Rev Left Radio - Empty Spectacles and Heightening Contradictions

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Alyson and Breht reflect on the pathetic Presidential Debate, analyze the fallout from the debate, and then reflect on some major internal divisions within both American and Israeli societies.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow Rev Left on Insta Support Rev Left Radio and get access to multiple bonus episodes a month

Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. So on today's episode, we're going to reflect on what the fuck happened at the debate. We're going to, you know, cover what the Democratic Party and the mainstream Democratic lean. media is saying and coping with regards to the debate, what the possible trajectories from here on out are, with regards to, you know, the convention, third parties. We'll talk about APAC, et cetera. And then we want to get into a discussion of some of the growing internal contradictions and social divisions within American society at this moment leading up to the elections this fall. And also if we have time touching on some of the internal contradictions

and social divisions that are continuing to widen in Israeli society as well. Because, of course, American hegemony and the ongoing situation with Israel are deeply tied together. And so, you know, it behooves us to sort of explore both together, again, if we have time. So I think the first place to start, though, is just to get into a discussion about the debate, about what happened, the fallout from the debate. It is very interesting. One of the things that I note is, like, what we've been saying, and many people have been saying across the political spectrum for months and months is coming across

Democratic elites as a brand new revelation that like, you know, Joe Biden has just turned the corner into incoherency and hasn't been that way for many, many years at this point. And I also want to remind people that Joe Biden was losing the primaries. We had Bernie winning like the first two states and Biden was coming in like fucking fifth or something. And it was only because of the back room, you know, maneuvering by Obama, getting all the candidates to drop out and endorse Biden that were even in this mess right now, although we probably would be in a different type of mess if anybody else got in. But it just shows you the short-sightedness of the Democratic Party and just the complete lack of a long-term strategy or vision for anything. But, Alison, what are

your thoughts on the debate and the immediate fallout from it? Yeah, so the debate, you know, For anyone who didn't catch it, I would say you should go watch it, right? I think, yeah, Brett and I, obviously, we are not super engaged in, like, mainstream politics. We come from a revolutionary perspective, but that doesn't mean it doesn't impact all of us. It doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to what's going on and be studying what's happening there. So I'd encourage everyone to go see it if they have it. If you haven't seen it, you know, the TLDR is that it went probably how you would guess, right? Trump was funny in the way that Trump usually is. He was snarky. He lied through his teeth. He kind of kind of dominated the debate in a lot of ways. And Biden was at some points just outright and completely incoherent throughout the entire night felt extremely weak. You know, a lot of that wasn't even in the content of what he had to say. You could tell he had some pretty okay pre-prepared remarks a lot of the time. But when he was saying them, it, you know, it's hard to even describe this if you didn't watch it. It felt like he didn't even know what he was saying, right? He's just kind of like rot rattling off these talking points. They're given

kind of a weak, raspy, monotone. It's not clear at any point that he's like emphasizing parts of the sentence or the words he's saying to give any meaning. It came across as very weak, very incoherent. And at a few points, he really did just kind of fully trail off and lose where he was at. In talking about healthcare, he completely lost where he was at. And then after stumbling around for 10 seconds or so, just blurted out, we beat Medicare, whatever the fuck that means. Trump quickly took advantage of. There was another point where he was talking about abortion, and he clearly forgot the word trimester in the middle of his discussion, and he replaced it with the word times and the first time, and the second time, making the sentences incoherent.

Trump again, you know, very successfully clowned on him in response to that. And Trump, you know, didn't come with a lot of substance. We expect that. We kind of know the kind of politics that he brings forth, but it also didn't feel like it really mattered in the grand scheme of things, because he was able to, you know, be the stronger-looking person, and that matters in a lot of ways. One thing I'll note is I do feel like Trump looked a little weaker than he usually did, and I think a big part of that is there was no live audience for the debate, and Trump is definitely the kind of speaker who feeds off of that, right? Like, he's going back and forth with the energy of a crowd. So not having that there, I think, made him look a little bit worse, but that's kind of

all the more embarrassing for Biden, right? Which is that Trump is in this context in which he's kind of at a disadvantage, I think, and Biden still is fumbling it. So that's kind of what happened in the debate. Broadly, the fallout from this debate has been pretty intense, actually. The headlines that we're seeing are saying that the Democratic Party is basically in panic. And like Brett, you know, pointed out, they're reaching a conclusion that anyone who can just kind of fucking watch television and see what's going on has already reached a long time ago, which is that Biden is not fit for this job. He is increasing incoherent. He is old and he is weak. And whether or not you think that ought to

disqualify someone or not is irrelevant to most people in the United States that does disqualify someone. And it is very obvious that he, you know, is not meeting the requirements that the average person has for the cognitive abilities and the health of a precedent. There have been actually some pretty big dissents within the Democratic Party calling for him to step down since the debate, Nate Silver published a piece in his substack, actually. The Pod Save America bros fucking wait in. And they've since apologized, funny enough, but they did originally weigh in on the step down side. The New York Times has published op-ed saying that it's time for him to step down.

And throughout much of the kind of democratic insider press like Axios, there's been discussions about donors absolutely panicking. My favorite quote from one Politico piece was a donor who told them, either he dies, there's a brokered convention or we're fucked, which is a pretty good summary. of what the situation looks like and the level of panic that we're seeing. So that's kind of been the fallout. As of today, Biden is at Camp David with his family. And the chatter on like Democrat Twitter and in, you know, some of these news sources is that they're discussing their next steps and whether or not the plan is to move forward. Obviously, I think Biden is probably genuinely worried about the possibility of a brokered convention. Who knows whether or not that will actually happen. So things are in quite a state of disarray for the Democratic Party right now,

and they're kind of being forced to recognize that what everyone else has been saying is true, that this is a losing candidate who's not going to make it. As one person on Twitter put it, you know, sometimes being a leftist just feels like being right six months ahead of everyone else, right? Like, everyone will eventually have to admit it. And that's kind of where we are with the DNC right now. It'll be interesting to see, you know, what happens between now and the convention. I'm not even going to try to make a prediction. Who knows? But things are in a pretty chaotic state at the moment.

