Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF 2025] From Reagan to Trump: Neoliberalism, Class War, and American Decadence

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Nov 5, 2025   In this episode, public school history teacher Gianni Paul joins Breht to trace the historical roots of our current crisis — stagnant wages, mass homelessness, collapsing infrastructure, rising fascism, Gilded Age inequality, and a beaten down working class — back to Reagan's counter-revolution against the New Deal and the forty-year neoliberal project that followed. Together, they explore how neoliberalism emerged out of the crises of the 1970s, Carter's role in laying the groundwork before Reagan, the destruction of unions and working-class power, the ideological weaponization of anti-communism, the bipartisan consolidation of neoliberalism under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, the ways Reagan and Trump represent two phases of the same class project, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of capitalist triumphalism, the slow disintegration of America's middle class into debt and precarity, the explosion of homelessness and hopelessness, the erosion of U.S. imperial dominance alongside the emergence of a multipolar world, and why the U.S. repeatedly chooses reaction over social transformation — raising the question of whether genuine change can still emerge from within the imperial core or whether new possibilities are taking shape elsewhere. Understanding this history is key to understanding why everyday life in America feels increasingly unstable, and what futures remain possible beyond neoliberal decay. Follow Gianni and The People's Classroom on Instagram @thepeoplesclassroom315    Check out his full lectures on YouTube HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have my friend Gianni from the People's Classroom on to talk about Reagan, the rise of neoliberalism, the last 40 plus years of what we call the neoliberal era, how it was a capitalist response to the New Deal and the crises of the 70s, the political coalition that Reagan put together to advance the class interests of the capitalist class. and how every president, since Reagan is just a variation on Reagan, and we also draw clear parallels, direct parallels, between Reagan and his political project and Trump and his political project. And the interesting aspect here is we see Reagan at the beginning of neoliberalism doing a very similar thing but with differences than Trump at the end of the neoliberal period. Not that Trump himself represents a divergence or a rupture from neoliberalism, but he actually is a symptom of neoliberal decay and perhaps its last gasp.

So to draw those direct lines and parallels and kind of oscillate back and forth and show, you know, the society we have today was really birthed in the neoliberal era through Reagan and that Trump himself can be seen as an interesting, you know, version of Reagan at the end of the neoliberal project. So this is a fascinating conversation. I think it's really crucial to understand. this history to understand that, you know, this is where we are and it's a very clear trajectory. But we also go back and cover the Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, the New Deal, the Great Depression, World War II, and show how in these periods time and time again of American

crisis that the ruptural opportunity for a revolutionary shift is there, but it is always foreclosed by reactionary elements. And we talk about the weapons and the arsenal of that reactionary. and how those revolutionary openings are foreclosed. And I think we are living at the precipice of a new moment of extreme American crises. You know, that's only happened a handful of times in American history. I think we're living in the prelude to that. And so this history is more important than ever to really fully understand and integrate so that your analysis of the present moment can be up to par.

As always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us at Rev. Left Radio or at Patreon.com forward slash Rev. left radio for only five bucks a month you get access to bonus content um our rev left situation room community zoom calls our meditation group and much more and of course you support the show and keep it running which we deeply appreciate all right without further ado here's my conversation with giani from the people's classroom on ronald regan neoliberalism and the trump era enjoy yeah my name is Gianni Paul. I'm a long time public high school social studies teacher in New York State. And for the past few months, I've been running the people's classroom, which is a lecture and lesson series on history and current events from a working class perspective. We also focus on how history does not happen in a bubble. There are direct connections between the past and the present. And we cover a whole host of topics. So everything ranging from Palestine to LGBTQ plus history and liberation movements to the darker roots of the American Revolutionary. War, the impacts of imperialism. Basically, I've amassed a lot of material over my 15-year

teaching career that I've really poured my heart and soul into that I think would be valuable for people to learn from. So the reason why I started the people's class from those is because I realized how beneficial I thought it would be to bring my school lessons, which again, center that working class perspective to the community at large. Our social studies curriculums across the country, like do a garbage job of representing the working class? perspective. It's a lot of like great man history, tons of focus on the world wars, and a lot of nationalist rhetoric with some of the darker aspects of the country's history can be missing from the curriculum. So to me, it's like basically the history channel brought to the public school system and that's not beneficial. So, you know, as a result, a lot of people are so confused as to what is going on in today's world. And I hear this refrain all the time from my family and friends, you know, a lot of people who are, you know, mainly well-meaning liberals, but They say the sort of stuff all the time, you know, like, this is not who we are. We didn't used to be like this.

And it really made me realize, unfortunately, how many people across the country were not exposed to this all important working class point of view when they were going through school. You know, a lot of boomers have just been blasted with Cold War propaganda and have their brains melted. And it's really tough for them to break out of it. So I want to rectify that as much as I can, you know, through my community-based lessons with the people's classroom. because the truth is when you actually deeply study the history of this country from the workers' perspective, this is exactly who we are and always have been, and the American education system purposely spreads misinformation and half-truths, and it leads to people to grow up with this warped mindset as to what the country really is all about.

So it makes it so that a typical person is unable to grapple and reconcile with the present to act in responsible ways. And, you know, I quote Malcolm X quite a bit throughout my lessons, and my students end up mocking me for it because they're really just, you know, waiting for me to drop in a Malcolm X quote at some point through my lessons. But I usually start each one with with this quote in particular. So he says, you know, it's so important for you and me to spend time today learning about something from the past so that we can better understand the present, analyze it, and then do something about it. So that to me perfectly sums up my people's classroom and what it's really all about.

Well, that's beautiful. I applaud you, you know, salute you for that. the people's classroom is a wonderful pedagogical intervention. I'm so happy to have you on today to talk about this period of American history, which we'll get to in a second. But you're absolutely right that a robust understanding of American history will completely make it perfectly clear why we are here today. And, you know, the liberal shock and horror at where we are today, you know, like the good liberals who are just can't fathom how we got here. We got to vote Democrat. Trump is such anathema.

It's like when you study American history, you realize the trajectory that got us here is so clear that Trump is the perfect instantiation and mascot for American Empire and American capitalism and that it should surprise absolutely no one with any, with even a somewhat tenuous or somewhat solid grasp on American history. why we're here and how we got here. And today's episode, we're going to be, I think, focusing in on an era of American history that helps us understand this even more.

That is Reagan, the 1980s, the dawn of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is a term that gets thrown out there a lot. Some people understand it fairly well. Other people, it's just kind of a vague signifier of something that is going on in our economy that they struggle to define. But it is a real era in American political economy. It was ushered in and given not only an ideological articulation by Reagan, but also a political coalition that made neoliberalism viable and eventually made it the bipartisan consensus. And as we'll get into in this episode, Trump is by no means a diversion

from neoliberalism or a break from neoliberalism. He is a product of 40 plus years of neoliberalism. And maybe he is also representative of its last gas. But we'll get there in due time. I think I guess the best place to start is just starting with that word because it is ambiguous. People do use it in all different sorts of ways. It has become a sort of cliche catch-all and even platitude that people throw out there without really defining it. can you provide our listeners with kind of a quick definition or description of how you would describe neoliberalism? Like, what is it? Yeah, for sure. It sounds like it's like this very complex word, but it's really not when you break it down.

So neoliberalism, it's taking the concepts of classical liberalism, like, you know, the John Locke's and those Enlightenment philosophers, which was freedom for the individual and applying it to businesses and corporations. So freedom for them without any sort of governmental regulation. So a neoliberal basically looks at anything and everything as an opportunity to make a profit. So, you know, they would see a house on fire and think, you know what? We should make people swipe their debit cards through the fire hydrant before they can have the fire department actually put out the fire. So neoliberalism, it's been the dominant economic policy in this country for the last 40 plus years. And, you know, many would argue that it was the Reagan president's city in which we truly saw these policies become entree. trenched in our society, but the fundamentals I feel like have one of my, the favorites is we do a little

opening writing prompt. That's a private company. So it's amazing watching them try to come up with stuff. And that's for both my younger students and my older students when I'm out in the community teaching. But it shows the impacts of neoliberalism. Like the government does not care about you. Absolutely.

And I think as we'll get into this, I also make it clear as I've made it clear in many other instances that, neoliberalism was this assault on post-war Keynesianism. It was the dismantling of the New Deal. It does speak to the fact that capital, even in a system that at one point in time can give concessions to working people, is always subject to recalling those concessions at any point. And so I think we also have to understand the neoliberal era as a capitalist response to the New Deal era, which came before it and really a concerted effort to dismantle that that even, you know, fairly thin version of social democracy that the U.S. gave rise to in the wake of the Great Depression in World War II. Also, of course, a response to the falling rate of profit and the

stagflation of the 1970s, you know, relatively high wages, the slowing of productivity, the rise of global competition from Europe, Japan, etc. You know, the strength of labor militancy, these were all issues that needed to be resolved by and for the capitalist class and neoliberalism is what the result of that class struggle is. And we're living in the wake of it. And we're living in the midst of it still, I think. No doubt. Like, it is here and it is hurting a lot of people.

Definitely. So how did Reagan's presidency, kind of, as I was saying, How did it function as this counter-revolution that dismantled the New Deal order and really brought in what we call neoliberalism? What were the historical and material conditions that made Reaganism possible? And how did it reassert capitalist power after the crises of the 1970s? Yeah, so in my eyes, like the Reagan presidency, it's the beginning of this country becoming what it was always destined to be when you truly study its history. a paradise for the rich and a capitalist hellscape for the working class. So you go back to the founding of this country and James Madison

and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. One of the most critical quotations to understand in the grand scope of history are Madison's arguments on the function of a proper government. And remember, I'll give you the quote in a second, but this is the father of the U.S. Constitution saying this, not me. But his quote is, the primary function of the government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority of the poor. If that does not perfectly summarize all of U.S. history,

then you clearly are not properly studying U.S. history. You know, that fundamental contradiction, the history of class struggle, was baked into the foundations of this country. So, you know, look at any time period in U.S. history. You'll see countless examples. But, you know, to link it back to the Reagan era in particular, I think the final death knell of the New Deal era that truly set this country on its path to hell for the working class was the issuing of the Powell memorandum. You know, the Reagan presidency to me is the true culmination of the Powell memorandum's initiatives from 1971. And, you know, I'm sure you've seen the Chomsky documentary, you know, Requiem for the American Dream. It's really solid. And Chomsky obviously does a great

job breaking down neoliberalism and how we have ended up here. But I do disagree with Chomsky that Nixon was the last New Deal president. Like, yes, Nixon protected Social Security and he created Earth Day. You know, that's nice. But he also began the process of privatizing our health care system with the dawn of the HMO and Kaiser Permanente and, you know, introducing us to our favorite war criminal, Henry Kissinger, you know, the guy who said kill anything that moves in Cambodia. So you have to remember it was Nixon who was president when the Powell memo was issued,

and it was Nixon's policies that began the process of seeing these initiatives of that memo begin to come to fruition. And, you know, I guess just in case if your listeners are not familiar with the Powell memo, but to me, it's one of the most critical things to understand to get a better grasp as to why we are in the situation we are in today. You know, it was basically the Chamber of Commerce getting together to figure out how they could push back against the egalitarian reforms. The working class were beginning to institute in the 1960s. You know, you had African American groups, women's groups, LGBT, you know, plus groups, immigrant groups, fighting their hearts out to be treated like actual human being. and you saw some gains being made. You know, the rich couldn't handle it.

