Rev Left Radio - Shattering the Spectacle: Trump, Kamala, and the 2024 Election

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Alyson and Breht analyze the results of the recent presidential election and explore its various meanings. Together they discuss the grotesque hollowness of the Democratic Party, the identity crisis of the post-Trump Republican party, dealignment and realignment, the end of neoliberalism, the rise of the illiberal Right around the world, strategies for developing the socialist left as a serious player on the electoral terrain, how Trump might navigate the Israel issue, the end of neoliberal identity reductionism, the importance of solidarity across identities, building power outside of the Democratic Party, neoliberalism and neoconservatism, challenges to liberalism, Tenant Organizing, the Labor Movement, how Trump's second term might (or might not) be different from his first term, and MUCH more!  Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Subscribe to Red Menace on your preferred podcast app  

Hey, this is Allison. I am here when Brett, and you are listening to Red Menace. And we are coming to you with a special episode of a guest that we figured we would put together to just discuss the election and the results. the election and the results of the election. If you're living under Iraq, then you may not know that Donald Trump won both the electoral vote and the popular vote. The Republicans control the Senate, and it also looks very possible at this point that they might take the House as well. So that's kind of where we're at. We have some thoughts about it. I'm sure you all have some thoughts about it. You know, kind of briefly, this is obviously a situation that I don't think was unpredictable. The polling, you know, to the extent that anyone believes in polling anymore, was pretty, like, neck and neck.

Like, it was not clear who was going to win in looking at it from that. I don't think anyone had Trump winning the popular vote, admittedly. But, you know, kind of broadly, I think my thesis going into this, and I imagine Brett's is going to be pretty similar, that the Democrats ran, like, a historically bad campaign, essentially, just absolutely one of the worst campaigns that they probably could have run strategically. And that's what got us here. And I think it's worth commenting on this. You know, I always say this when Brett and I talk about electoral politics. Like neither of us are electoralists necessarily. But, you know, at the same time, these things matter. And I think really importantly, everyone's trying to get their take sort of in retrospect about what happened here. Right. And currently, the Democratic Party take seems to be it's everyone else's fault besides ours. In particular, it is the fault of the left. It's the fault of the left. It's the fault of. caring about social issues at all. It's all to be, you know, kind of all of these things. And so, you know, I think it's worth making an intervention right now and taking the time to kind of comment on this and, you know, give our perspective and try to come at it from a materialist

perspective with a obviously socialist and communist bent to it. So it's kind of how I'll lead into it. I think Brett and I want to talk about quite a few of the same things. I imagine our perspectives are very similar, but I'll toss it over to you, Brett, see if you have any kind of opening thoughts on your end. Yeah, let's get into it. So I think the first thing I would say is, you know, there's an obviously different, effective and emotional response from those of us on the Socialist Left than compared to 2016.

I remember 2016, no fan of Hillary. You know, I was definitely a Bernie guy at the time. I was already calling myself a Marxist, a Socialist, et cetera. Rev. Left started in 2017. So, you know, as Trump was being inaugurated, Rev. Left launched our first ever episode. but I remember being taken back into 2016, emotionally invested in the outcome, was anxious, was hurt, you know, in ways that now I've just been so beaten down by this system and so hard into its machinations that I actually, there's this liberating sense of not being emotionally invested at all.

And how I put it is, you know, you're watching half the country melt down in despair, the other half jerk off with false hope of real change. that's not coming. And then the rest of us are just sitting here calmly observing, preparing, accepting what is. And it feeds into my broader idea that what has to happen is that we are in a crisis period. This has happened many times throughout American history. It's probably started formally in 2008 with the Great Depression, but you could even see maybe the prelude with 9-11 in the War on Terror on the end of the 90s, right, captured by shows like The Sopranos where in the very first episode, he says, do you ever feel like he at the end of something?

And he was giving voice to this sort of pre-9-11 zeitgeist that the 90s were this sort of dead end. And then 9-11 happened and the war on terror happened and then 2008 financial crisis happened. And ever since then, the entire neoliberal project globally, but also

nationally, has been limping in zombie form. It's continued on in zombie form. And so there's that element. And what has happened now is that we are at the end of neoliberalism. This era is dying. It's probably already dead. And there are two possible responses to the death of neoliberalism. There is a broadly conceived left, you can call it left populist response. Populists in this sense, just meaning meeting people's material needs from a socialist

or even social democratic perspective, right? There is that broad left-wing solution to neoliberalism, which is some form of socialism. And then there's the right way. wing fascistic foe populism, the scapegoating and the punishing our enemies, the feelings oriented fascistic response to neoliberalism. And because the Democrats systematically crushed any possibility of left populism emerging in this country, they have given the right the option on a platter. They have given the entire terrain over to the right to be the anti-neoliberal party as they have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on neoliberalism. And not only has the liberal party, has the Democratic Party doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on liberalism economically,

they have now trying, they're trying to absorb neoconservatism. I mean, they've successfully done so, absorbed neoconservatism into their coalition. So you have Dick Cheney, you have David Frum, you have these people that, you know, in previous instantiations, were Bush supporters, Iraq war supporters, the John Bolton's of the world. We won a bomb Iran for the last 20 fucking years, just waiting for an excuse. The Democratic Party has absorbed neoconservatism into it. So it is now the party of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Two things the American people fucking hate.

Right. And they are, and knowing that they can't deliver on material goods, knowing that they can't actually deliver anything meaningful for the people because it would contradict the basic interests of their donor class, What do they do instead? They tripled down on a shallow, meaningless identity politics, and they try to scare people with reproductive rights issues, which they've already lost. They've already lost that. And they're still using, I see, unfortunately, you know, I see a lot of liberal people throughout the country really melting down, talking about losing our rights. We're not going to have, we've already lost them. And you lost them due to democratic incompetence. You've lost it due to democratic cynicism, correct. Obama in 2008 had a super majority and a mandate so he could have codified Roe v. Wade knowing that it's always up for it's always up to be overturned by SCOTUS. You could you could codify it legislatively with the super majority making sure that that is now a solid tucked away right that we don't have to worry about anymore. The only way you could overturn it possibly is for the Republicans to get a super majority and then do it. That is very unlikely to have happened. It still wouldn't have happened since 2008. You would have had your rights but what did they instead like guns and immigration for the right abortion was key issue that they can continue to fundraise and rally around and one of those things that stands in for material

politics right because a lot of people do care rightfully so about bodily autonomy and reproductive rights and if they solve that issue once and for all that's off the table and then all they would have is shallow identity politics now what is what did the party tell us they were fighting for this go-round. He said, we're the party defending democracy. And yet they gave us a candidate that never earned a single vote. And in fact, in 2020, had to drop

out before the primaries because she couldn't have break one percent of the vote. That's the one popular's person was. So she's never won a vote. It was no primary. She was coronated by the DNC elite. And then they're surprised when there's no mass popular support for a candidate that never earned a vote while they're

telling us at the party of democracy. And getting grass kicked by Trump, not only in the electoral college, but actually losing the popular vote for the first time in 20 fucking year? Yeah. I mean, the Party of Democracy really fumbled there. The second thing they tell us, we're the Party of Women's Rights. Well, I already went over

how they didn't codify Roe. I've mentioned on Instagram how Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire to allow Obama to, you know, put a position, appoint a new role SCOTUS to continue to protect you know, those reproductive rights up and down the line they failed

on this issue and cynically used it for fundraising. And then they've also mass-murdered countless women, not only in Palestine since October 7th, but look at the war on terror, look at the drone war, look at the ongoing wars, Libya, all over the fucking planet. You're murdering, slaughtering babies, slaughtering families, slaughtering mothers.

