Rev Left Radio - Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder, & Upheaval at the End of the 1970's

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Aaron J. Leonard returns to the show to discuss his newest book "Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder, and Upheaval at the End of the 1970s". The final years of the 1970's were a moment of crisis and transition for the United States, both at home and abroad. Today, in 2024, we are also in a moment of crisis and transition - though without the benefit of hindsight we struggle to see where this transition might lead; moreover, we still have the ability to learn from the past and influence this transition through political struggle. Aaron not only writes about this period as a historian, but also lived through this period as a Marxist and an organizer and has personal as well as professional reflections on it. Together, Aaron and Breht talk about the end of the 70's, the imperial crisis in the middle east (specifically regarding Iran) which still shapes regional politics to this day, The opening up of China and its consequences, Jimmy Carter and the rise of neoliberalism, de-industrialization inside the US, the shifts in and around the FBI, the changes in music and culture, and much more.  Check out all of Aaron's previous interviews on Rev Left HERE Get 15% off any book in the Left Wing Books Library HERE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Support Rev Left and get access to over 300 bonus episodes in our back catalogue, as well as new bonus episodes each month.   

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, Aaron Leonard, to talk about his newest book, Meltdown, Expected, Crisis, Disorder, and Appeal at the end of the 1970s. Aaron writes about the history of radicalism and state repression in 20th century America. He's been on the show many times. He's the author of Heavy Radicals, the FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists. the folk singers in the bureau, the FBI, the folk artists, and the suppression of the Communist Party, USA,

and whole world in an uproar, music, rebellion, and repression from 55 to 1972, all of which we have wonderful episodes with Aaron on Rev Left. If you're interested in any of those, you can go and check those out. I'll link to those in the show notes. And I also wanted to mention that we have an ongoing collaboration with our comrades and friends over at leftwingbooks.net, who are offering Rev Left listeners 15% off, any book in their library, their ever-growing library.

They have lots of great work on theory, on history, autobiographies of important historical figures on the left, et cetera. They're just good comrades offering good resources to people who want to dive deeper into these topics and we're happy to be working with them. So in the show notes, I'm going to link to left-wing books with the code already embedded. So when you click on that link and you go to checkout, you're automatically going to get 15 percent off whatever you order. And so that's just a way to make these books a little bit more accessible to people, particularly

in tough economic times like the ones we're living through now. So shout out to left-wing books. I'm really happy to be in collaboration with them. We share a spirit. We share a goal, which is educating and lifting up the class consciousness of the American working class in hopes that we can struggle towards a better world. And so we share that goal, and that's why we're engaged in collaboration. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

But without further ado, here is my conversation with Aaron Leonard on his newest book, Meltdown Expected, where we talk about the 1970s. We're talking about the death of Mao and the Deng reforms. We're talking about the rise of neoliberalism. We're talking about the Iranian revolution. We're talking about musical shifts in the U.S. And what those say about broader cultural shifts underlying them. And really this whole book is about pointing to the late period of the 1970s.

as this really interesting and important transition and flexion point that the world we live in today here in the U.S. was shaped by in deep fundamental ways. And so I think if you want to understand the crises that we're living through in the 2020s, going back to previous areas of American history to try to figure out how exactly we got here, learn from that so we can inform our struggles going forward, I think is really important. And this late 1970s period is one with a lot of sense.

significance and relevance for the world we're living in today and this new crisis period that we're living through and what might come afterwards. So enjoy. Well, welcome back to the show, Aaron Leonard. I'm an author and historian living in Los Angeles. fourth or fifth visitation on the show, but every time you're on, I learn something new. You're a fan favorite and one of my favorite guests as well. And we are talking about, as I said in the introduction, your newest book, Meltdown, expected, crisis, disorder, and upheaval at the end of the 1970s, which I just finished recently

and really enjoyed. So as a way to get into this conversation and orient listeners to the rest of it, can you tell us about the book, why you wanted to write it, and what its relevancy is for us today? Well, I wanted to, my last two books dealt with music and repression, one on the folk singers and the FBI in the period, roughly the 40s into the early 50s, and then I followed that with a book on music and repression in the long 60s, which took me up to 73. So I was puzzling over, well, you know, rather than just to focus on music,

you know, what can I pick up on the kind of. to pick, it continues on that historical continuum. And it also occurred to me that some of the most consequential years of my life were actually at the end of the 70s. You know, I came about a high school in 75 and migrated to the northwest. So I was living out there at circa 76, 77, into 78. And then things started to get, you know, rather intense toward the end of 1978 all the way up into like the first years in the 1980s. You know, I was a political activist.

I had worked with the Revolutionary Communist Party really closely. I was a true believer. I worked in their unemployed group and then in their youth group. they underwent a big schism at the end of 77 over the direction in China. And as a result, you know, the group itself, you know, was gripped by a lot of tumult. It actually sent me to the East Coast. I had been living in Seattle. And they sent me to New York to try to rebuild the youth group because one section of the group had left.

They were arguing that China was still on the socialist road and, you know, things were proceeding according to plan, whereas the other faction was saying, oh, my God, they're counter-revolutionaries, they're revisionists, and they're undoing everything Mao stood for. So I went back to raise up that Maoist flag in New York, ended up being a really intense period because in 78, you've got the Iranian revolution. coming to a keen fruition. There was a fair amount, a goodly amount of police brutality in New York City where I had moved to. And then there was some seminal kind of historical moments or incidents. There was the massacre in Jonestown of Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana, followed, you know, within a week by the killing of Harvey Milk and George Mascone and San Francisco by the conservative San Francisco councilperson, Dan White.

So, you know, all these things seem to be happening, you know, at a single moment. And it was kind of hard to keep up on it. You know, Jimmy Carter was president. He had come in doing fireside chats on energy and trying to. to re-cohere the United States at a point of, you know, coming off the 60s, you know, the loss of the war in Vietnam, trying to re-cohere, re-legitimate a lot of the institutions of the United States. But then by 78, you know, he's becoming a fierce cold warrior, you know, starting to arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. So, I mean, a lot of things I'm speaking to here in a very concise way, but they're all happening in this period, roughly from November 78 to the end of December 1979.

So I wanted to look back and try to make sense of it, you know, actually having been, you know, young and living in the midst of it, it just seemed like one thing after another. But stepping back, you know, one can see the world we inhabit. it today, it was staked out in those 14-odd months from China to the situation in the Middle East to the mid-deindustrialization, which still grips and impacts the landscape of the United States. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I really appreciate about this book is it's not necessarily an in-depth dive on every single political or social event that happened, It's this sort of summary of major events and transitions and shifts across many different terrains of existence, right?

There's the morality wars, the rise of the Christian right, there's the geopolitical situation in Iran and beyond. There's domestic radicals operating and facing off with the FBI. There's this transition period for the FBI itself in some ways. And so you really touch on a bunch of different focal points, and together it kind of gives rise to this broader picture of this. really tumultuous time. And as you said, it's really this period from late 78 all the way through 79 that your book really focuses on. And of course, another thing that you add in is you were just

alluding to here and is a good segue to this next question is your own personal experience. You know, lots of people can look back and do historical work on a certain era, but to actually have lived through it and to offer that as a piece of this broader puzzle that you're putting together, I think is really interesting and worthwhile. So with that in mind, can you discuss your politics, your worldview, and your organizing efforts during this period of time. Yeah, I was, as I say, I, you know, I had basically caught a ride with a friend who was, he was in the military stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington, which is in Tacoma. So when I graduated high school, I drove out there with him and settled in Tacoma.

