner to discuss what might change and what might continue in a foreign policy transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Then, we get beamed aboard the MOTHERSHIP as we take a look at Daniel and Amber’s recent Jacobin article on Democrats’ material incentives to lose. Subscribe to Derek and Daniel’s substack Foreign Exchanges here: https://fx.substack.com/ And check out Daniel and Amber’s Jacobin piece here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/democratic-party-2020-elections-campaign-donations-failure

He said jump Okay, Chris queue queue up the queue for intro vid. The media said what? The media said Joe Biden's present Ha ha ha ha that's uh, that's me watching tucan birdie Someone from the charismatic tradition he started off a little wooden, but he picked it up at the end And it's all about the closer. It's all about the closer. I have to say that didn't really read to me as terribly confident kind of a little overcompensating going on there. His name is Kevin Copeland. Kenneth. Kenneth. Yes. Kenneth Copeland. Step on the joke there, Matt. I know, but it's Kenneth.

God damn it. And the funny thing about the guy is that a few years ago, someone asked him why he felt it was okay for a Christian minister to have a private jet, which he has. He's a real righteous gemstones type guy. And he responded that he couldn't risk flying commercial because he might encounter a demon. And that is true. I mean, there are a lot of demons. I mean, if you phone commercial, right? Do you know he actually used to be Oral Roberts, his pilot? Wow. Yeah. Well, now there was a good, there was a good charismatic creature. Oral, yeah, Oral Roberts, like, that was a guy who could sell it. This guy can't really, no, I feel like anyone who's going to this guy's ministry, like sort of deserves to get scammed. Oral, yeah,

Oral Roberts, you could believe that guy was having a close personal friendship with God. This guy, no way. Fuck off. God does not return his texts. Do you know who's with emojis? Do you know who Kenneth bought his private jet from at bargain basement prices? Tyler Perry. Tyler Perry. Oh, right. Tyler Perry. Oh, I thought it was Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell's jet, like, I don't like probably not even safe to fly anymore. It was probably built in what like 1951. Yeah, you don't want to take a blacklight to it either. Yeah. Between I mean, between this guy and the and Trump's spiritual advisor, you know, doing the mind out of Africa thing with that guy, like randomly walking behind her, it's been a really great week for, for videos of

evangelicals. Yeah, I'm just waiting for my shot. Well, everybody, it's hello. It's choppo. We're back. Just some update the news from our previous episode. It does, it does appear as though Joe Biden will be our 46th president. But you know, I just got to say, just with the caveat, it appears that way for now, for now, but you know, got to keep counting those votes. The angels have yet to be heard from and I still think that there's a good chance that Donald Trump's going to pull this one out, guys. So I'm just got to with it. Got to got to keep that powder dry. I don't want to get owned. But I'm just saying here, you know, a lot of people, there's gonna be a lot of egg out there, a lot of egg on people's faces when it turns out that our boy, Trump actually did win all those

states. Once I mean, once they stop counting all the illegal saying he's saying they're getting great results back, they're getting great early results from Wisconsin, that there's new votes coming in all the time and that they're seeing more and more of them. I just think, you know, I mean, like it's it's gonna be a lot of a lot of shot and Freud out there. When all the people who are making fun of Trump for losing, they're going to be doubly. I mean, this is part of the plan, though. This is part of the plan. The ballots have been watermarked. Once they find the ballots that watermarks and throw them out and arrest the people for doing illegal votes, it's going to be a landslide. So I just got to say, it may seem now like Biden is president, but you know, we are,

you know, we're not going to make that call yet, because I just I'm not going to get made fun of I'm not going to get caught in my pants down on this when Trump is eventually reelected. Has Bill Mitchell responded? Has he commented? I don't know much like Q. I don't think Bill Mitchell has posted since the election. Anyway, guys, check in. Yeah, let's do a wellness check in on Bill. But just to kick off this episode. Okay, we have a we have a full deck here. We've got myself, Felix, Matt and Amber. But we are also joined by the Trappo Foreign Policy Desk, Derek Davidson and Daniel Bezner. Hello, guys. Hey, hey, thanks for having us. Okay, well, I appreciate it. Just just to start out today's episode, though, I mean, like I have to speak

on an issue. I have to address this at the beginning of the episode. You know, we're doing this over Zoom like we normally do now. We've got the cameras on. I'm looking at all my co-hosts here. I do not see a single poppy being worn by any of you. And that is a bloody shame. Actually, I have a poppy shoved into my urethra. I have a bunch of poppy shaped anal beads in my ass right now. It's the second day of the day of remembrance. What are you guys doing to remember our boys, our lads? You mean Billy the butcher and the other gang from Amazon primes of the boys streaming now on second season, third season coming soon? No, I'm talking about the many, the many great lads who perished the top blokes. You mean in the Falklands? The Falklands, we have a separate

holiday honoring those of us who have gone on holiday with the misses and have been attacked by a penguin in the Falklands. But we're talking about the First World War, our great lads who died and were exemplars of top class. Absolute legends. Again, back to the World War one thing. It is weird that they still are into it. I mean like it did like devastate the country and whatnot, but it's like a lot of those still alive. You know, maybe do it for the seven ones that are walking around, give them a little party or something. It was a hundred years ago, man. Get over it. Literally a hundred years. But it was the most just war. That's the important thing is that they died in the least amount of vein of anyone in the military. It was the most important

war probably of all time to figure out which of a group of interrelated chimless pig fuckers had the coolest mustache. Yeah, my cousin deserves this river in Austria. And it's also, it also honors other heroes of English history. People who were injured while performing stunts on shows like Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Holly Oaks. People whose dog track was attacked by the IRA in the 70s. Things like that. So if you're out there, you know, it's going to be the end of the second day of remembrance by the time this episode is over. I want to see those poppies. Get those poppies popping. Get those poppies popping. To all our British World War One veteran fans, thank you. I saw a really touching picture of one of my favorite shows in the UK. It's one of those

panel shows where it's a bunch of just disgusting guys who were all shot in the face by the IRA in the 70s. It had very crude facial reconstructive surgery and they all cough on each other at a table. It's called like newsmates or some bullshit. And it was one of the newsmates and Cookie Monster both wearing a poppy. And they had Cookie Monster solemnly look down at the floor as a moment of silence for her boys. I think it's, and I don't use this term, but cultural appropriation for them to take Cookie Monster. That is an American icon. Frankly, one of the most American icons. Yeah, Cookie Monster. He loves cookies. No, Cookie Monster was actually born in Northern Ireland. He's a unionist.

One of the orange men. We will be showing all of our wives how we won cookies down in Flanders. But yeah, if you see anyone out today, especially if you're in America not working the poppy this week, just do a class intervention. Like just said, this is a class check moment. Stop. You're exhibiting no class. You put on the poppy. You'll immediately be exhibiting top class. Felix, one of the best things that you clocked about the poppy mania is that they've managed to project a poppy onto a cooling tower of a nuclear power plant somewhere in like the middle of England. That is absolutely top class. That is top class. That is like Garth Ennis would reject that for being too unsubtle. He'd be like, ah, that's like too

crass and lame to do. That is so fucking grim. Just walking by the nuclear cooling plant and saluting the poppy. It's so awesome. Well, I mean, nuclear energy is the green future. So maybe it's a progressive message. Well, okay. So we got a full deck, guys. And you know, I mean, just technically, technically it is a new era in America. I mean, again, like, and that's assuming that, you know, Biden is not arrested between now and January, which very well could still happen. But, you know, so how you guys feeling? Were you guys shouting in the streets? I mean, I was throwing pots and pans out of my window onto the street. That's how happy I was. My neighborhood went popped. It was popping. People were in the streets.

