Rev Left Radio - Postmodern Conservatism: Reactionary Politics in Late Capitalism

Episode Date: April 4, 2020

Professor Matthew McManus joins Breht to discuss his work on postmodern conservatism.  Find Matt on twitter @MattPolProf Learn more about Matt and his work here Find the book here Here are two other Rev Left episodes we've done on this topic: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Post-Structuralism, Postmodernism, and... Metamodernism? Outro music 'A Song for Our Fathers' by Explosions in the Sky ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have Matthew McManus, who was an author among many other authors on the book, Postmodern Conservatism. So we really explore this idea of how postmodern culture has manifested itself on the political right. We talk about Trump, we talk about the pandemic, we talk about how neoliberal late capitalism really creates the conditions for the rise of postmodern conservatism, and we just cover a lot of fascinating ground. We've had many episodes in the past on topics related to postmodernism. I'll link to as many of those in the show notes as possible, so that people who are really interested in this topic,

who might not have heard our previous episodes can easily find them. And, you know, we probably have maybe three, four, or five episodes talking about this broad topic known as postmodernism. And so I think if you were to sit down and listen to all five of those episodes, including this one, you would have a really, really good understanding of a very complex cultural phenomenon. So I hope people who are interested in this topic pursue that, and I'll make that as easy as possible. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get into this conversation with Matthew McManus on the book, Postmodern Conservatism. Enjoy. A professor of politics and international relations at Dr. Monterey.

I completed my PhD in 2017 at York University. And I'm the author of several books. The one that we're here to talk about is, What is Postmodern Conservatism, Essays on Our Hugely Tremendous Time, which I wrote and edited along with my co-authors, Conrad Hamilton, Warner Radnick, Eric Tate, Dylan Dijong, and David Holland. And I'm also the author of The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism, which is a more academic-y kind of monograph,

which was published with Palgrade McMillan. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really am excited about this topic. We've covered a lot of issues surrounding postmodernism in the past, including entire episodes on Jameson and Mark Fisher, which you draw from in this text. But I really think this will be really eye-opening for a lot of people who have maybe that father or that uncle or that grandfather

who is completely sort of, you know, in the Fox world, Trump universe, and we were finding it increasingly difficult to relate to our loved ones and sort of falling into this whole other world with this own worldview and separate set of facts. And a lot of us are sort of wondering what's going on. And I think more than a lot of other work, your work on this topic and your co-authors work really illuminates a lot of what exactly is going on. And it made it a lot easier for me to make sense of some of my family members who are very much on the Trump train and in that universe. So I found it very illuminating on that level. And so I hope listeners will find that as well. I guess the way to start off

is just like, so where did the idea or the inspiration to write this book, where did it come from? When did you start getting interested in this topic? Well, back in 2016, when I was just wrapping up at school, my plan was basically to write fairly dense books on legal theory, which is my technical field that maybe only, you know, 50 people would read, and that would be, you know, useful for getting a job. But then, of course, 2016 rolls around and Donald Trump was elected. And the Brexit referendum happened. And I was kind of like, oh, shit, things are kind of changing beneath my feet, as it were. And like a lot of people, I didn't actually expect Trump to win. I wasn't happy that Hillary Clinton was going to win since, you know, as progressive,

that's kind of a pure victory of sorts, but genuinely very surprised. And around the time I graduated, I started deciding to go back and look more extensively at the history of conservative thought and activism to kind of try and understand how this transition occurred. And the thing that happened for me was when I was reading Evan Burke's Reflections on the Revolution of France again, hadn't read it for years by that point. And I noticed that a lot of the things. things that he was arguing for, you know, this kind of epistemic skepticism towards reason,

respect for particularism, married very nicely with a lot of the postmodern theory that I have been kind of imbibing throughout my PhD studies. I didn't agree with a lot of it, but, you know, certainly spent a great deal of time with those figures. And that was kind of the first clue to my mind that there might be something distinctively postmodern about certain forms of conservatism. And certainly as the Trump administration got up and got going, and it started displaying similar forms of epistemic skepticism, criticisms of reasons, criticism of intellectual elites, a lot of the material then started to come together. And I released a paper with the International Journal of Zergic Studies in 2017, kind of summarizing my preliminary thoughts on the subject matter. And once I got

some positive feedback on that, I decided, why not? Let's try to turn this into a book. And that's what I did. Awesome. Well, as I said, we do have a few episodes on postmodernism, and I know this can be, especially for people that don't have academic training, the whole world of postmodernism, the distinctions therein, the different thinkers that sort of make up the vague boundaries of that category. It can be very confusing for people. So if anybody still needs to have some sort of basic orientation to this entire sort of field of philosophy and cultural studies, I'll link to some of our more previous 101 episodes in the show notes. listeners can sort of build up their understanding if they find themselves a little bit out of

their depth, which is completely, you know, normal and I don't blame you at all. Oh, yeah. Having said that, you know, we have been aware of in the past of just how sort of slippery a term like postmodernism can be. And so every time I discuss this topic, I like to lay out some definitions up front. So can maybe instead of just laying out a definition, can you like summarize how maybe some of the major Marxist conservative intellectuals have thought about the term postmodernism and then how you think about the term throughout this text?

Sure, of course. Well, one of the things, again, that struck me when I was starting to delve into this literature and more depth starting in 2017 is, of course, postmodernism is often set up as the boogeyman of the political rights, particularly in the 2010s. You know, you have people like Stephen Hicks and Jordan Peterson, who are probably the most prominent critics of what they call postmodern neo-Marxism or postmodern socialism, variably. And usually this isn't really defined with a great deal of rigor, but it seems in some sense to refer to this collection of French intellectuals who have an oversized influence on our culture and who, starting in the 1960s, decided that socialism and its traditional forms was dead, and they needed to reconstitute the program with a kind of new lingua franca, which is why they started developing all this rhetoric about power and deconstruction and discipline and so on. And there's some truth to this conservative narrative.

I mean, there are French theorists who were influenced by Marx who transitioned towards postmodern forms of theorizing. Somebody like Jean-Françade comes to mind. But generally, it's far less ubiquitous and far less simple than they tend to make out. Ironically enough, the Marxist tradition, as you pointed out, has had far more sophisticated and interesting critiques of postmodern theory. And generally speaking, they see postmodern theory. as emerging as a result of cultural changes in late capitalism.

You know, this is David Harvey's and Fred Jameson's famous thesis. And their kind of argument is that just as Hegel said, philosophy always reflects his time and thought. Postmodern theory emerged because our culture is fundamentally postmodern. And it's fundamentally postmodern because a variety of different changes, which have occurred in late capitalism, which have destabilized our traditional ways of doing things and our historical ways of thinking about them.