They knew they were losing their grip on society. So they hired Lewis Powell, you know, who was a corporate lawyer before he eventually became a Supreme Court justice, put together recommendations as to how the rich could maintain their stranglehold on society. And what Powell concluded was that the rich need to unite and use their wealth and influence to take over all aspects of society. So, you know, the media, the education system, the government as a whole. And if they didn't do as he recommended, he argued capitalism, was on the precipice of defeat. Well, you know, the rich did listen. And in the decades to follow,

they accomplished exactly what he directed them to do. And again, it's my argument that the Reagan presidency being the full might of the Powell memo in action, and you're starting to see the beginnings of class warfare ultimately during that time period. Yeah. Well said. And I think you pointed to something very important,

which is that this was not merely an economic response, right? It was a full social, political response to not only the economic situation, but also political and cultural movements that exploded during the 60s and 70s, right? The entire society still reeling from, you know, the defeat in Vietnam. The civil rights and the women's movements had gotten so much steam, had become radicalized in a lot of ways. A broader youth revolt against the entire system. So this wasn't merely a reassertion of economic domination by the capitalist class.

against the New Deal Keynesianism, although it was also that, but it was really a full-on attempt to reestablish cultural, political, and social hegemony for the ruling class. And of course, the vehicle they used in their fight for that was reactionary politics and building a coalition of reactionary political formations from evangelical Christianity to cultural conservatives to hardcore nationalist, et cetera, as the political coalition where they could then advance their fundamental economic and class interests. And we're seeing that, I think, in very interesting ways under new conditions today with Trump. And we're going to continue to draw these parallels between today and then. but I think we see another attempt, you know, in the wake of many movements like Black Lives Matter,

the pro-Palestine movement, the Occupy movement, Standing Rock over the last 10 to 15 years, the radical deligitimization of the media, of institutions, of the political class as a whole, these are all things that are trying to be recaptured once again by the Trump administration and the forces behind it in a very similar way, though under different perhaps economic conditions, as Reagan and his coalition did. Now, what Reagan and his coalition was responding to is the economic crises of the 1970s and how do you dismantle the New Deal and the very idea of Keynesianism, the very idea that government can play a role in the economy. And today, I think we're living after 40 plus years of that winning. And so we're not in a state of having to roll,

back concessions were in a state of having to squeeze even more profit out of a fundamentally decaying system that's already made a robust attempt at doing just that. And so it's a different economic situation, but I think a very similar pattern of an attempt to reestablish hegemony by the ruling class using reactionary politics as the vehicle to do that. Yeah, it really was. It's a full frontal assault by all these different avenues that you mentioned to squeeze even more money out of us when people are in such dire straits to begin with. So it's incredibly frustrating and alarming. Yeah, so let's go ahead and move on because, you know, some people do argue, and I've heard this argument,

and I think there's a nuance here that's important to note that Jimmy Carter kind of quietly initiated neoliberalism before Reagan made it hegemonic. I sometimes would articulate it as, you know, under the Carter administration, neoliberalism as a material movement began to kind of coalesce, but that it was Reagan that gave it its ideological addressing, that gave it the rhetorical and ideological power that it had and that actually built the political coalition necessary to continue to advance it.

But I think there's an argument to be made that you could see it creeping in under Jimmy Carter. So do you see Carter's like deregulation and the Volker shock as the real starting point of the neoliberal term, or was Reagan's project kind of qualitatively different than even Carter's? Yeah, this is a tough question, but to me, I think Carter and Reagan, much like Obama and W. Bush or Biden and Trump, they're just two sides of the same coin. So, you know, you take the liberals like Jimmy Carter or Obama and Biden,

they provide milk-toast reforms. You know, they'll raise taxes on the rich by like 1%, get called communists. Nothing fundamentally changes for the working class. And then the conservatives come in and blame the left for government overreach and they further deregulate everything to say they're providing, you know, the working class with this vague notion of freedom. And to me, liberals and conservatives, they complement each other. It's a game. You know, when you really break it down, they both serve capital.

One side you could argue is just more overt about it, but make no mistake. when push comes to shove, they are united in destroying the working class. Again, take, you know, Carter, Obama, etc. They perfectly demonstrate the complete ineffectiveness of liberal economic reforms or, you know, the reasonable, measured approach in regards to economic policy. When you take this middle ground, reasonable approach, what does it always lead to? You know, who benefits? Reagan's presidency, to me, it just simply capitalized on the failures of Carter,

much like Trump capitalized in Obama's failures, and then again on Biden's failures. The end result being the country being pushed even further to the right. And, you know, I would argue if Carter or Obama actually instituted real left-wing economic reforms are at the very least some type of FDR-style Keynesian model to try to rectify the issues for the working class within the country, I believe we would have very easily been able to stave off this neoliberal hell that we live in today. And you have to remember, like, left-wing economic policy is incredibly popular. You look at any polling in regards to whether, you know, corporation should pay more in taxes or, you know, these freaks like Bezos and Zuckerberg should be taxed heavily. There's almost 60 to 70% support for those policies. You know, it's almost impossible to get 70% of the American people to agree on anything. But we see no legislation or policy, whatever, to actually meet the needs of the people.

Instead, further neoliberal reforms get imposed on us. everything gets worse, a horrific economic crisis develops, and it perfectly plays into the hands of the rich. And you have to remember, the rich love these crises because what is a crisis, but an opportunity. And, you know, I hate to quote Game of Thrones because the final season was so disappointing, but, you know, as Littlefinger said, chaos is a ladder. And as usual in this country, when chaos strikes, it becomes a ladder for the rich to further secure their status and class interests since they own the state. So, you know, just at the Great Recession and what Bush and Obama did with bailing out the banks in 2008 and 2009, crises like the Great Recession and the way in which the government responds to it further infuriates people. The government responds by bailing out the rich instead of them, turns off more people, they feel like the government is evil, and it plays into the neoliberal rhetoric of government being the problem. When in actuality, if you had a government that was in the hands of the working class, like, I don't know, I'm just spitballing here, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, perhaps, they could see the value and power.

and justice of a government that could deliver for the vast majority of its people, but we simply don't have that. Absolutely. Yeah, and it's so important to realize how crises is used to reconstitute and even advance the goals of the rich. So the financial crisis of 2008, what happened in the wake of it? But all the very trends that led to it got worse, that inequality increased, corruption, open corruption in the political system increased.

You know, the banks were bailed out why regular people were forced. foreclosed on. People were pushed down the economic ladder, economic and class mobility, slowed down even more than it already had. And the situation we're living in now is on the precipice of yet another crisis. Is this going to explode into a World War III type of situation? Are we going to another war? Is the next Great Depression coming? It feels like this is a very top-heavy economy that is resting ultimately on an AI bubble. And if and when that AI bubble does burst, it's not the tech oligarchs that are going to go under. Elon Musk and Sam Altman and all these guys are still going to be incredibly powerful and

incredibly rich. It's the rest of us that will that will take the cost of, that will really bear the cost of that. And they will use that to further entrench their domination over the economy and over society. So I think that's an important point to note as you did. And the other thing is, as we're drawing parallels between Reagan and Trump, I think you alluded to something fascinating too, which is that there's an amazing parallel between Carter and Obama, right? Carter is coming on the wake of Watergate at the wake of the Vietnam War, out of all these crises of legitimacy for the government as such. He's presented as a decent guy,

like a good person that is not morally corrupt, that is not susceptible to financial bribery, you know, that wouldn't do something like Watergate. And that was his fundamental appeal. And there was a moment wherein Carter might have been able to use his administration to push things in a different direction, but really solidified the status quo. And in a very similar way, Obama's coming after eight years of Bush of fucking Cheney and Halliburton and the Iraq War and the War on Terror and the Patriot Act. People were absolutely fed up. Obama had a super majority in Congress and he really could have taken. things in a new direction. But of course, if he was the sort of person that was going to radically take things in a different direction, he would have never been presented to us in the first place

as a candidate for presidency. So he ran on hope and change. He talked about getting in his sneakers and walking picket lines with the unions. He talked about redistribution of wealth. He talked about the end of endless war. And he got in and he did the exact same stuff. And where does that lead? It leads to even more reactions. So after Carter, we get. get Reagan. After Obama, we get Trump. And that is another reason why Democrats and liberals cannot extract themselves from culpability to where we are. It is not the fact that we are here where we are because of the right and because of Trump and because of just the Republican Party. It is a bipartisan path that has led us here. And we would have never gotten Trump if we didn't get those sort of

eight years of Obama. You know, a real chance where people were looking for real hope and change. And Obama could have come in and done some radical stuff with mass support and legitimacy, truly out of the gate. But in the wake of that, when people get their hope so high and they say, this is really different. This guy's an outsider. He's the first black president.

He's promising all these things. He's coming after and then to still be let down by that. Then what do people do? They tend to turn towards reaction. Now it's the right wings turn to pretend. that they're going to be the agents of hope and change. And that's what Trump did, right? He sold himself as an outsider willing to take on the elite, take on corruption,

end the endless wars. And so that's why I call him the Obama of the right. He promised so much of the same stuff only to deliver more of the same. And here we are once again. What comes after? Who fucking knows? I think a crisis is going to happen in the next three and a half years that Trump is going to, you know, fail to navigate in anything like a responsible or healthy way. And so I think the future is radically open because I don't think that this system is going to keep rolling on too much longer as it's currently constituted.

But yeah, I just wanted to kind of draw those parallels between Carter and Obama and show how they are inseparable from Reagan and Trump. Yeah, I think, and again, for me personally, like the Obama moment was such a clarifying moment because I was so in the tank for Obama back in 2008 and it's like pathetic to look back on now. But like he had such an opportunity to actually like course correct this nation and just did not. You know, nothing even close to what he could have accomplished with the super majority that he had. And then he has the gall to go on Mark Maren's show the other day and say like, oh, you know, I didn't have the votes or whatever to pass universal health care. And it's just a bald-faced lie. And I hope that, you know, enough people can start to wake up and realize like,

neither one of these parties cares about you. It's just it's not going to happen. And I hope the same thing eventually happens with people that are in the tank for Trump. Like he's not going to meet your material needs. He's not going to do anything for you. And people need to wake up to that. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, fundamentally, they do serve their donor classes.