They were dancing. I went to Plaspect Park. There was a huge crowd at the Glen. At one point, they did the cha-cha slide. And I remember 2008, which was just had a similar feeling, sort of an Ewoks on Endor type deal. The chop, yub-nub and such. And I was just, I was so struck by the difference in my reaction compared to it and witnessing it from then to now. It was kind of stunning. Like, I didn't feel anything. I wasn't even mad at them. I wasn't even like, look out, look at the libs. I just was like, the entire scene just evoked it mean nothing. It was very surreal. So I was woken up by like cheering and announcements and whaling and, you know,

what's what's the joyful eulation eulations? Yes, they were eulating. I felt very apart from my fellow man. Yeah, that's the feeling. Very, very. I was, and I was like, relieved, sort of in a technical sense, because it's like, okay, maybe now we can start talking about politics again, and not orange man bed. Like, but that was more to do with the actual results of the election. The actual response of everyone made me feel incredibly lonely. Yeah, it seemed like the response was really celebrating, having not to think about politics almost. That's what it felt like to me that people were excited. Like Italy in 1992, and everything was better.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, now I was feeling, I was feeling like the dude from that book. There was, there was nothing in my neighborhood. I mean, Bill Clinton is like still president in my name. There's like, no one gave a shit. It was, and it's not a conservative area either. Just like, no one gives a shit. People are on their business. People are about their business. They're not fucking wasting their time creating a little hobby out of really caring about the political football game. Yeah, Felix actually lives in Lumpen Hill. It's a great area. I'm okay. So everyone who lives in my neighborhood, I'm the only person who lives in my neighborhood who is like born in America. Everyone else is from the country, Georgia or China.

And it's like, I'm like, yo, I'm with you guys. I don't give a shit. Let's get this paper. My local elections that I voted in are incomprehensible to me. Don't care. It's awesome. Yeah. I don't know. It's weird, but you know, whatever. I'm happy when people are happy, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. No, I got, I was sort of feeling that, Amber. I think like, I mean, I intuited a certain amount of the, like, we're just so happy, like not to care about this bullshit anymore, which is like, honestly, I kind of, I honestly, I kind of like sympathize with. And but I mean, I thought it was more, it was just like, people were so desperate, or at least here in a bourgeois hipster Brooklyn, it's just like people were so desperate for like anything

good happening this year. That this was it. Like, it was, yeah, exactly. It was just like, it was a, it was this overcompensation after like, you know, just, just fucking disaster after disaster this year, and just feeling like, oh, it's like, it's never going to get any better. And like, this was like the one sort of exterior sort of global national event, where everyone could sort of like, come together, at least in here in New York City, and be happy again. And you know, whether, obviously, I mean, you can be very skeptical about whether things, you know, can or will get any better. And we'll talk further about that as the show goes on. But I just think it was like, people were, people just so wanted to feel happy,

they wanted to, they wanted to have something to feel happy about. And I guess like, you know, as little enthusiasm as I had for the whole thing, I mean, I guess I can't be, I can't, I'm not going to be a sort of like, angrily shaking my fist out my window, like, go home, stop making noise. And I would also say like, I don't think it was fraudulent. I think it was the conflation of relief with joy. Exactly. It was a simulacrum of joy, yeah. Which is sad, but it's still an improvement on the anxiety they were feeling before. So, you know, like, let them, let them have it. In reality, you'll hit them in the face soon enough. It didn't remind me of Obama winning. I was, I was in Chicago for that. It reminded me of when

Bin Laden was killed. Oh yeah. Yes, you're right. People had to, people had to pretend that they felt really good about it. USA, USA. And with Bin Laden doing it, there was this sort of like, undercurrent of awareness, like, well, he like kind of won. Yeah, yeah. He kind of like looked at everything. He kind of won. And with Trump, it's sort of the same thing. It's like, yeah, Trump is the, he's now the living embodiment of like, well, still beat though. Yeah, I was, I was just relieved because we published Daniel's post-election piece on like Thursday, and it was premised on the idea that Biden had won. So I was happy not to have to eat shit over that. That's the only true joy is not having to eat shit.

Yeah, but people are still throwing around shit. I mean, on Twitter, I was, there was attempted canceling of me for claiming that Trump wasn't a fascist. So emotions are still running high. Can you use that? I thought we were here. That is American pop-e-mania. Yeah. Pretending, pretending like Trump has executed 100,000 journalists. Oh my God. The journalists, they were made to feel unsafe in their lived environments. Yeah. Well, imagine, imagine how much shit you would have gotten if you weren't a Daniel professor and were a mere podcast. I thought we were here to have a struggle session with Daniel about this to convince him that it was in fact, yes, yes. The guys who filled the streets to do karaoke fucking singing and line

dancing, that's the stormtroopers who are going to overthrow democracy at any moment. And by the way, you don't get to laugh at the limp dick. You do not. At the limp dick stealing efforts that are mostly just a grift anyway. Like a lot of this was. Oh my God. It's totally a grift. Yeah. Yeah. If for the past four years, you were like just screaming at anyone who wasn't totally on board with whatever Democratic candidate that they were folding in the face of fascism. It's a fascist, okay? Fuck off. Remember that, lady? No. Yeah. If you, if you, if you've been doing that, you do not, you do not now get to go, LOL, look at Trump. He's such a loser. He's so pathetic. I'm sorry. How is the figure that you have conjured in your mind over these four years,

the figure who just goes, well, hopefully, you know, they'll clear it up and we'll see it. Keep watching TV folks. So they're going to get some big returns out of Wisconsin. Who knows? And people might kill myself. Yeah. People just doing the cha-cha slide in front of the fucking board of elections or like a macing themselves to get on Joe Rogan or whatever the hell they're doing, nothing involving any mass violence, not even like the military or police state doing anything on Trump's behalf. Just everyone sort of just silently waiting awkwardly for him to just get tired and, and sleepy and then go to bed and then they'll just sneak him out of the White House like Willie Mays Hayes and Major League. And you're going to fucking tell me that you don't have to

seriously reconsider your fucking apparatus of understanding the world. If you've spent four years assuming that this guy was going to be capable of pulling off anything more grandiose or dangerous than what we're seeing in front of us. I think that you're going to see people still defend the fascist thing. I think it's going to be a- Oh, of course. No, you can't ever, you can never say you were wrong. They're committed now. Your stock goes down. You lose subscriber if you are ever admitted to be wrong about anything. But it will be very interesting to see them try to basically, they're going to, I think they're going to build like a QAnon apparatus to explain why we didn't get fascism, why it's actually just occluded fascism and waiting in

the wings that we have to battle. And that's why we have to support Joe Biden in all of his endeavors. If you deny that something is fascist, you are in fact- You are in fact, it's proof of being fascist. Yes. Yes. Because why else would you say that? Because it's so self-evidently true that you would only say that if you want to make people, you want to disguise the threat from them. Matt, that sounds like something a fascist would say. Yeah. If he is, if he is a fascist, then you don't get to laugh at the Four Seasons thing. That's the equivalent of Mussolini returning and being reinstalled, isn't it? Yeah. Right. Yeah. The March on Home Depot that he used to take power. What would Trump look like, look like hung upside down though?