And we can certainly talk about that a lot more, but that's the way I'd say conservatives and Marxists tend to approach the subject matter, at least classically. I see. So on the Marxist end of things, postmodernism is viewed as a sort of cultural epoch produced by the underlying functions of capitalism and neoliberalism, etc.

We'll get into that later. But the movements and philosophy and arts known and film known as postmodernism are sort of a second order effect of that broader cultural postmodernism that we all exist in. Is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah, I think that's perfect. And Fred Jameson, who I think is a brilliant scholar and is probably the biggest single theoretical influence on my comments on postmodern conservatism makes exactly this claim, right, that postmodernism and art is the cultural logic, as he put it, of late capitalism. And expresses the sense of insubility that we increasingly

feel inhabiting a world defined by the forms of precarity that are unique to 21st century capital. Got it. So having laid that on the table and people sort of orienting themselves to that definition and that approach, what is, and we're going to get into the five features in a second, but just broadly speaking, what is postmodern conservatism and when did it begin to arise? Okay, that's a very good question. I kind of went back and forth on this quite a bit while I was writing because you don't want to start assimilating all forms of conservatism into this postmodern conservatism paradigm, right? At the same time, it's important to try to talk about this as something that is novel and also spreading. So usually I start to trace it back to the 1980s, which is

when you started to see the emergence of distinctively reactionary forms of media that weren't all interested in engaging in the kind of discursive politics that even earlier conservatives were interested in engaging in. So one of the contrasts I often make is between people like Newt Gingrich, Dinesh De Sousa, or Ben Shapiro, and somebody like, let's say, Bill Buckley in the 1950s. So Bill Buckley was still very much a conventional conservative of the modernist paradigm who felt that the way to kind of argue for conservative positions is you set up a magazine like the National Review, you go online and you have disputes with Noam Chomsky and other progressive intellectuals, and you try to convince the people by appealing to their reason

and to a certain extent their emotion via literary mediums. That's not what you really saw starting in the 1980s with the emergence of these new postmodern conservatives. What you saw them start to do is appeal instead to affect conspiracy theories, the centrality of an identity that was under attack, and using all kinds of new media in order to promote this message. And certainly as time has gone on, we've seen the radicalization of these tendencies as were embedded in an ever more complex digital culture, which abets the emergence of these kind of reactionary viewpoints. I see.

So having laid that bird's eye view out, can you talk about the five features, the main features of postmodern conservatism that you lay out in your book and give an example maybe of each one as you go through to highlight exactly how postmodern conservatism manifest in the world? Sure. So the essay that you're referring to was originally published in Marion West back in June 2018, and it was modeled after Umberto Eco's The Features of Fascism, which was published some time ago. I wanted to do something that was similarly comprehensive and also that was relatively accessible. So the first feature that I mentioned is that postmodern conservative,

conservatives engage in a dismissal of rational standards for interpreting facts and interpreting values. And this, again, has deep roots in the conservative tradition. So going back to people like Evan Burke and particularly Joseph Demaestra, who I describe as the most important precursor to postmodern conservatism, there's always been this sense that rationality can pose a danger to the conservative worldview. And the reason that it does this is because tradition is something that you're not supposed to think about all that much. You're supposed to feel an attachment to it and then dedicate yourself to obeying its dictums. And rationality can pose a challenge for that because once people start asking, well, why am I obeying this tradition?

Should authority really be organized this way and so on? They're opening it up for question in a way that upsets conservatives or at least provides a great deal of anxiety to conservative intellectuals. And postmodern conservatism radicalizes this skepticism of epistemic rationality. Because what you start to see, again, starting in the 1980s, especially nowadays, is the idea that rationalism is associated with what's sometimes called liberalism in the United States or the left everywhere else. And this idea that people should be free and we should reorganize the world along scientific lines, reject religion, reject traditional forms of social social organization, redact traditional hierarchies.

So postmodern conservatives react very strong against epistemic rationality, both for historical reasons and because it's now so closely associated with the liberal and progressive movement, especially in the United States. The second feature that I talk about is postmodern conservatives appeal to a traditionally powerful identity as the source of truth. This in turn leads to them developing narratives of victimization and resentment, in turn, leading to a demand for a return of traditional social hierarchies. And what I mean by this is postmodern conservatives, like conservatives historically,

are deeply concerned to maintain tradition because they see this as a source of identity and providing stability for their sense of identity. And postmodern conservatives are hyper allergic to the destabilization produced in postmodern culture. And they feel the identities that they relied on for a sense of meaning, and civility are ebbing away. And so they become very attached to trying to find some kind of identity that's sufficiently powerful to withstand the kind of pervasive effects of postmodern culture and in turn demand that this identity that they now associate with is returned to the top of the social hierarchy where it's been displaced by feminist and progressive groups and so on and so forth.

And one of the things that I point out is that the kind of identity postmodern conservatives appeal to or affiliate with doesn't in any way have to be consistent. It can be highly fluid, it can involve contradictory elements as long as it provides that sense of stability. So this is why you can see people who will claim on the one hand to be paragons of Christian civilization. And this Christian civilization extends across the whole globe while at the same time claiming to be devout nationalists and demonstrate a way. willingness to kick other Christians or are other members of Christian civilization like Latin Americans out. It's because they're not actually looking for a consistent way of looking at the world. What they're looking for is a sufficiently powerful identity to provide a sense of stability. The third trait that I usually bring up is that postmodern conservatives call

to a contradictory and reactionary political ideology. And here it's important to understand the difference between being a reactionary and just being cautious. So somebody who is cautious about change is an individual who recognizes that there might be risks in trying to transform society too radically. So they tend to think that we need to be pragmatic and empirical in our approach to social change. Postmodern conservatives aren't like that. Since they tend to rely on a sense of identity that they see as being undermined for our sense of stability in the world, they also tend to be very past-oriented. They say that, well, the identities that we now affiliate with have been

undermined over a long period of time, particularly by the left and other progressives. And what we need is return to an older way of doing things where there wasn't the kind of instability that we see now and where people who look like us, or who are affiliated with the same kind of identity that we've now embraced, we're at the top of the social pecking order. And this means that they can develop a very skewed vision of history and the developments that have led us to where we are right now.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's like the whole idea behind Make America Great Again, this nostalgic retreat into a past that never quite existed. Exactly. I mean, I often point to that. If you think about the 1950s, right, which is often pointed to nostalgically, as the kind of time period that many conservatives want to return to.