They serve the economic interest of the class that they represent out of which they come. And that's what we mean by they don't care about you. They're literally not here to serve you. Their job is not to serve you. at all. It's to pretend to be serving you while they're serving their actual class interest and the donor classes and the big money people that support them. And even under Trump, right, one of the, one of the appeals and the main arguments of MAGA, especially the first time around, is like, hey, he's so rich, he can fund himself. So that means that he's immune to corruption because he has

his own money. He doesn't need other people's money. And then you find like Miriam Adelson donates $250 million so that he, you know, pursues the interests of Israel and who's the capital to Jerusalem and supports that in Yahoo. And it's like, of course, he is still totally open to bald face corruption and to being in the pocket of moneyed interest who give him money to do so. And so, yeah, another way in which there was the false promise that Trump offered to the American right. For sure.

Well, let's go ahead and move forward because another thing that Reagan represented, Thatcher represented it in the UK, and neoliberalism is defined by in part, is the, the disciplining of labor, right? It's the privatizing public goods. It's the deregulation of capital, and that requires the disciplining of labor, which requires the weakening and a full-on attack on unions, which is the mechanism by which labor organizes itself to fight for its class.

And so Reagan's firing of the PAC coworkers, as one example, did symbolize this wider war on organized labor. and union rates today really are a reflection of this multi-decade attack on unions as such. So looking back, how decisive was that moment in breaking the power of unions and reshaping American political consciousness around individualism and competition, right? Because there needs to be an ideological sort of fig leaf, an ideological Trojan horse in which these policies are advanced. And that ideological Trojan horse was freedom and individualism. and small government, et cetera. So what are your thoughts on Reagan's war on workers

and what that moment in particular symbolized? Yeah, I think it was massive and should be a critical moment for labor unions to look back and deeply reflect on and self-critique. You know, people forget that Patcoe endorsed Reagan in 1980, less than a year before the strike and their eventual dismantling.

So there is a deep and profound lesson for unions to learn from this. You simply cannot play nice with capital. It is fundamentally at odds with what your goals are and will always sell you out when push comes to shove. And unfortunately, the failure of the Patco strike was the beginning of the end for unions in this country. You know, I have a great graph that's from an Economic Policy Institute study that I show in my classes in which you see how since like the late 70s and then the 80s union membership falls off a cliff. And on the inverse of that, the wealth of the 10% starts to exponentially grow. So, you know, now we're at less than 10% union membership.

Meanwhile, the top 10% controls over 50% of all the wealth inside of the nation. So it's insane. And it brings us to where unions are today and the general ineffectiveness of them. They try to play nice. And outside of a few examples like the West Virginia teacher strike or the Minnesota teacher strikes, when it comes down to it, they always seem to end up backing capital. I mean, look at how many labor unions endorse Democrats. How's that working out for them?

They think they have a seat at the table and can influence things. and they just end up being absorbed into the system and completely nullified. Unions, I feel like, have completely lost their revolutionary potential, especially when you look back on the history of the union movement and the militancy we used to see. Like, you go back to the Battle of Blair Mountain, for instance, or the Haymarket Square Strikes. There was coal miners, like directly fighting U.S. troops.

Now, it's the leader of the union getting photo ops with the governor or with the president. You know, it's really disgusting when you start to think about it. And, you know, I got to call out my own union, which is NICIT, which is New York State United Teachers. It's the, you know, the teachers union in our state, but they're a prime example. They do some decent work around the state, but it's all like very peripheral. It's a cookie cutter stuff. So like, we just got cell phones banned in our schools across New York State, which is nice. But actually fighting and confronting capital to address our material needs is it's non-existent.

They'll never go after the root causes of serious issues plaguing our profession. like the teacher shortage or the low pay, the oversized classrooms, the crumbling infrastructure of our classrooms, or I don't know, the fact that I have a better chance of getting killed in my classroom than I do in a prison. Instead, we get to go to Yankee Stadium for Nice at Day, which, by the way, I'm a huge sports fan. I don't know if you've seen Yankee Stadium lately, but it's essentially an America First rally at this point.

But, you know, we get to see our Nicet president pose for photos with Kathy Hochel, who's cutting funding for all of our schools and leaving us in dire straits. And one of the other things I want to mention, I don't know if you want to get too into the weeds with this, but I don't know if you're familiar with the Taylor law in New York State, but it's really enraging when you dig into its history, and it's a great example of what I'm talking about here. But back in 1967, New York State Public Sector unions agreed to this law in which they would make striking illegal with significant financial penalties and jail time for union leadership. And in return, what unions got was that it would force the employer to go into binding arbitration

when there was a contract dispute. So that's it. That's all the agreement was. So unions got binding arbitration to have the most powerful tool in a union's toolbox taken out of play. So to me, that's where you can kind of bring in Lenin's quote about trade union consciousness from what is to be done. I think that's incredibly relevant. And to me, it kind of just shows that unionism is not enough. The Patco strike failure, the way unions operate today, I believe unions need to regain their militancy and ditch the Democratic Party and either join or form an actual workers' party. And that, to me, are the all-important historical lessons to take away from the Patco strike. Could not agree more. And just to be clear, the Patco is the professional

air traffic controllers organization. So I didn't define that. I should have to find that in the question. So that was the air traffic controllers that went on strike in 81. And and Reagan crushed them. And so that is what we're discussing here. And I totally agree with the limitations of trade unions and how they have been sort of ushered into the system as a whole, a part of the class collaborationist project that will carve out a relatively comfortable position for you within this decay, rotten, exploitative system.

And that, you know, and a lot of unions that are big and powerful and are allowed to continue, they'll have agreements where they're not allowed to strike or that they agree with the contractors or whatever that they won't go on strike. Well, the union that I'm in has an agreement with an organization that represents the contractors, that we have a third party sort of judge panel that we can bring disputes to and that they solve so that the workers don't go on strike. And so these are all ways in which union. have been de-radicalized and have been absorbed into the broader project of Americanism.

And that's why during the Palestine strikes, we saw, you know, dock workers around the world or various trade unions in places like Italy, you know, use their leverage at choke points in the economy to try and, you know, push a pro-Palestinian politic to try to stop arm shipments to Israel as they're conducting their genocide. And you just didn't see anything like that here in the imperial courts. core and the concept of the labor aristocracy, I think does speak to that, the bureaucracy of some of these big unions and their just total absorption into the system itself is really, you know, it's really notable and it is something that needs to be corrected.

I think labor unions are still essential. There's so many pros to them as well as their cons. They do provide. They're one of the last ways that a working person can provide. a decent life for themselves and their families and have the long-term benefits that are the foundation of long-term stability for one in their families. And they do have a certain level of class consciousness within them that is important. And they do often, especially in the trade unions, they conceive of themselves,

not as a vanguard in the Leninist sense, but as like a vanguard in the broader colloquial sense for the whole working class. And so they are thinking in those terms. they do understand that, you know, they define, they help raise the floor, as it were, for working people in general. Their political action is centered on trying to get workers a better deal in general, but it is myopic. It's not revolutionary. And they've tied themselves in many instances to a Democratic party that is just thoroughly corrupt, a complete arm of the ruling class, has a terrible branding issue in the sense of, like, most Americans,

It has like the one of the highest unfavorable rating in decades for the Democratic Party as a whole. And so the unions have really tied themselves to this sinking ship that is the Democratic Party. And they need to reclaim their independence and the radicalism that could come from it. But I do want to also mention, though, I don't know, it's not funny at all, but it's an amusing parallel. you know, Reagan comes in, he breaks the air traffic controller strike. And if we're drawing the parallel to Trump, Trump comes in, there is no air traffic controller union that is going on strike that needs to be busted. But what do we see in the first several months of Trump's presidency?

Multiple plane crashes. So it's like this, it's this fascinating repetition of history where Reagan dismantles the union. And then, you know, on the far end of neoliberalism, which he helped usher in, you get the emergence of Trump who oversees, you know, an unprecedented amount of plane crashes as an inauguration to his four years as president. So that's like a interesting coincidence of history that we see that repetition in that way. And it really speaks to the fact that we're on the tail end of the neoliberal project. And so where Reagan dismantles the air traffic controllers union, Trump oversees planes falling out of the sky, you know. History really is something when you study it. It is, it is. So let's go into the ideology of Reaganism and neoliberalism. How did Reagan manage to sell austerity, union busting, deregulation as really moral virtues, right?

Freedom, patriotism, personal responsibility, rather than as class warfare from above. Because obviously they never advance their class project as a class project, right? they advanced it as a social or cultural movement or whatever. And how has Trump been able to kind of do the same, but perhaps with a different sort of message, though a message that certainly resonates with the message of Reaganism? Yeah, I think this is such an essential question. So this to me is the real trick of the Reagan presidency, and it carries right through the two Trump administrations.

And I think you've got to go back to Reagan's classic quote of government is not a solution to our problem. government is the problem. I think that sentiment really resonated with people, because when you had a government before Reagan that did nothing to fundamentally address their needs and you're seeing record inflation, oil shortages, and increasing military budget

with domestic issues being pushed to the back burner, that sentiment of government being the problem is much easier to sell to the American people because, yes, technically, technically they're not wrong. A government in the hands of the rich is certainly a problem. The issue is Reagan was such a slick PR salesman because of his acting background. He's able to mask that his government would somehow be even worse for the working class. You know, Reagan was the absolute perfect pitchman for the capitalist class and to usher in these neoliberal reforms.

Like to me, the Reagan presidency is also like the W.W. Eification of politics in the presidency. You know, Reagan was portrayed as some type of superhero celebrity. I don't know if you've ever seen the Reagan's Raiders comic book, but go look that up if you want to see some truly unhinged stuff of how, you know, Reagan was framed. But, you know, it resonated with people. And it also kind of connects to like, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Idiocracy and President Camacho. That's basically the Reagan presidency and the Trump presidency today. And then, you know, on top of that, Reagan, much like Trump, they framed themselves as outsiders. You know, neither were traditional politicians who had been in it their whole lives.

Reagan was the actor, you know, Trump's a businessman, and a lot of people like that. They think they aren't part of the corrupt system. And because of their different perspectives, they'll change things. It's this, you know, vague notion of change, but they're offering something. Now, you know, obviously they could not be more wrong. But I completely understand how people can arrive at a conclusion like that. Now, for the, like, the critical question, though, like, how did they turn so many people into, like, bootlickers? How did they turn a significant segment of the population to vote against their own material interests?