Oh my God. That would happen. They're alone. It would all set on him. Funny as hell. Cooling around. It would be like beef lo mein put in his Ziploc bag. Oh, once again, Felix paints with the light. Yes, monstrous. Well, it's all fun and games, Daniel, but I'll have you know that here in Brooklyn, people who were tweeting things like that were having their heads shaved in the streets among throngs of a jubilant, newly liberated Brooklyn. Well, yeah, you brought it up though, because I mean, it is hilarious. The Four Seasons Landscaping Company press conference, has this, okay, has it been confirmed that they just accidentally booked it when they were trying to book the Four Seasons Hotel in

Philadelphia? We don't know, but the claim is even more insane than that. The claim is, is that they didn't want to have a press conference anywhere downtown because every time they did it anywhere that people could get to ahead of time because you know, you'd say we're going to have one here, people would show up. They would always get heckled by people yelling, you know, count the votes or whatever or telling them that they sucked and they didn't want those optics. So they wanted some places that was way out of town and that they could just zip in and out of like the way that Macaulay and the guys planned the armored car heist and heat and that they told Trump Four Seasons and he just assumed it was the hotel. Okay. That is the official claim, although I don't

know if I believe that either honestly, because that seems insane too. Because again, there is a Trump golf club in Philadelphia and he would never, ever do a Four Seasons if he had a Trump venue to do it at, even if he was sending someone else to do it. Yeah, that's true. And also, I don't know, but the yelling thing also kind of doesn't make sense either because like it doesn't matter where there's, first of all, it doesn't matter whether you're running for president or not, there's no where you can go in Philadelphia proper where you're not going to yell at. Like, that's just the city. Well, it's way in the mid, yeah, but that's just it. It's out in the boonies. It is. It's like, it's a way out. It was between the Dildo factory and something else.

Oh, the porn shop. The porn shop. Yeah, no, it's about 10 miles away from downtown Philadelphia. And of course, the funniest detail about not just the press conference in front of Four Seasons landscaping, it's that Four Seasons landscaping is situated directly in the middle between on one side, a Dildo store, and on the other side, a crematorium, which could not be a more perfect summation of the end of the Trump regime. But I mean, can you imagine... Are you sure the Dildo store wasn't called a crematorium? Can you imagine, though, what a Dildo store... Can you imagine what a Dildo store in Philadelphia is like? I think it's like a... Definitely a body front.

It's like a thrift shop. It's like a secondhand Dildo store. It's a secondhand sex toy shop in Philadelphia. Yeah, you can put stuff on layaway. Well, I mean, I want to get to it here because we got the foreign policy desk here. And I just want to take these off. Derek Davidson, you just published a piece on foreign exchanges that is sort of a look forward to what the Biden administration's foreign policy will look like. And you sort of outlined... It's a little bit of speculation, but you're outlining... Potentially, what are some of the things that could get slightly better? And what are some of the things that could get dramatically worse?

And I'm just wondering how you see overall a Biden foreign policy or the terms of the people who will lead it and in terms of the assumptions that are undergirding his view of the world and America's place in it going into potentially a new administration. Well, Derek, maybe I should actually start because I could start with the structure and then you could get into the policy stuff. That might make sense. So, I mean, I think just when we're looking at the structural material issue, I think we're going to see an exact continuation of the American Empire, the 750 military bases, the enormous amount of money spent on $740 billion spent on the military,

the fact that there are 190,000 soldiers deployed abroad. I think we're going to see an absolute continuation of all of those things. So then the question is, what can we actually expect that's going to get worse? And just on the structural level, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a new Cold War with China. I mean, I think it's going to be very different from the First Cold War with, you know, the number of proxy wars and all of these other things. But I think you're going to see a significant strengthening of the military industrial complex where you're going to see a lot of contracts going out to build surveillance equipment,

to build weapons, you know, to make work jobs for people within the United States to fight this new Cold War with China. And I think you might actually see, and Derek would disagree with me if I'm wrong, I think you might actually see a reduction of troops in the Middle East. That seems to be like the new bipartisan consensus is that you don't really need the Middle East. But I think like structurally, the things that really matter, that might have actually been changed in the Bernie Sanders administration, where we were talking about things like, you know, reexamining the bases. Do we actually need this fucking incredible number of bases when China has won? Are just going to be, you know,

business as usual. And it's actually kind of depressing. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, Daniel's piece, we've published three now pieces on where things may go from here. And Daniel's piece kind of looked at the overview. And I think if you had to sum it up in one word, it would be a continuation of, well, that's more than one word, sorry, but it's a continuation of American impunity, which is one of the defining features of U.S. foreign policy, and has been that way, you know, virtually since the end of World War II. Trump, what Trump did, I think, and what what a lot of people, you know, look at and say,

oh, well, he made everything worse. He changed things, you know, this American first America first policy kind of, you know, represents a real change. I don't think it represents that big a change. What it represents is sort of a rhetorical shift from kind of not talking about openly about the idea that the United States is free to or an empowered to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, wherever it wants. Trump was more open about just saying it. And that, you know, you'll probably see us kind of try to get back to the days when we didn't talk openly about that, but we're not going to change fundamentally, you know, the the the core of the policy of U.S. foreign policy here. And, you know, we're going to continue to maintain,

you know, the notion that, as Daniel said, you know, the United States is entitled to have bases all over the world, we're entitled to have troops all over the world, we're entitled to do drone strikes all over the world, we're entitled to sanction whomever we want, whenever, for whatever reason, no matter what kind of harm that does to people, you know, regular civilian people around the world. So, you know, if I had to sort of put it in in one overarching kind of category, that's what I would say. I mean, there are obviously different areas where I think, you know, unspecific issues, Biden may be better, he may be worse. In, you know, he may he's likely, I think, on China to, I think, take advantage in a sense of

what Trump has done, which is sort of clarified what had been a kind of inconsistent U.S. approach to China, we're going to engage them here, but we're also going to treat them like the new Cold War opponent in these ways. Trump just kind of discarded the idea of engagement and went straight for the Cold War stuff. I think Biden's likely to maintain that to a significant extent, and, you know, you'll see U.S. policy toward China very focused on sort of containment and opposition much more than it was, say, under Obama or before that. Can I, where did he land on Corona and China? On the bottom side of that equation. He stopped talking about it, really. There was that one ad where he like sort of in an ugly way

kind of accused Trump of being soft on the pandemic and soft on China, and he got so much criticism for that, that they kind of they kind of dropped that altogether. Yeah, just one thing I want to add quickly. I think a trend you'll probably see under Biden, which you started to see in the second Obama administration, is a move towards so-called clean war, where there's going to be a lot of arguments in favor of type of competence and cleanliness toward war fighting. I think that that is going to be a new word of the day going forward in what might be called like liberal internationalist foreign policy, because they can kind of no longer really claim humanitarian intervention, but they're just going to claim

that like the war that they do is, you know, more humane and more clean than other people's wars. Yeah, I mean, that was sort of how Libya was sold. Libya was sold as a one and doneer, that we were going to hit Qaddafi. All our coalition partners and our forces in Libya had worked out a post-Qaddafi arrangement, and there would be no partition of the country or no civil war bearing intensity for a decade, and you see how that turned out. I think drones are a really good kind of illustrative example of this. I mean, after sort of first term Obama really escalated the use of drones and took a lot of criticism for it, what you saw sort of more in second term Obama was this idea that, okay, we're not going to stop

using drones. We're not going to give up the, you know, the claim or the right, I guess, the power to strike anytime, anywhere, any place or any, you know, anyone. But what we'll do is, we'll put in place these like accountability measures or transparency measures that will make it all good. Like we'll do a better job of counting casualties and being transparent about it, and we'll do a better job of sort of working with corrupt local governments to kind of, you know, guide our policy. And it's all kind of, you know, a fig leaf type of a thing. You can't really rely on casualty counts because you don't really know how the United States government, you know, defines a civilian versus a combatant. You can't rely on, you know, working

