The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Fredrik DeBoer: How the Elites at the Social Justice Movement

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Author, journalist, and popular Substack writer Fredrik DeBoer is a self described marxist with a long standing commitment to left-wing activism. However, his new book, How the Elites At the Social Justice Movement, takes aim at his former political allies. Fredrik criticizes the current social justice movement for taking a hyper emotional approach to politics, engaging in character assassination against anyone perceived to be on the wrong side of history. In Fredrik’s words, we are living in a moment of political bloodlust dressed up in the language of anti-racism, damaging free speech, societal cohesion, and any chance of affecting real progressive change long term.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Hello, Monk listeners.

Rutger Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and moving the public conversation. Today I'm speaking with author, journalist, and popular substack writer Frederick DeBoer. Frederick is a self-described Marxist with a long-standing commitment to left-wing activism. However, his new book, How the Elites Eight, the Social Justice Movement, takes aim at his former political allies. Frederick, or Freddie, as he's known to his friends, criticizes the current social justice movement for taking a hyper-emotional approach to politics,

engaging in widespread character assassination against anyone perceived to be on the wrong side of history with a capital age. In Freddie's words, we are living in a moment of political bloodlust, dressed in. up in the language of anti-racism. Freddie DeBoer joins us from Connecticut. Freddie, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this conversation today about your new book, generate a lot of waves and debate out there,

which we'd like at the Monk debate. So let's start with a recent substack post of yours that was in advance of the book's release, saying in a sense it's, It's not about wokeness or other broad concepts of social liberalism. This is you speaking. Instead, it's about American progressive social movements, particularly the civil unrest that engulfed the country in 2020.

Unpack that for us. Set the scene here. What are you trying to get at with how elites ate the social justice movement? Here. So as the book talks about at length, I am a member and have been my entire adult. life of what I would call the activist left, as well as being a writer who sort of works on that sort of level. So I've always tried to balance being a commentator with actually getting involved in local communities and with various on-the-ground movements for a variety of reasons. I mean,

I'm actually, my experience is an activist is a lot longer than my experience as a professional writer. And those things are entangled with what are typically called cancel culture or Wilkinsness, et cetera, but they are very much distinct. And I think that part of the failure, our collective failure to really understand what happened in 2020, the political moment that sort of, sort of the 2010s were sort of building to a head was to equate sort of what people call wokeness or cancel culture. So, you know, a prominent figure says something that is perceived to be offensive. It generates a lot of backlash on social media that leads to personal end. professional consequences for that person, which then other people say is excessive, which they then call sort of canceling or wokeness. I've weighed in on those topics plenty, but they are profoundly distinct from an organized movement against police violence and against racial inequality in general and the various other offshoots of the social justice movement that I discussed in the book. And so the word woke appears three times in the text, but all three times it's in the context of talking,

about other people's, how other people talk and think about politics. And I'm fairly certain that the words cancel and culture never appear next to each other. And in fact, that was a stipulation that I made to Simon Schuster at the beginning of the process of writing the book. Great. Let's build on that. Playback another quote to you from March 2023, you wrote, it's absurd that so many people pretend to know what woke means. The problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness. Fine. Pick something. Well, Freddie, let's talk a little bit more. What do you think woke has come to be understood to mean within the broader kind of progressive

movement in the left? And then what do you understand it as? I mean, I think the first thing to say is that no one loves the title that there is sort of applied to their political movement, right? The world is stuffed with people who say things like, well, I'm called the conservative, but I'm really a classical liberal or whatever. It's also the case that there is no such thing as a political descriptor that is not shaggy, right? Get people to define liberal and you'll get 10 different definitions, 10 different people, 10 different definitions, same thing with conservative or, you know, what have you. I think that there has been a clear evolution in what I would broadly term a sort of social liberalism.

So if we want to sort of artificially define or divide the political project between sort of economic issues and issues that are more sort of social and cultural, obviously they're intertwined. But, you know, issues like abortion tend to fall on the social cultural side. Gay rights are social cultural, et cetera. races, I think part of the reason why race is such a flashpoint in American politics is because it is so deeply divided between the two. But if we talk about social liberalism, so the cultural and social politics of the left of center in American life, I think there's clearly been a profound evolution that starts sometimes in the early 2010s and dates maybe to 2021. I think that many people are talking about a vibe shift, a change in these things. But in any event, ideas from the

academic humanities departments, elite academic humanities departments, Ivy League stuff, began to filter out into broader consciousness, broader public consciousness. Social media played a large role in this. The site Tumblr, which has always been in pure number, sort of a niche phenomenon, which has a lot of people who are very dedicated internet users and who are very sort of influential help to sort of take, okay, Bell Hooks is someone you talk about in the Academy, but now we're going to talk about her on Tumblr and those ideas sort of filter out into Twitter. And the next thing you know, a sort of center-left journalist of a type who would never have heard of Bell Hooks 15 years ago is now quoting her in our political discourse.