And I had been a radical as a teenager. had formed my own little group, well, I had formed with my friends, I should say, this group, the Stone Rabbit's People's Party kind of modeled after John Sinclair, Black Panthers, you know, the kind of free-floating, ill-defined, or loosely defined radicalism at that time. So I'd already been a radical, but I reached out to the Revolutionary Communist Party and ended up aligning with them in 76. I got a job in a pickle plant. There was a food processing plant.

Nallie's fine food. They made potato chips. They made canned chili. They made pickle. In the summer, they hired a bunch of teenagers, you know, just out of high school, teenagers to stand on a production line to push pickles into jars as they headed down a conveyor belt so that the lids could be screwed on. And from there, I moved on to the chili.

plant where I would dump this huge cauldron of cooked ground beef, me and a partner would dump it into a vat of chili sauce, and you know, you have to be careful to splash back. So I was working as a proletarian and socialized production, you know, back when that was a thing that, you know, you could pretty readily do. But then, you know, the party said, well, we need to create a young Communist League. So we want you and this other guy to go up to Seattle and organize youth. So I quit my Teamsters job and got a job flipping burgers. It was, I think Campbell's Soup owned this company called Hepty Herfies. And they made the quasi-wopper called the Hepty Burger. Didn't really do too good with organizing youth. But just around that time, you know, September.

number 76, Mao Zedong died, and everything began to change. You know, China, this model for a section of the revolutionary left was suddenly distancing itself from the radical policies of Mao. And like I say, you know, the group itself I was in, you know, had a huge schism, you know, and I was called on to move to the East Coast. So I'm in New York at a point when, you know, Iranian students are gathering in Harlem and marching down to Union Square demanding, you know, the removal of the shop. And, you know, there's this, you know, the Iranians are extremely political.

You know, the Iranian Students' Organization has many factions, but there is a considerable Maoist faction, which is, you know, was aligned and working with, or I would say aligned is probably a stronger word. but, you know, mutually supportive of the RCP and some of the Iranian students. So it was, you know, very intense. I stayed in New York for a little while and moved down to Philadelphia within a week of the first attack on move by the Philadelphia police, where they infamously beat Delbert Africa. A friend of mine's walking me around the Palton Village section of Philly, and there's this open lot, she says, oh, this is where the move house was, which the police just pulled a bulldozer the day after the shootout.

One of their cops had died, and nine of the move members were put on trial and sent to prison for what seems to be a friendly fire killing of the police themselves, but it's just this abandoned lot of where the move house had stood. So, you know, all that's happening, and then events in China are moving. rapidly toward this market economy. And Deng Xiaoping is getting ready to visit. So I'm in the middle of all this, trying to relate to it and trying to move it

in the direction of revolution and not really able to kind of step back and see what actually is the overall development. So that's where I found myself, circa 78 and 79, and then famously, or whatever in January 79, Dung came to the United States and the RCP had inspired this committee for a fitting welcome to try to disrupt Dung meeting Jimmy Carter.

I mean, I think the plan was to throw a bunch of bottles or something on the White House lawn and, you know, create a big to-do, you know, When Don and Carter faded one another, except the police preempted that, there was a clash between the police and demonstrators. I had actually been at the front of the march with the youth. I think it was strategic. You know, the youth weren't involved in any of the violence, but kind of given my revolutionary

fervor at that point, I, you know, circled back several blocks to the site of the confrontation and started, you know, railing against the police who responded by pushing me to the ground. It was a pretty point, you know, you remember certain things. I remember this cop coming at me holding his Billy Club in a way that was daring me to take it from him so he could beat this shit out of me, which I didn't do. But he knocked me to the ground and then two or three of his buddy got a few kicks in. They ended up bruising my lung. I actually fared much better than other people, but of course, I was arrested for assault on an officer, which I didn't do.

Eventually, the charges were dropped, but me and 78 other people were confronting a felony assault on a police officer. I mean, there was a circuitous route to that, but it was facing a five-year prison sentence. Eventually, you know, my charges were dropped and charges were dropped on most of the others. but they remained on 17, including on Baba Vakian. So it was a turning point for the group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which had been kind of a deal coming out of the 60s into the 70s. As time went on, it gets smaller. It's still around, obviously, and, you know, kind of basically a cult around of Avaeca,

it's extremely small. But its turning point is right. there because that's what moves Evakian to feel like he's an object of hyper-political oppression, repression he goes to Europe and never really reemerges as a public figure. So there's a lot to say. So, yeah, yeah, in a preface, I spent a page or two doing a little bit of an autobiography, which is probably the extent of what I'll ever do. But, you know, it was a wild time.

It was pretty exciting, but there was also a little. little nuts in hindsight. Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. You just sparked a memory of mine. I was at a sort of an anti-fascist rally, I think in 2017, yeah, 2017 period. And it got very heated, very confrontational. The police started cracking down on us.

They had horses, pepper balls, all this stuff. And they were trying to push us out of this area. And this cop told me, like, keep going, keep going, go around this corner. All you need to move this way, move this way. And I actually was listening and I was moving that way. And the moment I turned my back on him, he ran and jumped on my back and got me to the ground. A bunch of other cops got in. And I remember saying to the cops, like I'm on my stomach, you know, with my face down and my hands out.

And there's like five guys on me. And I said, I'm not resisting. And this one woman cop grabbed to the back of my head and shoved it into the concrete. And she said, too late, motherfucker. And, like, rubbed my head into the concrete. And in my mugshot, I had a big, you know, smear across my head of, like, ripped off skin or whatever it wasn't that bad of a situation and they'd try to do the same thing where they tried to pin the charge on you as if you were assaulting a cop and I was like I

turned my back to the guy and he jumped on me but I guess we eventually pleaded down to disorderly conduct but yeah that's that's kind of their modus operandi for sure um I yeah they go ahead the NYPD actually they they have a phrase for it the troika and I'm not sure what the third one is but the Troika is whenever the police basically do a kind of a brutal arrest, it's disorderly contact, resist, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer. So whenever you see those three things together, there's probably a pretty good chance that the police, you know, we're having, you know, getting their anger out as it were. Exactly.

I've seen that many times. Well, you mentioned Move and in the book you also mentioned Mumia. and kind of those two situations briefly, but still importantly. And just for people who want to learn more, we have, I think, like, a two or three hour episode on the play-by-play of what happened to the move organization and the police response. We have all the background characters. We talk about Mumia, et cetera.

So if anybody wants to learn more about that, I'll try to link it in the show notes, but you can always just Google it and find it very easily. But I have a side question before we move on for you, Aaron, which is, you know, in the 60s and the 70s, there, and you know, you're talking about being a part of the Maoist contingent, there was, the Marxism had a real presence, you know, not a mainstream presence necessarily, but a presence among protesters, amongst the radical left that seemed to disappear in the periods of the 80s, in the 90s, in the early 2000s, in the early 20 teens, and is only now kind of re-emerging. Now, Marxism is never going to be, you know, 10, 20, 30, 100 million Americans

and getting behind it are, at least it's not going to be in the foreseeable future. I hope one day it is, of course. But what do you personally think about the shift of Marxism? So, like, Marxism seems like very prevalent in the organizing circles of the late 60s and into the 70s. And then it seems to have a real dark period as, you know, Reaganism takes over. Clinton does third wayism. There's the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. hegemony, unipolarity. And Marxism seems to, like, take a back seat. And anarchists actually come to the right late 90s the WTO protests the animal liberation front you know that the FBI cracking down on these sort of anarchistic manifestations which I think culminated in the Occupy protests which was

you know kind of started by a group called ad busters and was really anarchistic in its tendencies and its structure and only now in the last five 10 years do we really see this reemergence on the activist left of the prominence of Marxism does that does that sound right? to you, having actually lived through it and not just looking back on it as I am. Does that seem like that kind of happened? Yeah, it does. It's, I mean, you're just sparking all kinds of thinking. I don't want to run too far afield, but there is a chapter in this book on deindustrialization, which I feel is, it's a topic I feel like is underappreciated and under examined. There's a lot of assumptions about deindustrialization.