with local authorities because local authorities are liable to just say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, my political opponents, they're all terrorists, you should drone bomb them. I mean, it's things like that that sort of give you the impression of some kind of accountability, but don't really, don't really provide it. Okay, like, I mean, in addition to looking forward to, like, potentially what a Biden administration foreign policy look like, and, you know, I mean, I think the consensus here is that it would be a continuation of basically, you know, American imperial hegemony, or just with a nicer face. But to that extent, like, let me ask you this, to what extent did Trump's foreign policy represent, if at all, a breach or a split with, like, American foreign policy doctrine or

the blob? I think it was fundamentally in line with everything that the blob had come to expect. It's kind of the way that I think about it is similar to his judicial nominations. He gave the party what it wanted, which is, you know, essentially American military dominance. I think why people within the establishment didn't like him is because they found his rhetoric so distasteful. I mean, Trump ran on an anti militarist platform. And I mean, I don't know if Derek disagrees with me, but I don't think he governed in this way whatsoever. I think the big change that you might actually see, and I'm curious what you guys think about this is that I think you might actually see a kind of sundering between the European American, I mean, as close as it was, I don't think

it'll be as close in the future. And you might actually see European nations begin to pay a little bit more for their defense. You might actually see NATO come under more serious questioning than it has before. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think that's been coming. I think that was going to happen, regardless of Trump or not, because this, we're on a down swing. This whole thing we've got going on here, or Kosinostra, that, you know, you could argue over who started it. I like to think of our current iteration as a Dulles Brothers project, but it's not what it once was. Do you think HW or Reagan or Nixon or Ford, for that matter, would have had as much trouble as the Deep State did replacing regimes in Syria, in Bolivia, in Venezuela, as they did. And yeah, no,

they succeeded in Bolivia, but it was later and done. They couldn't, they didn't have the same magic that they once did in Chile. They couldn't close the deal. Yeah. Well, this is, I think that the bonds holding both the EU and NATO together are fraying. I think there are a million examples of this, but what are Turkey and France doing together in the same military alliance? Yeah. How do they act? Do they act like they're in an alliance together? Is that what you see? Do they act like they're part of a currency union? This was not built to last. And every pro-EU thinker and every Atlanticist, they all say the same thing. Oh, well, this is the longest period of peace ever in the European theater. You know, working with a sample size of what, like 60, 70

years, everything comes to an end. It's ridiculous. I mean, you actually see that with Turkey supporting Azerbaijan and Russia supporting, you know, Armenia, you see basically the creation of these new constellations of power that are beginning to recognize the weakness of the United States on a geopolitical stage. And I think the interesting thing to me, just theoretically, is I think we're going to have this totally decrepit, depraved society at home, but still maintain this like massive material structure of empire on a global scale with nuclear weapons that, you know, we forget, could really annihilate places. And I'm not sure if we've ever seen that before in human history. Back to what Felix said about, like, this kind of EU NATO alliance.

I think for, I think initially, a lot of the anti-EU sentiment was purely focused on the EU as an economic unit because they thought of NATO specifically as, and they describe themselves as a purely intergovernmental, a non-economic, as if there is such thing, organization. And I think at this point, like, they made the leap, at least after the second referendum in the UK, it was no longer just the EU, it was like, oh, the EU NATO, there's no such thing as a purely intergovernmental, this is also economic, they're all part of the same project. And so I really think like broad popular opinion is turning against both. Yeah. And to go outside of the EU a little bit and NATO, I was thinking about, do you remember Saudi Arabia's play to isolate Qatar

more early? Oh, yeah, well, they blockaded them and they were like almost going to invade or some shit. Al Jazeera was hilarious saying that. Well, they try, I mean, they tried to launch a coup in their inimitable Saudi fuck-up fashion. Yeah, I would love an oral history of everything they tried to under Trump. But the thing that people don't talk about a lot with that is it failed pretty badly in a lot of respects. And one thing it succeeded in, it brought Qatar, Iran, and Turkey closer together. You know, the kind of opposite thing that the Saudis had wanted. And that happened in the first place because they, you know, the Saudis clearly went to a disinterested and ignorant Trump and were like, hey, we're going to do this. And he was like, sounds good,

you guys were nice to me. Yeah, you gave me a sword. Yeah, it was one stupid guy asking a dumber guy permission to do something idiotic. And what it caused was this polar realignment in its region. And I think we're going to see sort of, I wouldn't call it exactly localization, but I think we're going to see less regional powers or aligned with the United States or aligned with Russia or aligned with China. And they're more going to be like quick relationships of convenience, like Turkey, Iran and Qatar did in that in that instance, based on opposition to a to a larger, like more imperial project, do you mean? Or no, just sort of like marriages of convenience between two or three regional powers that could

only exist sort of in a vacuum of a super of a superpower's auspices. And like Felix, just to build on what you're saying, that's exactly what's happening right now between Turkey and Azerbaijan. I mean, Turkey's eventually essentially invested it for access to the pipeline. And Azerbaijan seems to have taken some of the corner carabakh today. I think I read that right before we went on. So like exactly what you're saying, these new constellations of power, I mean, like what is India going to do, right? What, how is it going to ally with South Korea against Pakistan and China? And this is what I mean by like the post post Cold War era, these gigantic hegemons, I just, I just think are going to be less important. But the fucking

weird thing is you still again have this global structure, which is going to be there and is going to be this, you know, sort of distorting elements. And I don't know what that's going to do. If I really want to scare somebody, we have a crumbling, we have a crumbling core, a crumbling domestic front and a crumbling state apparatus, a rogue general or a rogue CIA officer or a rogue Department of Energy, whatever, could, you know, their missile installation, their base where they've got the nukes, they could go, Hey, this is just mine now. My guys are loyal to me. And I can just fucking launch this into Central Asia and wipe this whole planet out. Like that's what's not going to happen now. But 50, 60, 70 years from now, I don't know.

Stranger things have happened, right? What happened, you know, I hate like one to one analogies of the fall of Rome to the fall of the United States, because they're going to be totally different. And one took place when, you know, five, two guys fought each other's swords. One's going to take place now. But there is, when the core crumbles, everyone on the frontier of the empire, they decide they're their own agent. What's going to happen when those sole agents command fucking nuclear warheads? And I think we actually don't know a lot of what happened under Trump. Like I think that as time goes on, and I mean too bad no one funds investigative journalism, but I imagine like the military was super decentralized. So like who

knows what special forces were used, who knows what already local generals were doing, local ambassadors. I think we actually don't know what happened on the ground in a lot of cases under Trump. I do think that Trump factors in here, though, to some extent in terms of, I think we all agree he didn't change fundamentally anything about US foreign policy, but there was a certain level of unpredictability or capriciousness about some of the individual decisions that he made pulling out of the Iran deal, pulling out of the Paris Accords, pulling out of arms control treaties with Russia, the Open Skies Treaty, the two aborted attempts to pull American forces out of Syria that just turned into gigantic clusterfucks basically. The diplomacy with the Taliban that's

turned into this weird thing where we've really kind of incentivized the Taliban to escalate its war. There's just been a lot of unpredictable stuff, I think, for people who are making decisions in other countries. And I do think that the possibility that the United States could elect another guy like this, which lingers and will continue to linger, affects some of what people are thinking in other countries. And this move toward, you know, I think the buzzword now is strategic autonomy. At least that's the way the Europeans talk about it. It does have something to do with that. It may not be a major factor, but it is a factor, I think. Talking about, I guess, the reframe here, more on the domestic front and the future of American

politics, the question is now, and you brought it up, this idea of, oh, what is the next Trump going to be like? The GOP's search for the next Trump begins now. And hey, it could just very well be Donald Trump running again in 2024 or his idiot son, Don Jr. But the thing is, do you remember back when Democrats were asking themselves who the next Obama is? And the thing is, if it were that easy to find the next one of those guys, they'd fucking do it already. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. These attempts to retcon Obama into Mayor Pete or into these other vessels, and I think you're going to see the same thing with Donald Trump, but it's the Aldi brand. And not just anyone can do it, even if they're adopting the rhetoric or in Pete's style,

the actual voice of Obama and the way he talks. And also, an integral part of Trump is that he was anathema to working with the Republican Party. So it's like a catch 22. If you found a Trump, he wouldn't want to work with you because he has oppositional defiance disorder, and that's why he was attractive to people. I'm not even sure, ideologically, to sort of continue what we were talking about in terms of the foreign, what other parts of the world look at the United States and the election of Trump and what they take from that. I don't even know if it's an ideological thing, it's just the possibility that the American people elect another reality TV dumbass.