Yeah, one of the things is they're sort of resonances of like giving big Boris Yeltsin vibes, big late Soviet energy, the collapse of an entire system. It really feels like that. And I always say it wasn't that in 1990, 91 that the U.S. defeated the Soviets. It's that the U.S. was just 30 years behind their own collapse. Right. And so I think we're starting to see that. There are some differences. The economic strength of the United States is still very much on the table, despite all of its problems. And so there are some major material differences that aren't exactly one for one, but something big is collapsing. Something big is falling apart at the seams. It feels like the entire society, certainly ideologically, the neoliberal period is certainly coming to an end, et cetera. And I think Trump and Biden are the perfect representations of, of this dying order um you know for they are like the dying empire incarnate and the dying two party system incarnate um in all its grotesquery and um one thing that i noticed about trump in this one is that he wasn't overly cruel there's a couple times where he pointed out like

i don't even think he knows what he's saying but i think trump was restrained enough not to be needlessly cruel because while everybody sort of mocks and disdains Biden and you know know, for good reason. And we all know that it would be terribly sad if this is just like our grandpa or somebody just going through this in general. But Biden's an evil human being. He's a venal, self-serving, corrupt, you know, motherfucker and genocide enabler. So that really decreases the sadness we might feel. But Trump, I think, knew that if he was overly cruel, it would make him look worse. And so he just kind of sat there, made some weird faces when Biden was trailing off and it probably served him as it probably served him well um but um one thing that the debate

showed me or at least the huge chunks of it that i saw is that you know we know this on the left but there's still people across the spectrum that really don't fully come to terms with this yet is that trump isn't nearly as anti-establishment in practice and even in ideology as he is in style and rhetoric so much of his it seems like he's divorced from certain elements of his that are most wanting to support him. Like they want not just a sort of tepid call to like make NATO members pay more, but they want hardcore isolationism. You know, there's even elements of America first that want to completely get out of

Ukraine, stop helping Israel, dismantle APEC. And there's big energy there, even amongst independence and people across the political spectrum that Trump, if he was tapped in at all, could and should sort of begin to reflect. but you know it's just more tax cuts for the rich it's deregulate corporations let you know sell public lands to a big oil big drilling continue to support Israel no matter what they're having a debate over who loves Israel more Trump's calling Biden a Palestinian it's fucking insane there is no real change the the change that like liberals and progressives hoped Obama would bring and then we were let down you know there's there's a sense of that on the right that there's like there's a real belief even after four years where trump you know governed like a pretty much down the middle um republican there's still this like naive belief that like trump's style and rhetoric is going to translate to policy uh and real shifts in like you know the military industrial

complex and stuff and it's just not all the people he's considering for vice president for his cabinet the people he's talking about surrounding himself it's just a rerun of last time and so neither one of these two candidates, neither one of these two parties is really going to make a decisive break with things as they've been. And I think that's certainly worth noting, lest anybody becomes sort of beguiled by Trump and begins to believe that Trump is really going to, you know, tear down the status quo or whatever. It's really shallow and it's pure aesthetics. It's not really deeper ideology or policy. And he's not even tapped in enough with elements of his own base. like the America First element of his base, which is more and more disillusioned with him and more and more

turning against him, which I find very interesting and indicative of, I think, where things are going in the coming years that, as I was talking to Allison before we started recording, you know, a realignment of some sort is happening. You know, the old way of doing things in both parties, the old ideological cornerstones of the Republican and Democratic parties are falling apart. And I'm not exactly sure what comes next, but change is coming, crisis is coming, turmoil is coming. That's for sure. So what do you think is going to happen with the convention? And what do you think about the whole RFK Jr., a third party position in all of this? Yeah. So the convention, I'll start with that, which I think, you know, it's hard to say, right?

So brokered conventions have happened before in American history. They've happened with the Democrats before. So it's not completely out of the question that a brokered convention can happen. And actually, this convention will be one, you know, a fairly feisty contention where the new superdelegate rules that the Democrats put into place after a lot of the Bernie kerfuffle are in place, which means that the first ballot will not have super delegates voting in it. And if the first ballot fails, then the super delegates end up voting. Which creates a really interesting situation where winning the second ballot actually is harder. It requires. more votes. So to figure out what will happen at the convention, I think we have to think about

some of the contradictions in the Democratic Party, right? One of the things that's interesting is that the Democratic Party is made up of politicians and staffers who are essentially careerists, but it's also funded by donors who have concrete interests they want to see fulfilled, right? And those two groups can have very different interests. Donors want to see policy changes that are going to benefit them. That's why they fund the party. but politicians and staffers want to maintain their jobs. And those two things can very much be at odds with each other, which has led to this interesting post-debate situation where a lot of the donors and a lot of pundits external to the actual party have called for Biden to step down,

but where the individual staffers and politicians around Biden and around the DNC have rallied in support of him. Right. So there's this interesting contradiction there. If we make it to a second ballot where the superdelegates tapped in, that means a lot of those politicians now get to vote in the second ballot at the convention. So theoretically, that seems favorable to Biden. But at the same time, those politicians are reliant on the donors who want to see Biden out for money. And so once they're in the voting situation on the second ballot, they might actually be more susceptible to external pressure from donors, you know, to push things out. So the convention, it's hard to say, I'm not going to say, yeah, there will or will not be a brokered convention. But it seems like there's a real risk of contestation. One of the biggest issues, though, for that perspective is there's not an obvious alternative to Biden on the Democrat side, right? It's not clear who you'd replace him with. So a lot of the kind of like Democrat debate today has been, okay, if he does step down or if we do get rid of him, who do we replace him with? And there's definitely a faction that's saying it has to be Kamala Harris, right? Um, there. Um, there's,

kind of making two arguments. They're saying, one, because it would be this historic run for a black woman. And two, because she's already on the ticket, there's like a Democratic mandate there or whatever. But by all accounts, she's not any more popular than Biden is, right? So it's not clear that that resolves a lot of the issues. And then here's where I think your discussion, Brett, about, you know, neither side really having an anti-institutional approach to things or really shaking things up. The Democratic bet seems to be that if they're going to, you know, to replace Biden, they need to find a nice centrist to replace him with, right? There's this whole theory that the Democrats have that I think is kind of bullshit, but you can see this like on

CNN and their discussion around the debates, that basically there's like a huge chunk of the electorate who are going to vote Trump because they dislike Biden, but they really, really dislike Trump, and they're just looking for a respectable moderate to pivot to. And that's kind of their whole thing. So the discussions that I've been seeing also is if it's not Harris, that it should be Buttigieg, right, as this kind of boring, milk-toast moderate that people can pivot to. And I think that shows you that even in a moment of crisis like this, where the Dems are thinking about, are we going to have a brokered convention, is our candidate going to step down? They're not thinking about, okay, how do we get a candidate that can mobilize demobilized voters, right? They're thinking

about how do we flip these kind of like vaguely undecided default to Trump moderates. And I think that just tells you that even in a moment of crisis like this, the party is incapable of having a pivot to something like populism, right? To something like anti-establishment politics. So it'll be interesting to see how things go. I think it will be a fascinating thing if there is a brokered convention or if Biden somehow decides to step down himself. But I wouldn't get up hope that that means that the party pivots in a different direction from a policy perspective or even just kind of an affective perspective since their go-to replacement is fucking Buttigieg, right? Like that I think kind of tells you all you need to know. There's not

a chance, I think, for really systemic change here, even if there's this huge shakeup. I think it'll be a pretty small pivot. Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, for many reasons, including the material basis of the party itself, which is the donor class, which is these corporations that since the neoliberal period and particularly since Trump have overwhelmingly shifted in the direction of the Democrats, because they view them as much more stable and much more likely to have a return on investment when it comes to

their interests as huge corporations and the ultra wealthy. And that is also, I think, part of the realignment that's been happening for a long time where ostensibly at some period in the past, the Democrats were seen as the working class party. They were seen as the union party. And the Republicans were the country club, CEO, big business party. And that was very stable for many decades. That was the stable constituencies. That was the alignment of the two-party system. And neoliberalism has torn that up. Deunionization has destroyed unions and working class power. And so we get two huge gigantic corporate parties that are interested in the military, that are, you know, interested in the military industrial complex and get their donor base from these huge corporations and these huge PACs. So that prevents a shift which would be strategic towards populism.