It's, you know, I think one could say, well, you know, there used to be a lot of industry, but through the course of the 80s into the arts, you know, industry fled and, you know, reposition itself mainly in China. And that's that, that happened. And now we're into a new era without enough appreciation of its profound impact on the landscape. I mean, one cannot understand. you know, the political situation today without understanding the huge swaths of the country

and the population basically have no place here. Now, I'm currently working on a history of the repression of the Communist Party, which I'm contracted with Rutgers University Press. You know, it's well underway, but it's basically, it's going to be called menace of our time, the long war against American communism. And in looking at it, you know, you see the basis for the Communist Party coming up in 1920 is there's a lot of industry and there's a very volatile proletariat in the classic Marxist sense. I mean, it's very international in the United States. There's a lot of foreign language groups, you know, folks from Lithuanian, Russia and Germany, you know, who are adhering to Marxism and, you know, sinking roots in the United States, you know,

and that had, you know, taken over from the end of the 19th century. But, you know, what we've seen from the post-World War era on, particularly in 1960, there was a whole process of deindustrialization. So it does really undermine, you know, the ability of this communist doctrine to take hold in the United States, and then you have these global transformations where both the Soviet Union and China, you know, evolved past some of the more radical forms of the stated socialism and communism. The Soviet Union actually collapsed, and China basically kind of held on to this democratic centralist leadership model while enacting a market economy. You know, I mean, China

today is considered the shop floor of the world. It has the biggest manufacturing base. So, you know, the material basis for communism and socialism in the United States was severely undercut. It was hanging maybe not by a threat in the 70s, but, you know, it was a real paradox that coming out of the 60s, some of these groups wanted to reignite Marxism, Leninism, at a point when industry was starting to flee. 1979 is the year where the most people in the U.S. are working in manufacturing. But it belies the fact that per capita, manufacturing was already on the decline, and it's going to accelerate.

You know, 13,000 U.S. steel jobs disappear in 1979. Youngstown, Ohio is on its way to becoming, you know, emblematic of the preemptive. permanent Rust Belt City. I mean, this is a whole way of life. I mean, it's not like these workers, circa 78, 79, which, you know, anybody who went into the new communist movement quickly discovered, it's not like these workers are really all that left and progressive. I mean, to the degree, there's a left and progressive cohort in the working class. It's, you know, returning Vietnam vets or youths who had kind of been caught up in the cultural, countercultural, you know, upheaval. had gone into the factories and had kind of started to stamp some of the conventional proletariat.

But the old timers, a lot of them, you know, were, you know, they had a pretty good life. You know, pretty good pension, benefits, health care, and very conservative. So, I mean, it was, it was a really tough ticket to, for some of these radical use to go to the factories and try to, you know, advocate communism and, you know, the limits of where they could get. But underneath it, it's like the ground was slipping away. So, I mean, that's by way of a short, long answer on the material basis for this socialism and communism has been undercut. I mean, you know, in the 20th century is now something we look at in the rear view mirror. What's to come? I mean, the current embraces socialism and communism, I think folks who are looking for the working class in the United States,

they have a tough road ahead. I mean, I was reading something about what percentage of the current United Auto Workers is actually graduate students and professors. So it's a whole different dynamic. And what's to come is something I want to dig into more. It's probably beyond what I can speculate now, but we are definitely in a different terrain. I mean, this Marxism has appeal, and I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of what Marx was looking at is really profound. I mean, I spent a fair amount of time trying to understand capital, and there's stuff there. You know, I mean, he talks about the relative surplus population.

In other words, he talks about how his capitalism advances. There's more and more people who are really not creating surplus value. There's increased pauperism and immiseration. And that's a lot of what you see in the U.S. and globally. I mean, where does that fit into these grand plans of conceiving a new world? I don't know. But I think there's a lot of truth in what Mark said. I mean, how he was implemented and applied, I think was,

and the further way I get from it, the more I feel there was a certain religious appreciation of Marx that wasn't especially helpful. You know, in my sense of Marx is he'd open a door, he'd walk into the room, he'd see another door, he'd open that door, and, you know, he'd just keep following everything. And I guess, I guess that's where I'm at. I mean, not on the level of Marx, obviously, but, I'm just curious of where all these things might lead and where they all might be headed. Yeah, I am deeply curious about that as well. I know that we're in a period of real crisis in this country domestically with regards to legitimacy crisis, reallignment, young people versus old people, and then also geopolitically with the sort of end of U.S. unipolar hegemony, the rise of a multipolar world, you know, the rise of something like bricks to undermine American currency dominance, et cetera. we're certainly in this interesting time.

What the U.S. is doing with Israel, you know, just going off the cliff with regards to world reputation, undermining their stated values of a rules-based international order, really revealing the nature of colonial and imperial, the imperial and colonial nature of Israel and the U.S. and their relationship. I mean, we're living in this period of change, but it's so foggy you can't see outside of your own era to see what's coming next, but you know something's coming. something interesting you said there too was in the 70s you know in the 60s and whatnot there's a certain contingent of the industrialized working class that had a relatively high quality of life for many reasons and so you had on some level you had remaining industrialism on the other hand you had this high quality of life that sort of de-radicalized or act as a bulwark against radicalization for some workers in that in those industries but now in today's in today's world you have the lack of industrial jobs and good pay and unions and pensions and all of that. But you do have this decreasing quality of life as well. So the relatively high quality of life that might have prevented many workers from becoming

radicalized at certain periods in American history, you know, that quality of life has really shrunk. There really seems, especially for young people, to really be a lack of opportunities, a lack of a future, no ability to access health care, you know, education puts you in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. You'll never own your own home. And so the quality of life is dipping, but the economy is a post-industrial, you know, largely service-based economy. And that makes, you know, classic Marxist strategies certainly more difficult and more complicated. But we're also living in this period of time where there is this ostensible or possible at least end of globalized neoliberalism and this attempt, even by the Biden administration on some level,

to, you know, re-shore or de-globalized supply chains, you know, implement industrial policy. So it's an interesting little, an interesting possibility that you could have, at least to some extent, a re-industrialization of certain parts of the American domestic economy and what that might do for the Marxist strategy. Lots of question marks, but I think it's a certainly interesting developments. Well, you know, if I could jump in on that, because I mean, one thing in writing this book is there's a chapter on deindustrialization and then there's the chapter on basically China on the capitalist road. And the two things are really integrated. I mean, production and manufacturing is global. I actually wonder to, I don't know to the degree it's

reversible. I mean, I think David Harvey made a point which struck me that the largest section of the proletariat right now are women in China. You know, so how do you, you know, once you erect these whole new means, you know, can you really undo it? I think the crisis and upheaval is the subtitle of my book, but I also think it's, to a degree one wants to make a solid prediction. I think the future holds more crisis and upheaval in what forms it takes is perhaps a bit of a mystery. And also the thing on neoliberalism, I talk about it in the book,

but I talk about it in the context of the material basis in neoliberalism. You know, this whole notion of, look, look, people, you're on your own. Take care of yourself. The government is not there to, you know, to give you all these benefits if you're struggling. You know, it's pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know, we will support industry if they're in trouble, and, you know, they did it in 2000 and 2008, and they'll continue to do so. You know, so this ideology of neoliberalism fits neatly with the fact that, like I said, for a huge swath of the population, there is basically no place in the economy for you. You know, you're external.