There's that level of just like somebody could get in again who doesn't know what the hell he's talking about or what the hell he's doing, doesn't understand anything and just kind of go ham on us, and we have to be prepared for that kind of just complete uncertainty. Well, speaking of loyalty and uncertainty, did you guys see that Donald Trump unfollowed Netanyahu and A-Pack on Twitter? Because they congratulated presidential elect Joe Biden. And I just love the idea that like Trump is just, I mean, it's not just Israel or like the Israel lobby that Trump is finding this out about. He's finding it out about the entire Republican Party. Is that like, you know, it's like, Netanyahu ended Naftali Bennett is my new best friend.

What do we always come back to? Casino. It's like, you think they gave you all that fucking money because you were so smart? Like, you think you're so fucking indispensable to these people that like, once you go away, they can't possibly, they can't possibly even recognize another American president after you, Donald. We've got a grand bargain to make, which by the way, they're going to do in about five minutes. Oh yeah. Basically, it could not do with Trump. And no, and it couldn't happen under Obama either because they didn't have like a, like they, like in two years later, like the Yahoo, like Tea Party fucking caucus, like coming in, like the freedom, which is like possibly the only thing that stopped Obama and Boehner from cutting in

documents when they had a chance. And there's, there's going to be none of that now. They're going to be like, that is going to be like the big, like I could even see Biden getting in there and like canceling a certain amount of student debt as the one thing he does at the beginning, at the very, very beginning of his administration. The one thing he does that's a SOP to like young people and to the progressive wing of the party, broadly speaking. College kids. Yeah, exactly. And that like that will be used as a future democrat of consultants. Yeah, like of like, oh, like why, why it was right to vote for Biden or why it was wrong to have been skeptical of him and like, look at this, he just, you know, he canceled everyone's debt up to $50,000,

which I'm, you know, I'm not saying don't do that, but like that is going to be the, just like that's, that is the fig leaf that they're going to use to justify cutting social security and Medicare and doing, doing a grand bargain. The actual and also to give it, also to give a stimulus to the housing market, like they do actually need people, there are, they are going to need people to buy houses sometime soon. We put a lot of the economy on the housing market. So like at some point, it will make sense for them to do some debt forgiveness just to give real estate a fucking goose. Yeah. I mean, housing is the investment vehicle of the American middle class. So it's absolutely no one can afford to buy a

goddamn house. Nope. And let alone these McMansions that they built in the suburbs, Phoenix, that isn't going to exist in 50, 50 years. And then when, and then when Kamala runs in 2024 against John Taffer, and it's just been more for misery, four years of misery and like prop 22 is now like a national law and like they've completely, uh, territorialized labor to this like 24 hour exploitation machine. They'll say, but this college debt, they got rid of the college debt. Yep. And then you got to vote for them. You got to vote for her. Then it's like, maybe next semester or maybe semester, maybe might as well be a semester, maybe the next term Kamala will give us those Pell Grant, uh, uh, for going into the developing neighborhoods and building a freaking

good, uh, mustache wax store. Well, this gets into, uh, uh, Daniel, the piece that you and Amber collaborated on recently about, you know, I mean, this is, this is old hat for, for listeners of choppo, but I mean, you guys asked the question, uh, do Democrats actually want to lose? And, you know, I think people may rebel against that because they're like, oh, look how much energy they just put into, to winning this election. And like, are everyone so happy now that Joe Biden won the White House? But like, yes, they want to win the White House, but they're totally happy not winning anything else or just keeping, like they, or they, they never want to press their advantage in, in any way. And I was just wondering if you guys could expand a little bit more on,

like, on, on some, someone who might be skeptical about the idea that the Democrats are like Max Bialy stock and the producers that they, that they win by losing. Yeah. So I think the basic idea is, is less whether they're trying to lose on purpose, but the fact is that they don't really need to win to continue the grift that they've been pulling for a long time. And so the way that, you know, I think about it in the way that Amber and I were thinking about it is that there's like actually a material basis to the, these like seemingly ridiculous candidacies where people spend tens of millions of dollars. I think this was actually the election in which most money was ever spent on, on campaigning and, you know, people lose. Like we were highlighting

Jamie Harrison, who just got crushed by Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. Campaigning, by the way, being a very broad term that covers a lot of things that most of us would not consider campaigning. Right. Consultants. Exactly. And so we always talk about like these, these pathetic campaigns and they always get crushed. And the reason is like, why do they keep on being run in almost the exact same way? And I think what Amber and I were trying to point to in that article is that, you know, a lot of people are making a lot of money off these campaigns. And so one of the things that we highlighted, I think in the, in that we actually just found that was in the Harrison campaign. A lot of the donors actually came from out of state,

which isn't actually a, we don't think is a problem necessarily, but the, Yeah. Like we don't want to end up in a situation where we're like, we're anti-carpet bagger. Carpet baggers are good. We all live in the same country. And the idea that states are little fiefdoms is bullshit. So as small are Republicans, that's good. But in order to be a carpet bagger, you have to actually fucking pack a carpet bag. You have to go somewhere, or just pouring money into it is clearly just like moving wealth around. It's wealth transfer. Right. And that's what we've been seeing is basically like rich Democrats in the coast funding these ridiculous campaigns in the center of the country or wherever in the south,

the historical south, that really have no chance of winning. And so when you actually look into the consultant companies that go behind this, one of the one that ran the Harrison campaign or actually received a lot of money from it was this company, Mothership. And I think it was the Washington Post wrote about them a few years ago. And Amber, you want to give the details of this? You guys know about Mothership? Beam me up. No, what is Mothership? You'll know about Mothership. So Mothership is a consultancy firm and also a political advertising firm. And that's what's called vertical integration. So you hire them to consult for your campaign and they tell you, ah, I know what your campaign needs. They need to hire us to tweet. And then you give them

even more money to do that. So Mothership has 7,000 employees. All of them are millennials. All of them look weirdly mutant like. Actually, there's a 2019 Washington Post article. If you'll permit me to do a little reading series here. Well, if you mind. Absolutely. Okay. So this has been the Washington Post and it's from January 8th, 2019. How a little non-democratic firm cashed in on the wave of midterm money. So these are the people who got like, I think 12 million from Jamie Harrison, Osoff, you know, just like winners all around. The solicitation piled into voters email accounts, sometimes multiple times a day, and they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters. We're on the verge of

bankruptcy, bankruptcies, all caps. Our bank account is almost empty. It's an exclamation point, almost empty all caps. Trump is inches away from firing Robert Mueller. Remember that? Remember that time? The catastrophic language yielded a fundraising bonanza for clients of Mothership Strategies, a little known and relatively new digital consulting firm that raked in tens of millions of dollars from a tide of small donations that flowed to Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections. The firm's ascendancy is one of the highest paid vendors of the election since its launch four years ago, speaks to how lucrative the explosion of small dollar donations has been for the group of savvy political consultants who saw a wave of cash coming and built a business