Sometimes it's now the Reagan 80s if you're kind of a millennial postmodern conservative. These times periods were characterized by tremendous instability, mass violence, the threat of nuclear incineration, quite literally. And pointing out these things doesn't really lead postmodern conservatives to reflect or change their views

because they're not really concerned with the past as it actually was. They're concerned with this nostalgic fantasia of the past. where the identity they now affiliate with was stable and, of course, in charge. Then the other thing I point out that's a bit simpler than the others is that despite being reactionaries, as we all know, postmodern conservatives tend to deploy hypermodern media to promulgate their political ideology. So there's a number of really good books that have been written about this.

Probably the most famous is Angela Ingalls Kill All Normies, where she talks about the influence of Chan culture, for example, in the formation of the alt-rights. But, you know, you don't even need to look in something bad esoteric. You can also look at the emergence of things like Fox News or various new media, certainly in Eastern Europe. The way that the Brexit campaign was highly sensationalistic, these are not coincidental, right? Because postmodern conservatives emerge in this particular culture, which means they have a very strong attachment to the technologies that enabled it. And a lot of them understand how to use these technologies at an almost instinctual level, like Trump with Twitter, for example. And then the last thing that characterizes postmodern conservatives is that once they are in power, they tend to actively crack down on other identity groups that pose a threat to the stability of their reactionary worldview.

And usually the other identity groups that they tend to target are minorities or people who are blatantly different than what they consider to be the majority or the normal person and, of course, the left. And they see the two as fundamentally aligned. You know, the narrative takes a lot of different roads. I know sometimes at Hungary, there's this idea that people on the political left support George Soros, who interred supports the mass migration of Muslims into the country. So the kind of identity groups that we have to fight against are progressives financed by George Soros and Muslims. In the United States, you have this reaction against, quote, quote, liberal elites or, you know,

political elites, as they're sometimes called, who are allied with migrants, who want want to come in from Mexico, in Canada. There's similar rhetoric about the Liberal Party of Canada and its allies in academia and the media and how they want to bring migrants in to change the country and create this kind of multicultural utopia. But the constant thing, of course, is that there's always an enemy, or a set of enemy groups that postmodern conservatives hold up. And this is a necessary feature of their worldview, I say, because having this kind of

agonistic political outlook enables postmodern conservatives from looking too deeply into the actual cultural conditions that produced the kind of instability they react against. And, of course, if they looked really deeply into the kind of cultural conditions that produced the instabilities that they're reacting against, it would probably lead to a critique of capital and inequality, which most conservatives don't want to gauge in. So it's a lot easier to sit there and say, well, the fault is really with, you know, these liberals at elite universities and Latin Americans who are coming in to pick tomatoes and grapefruit and so on and so forth. Yeah, absolutely. This whole idea of you have to have enemies both on the

inside of the country and on the outside, which is an obvious long-running, you know, right-wing sort of idea, but mixed in with all these other features of postmodern conservatism only heightens everything. And then there's this whole irony where, you know, conservatives will constantly, you know, talk about like what, like snowflakes and liberal identity. politics. Now, everybody wants to be a victim these days. Meanwhile, this whole sort of postmodern conservative structure is premised on their aggrieved identity politic, whether that is I'm a white, you know, person or I'm an American person or whatever. They are also engaging in a reactionary form of identity politics, and they see themselves actively as being the victim of both internal

and external forces and pressures, right? Oh, absolutely. This was all really well expressed in a political cartoon that spread around 4chan back in 2016, where Donald Trump was projected as a night and shining armor who was slaying the dragon of PC culture. And that tells you a lot about how postmodern conservatives see the world, right? The real danger isn't inequality or economic instability or even the coronavirus, right? It's people who are undermining our sense of who we are and the authority that we feel entitled to. And they literally depicted themselves almost as a princess in a tower that needs to be saved by a white authoritarian. It tells you a lot. Yeah. And I love the way you put it. I forget the

exact quote, but in the book, you talk about the posture towards internal enemies and what they really hate are leftists like you and I probably who sort of chatter the idea, the mythologized, nostalgic idea of the past that they have in their head. And so our critiques of, let's say, American exceptionalism, showing how America has been a violent terrorist force in the world throughout history, how it's premised on suppressing democracy in other countries, et cetera, all of that is seen as an attack not only on their nostalgic past worldview, but on their very sense of identity, which is attached to that nostalgic past worldview.

Oh, absolutely, right? And I mean, this is one of the things that I consistently pointed out to some of my conservative critics, particularly some of my more intelligent conservative critics, because they point out that leftist universalism tends to be a historical or it's not concerned with what happened in the past. And sometimes that's true. You know, certainly there's liberal forms of ahistoricism. But one of the things I frequently point out is that conservatives aren't really all that good on history either. In fact, in some ways they're worse because they develop these highly politically correct, nostalgically driven visions of what the history of their country

or their polity was. The reason they do this is, because the point isn't to actually get the facts of history right, is provide a sense of stability for authority structures and identities as they stand now. And I find that highly disquieting. Yeah. Yeah. Just one more thing before we move on to the next question. It was this quote in the book about how the left says America is often this bad thing. And one example of how America fails is that for white, wealthy men, the whole climbing the social ladder is much, much easier. And because they're angered by that sort of deconstruction of American history, they put forward a trust fund, I think you call it a trust fund sex offender into the White House

to own the libs saying that very thing. And what it serves to do is sort of bolster the anti-American or the critique of American point of view by reinforcing the very things that we say are wrong with the country in the first place, right? And revealing, I think you put it something like American shame, right? That was actually related to a friend of mine. Well, not a friend. Kind of a guy I grew up with back home when he said, you know, the reason I'm electing Donald Trump is to put to shame, you know,

all these social justice activists. And my immediate thought was, really? Like, do you actually think you're disproving social justice activists by putting a wealthy white guy who inherited a lot of money into the White House after he said a bunch of racist things? I mean, it's anything you've almost single-handedly verify their entire worldview. and I was never exactly quite sure how to think through that paradox until I started actually engaging in some of the literature on postmodernity a little bit more thoroughly.