And you can go to other countries, and you can see this pretty pronounced, where there's huge sections of the population, basically just living off of the crumbs. I mean, I guess maybe the best exemplar of that is the people who sustain themselves in the Philippines by scavenging the garbage dumps. I mean, you know, this is where capitalism has come to. It's extracting wealth from a small section, you know, of the population, and then a huge population of this reserve and, you know, just exist to reinforce the overall system. But it was just really striking to see how the roots of that were actually going on in 78, 79.

Had China not reversed itself, it would have been a different world. I mean, I don't want to, I'm not a huge fan of counterfactuals. But, you know, the turn in China really did stamp the world we in today. And then the things you were alluding to about geopolitics, the fact that China is now a very rich and powerful country, you know, does mean, you know, the geopolitical order might change. I mean, what, you know, will China, you know, encounter its own limits and things of this sort? I mean, it's a big open question. But China now, I mean, I think Li Xi Ping talks about, keeps offering this. mantra, we're in a, I'm going to paraphrase, we're in a period, a rare period of a hundred

years where, you know, great change can happen. Again, I'm paraphrasing, I wish I had it right in front of me, but they see themselves, maybe not overtaking the U.S., but, you know, operating on the world stage is an equal, probably in their own sphere and zone. So that's huge. I mean, the end of the post-World War II order is huge. Because it's the world we all grew up in. So that's a huge portent. And I do feel like my book is by way of, you know, helping us understand that.

I mean, you can't understand the Middle East today without understanding that pro-US Shah was overthrown and replaced by an Islamic Republic. that was antithetical to the U.S. dominating that region. I mean, and that it still exudes a great power. You know, it's why Israel is, you know, in the situation it's in. You know, what's the future of Israel is actually a big question and stuff. So, you know, all these things are stamped with these episodes of the late 70s.

Absolutely. And I think we're going to get back into that Iranian aspect in a second for sure, But one thing I'm really interested in is for people that were dedicated, you know, revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s, this transition period into the 80s and 90s and the sort of psychological impact of that. So the 1970s, as we've been saying, were this interesting transition from the 1960s and early 70s radicalism, you know, hippies, counterculture to the 1980s marked by the rise of Reaganism, yuppies, greed is good, Wall Streetism, etc. We also went from communes and free love to cults and serial killers culturally, which is kind of interesting. Can you talk about this sort of liminal phase in American history, specifically with regards to the psychological impacts on people, you know, like yourself who were on, you know, some periods of this 60s, the 70s transition were really hopeful that revolutionary change was imminent. If you go back and read some of the Black Panthers, for example, in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, they're speaking as if revolution is kind of. coming. You have this decolonial movements around the world, adding fire to that. And so it's a really interesting period. And then you also, then you have the huge deflation psychologically of the rise of Reaganism and the ushering in of neoliberalism and the end of that, that revolutionary hope. Can you kind of talk about that psychology?

Well, I guess the way I would respond is so in my book, I discover or, you know, I argue that the 70s needs to be understood. stood as three actual periods. The first is period 1970, right up until the very end of 72, is still the 60s. There's Kent State, there's Attica, there's all manner of, the largest anti-war demonstration happens in May Day 71 in Washington, D.C. It's still very much of the 60s. Musically, even, you can see some of the best stuff is coming out. John Lennon's Imagine and Marvin Gay, what's going on.

You know, all those things are happening then. But then the war in Vietnam ends. You know, January 73, they sign a treaty. And you begin to enter into this new period. I mean, there's not a hard end, but it's a very quickly, 73, 74, it just starts to feel different. And it actually is the 70s of polyester. and lava lamps and, you know, and, you know, Tom Wolfe, who's not somebody I particularly like,

he's very, you know, the master of snark, but he calls it the me decades. So between 73 and approximately to the end of 78 is, is this period of introspection, people kind of licking their wounds. I mean, look at Bob Dylan's album. His big album for 75 is Blood on the Tracks, which I always took to be, you know, him looking back at all the tumult that actually created him and trying to take stock. And a lot of people are doing that. And, you know, there is the energy crisis. And Jimmy Carter is the anti-Nixon. I mean, you know, he's just soft-spoken. He tries to recreate FDR sitting in front of a fireplace, you know, giving a speech. You know, and he's arguing that the U.S. should be a big advocate of human rights because, you know, they pretty much like, I think you

used the word legitimacy. You know, with Vietnam, they had lost their legitimacy in the world. And the thing is, they lost the war. I think the thing is about people thinking revolution was possible is they, I think they mistook the U.S. losing the war in Vietnam with the U.S. being defeated. And it was not defeated. I mean, it was battered. But, you know, it was not like the German army after World War I where, you know, they had just lost, you know, millions, I believe millions in that war. And it was, the whole country was shook up. And, you know, Germany was gripped by revolution in the immediate aftermath of World War I, as were a number of countries in Europe. And, of course, the Soviet Union had an actual socialist revolution.

but the end of the 60s in the U.S. was not, you know, a defeat on that scale. It was big, but it was not totally destabilizing. So, you know, then, but then, you know, the U.S. licks its wounds. And they've got a big thing going for them is, you know, throughout the 60s, they had been confronting both China and the Soviet Union as social systems that were you know, totally in contradiction to Western capitalism. You know, they didn't fit in the world market. They were hostile geopolitically.

They were encouraging national liberation. And it was just a problem for the United States dominating the world. But then suddenly Mao dies and China's not a problem. Even when Mao was alive, he was worried about the Soviet Union, I think probably largely for national reasons. But, you know, China actually goes from being a problem to being a help, you know, and it's essentially an alliance with the U.S. And that means everything changes. The U.S. can now actually focus on, you know, essentially bringing down, challenging the Soviet Union in a way they didn't dare do since the Cuban missile crisis. So, you know, by the end of

the 70s, you've got a situation where the U.S. is basically saying, well, let's do this. Let's go into the final phase of the Cold War, although I'm sure they didn't articulate it in that way. They couldn't. And let's challenge the Soviet Union because, you know, we know they're actually weaker than we've been telling people and we're going to do this. And that's where I think the character of the late 70s starts to flower and become qualitatively different than the malaise years, you know, that had preceded it. Yeah, it's incredibly interesting. One of those counterfactuals that you were sort of warning us about earlier that I always find very fascinating is that the Sino-Sovia split and what would have happened if the