Pregnant mothers can't get basic medical care because Israel with American bombs and American money and American political covers bombing every hospital, bombing tents, pregnant mothers, hunkered down. American bombs drop. drop on them and you're the party of women's rights? Dischicable. The third thing they tell us, we're fighting against fascism.

We're the anti-fascist party, as they are making possible a genocide in which people based on their race and religion, systematically ethnically cleansed and mass murdered. If there's no other definition of fascism than literally a second fucking olicox, I don't know what is. So up-down, this party is a complete and utter failure, and now in the wake of a yet-a-humiliating us. Another humiliating loss, as Alvin was alluding to, they come up with anything and everything to blame the entire world, the entire cosmos, God himself, before they even look even in the direction of Amir and start to self-reflect. So this is not a party that's going to radically change. This is not a party that's going to finally take accountability. This is a party that is ossified as the elite, as the dying neoliberal class, as the military industrial complex.

they're going to die on this hill and they will die. This party can't go on. This party can survive. And I could say more about that here in a little bit, but I don't want to take up too much time. So I'll pass it back over to Allison to get her thought. Yeah, I mean a couple things. So first, let me just kind of lay some groundwork

on like some numbers to back some of what you're saying, right? So plight people have analyzed this already, but turnout wasn't good at the selection, right? Like both sides saw lower turnout than in 2020. and the really kind of crucial thing from the numbers perspective that, again, I'm not the person to point this out. Trump's turnout went down about two million-ish voters. Harris's over Biden's in 2020 was down over 10 fucking million voters, right? And so when we look at those numbers, that tells us something.

These are candidates that are not popular. They are candidates that people do not like. People are making a compromise voting either way on one of them. And on top of all that, I think the really important thing is that Trump, to the extent that he was able to mobilize a vote, mobilized his base, right? He was able to do that. Sure, he had two million voters fall off, but that base was there. The Democrats absolutely didn't do that, and that's why you see minus, again, 10 million plus votes on the Democrat side of things. They didn't mobilize their base.

Instead, they spent the last month saying, fuck you to their base and shoving fucking Liz Cheney out of everyone's throat, right? It is just an absolute strategic failure, even within the terms of kind of electoral liberal politics. Who the fuck thought the month before this, let's pivot as hard as we can to neoliberalism to win like 10 Republicans who read the Atlantic every day. It is just fucking beyond me. It is this insane strategic decision that they made, and it played out that way. So what do we do with this, right? I think, Brett, you're correct. this is the end of neoliberalism in a sense, but I want to qualify that slightly in that this is the end of any broad support for neoliberalism, right? But one of the things that I think is crucial is that I think you should look at this vote as a blatant rejection of neoliberalism, as a blatant rejection of neoconservatism as well. But let's like very, very, very much clarify that Trump doesn't break with either of these things. Trump's policies in functionality will likely be.

in line with both of them. He put fucking neocons into his cabinet, and he has consistently pushed in a neoliberal direction in terms of a whole host of deregulating policies and an openness to privatization. So it's not like that impulse isn't there, but the difference is that Trump says he's opposed to those things, right? And so at the end of the day, people are much more interested in that than voting for the person who runs proudly on neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. And I think that's really important for us to look at. What this really comes down to, though, is is that being neoliberal consensus, basically, again, since the Reagan era, has left people in a bad spot, right? It is just a simple fact that people are economically desperate, and this election is a reflection of that.

That is what voters said in exit polls over and over again, was that the economy was their biggest voting issue. And plenty of people want to brush that off, but that's real, right? People are fucking struggling in this country in a very real way, and there is a rage that comes with that. I think in response to that, the messaging out of the Democratic Party from their fucking, you know, their various things tanks and their stupid social media voices like Will Stancel have been actually the economy's great. You're kind of hallucinating that things cost more and that things are actually bad. And you tell someone who can't afford to pay their rent and afford food and medicine that they're going to say fuck you and vote for the other guy. Right? Like what other possibility is there?

So there is this strong rejection of the Democratic neoliberal. and neo-conservative bullshit, and the way to see that this isn't about a hard pivot to the right or something like that, which is how the Democrats want to say it, right? Their whole take is, oh, we ran too far to the left. It turns out there's been a massive right-word shift in the country. But the proof that that's not the case is the seven states that passed abortion protections, right? The proof that that's not the case is the fact that states that went hard for Trump past minimal wage increases and worker sick leave. All of that is completely indicative of the fact that people want politics that have traditionally been

associated with progressivism, but they are not willing to vote for the Democratic Party to get those who doesn't even pretend to fucking want those things anymore. At this point, they're not even acting like that is what they're interested in. And so everything about this shouldn't be seen as a pivot to the right necessarily. It shouldn't be seen as though the Democrats ran as too radical. It should be seen as the Democrats ran as, were the Republicans but a little bit less evil, and the people in this country said, well, then why should I just vote for the fucking Republicans? And

that is how he ended up where we are at. This is the, I think you're correct. It's a dead party. There is no future here. They are not going to learn their lesson. They are going to re-consolidate against around younger neoliberals like Buttigieg or Newsom, most likely. But they are not going to pivot in another

direction. I mean, well, we'll get into it, but I think even Bernie is kind of recognizing that. We came with this stone that he made, like, it really is a party that can go nowhere else. And, you know, the takeaway here, they're going to put forward a lot of them. It was Arabs. It was leftists.

It was social issues. It was isolating people. But ultimately, it was, no, people are desperate in this country. They're hurting. People have material needs they want addressed. And you told them you're hallucinating about how that inflation is. The economy's really good. And oh, also, let's keep giving money to Ukraine and Israel

and make you celebrate the family behind the fucking Iraq war. Just an absolute really moronic strategy that got us here. And, you know, yeah, that's all I can say. I'm not surprised. This party is dead. Absolutely. And you make

a million great points. One of them is that, you know, if the Democrats, they did lose, so they lose, they're now, you understand. Structurally they're beholden deep. Their donor class. So their donor class is not going to allow the emergence of a politician who's

going to go in the direction of Bernie Sanders. In fact, it was the donor class and the media class. All millionaires that orchestrated the squashing of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the prevention of it. As I've said a million times, the Democratic Party is not a vehicle for the expression of left-wing politics. They are the final bulwark against it. And you have to understand that. It's structurally a millionaire's elitist party. And so even if it wanted to, even if there was an element within it that wanted to turn populist, it fucking couldn't. Because its entire material basis is rooted in the elites. And so, yeah, you have.

millionaires in the media class and the donor class who not only told us that we're hallucinating our economic issues and chastise people all the way to the you know to the bank but then when they lose in the wake of it they're the first ones to say we went too far left you aren't too far left in what fucking way but that's all they can do they're redoing the 2016 Hillary loss you know and they was like monumentally absurd how they would not reflect upon their own failings after Hillary and they did the exact same thing, down to Hillary's consultants helping the Kamala campaign, right?