And we see a very similar thing happening in the recent European elections where centrist after centrist, neoliberal after neoliberal are completely being displaced. They have lost the support of the population. and even just a couple years ago, especially during 2016 up to 2020, these leaders, like in Germany and France, we're seen as like, you know, stable, like Europe is stable compared to the United States. But that, that veneer has been lifted. That facade has fallen away. And we see that the populations within Europe are also pushing away from neoliberalism and jetticing the ideology and the entire approach to politics that have been, you know, a mainstay of, of, of, you know, Western Imperial Corps for the last 40 years. And the loss is suffered by Macron in France is a huge signal of that. And it's happening all over. There's a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in Western Europe, as there is here in the United

States, for better or worse. But there's also just, I think, around the world, a desire to move away from globalization. And in Europe, that takes the posture of being against the EU as some non-democratic threat to national sovereignty and they they see the EU and these sort of international globalized neoliberal bodies as being you know part and parcel of what they perceive as the immigration crisis and the economic crisis um the UK oh my God the UK is a fucking fire it's a dumpster fire right now we think the US is bad and it is the UK is just as bad if not worse you know what 14 plus years or more of of Tory rule multiple

prime ministers coming and going they're still trying to jam the square peg of neoliberalism into the round hole of modernity or post-modernity and um they're just destroying society just destroying that entire society and labor is is in no better hand so it's it's like um if the republicans had won like the last three elections oh but don't worry now we're shifting to the democrats finally as if that's going to be any sort of savior um for us so that refusal to shift towards populism would actually be their best bet of re-solidifying their base of speaking to young people. It's the Bernie Sanders move, right? It's not what you and I as Marxist revolutionaries want, but it's a shift to the left.

But what that would do would be violate the interests of the donor class, and that cannot happen. And so we get these ideas, and they live in this fucking bubble where they think the masses in the United States are like, what we really want is like Pete Buttigieg or like Kamala Harris. I even saw this Washington Post analysis of like, well, you know, you know, Gavin Newsom might be an interesting direction to go into, but you have to understand that if they skip over Kamala Harris, it'll really, really aggravate the black community, which, you know, which is they're already losing. And they think that Kamala Harris is some avatar of the black community that the, you know, I'm not a spokesman for the black community by any means, but based on my observation and analysis, I don't see that. that the black community is riding high on Kamala Harris and that skipping over her would be some big blow. But they can't think outside of their ideological box of identity politics, of identity reductionism. They still think we're living in 2015. And they're acting accordingly.

But nobody likes Kamala Harris, not because of her identity markers, because of her politics. Nobody likes Pete Buttigieg, not because he's gay, but because he sucks. There's no vision there. There's nothing. They're empty corporate shells. And so they're going to keep doing this. And it's going to be the death of their party. And I think we're living through the beginning of that. And the last thing I'll say before I toss it back over to Allison is just, and this has been said before, but what the fuck is Jill Biden doing? Imagine that was your loved one. You know, imagine that was your husband or your dad or your grandpa.

And it's just so obvious that he needs to be taken home, given rest. He's not in control of his faculty. Stop humiliating him. Stop gaslighting the entire world, acting like he's totally fine. all just right wing lies you know this was this was clear back in 2019 that biden had lost several steps um and you know there was it was even as the election in 2020 was going on one of the major criticisms was that he's way too old he's incoherent he can't get through sentences now we're four years on it's noticeably gotten worse can you imagine four more years like what is biden in

four more years going to be like it's just cruel at this point for anybody that loves him um and So, you know, the fact that Joe Biden is still out there parading him around and, you know, after the debate, she's like, good job, Joe. You answered every question. Incredibly patronizing. And I would love to get into her psychology and see what the fuck is it? What is in this for you? Like, if you loved somebody, you would do everything you can to be like, it's time to step away. Hey, Biden, you did a great job getting us away from Trump.

You did your role. Even as Biden was running the first time, he said, my job. I mean, he said this in more or less dodgy. language but it was more or less this idea of like i'm here to be a bridge i'm going to serve one term to get away from trump to re-solidify our society and then i'll hand it off to the younger people in the party but the people around biden whose jobs depend on Biden continuing on and what i assume is some weird social climbing impulse within jill biden where she wants to be on the inside of these special dinners and this power elite um you know that that is just disgusting and that's

taken over now so it's like no i'm not even a bridge i'm going to do a another four years just they're trying to lose but again the democrats don't care their donors as i said will be served by either party even though the corporations like the stability of the democrats trump's going to get in he's going to deregulate he's going to give him huge tax cuts he's going to rub their backs and make sure that they're taking care of because he is them so either way they win and then they get the added benefit as i've always said of playing the opposition you know now they get to not only have their economic interest fully served but they also get to pretend like they're the scrappy underdogs fighting back against

you know bad orange man and so they don't lose we lose right no matter who wins we lose yeah no that's super real and i think the the jill biden thing is actually really interesting i will play on that for a second because it's actually very timely at the moment you know i never know how much to read into the like politico axios and nbccc kind of reports that they'll put out about like oh people in the white house are telling us this right you know Sometimes that's meaningful. Sometimes that's not. But the big thing that we started seeing last night and that we're seeing today with Biden at Camp David with his family has been a bunch of those saying that they're hearing from people on the inside saying it's basically Jill Biden's call at this point, right? That Joe Biden will do what she tells him. So if she tells him to step down, then he will step down. And if she doesn't, he will not. Right. And I think, you know, again, I don't know how much to read into that. But like, if there's any credence to that, I think that is just the ultimate example of how fucking

stupidly broken and undemocratic this system is, right? Like, the very potential result of this election might come down to whether or not the wife of an aging and I would say potentially dimensioned adult, old man decides to

tell him to back off or not. Like, that is not how functioning societies work. Yes. Exactly. And that again is that late Soviet energy, that gerontocracy, that rodion, that rotting institution that's just barely standing up anymore and it is going to come crashing down in one way or the other um so we'll see now another element of this is the third party element um you know and again all the limits of electoralism fully acknowledged you know where alison