I think that is such a difficult but important question to try to tackle. And it's probably a combination of a lot of factors. So I think a few things to highlight is, you know, I believe the dismantling of our public education system and making higher education a luxury for the elite. You know, that certainly didn't help. I also think bringing in social issues and making that the main focus for a certain segment of the population to get upset about has historically been effective. I'm sure you know the classic quote of they got you fighting a culture culture war when you should be fighting. a class war. And then lastly, I would say, like, there's also a complete de-emphasis of class analysis in our country. Like, everyone knows something is wrong, but some can just never

quite put their finger on it. And to me, that's that complete lack of class analysis. Everything is framed as left versus right instead of, you know, rich versus poor, and that can leave people, uh, people rudderless. But I'd really love to hear your thoughts as well on that trick of how they've convinced people to vote against their own class interest. Yeah, I mean, there's so many different fronts to address this on. I mean, definitely with the small government pitch that Reagan came in with, you know, you have to also imagine that at the tail end of Watergate, at the tail end of Vietnam, at the tail end of an economic period of stagflation,

wherein people across the political spectrum had genuine reasons to increasingly distrust the government. I mean, even look at the 60s, many of those hippies, right, turned into yuppies under Reagan as they aged into an economic cohort that was more resonant with the Reagan messaging. But they're the same people who, 20 years prior, were pushing this individualism, as well as had huge reasons to distrust the government from an ostensibly left-wing position, right? If you're attacking racism in the system in the 60s, you're attacking the Vietnam War, all these things as a young person wanting real change. But by 1980s, you've now shifted into a different period of your life. Maybe you own a house or something. And Reagan is coming in with an individualistic and a small government message. One that also happens to perhaps align with your class interest.

well it's quite obvious why somebody would bite on that. But, you know, Trump is an interesting inversion of this because Trump actually beat out the Republicans still arguing explicitly for a small government libertarian ideological framework, right? Trump is saying, no, I'm going to use the government as a weapon. Like, I'm going to use a state against my enemies. That is an interesting deviation from small government. Reagan libertarian rhetoric, which said the exact opposite. And a bunch of a huge faction or multiple factions of the Trump coalition explicitly want him to utilize and weaponize the state apparatus in the interest of his political project. And, you know, Project 2025 or whatever is a

reflection of that. It is taking seriously the idea of pushing as far as you can, executive dominance in the government so that you can use the state as a big stick to carry out your political project. Of course, on behalf of the oligarchic class, on behalf of trying to reestablish American imperial hegemony, on behalf of the ruling class, but now instead of using the rhetoric of small government, which Reagan had to do, trying to dismantle Keynesianism in the New Deal, the new reactionary right, is. is saying we totally accept using big government as a big stick. So that's an interesting inversion on the tail end of neoliberalism as opposed to its inauguration.

Yeah, I think I guess what it boils down to just to take away from what you just said, like people don't really care, I think, ultimately at the end of the day, between like big government or small government. They're so desperate for somebody to just try to do something that they're willing to back whoever's going to actually take action because of the dire straits that people are in today. But I think that that probably plays a role as well. Yeah, without a doubt, for sure. So let's go ahead to this next question.

And, you know, this is a meme now. Like every president is Reagan, you know, cool Reagan, dumb Reagan, whatever. From Clinton to Obama, Bush to Trump and Biden, right? These are all sort of reflections of the basic premises of neoliberalism. and every president since Reagan has largely operated within that framework that he established, right? Market fundamentalism, financialization, endless war spending, and hostility to organized labor. Sometimes that shifts a little bit, right? Obama and Biden were ostensibly a little bit more open to the idea, but not in any serious way,

not in any serious policy direction. I think during Biden's term, I think there was to some small degree, a realization that there has to be a pivot back towards, if not organized labor, than at least industrial policy or something. And there were some small, hesitant steps in that direction. But it was in the package of this broader Biden failure. And Trump has completely rolled back the clock on any positive forward steps that Biden might have tried to make during his four years. But would you say that neoliberalism became the defining era of American capitalism, much like the New Deal order before it.

And if so, I was hoping that you can kind of explain the bipartisan durability of this consensus, even as its social and economic foundations have collapsed, right? Both political parties in their own ways are trying to rhetorically talk in perhaps directions that symbolize deviations from neoliberalism. But they're actually in this neoliberal realist position where they can't break out of the ideological confines of neoliberalism and so they continue to perpetuate it. So what are your thoughts on that, bipartisan consensus and its durability for so long? Yes, I would absolutely agree that neoliberalism has become the defining era of American capitalism. I think there are important reasons behind it.

I think it's because the left has been systematically destroyed in this country. You know, groups like the Black Panthers or anyone that actually had the guts to confront capital is long gone. And, you know, one of the most enlightening things I ever heard, and I wish I remember who said it to actually properly give them credit. But the question was asked, like, why isn't there a new Malcolm X or someone in that mold? And their response was, well, the U.S. government has made sure that that person is either dead or in prison. And, you know, as a result, all you have left are the current center-right Democrats who do nothing but somehow get painted as if they're, you know, some type of left-wing radicals. And it all leads to the Overton window moving further and further to the right. there are no fundamental economic differences between the two parties. One just tries to wield progressive

language to mask their true intentions. And now, you know, there's so much money in politics, it's absolutely nuts. You know, the citizens united, the amount of dark money flowing into campaign coffers, not to mention, you know, the insanity of APAC, you know, obviously as well. So you also have to have a ton of money to even get started in politics in the first place. So, you know, of course, the government is going to represent the wants and needs of the wealthy. I mean, I think I saw a study that said one percent of the American people are millionaires, but over 50 percent of the members of Congress are millionaires. You know, so the amount of money it takes to go to college, the amount of student loan debt there is, it's next to impossible to break through in American politics. So the average person who would have been a great working class-centered politician does not have a prayer of getting into our current system.

And it's designed to be that way. So, you know, again, it's a rigged game. So what's the George Carlin quote? You know, it's a big club and you ain't in it. I wish more people would realize that. So that to me is what lends to the durability of neoliberalism. It's tough for a regular person to actually get themselves involved in the system in any meaningful way. Absolutely.

Well said. And I want to kind of re-address a point that has kind of been looming in the background of this conversation so far. And I think we talked about it a little bit up front, which is that at every time, in fact, we did because you quoted James Monroe who talked about, you know, the opulence of the minority protected from the the barbarism of the majority or whatever, the poor. We have to understand not only, and I always make this argument, the American Revolution was the most conservative revolution imaginable. Yes, thank you. Yeah, to even call it a revolution is only called so because of its formal political shift away from constitutional monarchism and towards an explicit

Republic. So in that narrow sense of the of the official and formal political forms being being turned into, you know, this new thing called a republic and really giving. In that sense, you can call it a revolution in a political form. But when we talk of revolution from a Marxist perspective, we're talking about it with a class analysis as its foundation. And in this sense, this was, in the economic sense, this was a separatist. movement. This was not a revolution. And very quickly, the founding fathers made that clear theoretically in their writings, as you pointed out. Their class positions were all as the aristocracy of the United States. And early on, the colonial bourgeoisie that overthrew

monarchy was hell bent on preserving property and obviously initially slavery, right? And in the early days after the American Revolution, you had these rebellious. from below. Shea's Rebellion, whiskey rebellions, you know, of course, slave revolts the entire time, that represented this bottom-up energy that the new quote-unquote Republic, you know, quickly turned its guns on.

That the putting down of something like Shea's Rebellion was not just a historical event, but really signified an ideological project. We are not interested in, you know, this democracy from below stuff. are not interested in a redistribution of wealth and power. We're doing this republic thing, but we're still keeping the class hierarchy firmly attached. So the revolutionary period was a tumultuous rupture from what came before, and as such, it was an opportunity for a leftward movement that was shuttered immediately. So this is inaugural to the United States, right? This

this prevention of these ruptural moments from being turned towards revolution and instead turned towards a maintenance of the status quo. And if you look at the French Revolution, which was also a break from monarchy and was also the establishment of a formal political republic, that was a much more left-wing revolution in every sense because it was about bread, let them eat cake. It was a bottom-up uprising to redistribute economic power. not just a shift in political form. And that left-wing inaugural revolution for France, despite all of the things you can

criticize about France, including its colonial adventures since then, is still represented in the bottom-up militancy that we see in French protests and the left-wing politics with regards to like health care and stuff that we see in the French society that we do not see in the American society. So I just wanted to make that point. And then what happens next? What's the next major crisis that was actually present in the revolution but was forestalled for coalitional purposes? The question of slavery, right?

It was a, it was a contradiction from the very founding of the country that were building this country on these ideas of equality. And Jefferson's writing about, you know, the inalienable rights of all man, but while he's owning slaves, this contradiction had to burst, right? You could wrinkle over it for a time, but it had to burst. And of course in 1860s, it did just that. And after the Civil War, what did we have? Another ruptural moment that opened the opportunity to the possibilities of a multiracial, real democracy. Right. But it was reconstruction and the failure of reconstruction was destroyed by the planter industrial alliance.

And what did we get instead of a multiracial democracy? We got Jim Crow, corporate monopoly, the robber baron era, right? The gilded age. So another ruptural moment in American history where it went hard right instead of pursuing a revolutionary direction. Now, the next break was the Great Depression in World War II. That was a break with the old order. That was a chance to reestablish a whole new way of doing things. And for the first time in American history, we can reasonably say with caveats that that was not a revolutionary turn.

In fact, it was a protection against a revolution. but for the first time it was a leftward economic shift represented by the New Deal. But in order to get the New Deal, which organized the working class into a new political order, it had to fence it off by race, by gender, and by, you know, an attack on anti-communism. We just did an episode with Aaron Leonard on his new book, Menace of Our Time, talking about 20th century anti-communism, and we spent some time on FDR as an anti-communism. as an anti-communist figure who explicitly saw himself as saving capitalism from the Bolshevik threat externally and from a Bolshevik style revolution inwardly because you had the Communist Party. You had these militant labor organizations that were looking over and seeing the Bolshevik revolution as a possible roadmap for what they can do here. And by offering the New Deal, it was this concession on behalf of the ruling class towards the working class to satiate those things. but it had to be racist.

You know, it had to reaffirm, reaffirm gender inequality, and it came with a large dose of anti-communism. And it was a rare moment where after World War II, the real competition economically for the United States was centered in Europe, and that was in ruins, right? Because the war was fought on that continent. And so you had this brief moment where America had geopolitical hegemony

and economic hegemony, where it was able to make those concessions. But it also came with entering into the Cold War and all those contradictions. So even that slight center-left pivot that we saw in the ruptural moment after the Great Depression in World War II was only made possible by a very specific and unique set of global, political, and economic conditions that allowed those concessions to be made that are, by the way, no longer present. So when we talk about a new, new deal, you completely lose track of the fact that there were very specific conditions that existed at that point that allowed those concessions to be made that no longer exist now. And I think we're entering this next huge ruptural phase with an even weaker left, with an even weaker organized labor front than we have seen in the past. And so this history is absolutely crucial to understand.

But I'm wondering your thoughts on any of that. Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned the American Revolution and then the Civil War time period, because those are actually my next two presentations that I'm giving to my students, actually out in the community. And for like, you have to understand what the country was founded on, like, why the revolution actually happened. You know, it was led by the upper class. It was led by the bourgeoisie. They did not want to lose their slaves. And, you know, one of the most clarifying books that I've read in the past couple years was the counter-revolution of 17th. 76 by Dr. Gerald Horn.