They ran the same fucking campaign again. They will never fucking change. They structurally can't change. And it's against the material interest of the people who run that fucking party to change. So they will never fucking do it. And yeah, they lose.

It's the left's fault. A win, that's proof we don't need the left. That's how this party operates. Sooner Americans, people on the left, anybody that considers themselves a progressive in any sense, wake the fuck up to that and see the Democratic Party as your motherfucking enemy, right? As the left wing of the Republican Party, as the second Republican party, you're going to continue to get defeated. You're going to continue to get losses and

you're going to continue to amplify a handpower to the worst motherfuckers on the planet and the Republican Party and the fascistic impulses that it embodies. So, I mean, that, I mean, I know we're kind of speaking to the choir when we speak to our audience about that, but I know we have to we have to re-entrench that point of view and people listening obviously go out and tell people in your life that this is the case you know, well-intentioned liberals and progressives in your life that this is a dead end party

right. Nothing good will ever fucking come of it. How many do we have to go through before we realize that? I mean, how many times does our face have to be, how many times is Lucy have to pull the football away before we stop giving it? Okay, right? So the Dems basically, I've said earlier, they're

positioning themselves in the area to try to be the pre-trial Trump Republican Party. They're trying to be the pre-Trump Republican Party with the addition of the most annoying, grading, and divisive identity politics possible. Yep. So it's the old school Republican Party and the most annoying, wealthy, suburban, upper middle class own their own home liberals wagging their fucking see your face when you use the wrong word. And they think that's going to be a message that appeals to the masses. It doesn't. It never will. That's why they're a failing party. Too many contradictions within.

It. One of the signs of a fucking dead society of a political system on both sides that no longer works is what I call the ping pong effect. That the American people are given two shitty choices. So they pick one. Right. Let's say they pick Obama after Bush. Obama comes in recession, a hope and change. We're ending the wolves. We're taking the banks to prison. He does the exact opposite. So four or two. terms of Obama betraying everybody, everybody's life gets shittier and shittier. So then Trump comes along in 2016. The Americans are like, we want to change. We get Trump for four years. Disasterous, disgusting, the pandemic. A million motherfucking Americans

die. They're sick of it. Crats prop up the rotting corpse of Joe Biden and say he'll return us to normalcy at least. Americans so beaten down so fucked by the pandemic in four years of Trump, they say we'll take anything. You could have ran anybody. And then he went, Biden. He would

when the Democrats are like, ooh, okay, maybe we're on to something. You're not, this is ping pong. So then four years of fucking Biden, inflation, degrading, quality of life getting worse, more and more fucking wars, more millions and millions of our tax dollars going to Ukraine and Israel and every other fucker except for us. And so Americans are sick of us. They go back to Trump. Now, mark my fucking words, four years of Trump, America is going to be like, oh, my God,

we're beating down this fucking sucks. It wasn't what we wanted. And they're going to, yeah, exactly like Allison said, prop up, if not Kamala herself, Gavin Newsom, whatever the fuck, yeah, Pete Butt is judge. And then Americans are going to be like, okay, in a close election, the Democrats are elected again. And this is the ping pong effect. And what this means is that Americans are desperate for change. The options given to them are so radically and severely limited and narrow that they only can oscillate between A and B, A and B, be hoping, praying that something will change. Young people coming up have a whole new renewed sense of naivete, right? You got to think, we're hard in mid-30-somethings at this point. We've been through the shit time and time and time again. A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 18-year-old and 18-year-old, 20-year-old, they might see the Kamala Harris campaign as really promise it.

Or on the other side on the right, they look at Trump and be like, he's going to make America great again. He's going to give me an opportunity in life, right? Like every election cycle, there's an infusion of millions of new people who haven't been beaten like a dog by this system. And they'd think maybe this time, maybe. you know, they're the new crop of people can be picked and taken in one of the two

the coalition. So this ping pong effect is the dying political system and something has to my perspective has been and I've argued this for years at this point that the crisis has to culminate. That what's actually going to break the ping pong effect what's actually going to lead to realignment, real substantive realignment

with two parties that for better or worse speak to huge swath of the American population's interest for better or worse. I'm not saying this is going to be glorious necessarily. It could be good, bad, or ugly, or some mixture thereof. But that fundamental change, that dislodging of the current elite, can only come in the wake of a disaster. And we've seen party realignments and elite liquidations actually several times through American history. After the Revolutionary War, the federalist anti-federalist party alignment, after the Civil War, the Republicans and the Democrats fundamentally shifted, you know, changed positions, changed entire constituencies. after the Great Depression in World War II

with the New Deal, the Republicans and Democrats, brand new constituencies. As a micro movement within that era, we had the Southern strategy by Nixon, and then we had a neoliberalism ushered in by Reagan and codified as the duopoly's preference by Clinton.

And all those instances you do see this a disastrous sort of contradiction that has tried to be wrinkled over burst asunder, create massive conflict, economic collapse war of one type or another we had revolutionary war then we had a civil war then we had a world war right and in the wake of that disaster is there the opportunity for change so it's not that i'm advocating for a disaster it's not that i want a crisis uh to happen but it's just

inexorably in the logic of the system itself that that's the only thing that dislodges the status quo really like what we're seeing now and alison was saying trump's not a real solution she's absolutely right what we're seeing now is just a moving around of the deck chairs on the Titanic. But the Titanic has to go down for us to get a new, you know, a new goddamn ship. And what Trump is doing and what got him over the edge this time convinced a lot of people with the help of people like Joe Rogan and stuff is that I watched the three-hour interview with Rogan too because I'm curious. What Trump's line is is the first time I was elected president. I got into power having no experience in politics. I had a million, I had thousands of seats to fill,

right, bureaucratic seats to fill appointments to make. I got inundated by the ghouls of the pre-existing system. They told me pick this guy, pick this guy, pick this guy. Before I knew my cabinet was filled by people like John Bolton and all these other figures who Trump now hates

and so Trump's line and he said this very explicitly with Rogan and Rogan has echoed in every interview he's done sense is that this time's going to be different because Trump knows to avoid the deep state, the ghouls, the swamp and he's actually going to you come in with a strategy to rule.

So what Trump is, but this is belied by facts like one of the last speeches that Trump gave at his campaign, he gave the stage to Mike Pompeo. So which is it? Are you going to radically transform your cabinet? Are you in the CIA deep state psychos again? You know, it's not really clear. He says one's mouth and then he elevates Mike Pompeo the next fucking day. And the right wing doesn't seem to take notice of that, but you should.