and i stand on all of this shit but this is the the mainstream spectacle this is the way that the vast majority of americans engage with politics think about political change express themselves politically. So we have to wrestle with it. And it's interesting that the debate on CNN blocked out any third party, especially RFK Jr. Of course, both parties have a vested interest. This is one, this is another thing where they become bipartisan. And whenever there's bipartisan agreement, you know, we're getting fucked over. Like, it's a bipartisanship is a terrible thing. Because whatever the two parties agree on is fucking the most evil thing you can imagine. But of course, they both have a vested interest in not allowing a third party candidate to

come on because that could displace both of them. It hurts both of them in the long run. And so they made the rules such that it's very conciliatory towards Biden. There's no crowd that Trump can get amped up and make laugh, right? Because when Trump says a joke and the whole audience laughs, it just feels like that he's winning the debate even much more than he is. Yeah. And if they had RFK Jr. or any third party candidate up there, what that would signify, to the American population, which tens of millions watch this debate, is that there's a third option. And there's somebody that is coherent that, you know, I disagree with him about a million fucking things. But he does speak to certain elements within society. He talks about

trying to revitalize the working class, about making the rich pay more taxes. You know, he has those populist streaks within him. He also has these sort of reactionary streaks within him, particularly when it fucking comes to Israel. I mean, even if our people, RFK Jr. was up on the stage. It'd be three people, you know, fighting over who can give more of our money to Israel. So, obviously, it's a terrible thing. But, you know, what does happen in a election where 30, 40 percent of Americans vote for a third party? You know, what does that signify? What does that shake up? Will the two-party system still be able to buttress that? Because the odds of a third-party candidate actually winning are almost zero. So, you know, one of the one of the two major parties would come out on top. So maybe they would be able to absorb that third party run, but it also does indicate this deep yearning within the American population for another option, for something different.

You know, I think 70% of Americans in polls say neither Biden nor Trump, some democracy we have here, right? Right. So, yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on third parties, RFK Jr, etc. Yeah, I think there's a couple things there. So one, I think you hit on the important framing, which is it's this remarkable thing where, like, like a super majority of the United States fucking hates the options, right? And that is kind of a very absurd situation to be in in the first place. And it definitely does, I think, create the possibility for more disruptions here.

There's, I think, a couple, like, complicated points with the third party issue. So one, you know, I can't think of an election within my lifetime where there wasn't some amount of people who were like, oh, yeah, we're going to make a noticeable impact at the polls by voting third party. And it's never really happened, right? Um, you know, there's third party ballot access in some places and there isn't in many, many states. And that makes it much harder to ever try to accomplish that in the first place. So it's hard to say. It's also, you know, there are kind of technically two third party runs right now. There is, uh, RFK, but also to my understanding, Cornell is still kind of campaigning alongside, uh, Molina Abdullah as his VP pick. So there, there is that

too. So there's kind of a split in the third party situation there that I think is interesting. That split may be irrelevant because any vote that's not for Trump or Biden stands out, right, if it becomes a large enough majority. So whether or not it's united around a single candidate may be irrelevant. I do think, you know, from my perspective, I look at it like this. If Biden is the Democratic candidate, in my mind, there's just no question that Trump wins, right? It's fucking inevitable if Biden is the candidate. And so at that point, I think, you know, you may see many people acknowledge that and choose to make that third party vote, right? They may just say, yeah, I have no faith that Biden wins or that my vote matters, so I would

make a protest vote here. And that could be really interesting to see. I think some of that could build off the momentum of the uncommitted campaign that we saw with the primaries, where people were mobilizing to vote uncommitted in Biden's primaries, getting up to like 10% in some places. I think there's the potential for something like that. We kind of have to see what plays out with the convention first, but assuming Biden is the candidate, I think that becomes much more likely. An open question in my mind is whether or not it fucking matters, right? Does that do anything to actually shift things? And that's hard to predict, right? I think one of the difficulties about the Democratic Party is that, as many people point out, it's very happy to be

the opposition party, right? In fact, it's often most comfortable being the opposition party and just kind of slotting into that role and not having power and being okay in the loser position. And again, the donor class will find a way to get what they want from the Republicans anyway. If we see Trump win again, it will probably be a less populist version of Trump for precisely that reason. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see. But I'm not super hopeful that even if we saw a big third party pivot, it would have a massive impact on the Democrats thinking about things. To me, you know, the Democrats, I think they'd rather a right populist in power than a left populist, tragically enough. Like, that really just seems like what their calculus is. And I'm

not sure if there's anything that can really shift or shake that. Absolutely. And, you know, it's common sense for those of us on the, on the revolutionary left, but it's worth repeating that the Democrats are not, nor do they conceive themselves as being the vehicle for progressives and left-wing voters. They are a bulwark against them. They are the, they are the elites bullwork against that co-ops, that that neuters, that strips away any revolutionary potential that attempts to bring in that energy. completely defang it and then push it back into the maintenance of the status quo and of the capitalist system. So you have to think about the Democratic Party in those terms. They are a bulwark

against the left. They are not a vehicle for the left to express themselves. What has happened historically when there are third party runs is not necessarily that the third party wins or that there's an acute change in the two parties. But what tends to happen is that if there's enough energy behind one of these third parties is that they begin and they perpetuate this process of realignment. So you can even think about the progressive party, which was nicknamed the Bull Moose Party with Teddy Roosevelt that was eventually shifted politics within the Republican party and was merged into the Republican Party as a core constituency, you know, later down the line. And I think things like that happen more. It's not that the third party wins or that the

two parties immediately change in response to a successful or semi-successful third-party run, but that it is part of this realignment process and part of this broader crisis. And so to that extent, again, we don't really know how that plays out in the future with these two parties, and the realignment is sort of happening either way, but it is worth noting that just huge swathes of the population are completely turning against not only these two politicians, but in significant ways, the two parties. And the younger you get, The lower down the age scale you go, the more that's the case. And so that divide, that divide has to play out.

Like, there's, there is no way in which the status quo is maintained for the next 40 years. We are living through a period of intense, dramatic change. And again, we don't know what's going to happen. We have to struggle to push it in the directions that we want to push it in. But, but that's what's happening. And for, and for that reason, maybe these third party runs have some significance in the medium term, if not the short term. Yeah, I would hope so.

What I think is hard, though, is like, I guess from my perspective, and this is really a question that I'll pose to you, is concretely, how could that realignment take shape, given the, like, discipline within the parties, I guess? So, you know, to make this, like, more concrete, perhaps, I think what we saw with Bernie in 2020 was, like, the closest thing to a potential successful, serious realignment, right? to a populist kind of framing within the Democratic Party. But the other thing that we saw in response is that the Democratic Party is adept, right? Like, they're good at what they do, and they actually unified very intensely around Biden in order to make that happen.