And what you recognize is that what this is is very much a kind of reactionary gesture, right? It's an embrace of the very kind of identity that has been criticized and should be criticized as a way of sticking it to people, fundamentally, right? And providing a sense of stability for your outlook that way. Right. Yeah, fascinating. So let's talk about Donald Trump. How does Donald Trump as an individual figure and human being

reflect some of these main features of postmodern conservatism? Well, I think there's two things to say here, right? First off, I've often said, you know, it's important to recognize that Trump is a symptom of a broader cultural malaise. In terms of his own personal capacities, I think he's certainly a very skilled salesman. He's a good rhetorician, at least for the kind of people that he appeals to. Not exactly the brightest guy in the world, but he certainly has a kind of gut-level set of instincts

for how politics are moving in his countries. The way he reflects postmodern culture in a kind of very interesting way is his outlook has very much been shaped by the 1980s, and in particular 1980s and 1990s television culture, which, as Jean-Baudiard put, is really where you started to see the hyper-real become far more important than the actual material conditions of things on the ground. And Trump instinctively understood this as a guy who's pretty much lived his life on television. You know, he understood instinctively that being a self-made man is far more impressive than just inheriting a lot of money. So you start to get this narrative put forward about him just getting a $2 million loan from his father

in order to start his business. We now know it was more like a couple hundred million dollars and most of it wasn't alone. It was a gift. But the spin of that narrative is more appealing. You know, we have him consistently promoting himself as the superlative businessman who knows the art of the deal. This reflects certainly this very hyper-capitalist attitude

that you saw through the 1980s when being an entrepreneur in New York was considered in some ways the ideal for American society. You also see it reflected probably most remarkably in his injunction that the truth sometimes doesn't matter. I mean, I'm guessing you've heard his phrase, truthful hyperbole. So in the art of the deal, he talks about why it is that people want sometimes to believe in something that's bigger than themselves. And even if it's not necessarily true, you can exaggerate for the purpose of getting people invested in the narrative and getting them excited about you. and she says that this is truthful hyperbole, right?

It's an innocent, you quote, says, quote, form of exaggeration that allows you to market yourself more successfully because people will invest their hopes and their optimism in you. And I don't think you can find a better summation of the postmodern disposition than that, you know, who I really am and what I've really done doesn't matter. And frankly, frankly, people aren't even going to care whether it's true because, they want to invest their hopes in me, which means I need to transform myself into this bigger, larger than life figure through every possible form of digital and television medium. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and he certainly sort of manifests every one of the main features, this skepticism towards rationalism or expertise, this identity politic rooted in traditional hierarchies and traditional imagery, as you say rooted in like

the boom of the 80s and his ideas of that, a fundamentally reactionary idea. ideology. He's not just a cautious conservative. He's reacting against, you know, progressive movements, Black Lives Matters, and the overall conditions that capitalism has created. He uses the hypermodern media in his best ways through Twitter, right, using that media to get his message out and almost exclusively in a lot of ways. And then the whole crackdown on enemies, both domestic and foreign, obviously we know like Muslims and immigrants, but also fake news and the media institutions and the Democratic Party and the radical socialist left, right? He's always railing against all of those enemies. And so in every level, he's a reflection of the features

of postmodern conservatism. And you said something really interesting in the book, you are one of your co-authors, whatever he might have had in the beginning, maybe his idea of like truthful hyperbole or whatever, it's almost like now, it's not even a matter of whether or not Trump is a liar, right? Because a liar, like, as you say in the book, a liar knows that he's lying and is saying things to purposely mislead people, whereas Trump just seems to have no conception or care about regarding anything as true or false. It's what will help me in this exact moment. I don't even reference what is true or not true at all, right? Exactly, right? I mean, the quote is actually from Hey, Frankfurt, who's a philosophy of language, but he wrote a

very good book that I'd recommend everybody read, particularly nowadays, called On Bullshit. he makes this distinction between a liar and a bullshitter and he says a liar is somebody who is aware of what the truth of the situation is and actively tries to deceive you and the thing about a liar is a liar still has a kind of provisional respect for the truth and he points to somebody like richard nixon and the problem is when you have a kind of provisional respect for the truth people expect you to be honest because they can see that in your character and in your outlook. So, you know, when Richard Nixon famously said, you know, I am not a liar, I am not a crook, and then it turned out he was a liar and a crook, people held them very strictly to account for that. A bullshooter, by contrast, as you pointed out, is somebody who just has no concern whatsoever for what the truth of the situation is. To their mind, reality depends upon their interests at any given moment, and they expect that everyone else has the same kind of understanding and approach to reality. And Trump has presented that throughout his

entire life. And he's helped inculcate a cultural expectation that this is okay, that what is true and what is false doesn't really matter. What's important is what you want to be. And even more than Trump, I'm not sure if you ever heard of Carl Rove and his comments about the reality-based community. I think I have, yeah. Yeah, well, it's a very distinctively, I think, American attitude, because in the middle of the war on terror, Carl Rove famously did his interview with the New York Times a reporter that came out later, but the reporter was basically chiding Roe for not telling the truth about Iraq, and Roe famously expressed, I'm not all that concerned about people in the reality-based community. We're an empire now. We create our own reality, and the rest of you will just be reading

the books about what we've accomplished afterwards. I do remember that, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, that's a pretty sick idea. But when you think about the influence this kind of mentality had in the Republican Party. It would come as no surprise that you'd see Trump as the emerges the kind of finer flowering of this disposition, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's a dead horse at this point, but the technocratic, centrist, liberal sort of desperation, especially during the campaign in the early years of the Trump presidency, was this constant urge to fact check to point out. And they felt that they just pointed out every time that he lied, eventually his supporters would somehow you know wake up to the truth and and leave their support of the president and they were

miles and miles behind trump who had already blown past that entire sort of paradigm and his supporters don't follow him because they're looking for objective truth about the world they're following him because how he makes them feel how he reifies their reactionary identities and how he sort of gives them a sort of sadistic outlet for their cruelty or whatever and it's it's not at all about empirical facts, which some liberals still, it seem, haven't caught up with that reality yet. No, I think so. But I could say that there's a good reason why it is that many of them haven't caught up with that. And it's because once you realize that the traditional norms of liberal discourse are no longer being obeyed, you have two choices. You know, you can question them and start

to ask yourself, why is it that a society that's been beholden to these norms for such a long time is no longer functioning the way it should, or you can double down on them? And obviously, the choice is the one I think we should be taking. You know, why is it that traditional epistamic standards that functioned in the liberal public sphere are no longer operating the way they should? I think we need to ask that question. But for a lot of people in the media, that was just too unbearable a thought to really deal with.

So they doubled down and they figured, like you said, that if we just keep on pointing out he lied about this and that and make fun of him for misspelling a few words, eventually this will all just pile up and people will turn away from him for that reason. when the very opposite I found was actually true. The more of these figures actually attacked Trump, the stronger and the more appealing he became to a lot of supporters because this entrenched their sense that there was a very us versus them kind of situation they were involved in.