And so Trump ultimately uses the Obama of the right. false hope and change lots of mass support from the right side of this country who just who genuinely do want change right of some sort um and then they're going to be let down again and we're going to see the ping pong thing continue until this culminates and now the empire is dying right we're in regional wars world war three is not off the table some horrific economic collapse is not off the table some environmental disaster is not off the table but unfortunately it's going to take something of that caliber to to knock things loose so alison what do you think about that general description of what's going on. Yeah, no, I mean, I agree, right? I think, you know, you talk about, we're not saying we want a crisis, but this is like fundamental to Marxism, right, is that the conditions for crisis are built into the society we live in already, right? And I think in many ways, like, Trump is an expression of an already existing crisis, right, which is that capitalism is not in a state in the United States that people find tolerable, people pretty across the board seem to not find it tolerable. And so that crisis,

will likely, in my opinion, intensify under Trump, regardless of everything, right? Like, let's be real. Like, a lot of his economic policy is probably going to be bad for the capitalist economy in the United States. The tariffs he's proposing are probably going to exacerbate things further. There is, you know, even Elon Musk was coming out there being like, we shouldn't be prepared for like a tough economy under Trump, right? Like, it is very clear that destabilization is going to continue despite the markets kind of rebounding yesterday. So I think it's worth pointing out that this will all facilitate movement in that direction. And I think you're correct, though, that largely for something like realignment in the United States to happen, it's going to take something drastic, right?

We saw the beginnings of what that could look like with COVID and the George Floyd uprisings, right? And in fact, that crisis probably is what lost Trump the election in 2020, right? That is almost certainly the reason that he was not able to win that. And so there will be the shift here. And the question that I don't have an answer for is like, how do we capitalize when that crisis occurs, right? And I think that was the question a lot of us were asking in 2020. I think it's the question that a lot of us have been asking for a very long time. And it's not clear because the simple fact of the matter is that the institutional power that the Democratic Party has is still there, right? That's not going anywhere anytime soon. And so we find ourselves in kind of this catch 22, right? I think on the one hand, like you and I both agree, the Democrat. Party is a dead minute, right? You're not going to win through there. You are not going to win working with it at all. In fact, it is not the path forward. And it's actually there that I think we're maybe not singing to the choir on because I don't think all of the left is convinced of that yet. But hopefully, you know, we ought to be at the point where people are relatively convinced of that. I know, you know, I'm not going to weigh in on Hassan Piper. But that's an example of someone who I think is saying most of what we're saying and who also still isn't ready to abandon the Democratic Party. party completely, right? And so that's probably where we diverged somewhat, is that our position is very much like, no, there's just not a future to this party. But I'm going to be honest with

you, there's not an immediate obvious alternative. Okay, the protest vote for the third parties wasn't even that high this year. It didn't have a difference whatsoever. So the question then of like, how do we have another route out so that when that crisis occurs, when people are ready for realignment, we are able to seize upon that. and be able to build power based on it, man, I just don't have a good answer for that. And I think if you're someone who is invested in the idea that we need to move beyond the Democratic Party, that is the question to be asking right now, right? That's what we need to spend our time hashing out and figuring out and getting a path forward

for it. And I know many of people are doing that, right? Like, criticisms that I have with the DSA aside, that is essentially the position of like the Marxist unity group in DSA, right? like they are this party builder faction where it's kind of like the most urgent thing is to get this alternative and that is a party up and running so people are wrestling with this but i do think that's kind of just like the question we need to deal with now because when crises come what we've seen you is that if you're not ready to seize upon them they're not going to go anywhere frankly

i hate to say this the wins we made it in 2020 are gone right they were not doing it and even the organizational capacity that we built is by a large gone so in my mind at the current moment is largely one in terms of preparation and what we need to be doing. If we can accept, and I hope we can, that the Democratic Party path is dead, then what are our next steps? Those are kind of the questions I'm wrestling with right now. And I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for you. I think these are debates we're going to have. There are essays to be written. There are arguments to be had between different organizational circles that will hopefully be generative and productive. But I think that's like the question of the moment that we need to be able to kind of coalesce around

that least. Absolutely. So I want to get to that. I want to make one point quickly, and I'll circle right back to that and have a robust discussion about that. But the one thing I just do want to say, and I think, yeah, again, a lot of people will already know this. And Allison and I have both alluded to this. But what we have to really, you know, sort of internalize is that this loss has nothing to do with race or gender. I'm sorry. But if you're the sort of person who will not vote for a black person or a woman, you are already on the Republican. fucking party. You are already deeply in the party. If you are a Democratic voter in

motherfucking 2024, you have no qualms whatsoever about electing a woman or a person of color. It is not the identity of Hillary Clinton and Kamala that stop them from being elected. Their womanhood, their race, anything like that. It is their soulless, neoliberal politics that completely lacks a motherfucking vision for a future for people's lives. And instead of a vision, they say at least we're not orange man back. And

That's all they say. And so you can't expect to win. And then when they don't win, the fucking liberal establishment says everybody just hates women. Everybody just hates, you know, black Southeast Asian people. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And in fact, the race dealignment of the two parties speaks in direct contrast to that idea, right? It's like one of the things they're pulling their hair out is like, how can black people and Latinos be white supremacists? Yeah.

Because their narrow, their narrow cognitive framework for understanding this shit is, If it's not a white male, then that is the reason they lost. That's as deep as their analysis goes. You hear Joe Scarborough and Reverend L. Sharpen talk about it, Joy Ann Reed, MSNBC. You know, they're all doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again. We just have to immediately reject that. And it has nothing to do with it. I'm sorry. And we're not even going to coddle the people that think that it does. Is there racism in the society? Yeah, absolutely. Is there structural racism? Yes. Is there a misogyny? Definitely. Is it a big problem such that a woman or a person of color can get elected?

I'm sorry, no. I say, Rev, really quickly, too. Democrats need to be mature and they need to be honest. And they need to say, yes, there is, there's misogyny. But it's not just misogyny from white men. It's misogyny from Hispanic men. Right. It's misogyny from black men, things we've all been talking about, who do not want a woman leading them.

might be race issues with Hispanics. They don't want a black woman as president. You know, the Democratic party I've always found when you're sitting around talking, they love to just sort of balkanize everybody into these separate groups and say, oh, white people don't like women and black people. No, it is time for the Democrats to say, okay, and you and I've talked about this before, A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with black candidates. Right.

And with other Hispanics. You've got something that don't like each other. And some of the most misogynist things I've heard going on and get out to vote to her came from black men. I think if you had a woman or a black person or somebody with any number of identity markers, come along that was charismatic, that had mass popular support, that spoke meaningfully. authentically and genuinely to people's material needs and actually convince people that they were willing to fight and deliver on those motherfucking promises, they would be elected in the landslide,

honestly right or left. If you had a black woman that just was on message on the right, you know, did the Trump thing, whatever, I could see Trump's, I could see the Republicans electing somebody of color, genuinely, right? The women fascists aren't an anomaly in history. They exist and they could absolutely

rise up in the party. So I just, we got to reject that because that is the old, that's the main way that the Democratic elite escape responsibility by calling everybody else in the fucking world racist and misogynist. They did it with the Obama bros. They did it with the Bernie bros. And they're still dying on that motherfucking hill. It's not 2014. Politics isn't Tumblr. I'm sorry. The identity reductionism shit doesn't fucking work. You've tried it several campaigns. Doesn't it fucking work. Give it up. It is a losing strategy. What people want, is universalist programs that make everybody's life better and what we believe in is not hyper microdivision along the line

so you have every single identity group pitted against each other right now what we want is solidarity right now what we see a solidarity across identities that's the only foot path forward by the but right now what we see is this horrific situation where the democratic party is now the party of win and the trump and the republican party is the party of men and so liberals are like fuck all men we hate all men this is men like this is quintessential division and and most people understand like how the ruling elite and especially the republicans in their crude way use race to divide the working class that is what neoliberal identity politics is from the