You know, the infamous moment that I think we referenced earlier even of Obama calling all the other candidates and telling them to drop out to make sure that Biden would beat Bernie is like a good example of that. And I guess I wonder, do you even think there's the institutional room for realignment to occur? That's kind of where for me there's like an open question here is whether or not like the space for that even exists within the institutional structures of the parties such that a realignment could happen. So yeah, I think that's that's the huge, that's the huge barrier that you, you would, you would have in order for actual any substantial realignment to occur. you not only need most of the population across the spectrum to be turning against these two parties in their institutions, which I think we do see, but you would need to actually overturn what they've built up to protect themselves, which is they're protecting themselves from democracy. With the donor classes, with Citizen United, with corporate media, with their lobbying, which is just legalized bribery, they have completely cut out, insofar as we ever had it, right? the masses from democratic input to the point where elections in this country are pure spectacle. They're merely images.

They're not any substantive democratic processes or institutions. So mere democratic pressure to change isn't going to be enough, whereas it perhaps in the past, that was sufficient. Now it's not. And so that does tell me that this realignment is not going to be as simple as the two parties just coming to, you know, new realizations and then shifting their policies, it's going to absolutely require bottom up struggle. There has to be mass movements against these two parties, against the way things are. Perhaps that will require counter elites of some sort rising. I mean, you know, to have a head of a mass movement is important. You can't just have people protesting. They've already protected themselves from that. Protest all you want.

Go out and see what happens when you protest for Palestine. Go out and see what happens when you protest against police brutality like during the George Floyd protest. They've, figured that part out you know just destroy them meet them with violence you know slander them in the media they're really good and and over generations they've gotten really good at protecting themselves from democratic input although that's it goes back to the founding of this country the founding fathers were deeply worried about what they called the mob they never really wanted democracy and so that strain has always been something that has been expanded in so far as it has against the will of the elite and from bottom-up pressure.

And so that's going to continue to absolutely be essential and really the necessary prerequisite to any sort of meaningful realignment. But there is just an untenable situation when you have, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people whose basic economic needs are not being met. Right?

You can cover up a lot of bullshit as long as enough of the, not even, never has it been all, but enough of the population is satiated economically. You can do anything. your power is secured but now we see the proletarianization of what we would misdifyingly call the middle class happening we see you know small business owners being fucked over by monopolies we see our tax dollars

being spent in the most irresponsible way in part because they only respond to their donor classes to the military industrial complex and they have no mechanism by which to respond to the actual opinions of the masses so they protected themselves against democracy and when that happens, you know, only a bottom up struggle and movement can actually change things and shake things up. But that has to come because, you know, you can't just immisorate 60, 70% of the population and expect to just go on as normal forever. So something has to give. And what that may be is in our ideal situation, bottom up mass revolt, but in another situation, fascism. Fascism does attempt to deal with these problems. We saw it with

the We've seen it many, many times in the past. The elites will, when push comes to shove and everything else has been exhausted, they will turn to fascism of one sort or another. And I think that's actually, in my genuine opinion, as of right now, based on where the elements of society are and how organized everybody is, probably the most likely situation from where we stand at this moment. And that can only really be changed by organization and bottom-up mass movements that really take the whole system on not like i prefer this guy over that guy or this party over that

party but to hate both of the parties and to to have a real spilling over and and the thing that's happening is that you know you can do almost anything else but when you start just making life impossible for people then that's when something has to give and something has to give and so we have we have to struggle and fight to make sure that what gives is in the direction of more humanity more equality more future and not a military fascist coup or a crackdown or just a hardcore police state right or or learning from israel how they deal with their rabble we're going to start more explicitly having to deal with our own in that way so right dark times for sure but yeah i do agree with you that the mere presence of a third party um or just the mere presence of disapproval is by

no means sufficient yeah if only yeah right i will build on the fascism point a little bit, actually, because I think this is like an interesting question. And someday we will do the German Revolution episode. We've been planning for all this time now, which feels actually extremely timely for kind of what's going on here. But I do think, you know, it is worth pointing out that that shift to fascism, I think we're seeing the, you know, really the foundation for that laid. And I, let me kind of qualify this. I know that there is a subset of the left, especially kind of the more Maoist left, who does not like this idea of talking about fascism as like an aberration in the American context, right? So this is like the George Jackson kind of perspective that like fascism is already kind of what America is.

And while I'm sympathetic to that, I also think there is like a phenomena, whether or not we want to call it fascism or not, of like a even more militarized state that becomes possible and a state that valorizes violence and has all of these other features that we saw in European. in fascism that is worth thinking about the possibility of emerging in the United States because it is not what our current system is, right? So I will kind of preface that because I know there are always people who really want to push back on that. But with that said, I do think like some of what we're seeing now is laying the foundation for this, right? So the SCOTUS decision about homelessness, I think is horrifying, right? You can now be criminalized in the United States for not having a house and not having anywhere to go. Being in public and sleeping in public is now a criminalizable offense. And that lays the foundation for a mass

incarceration of people who haven't to this point faced that level of incarceration, right? And that lays the foundation for exploitative labor in an incarcerated system on a significantly higher scale as well. And so some of like the foundation that will be necessary for that kind of development, I do think is at play in the current situation that we're seeing happening here. The other thing too is that as we move in that direction, I think it's super important to not lose sight of the fact that it really is kind of the Democratic Party who I think bears the prime responsibility for us going in that direction, because fascism becomes an inevitable outcome of that, you know, sort of untenability that you were discussing, Brett, when no left release pressure valve exists, right? And the Democrats are

highly committed to making sure it doesn't exist. Even like a fucking light social democratic release doesn't exist in the United States and has been prevented from existing, which is causing people to pivot to that more right-wing collectivist sort of approach to things that, again, I don't think is actually anti-establishment at the end of the day, but frames itself as anti-establishment in a way that is compelling to people. And so, you know, oftentimes, I think the problem with the fascism discussion in the U.S. is it gets mobilized to then say, we need to vote Democrat, right? So Project 2025 is coming, and it's this horrible fascist threat, so Biden needs to win. but really they're two sides at the same coin, right?

The neoliberal centrism of the Democratic Party is what makes the fascist project appealing in the first place. And so I do think we can kind of affirm this shift towards a risk of fascism in a way that doesn't mean rallying to fucking liberalism, right? And I think that's an important thing to kind of push out right now, because that is the other way this election is being framed, right? This is a choice between democracy and fascism, and that is kind of bullshit, actually. Yes.