And when he gets into like the fundamentals of why this revolution took place inside of this country, it goes back to the James Somerset slavery case. And the, you know, landowners and the people that owned enslaved people over here were terrified that they were going to lose their property. So that's what really caused them to make a break with England because they felt like England was on the precipice of abolishing slavery. And they couldn't handle it. So they got certain segment of the population, worked up about some of the taxes and those sorts of things. But the real, like, fundamental issue was they did not want to lose their property. They did not want to lose their enslaved people. And that's what led, you know, to the revolution ultimately.

And when you understand that, that's what our country was founded on, then I feel like everything else starts to actually make sense. And you can connect the dots on these issues that we're seeing today. But they've always been there. And that's why, again, studying history is so important. to understand the context and what this country was born out of. Otherwise, you're rudderless. You're not going to be able to grapple with the present in any meaningful way. Absolutely. And what does American reaction depend on? It depends. And every time you have an American reactionary movement, it has these qualities. Hardcore anti-intellectualism, right?

A suspicion of theory of abstraction of collective reasoning. A racial hierarchy, a reassertion of racial hierarchy in the face of crises, right? We saw that. that after every period of American history. And we're seeing that now. What is the Trump presidency? What is this attack on immigration? What is this white identitarian politics? If not a reassertion of racial hierarchy, especially after 10 to 15 years of a renewed bursting forth of, you know, identity movements that were concerned about, you know, black lives and these things. So it's a reaction to that. There's always a religious, reactionary, moralist component to American reaction. We saw that with Reagan. and his, you know, turning evangelical Christianity into a political force.

We see that today with the backing of Trump by the evangelical, you know, hardcore Christian nationalist, right? We've seen that throughout history. And also, and importantly, the hyper-individualism that is actually rooted in settler colonialism, where freedom is seen as property. Those two things are indistinguishable. So the settler colonial foundations of the United States is at the same time an ideological pillar of all reactionary movements up to this very second that we're living through. And if you look over at Israel, you see the exact same contradiction that because it is a settler colonial entity, it can only ever really be fascist. because the ideological superstructure of the material base of settler colonialism has to be fascism.

And we've seen that time and time and time again. And so you see the United States, you see Israel, you see any other settler colonial entity in history, and you see a very similar way in which reaction manifests and articulates itself, particularly in moments of crisis. So that's why we're dialiticians. We understand that, you know, this is not something. something in the past. We don't go back and just look at manifest destiny as if it's an object on a museum shelf that we can ponder at. It is a living, breathing process undergirding American reaction to this very day. And a true revolutionary rupture from, you know, the reactionary

American apparatus as it currently exists, requires a revolutionary rupture from the Settler Colonial Foundation itself. And if you try to do a revolution that tries to keep intact the settler colonial pillars of the of the country that doesn't try to solve that contradiction, you're going to kind of create the opening for the reassertion of hardcore reaction every single time. So that's something to think about. Yeah, because I mean, like you said, like this is what we were always destined to be. You know, it's baked into the system. This is the path that we were put on.

And again, you know, history doesn't happen in a bubble. And you have to understand those connections between the past and the present. in order to really be able to act appropriately with what we're seeing today. Amen. So let's go ahead and talk about, we've kind of already touched on this, but this is important. Anti-communism, right? Because both Reagan and Trump rely heavily on anti-communism. Trump's talking right now about, you know, cracking down on Antifa and the radical Marxist left.

You know, that's a huge part of his rhetorical posture and has been really since the beginning, but is being ramped up now. Reagan through the Cold War rhetoric cast social democracy itself as a step toward totalitarianism, right? Stuff like universal health care is a government takeover of our freedoms. And that's why we can't have it, which is, you know, really bolstered through the Cold War ideology, which, as you mentioned earlier, among other things, have been beaten into the heads of boomers. And Trump, again, is reviving the same language to justify his current crackdown on dissent.

can you walk us through kind of Reagan's history of anti-communism and how did the weaponization of anti-communism serve to legitimize neoliberalism at home? And maybe another question you can address, sorry for throwing so much at you, but as what role did the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union play in producing the triumphalism of the 1990s, which allowed neoliberal ideology to not only go unchalleng, but to become the bipartisan consensus? Yeah, I think this is such an important topic to understand that demonization of communism around the world was critical to the continued domination of neoliberalism at home, you know, right up through today. So for the Reagan administration, there are sadly countless examples of U.S. interventionism and the demantling of communist projects, you know, abroad, but especially in Latin America. You look at Grenada or, you know, Nicaragua, the first two countries, you know, that come to mind. but in Grenada, you know, you had Maurice Bishop leading the PRG, creating absolutely remarkable reforms inside his country after their successful communist revolution, you know, fighting for workers' rights, women's rights, free health care, mass literacy campaigns, fighting against apartheid, you know, the list just goes on and on. What the Reagan administration did to this man and this movement is so vile, you know, I can't even put it into words. But, you know, regardless, in the big picture, the whole point behind this is, When you can demonize communism abroad, it makes it so a certain segment of the population will instantly turn against any semblance of communism here at home.

It's a way to break solidarity. And you see this, like, unfortunately, it pops up all the time. It's all too ingrained of that mindset of American exceptionalism. It rears its ugly head with the American people quite often. And to make things worse, I'm sure you'll agree, you have this incredibly frustrating strain of Western communists or socialist, leftists who will instantly start spewing CIA talking points whenever a communist nation abroad is mentioned. And, you know, one of the first presentations I gave from my people's classroom was on immigrant

rights. So we covered, you know, obviously the history and all the deep connections to today with ice and all the horrific things that we're seeing. And I was going through the historical context to Sacko and Van Zetti and the first red scare. So I mentioned, you know, how the Soviet Union made these incredible gains for the working class and how it scared the hell out of the powers that be here in the U.S. You know, that's a major reason why Sacco and Van Zeti were targeted. And after the presentation was over, you know, I did a little Q&A. And these guys had an issue with me highlighting the positives of the Soviet Union for like

20 seconds out of the nearly two-hour presentation that I gave. And, you know, I'll remember their quotes. It was like, you know, well, capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we have. And communism is good in theory, but, you know, it doesn't work in practice. And it's just like, open a goddamn book, study actual history, like my God. But it was clarifying for me to see how anti-communist rhetoric is ingrained into the American psyche. And Reagan greatly helped to exacerbate that with his foreign policy. And then, yes, to answer the second part of your question, the collapse of the Soviet Union,

that to me is one of the most tragic events of more modern history. Without that counterweight, without multipolarity, U.S. neoliberalism and capitalism was able to entrench itself abroad for multiple decades and obviously here at home as well. However, you know, I do feel like there's a little bit of cause for hope as a result because of some of the gains that we're seeing out of China because, I mean, you could just like show an American the Chinese Huawei tablet and what that looks like and they might like start quoting Mao just as a little bit of a counterweight to the things that we're seeing because of how awesome those things look. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's so interesting to think about those dynamics. And I would even make the argument that the New Deal, FDR, concessions. Of course, with all the other conditions I already mentioned being, being necessary for its

formation, if you took out the threat of global communism, if you took out the Bolshevik revolution from the international sphere, not only would the communist movements here in the U.S. be robbed of a dearth of theory that allowed them to make progress in that time, but the capitalist class, I think, would have been under less international pressure to give those concessions. Without, you know, the big fear, and they made this explicit, was a Bolshevik-style revolution in the United States. And if that Bolshevik revolution wasn't successful over in Russia in the first place, they would have never had that sort of hanging over their head as a possibility at home. And, yeah, the communist international movement as it manifested here in the U.S. would also be weakened in, you know, severe ways. So perhaps we wouldn't even have got the New Deal or perhaps it would have been much less robust.

than it was if the Bolshevik Revolution hadn't succeeded in the first place. And that right there is an example of dialectical understanding of these two seemingly completely disparate political events, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the New Deal here in the United States.

What is their actual connection? Those two things seem totally separate from one another. No, they're actually deeply, deeply intertwined in these fascinating ways. And so I think that speaks to the power of a dialectical form of analysis. But I also wanted to point out that you know that you said you gave this two hour lecture and they they were harping on this 20 seconds where you said something nice.

But and what came out of their, what came out of their mouths is this these platitudes, right? And I think this communism looks good on paper, but it doesn't work in practice. These things that you hear all the time, it is so clear that they are not the product of independent thought. They are the parodying or the regurgitation of propaganda. It's actually fascinating to see somebody who you know has not spent a millisecond studying this history, reading a single page of a single book about communist theory or history or anything like that, confidently spewing out these completely anodyne baseless, shallow platitudes, as if they are the product of their own independent thinking.

And in this way, this is how we see ideology and how it actually manifests in real life. It is the ideological apparatus and its muscle memory being worked. And we use these words like MPC or stuff like that. And when you see somebody look you in the eyes and just vomit out these sort of platitudes, you can kind of see that they are, at least in one way,

ideologically completely captured and that they are just they have been like sort of like brainwashed to when you poke them with this certain stick they regurgitate this certain thing it's like a Pavlovian response to uh to any uh critique or anything that would threaten that ideological assumption and um it's quite scary to actually see in real time how it just flows out from the faces of people um who otherwise not only haven't thought about those issues or study them importantly, but also would benefit and are being screwed by the system they're defending. And they don't realize how when they spew those platitudes, they're actually participating in the ideological maintenance of a system that is destroying them in their future. And that's also

the sadness of it all, right? Absolutely. And just it made that Mao quote pop in my head of no investigation, no right to speak. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think like that. Like you said, people just go into like robot mode and they just hear the word communism and it's just this scree of like i said cia talking points just coming out of them and they don't even realize it like the lights just go out and it's just so frustrating for me as a teacher because like can you please just use your critical thinking skills or just try to take a deeper dive into this stuff without just spitting back things that you've heard like in the capitalist press or wherever and it's so difficult to break through that so um that's why it was so tough for me with that that presentation like

you know, that was the thing that they took away from what I talked about for two hours was I said like a nice thing about the Soviet Union. It just shows how deeply ingrained those mindsets are and it's very frustrating. And yeah, and my thing is like I don't even care if you disagree. There are people out there that understand the history and there's not communist. They just don't agree with the communist premises, but they will articulate it in a way that's not, you know, platitudinous. It's not empty. It's not shallow. They'll have their critiques.

We can argue. I would, I like that. I enjoy like spending time with somebody who is an ideal. opponent of mine actually has studied and gives a serious critical analysis of a thing and then comes to me with with a disagreement. That's fine. Like we're not saying that anybody by virtue of disagreeing with us are brainwashed. That's not what we're saying. No. We're saying that many people who spew this stuff are brainwashed in that ideological way. But, you know, if they did the study, if they read the books, if they studied history, if they really became curious about this

stuff, that doesn't guarantee they'll end up agreeing with us. That's what political struggle is for, right? We don't all agree, and we'll never all agree. And we have to fight on the political, social and cultural terrains for control and for power. That's just, unfortunately, that's the game we're playing here. So I just never want people to think that by virtue of disagreeing with us, we're saying somebody's ideologically captured. That's too convenient. And I know you agree.