other side right to make us into a million scattered fragments of identity pitted against each other if you get 50% of the country women to hate 50% of the country men i mean like you fucking you you've completely divided working class people in their homes and their own lives, there's no hope of solidarity. Do that with black and white people with any marginal identity, etc. Does that mean we reject the seriousness of oppression based on identity? Absolutely not. In fact, a core part of building a multiracial solidarity movement is completely acknowledging and working to solve through our shared interests and our solidarity those historic and present conditions of oppression. And anybody that says

gay people are bad or black people are bad or women are bad they're not only attacking human dignity which is first and foremost what we need to fight back on they're dividing the working class they're dividing the work class and so i don't want to just make it a class thing because it's kind of crude if you say we're against racism because it just divides the working class that's an element of it we're against racism we're against bigotry against homophobia because it's an affront to the human spirit because it is it is an affront to our core values as human motherfucking being And then also if we want to be successful politically, we need to have solidarity. You know what I'm saying?

So let's put that in mind. Circling back to Allison's point, what do we do? And if we accept that the Democratic Party is the lost party, but we also have to accept we're not popping off with the revolution tomorrow. And even if people flooded the street, but wouldn't be a socialist revolution, it would evolve in some sort of horrific civil war, we don't have the capacities there yet. So we can't use the Democratic Party. We're not engaging revolution tomorrow.

So what can we do? And I think we have to fight electoral terrain. I think we have to do something like build a mass party. What I see that's very frustrating is we have the PSL, we have the DSA, we have the Green Party. We have the what did Cornell run under the legalized marijuana now party? You know, we have all these different fucking parties scattered in a million directions. And it's like, can we just at least unify that first? Like can't we just get our forces, unification? unified into one party, that's really hard because what the left loves to do is deconstruct and criticize. So you try to get, you know, Kurting, try to get Marxist and Democratic Socialists and Progressive Social Democrats and people with anarchist leanings and anti-porealists. You get us all on the same page. It's incredibly difficult. But my God, we have to grow up and do something like that. The only way that you can break through in American politics, as far as I see it in the near future, is combated on the electoral terrain and it can't be

all the Green Party earned 1% and Cornell West got 0.01% and the PSL got 0.2%. It can't be that. It has to at least be like this one fucking party that represents this huge block that we could broadly call the anti-war socialist left coalesce into that

and then we have struggles within it and you can kind of see, actually the DSA kind of does this, right? They have their different caucuses. They have kind of like lines. struggle within a broader party. I'm not in the organization. I can't speak to, you know, how effective that is. But I think it is like gesturing towards something that needs to happen more broadly. And so I think the solution is we have to coalesce around something like that in order to go after regular Americans with a charismatic leaders, a coherent narrative, you know, and a message

that speaks to their actual material needs. We can't replicate the problems of the Democratic Party by being this hyper-academic, jargony, you know, deconstructionist or nuanced or postmodern party that just leaves regular people feeling cold and confused. We have to coalesce and directly speak to people's material needs. And honestly, this message, our economic program is working class economics. We're going to give health care. We're going to give education. We're relieving debt. We're raising the minimum wage. We're backing unions. We're doing that on the economic front. On the foreign policy front, we are against war. Now, you and I would say we're anti-imperialist, and there's an important nuance to make, right?

Anti-war versus anti-imperialist. Anti-war is too vague. It's like a liberal could say that, but be against certain things. Like, we're anti-imperialists. But when we speak to broad masses of people, if we just say, here's our working class economic program, and we're anti-fucking war and all the money we spend on all these wars to trillions and trillions of dollars, we waste murdering people around the world for global hegemony, we're going to stop that,

and we're funneling that money to create the highest quality of life for possible for the most amount of people in this country right now. That's a winning fucking message. That is anathema to both the Republican and the Democratic Party, but that message in a nutshell is a winning fucking message, but it can't be delivered unless we actually have a presence, a coalesced presence on the electoral terrain, in my humble opinion. But, Allison, if you think I'm wrong about anything, please correct me.

So not wrong. I mean, I just kind of, so let me, you know, we can try to think this through together maybe because here's the issue in my mind. I don't disagree with you really much at all. But the problem is let's say we take the Green Party, we take PSL's electoral side. We take here in California, it's like peace and freedom party, right? In some places, working families party, which is mostly just an extension of the Dems, but sure, let's say we take all of these smaller parties and we get a single electoral platform together. That's still fucking absolutely. absolutely insignificant, right? Like, that number doesn't matter. And so I think that puts us in like this very tough situation where, yes, I think I've probably softened on this. I think we should compete in the electoral arena. I just think it has to be independently, right? That is kind of freesingly where I land. And so the question for me, though, then, is how do you get the ability to enter that? Because these groups are trying to do that, right? Like PSL, you're not going to get fucking PSL, but they have a presence, right? And they, are trying to make these interventions electorally.

And so we find ourselves in like a really tough place. And so I'm going to just like, you know, I might be like slightly vulnerable here. I'm going to talk about my experience organizing and it might overlap with yours some too. Because I think this is like a thing that people are trying to wrestle with. Right. So, you know, you and I both were associated with the Marxist Center, right? And whether or not people know what that is, it doesn't matter. But at the time when we were doing the Marxist Center stuff in like 2018,

no one was like sold on the idea we needed a party yet, right? That was, like, actually a very big argument within that group, was, like, are we trying to build a party? Like, what are, what is our relationship to the idea of a party? Thankfully, since 2018, I think that those of us who left that milieu have more or less landed on the question of, we need a fucking part. Right. That ambiguity is gone.

Now, I will say that those of us who left that milieu and went in different directions, I think have gone in two directions since then. And I've only used these both to kind of frame thoughts about the path forward, right? so on the one hand I think you know this a lot of our comrades from that time are in DSA now right like a pretty good chunk of them have gravitated towards the DSA Marxist unity group is full of people who came from that project some ended up in some of the other left caucuses as well so some people went there and I think they went there for exactly the reason you just stated right which is that there's like this structure in DSA that already looks somewhat like what we want to build right and so they see that and they see that as an opportunity to you you know, not to be crass, but like kind of do entreeism in the DSA. It's totally calm and dear it. Now, I, you know, you could have talked to them about it.

I think many of them have found that that fight's been a lot harder than they expected over the last couple of years. They've taken leadership within parts of the DSA, but the other side of the DSA is entrenched is pretty powerful and is pretty good at organizing in their own right. So that's become, you know, its own difficult thing. So that's one impulse that I think the military we were a part of what. And then there's another impulse. this is more the direction that I went in and a lot of the people who I agreed with out of that group went in, which is in some ways of more like anarchisty, Maoisty direction, right?