model to capitalize off of it. But its lightning quick rise also had sparked the consternation in Democratic circles, where Mothership is sometimes derided as the M word, because of its aggressive and sometimes misleading tactics such as claiming and fundraising appeals that President Trump is preparing to fire the special counsel. Some critics call its approach unethical, saying the company profits off of stoking fear of Trump and making the sort of exaggerated claims they associate with the president. They are Fox News, but for libs, basically. They scare people. They scare old people. The company's three millennial founders are unapologetic about their tactics, so much so that one employee's bio on the company's website touts she has

mastered the all cap subject line, which is in all caps. The tone of their email appeals, they said, is in keeping with the Trump era. This is a unique moment in American history. The urgency of our emails, the volume of our emails reflect that, said Jake Lipset 25 during an interview with the firm's sleek offices near the District of Columbia Heights neighborhood. Seating next to him, prepare yourself, was his two-year-old golden doodle, C.J. Craig, named after the White House Prestexter Kerry in the California political problem in the West. That is what I'm talking about. We could take a break to just discuss that, but these are exact, I can't parody these people. We can't. This is the material basis for why Democratic

campaigns are run the way they are. I think that's really critical to emphasize. There's a lot of people making a lot of money off of campaigns that are almost designed to lose, might be too much but certainly not designed to win. That doesn't take seriously. I would say that they are designed in such a way that, over time, it will be impossible for them to win. That's just because that's the structure of the party. It's the personnel and it's also the institutional inertia and the interest structure, which is all made up of the same corporate interests that are driving us towards full extraction of profit and denying any material base to politics of any kind. They can't run any other types of campaigns. Exactly. The objection would be, well, won't

people stop donating? Actually, no, they won't. We've learned that they won't. Maybe after a long and on a long enough timeline, but they do not stop donating. If anything, they donate more to lost campaigns, which they address here. Every day there's breaking news coming out, Donald Trump has done something actually outrageous, slips it said, keeping people informed of that and capitalizing on these big moments is something that's really important. I don't know if that was a pun capitalizing, but I thought it was cute if it was. Lipsid and other members of Mothership, Charles Starnes and Greg Berlin, both 32, met them at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee where they worked in digital outreach and fundraising. They credit their success

to that experience and to their connections in democratic circles. I haven't looked up their parents, but I would like to know the extent of the connections. The firm has gone rapidly from fewer than 40 staffers in January 2017 to 100 by the end of 2018. They have to have more than that now. The company said it helped raise nearly 150 million for its clients in the 2018 cycle. The surge of cash helped make Mothership one of the top paid firms in what is the most expensive midterm election in U.S. history, collecting 35 million for its services from political committees during the past two years, according to federal election. This is talking about the 2018 election. They have since blown through all of that. It is insane. Lipsid,

Starnes and Berlin said that the company retained less than half of the money it was paid, with the rest passed on to their vendors for expenses. Oh, less than half of, was that 35 million? And the vendors, by the way, are also me. Right. If you look into, like have us say, the Lincoln project spent its money, $23 million alone went to a firm founded by Lincoln project co-founder Reed Galen, whose only office is in Park City, Utah. Vertical integration, baby. So oftentimes when they're saying that they burned half their money, which already should get you sent to prison, only spending half, only keeping half, that money that they spend on vendors, the vendors are usually them or their friends. We're going to scratch back down the line.

It's exactly the same as Trump's self-dealing, exactly the same. Just replace, replace fucking Carl's Jr. with Coasey. They were asked about this, by the way. They declined to discuss the company's profits or reveal their salaries. However, they acknowledged the firm has brought them success. Public records show that in the second half of 2017, all three men purchased homes worth more than $1 million each in snazzy Washington neighborhoods, not far from their offices. Very humbling. Yeah. By the way, interesting little aside here, you remember in Scarface when Tony and his sister go to his mom's house and he's just walking around like an asshole all coped up with a big water cache. Yes. His justification to his mom of what he does is

that he's involved in politics. He's not wrong. Makes you think. Oh, I wish, I wish all these people could get the Scarface ending. Back to Trump for a second. I mean, it was reported the other day that he's starting some sort of new campaign apparatus to go around the country supporting the legal efforts to invalidate the votes that would have otherwise not made him president, whatever. He's going to keep stoking the fires. He's going to keep going with these lawsuits, but keep doing rallies and keep essentially campaigning to be recognized as the rightful president. Now, people are like, oh, this is a bit frightening. Then you look at the fine print and you find out that all of the money that will be donated to Donald Trump in this effort will go

to servicing his debt that he accrued on the last campaign. That's what freaks him out. A pure grip. I think that is basically what we're going to see with the future of Donald Trump is that he will never concede. He will never officially concede, but he will slink out of the White House because he's not going to die or go to jail for this shit. What are you crazy? And neither are his fucking supporters. No one really wants to die. Absolutely not. No one really wants to die or go to jail over this bullshit. Nobody wants to miss a meal over this shit. I don't mean to say some lone crazies definitely will and do, and that's disturbing. That's America. I don't want to downplay that, but I think Trump will

never officially concede so that for his suckers who are going to keep giving him money, he can keep stoking that, but also for him psychologically, he'll never really have to admit that he lost anything. He can just go on forever doing what he always does to say, oh, I was treated so unfairly. This is so unfair to me. Can you believe it? And I think he will, for the next four years, a conceivable future, be a kind of president in exile for the right wing of this country and for his MAGA base. And I think he will do rallies and I think he will go on right wing TV shows and radio shows where they'll kiss his ass and pretend he's still president. But he will keep raising money that he will be using to basically pay off his massive amounts

of debts that he has accrued over his both presidency and lifetime of corruption and criminality. But yeah, I think we will see, I think we will see Trump as a president in exile and that for a third of this country, there will be sort of an avenue on papacy for the presidency. Yeah, I got to get to one part of this though. So the critics know that the firm charges clients a commission of 15% of funds rages online. The industry standard is seven to 10. They're pulling off of small donors, which again, like that's a model that Bernie built up. So they're basically eroding trust among people who make small donations. And they do address the fact that they suck at this. For Caveiro, the Democratic consultant who used mothership service for

Arizona congressional candidate Hyrule Tibernini, the concern laced campaign's efforts to raise money quickly. So the tone of the, oh my God, we're dying. So mothership's ability to fund raise was quote, revolutionizing, Caveiro said, helping the campaign raise $2.5 million in donations of $200 or less, more than half of the entire hall. But the campaign struggled to tone down the language in a way that aligned with Tibernini's message, she said. The world is falling down, it's caving in, donate $5 is not the right approach. We didn't want that on Hyrule's campaign. The constant struggle was that Hyrule wanted to run a campaign that wasn't the roof is coming down on us, but on either side they're saying that's the most high generating one. Mothership was responsive to the campaign's request

to ratchet back its tones, she said. Tibernini lost her congressional bid, but overall Caveiro said she was pleased with the firm's results. Would I use mothership again? Yes, she said. There you have it. And what's so despairing is I don't see how one possibly challenges this barring some sort of like revolutionary change and something, but it's really fucking evil and. They ran the first Osof campaign and the second one. Okay. How can you tell me that this is in any way anything other than just moving money around? Like they don't do anything. Making jobs for people. It's a make work program. Exactly. It's make work for fail kids.