Soviet Union and China were able to maintain a partnership and not have to, you know, not have that division that was ultimately played on by the U.S. to its ultimate advantage, I think, and instead remained a sort of steadfast, you know, block in the East, cooperating with one another instead of competing or saber-rattling, et cetera. You know, who knows what the world that would have been created if the Sino-Soviet split never occurred. Another thing he said was Jimmy Carter trying to revitalize FDR's fireside chats. It reminds me of in the 18th Brewer, Marx talks about, you know, in these periods of crisis, figures putting on the costumes of the past to try to get some of that energy or to try to at least display the aesthetics of a previous

era. But it obviously is like, you know, the first time is tragedy, second time is far sort of situation where it never quite equals up. And Jimmy Carter trying to just summon the spirit of FDR in this period of time, I think is really interesting and kind of indicative of that quote by Marx that I find that interesting. Now, we mentioned earlier the Iranian Revolution, and of course this plays a incredibly significant role in the late 1970s. Can you talk about Iran in this period, how the CIA orchestrated coup of Mosec in 1953, the rise of the American-backed Shah, and how it all reached this crescendo in 1979 and sort of changed the terrain in West Asia? Well, you know, your question actually summarized kind of all of what actually did happen. And, you know, it was out of, so Mosaday was, you know, the U.S. was worried he might align with the Soviet Union. He was a little bit too liberal for their taste. And they did overthrow him. And, you know, it's actually interesting to see, you know, part of their ability to overthrow him did involve, it seems.

like some support from some of the clerics, the Islamists at that point, who were hugely influential. And people who I think the left really underestimated. So, you know, there's this secular, well, there's this mass uprising in Iran, circa 78, 79, because the Shah held power through force. He had this secret police agency with the acronym Syvac. which had actually been trained in part by the FBI. And people were sent to this Evan prison, which was notorious for its brutality. And people in their masses rose up and challenged the Shah because, you know, the stamp of the CIA coup that brought him to power was still very much with him.

And like I say, the term blowback actually emerged from that period where the CIA cautioned about, you know, we're worried, you know, you need to be. be mindful that if you carry things out, you know, they might come back to kick you in the butt. And that's exactly what happened with the 79 revolution, which initially involved all of the people, but the Islamists, you know, were far more organized and were able over the course of a year, year and a half struggle to gain supremacy and basically, you know, imprisoned and murdered, you know, a greater part of the ultra-left forces. It was pretty bad news.

But for the United States, it meant, you know, this huge country in the Middle East, you know, they had Israel, they had Iran. Suddenly they just had Israel. So it just shifted the whole power dynamic. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, you know, had, you know, more or less control in Afghanistan, but it was being very much challenged in the U.S. even before the Soviets invaded in December 79, the U.S. was already starting to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to counter the Soviets. So there's, you know, that area of the world is becoming very volatile.

I mean, at that point, you know, it had a lock on the global supply of oil. I think there's been some differentiation since then. I'm not an expert on this, but if you cut off the full, low of oil, you just, you know, you just stopped the ability to make super profits. And, you know, those were the stakes of the Middle East in that period. Whoever controlled the Middle East controlled the world and suddenly the U.S. didn't. I mean, this is, I mean, when they talk about Jimmy Carter, they tend to mystify it as his own personality and weakness and stuff. But I think the fall of Iran had had more to do with Carter's downfall than anything else.

I mean, he was certainly willing to do anything. I mean, I've come to understand that anybody who wants to be president in the United States has to be willing to commit crimes against humanity. And Jimmy Carter was no different. I mean, you know, I mean, I think he went on later in life to, you know, to try to lead a good life. And, you know, I think that's commendable to to a degree he was able to do that, but it doesn't erase the fact that, you know, the most important thing about Jimmy Carter is the fact that he set the U.S. on a course to confront the Soviet Union. I mean, he produced the MX missile.

I mean, you know, under Carter, they were trying to produce something called the neutron bomb, which would emit radiation and leave buildings. in place. And I was reading about the neutron bomb and I'm thinking, well, oh, yeah, well, today we call those things dirty bombs, don't we? You know, and this is what, you know, Carter was doing. He created the Federal Emergency Management Association, which was supposed to respond to things like emergencies like Three Mile Island and, you know, nuclear energy catastrophes, but it also established evacuation programs for cities under nuclear attack. So it was actually part of a warfighting capacity.

You know, and this happened under Carter. And then, you know, the foreign policy, his man is a big news. Brzynski famously said, oh, we couldn't support Paul Pop, but the Chinese could, essentially saying, you know, the U.S. and China, you know, had common cause. in Southeast Asia. They didn't want Vietnam and the Soviet Union to gain preeminence. So they were pushing for China's interest, China and the U.S. interest, and that involved supporting Pol Pot over the Vietnamese.

So it's, you know, and this is all on Jimmy Carter's watch. So I think I went far afield of your question. No, it's good, yeah. That's very good. And the dive into Jimmy Carter and his reputation versus the reality. And then, yeah, the Pol Pot situation in Cambodia and how that can, you know, kind of split certain forces with Vietnam invading Cambodia to stop it. And then China, I believe, invading Vietnam afterwards. Just a really intense period of time for sure geopolitically.

Now, I do want to get to music here in a second. But first, a big focus of much of your work and many of your appearances on this show, which, of course, I'll link to in the show notes so people can go listen to the rest of our discussions together, revolve around the FBI. co-intel pro and the role of such domestic intelligence agencies and the management of radical movements and leaders here in the U.S. What was the FBI going through during this period of time? And how did this period sort of shape the FBI of today? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the FBI today doesn't have the power that it had in the 60s 70s because, you know,

the Cold War, you know, as it was, is no longer. I mean, it's not like the U.S. is confronting. nominally socialist countries in the way it was in the 60s and 70s. So the FBI is not involved in a domestic, what's the word, internal security in the way it had been. But I think the mythology or the popular understanding is, well, in the 70s, the FBI kind of took their hits. There was the church committee hearings.

There were the hearings on the killings of MLK and JFK. And the FBI was, you know, basically in disrepute, you know, they had most of their domestic internal security investigations closed down. There were new guidelines put in place, mandating that the FBI couldn't go after you unless you were actually planning violence and not just talking abstractly about overthrowing the government. So, you know, we're led to think that it was an age of reform, And to a degree, it certainly was. There was a certain transformation of the FBI in this period. But what I discovered is, you know, by the end of the decade, things are tilting the other way.

You know, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller are two top FBI deputy inspector and assistant deputy inspector. I think those are the titles. But W. Mark Felt is deep throat. he's the guy who went to the press about Nixon. He helped bring Nixon down for an illegal break-in, right? That's what we're told about Mark Felt. What we're not told too much is that Mark Felt was put on trial for illegal break-ins in 1980, and he was convicted.

He was convicted felon, you know, like, I mean, we've been hearing this term convicted felon in the last week or two. Well, Mark Felt was one of those people. he's pardoned by Reagan and essentially, you know, the message, I mean, he's actually convicted at trial and he's given a $5,000 fine. And the evidence is overwhelming. I mean, he goes to San Francisco and supervises breaking into this Maoist label Bergman's apartment so they can put in a microphone. They've been talking about putting in video surveillance. They break into the weatherman's family and friends to try to find these fugitives at this point.

They break into the U.S.-China Friendship Association, essentially just to steal their membership list. You know, he's done these things, but essentially the laws are changed or the Attorney General guidelines are changed and adapted, and the FBI is given a mechanism to break in, the foreign intelligence surveillance court, which is still in the news, is still debated, but it comes out of this era of a very legal mechanism to break into people's places if they think they're a threat to U.S. national security or, you know, if they're, you know, planning violence and stuff. So the FBI is essentially, it's knocked down, but then it's starting to be rehabilitated. And I have a section two where I talk about, and actually your listeners can go to Jacobin and just Google

Jacobin, Hampton, Leonard. And there's a reprint of the chapter where I talk about William O'Neill, who is the informant who famously supplied a floor plan that helped the Chicago police kill Fred Hampton and Mark Clark actually goes on into the 70s to set up a Chicago police detective, who's a corrupt cop involved in a murder-for-hire scheme. And the informant, William O'Neill, actually helps this cop, Stanley Robinson, kill somebody and dispose of the body. And he's, you know, the informant, O'Neill is sued by the family of the victim, as well as Roy Mitchell, William O'Neill's FBI handler.