A lot of us ended up rejecting the idea of electoral work, rejecting the idea of going into a group like DSA. And, you know, a lot of us did mutual aid work, doing what we at the time kind of called dual power work, but by and large really wasn't building power in any meaningful way. Mutual aid was a really big part of that. And that, you know, I think many of us have realized stalled out as well, because whatever good that may be, and I don't know, like, we, the group I was with here, we found a lot of people during the pandemic who wouldn't have eaten otherwise, right? And I'm like proud of that, but you didn't do anything to build power, and it didn't do anything to bring us towards a party, right? And there's

various reasons for that. That kind of works not confrontational, right? It doesn't build class consciousness. It doesn't teach the people that you're working with to see themselves as a class and fight as a class. And so it kind of deadended there. So all of that to say, out of the milieu that you and I emerge from kind of within the left, people have gone in all these directions. And I think we're all kind of stuck in these interesting ways. I think the DSA people would contest whether or not they're stuck. But that's my perspective, at least. And so there are people who are working really hard and you have been working really hard to figure out what the path forward is. And the goal, I think we are more or less coalescing around. We need a socialist party. We need to be a to organize as a socialist party. So I don't think it's enough to say, well, let's just coalesce all the existing forces, because as someone who's been involved in some of those existing forces, I don't think we were achieving anything that built power or base, right, in this very real sense. We called ourselves base builders, but we didn't really ever build

one. So, you know, I agree with you. We need to coalesce these groups together. But that's also, like, not enough, right? We need something beyond that. And again, I'm not going to say I have the answer here. I'm very curious, your thoughts, right? But you could get together every Green Party PSL and peace and freedom voter tomorrow, and we'd still be irrelevably minuscule, right? So there's that connection to the actual masses that is really missing in that equation. And that, for me, is kind of what we need to figure out how to establish. Yeah. I mean, yeah, wonderfully said it and incredibly true. I could maybe make an argument even just that coalesce would be a step forward, right?

And then we could go from there. But, I mean, still, same problems present themselves. There's a glaring hole in this conversation as well, which is obviously almost every successful, if not every successful socialist movement has had a labor movement. And so, you know, and that's a perennial perplexing question. The socialist left in the United States is how do we, I mean, the shreds of what's left of the labor movement. movement. It's really, you know, neoliberalism did a huge number. Right. There's a little bit of a resurgence and there's still a labor movement out there somewhere, still unfortunately connected at the top levels to the Democratic Party, though the rank and file, I think, broke

over 40% for Trump in this last election, which is just fucking depressing. But, you know, there seems to be an absolute necessity to fuck with the labor movement, to have some integration with the labor movement to ride the labor movement, but then comes another problem. I have many, many, many, many friends. Almost all my high school buddies, labor trade unions is this problem of, you know, cultural and social chauvinism that can sometimes emerge. And so, you know, even if we could hypothetically coalesce with a labor movement that was actually socialistic, you know, there's this issue of that element. with the, you know, white, maybe, you know, the working class, the white working class,

however you want to talk about this. There's that element there, and then that makes it difficult as well, because then do you, you know, liquidate certain aspects of your core values and principles to accommodate that chauvinism? Do you try to struggle with it? Do you risk alienating yourself further from that labor movement? Right. You know, the thing that gives any possible socialist left, it's actual thrice. So, yeah, what are your, what are your thoughts on that. So this is, yeah, I have thoughts. It's tough. So that is the hard thing, right? The relation to the labor movement is not clear to me. You are correct. The rank and file the labor movement in many ways, voted right wing in a lot of ways in this election. And in addition to that,

I think one of the things that always shocks me when I look at like the internal party, or not party, internal organizational politics in the DSA, is that oftentimes the DSA chapters that have the, uh, caucuses that have the closest links to the labor movement are really the right wing caucuses, right? You see this quite frequently. And so it's not straightforward to understand how the left could build that relationship. I think we have to, right? Like, I don't think there's any question about that. But what that looks like and how you do it is a difficult thing. Now, I will say, like, again, like having talked a lot with like tenant union organizers, their thesis, I think is interesting, right? Because I don't think you've hear a lot of talk about this with like,

why people think tenants unions are strategic. But one of the things that I hear that I find kind of compelling is that it's a proxy way to build labor power because essentially most tenants are workers, right? That is the reality. And in fact, through tenants organizing, you have access to workers that you wouldn't get access to through union organizing, right? For example, the guy who lives down the block who drives for Uber and that's how he pays his rent, you're never going to get him through a union, but you can get to him around tenancy and housing as an issue, right? And so one of the things that as I've tried to like kind of understand more the perspective of the tenants organizing people come to see is that it's a proxy into labor, right? That is often how it is understood. And so

I have to, you know, say I'm fairly persuaded by that idea, right? I'm fairly persuaded that given the difficulties that we've had with labor unions, that there is something there, that it does get us access to people who we would not even be able to access through those unions. And then I said this before and I'll say it again, the thing about tenants organization that I think makes it distinct from like mutual aid and these other things is that it's confrontational, right? And so it's not just a way to get access to these populations. It's also a way to help build class consciousness and, you know, make struggle a reality essentially. So I don't have a solution to the labor problem, but I will say when I talk to smart tenants organizers, that's the frame.

that they're giving me. It sounds very persuasive to me. And it sounds like the way to understand this work as still labor work, which isn't obvious on the surface. I don't know if that's a satisfactory answer, but that's kind of, you know, what I am thinking about in relation to this question right now. I think it's a really creative and fascinating answer. I just did an episode with Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchus on Abolish Rent. I'm in the LA Tenants Union. It's a really great episode. I encourage people to check it out. And, you know, I think there's something there. I think there's something there. Yes, because in a tenant, you do, you have working class people. And importantly, in these tenant unions, they're often, often maybe lower income neighborhoods or even just apartment complexes. And the thing, one of the problems with the labor movement is that there's this labor aristocracy element. And, you know, some of my friends, I have a close friend who's actually younger than me. He's one of my best friend's little brother. And he got into a steamfitter union at age 18. And the motherfucker. Licker lives in a big ass, lives in a big ass house that he owns, drives a $70,000

pickup truck, reactionary social sentiments, and, you know, is not necessarily interested in revolution. He has a pretty motherfucking comfortable spot in the hierarchy of class society. And so that's going to be a problem when you get to these, you know, really robust trade unions, and there is this progressive streak within them. do have business raising aspects, but for a bunch of variables, culturally, historically, internationally, there are these issues of, if nothing else. I mean, on top of the other issues we've talked about, this comfort level. And then people that own their own house on a nice

plot of land and just paid off their brand new truck, they're not looking to risk it all for revolution. But tenants, you know, getting pressed and having nowhere else to go, barely making rent. They're all also workers. But they're the less the less sort of privileged workers in a lot of ways. Right. You know, that might be the sort of 21st century solution in America to that labor issue problem. And then, of course, kind of maybe even could, if this strategy could be successful, come in through the back door of organized labor where the movement is going. Workers are already in it. Some of those tenants are going to be apprentices.