I know you agree with me, but. Yeah, it's that lack of critical thinking, that lack of critical thought that is just so frustrating to. not see from certain people that you, again, like you said, like they should know better. Like those two guys, like I said, that, uh, that did say those things to me, like one of them prefaced it by saying like, well, I'm a polysci major. Oh, God. You know, just trying to give himself some credence to what he was talking about. And it's like, well, did you not, are you listening to yourself?

Yeah. And just, yeah, it's tough. That's not the argument you think it is. I'm a polysci major. That doesn't immediately give you legitimacy. Yeah. It's like saying, trust me, I know my shit. I'm an economist.

It's like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the last thing I wanted to say because we're doing the parallels, obviously Reagan is known in the anti-communist part is like, you know, these contras throughout Central and South America, the CIA coups, destabilization of these areas.

And today we see that being revamped with Trump, right? Trump, as we speak, is building up a real force to basically do regime change in Venezuela. The moment he got in, he puts Cuba back on the, sponsors of state terrorism list, increases the embargo, right? Rolls back anything that Obama did to try and begin opening relations with Cuba and really causing crises inside of Cuba and inside of Venezuela where because of the sanctions and the embargoes, you know, medicine and food and stuff are hard to come by. And especially when you're an island nation, you depend on trade in order to get things that

you can't self-sufficiently create on an island, a literal island. And so Cuba is in this weak geographical position, and Trump is just tightening the screws on them. And I do think that in this era of multipolarity, that this re-attempt to dominate your sphere of influence, right? To pursue the Monroe Doctrine vociferously in this moment of imperial decline in multipolarity is an interesting parallel, because Reagan was doing it in the context of the Soviet Union still existing, the Cold War, and the real competition. Like, there was, until the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, it wasn't clear who was going to win the Cold War, ultimately. And there were periods of time in American history during the Cold War where it seemed like revolution was around the corner

and that the Soviet Union was pulling ahead vociferously, you know, and you go back and you look at radicals and revolutionaries in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, they're feeling that too. They're seeing that the U.S. is in this state of catastrophe. So it wasn't a foregone conclusion that that was how history was going to go. So Reagan operating in the context of the Cold War is doing the Monroe Doctrine and establishing hemispheric control and domination as a foundation to fight the Cold War. And now in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of multipolarity,

Trump is trying to do the exact same thing to give him a foundation to try to prevent or arrest imperial decline. So another iteration in the same ways that we've been exploring throughout this episode that I find, I mean, fascinating, but also deeply disturbing, right? For sure. Yeah, I actually just covered in my class the other day based on the episode that I just listened to from you, like the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 of what we're seeing in Venezuela. I just taught a lesson on the Monroe Doctrine itself, and I wanted to make those connections to today of just seeing the Monroe Doctrine once again being put into play of everything that we're seeing currently

with Venezuela, with the boats being targeted, the Nobel Peace Prize, you know, going to the right-wing leader of the opposition party inside of Venezuela. And it's just, you know, you're seeing history repeat itself in the worst possible way is yet again. And I could be wrong. I'm not, I don't predict the future, but it doesn't feel that this is a bluff. It doesn't feel that this time that they're saber rattling or they're just trying to destabilize without making a real move. This seems much more aggressive. The Nobel Peace Prize going to Machado is this soft power setup. You know, Trump explicitly activating CIA proxies in Venezuela to destabilize it from within, using Puerto Rico as this launch pad for military actions and, you know, prelude to. an attack on Venezuela sending I believe 10,000 troops over there flying B2 bombers in Venezuelan airspace. This seems like it's happening. Marco fucking Rubio is the Secretary of State. And, you know,

he's like a John Bolton for South America. This is what he wants. This is his constituency is made in large part by these exiles from Venezuela and Cuba, these hardcore anti-communist reactionaries that want this. And so everything is set up perfectly. And Trump also has to kind of, if he wants to do this, if this is part of his imperial plan, which I think it is, doing it before the midterms, I think is also another constraint on them that they're thinking about, that they've got to kind of push some of this stuff through before, you know, Democrats make any sort of inroads, not that Democrats are going to be anti-war in Venezuela necessarily by any means, but that there might be some more legal or bureaucratic

restraints put on the Trump administration as a whole that could slow them down or or in other ways obstruct their ability to go full on with the things they want to do. So I think there's a little bit of a time thing at play here. And with the ceasefire in Gaza, this might be the perfect time to do a full-hearted attempt at regime change. And all the things we've seen leading up to here has been kind of setting the table for that actual military action, which I do think if I had to place money on the thing is coming. Definitely. And like you said, I think it's just, it's so blatant like what they're doing.

Like they're not trying to hide it. They're not trying to mask it. It's so on the nose that like you said, they just feel like they have a small little window and they're trying to just accomplish whatever they can possibly accomplish within this tight little time frame. And like the bigger picture thing though that I focus on with my students is like like I said, it is very blatant. But like it's not complicated to understand. And I wish more people like felt comfortable actually analyzing geopolitics because it's really simple. Like, you know, they want the oil inside of Venezuela. That's really. what it boils down to. The U.S. companies got kicked out after the Bolivarian Revolution with Hugo Chavez. And all the things that have happened since are very simple to understand of why the U.S. wants to saber rattle so hard and take out, you know, Maduro currently inside of Venezuela. So I wish more people felt confident actually pinpointing that stuff because it is not complex at all. And it's very clearly, you know, it's easy to see through. And they don't even want to negotiate with Maduro. So even if Maduro is trying to make overtures saying, hey, well,

open up some of our natural resources to you. You can have all these things. They're not cool with that. They want the full overthrow. They want to turn it into an Argentina. They want to install a Malay-type figure for their own total domination of their area. They're not willing to even compromise with these states. They want to totally overthrow them.

And they explicitly say they have the right to. Trump has been recorded as saying in meetings. He sees Venezuela as part of the United States. I mean, and this speaks to your point. point, there's no attempt to ideologically and rhetorically wrinkle over these things or to present a fig leaf or anything. I mean, you know, Trump making AI images of a Trump hotel in Gaza, right? Or posting on truth social the video of him bombing boats. Now, Obama and Biden and all the rest would do those things, but they would have the restraint not to brag about it, right?

the boat bombings would be lines in the New York Times, you know, Obama would come out and say, you know, we had evidence that this was a cartel and, you know, if he did those sort of things. He would not, like, posted on his Twitter being like, got another one, you know, or make these grotesque AI videos of real estate development in Gaza after they take it over. That's, of course, a part of the plan of the donor class. Like the Zionists would love nothing more And the Western capitalists And venture capitalists and investors Would love nothing more than to have that As an investment opportunity

And that's been true throughout administrations But Trump just makes it so fucking belligerently obvious He takes pride in things That every other president would feel We have to soften this We have to present this in a certain way You know? And he's just like, we're doing it We're going to do more of it

We love it And his cult members love it And he just, he takes no prisoners in that regard. And so there's, he just makes it, he makes it plain. Like, I'm going to say these things. I'm going to do these things. Does anybody care? And it, it reminds me of back during his first campaign, like back in 2016, when he just

went out and said, you know, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and I would not lose a single vote. Absolutely. And it's kind of the same thing that you're seeing now. He's banking on the fact that the American public, or at least enough people than the American public, just don't care about these things. And he's just going to power through it. regardless, without any sort of decorum that an Obama would have or anything along those lines. Absolutely correct. So let's go ahead and move on.

We're more than 40 years into the neoliberal era that began, you know, formally with Reagan. Four decades of deregulation, privatization, financialization, union decline, tax cuts for the wealthy. How do you trace a direct line from these policies to today's economic landscape of stagnant wages, Soaring cost of living, you know, incredible inequality, gilded age levels of inequality, mass precarity, etc. I mean, I think a lot of us intuitively understand this, but maybe you can give it an articulation. Yeah, I'd really like to focus on what I feel is a pivotal and all too forgotten aspect of the Reagan presidency to help answer this critical question. So that's going back to when the Reagan administration deregulated children's television. You know, before the Reagan presidency, there were a bunch of regulations in place for kids' TV. It was the Grassroots Organization Act Action for Children's TV that fought for these regulations. So a few of them were, you know, 14 hours of programming for kids was mandated throughout the week.

There could be zero commercials during a children's show. You know, the hosts of children's shows could not sell products. So, you know, you had amazing children shows on. And obviously, I'm going to date myself here with some of them. But, you know, you had Reading Rainbow. Mr. Rogers, you know, Sesame Street. I don't know if anybody remembers Captain Kangaroo and Schoolhouse Rock, but, you know, now a neoliberal would view these regulations and these shows with complete disgust. When a neoliberal sees a precious baby, they see massive profit opportunity.

So the Reagan administration decided to go after, you know, these regulations. So that's when Reagan hired Mark Fowler as his new FCC chair, and Fowler was a corporate lawyer, and he immediately decided to deregulate everything. you know, in TVs. And his quote was, you know, let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes? Hmm, what always happens when the government takes this hands-off approach? Who benefits? Because when he says he's going to let the people decide, he means he's going to let corporations decide. So, ACT put together, you know, a massive task force study. It was over 60,000 pages long in which they consulted child psychologist, teachers, pediatricians, nutritionists,

and they concluded deregulating children's TV would do irreparable harm. So obviously corporations are going to push back against this and they raise $16 million, you know, just like the Powell memo would have wanted, and defeated act. And children's TV was deregulated and eventually the fairness doctrine was also done away with. And just want to give a quick shout out to my dad, who still rants daily about the loss of the fairness doctrine. But regardless, you know, corporations swooped in and children's TV ended up looking like, you know, capitalism threw up on your TV screen.

You had shows like G.I. Joe now and Transformers and commercials all over the place marketing plastic crap to kids. And I remember, like my entire childhood, became dedicated to getting the Ghostbusters replica proton pack. And, you know, all the actual educational shows began to fall by the wayside. And it had significant educational and cultural effects. You know, younger students reading math and science scores began to fall off a cliff in the 80s to the point, you know, where we're at today, where we rank in like the 20s and 30s in the PISA educational scores.