Right, exactly. Yeah, well said. So I know you wrote this book well before this latest pandemic broke out, but I am interested to sort of apply the lessons of the book to what's going on right now. So in what ways has this trend of postmodern conservatism manifested specifically among the Trumpian right in the wake of this recent COVID-19 pandemic? Well, I think there's two things to say about that. I mean, on the one hand, you've seen a lot more fierce criticism of Donald Trump, even on

the political right. And the same is true of Boris Johnson. And I think the reason for that is if the primary form your politics take is as an existential struggle around identity, that's very amenable to the. kind of postmodern bullshit that Trump is so fluent in, when the primary political issue dealing with is life or death, things become a lot different, right? And I think, or at least I'm hoping, that what we're going to see is that this pandemic reflects the limitations of this particular postmodern style of politics, because there's just really no way of being hyper-real

or engaging in trifle hyperbole about death and having people follow you on that the whole way, since very few things are more real to them, concrete, really real, than death. Right. The other thing that I think you've seen recently with the COVID crisis is the more glamorized iterations of the postmodern mindset

that characterize conservatives, in particular the United States through the late 20th, early as 21st century, are starting to fall away. And we're just getting back to really crude materialism. I mean, the other day, you saw a variety of Republican figures all about go up on TV talking about the actuarial tables and saying, look, if this many people need to die in order to get the economy started

again, then that's an acceptable loss. And I think in those kind of circumstances, we don't need to turn to postmodern theory. We actually need to turn to Karl Marx when he talked a lot about how, at its fever pitch, what we would start to see is capital being presented almost as a theological entity for which human beings must now sacrifice and I think that's what you're really seeing with the Republicans in the United States at this point where people are literally being told you might have to die in order to restart the economy and if that's the case it's a sacrifice that we at least are very willing to make for you yeah yeah exactly it's it's absolutely horrifying it's definitely

spilled over to the realm of religious zealotry more than any sort of empirical economic policy or anything like that. You know, the lieutenant governor of Texas talking about how we just got to get back to work no matter what. I'll gladly lay down my life to avoid an economic downturn. It's just absolutely insane. These people cannot think outside. And speaking about Mark Fisher's capitalist realism, these people literally do not have

the imagination capacity to think outside the capitalist framework. and it's very, very true that it's easier for them and even beyond just the right, but even for a lot of us, easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine what the end of capitalism might look like even in the middle of a huge crisis like this, you know? Yeah, I know, and that's the really truly frightening thing, which is what I got out with my first point, right, which is that very few things are more real to us than death. And if we don't actually have the imagination to think through new solutions to our problems during the midst of this crisis, we write very well be faced with the situation where people

are being told death is a preferable option to the system falling apart because we just don't know what it will replace it. And I would say very much the opposite should be true, right? The system is supposed to work for people, living people preferably. And if it has to fall in order to save everybody, then that's more than an acceptable price to pay. Right. Absolutely. I'm worried about some of the polls right now. A lot of these polls are still showing majority support in America for Trump, and maybe that's just because we're at the early stages of its effect on the United States, and they haven't seen those images coming out of the media of New York hospitals, you know, being totally overrun and bodies piling up. Maybe those

polls will shift when that reality starts to hit home. I'm not so sure, though, but certainly it's sort of jarring to see these polls come out again and again and showing that the majority of Americans still approve of Trump's handling of the situation. It's just crazy. I mean, there's two things I always like to say to this. You know, one is that I reject the idea that we should be cheering for Trump's failure on this part, right? I mean, I despise Trump. I think he's an awful human being. But I would thoroughly embrace if he was able to come up with some solution to this problem like he promises to do.

I just have no confidence that he's going to do so. In fact, I'm terrified at the thought of him at the wheel during this kind of time period of crisis. particularly given some of the rhetoric that I heard the other day. And the other thing that I like to say is that it's something that the left needs to learn to really get a grip with, which is that there's long been this kind of expectation, particularly in versions of accelerationism, which is that during times of crisis, people will tend to gravitate towards progressive alternatives. And I've never seen a lot of history that suggests that this is invariably true. A lot of times during times of crises, people turn to reactionary figures who,

promise them an easy scapegoat for their problems and say, you know, if we need to sacrifice a part of the population to save the rest, then we're the only ones who can make that tough call. And that's very appealing to a lot of people. And so I'm quite concerned about what might actually happen over the next couple months, given Trump's at the wheel. And he might very well start to see this as a political opportunity under the right circumstances. Yeah, no, I totally agree with both of that and just to your first point because Trump totally failing does mean innocent people dying so we want him to you know sort of have a real solution to this problem although time is pretty much out at this point but like just just speaking on like the if I could get Trump

in a room just speaking on his bare egoism and narcissism this really is an opportunity for him to be the bet like a hero of American history if he put money like really went all all forces ahead on putting money in regular people's hands, huge, like, sort of emergency UBIs. You know, he puts into the Defense Production Act and takes over factories and pumps out ventilators and masks. He would absolutely devastate the Democratic Party, put the death nail in their coffin,

and be remembered for centuries as somebody who helped America. So just on that bare egoistic level of Trump's mind, like, I wish there was somebody in his ear saying, you could do this and you could be, you know, living on in history as the good guy instead of the utter, incompetent myopic narcissist, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, look at FDR. I mean, a lot of people point out, FDR was not a revolutionary or a radical in any way,

shape, or form. But he understood that there was a political opportunity in the 1930s, and he seized it. And he's gone down in history as one of the all-time American great presidents, and he essentially solidified democratic rule of the United States for 40 years until the Reagan Revolution. And, you know, part of you does want to certainly tell you. Trump, you know, if you use this opportunity to implement a universal basic income, not only it would be very difficult to get rid of, but you'd be considered a historical figure who saved the country from a disaster. But I think that's just really asking far too much from somebody with the kind of narrow worldview that he holds. Yeah, absolutely. I won't hold my breath for that

either. Yeah. So let's move on throughout part three of your book, and I think we talked about this at the beginning of this interview, but you follow thinkers like Jameson and David Harvey in exploring how late capitalism, aka neoliberalism, gives rise to and helps shape the cultural epoch of postmodernism, as well as how it produces the very conditions in which postmodern conservatism arises. So can you talk about these connections between neoliberal late capitalist and the postmodern culture that we've been discussing? Sure. Well, the way I usually try to streamline it is by talking about the three fundamental transformations that occurred under neoliberalism. And it is important to note that these are continuations of broader trends that have existed within capitalist

societies for a very long time. At the very minimum, I would say, about three centuries. So it's not like there's a break that occurred with the advent of neoliberalism, what we saw as the kind of radicalization of trends that had already been existing for a long time. But in terms of the social political trends, what I tend to talk about is under neoliberal governance, you saw a decline support for democratization. You saw an increasing concentration of power in the hands of elite figures. You also saw an increasing pluralization of many liberal democratic societies, often spurred on by a demand for cheap labor by the various powers that be. And this has produced multicultural societies, which is something that I tend to approve of, actually. I support

pluralism and multiculturalism. But for a lot of people, this is, of course, extremely anxiety-inducing, because it's associated with the second major transformation that I talk about, which is deepening economic and precarity, a feeling that you're no longer going to have a job in 10 years. Everything is going to be highly contingent. We're going to move towards a gig economy. And, of course, this is all exacerbated by the fact that economic inequality in many developed states is growing, which in turn further concentrates power in the hands of the few, while leaving everyone else at the bottom, feeling increasingly dispossessed.