They are going to be in trade unions. there is just right and on the right and the left in America more sympathy for unions than I've ever seen in my life. And so the union movement broadly grows. And as the union movement broadly grows, it reaches new people, new echelons of class society, different strata of class society. And then that tenant organizing can even plug into elements of that. So those could be some doorways that we pursue. Absolutely. I think that's a really wonderful point. Yeah. And I think the tenant union thing, you know, it's hard to pitch to people because I think this work happens around the country. But here in Los Angeles, you know, I'm not as active as I ought to be

with law to. I am very adjacent to people who are extremely active with the LA Tenants Union. And it's the biggest thing here, honestly. It is huge. The size of it, the ability it has to mobilize people both for, you know, kind of confrontational protest work, for confronting landlords directly, the ability that has to mobilize, even for recently, just poplucks and garden parties to improve things. Like, it's really hard to overstate how much if I had to point to something here in Southern California that is probably, like, the seed of something bigger. It is that union, right? And I know that other labor unions across the country haven't necessarily gotten quite as big. But up close, yeah, I don't know. Like, I really think that is very likely the

pass forward in a lot of ways. And so that's not to say that like, oh, we should just do tenants organizing and never think about any other kind of work. But again, there's this thing that I keep getting at, which is this gap between our aspirations and where we are now, right? And I do think that will probably be central to that gap, at least. Absolutely. Yeah, food for thought. You know, when I look around the land, obviously, it's not L.A. It's not the second biggest city in the country. But I live in the 41st biggest city in the country. And when I look at the terrain here, you know, my close friends and comrades in the Omaha Tenants Union and OTAU are doing some of the inmost

consistent work. Right. And so there's and and have brought people over through their political education apparatus and their struggle, you know, to be very sympathetic to socialist ideals. And it has its own issues and, you know, there's struggles and there's tenants that are obstinate and there's all those problems. It's always going to be there. But I think people should think deeply about that as a real possibility. So there could be a coalescing, a tenant organizing focus. Yeah, I think that if we have any plans from this moment right now in the very bleak condition that we're in, I think that is out of the ones that I'm familiar with, the most promising. Yeah. Let's touch on a couple more points here. Maybe we can do this a little quicker

because I know we're coming up over an hour here. A couple points I wanted to do touch on and get your thoughts. One is maybe three points I want to toss out there, but I'll share one in a time. One is where do the parties go from here? And I think we've already the Democratic Party. It is in, you know, for all of this issues we've

already talked about, there's this problem of just being too big of a tent, fitting many contradictions and stuff it and going it's already ripping and falling in part because of that. But on the Republican side, there's a genuine problem of a post-Trump Republican Party.

The Republican Party is going to have an identity crisis in lieu of Trump. And some people say, well, they're just going to elevate Don Jr. or J.D. Vance. And I just don't think that I have those people or anybody else that you could come up with. And the Republican Party elite have what I call the sauce, the Jews at Trump has. They're not as charismatic. They don't have the popular support. They just don't have this intangible quality that this son of a bitch has. It is almost inexplicable to loop people and ramp people of them.

hire people. So I just don't think it's going to be as simple as finding Trump 2.0. It's going to be a real problem. And there's still elements within the Republican Party that are fighting against the emergence of whatever weird conglomeration Trumpism is turning out to be. Trump self, I think is racked with this identity crisis. Do we move in the direction of the new right? Do we move away from the Republican elite in the deep state? Do we double down on militarism in some areas but pull away in others? This is a identity crisis fraud. That is being held together by the glue of Trump's personality, but in lieu of that is going to have some real issues. And so it speaks again to the crisis in and what comes after it. There's like a de-alignment that's happening that might be a prelude to an ultimate realignment, but a crisis, again, I'd be the have to be cat to that. But do you have any brief thoughts on where the parties go from here or even just that identity crisis within the Republican Party? Yeah, on the GOP side of things, I mean, what I will say is I don't think I can speculate on a figure who they will be. align around, right? I think you're right. It's hard to see any of them that have the same kind of it factor that Trump had. But one thing that I will say, right, is that I do think

like my perception of where the phenomena of Trump's politics will go is further away from explicit white nationalism, right? Which he flirted with much more in his original campaign towards, I think, more of, yeah, people have called Christian nationalism or kind of like a civic nationalism, right? Around the idea of American citizenship as the core identity construction and frankly even probably a multi-racial understanding of American citizenship but one that still

draws very fucking harsh lines around that and I think yeah there will be a general move towards a civic nationalism that is not like flirting with neo-Nazi far right kind of ideology but flirts more with American Christian civic identity that is kind of what I think by guess would be

I can definitely see that there's there's also the contradiction of like the slurbed stool key and right elements within the to be into the party as well which might contrast with some the right you know Christian elements and that we've already seen some clashes around the abortion issue for example within the party itself Trump himself fair and comfortable with having to deal with that contradiction you can tell he's not he's not quite good at navigating that particular issue um so yeah so those things will have to be said but i just do

do think that these parties are out of steam in some sense. And a post-Trump Republican Party is really going to have some soul-searching. It's going to have to coalesce around something that's not just a single person. But keep an eye out for those developments. And I think whatever Trump does in this term could in many ways influence what that post-Trump Republican Party is going to look like. This is really like his, the first time was a little scattered. This term is like he really has a chance to set an agenda and to sort of create. an ideological terrain that the Republican Party can operate on going forward. So we'll see how that pans out.

All right. Two more quick points. Now, I know earlier we were talking about the death of neoliberalism, and I think that's pretty taken for granted to this point, honestly, fairly widespread notion at this point. But the bigger question is, is liberalism dead? And I've seen some people mention the death of liberalism as such. Globally, it seems to be under attack. I don't think a multi-century situa, a sort of ideological orientation goes out of existence

in a couple election cycles. Neoliberalism is a much smaller iteration. Right. Liberalism and capitalism, we could see that coming and going. But as liberalism itself, maybe not dead, but is it on the ropes? Is it running out of steam? What are your thoughts on that pretty big? Yeah. Yeah, it's a huge question, right?

Yeah, I know the takes you're talking about. I think liberalism is not dead. I think liberalism is dead end, right? If it's dying, I think everyone knows it's dying. I think the turn towards the right globally has been an illiberal turn, right? It has been framed that way very explicitly. So I think that, you know, is one way to understand what's happening. I think even like thinking about like the Eurasianist ideology out of people like Dugan that gets flirted with within Russian nationalism. I'm like, that's articulated as an illiberalism, right? I do think illiberalism reigns the day, right? The question, in many ways, it's like, what is the form of illiberalism, which is going to, you know, replace liberalism, which is going to come in in response to that. Liberal parties are struggling across the globe. They are struggling to compete with far right parties, which tells us something unfortunate, which is that the type of illiberalism, which is dominant at the current moment, is like a purely negation-based illiberalism. It's we are just going to embrace all the opposite of liberal values, right? You think that democracy is good. We think autocracy is good. You think that autonomy is good. We think that control is good. All of this just kind of inversion of liberalism, which is really what reaction generally embodies. And so that's one path we can go on. It's the path we're on, I think, at the moment. But the other alternative is an illiberalism that is, you know, the Marxist understanding of illiberalism. Where Marxism seeks to overcome liberalism, it seeks to transcend liberalism. But at the same time, We also insist that it fulfills the actual promises of liberalism, right?

Liberalism promises equality and is incapable of providing equality. Therefore, when opposing liberalism, we don't say equality is bad. We critique liberalism as failing to ensure equality, and we insist that actually it is something illiberal, i.e. communism, which can achieve the reality of that value, right? And so from my perspective, we are on a path away from liberalism. It is a question of what replaces it. I hope that it is that Marxist understanding of illiberalism, but that is not the past that it feels like we are currently on. And I think we do need to wrestle with that. Yeah, absolutely. Beautifully said. And I genuinely agree with that, with that examination of the situation.