They're both sued, and the courts say, no, no problem. You know, the FBI and its informants, they got work to do. Sometimes it's a little precarious, but even if it involves taking part in a murder, you know, that's okay. And I think that's part of the rehabilitation that's going on. If you look at the FBI's website today, I mean, they'll talk about informants and how important they are. I know a lot of the attention is on electronic surveillance and, you know, scanning social media. And that certainly is a huge realm of surveillance and suppression.

But informants are still a pretty big deal. And they're canonized, I guess, I could say, in the late 70s through the course of a case that, you know, goes back to 69 with Fred Hampton. You know, they're all linked. Absolutely. And, of course, we have a full episode on Fred Hampton. I'm very proud of. People can listen to that entire episode if you're, for some reason, listening to the show and not familiar with Fred Hampton and his organizing and his amazing talents and how the U.S. government, the FBI and the Chicago PD, teamed up to murder him more or less in his sleep. So, yeah, certainly a dark chapter in a history of many dark chapters.

But another topic that you touch on very often in your work, and of course we've done an entire episode on your books about the folk artists and the FBI and the Communist Party, but also the whole world in an uproar about music, rebellion, and repression from 55 to 72. You talk about the role of music and culture in American society at these tumultuous inflection points within that history. So thinking about that, how was the music scene shifting in this era? And what does that say about the broader cultural shifts happening at the same time? Yeah, there is, you know, there is in 78, 79, there is a bit of a renaissance going on. I mean, it has its roots in the punk movement at 76, but there's some really interesting, there are two things going on. One is the legacy of the 60s, you know, music and the communal spirit has evolved into mega concerts. and stadium shows.

And there's this awful incident in Cincinnati where ticket holders are only allowed to enter into one door for a who show. And people are trampled to death. And, you know, the media is like, oh, my God, these kids, they're all on drugs and they're drunk.

When, in fact, it's like, you know, people are not seen as people. They're just seen as, you know, ticket holders. You know, just little parcels of, of an entrance fee, you know, aggregating up into a huge profit. So, you know, the music becomes just a means toward making money and the people coming to the shows are just, you know, instruments toward that. You know, and that's pretty awful.

There is a backlash against disco, which is problematic. The Chicago baseball event, they have a mass burning of disco records, which, you know, I mean, that's just, that's not a good look whenever you're burning and destroying things. You know, that's definitely not good. But it's a whole death to disco movement, which is, you know, part of it is just, you know, it's kind of like Taylor Swift. Enough Taylor Swift already. You know, we've heard it, please stop. There's kind of just being overwhelmed by that. But the other, there is an aspect, too, of a little bit of a little bit of racism, a little bit of homophobia, you know, it's like white youth have their rock and they don't like this, this disco, which is, you know, more urban and things like that. It's not, it's not really cool. So you've got that going on. But then you've got these little shoots, you know, you've got the Ramones who broke in 76 and the sex pistols. And they're basically saying, you know, rock music should be rebellious. and it shouldn't be too fancy and, you know, step down from all the glitter and things like

that. And then you've got the emergence of, you know, people who I think are, I mean, I write about them. I mean, they're personally among my favorites, but more than that, I think they capture the moment better than probably some of the other acts, which is people like Bruce Springsteen and the clash. You know, neither of whom are Bruce Springsteen in the clash as we know them now. I mean, Springsteen had a big following off of the born Iran record, but he wasn't yet Bruce Springsteen of born in the USA, and that whole mega, almost monstrosity of blowing up nationally. But he is a very big deal because he's speaking about essentially, you know, the deindustrialization and the transformation of the working class post-World War II.

I mean, he's tapping into the fact that all the promises and dreams are basically done. You know, they're not going to be realized. And then the clash are basically taking, you know, the punk sensibility in a much more political direction. I mean, they're all over the place politically, but they're definitely on the left. I mean, some people have argued, you know, they were more than what they were, and that's not true. But they are definitely, famously, I think Mick Jones, the guitarist, wears an armband from the Red Guards from China as a counterstatement to Susie Sue wearing a swastika.

Some of the punks had done swastikas just to be outrageous. I don't think there were Nazis or things like that. Yeah, it's like transgression for transgression's sake. Exactly, exactly. But, you know, the clash, you're on the, the clash or not the clash. I mean, I saw them in Philadelphia in 79, I think it is, yeah, at the Walnut Street Theater. And, you know, I think four or five hundred people in there. And, you know, it's like you can really be there with the band.

And, I mean, today, I mean, I think people would, some people would, you know, they would give their eye teeth to see the clash. I mean, they're no more, you know, they could probably have, well, whatever. But, you know, they're tapping in their album. London Calling, which kind of inspired the title Meltdown Expected, is a lyric from London Calling, and the artist at Rutgers actually kind of mimicked the London Calling album typography,

which, you know, that album's typography actually mimicked Elvis's, I think, first record with the pink and the green typography on the cover. Their album, London Calling, talks about in work for the clampdown lately one or two is fully paid their due for working for the clampdown which is an allusion to as near as I can figure anastosio Samoza, Nicaragua, and the Shah of Iran. They talk about flying in on a DC 10 tonight in Spanish bombs, which was an illusion to a plane crash that was kind of a scandal for the airline industry and of course London calling, which is an allusion to three-mile island

or, as Jones said, just a general sense of things falling apart. So I think, you know, the clash kind of get the moment pretty well. I mean, there's others. There's a lot of really good stuff going on. And it's all kind of emerging off of a situation in which you're being saturated with the soundtrack to set it in a night live, which is not a bad record. you know, or Saturday Night Fever, excuse me, or Debbie Boone or even my favorite Captain and Teneal's muskrat glove, you know. I mean, this is music on a whole different level, which is actually,

you know, merging and, you know, artists that are kind of capturing the moment and trying to live on the edge of that can generally produce some pretty interesting things. And I think, you know, there is stuff like that going on. And, you know, some of the reggae, too, which was underappreciated in its time. But Peter Tosh and Bob Marley both did some of their best work, circa 78, 79. And then, you know, you have films, too, which I speak about. I'm not going to go off all into that. But there's some very interesting things coming out from coming home to apocalypse now to

the revanchist deer hunter of trying to reassert an American continuity. Yeah, films definitely, in the 1970s, late 70s, there was this interesting shift in, you know, in films in general in the U.S., and that is something that I am sort of interested in. But another thing that I wanted to just touch on about music before we move on to the next question is in relation to that disco, the Disco Sucks Movement, and you mentioned Disco Demolition Night, which was in July of 79 in Chicago. And you touched on it, but I just think it is probably worth saying that there was this deep association of disco with gay people, black people, Latinos, women, et cetera. And so for like young white males, their hatred of disco was, you know, in part a dislike of the genre, the commercialization and popularity of the genre, but also I think this sort of cultural backlash to some of these movements that had been happening in the 60s and 70s.