And the third transformation that I talk about is technological. And this, of course, has far, far, far deeper roots than just neoliberalism. But certainly the neoliberal epochs saw an explosion of new communication and digital technologies, the Internet being the most remarkable. And this fundamentally transformed not just the way that we communicate, but even the way that we talk about politics. So I mentioned, you know, in the 1980s, you start to see the emergence of, you know, the new gingriches of the world, the Rush Limbaas, and so on and so forth. And that's because they really took advantage of these new technological mediums to espouse a very hyper-partisan type of politics that was highly amenable to the antagonistic outlook that postmodern conservatives would tend to embrace. You have Rush Limbaugh who can now reach you in your computers any time of day, you know, constantly we're pining about how the left is doing this, the left is destroying that, you know, left-wing activists at university campuses are bulldozing this or whatever happens to be. and that all foments the emergence of postmodern conservatism.

Yeah, absolutely. And we talked earlier about how capitalism gives rise to these conditions. And if conservatives really wanted to solve the problems, they would look at the underlying structure and those conditions that it generates. But the entire sort of posture of postmodern conservatism is because they're conservatives and reactionaries in that way is to look away from any critique of the underlying social order and the underlying economic system, and they must replace that with something.

And so you have, you know, the aggrieved identity and the reactionary ideology, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, there is that solution. And I think that's the advantage and the disadvantage of the left is, you know, we understand the actual core problem, but it's much harder to explain to an average person living in America all this shit about, you know,

capitalism and political economy, whereas the fascists in the far right have just the simple advantage of, having a much simpler worldview, a much more visceral, immediate sort of way of talking to people, like, oh, it's that immigrant, that person that makes you feel uncomfortable inside. It's his fault that you're feeling this way. And that is always going to be the difficulty. We might have the right answer, but it's much harder to sort of show people the depths of that answer when the fascists have the wrong answer, but have a much easier time tapping into people's sort of

intuitive, visceral notions, right? Yeah. And I think this is also one of the points, where the left also needs to do some serious soul-searching about how to better present our narratives, right? My friend Mike Watson, the author of Can the Left Learned to Mem, has written a lot about this, and I think a lot of it's really great. But one of the central points that he observes is that, look, you know, we now inhabit a different landscape communicatively than we did even 20 years ago. Conservatives have been much better at taking advantage of these changing conditions than we have. There's just really no doubt about it. If you look at the preeminence of Fox News, the president's use of Twitter, the fact that YouTube for many years was dominated by reactionary figures, you just can't talk about a comparable effort on the part of the left to get out there and to try to make the message sexy for a 21st century audience. And I do think things are changing.

You know, I'm very happy that Jacobin has really taken off. I think people like ContraPoints or Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs. are doing fantastic work on this front. But there's a lot that we still need to do if we're going to kind of catch up to basically 40 years now, 20, 40 years of right-wing innovation in these new postmodern medias. Yeah, and part of that problem,

and I think you might agree with me and tell me if you don't, is just the sheer amount of systemic support that right-wing narratives have when it comes to funding, when it comes to having access to big money and big donors. Somebody like Charlie Kirk at TPSA gets completely funded by, you know, big like Coke Brother type donors and whatnot while a lot of the left well not only do we have an inbuilt sort of skepticism towards taking big money in the first place but just because of the nature of our narrative sometimes it has to come from a more grassroots underfunded DIY you know base and

so that also makes it more difficult for the for the far left to compete with the right on that level is that fair no I think that's absolutely fair I mean when you look at independent conservative publications, they tend to be far better financed and far better organized because money can facilitate efficiency than their left-wing equivalents, at least until recently. Like I said, I think current affairs and Jacobin are doing a lot to catch up pretty quickly. I also think that one of the things that we need to point out here is that for a long time, it was expected, particularly by the political right, that the university was going to serve as the kind of counterweight to the preeminence of conservative media in other areas.

But universities are changing very fundamentally. They have dramatically since the 1980s. And the kind of critical theoretical work that I think is so vital for left-wing radicalism isn't valued even the way that it used to be. There's a lot of emphasis on marketability, getting people into degrees where they can be sure to get a job in the business sector afterwards. And that means even on that front, you started to see a declining capacity of left-wing intellectuals to really get their message out there

or engage in the kind of radical theorization that's necessary for us to kind of keep the critique of late capital modern and fresh. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. We've talked about this before on the show, this whole idea that conservatives have that universities are these Marxist brainwashing camps when in reality the dominant ideology

that they pass down is the ideology of capital of neoliberalism, et cetera. It may be, you know, sort of gleaned over with the sort of progressive identity politics sheen, but the actual core economic indoctrination is nothing like Marxism. It is, you know, neoliberal capitalism, if anything. Yeah, absolutely. And you also have to think about the way that students approach this. And I don't blame them, right? I mean, I've had lots of students over the years who come to me,

and their first concern is, how am I going to get a job? Because we live in a very cutthroat economy. And even if I get a job, there's no guarantee that I'm going to have that after a year. In those circumstances, you know, there's tremendous pressure on the part of these universities to provide efficiency-minded degrees, and this might be contingently useful for students for a year or two, but it makes it very hard to get people to focus or think about the long-term structural issues that we really need to change in order to improve things. Totally. So this is a question sort of at a left field here, but I just wanted to touch on it.

In your essay with Eric Tate titled Benjamin Aesthetics and the Political Practices of the Alt-Right, you discuss and extend Volta Benjamin's work on the aestheticization of politics. Can you please sort of summarize that argument or the main thrust of it anyways and let people know what you mean by the aestheticization of politics? Sure, absolutely. So Benjamin, as you know, was a Marxist, brilliant Marxist, right? But he felt fundamentally like many people in the Frankfurt School that the problem with classical Marxist analysis was it was too focused on

material determinants of historical change. So this is one of the things I criticized earlier, right? The idea that, well, eventually people will become sufficiently impoverished or work will become sufficiently precarious, that there'll be a revolution, and things will change. Now, I'm not sure that Marx himself felt this way, but Engel certainly writes in this kind of format sometimes. What Benyman did very brilliantly was try to talk about why that didn't necessarily occur.