And that change, I think, is not sort of deniable. Something happened. There is an increasing focus on sort of the interpersonal moors as the sort of the basic unit of politics. So the concept of the microaggression where you and I have an interaction and I don't say anything that I intend to insult or offend you with. But where you do become somewhat offended or insulted in a small way, it's kind of. kind of like the sort of prototypical sort of woke sort of intellectual object in the sense that it locates the center of politics in interpersonal relationships and in feelings, right? So rather than being a question of structures, rather than being a question of objective fact,

politics is about how we interact with each other and how that makes us feel. Robin DiAngelo's runaway bestseller, White Fragility is a book of it's all about, this approach to racial politics that racism exists in uncomfortable interactions between white and black people what is frustrating is i just don't see any reason to pretend that if you went back to 2010 that the you would not see a major difference in the way that liberals speak about cultural and social issues and sometimes they acknowledge that right um oftentimes people will talk about this change as you know i'm part of like a revolutionary moment a revolutionary movement, we're changing the world.

And then you say, okay, what is your movement called? And they get offended. And that's what I was reacting to in that piece. Excellent stuff. Yes, some really key points there to think on. Let's just situate for the listener a little bit where you're coming from, because you say, you know, we all don't like labels, but kind of need some labels to understand each other's respective points of view.

In articles that you've written the new statesman, and elsewhere, you seem to characterize yourself as someone who has a liberal orientation, and let's unpack what that means for you, but also that you're concerned about the illiberalism of our current moment and the larger social justice movement. So to build on your last answer, let's talk a little bit about your own philosophy and orientation and then how you apply that to your critique that these theories, these concepts of race and identity have created an illiberal moment within arguably the very political and social movements that one would expect to be the most critical and resistant to illiberalism. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I do have a label and it's quite,

it's quite simple and direct for me that label as Marxist. The trouble is that I'm operating in an intellectual context in which what most people think of as Marxist, I think is not what Marxism actually is. And that's true, both of, you know, conservative and liberal critics of Marxism, but it's also true of most people who call themselves Marxists. I just think that there is widespread misunderstanding about what the Marxist philosophy actually says. My sort of liberalism in the sense of being concerned with individual rights and procedural fairness is often seen as sort of a departure from my Marxism. In fact, that's not the case. The idea that Marxism is inherently illiberal is really a vestige of 20th century expressions of sort of quasi-Marxist sentiment

in the form of Marxist-Leninism, in the form of Stalinism, in the form of Maoism. But I'm not a Marxist-Leninist, a Stalinist, or a Maoist. That's not my problem. Marxism properly understood is not a rejection of the Enlightenment. It is the culmination. of the Enlightenment. It's not a repudiation of liberalism. It is the natural extension of liberalism precisely in the following from the schools of like John Locke or whoever. But even if that wasn't true, even if I didn't believe that about Marxism, reality is that we live in a liberal democratic society today. And that society has been governed by certain norms about free expression, about the right to be able to say what you want, about having a degree.

of due process, or if you don't want to use the legal term due process of basic fairness. So when someone is accused of something, like accused of harboring racist sentiment or accused of sexual misconduct, et cetera, traditionally, the sort of liberal mindset would be, well, we need some sort of process through which we find out the truth. And in order to sort of preserve, you know, the rights of the accused, et cetera, that sort of thing was rejected by many people who are consider themselves left-leaning in the last decade. Everything sort of happened in the context of a lot of screaming, right? I'm semi-serious when I say that, like, if I wanted to use the best term to describe all of this,

it wouldn't be woke or political correctness. It would be social justice yelling, right? Because there emerged this approach to politics that was hyper-reaching. emotional that insisted that anyone who was perceived to be on the wrong side was someone who was totally fair game for character assassination, for firing from their job from just, you know, total social destruction. Everything was happening in this, this era of like political bloodlust that was dressed up with the language of anti-racism and feminism and et cetera. And so the liberalism was all around us, among other problems, like freedom of speech and basic procedural fairness

are very popular, right? I mean, one of the reasons why this version of politics always had an expiration date is that, you know, when people go on Twitter and they put the phrase freedom of speech in quotation marks to indicate that they think it's ridiculous or that it doesn't exist or that it's not important. They're failing to understand that like freedom of speech is vastly more popular than they are, right? They do polling about the popularity of broad concepts like freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is consistently more popular than either political party, more popular than any individual politician. So, you know, you had this sort of personally liberalism within the spaces that were controlled by sort of yelling social justice politics.