I mean, it's complete bullshit. There's, you know, the both parties are completely anti-democratic and both parties are ushering in fascism. And that's the thing about the Democrats that are, is even more dangerous than the Republicans. The Republicans have always been overt in that way. It's very clear that, you know, what sort of animates them. And it's very easy also for the Democrats to point at them and say, see, they're fascists, because in a lot of ways they fucking are. But it's the Democratic refusal to move in an inch leftward, the Democratic buttress against the left. the democratic demonization of the left constantly that actually is the bigger threat and with the corporations and um you know the elites of society outside the political realm more and more seeing themselves reflected in the democratic party

the Democratic Party actually is the actual vehicle through which fascism will most likely arise that the Republicans are too ham-fisted right when Trump gets in the liberals start taking to the streets again and people start revolting and you know it's just too ham-fisted but the Democrats presenting themselves as the anti-fascist solution and talking about the the radical left as if we're the real fascist which they do all the time

is the entryway into fascism and I think that makes the Democrats all the more poisonous in that regard and all the more worthy of our complete disdain because they can trick people into thinking they're the solution when they are the purveyors. If you support the Democratic Party, if you support Joe Biden, you are helping usher in fascism. You are not fighting for democracy. What democracy? Point out the democracy, please. There is none to save. You've already gutted it insofar as we ever even had it, which that is a controversial and arguable point. I don't even think, you know, we've never even had a real democracy but there are degrees and that goes to the george jackson point which

you know blood in my eye is essential reading and george jackson is on point with so much fucking shit but there is a spectrum of fascism there are degrees of fascism and yes fascism has always been a constituentive element of american society it has always been a primary stream flowing through the entire history of the united states it was founded in colonialism which in a lot of ways is the soil from which the ideology of fascism and the material reality of fascism grows. And for dispossessed people, for marginalized people, for Native Americans, for black people, they've always faced fascism. And that's what George Jackson made that very clear. Right. But it can always get worse. You know, it can always get worse. And just saying,

hey, we've always been fascist. So who gives a fuck isn't really helpful in any real material or strategic way. Yes, fascism has always been present. But that strained. can become more and more dominant and there can be more and more degrees of its expansion and we have to fight against that and then ultimately of course we want to we want to overturn this entire system this entire project of america that is founded and maintained by brutal insane exploitation and violence that's all america's ever been it's just a mountain of a growing mountain of corpses upon which a lot a small amount of people make a lot of fucking money and that's the entire scheme of this fucking country so i have no i have no i have no patriot

I have no, you know, loyalty to America, right? I have a loyalty to human beings. I want my community and people in this fucking that happen to end up here through crazy historical forces. I want them to be okay. I don't want to see homeless people or people imprisoned or starving people here or abroad, right? We want a global system that's better for everybody. But that almost necessitates the end of America as we know it. And the thing is, no matter how much we can organize and rail against America, it's the

internal contradictions of American capitalism and imperialism itself, that is actually a main driving force of this collapse of this thing we call America. And so the only way to save it eventually is going to have to be bucking some version of American Hitler. And, you know, that's the only way to keep the contradictions at bay. And it might not be, you know, the genocide of Jewish people or whatever, but it's going to have to be some really violent, nasty stuff because that's just what America is, you know? Yeah, no, there's no getting around that, I think. And I think, you know, you hit the nail in the head there, which is like, we're talking about these internal politics of the Democratic Party, these third parties and all of that. And the point isn't that either Brett or I think any of that fixes the situation, right? Even if the Democrats gave us Bernie, I really think that would just be pushing the ball further away, right? We're still going to get to the crisis. Inevitably, none of those are an actual solution. The only thing as an actual solution is, you know, the working class in power, essentially. And I would say in the context of the United States, that takes the

form also of a decolonial struggle against, like you said, Brett, the colonial foundations of fascism within the U.S. that are already here. And so obviously something more systemic is important and has to take place there. And I hope, you know, when we have these discussions, it doesn't come across, like we are suggesting that like, oh, yeah, like a sort of realignment within the Democratic Party could be a solution. It would, you know, be a release on the pressure valve again, but it wouldn't actually fix the situation and there's something much greater that is necessary. But precisely the reason that these conversations matter is I think, you know, well, I'll get slightly theoretical about this for a second. You said it well, Brett, internal contradictions are the primary

contradictions, right? This is Mao's whole fundamental point in on contradiction. External contradictions matter, but they can only really impact the process if the internal contradictions are already there. And the United States, as an empire, is full of internal contradictions that are pushing it towards decline right now. And so if we want to be able to intervene and act on that, if we want to be able to navigate that in a way that, you know, results not in, as you put it, American Hitler, but in the working class and power, we have to study those contradictions. We have to understand them. There's often this kind of, I think, arrogant sort of disdain for studying these things on the radical left where it's like, oh, we've already seen through

electoralism, so we don't need to think about the details of it, right? And I think that's a huge mistake, because these contradictions are driving forces that matter within, you know, with the fate of the United States, the fate of the working class here, the fate of colonized nations within the U.S., and that requires us to engage in this kind of study. So I do always want to, like, when we get into this, be like, this isn't Brett and I saying there's an electoral path out here, but it is us saying that if you believe in a non-electoral path out, you sure as fuck have to understand what's happening in that realm. Exactly right. When we talk about realignment, the third party, the debates, we are analyzing. We're not promoting. We're not promoting. or advocating. I'm not saying, yeah, I really wish a third party would arise. And then we could have a realignment. And then the Democrats and the Republicans slightly shift their policy here or there. I'm just saying these are forces that are playing out. And it behooves us to wrestle with them and try to be clear about what is happening. And, you know, the funny thing about tepid social democracy represented by Bernie Sanders is that it was probably the elite's best hope at keeping

this system going a little longer. You know, to have that release valve, that populist left wing release valve that attempts to solve people's economic precarity at home. And, you know, Bernie's not going to be an anti-imperialist. I mean, sure, he might not be as overt as some of the other two, but he would have maintained the system as it is, more or less. He would have just worked around the fringes and maybe have extended the lifespan of this fucking thing. And so it was always the irony of that how much the elite hated Bernie Sanders when he was simultaneously their best bet at medium term you know sustenance and for a lot of these motherfuckers that are 60 70 80 years old that would have been best for them but uh yeah but they couldn't even stomach that and so here

we are um it's a fucking nightmare it really is um so let's go ahead i think we know some of the internal contradictions in the u.s right now i don't think we need to go too deep into that we talk about it all the time we have about 15 minutes left 10 to 15 minutes do you want to shift in the direction of what's happening within Israeli society and see some of the fault lines developing and widening over there? Yeah, I think this is worth considering. So, you know, this might feel like a little bit of a pivot, but we've been talking about the situation in Palestine for quite some time and the struggle that is going on there. This is not something new for us to come back to. And again, you know, when we think theoretically about contradictions, right, we have to study