And in particular, why, when faced with these kind of materialist disruptions, you saw people move towards reactionary movements like fascism rather than towards communism or socialism or social democracy. In his book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which is a brilliant text, he talks about the appeal of fascism. And the appeal of fascism fundamentally is that it's society turning itself into an entertainment spectacle, complete with violence. violence, extraordinary outfits, mass drama, and this is very appealing to people in materially precarious conditions, because it allows them to escape from their problems and to live out apart in this kind of grand narrative that ultimately is going to leave structures of exploitation and power intact, but it could very well take a lot of people down with them as they kind to try to engage in this spectacular politics. Absolutely, yeah, thank you. We've touched on that

in other episodes as well but I always like to revisit it because it is sort of a complex issue but it's happening all around us in a million different ways so I appreciate you pointing that out yeah I mean Benjamin I think is really in many ways the Marxist theorists for our time

in addition to Jameson I should say it right I mean in that piece work of art you know where he says think about a movie right and a good movie has violence, excitement a clear enemy and what you want at the end is for good to triumph and evil to be utterly destroyed.

It's simple, it's streamlined, it's effective. And what else is fascism in some sense, but the logical outcome of society that consumes this kind of material incessantly? You know, you have the good and noble people who have been disrupted by, you know, their antagonists who are entirely evil, and what you need is the heroic leader figure dressed in a funny costume to take back control. Yep, we are absolutely primed. for that in our culture for sure.

So let's talk about a little bit before we go into the conclusion section, just about the sort of postmodern debate within the left. So in what ways does that postmodern debate or that conflict happen on the left? What elements of the left, broadly speaking, fall into a sort of more postmodern approach and which elements of the left sort of reject and fight against that? I know you've talked about Jameson and stuff like that, so maybe just the other side of that coin. Well, I think there's a lot of complexities that are involved here, right? And that's because, as people consistently point out, the left isn't a monolith, right?

There's a lot of us out there. You know, you have everyone from liberal social Democrats, from radical Marxists, to, you know, postmodern critics. And the theoretical differences between them are in some cases profound. And the way to overcome them, I think, is we need to start having a serious discussion about what brings us together and one of the core set of concerns that we can focus on rather than just these kind of esoteric differences. And I'd be happy to talk a bit more about that in conclusion. When it comes to what's the difference between a kind of postmodern left and I suppose I don't call broadly a kind of Marxist socialist left.

I think a Marxist socialist left is ultimately committed to the idea that there are structures of oppression that need to be overcome. And they need to be overcome by collective action by as many people as possible. Right. And there's a lot of different ways to theorize. how this might occur, but that's the kind of central idea. The postmodern left isn't as convinced that the problems are fundamentally structural, or at least that they can be resolved through structural transformation. Their kind of argument is that power relations are internalized through all walks of life

within people's everyday habits, within discourse, and so it might not necessarily even be all that useful to just try to tackle structures if there are such things, because what we need to do is try to enact changes that a more micropolitical level. And I don't necessarily think that that's a, I think that's a very important task, right? And I think that's actually accomplished quite a bit. You know, under the influence of postmodern theory, we've seen various identity groups that have historically been marginalized, use theory as a way to demand inclusion and conversations

that have previously excluded them. So I'm not trying to dismiss them in any way, shape, of form. But I do think that focusing excessively on a kind of micro-politics of power can ultimately lead you to dismiss structural problems entirely. And this is a serious gap because, of course, the one thing that unites us all is the ubiquity of our life under neoliberal late capitalism. And that is a structure.

It's a global structure that's becoming ever more complex, ever more exploitative, and we need the theoretical tools and the political ambition to confront it head on and demand radical change rather than just trying to engage in highly particularized in local micropolitics that benefit some but don't necessarily confront what I consider to be the overarching problem. Yeah, and I think even in the book you talk about how some of these ideas that come out of just broadly speaking postmodern theory, especially centered around identity politics divorced from a more structural class analysis. We find ourselves with this weird outcome where neoliberals, in defense of the status quo,

will then weaponize identity politics against the class-based and anti-imperialist left. We see that a lot with like Hillary Clinton versus Bernie or even today with people, after Bernie's sort of option for victory is getting smaller and smaller by the day. You'll hear people who are supporters of Biden, call people who are maybe skeptical about supporting Biden privileged for not doing so, and then they'll resort to a whole cacophony of identity-based arguments to back that up. So do you have anything to say

on just that weaponization of certain aspects of identity politics against the actual left? Well, I think it doesn't necessarily even have to come from the political center. I think you've seen that also from postmodern conservatives. So, for instance, the Trump administration has a kind of ambiguous relationship right now, often a very hostile one, I should say, towards trans individuals.

But it's been quite happy. to involve pink washing to kind of glisten up its record towards the gay and lesbian community, right? And Israel has done the same under Netanyahu, right? One of the ways that they consistently tend to diffract any objection to the way they treat Palestinians is by saying, well, we're the only democracy in the Middle East where gay is can live safely. It's not quite true, but, you know, it makes for a good spin, right? So I do just want to point out that I don't think this is unique even to the center. The reason why I think this is appealing is because the kind of micro-politics of what David Harvey calls militant particularism, or you call it, called identity

politics, has a lot of radical potential for getting groups that have traditionally been excluded from liberal democratic policies into the conversation. And they've done this to a myriad of different ways, and I think it's a real accomplishment. But it's worth noting that because they're not aiming to challenge or to change the structure of society, the neoliberal global structure, this also means that these movements can see the kind of radical edge of their agitation very quickly co-opted by the capitalist system as a way both stabilizing itself and, of course, to maximize profits. And there's a lot of different forms this is taken, right?

I mean, probably the most obvious one is, you know, Starbucks. People talk quite a bit about that. Starbucks is embrace of the environmental movement and LGBTQ culture as a way of selling coffee. You know, and I have nothing against the environmental movement, and I strongly support LGBTQ culture and its promulgation. But there's something extremely worrying about a coffee company that's involved in mass exploitation in the developing world. using this as a way of shielding itself against criticism for its exploited to practice while at the same time trying to sell more coffee, right?

Yeah, and I'm really happy you did that. You sort of broadened it out. It's not just a neoliberal-centric political thing. It's a corporate thing. It's a right-wing thing. It's happening all over the map. And just to reiterate our position, which I've said many times in the past, you know, we're definitely not against identity-based awareness and understanding how certain identity

groups face very unique forms of oppression. It's just that that class politic, that structural understanding, that sort of class critique can be the thing that unites people across identities. And when you just have a sort of liberal or neoliberal or centrist or even reactionary forms of identity politics, divorce from that deeper structural and class critique, this is the sort of stuff that you get, which is just co-option by capital, reactionaries using it for their own ends and neoliberals weaponizing it against the actual progressive and revolutionary left. So just to be extra clear on that. But yeah, I very much appreciate everything you said there for sure. I should say, I think that there is reason for optimism, at least on this front.