of these, you know, identity-based progressive movements for, you know, historically marginalized and oppressed peoples. And I don't think that can be forgotten. But I also find this really weird shift into the 80s. We're getting kind of beyond the boundaries of your book. But with the rise of, like, hair bands in the 80s where you had these like, you know, my dad, for example, he was like a football player and he was a guy that would get in bar fights, you know, and he loved these bands where these guys had this long, you know,

permed hair and would wear makeup and, you know, do things that you would think in a different cultural period would be seen by, you know, young white males as sort of transgressive in a way that they didn't like, but somehow that came to prominence. Do you have anything to say on that interesting shift, or am I missing something with regards to that shift about how those... No, I mean, it's an interesting point. I don't know that I have anything interesting to say. It is kind of a phenomenon. I mean, but, you know, the thing with the 80s is, the operative word in the 80s is decadence because, you know, you got these hair bands, but they're just extolling the worst of misogyny, you know, and just, you know, partying to you, like, pass out. I mean, it's just a lot

of it is just not very good. The 80s, a lot of people are, well, whatever, I can only speculate. I I should not just, you know, Brett, you and I can just have a talk on this sometime. Okay. Yeah, interesting for sure. Before I move into the last question about possible parallels between the current situation and the late 1970s, I wanted to ask one more question. I didn't include on the outline. But you touch on it in your chapter, a shifting chessboard about Latin America,

about, you know, Granada, Nicaragua, El Salvador. And, of course, going into the 80s, we have the rise of Reagan. We have the rise of contras. You know, horrible massacres. This is certainly not just relegated to the 80s. This was happening all throughout. But can you touch on the occurrences in Latin America and the U.S.'s response to, you know, left-wing, union, communist movements down there. Yeah, I mean, it was getting real. I mean, there was instability in Central America, in particular Nicaragua and El Salvador, both Nicaragua Samosas thrown out El Salvador. There's Civil War. And you've got Cuba, which is this thorn in the U.S.'s side forever. And the Soviets are, you know, pushing, you know, pushing against the U.S. Grenada, it's a tiny island, but it's aligning itself with Cuba. And the U.S. is just not going to stand for it.

I mean, you know, Grenada will be the first big reassertion of putting to bed the Vietnam syndrome where the U.S. basically attacks this tiny island nation and overthrows the government of Maurice Bishop. But it becomes a hot war. I mean, in Latin America, and you've already spoke about in Southeast Asia, you know, the huge disorientation for millions of people around the world who supported the people of Vietnam against, you know, U.S. imperialism. Suddenly, Vietnam is firmly aligned with the Soviet Union and China is aligned with the United States and, you know, Vietnam first invades Cambodia and then China, in turn, to teach Vietnam a lesson, invades Vietnam. So it's, you know, national liberation is playing a second seat

to geopolitical power. And it is all part of basically, you know, the rise of Reaganism is really about the final phase of the Cold War. The U.S. no longer has to worry about going to war with China and the Soviet Union. So they're going to push the Soviet Union. I mean, I do need to dig more deeply into this. I'm sure there's good scholarship on this. But my sense is the Soviet Union is a lot weaker than we are led to believe. Well, you know, the book talks about there's a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island of a nuclear plant.

And within a week of that, there is. anthrax escapes from a lab in the Soviet Union and kills a dozen people or so and infects many other. You know, the Soviets are producing anthrax as a bio weapon because it's a lot cheaper to do. You know, the Soviets don't have unlimited wealth in the way the U.S. does. And the U.S. is just pushing the Soviets, you know, militarily. You know, they keep upping the anti. and they are bringing things to a head, which is why, you know, I also talk in the book about, you know, one of the best sellers. And 79 is called World War III, and it's written by this former NATO official, and it's a, it's a scenario in which World War III breaks out. And because of the efficacy in NATO, only two minor cities get destroyed in nuclear war.

So it is part of, you know, this is the world we're in. And, you know, we're actually going to openly talk about nuclear war because, you know, that's how this fundamentally, you know, that's how this ultimately ends. And of course, you know, by 86, 87, Gorbachev has been, you know, backed into a corner and things collapsed. But, you know, the seeds of this are in 78, 79. It didn't have to turn out the way it did. It could have gone in different directions. it was very volatile, but Reagan and his whole administration was like, we're not going to let the Soviets get a foothole in Central America,

let alone, you know, in the Caribbean, and we're going to push back and push back hard. And, you know, Reagan actually destabilized his whole regime, you know, through this Iran-Contra affair, where he made a deal to release hostages in, to take. get money from the Iranians to pay for the Contras in the Middle East, you know, basically circumventing Congress. I mean, a lot of this isn't remembered about Reagan, right? The other thing not remembered about Reagan is the fact that for the last year or so, he almost didn't

exist. I mean, I think it was Howard Baker was his spokesman who was mainly the figure who spoke for the administration. You would see Reagan walking to the helicopter holding his hand to his ear like he didn't hear somebody you know i mean he was he was just not that effective toward the end for a lot of reasons it's really interesting and um yeah scream some parallels with regards to biden sort of the the ineffectualness of carter and the late um cognitive decline of reagan all mixed into one but it's a good segue into this this next question the final question i have for you today because you just mentioned that the this period of time was volatile and that there were multiple trajectories that were open at that time and they eventually got consolidated into

Reaganism and we know how things go in the 80s and the 90s etc but things could have taken different directions and I feel like we're very much in a similar situation today where lots of opportunities lots of doors lots of trajectories are possible good bad and ugly but we're still living in the fog of our own period and we're not sure where things are going to go so as we move deeper into the 2020s and the current crises of capitalism imperialism, legitimacy, etc., deepened in this country. Many of us are naturally inclined to look back at previous eras of American life to try and draw parallels and lessons.

Increasingly, the 1970s is being revisited in no small part due to the stagflation and the economic parallels that we're facing today. And your book is a part of that process of reflection, in my opinion. So with that in mind, and this is mostly in your opinion, what are the major similarities as well as the major differences? between today and 2024 and that late period of the 1970s? Well, you know, there are no socialist countries as they define themselves. So that's a huge difference.

And I think in general, you know, because communism, the 20th century communism collapsed and the U.S. is so happy about that, it acts as. if it was never a big thing, but it wasn't the driving force of events in the way it was. So that doesn't exist. I mean, what does exist is, you know, we're still in the post-communist era. And I don't know what's emerging. You know, actually, so this is probably the thing I want to research next. I'm not committing to a book after this book on a,

the long war against the Communist Party USA. But I do want to look at the period 2008 to the current period because, well, first off, this book on Meltdown expected, you can see the world today, you know, you can't really understand the world today without understanding the events of 78, 79, Iran, deindustrialization, the rise of neoliberalism, the, you know, China becoming, you know, a major, you know, a socialist country with Chinese characteristics, you know, essentially a commodity-driven capitalist model-based country. You can't understand the world today without understanding the shifts that happened at 78, 79. And I think we're in a period now of further shifts.

I mean, you know, the war in Ukraine, especially where you have the, you have, this, what seems to be a certain alliance with China and Russia, with China being the major partner, is, you know, out to, you know, create a different political framework in the U.S., which seems to be holding on economically, but, you know, there does seem to be an underlying volatility where, you know, one wouldn't be astonished to wake up one morning and see, oh, you know, this bank collapsed and suddenly the economy is spiraling down. I mean, you know, I mean, or it could continue to kind of keep along for, you know, several years, you know, going on ahead.

But, you know, the polarization in the U.S. where the political system in the U.S. is woefully, you know, out of sync with the actual society. I mean, that's got to lead to, you know, some kind of reconciling. So I think we are in a period where, you know, things are going to have to get redefined. And you can start to see it. You can start to see less U.S. power and more power, you know, toward the east and stuff. But, you know, the economy really is integrated globally.