internal contradictions to understand what's happening. And I think oftentimes in the context of Israel, there are factions within the left, I won't say all, that are primarily concerned with the external contradictions, right? So how the international BDS movement is impacting Israel, or how the fight from the resistance is impacting it. And all of those things matter, right? Those are important. Those are factors that have to be taken into account. But one of, like, the really fascinating things is that Israel's like a settler society is plagued by some fucking insane internal contradictions that I also think matter. And that I think the resistance fighters themselves are very aware of, right? I think it's more in the West often where these get

neglected. So I wanted to touch on kind of a few recent developments that I think are interesting that, you know, are kind of, in my opinion, really destabilizing the situation for Israel. So actually, I think pretty quickly after October 7th, when we did an episode on the situation, Brett and I both actually, I believe, talked about a really interesting feature of Israeli society, which is that the Haredi communities, often called the ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel, have some level of an exemption from serving in the IDF. So the IDF has mandatory conscription for Jewish citizens within the Israeli state, but if you are Haredi and studying in a yeshiva, you have historically been exempted from that requirement, which is very interesting because the Haredi communities within Israel are kind of politically all over the place, but there are some very right. right-wing heretti communities that are a part of the dominant parliamentary coalition led by Netanyahu and who have been very supportive of this kind of more aggressive outward stance.

And one thing that, you know, probably stands out pretty easy is it's easy to be supportive of that when you don't have to get fucking drafted to go fight in the conflicts that that provokes, right? And the Haredes have had this exemption as a result of that. And this has been actually a big point of kind of conflict within some of the coalitions with more secular right-wing forces, not wanting to give that exemption, believing that they should have to fight as well. And a really wild thing that actually happened this week is that the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that those exemptions are unconstitutional. So that doesn't necessarily immediately mean that the Redis are going to get deployed to fight tomorrow. Actually, the time frame for what

that ruling means is a little unclear. But it definitely indicates, again, this contradiction between some of these religious communities who support the more aggressive push, but don't want to actually participate in the secularized fascism of Israel and, you know, those other military elements, and there is kind of a contradiction there. We'll see if it has any impact, but if I had to suspect this could be a thing that reduces internal support for the war. If the heretic communities now have to send their sons to go fight in the IDF and, you know, casualty rates are not fantastic for the IDF at the moment, that could be a really important shift that happens. You know, we'll have to see whether or not it plays out in anything, but it is, I think, an important reminder that,

like, Israeli society in the Israeli right is not as united of a front as we sometimes think it is. And there are these kind of shaky changes that can happen here. We're definitely seeing one of them occur with this. Who knows what the impacts are. But I think it's worth highlighting a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. That's a long-running strain of discontent within Israeli society. And that will have, you know, huge impacts on, like Allison was saying, the, you know, the popular support for the war, what that looks like, you know, what resistance that generates among these factions, which are in the Lakud Party to a large extent. So that's going to be an internal party division as well as a broader Israeli society division. And you

also have this very self-interested Netanyahu at the forefront, who is for many reasons trying to drag the U.S. into a regional war and trying to perpetuate the war indefinitely for his own ideological as well as personal reasons. So there'll be a lot of criticisms of Israel that focus solely on Netanyahu himself as if he's the problem, as if anybody who would replace him wouldn't also have more or less the same ideology. The amount of support for the general thrust of the logic against Palestinians and Israel is incredibly high. I mean, this is a society which most, the overwhelming consensus is that, you know,

they can't live with these Palestinians, that they need to be expunged in one way or another, they need to be subdued, and that this is their land and that they have every right, even people who don't believe in God, believe they're the chosen ones

who's given this land from on high, which is in and of itself an interesting, weird ideological contradiction. But the bigger thing is that this surrounding regional war is always, you know, cropping its head, the possibility of full-blown war. There's engagement with Hezbollah,

obviously we know what Yemen is doing in the Red Sea you have the contradictions and the escalations with Iran obviously like there are lots of elements within Iranian and Lebanese society that don't necessarily want a war at this time but there also seems to be a real dogged determination on behalf of Netanyahu and the Israeli government to push in that direction because Israel knows that if push does come to shove that America is not going to let Israel go it alone

no matter who's in office you know Israel will get the support and that's one of the other sad pathetic things about Biden and the Democrats is that Netanyahu has so much obvious disdain for Biden and Biden's still bending over backwards to do everything that Netanyahu wants which is really just kind of fucking pathetic in a way and um when when uh netin yahoo came out recently just talking about how entitled he is to having America weapons and how just sort of offended he was that that never-ending supply of weaponry would ever even be halted on any grounds whatsoever, just the entitlement that came out in that. It's just so grotesque.

And it just really shows the weakness of Biden to do anything. I mean, Biden's a committed Zionist. He's committed ideologically to Israel. And he's giving Israel everything they could fucking want. And still Netanyahu spits in his fucking face, you know, and overtly prefers Trump, etc. And so you think that that might give them an opening to be a little harder, but no, Biden and the Democratic Party ideologically committed to this shit. And it's going to unfortunately continue. Yeah, the one thing that I do kind of want to hit on a little bit there

is this risk of a broader regional war, because I think that is the other internal contradiction that's very complicated here and very difficult to see how it goes. So one of the things that, again, I think the resistance in Palestine is very aware of this, but in the West people don't wrestle with, is that there is kind of this contradiction between the Israeli state and the settlers in some way. A lot of the sort of intelligence side of the Israeli apparatus and the military side see the settlers as sort of a liability, right? They actually often have a lot of tensions with them. You will see outlets like Hararets, which is kind of an outlet that represents a lot of the intelligence perspectives within the Israeli

state, push back against the utility of settlements, actually, and even criticize them openly. And that is because they come from this more kind of rationalist military perspective, where, again, the settlements are troublemakers in their mind that weaken their position. And one way that we see this right now, I think, is that the settlers have been getting actually attacked in northern Israel by Hezbollah. So in the last month, we've seen attacks on at least three settlements in northern Israel by Hezbollah, which has led to the settlers there, pushing for Israel. to engage in a war with at least Hezbollah and possibly with Lebanon itself, right? And that creates

this massive risk for, you know, a really spreading regional war. The settlers also have this kind of ideological belief often in this idea of Greater Israel, which is sort of this territorial maximalism, that believes that they should control parts of Egypt, should control parts of Lebanon, should control parts of Syria that are outside their current borders. And so there is this weird contradiction between the military. rationalists who I think understand that a war with Hezbollah, like openly declared would be a fucking disaster. And the settler factions who want that war, who see themselves, you know, as at risk of these attacks and are pushing them there. So that for me is kind of the big thing to

keep an eye on with the current trend, too, is not just the resistance in Gaza, but the possibility of the settler fanatics pushing this into sort of a two-front war, which in my mind would be devastating for the Israeli military, right? It's been all the way since October now, and they still haven't eliminated a guerrilla force within Gaza, which is much smaller and less armed than Hezbollah is, right? And so you can't even imagine what it would look like if they were to push into that multifaceted war. And yet again, those contradictions between the military intelligence and sort of the military rationalists and the settlers are rapidly propelling them towards that. So there's a lot to keep an eye on there and to kind of study, I think, and really