You know, maybe not have many others given the COVID virus. But, you know, many, like a lot of my colleagues who identify as feminists embrace Bernie Sanders campaign. And this surprised me a little bit. I thought some of them might be Warrenites. But the reason was they said, you know, ultimately we feel that the kind of progressive change that he's proposing, health care. for all, access to education for all, you know, the elimination of student debt, that'll be more

beneficial for women, in addition to being beneficial for everyone else. Right. And we need to start to rethink how it is that feminism can rejoin or get back in touch with its socialist groups. And I've seen that going on across the board. So I think there might actually be some positive trends going on there. I'm not sure, you know. Things are really up in the air right now, but, you know, I like to say optimistic.

Yeah, no, I agree with that for sure. And I think that's borne out in a lot of the polls that show the support of like a Sanders figure from women under a certain age, often in the millennial category where a lot of this action is happening and these optimistic forces are sort of taking place. So I think that's absolutely going to continue to be a thing in our society. And I see it all around me in my organizing circles among my comrades, those very same struggles playing out and those synthesis really happening, which is awesome. Yeah. I mean, I tend to agree with David Harvey and Wendy Brown on these kind of circumstances, right? You know, we're not faced with the choice right now between agitating on behalf of traditionally marginalized groups or engaging in class-based analysis, right? The task of the left right now is to find a way to marry these two together, you know, get rid of the kind of brocialist label that's kind of held socialism back for a long time on the one hand. and then also getting rid of the corporatist, conformist kind of mentality that you sometimes see in identity politics movements and getting them back to their socialist roots.

Yep. Could not agree more. All right. So at the end of the book, which concludes with a wonderful essay by Borna Radnick, the idea of in the political fight for communism is put forward as the solution to the capitalist realism and its attendant cultural manifestation of postmodernism, everything we've been talking about so far. the book ends with this wonderful and powerful sentence quote our future remains indeterminate it is up to us to ensure that the future is communist end quote can you discuss this and tell us why the communist hypothesis as badu puts it is the way forward out of this sort of cultural epoch that we find ourselves in well i should point out you know born is a brilliant guy and

you certainly have to get a chance to talk to him on his own terms he's probably one of the smartest Marxist Hagellians that I know, which is really saying something. And what was interesting to me when I was writing the book is we all had different formulations of how this hypothesis was going to be carried out. You know, Borna kind of justified it from a more Hegelian-Marxist kind of perspective. You know, I kind of took my own more analytically driven kind of look at things. You know, my friend Eric Tate, who also mentioned was a lot more convinced that the Communist hypothesis needed to be formulated in environmental terms.

And I think what this reflected to me was rather what Jujik said in his essay on this topic, which is that the idea of communism isn't necessarily about any particular form of government yet, at the very least, or any kind of specific social reform. When people invoke it, what they're doing is expressing dissatisfaction with the way things are right now and calling for a creative reimagining of the possibilities that are available. to us in the future, aligned with a rejection of capitalist realism is the way I would formulate it. I'm not sure what new forms this is going to take in the future or how people might decide to reimagine the future if capitalist realism does finally come to an end. What's just exciting

to me and what is optimism-inducing for me is the fact that people are thinking about new kinds of future at all, rather than just accepting that history has ended and that we just need to carry on with the system the way it has been for 30 or 40 years now. Yeah, so that makes sense. So the communist hypothesis or the idea really here is not so much a particular set of beliefs or strategies necessarily. All of that can still be debated, but just the idea that there is an alternative to the way things are and the fight to build that alternative and to look for a future

that is populated by that alternative and not the status quo. That is sort of where the book, as the sort of reopening of the political imagination. Is that fair to say? I think so, yes. I mean, my own interpretation of this is typically drawn from Ernesto LeClau. You know, I disagree a lot with LaClau, and his particular postmodern interpretation of Marxism.

But he got this right, where he said that the challenge for the left in the future, or one of the challenges, as you would say, for the left in the future, is finding a way to have a universal outlook and to criticize structures of power. while at the same time allowing a plurality of different views to coexist within an overarching political ideology, or within an overarching political outlook, I should say. And that's a very challenging thing, but I believe that's the more democratic way to approach it. And it's what I'd like to see in the future, right, a left where people form coalitions and come together to establish new futures for themselves while not sacrificing any of the particularity. of their given viewpoints, but rather see them embrace in a more democratic culture.

Yeah, fascinating. Well, if you had to have listeners, readers, take one thing away from this book, one sort of concluding thought to mull over as they close the pages of this book or turn off this interview, what do you hope they take out of it? I think the most important thing is, this is what we didn't talk about, it's the importance of trying to understand your political adversaries. And this is something that the left has always been quite gifted at, but I'd say again, conservatives have actually done more work on because there's the temptation in the left to sometimes just adopt this idea that we don't really need to understand what conservativeism is. We don't understand. You need to understand why these trends in conservatism emerge because they're just reactionary and eventually they'll go away. And if we ignore them long enough, then systemic changes and crashes will bring. us to victory. And I think that's a dangerously vain kind of outlook. I think to confront conservatism and postmodern conservatism effectively, we need to understand it, which means that leftists need to take the time to go back and read the classics of conservative literature,

go on to right-wing sites, to figure out what the other side is saying, and then finding strategic ways to halt their ambitions. Absolutely. I could not agree more. Like we have to understand our political opponents very deeply and understand how they think we cannot just reject that entire effort in the hopes that it'll go away because it absolutely will not. So I absolutely echo that argument. Thank you so much, Matt, for coming on and having this discussion. I know my listeners really appreciate it and we covered a lot of ground here. This again can be a challenging topic, but I really appreciate the informed and accessible way that you help present it. Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can

find you and your work online? Sure. So I'm on Twitter at Matt Paul Proff. You can add me. You know, a lot of my papers and little articles and interviews and stuff go up there. You can also email me at Matt McManus 300 at gmail.com. I'd be happy, you know, to correspond with you about any of the stuff that we've discussed. And if you're looking to get a copy of my book, What Is Postmodern Conservatism, you can check it out at the Zero Books website. We also have a new book coming out, I should say, Myth and Myth and Mayhem, A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, which is co-authored with Conrad Hamilton again, Ben Burgess, Marion Trejo, and has an introduction by Slavajajja. And it's also at zero books. So people

might be interested in that. Awesome. Yeah, I'll link to all of that in the show notes. And thank you again so much for coming on. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on your work going forward. All right. Thanks a lot. And, you know, stay safe, self-isolate. And hopefully once this is all done, we can awaken to a new socialist on, right? Absolutely. Agreed. I'm going to be I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm not

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