So, you know, it makes complete sense why the Reagan administration would want to do this because if you look back at Reagan's history when he was the governor of California, you know, there was a push to provide free college tuition at all, you know, California state colleges. And of course, he's, you know, he defeated that. And one of his advisors was quoted as saying, we are in danger of producing. an educated proletariat. That's dynamite. We need to be selective about who gets through the higher ed programs. And I think that perfectly sums it all up. When people aren't properly educated, you can easily see why we are where we are today. And now you have AI being pushed inside of society, but especially inside of public schools, which is incredibly frustrating for me, you know, of course, as a teacher. But the reason why I think this is also pivotal to understand

because it's a perfect microcosm of the goals of neoliberalism. It's a perfect microcosm of the goals of neoliberalism. It's the hollowing out of humanity and the slow turn of all of us into tiny little profit centers to exploit. So, you know, I guess to tie it back to your question, to me, this example helps explain in the last 40 years of why there has been no type of course correction whatsoever. And you already referenced it, but I have a great meme of Reagan and the subsequent presidents that is hilarious, but insanely accurate. And, you know, it's a picture of each president and the title are a little caption under ETH one. So you have Reagan is classified as Reagan classic. then H.W. Bush is nerd Reagan, Clinton is cool Reagan, W. Bush is dumb Reagan. Obama is Elegant Reagan, Trump is Rich Reagan, and Biden is senile Reagan. But the key thing, it's hilarious. It's great. But the key thing is that they may have personality differences, but the policies are the same. You know, you study any of them for like five seconds, and you'll find policies ripped right from the Reagan neoliberal playbook. You go through H.W. Bush and his tax cuts, Clinton and, you know,

NAFTA, you know, W has too many to mention, but of course, his tax cuts, and then you could argue, you know, the No Child Left Behind Act as well. Obama with the ACA, you know, that was created by the Heritage Foundation. And, you know, Biden destroying the railroad worker strikes or Trump with the USMCA. You can clearly see that lineage from Reagan to Trump. You know, the president's name changes, but the neoliberalism seems to endure no matter what. And if Hillary would have warned, she would have been the girl boss Reagan. And if, Kamala would have won. Perfect. She would have been the coconut Reagan. Yeah. I did see one that actually said her as a cop Reagan.

Oh, nice. Yeah, perfect. Even better. Yeah. Also very good. But yeah, so I love that you focused on one thing and you really flesh that out the education thing because, you know, we get the broad contours of the economic policies and where we're at. I want to focus on another aspect. And I wrote some notes to this effect, kind of doing what you did.

but instead of public education and the education of children with public television, I want to talk about the homelessness problem, right? Because homelessness was not what it is today for most of American history. You did not have just miles, blocks and blocks of homeless people in every major city and even small and medium-sized cities that we see today. And Reagan really, really is at fault here, right? And there's many ways in which his administration can be, it can be, you know, pinned on his administration. So a HUD budget was slashed, right?

So between 1978 and 1983, federal housing assistance was cut by roughly 80%. So public housing construction stopped. So that's one element. The elimination of Section 8 and rent supports. Reagan gutted the programs that directly subsidized low-income tenants. So you're not building public housing. you're slashing subsidies to help low-income tenants afford housing. The de-institutionalization, so the process of closing psychiatric hospitals, it did begin

in the 70s, but Reagan accelerated it without building community-based mental health care or any other thing that could be an alternative. And in effect, thousands of mentally ill people were taken out of these hospitals and just dumped onto the streets. You had cuts to welfare and disability programs, so Reagan's administration tightened. eligibility and vilified recipients, right? The whole welfare queen thing. It was turned into like this national idea of people sucking off the welfare state and not contributing and things that we still live with today, right? That happened under Reagan. And finally, deregulation and

gentrification. The neoliberal urban policy prioritizes private development, speculation, and rising property values. Cities chased investment in tourism. They did not build affordable housing for their people. So the homelessness crisis and the broader housing crisis that we're all experiencing today that we see every single day when we go out into our worlds or when we pay our rent or when we pay our mortgage or when we look for a home, these are things that are also directly traceable back to neoliberalism and the Reagan administration. And these are things that are now huge problems in our society, which by no means are being addressed in any serious way. The fascist response to homelessness is to dehumanize them, to blame them for their own situation,

and then if they have to do anything about it at all, use the police state to go and prison them and use prison as public fucking housing in this fucking country. So again, you can see a straight line from Reagan to Trump, from those, the neoliberal policies of Reagan to the actual social conditions that we all live in in 2025. Yeah. Yeah, and just real quick, you know, I live near Utica, New York, which is a classic, you know, Rust Belt City. And it perfectly ties into what you just said. Like, we had a Sykes Center right in the heart of Utica that served a lot of people. And that was shut down, you know, decades ago.

And you can see the negative impacts of that, you know, kind of scattered across our city. So it's just a, I know, locally a classic example of exactly what you were talking about. Absolutely. And yeah, in a neoliberal individual society, it's like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Yeah, just go figure it out. Yeah, you're homeless. It's not a social responsibility to take. care of homeless people that's the individualist aspect of of neoliberalism and and a socialist vision

is like we are going to take care of you we are not going to allow anybody to be homeless we are going to take care of you're not going to imprison you for it we are going to hug you and love you and give you all the resources you absolutely need we will force you off the street we will put you in a home we will give you caseworker we will give you mental health we will get you addiction and recovery issues trauma counseling we will invest in our people we will take care of our people because they are our neighbors. They are human beings. We care about them. And the socialist orientation of society is to organize society around human well-being, not around profit maximization. That is the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism and we see a system is as it does. Well, we see what capitalism and what neoliberalism actually leads to. And that's the society we live in today. I think you perfectly say it's love versus hate that's really it absolutely so you know Reagan still is revered and there's this way in which

you know history is memory hold I mean events from two weeks ago are memory holds like when Charlie Kirk got assassinated the right was just saying now you've really done it you know you've pissed us off there's no returning from this civil war now like you are going to regret doing this and yeah Trump is doing this Antifa crackdown But what I said at the beginning of that was, hey, in two weeks, everybody's going to move on. Because that's the pace of our society and the digestion and the metabolic rate of our digesting of news and the moving on that we go through. And when you go back in time, you know, Reagan is now put up as like a really great president. Obama explicitly said that Reagan is one of his political heroes and somebody he looks up to.

Bush is now being treated and has been for the last several years by liberals as like can we at least return to Bush where things are more and it's just flucking insane and I would not be surprised if Trump in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years is treated in a similar way. It depends a lot on the trajectory of society in the meantime

but Reagan is still revered today among both political parties why do you think his legacy seems to endure in such a positive life? Yes I mean you look at it like most modern polls about like popularity of U.S. presidents, and Reagan typically ranks in the top 10 on most of those polls. So, you know, it's one of the most infuriating things to me

because when you actually study the history of Reagan, it's like, you know, unless you are a sociopath, how could anybody like this guy? You know, like when Reagan was governor of California, he was being driven around and driven past a food bank in Oakland. And he is quoted as saying, you know, I hope they all get botulism. If that doesn't tell you like everything you need to know about the guy,

and like I can't help you. But like to get back to the question itself, like I feel like his legacy indoors in a positive light for a few reasons. First of all, and I've kind of touched on it, but I think our education system does a horrible job of educating people on modern day issues in particular. And I'll look at my own state, you know, New York State, for instance. More of the modern issues in our social studies curriculum and standards like the Reagan

administration either aren't covered or very briefly discussed in a real surface level sort of way, because there's such a focus on standardized testing at the high school level with the regents exams that we have here in New York. And, you know, teachers are pressed to cover a ton of content in a short amount of time. And that, you know, goes directly against everything that a sound educational philosophy should be. So as a result, you get a ton of students in this country who go through school without ever talking about Reagan and the rest of the neoliberals, you know, that followed him in any sort of meaningful way. So, you know, these kids end up falling through the cracks and who will eventually fill in the gaps of that knowledge for them. You know, it's going to be the capitalist press or some

right-wing buffoon on social media. And it kind of, again, all ties back to the Powell memo, ultimately. You know, the rich control our education system, and it's designed to prevent working class knowledge. You know, do you think a, you know, company like Pearson or Prentice Hall is going to have a textbook that has anything other but a positive spin on the Reagan era? You know, of course not. So, you know, that's one facet of it. I think the other facet of it is, I think his legacy endures because there's a significant segment of the population today who don't, like, feel the impacts of neoliberalism the same way my generation and subsequent generations do. You know, I don't want to, like, dump on boomers too much, but, you know, boomers grew up in the shadow of the New Deal. They do not feel the heat the way that we do.

You know, they don't quite get it. Their material conditions are vastly different. You know, they don't understand that it's almost impossible to own a house. You know, I think the last study that I saw said you need to make like 115 grand. a year to even have a shot at home ownership. You know, they don't understand there's no state in the country that you can afford rent on minimum wage. You know, they don't understand that it's almost impossible to have a child or multiple children, you know, in this atmosphere. And they don't get that you've got to bankrupt yourself in order to acquire a college education. So, you know, it's all

insane to me. And it all ties back to the Reagan time period. So that's why I think his legacy indoors without much of a challenge, you know, in today's landscape. Yeah. And I think the only way in which that changes is a robust move away from the basic premises of neoliberalism, right? If and when society does break in a genuine left-wing direction away from neoliberal era, then we recast figures that in that era were heralded as heroic, we recast them in a different light, right? And history, as we look back over history, we're always kind of wrestling over it and redefining it and shifting it. People's views on historical figures and historical eras

shift based on the present situation and conditions out of which they're looking back across history so I think there will be a day when that does change and I think some of the political work that you're doing that I'm doing that people on the left broadly do even something like sharing those memes around

is a part of the broader process by which Reagan is ripped off of this fucking pedestal that he does not belong atop of so I know somebody in my life who lives in a deep red state in Kentucky, who is poor by all measures,

you know, disabled, can barely get any sort of social safety net, struggles financially immensely. And because they came up at a certain time, they still have this heroic vision of Reagan, and they're still attached to the GOP and is a full-on Maga-Trumper. And the mythos of Reagan is a main component of, of continuing to have them commit to this party that runs their state and runs their country in the direct opposite economic direction that would benefit them in any way, shape, or form.

And trying to get past that ideological fog and talk about the actual consequences of this person that you revere as a hero who has demonstrably created social conditions that has made your personal life way worse than it has to be. it's an impossible endeavor and it's just it is tragic to see that so a day will come yeah it is because like it's like it's it's all like optics for the people that really like Reagan they don't take a deep dive into his policies I would argue you know for the most part he just you know he looked like a president he fit the mold and that's all that they focus on instead of really looking and analyzing the things that he did with his policy initiatives during

his time as president that's what people should be focusing on But it's no, he was just, you know, a slick actor, and he just looked the part, and that's all people care about. Yeah. And it's tied into their sense of self. This person that I'm talking about, their father passed away. Their father was a cop in Kentucky in the 80s. Like, I can't imagine what went on then. Yeah. But was, you know, made his politics a lot about Reagan. And so, you know, his child who still lives today, it's the idea of Reagan is actually integrated into their very sense of self and their family lineage. And to bring. break from that to turn on that would be in some sense to turn against the values that their beloved father or whatever had and taught them

and so it's like it's deeper than it's not rational it's emotional it's visceral it's deeper than logical or rational thought and we have to we have to reckon with that if we're going to convince anyone for sure all right well as we wrap up this conversation this has been amazing we can go longer

we could talk about you know president since then we could do an episode like this on every president after Reagan and cover That's what my series is about. Every single lesson is one. Actually, well, for like W. Bush, I have to break it up over two. So that's like a four-hour presentation going through W. But, yeah, that's exactly what my most recent lecture series has been designed around.