And here's the thing though. Here's the thing though, like this is all happening in a political context. And like Matt, you and I talked about this the other day in which any campaign spending any amount of money on media or advertising at all is basically malpractice. It's just, or like it's just money down the fucking toilet, or it's not really actually going down the toilet. It's going to their, you know, this political patron, sort of modern political patronage network. And not only that, like not only is like this media not do anything that you should spend money on, apparently traditional campaigning doesn't matter either because Joe Biden barely did any of that either in the primaries or in the general election. And it didn't seem to make that

much of a big of a difference. So like we really are in a moment now we're like, you know, what is politics? Like what are elections? Like what are campaigns in this country? Like what do they really represent and how do they actually function? Because a lot of what we assume about like how you win an election, how you run for office, like, you know, how do you like, what do you do? Like what are the steps that you go through? A lot of it just doesn't seem to be connected to reality in terms of like what actually wins elections. Yeah, I mean, like, like Joe did well because of name recognition. And I think well, he won because of name recognition. And because people were incredibly sick of Trump. But like the thing that we know actually does work is talking to people.

It's not these fucking psychotic emails, which they absolutely raise money or at least will for a while. But they clearly are massive losers. And I'm sorry, these people these ghouls that work for this thing. Do you want to hear just a couple of their work bios? Hit me with it. As principal, Will leads the execution of digital programs for some of the top democratic caucuses in the country. Serving as communications director on a red to blue race in the 2014 cycle, he brings superb policy acumen and storytelling skills to the table so that clients can always stay on message. A campaign veteran four times over, Will is driven by passion for digital communications and field organizing public policy and diet Coke. They're all like

that. They're all like that. They all end with this tweet little but hey, I'm a person. They're all a fucking Twitter bio for wine moms or something. And there's so many of them. And they're making so much money tweeting and emailing people just shrieking that the sky is falling. And they just keep losing over and over again. And they make more the next time every fucking time. And this also explains like Mueller and Russia, which I think a lot of people rightly critique, but this is what that sort of politics does. It essentially ran off of. It's what they emailed to these like libs. One of the reasons that that shit got inflated. It wasn't just mass media. It was literally like an apparatus of the Democratic Party that we don't think about it,

which is all of their fucking fundraising like MLM schemes. Exactly. I wonder if one of the real lasting innovations of like the Sanders campaign 2016 and then again in 2020 for these people is going to be like, you know, these are the same people who in the 1990s were like we have to give up all of our like any connection we have left with labor. We have to give it up so we can, you know, grift off of money from Wall Street. I wonder if the like the 2016 campaign especially was like a wake up call for these people like, Oh, hey, like we don't have to grift off of Mike Bloomberg's hundred million dollars. Yes. You know, solely we can figure out a way to figure out a way to grift off of these small donors and like so they do have a Bernie bobblehead

that they took a picture of in the in the thing. And I remember thinking like, these people can't possibly like Bernie, but then I'm like, Oh, I know what they liked about Bernie. All the fucking got a whole bunch of people to donate a little bit of what they had. That is a brilliant populist fundraising strategy that involves people in a campaign in a very real and like meaningful way to them that gets them invested in it. And they are fucking destroying that trust. I think that Bernie campaign, I think one thing they might have done to maybe win, although I don't know, obviously, there's no way of knowing, is if it's been spending any money, because obviously, Bernie went into the campaign was very high name recognition. He didn't need to really get his name

or his agenda out there. He was a he was a brand. And then that why he was able to raise a ton of money as soon as he announced, instead of spending that money on more ads, if they had just spent that money on ads, not for Bernie Sanders, but directed towards an audience saying, Hey, do you want to work for Bernie Sanders? And then instead of paying millions of dollars for these guys fucking like latte orders as they sit in these offices in DC to conduct a normal campaign within the normal parameters, and in the same way targeting the same bullshit, hire people, not like huge amounts of money, like supplementary income for people who have other jobs, maybe who could then go out and just talk to people that they know field staff, field staff is the only it is not the

only, but it is the best investment that a campaign can make. And it's hard because it's very run at like a multi level marketing thing. You get like tears that you get like bonuses if you recruit enough people that they do. It's like pure pyramid schemes collapse because you eventually the base gives out. But here, every fucking additional level is more fucking people. Yeah. So this is all of this is by design and these people, these people that Amber brought up, they it's not that they fail at their job. It's what their job is. Right. Their job is to maximize returns and then secondarily maximize turnout and participation by college educated Democrat. Yep. They don't want non college educated Democrat. They don't know how to talk to those people.

If the party is just non, if the party is just college educated Democrats, you never have to have both, both legislatures or if you do have them, you could have them by, you know, an Obama margin where there is a Joe Lieberman or someone at play and you go, Oh, well, we actually need 60 votes for this. You know, those guys only need 51, but we need we need 60 for some reason. It cuts down on what you have to do. It cuts down on what you owe people. It cuts down on the types of policies you have to do. Yep. And where Bernie faltered was it was everything that people in 2018 said showed he was getting serious. Yes, exactly. Hiring people who only fucking spoke to college graduates. And if we wonder why the

campaign's model of turning out non voters succeeded in some places, it succeeded in Nevada, it succeeded in California, it succeeded in a bunch of other places, but it failed where he needed it to succeed. You only have to look at those people. Do I think Bernie wins South Carolina using math strategy? Not necessarily. No, but I don't think it's a fucking. Yeah, he doesn't lose my 30 points and like run up the red flag and it's not a waste of time was going to be the horse to bet on. It's not a waste of time because those conversations actually do carry over in a way just like throwing money at something or casting a ballot doesn't hold over in people's like fucking psyches. Before we wrap it up, though, I mean, like because we're on this tip now and I would like to

give Matt an opportunity because he's been talking about this a lot recently. And I would just like this election and like if you look at like who votes for Democrats and like who the party actually represents. Matt, I was going to be like just talk a little bit about this idea that like the real split in American politics in the future is not going to be about class as it's like as we define it. It's not really even going to be about ideology as like any like real or concrete thing. It is going to be about who went to college and who didn't go to college. And it looks like the Democratic Party is really, I mean, like here's the thing. The Democrats do still win a majority of voters who have incomes under $50,000 a year, but more and more in the last election. And certainly this

one, they're winning the richest Americans like in a big shift away from the Republican Party. If you look at the richest counties in America, I think like the single wealthiest county in America actually swung hard to Biden from Trump between these two elections. And they're losing all basically all types of non-college educated voters. All of these, all demographic. Yeah. Like what does that mean for the future? Not just of like the Democratic Party, but like also the left or like any sort of progressive politics in America that is supposed to be about helping the working class or non-college educated people fit into a system in which like, let's be honest, unless you make 200 grand a year, you basically don't count. You don't exist.

You are scum and it's your fault because you didn't get the right skills. But you don't, you don't have a voice. Like you don't even, you don't even have complaints because nobody hears or even sees your fucking. You are an unspeaking subaltern. Yes. And like, and like that dividing line of college being like the real fucking like difference maker between, are you going to vote Democrat or are you going to vote Republican in the future? Yep. And I think it, it means the Democrats are in a death spiral. Like they will get wiped out in the midterms and they will lose the 2024 election because I think we can all see this, this administration coming. We are going to get a COVID depression that, that will be settled

not in some sort of frenzy of innovation and, and democratic experimentation like the New Deal, but by a hunger chancellorship that reinforces like a structural decline in living standards that will now be baked into life and a greater degree of misery that will be like palpable in people's lives. And that's going to, and it's going to be responded to by a democratic party that fully invests in signifiers and a Republican party that will be driven even more mad by their own cultural narratives of opposition. And that I think what we're going to see in 2020 will bear out as people are miserable and as previously non political people, which are largely not at college educated people, college educated people vote because one of the things

you learn in college, whether you become a Democrat or not, is that voting is a meaningful civic act. Non college educated people are less likely to hold that, but if politics becomes more and more central and becomes the only thing that's on TV, basically it becomes culture. It becomes another civic ritual that's more like watching going to a ball game or something and you have to invest into it. And if that's the case, there will be these two parties with these two competing narratives and the non college voters are going to go in greater and greater numbers towards the Republicans because the Democrats will be saying everything will be miserable. Everything is going to suck. Your life will be terrible, but you don't even get to have any fun at all.