But you also had this external society in which that was embedded that was never going to go. Well, how do you explain, Freddie, the virality of these ideas? Because you've just made a, you know, a cogent argument, a convincing case to me about, you know, the value of some of our longstanding kind of liberal. beliefs and credos around free expression, you know, the sharing of ideas in ways that don't involve pre-prejudicial views as to what the intent or spirit of your interlocular is. So why do you think these ideas have spread so widely and so rapidly? You talked a little bit about technology, things like Tumblr, but surely there's something else here that these ideas are answering in people that's causing them.

to have the success to really redefine in the last, a matter of a few years, many of our kind of core assumptions about who we are as citizens, what kind of society we want to live in, how our institutions work. I mean, is this a revolution? Well, look, I do think fundamentally, the most important sort of precursors

to what we've experienced in the last 10 or 12 years was technological. I will get to sort of the more social sort of things in a minute, but I do think that this could not have happened, had it not been the case that for so many people, the site of politics moved online and onto social media in particular. And that for our elite class, for the class of people that generates our national narrative, politics moved onto Twitter. And it has only recently been dislodged from there, because that's where elites gathered in order to sort of set the conversation.

And I think that's, you know, I mean, again, like part of the reason why I am dedicated to doing politics in the real world is to, you know, sort of have an antidote to that. One of the things that the Internet does is that it creates a distance that allows you to be a bloodthirsty monster, right? I like meeting people I've argued with about politics online in person because I can see how consistently unimpressive they are in person and sort of like the you know the the bubble is popped and like their sort of you know sense of self-aggrandizement is not present in the real world but also just like it's harder to be in a space physically with someone and to scream at them and to reduce them to a caricature those things happen because politics is a very sort of lead elbowed business but

when everything is happening from a web browser, it's just really easy to forget the human and to act tougher than you really are. But to answer your question about sort of social factors, I think there's a lot of things that happened. I think one thing that happened is, look, I would never say that the people who engaged in this sort of thing in general were insincere. I think that they actively and consciously believed themselves to be part of a genuine movement to increase justice in the universe. in the world, and that's important. But I also think that, number one, you have a collapse of meaning in American life. So you have the demise of civic institutions. We have a dramatic decline in religiosity and particular in actual like attendance of religious services. You have the ironizing of identifying with your job, right? So we have had generations now telling us that it's somehow pathetic or

ridiculous to see your identity as your job. And there's just a vacuum in a lot of people where they just feel like they just don't have a lot to hold on to in terms of like the intrinsic value of their lives. And I think that one of the things that people did is they sort of took those feelings and they stuffed them into the shape of politics that they saw online. People are conformists and they want to sort of tow the line of the people around them because they want to be popular. And the way to get popular online in a lot of these spaces was always to be the most extreme voice. It was never popular to say, hey, we should slow down. Maybe these people aren't so bad.

Maybe this person isn't guilty of what they're accused of. Let's be more sort of circumspect about this. That was never going to happen. But also, you have the process through which elites go through a sort of a meat grinder of getting their space, their place, in sort of American elite society. So they come up as children, even prior to high school, their parents are stuffing their heads with all this stress about how they have to go to the best college possible.

Getting into fancy colleges is absurdly hard now. The acceptance rates are so low, and the competition is so fierce. And so they vie and they fight, and finally they get into a fancy college, hopefully. There was just an article in the Atlantic about how students at Yale and other elite schools create artificial scarcity in sort of in like getting into clubs and activities at school. The campus officials say in the article, hey, we're not doing this. We want the clubs to be open to everybody. But the kids sort of force this sort of scarcity onto the system.

And they do so because they don't know how not to do that, right? They don't know how not to vie or to struggle or to constantly achieve. They are addicted to the feeling of fighting to climb up the ladder. They enter their professional life. They get into their jobs. They become staff writers at New York Magazine or they become, you know, low-level functionaries at the Ford Foundation, or they become administrator in residential life at a medium-sized state college, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

social justice which became another way to compete, right? I think that if you look at the kind of people who did this, they were hugely disproportionately drawn from sort of elite, hyper-educated locales. And I think those people saw this as another way to sort of satisfy that itch to climb the ladder and be part of the elite, only now it was a moral elite instead of an educated to bring a bit of your kind of Marxist sensibility to this, I mean, how much is this is really a reflection of reality of class and growing kind of class divisions in, you know,

contemporary Western societies? I mean, is there an irony here, Freddie, that the very people that seem most kind of open to embracing some of the more radical tenets of contemporary social justice movements are often some of the most privileged people in society. They are those students at those Ivy League colleges and campuses that you just spoke about. To what extent should we be looking at this as a class phenomenon? And to what extent are arguably maybe the people that are most in need of campaigners and advocates for, I'm not going to say social justice, but let's say social improvement, those elements in society, the most dispossessed and disadvantaged. To what extent are they included in the movement? Where, you know, do you feel that their voices are

reflected? Well, no, they're not included. I mean, look, like it is hardly restricted to the sort of social justice movement or these sort of these discursive spaces where this sort of thing was happening is still happening that they are heavily class stratified. One of the basic realities of American life is poor people don't vote, right? So after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was this effort to blame his election on like laid off iron workers in Akron, Ohio, right? But if you actually looked at the exit polling, the median Trump voter made something like $90,000 a year. You know, the Trump foot soldiers are like guys who own car dealerships, right? It's just always been the case that participation in politics is heavily class gratified.