So, you know, how all these things get resolved without impacting every single, you know, nation and person on the earth? I don't see that happening. So I think we are, you know, I think the road ahead is going to be a bit rocky. I think the best we can do is try to pay attention and understand things as they actually are. And hopefully, you know, try to bring forward new ways and ways of being and ways of living together that, you know, can advance the cause of humanity, as it were. I mean, lofty sounding and vague as all that is, the best. we can do is the best we can do.

Yeah, it's, it's super interesting to think about some of this stuff because we're in a sort of malaise today, but, you know, there are some similarities and differences. You know, in the late 1970s, we're having the rise of neoliberalism, this sort of economic paradigm that will take hold for the next 40 years, and I think right now we're living through the end of it, and the two major countries spearheading that in the West, of course, were, you know, Reaganist U.S. and Thatcher in the U.K., and both of those, two countries are in a really precarious spot with regards to many things, the quality of life for younger people, but the age differences and the different experiences that older people in

the U.S. and the U.K. have and are having compared to what the younger people are facing in both of these two countries. And I think it's not a matter of like, old people think one way and young people think another way. It's a matter of the material conditions in which these different generations were brought up and how the system is sort of structured to benefit them in certain ways, right? If you were, if you're a boomer and you bought your house in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s, you've been able to really triple, quadruple down on your equity and your assets and your wealth. But now for younger millennials, Gen Z coming up, we don't have access to housing. We, the idea that we'll buy a house, you know, I'm a father of three kids in my mid-30s

and buying a house is just, I've been working since I was 15. Buying a house is completely off the table. You know, burden with tens of thousands of dollars of student debt, have never had health insurance in my entire adult life, can't afford it. And these are things that I think are very common features throughout this society. And so we have this period of applied libertarianism, neoliberalism. The government backs off, hands over power to the corporations. We have citizens united, big pack money, basically an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. And perhaps one of the changes that are coming our way is a re-appreciation. of state power, of order in the economy, of putting corporations back into their place.

Maybe that's optimistic, but I feel like among young people across the political spectrum, there is a desire for a whole new way of doing things, centered, whether it's on the left or the right, around state power and stepping away from this, you know, let it all rip, libertarian, the government is bad sort of approach. The government we have right now full of boomers brought up in that era is seen as bad. But government power as such, I think, is something that might come back online with regards to younger people. What are your thoughts on that? Well, you know, you're making me think of a lot of things.

But so in the 70s, I mean, some among the left were still proclaiming the ultimate demise of the United States. I think, you know, and I think that was premature because what happened was the United States ended up. emerging from the Cold War victorious, and it kind of got a second wind, you know, and that second wind involved two wars in Iraq and war in Afghanistan in an attempt to create, you know, the U.S. second American century. That dream is now in the dust. In the elements of decline in the United States are more pronounced every day. Does it get turned around? Well, you know, possible. I think when Biden got elected, I thought, well, maybe there will be, you know, a certain shift back, you know, bringing industry back, you know, revitalizing certain things that have

gone by the wayside, you know, four years into Biden or whatever it is, it's clear that's not happening. And the trajectory down continues. I do see that, you know, continuing on. The divisions in the U.S., while I think they're sometimes overstated, they're also real. There is a whole section of the population that basically, you know, doesn't feel like, you know, they're part of the same nation as everybody else. You know, where that actually ultimately leads, I don't know. But I think the U.S. that you and I grew up in is gone in the sense of it is the familiar aspects of it, to the degree they still continue. They dwindle by the day. Where that all ultimately leads, I don't know.

I mean, it's, you know, the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. It's certainly that. I mean, for me, the only thing is to try to understand it. I mean, there's an element of, you know, just dig in and try to understand the world you're in and maybe then you can see what the road forward is. But I do ultimately have, you know, I do have confidence in people and that people do learn and that hopefully from within all this, we can bring something, you know, into being that that's better than what preceded it.

That isn't going to happen in a year or two. It may not happen for decades. But to a degree, you know, solid work is done and solid envisioning is undertaken. I think it might well bear fruit. And, you know, that is what we can, you know, as far as what I know, what you can do. I've kind of having studied Marxism and the historicism of it all and the inevitability of the, you know, the communist. Utopia and understood that that was a quasi-religious formulation, you know, one could despair,

you know, understanding these things are not true, but I think the basis of optimism is that people do learn. We have this privilege of being conscious, and we should maximize it, maximize it. And we also have this biological imperative to be collective. You know, we don't live by ourselves. We live with one another and we should, you know, definitely appreciate that and try to advantage it. So that's what I could say to that, right? Yeah, I share your confidence in people. I share your view that there's a deep, deep impulse wired evolutionarily within us toward community, toward collectivity, and for all the talk of neoliberal and libertarians talking about unfettered capitalism being synonymous with human nature. I think the rise of mental

illnesses throughout the West, and specifically in the U.S. is an indication that this is actually hostile to our nature as human beings to be these atomized worker bees in a non-collective, just serving an economy for its own sake. I think what people my age and younger really, really want is a reintroduction of community, is a reintroduction of communality, of having each other's back, of feeling like you are embedded within a society that actually cares about you and not just, you know, another cog in the machine, serving the machine against your own ultimate interests. And I, sometimes when I was pessimistic, I would think, you know, maybe people just adapt to shittier conditions, maybe the quality of life decline that we've

been witnessing over the last several decades will continue when young kids coming up will just accept this as normal, but I'm actually, I've seen over the last several years that young people are not accepting this as normal and they're not simply adapting to shittier and shittier life prospects and conditions. And that gives me a lot of hope. As you said, you know, at the end of the 70s and at certain periods, multiple periods throughout American history, there were these feelings that a collapse was imminent. And there are some on the revolutionary left who are feeling that way today like you know the collapse of america is just around the corner it's going to happen any second and that may or may not be true but there's a certain humility that you get when you go back

over history and see that you know comrades in the past often felt the same thing only to be followed by various forms of resurgence right um at the end of the 70s there was maybe this idea that things were collapsing that things were falling apart and then 10 years later you have the collapse of the soviet union and the u.s now enjoys 30 years of unipolar hegemony in the wake of that. And so I think we have to be humbled by that. We have to live in the real world. We have to learn from the past. But we also have to never stop struggling for that better future and struggling together for that better future, if for nothing else than to put our children and their children in even better positions to advance the ball. Yeah, I think that's

well stated. All right. Well, Aaron, thank you so much for coming back on the show. As I said in the beginning, I'm going to link all your other episodes on Rev Left in the show notes so people can go and listen to those interviews if they liked this one. But before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, this book, and your other work online? Yeah, my website's the best place to go. That's Aaronleononord.net. That's A-A-A-R-D-D dot net.

And from there, you can go anywhere. Wonderful. The book is Meltdown, Expected, Crisis, Disorder, and Appeal at the end of the 1970s. Thank you, Aaron. Okay, Brett. Thank you. I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you I started dancing just to be around you

here's to thinking that it all meant so much more I kept my mouth shut and opened up the door. I wanted nothing but for this to be the end, for this to never be a tight and empty hand. If all the trouble in my heart would only mend, I lost my dream, I lost my dream, reason all again

It's not just me for you I have to look out too I have to save my life I need some peace of mind I am the only one now I am the only one night I am the only one night now. You may not be around. You may not be around. You may not be around. You may not be around. I am the only one now. I am the only one now. I am the only one now. I am the only one now. I am the only one now.

I'm going to be able to be.