So we'll see. But yeah, the forces of illiberalism are rising and they are right wing in nature overwhelmingly. Right. Right. But, you know, also that right wing illiberalism can, you know, reach its sort of contradictions and help spur the left-wing version of liberal transcendence of, you know, these historical processes do tend to play out in that sort of way. So we'll see. Very last question I have, and this is just sort of a final thought. It's on one hand, it's kind of silly, but, you know, other people do talk about it a lot. And the liberals who are chastising every non-voter and third-party voter because that they held back because of Gaza are saying, you know, now Trump's just going to be worse. That's the main argument that they have been, you know, throwing at people like you and I. So the question is now

that Trump has won, certainly Israel undoubtedly sees it as a victory. They see that it's absolutely good. But there is this interesting element, and I'm not saying that this is possible, but you do hear it. And I've actually followed people on the right wrestling with this idea because, you know, there's lots of America first people that don't want to support Israel. There's lots of straight-up anti-Semites on the right that don't want to support it. Right. Right. Real. So one line of argument is Trump, well, you know, either there's the right wingerers that are saying he's fully taken over Israel and the Jews got him, blah, blah, blah. But there's another element that says, hold on, Trump is going to get us out of Ukraine. Right.

And Trump is naturally and instinctively inclined to not like messy foreign affairs that weigh down his administration and importantly fly in the face of his ostensible. extensible core principle, which is America first. And if you're shoveling billions of dollars to Israel, you're getting sucked into a regional, maybe even a world war, that at some point Trump may let it rip at first, but at some point it gets very messy for Trump. And it drags down his administration, maybe, you know, causes chaos within his coalition, again, flies in the face of his core values of America first. So what is actually the prognosis, or the possible trajectories of the Trump administration on Israel without being obviously naive. We know for a fact what Kamala would be more of the same, more of the Biden, more of the deep state,

military, industrial complex, Zionism. We know for a fact that it would just be a continuation more or less of the Biden policy and of the broader democratic policy. But Trump is a little bit more of a question mark. So yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, so I do think he's likely to be worse. I think the question will have a clearer answer when we see his picks for the cabinet, right, in foreign policy positions. That will give us a much, much, much clearer sense of exactly where he's at, how he is approaching things, how he feels. I do think, again, I don't want to be naive. I think he's more movable than Harris would be. I really do too. I really do. I really do think if the crisis got bad enough, he would back off. So that is one thing that I think is very controversial to say.

but I think he doesn't have a commitment to a coherent neocon foreign policy. I think he'll implement one, but I think, yes, he would put his own political expediency above a commitment to that policy. And I'm not sure that's true to the Democrats, right? So, you know, do with that what you will. And the short term, I think it will be disastrous, frankly. I think he will be significantly worse, but we will have to wait and see. And again, we'll have to see who he surrounds himself with.

I think that is, you know, important. And this isn't me saying, like, oh, Trump is better, blah, blah, blah. But, like, let's be clear about the opportunities and the close. that emerge with each situation. And I think there is a potential opening that we see here. Just because, again, the guy's fucking self-serving, right? Above all else, before any ideological commitment. And that is manipulatable in the way that, like, an ideological neocon is not.

Exactly right. I totally agree. And there's this big pile of steaming shit on his lap the first day he gets in there. I mean, look at the contradictions exploding within Israel themselves after that Njahou just fired his war cabinet, minister, invalcan. or whatever, you know, there's riots or not riots, but protests in the streets and confrontations in the streets. So this is just an incredibly messy thing. And then you got to think Trump's going to be talking to Xi. He's going to be talking to Putin. You know, he's going to be talking to

world leaders all around the world. And internationally, the sentiment is against Israel and against America. And Trump is going to find himself in this really interesting position where a lot of the other people that he's trying to do deals with are going to be pointing this issue out and making it a fucking headache for him. And you know, so I think it's easy when he's just running and he's trying to shore up

his Zionist support that he's going to say stuff like, I'm going to do this and you're going to have no better friend to Israel than me, blah, blah, blah. But when he actually is in the position and has to deal with that shit, I think if nothing else, the possibility of him being movable is bigger than

it is with Harris. Again, not advocating Trump, not predicting even that it's going to happen. I'm just saying on an objective analysis would say that there's at least more potentiality. And that flies in the face of this sort of dogmatic and taken for granted position that liberals have been screaming in our faces that 100% without a fucking question is going to be way worse under Trump. And he's not even going to be kind of nice like Biden was, which is just insane in its own right. But also I think might very well be proven wrong. Yeah. That's not. I agree. All right. Well, that is red medicine. You know, in the heat of the moment, two days out, election analysis of what's going on. And we really hope people find this useful, inspiring, cathartic, resident, whatever it does for you. And I really wanted to, you know, kind of reiterate that. And an organizing point is as a highlight of this conversation and really worth thinking about as organizers and political educators listening to this conversation. But,

You know, a lot's going to happen. A lot's going to happen, I think, in this lame duck period where, you know, the world is waiting for Trump to actually be inaugurated properly. But the Biden administration trails on for a couple more months. You know, liberal cope will continue. We'll see what differences and changes happen there. Allison and I are getting to the German Revolution soon. And if all goes according to plan, I know we said this too many times. But if all goes according to plan, the next episode will be a German Revolution episode, which is historically. resonant in a wee way with our current situation. So it's not just a historical topic. In some ways, it's also a present-day topic. But until then, love and solidarity. Stay safe out there, and we'll talk to you soon. villagers to steal their dignity. It's simple. It's literal miseries are thrilled to industry. In case you're wandering the places, Philistine from little Italy to Greece and the streets of the Philippines. They know the name. Even Algeria felt the guillotine, because ignorant idiots sit and wish to bring them to their knees. When it's like that, they even kill children holding white flags. It's quite mad.

Clear the only choice is to fight back. No, we are not scared. No, you cannot kill us. Resistance forever on behalf of those not with us. A moment of silence for DJ Khaled. It's clear the counterculture is forming they seek to harm it. I bet they fear this verse in the words that the people chanting more than the songs charted from feeble, deceitful artists. This is it's what you want, isn't. This is more than just a song, isn't. People aching to be free, this is

more than faces on TV, isn't. When we shut down your factory is, and shut down a universityist. Your politics is too cordial. It's intifada if you're genocide. Genocide's a new normal. Once upon a time across the cities of the West, millions were stressed to see civilians oppressed.

By billions invested in these industries of death, they tried to talk, but the politicians didn't seem impressed. With horrid lies, try to remove me from Spotify, but the bottom lines are confused to be colonized. Go against the system, can jeopardize your salary. Call us the generation terrorize the factories check. Kendrick and Drake wouldn't know there was a genocide. You would think 40,000 people never died.

There's no excuse now because everything is televised Or on the phones where the rest of us are mesmer rises And it quite amazing all this synchronisation We will force their hands though the liberals like waiting They didn't sympathize though until the sky caved in With enlighten bombs bringing civilization You can call it what you want isn't This is more than just a song isn't

People aching to be free This is more than faces on TV isn't When we shut down your factory is And shut down the university Your politics is too caudal It's into father if your genocide's the new normal