You don't get to enjoy yourself in any case because somebody else has it worse than you, and you have to feel bad for them. And the Republicans are going to say everything's going to be terrible. Your life is going to suck. Things are only going to get worse. But hey, at least things are better than for you than these motherfuckers. And let's laugh at them. And that is a better fucking pitch. If the underlying misery is baked in and it's all about manners and what's rude or not rude in polite society, why does that matter to somebody for whom matters have never meant anything and have never advanced them as opposed to these Democrats who, even if they have failed to make it, even if they did get a college degree and then they

are working gig jobs, they still in their head have an idea that doing that mattered meant something and imparted values that make them deserve something. And so they want to see them reinforced. And that divide means that more and more people are going to be more and more receptive to this. And working class, and the Republicans will be a working class party in a real sense, is that they'll be making up, they'll be made up disproportionately of the working class, but working class will be pure cultural signifiers. It'll have no reflection on actual politics, and things will just grind down entirely. And there will be no escape from that death spiral. I am reminded of something I saw in early 2016 that was it possibly

pretended things that Matt has just predicted. It was an article in Vox by Zach Boakamp. It was after the first debate that was solely between Hillary and Bernie. It was after O'Malley and Webb and Chafee had dropped out. And it was Bernie's ideas for economics and American industries will cause the greatest standard of life collapse in developing nations. Yeah. That Bernie was racist because he didn't want people in Bangladesh to be making three cents an hour and instead wanted those jobs in America. This is the nihilistic democratic vision going forward. If Hillary had won, there would have been articles every fucking week about how you are racist unless you support TPP or something like that, which is not to say that

Republicans are against those. No, Republicans are right there with them, but Republicans, they figured out the cheat code around it. They go, these are unfair trade deals. These are terrible. They're hollowing out our industrial cores. They're killing our workers. Oh, I'm doing a different one that's called something different, but that's the exact same thing. Everyone wants to do it because the only scam left for America is to sell our licensing and our marketing properties and to increase the margins by just a little bit by participating in the labor death spiral to find the cheapest possible way to manufacture these shitty goods. Everyone knows it's the only game left in town if you're going to run an economy this way,

but the difference is, as Matt has alluded to, Democrats will call you racist for not doing it and Republicans will tell you they're not doing it because they named it something else, and that is the future. Well, I also, it's interesting too, because this means that in its decline, much the way the American state has found a way to persist while still being sort of empty in any kind of real, functional, life-giving way, the American university was failing at reproducing the class, which is its original purpose. Now it's figured out a way to survive and not just survive but thrive, not by reproducing a middle class, but by reproducing an ideology so that every graduate joins a fucking death cult, so that they unlearn how to talk to

normal people, they unlearn their basic instincts, they unlearn their basic humanity. Like any like instinct that you might have politically, we're like, oh, I don't, I don't think this trade deal is bad. You have a million post-colonial, post-structuralist, whatever supposedly progressive professors there to tell you that, well, actually, things are more complicated than that. There are fungible borders and there are bodies in spaces, and so you don't want to feel stupid, and you've gone to this place that you've paid a lot of money to supposedly learn, and you're indoctrinated into just this horrifying neoliberal worldview that gives you what, a sense of superiority over people who didn't do that? Because you're not doing a job, motherfucker. You have a thousand ways to call out

a co-worker for an off-color joke, but you can't explain why American life and quality of life has cratered in the past 30 years. Except by saying people are bad and America has original sin, and sex is reverting to some sort of weird, hyper-educated, post-modern Protestantism. That's what I was saying earlier. In an economy and a culture where you have to be, like I said, making well into the six figures to matter at all, or to be invested in it, or for even your anger to find a voice, the thing is, there are plenty of people out there who either didn't go to college or have family who largely didn't go to college or like a social circle that they have the ability to talk to these people and like relate to their lives, who are interested in politics and are

passionate about it. And the thing is, you don't have to go to college, you don't have to have had to go on to college to understand or care about politics or be like very well informed about them, but you do have to have gone to college to get a job at mothership or working on a political campaign or write about politics. You know what I'm saying? Well, and one of the things that was amazing about, you know, God bless and friend of the show, Ben Mora, like he doesn't have a college degree, like he went to like a couple semesters of community college and, you know, aside from someone getting into his private Instagram, he was an incredibly good organizer. He was probably better than the people that like were trying to do it for one campaign so they had something cool to

put on their law school resume. That's for God damn sure. Like when we talk about like building out like a political institution that works, that is directed by the needs and and plans of working class people, like for fuck's sake, like we know that staff, like campaign staff, people that people that knock on doors and talk to people are the biggest factor in a win for a left candidate. So why not? Why not fucking do that? There are two birds, one stone. Well, the thing is, is that they cannot allow you, they can't allow you anywhere near the positions of influence or power within a political party or a media organization for that matter unless they are sure that your brain has been thoroughly washed by the ideology machine of going through college. Yes. Of learning that

things are terrible, of unlearning that they come from material relationships, of of mislearning that it's a bunch of these voodoo spiritual bullshit that you have to just treat like, yes, like a Protestant trying to negotiate the world in search of like separating the righteous from the unrighteous. And then you get to go out into the world having fully, having gotten like the the the Ned Beatty speech on like day one from network that this is that there is no hope that this is how human relationships are that all attempts to better the relationship between humans and make the economy in any way just historically or even theoretically are impossible. Now, now we can build on top of that and then you can go out and try to make the world better.

And like all those positions that are open to people who theoretically want to make the world better is is locked into the exact kind of person who's going to end up with that job because like whether it's politics, media, basically any job that you that you know you would be looking for that is like you know in the media or in the knowledge economy, it's like you look for the you look for what it takes to apply to it and it's like at least a bachelor's degree and four years of experience already doing the job. Yeah, and a lot of that has to be done through like fucking unpaid internships. That's how you get a leg up and the only people that can afford to do that already have money like it's it's set up. It's set up to keep people out. It just is. And it's all

bolstered by the ideology of meritocracy, which I think is like actually a really crucial way to understanding why these people believe you know it's the ideological blast to how they justify their own material conditions. And I think that explains a little bit why they have such contempt for ordinary voters is that they genuinely think that their you know that their depraved position is because they weren't one of the elect. It's like this baked in Protestantism, this baked in Puritanism that really informs a lot of this country's political culture. Well, we've got we've gone long today, but I want to thank Derek and Daniel for joining us. And if people would like to check out foreign exchanges or anything any other joints that you guys are working on, what

should they do? Well, they should come to fx.substack.com for sure. That's that's one place. Daniel's got some stuff at Jacob and he may want to talk about. But for me, we got to have you talk about the war games. Yeah, we didn't even get to the general van Ripper. But yeah, a future episode that one's evergreen. American hero. Yes. So there's a piece coming out in Jacob in the next week or so. And I've been doing a podcast with my friend David Parsons on LA movies made in the 90s that Will was actually on. I was a guest. I did LA Confidential with. Yeah. So if you guys want to have some fun content, Daniel and David. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll have all the information for all that available in the show description. And that does it for us today, guys. Cheers.

Top class, lads. Oh, and by the way, just real quick, though, if you are out this week and you see anyone on the street not wearing a poppy, please hold them accountable. Please hold them accountable. If you see people on Twitter who haven't changed their avatar to have a poppy in it, hold them accountable. That's what we're doing. Just we're upholding it's all accountability top proper class through enforcing accountability online. So till next time, guys. Bye. Bye. We're in the capital town. The USA.

Hey, they on the way.