And you do a great job of that. And in a second, we'll talk about it. And I'll link to it in the show notes. People can go and actually watch those lectures and fill in all this historical knowledge. And even the Reagan lecture, it goes more in depth than what we were able to fully cover here. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, as a final question before we get into that, Today, as we've talked about, we face systemic crisis, declining living standards, ecological

collapse, imperial aggression and overreach. Do you see any possibility for a post-neo-liberal order emerging from within the U.S.? Or will meaningful transformation once again kind of come from the global periphery, right? Yeah, this is such a tough question and one that I constantly go back and forth on. So, you know, there are days when I'm incredibly heartened, you know, by the activism and pushback I see in this country and, like, truly feel Che's quote of how people in America that are fighting back are doing the most important work of all because we live in the belly of the beast. And then there are other days when I'm completely dejected and feel like all hope is lost in this country. And it's, it's times like that where I feel like I become like a disciple of Fanon and feel like fundamental change will have to occur outside the U.S. But, you know, either way, I look to like, I look to the people of Palestine and others facing Gen. aside and incredible amounts of repression. If they can continue on and fight, then, you know, what excuse do we have? You know, the least I can do is go out into my community and educate, you know, as many people as possible a few times a month. I feel like I'd be a massive hypocrite.

I'd be a coward, you know, if I didn't. So, you know, to order and to move forward in this country, though, I really feel like we need to go back to the basics and like listen to Lenin. And I really believe we need to form a true workers party, a Vanguard party. and unite the various branches we have into one. You know, we have the PSL and CPUSA and DSA and others, but I think we need to put our differences aside and come together at this critical juncture. Because I just feel like without a true vanguard party,

I feel like there can be no legitimate pushback against neoliberal domination inside of this nation. You know, the Democratic Party, to me at least, is a complete dead end. All the Democratic politicians that people look to to being as like, you know, the spark that could begin the transformation of the Democrats into a true opposition party have turned out to either be massive disappointments or complete frauds like, I don't know,

John Fetterman. And even like, you know, AOC and Bernie, and even a little bit now you're already seeing with Mom Donnie are being incredible disappointments. You know, Mom Donnie's a recent about face should tell you everything you need to know about the Dems. I mean, how many times can you be Charlie Brown and have the football pulled away from you before you realize, that the Democrats are not the answer. You know, their so-called progressives are doing nothing but sheepdogging people back into a political apparatus

that threw them out the window decades ago. So, you know, like I said earlier, it's two sides of the same capitalist, neoliberal coin. So, you know, let's listen to Lenin. Let's look to the bravery and courage of others around the world who are directly confronting the U.S. Empire to inspire us to do whatever we can, you know, back here

in what sometimes feels like the heart of darkness to try to raise class consciousness. consciousness and, you know, fight back in some way. Incredibly well said, and I just have two quick points as a follow-up. One, to your AOCs, Oran Mondani and Bernie Sanders, you know, sheep-dogging point. The main thing I want to say is, like, subjectively from within their consciousness, that's not what they see themselves as doing. But in order to survive in the incentive structure matrix of the Democratic Party,

in order to run campaign, even when ostensibly elites in the party are kind of hesitant to endorse, or whatever to exist in that world to move up in it at all you have to play the role of a sheepdog because the only principled stance towards the democratic party is total unapologetic opposition and the moment you try to take any other stance toward it when you think you can go within it and make it better you are now operating in that spider web and you are stuck to its you know it's sort of tethers and you have to behave and act in a certain way in order to just survive in that context whatsoever. And so I don't think AOC or Zoran Mondani or whatever

come into this stuff thinking, I'm going to pull back on these issues and I'm going to just do enough to get the younger people back on board of the Democratic Party so we can reinforce our hegemony on the left. It's not like that. It is just the structural logic of surviving in that context produces these results.

And so time and time, again, we're shown that our only viable position with regards to the Democratic Party has to be total opposition and a refusal to work with it, but to treat it as the enemy that it actually is, not a vehicle for our interests. And then finally, I oscillate like you, right, between like, you know, people are fed up, you know, something has to give. But I oscillate also in the other direction is like Americans sometimes are just too comfortable that this neoliberal system is, it, it can't sustain itself so it will collapse and maybe in the wake of collapse something new can emerge. But as we've seen throughout American history, in the wake of collapse, more times than not,

it's a hard pivot to the right, not to the center left, much less ever in American history hasn't been a pivot to the radical economic, revolutionary, liberatory left. It's never once happened. It's not saying it can't happen, but that it sometimes tempers any optimism I might have specifically locally. But that is not to say that we shouldn't do everything we can, Because even if I'm right and that real transformation that the real vanguard of global revolution is on the periphery, is on the global south, where the contradictions are higher, where the comfort level is not what it is here, where they are literally fighting for survival, that we still have to do everything we can, not because we here in the imperial core are the vanguard of global revolution, but because we're the rear guard. that we are operating within the belly of the beast.

And our job is not to sit back and let the global South take over. It is to support and sustain that global struggle by consolidating our support for these global South movements, fighting capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, and to organize and educate and do everything we can here in the belly of the beast to weaken the imperial apparatus from within and to lend support internationally to those movements that are on the front of the front of the world. front lines and the people in Palestine are on the front lines, right? The people in Africa fighting colonialism in the Congo in South America right now. The people in Venezuela, eight million of whom said they're going to come out and fight the U.S. if there's an invasion. The people of Cuba, that is where the conditions are the ripest for revolutionary action. That is where the line for

anti-imperialism and socialism is being held. And we have to deflate ourselves in the sense that we are not the the protagonists in this global story, but that doesn't mean we don't have a role to play. In fact, our role of organizing and agitating and educating is more important than ever. So it is not a view of passivity. It is not a view of putting the burden on the shoulders of the people in the global South. It is a view that deemphasizes us as the protagonist and puts us in a support role for a global movement of revolution. And I think that is a, I think a healthy way to look at it and goes a long way and deconstructing some of the egoism that naturally emerges from the West that thinks that, you know, they are the center of the world

and that any good thing coming is going to come as a product of their specific behavior. So people can disagree with me on that, but that's kind of where I am at the current moment. Yeah, that actually perfectly segues into a question that I wanted to ask you because after my presentations, you know, the number one question that I get, so many people come up to me and they're like, what can I do? I feel powerless. And, you know, I tell them to get involved in any way they can, you know, whether it's attending rallies or protests, you know, get out in the community and, you know, use whatever talents they have to do whatever they can to help out in some way. You know, like my role, I feel like is to educate. You know, there's maybe something else, like organizing. But what would be your answer to that question? Like, what can people do? I feel like we know what we need to do on a mass scale, but like on the local level, what would be your recommendations? Yeah, I mean, I mean, everybody has a role to play. Everybody has something they can offer the movement. Obviously, organizing, getting involved in tenant organizing is a huge important, materially relevant site of struggle, getting into political education, which first means educating yourself, humbling your own ego to the subordinate activity of studying and learning about the world. No investigation, no right to speak. You do not know as much as you think you know, so there has to be a humility there. There has to be a personal transformation where, you are redefining your vision for your life away from careerist self-centered notions of status and wealth and careers and towards liberation for others. That is actually a spiritual and

existential transformation that breaks out personally and psychologically from the ideology of capital which says you need to get the best job you can. You need to get the most money you can. You, you, you, you, you have to break out of that and live for something bigger than the self. for something bigger than the ego and its advancement in its own petty, petulant desires. So I think this involves a moral transformation away from the ethics of capitalism and pre, you know, positioning the ethics of socialism and communism, a spiritual and psychological transformation away from egoic and narcissistic, individualistic self-obsession and towards living for something bigger than yourself, a material and political struggle that is involved in political education,

community organizing, tenant organizing, labor organizing, influencing the people in your life, your friends, your family, your coworkers, when and where you reasonably can. An ethic, yeah, I said an ethical revolution. So I think you have to take your whole life, your whole life, and put it in service of doing everything you can to make the world a better place. And that happens at multiple levels of being. And I think that's what I would tell young people.

and also to do it in a way that doesn't need for the external world to immediately shift for you to feel valid. We don't know the outcome. We don't know where this all leads. That is not any reason to not do it. That you have to commit yourself to this even with the fact that you might lose being a very real possibility. And to totally accept, I do not control where history goes, but I am an active agent of it. And I can do everything I can to push this thing forward. And I think that's all of our responsibility.

But again, it's not guaranteed success. And so you have to do that without any assurance that you're going to succeed, but you still got to do it. And what's the alternative? The alternative is to just completely accept that all your life is, is working and consuming and trying to make the number in your bank account go up while everything around you burns. and that the alternative is just to care about your tiny little self and its little machinations in a social context that is collapsing all around it. That's no alternative at all.

So the choice actually, when you look at it with clarity, the choice is clear. The more meaningful, engaging, rewarding life is the life dedicated to something bigger than yourself? And the small, myopic, self-centered life is really an abandonment of your existential responsibility and a belittling of your spirit. So that's what I would offer to people. Yeah, I think that's beautifully said and definitely a message that I want to pass along to the people that I'm trying to educate. And, you know, one of the biggest things that I took away from, from what you just said, is just removing the ego is so huge, especially in this country

where it's very difficult sometimes to push back against that. All right, my friend, this has been a fascinating, wonderful conversation. I really, really appreciate you, the people's classroom, the work you're doing, the lectures you're giving. I hope this is not the last time you're on Rev left. You have my phone number at this point, so we can do another version of this. We can do more episodes like this. You're a very effective teacher. I appreciate you spending your time and sharing your knowledge with us. But before I let you go, can you just let people know where they can find the people's classroom and anything else you want to plug or point people towards? Yeah, for sure. And just for slightly, I want to say

thank you so much for the opportunity. You know, Rev. Left and Red Menace have been so pivotal to my political maturity and development and honestly help me become a better educator when I really think about it. So it's been honestly a dream come true to spend some time with you today, and I can't thank you enough. But for my social media, if you would like to follow me on there, for Instagram, it's at the people's classroom 315. So that's my handle on Instagram. And then I do have a YouTube page as well where I post the video versions of my lectures that have and giving out in the public. And that's just, you know, going to YouTube.com and then it's slash at the people's classroom altogether with no spaces and no apostrophe or anything. So

that's the best way to kind of stay up to date with the things that I've been working on. And I got a couple upcoming presentations. The 21st, I'll be going through the darker roots of the American Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. And then on the 28th, I'm going to give one of my presentations on Palestine again and going through some of the history and connections to today. wonderful well keep up the amazing work staying contact and let's do this again sometime sounds great thank you so much