pay attention to those internal contradictions because they may really be the things that kind of push this into the next level and that, in my opinion, might be ultimately detrimental to the Israeli state. Yeah, and one thing you notice about liberal Zionists is that there's only two objects of acceptable derision that you can aim your rage at or your criticism at. And that is the settlements and settlers themselves. And that is Netanyahu himself or even the Lekud Party more broadly. But that's where the criticism stops. And in fact, these things are pushed to the forefront, precisely because if you can just focus on those two things, the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself, that Israel has a right to exist, those things are

untouched. You can say it's these particular elements of the, you know, the corrupt Netanyahu and these, you know, going wild settlers that are the real problem. If we could only rein those two in, that, you know, that prevents criticism from the entire existence of apartheid, the ongoing genocide, the fact that you're talking about self-determination and democracy and freedom, but you're actively strangling it for Palestinians, right? All those contradictions can be subdued and pushed out of view, mystified, if we can just focus on just the settlers in Netanyahu. But the settlers are a real problem. Internationally, they're often the primary object of derision. It's one of the easiest things to criticize from around the world is the expansion of settlements

because it just is illegal by all, you know, by every metric of interpretation of law. These are illegal. And so it's a convenient object of derision for particularly liberal Zionists to hyper fixate on. But it is an issue and we're going to see what happens. But my last question to you, Alison, before we wrap up, is this idea of does the election change anything with regards to Israel's posture and ongoing war mongering? Because there is this element within the Trump camp and within the American right that, I mean, let's be honest, is not only quote unquote America first. And so they use that to like justify not helping Israel or Ukraine. You can think of like Candace Owens in this front.

But there's also the Nick the Nick Fuente is sort of America first, which is just explicitly anti-Semitic. And so the whole critique of Israel, like they're Jews. APEC is Jews. Right. That is their problem. And if you go into the comment sections of any. anything on this topic with the America firsters, you'll just

see rampant anti-Semitism. But that is a part of the Republican base. So the elites are neocons and Christian nationalists fully committed to Israel, but there's a significant part of Trump's base in particular, his hardcore constituency that is

rabidly anti-Semitic and wants to stop helping Israel completely. I think Candice Owens represents like the less overtly anti-Semitic version of that and other figures like Fuentes and some other dark figures on that side represent the more overt anti-Semitism coming out of that direction. But that's a real constituency. That's a real base that Trump's going to have to deal with if he's even aware that it exists. Like,

I don't even know how tapped in he is to his own constituency. But with all that, with all that considered, does the election change anything if Trump wins in November? Does that change anything about Israel, Netanyahu's policy, et cetera? Yeah, it's like really hard to say, right? So I will say, Netanyahu wants Trump to be president, right? Like, that's absolutely clear. That is the preference for Netanyahu. That's the preference for the Israeli right winged by a very long shot is that they want Trump to be president. And they are definitely betting on Trump being better for them. To an extent, I don't even know what being better for them fucking looks like at this point, right? You know, Biden has really given them everything they want. Every single supposed red line he's talked about has evaporated. So I don't really even know what it is they want. Do they want American troops on the ground, right? Like, it is very unclear to me. In my mind, I don't think the election makes a huge difference despite that desire, because I think, you know, the Dems will always bend over it backwards to give them what they want. Well, you know, the Israeli right-wing complains about it the entire fucking time. But I just, yeah, I struggle to believe that Trump would

actually go above and beyond in terms of military aid. It doesn't seem likely to me that if they do want, like, a mobilization of American troops, Trump would ever do that because it goes against the kind of more isolationist stance that he has, you know, teased at least, and that as you've hinted at, a certain amount of his support base really, you know, believes in and wants as a part of their support for him. So I can't really see Trump making that pivot for them. And I think you're right. There is a huge part of Trump's support base that does not want us to even be funding Israel. Again, some of that's for anti-Semitic reasons. Some of it not. It's kind of all over the place. Even the ones where it's not overtly anti-Semitic. That's probably under the hood a little bit

in that camp, but we are seeing some of that. In my mind, I think it's very likely to make no difference or a little difference. I just don't know what more anyone could do than what Biden has done for them. And I actually think when you start to talk about more serious intervention beyond, you know, just endless weapon supplies and money, actually, yeah, that becomes hard to see Trump doing because it goes against a lot of what his base wants and a lot of his own rhetoric. So my gut says it doesn't make too much of a difference. But, you know, time will obviously. tell. Yeah, I think there's a deep irony here in that what what Israel would get out of a Trump is less finger wagging. So the only thing the Biden administration does, it keeps sending

them money, keeps sending them weapons, all of that, giving it provide a political cover at the UN, but once in a while it'll leak that Biden's not happy with how things are. There'll be a threat that will withhold this shipment until this tiny thing happens. And I think Netanyahu, the Lakud party and Israel more broadly would like to not have that aspect of it, hence this idea that like Trump will come in and he'll stop the finger wagging. But then there's this irony that the Dems are actually more likely given their commitment to all these proxy wars to actually support Israel in the form of troops on the ground if it comes to that.

Like, you know, I think like the Biden administration would be much more likely to send in troops. And I think Trump would have to face that contradiction within his own party. where you have the neocons and you have the isolationists and they're both really strong right now. You know, and the neocons are falling and the isolationists are rising. He would have huge amounts of his constituency against it. And even if they support Israel with money and weapons, they're not going to want to see troops on the ground. So it's going to be a very interesting line to walk. Like we're not going to be as overtly finger wagging, you know, internationally as the Biden administration.

But we're also at the same time, I think. think more hesitant to put troops on the ground if push comes the show, which is what Netanyahu wants. Netanyahu wants to draw in America and have the regional war where they can expand their boundaries, defeat all their regional enemies, etc. So very fascinating shit. Absolutely. Such a horrifyingly stupid idea, too. You know. So we'll see. We'll see. But I think that's what Netanyahu seems to totally believe that Trump will be a wholly good thing. And I think he's kind of short-sighted in various ways. So, yeah, I agree. All right. Well, we'll find out, but I think that's going to wrap up for today.

Thanks to everybody who listens to the show, supports the show. Hopefully you found this episode, you know, engaging, useful, worthwhile, et cetera. We're going to get to the German Revolution eventually. You know, we're just busy. And sometimes it's easier to do these more organic conversations than like the deep dive on a specific text or historical event. But we'll get there. And as political events continue to pop up, we'll also continue to cover them in real time. so who knows what's going to happen in the next weeks and months,

but we'll be here to do our best to help make sense of it. All right. Love and solidarity. To be able to be.