It's not universally true. And in fact, you know, I spent years working in the housing movement, tenants rights movement, in New York City. And that's a space where you have tons of ordinary working class people who get involved. It's very diverse racially for the simple reason that people need a place to live. Right. And so those politics are remarkably real to them. The problem with the social justice yelling was that it was largely being overtaken by people who were financially secure, not rich necessarily.

Many of them were affluent. But people who did not feel the immediate desperation. of how am I going to pay the rent next month? And when that happens, there's just a necessary and inevitable, like, sort of when you're made up of people who are removed from politics, there's this inevitable fixation on culture war issues. Because culture war gets you out of bed, it gets you inflamed, it gets you angry. Whereas the expiration of the child tax credit expansion, which thrust millions of children back into poverty did not get an ounce of the heat on social media that, you know, whatever the gender controversy of the day was, whatever the race controversy of

the day was, even though the child tax credit is objectively one of the most important and high-stakes issues in American politics today. Sign up now for a complimentary monk membership. As a free monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and privileges, including streaming of select debates, dialogues, and podcasts on our website, a 24-hour advanced ticketing window to access seats to our in-person debates before the general public, written transcripts of all of our content, and email updates on special offers and promotions. You can grab your complimentary monk membership right now at Triple W Monk Debates,

that's MUNK, DebateswithanS.com. Simply click on the member. membership tab in the top right of our navigation. Grab your monk membership and open your mind to a world of great debate. Let's talk about trends and where you see these social justice movements going. Because to listen to you, I get a sense, again, I don't want to be too Marxist here, but I do like the idea of, you know, the contradiction in Marx, that, you know, contradictions reveal themselves over time. And they're often, if not the downfall of movements, they can be very destructive to those movements and what they do.

The conflicts kind of out themselves. And but that I mean is the conflict not of one group warring against another, but just the inherent intellectual conflicts that are maybe irresolvable in the very heart of many of our contemporary social justice movements today. So what happens here, Freddie? Do these contradictions come to the surface? Does the movement have a reckoning? I mean, right now, you could say there's some debate about those contradictions around the periphery of the movement. But in terms of its core tenets, I think many of its adherence, especially in the political world, feel that these contradictions don't exist. They are resolved.

They're subsumed within the movement. Well, look, the first thing to say is what I don't say and have never said. said is that these various cultural war issues aren't important that I don't care about them or I don't take a side on them. I mean, you know, if the book is anything, it isn't a, you know, 250-page argument for how to better wage the racial justice movement, right? In other words, the very reason I wrote the book, which I think some of the people reviewing it have forgotten or ignored, is that I want these movements to do better. Of course, I think, yes, I mean, look, you've already identified one of the major, like, fissures in this project, which is that it's all about the oppressed and the dispossessed and the downtrodden, but the movement is conspicuously not made up of people like that.

Is one thing, one big thing, though, is one of the strange things about all of this is many of the people, a majority of the people who sort of considered themselves social justice. warriors who would sort of go to bat for all this, they would talk about revolution and not reform. They would demand that the system be turned upside down. And then they would very sternly lecture you about how you always have to vote for the Democrat, right? There is an addiction to the sort of most sort of milk toast proceduralist, incrementalist Democrat politics married to a sort of revolutionary rhetoric for many of these people. And it never really made much sense except for in the shadow of Donald Trump. And I think that the reason I can't give you a clear answer to what the question you just

asked is because we are heading towards a post Donald Trump politics in this country one way or the other. I believe he's in his mid-70s. He's not what you would call in great shape. If he wins in 2024 and somehow avoid. being jailed on the multiple indictments against him. Worst case scenario, he goes through the next four years as president, and then he's ineligible for office.

Sooner or later, we're going to have a post-Trump politics. The weird thing about that is that Trump won and has some unique strengths, but a post-Trump politics is scary for the Democrats, right? Right now, the economy is doing very well, objectively, I would say. And Biden has done a lot of popular things, and yet his approval rating is at like 35%, in part because he's an 80-year-old man who sounds and looks frail to people. The question that all of us on the left have to ask ourselves is, what if after Trump comes Ronald Reagan, right? I understand that Reagan himself was a wholly unique figure in the history of American politics, but what if there is a

conservative demagogue who does not have, who does not appear to have some sort of serious brain injury the way that Trump does, right? What if there is a conservative demagogue, a Republican candidate who is not serially breaking the law? What if there's a Republican candidate who marries Trump's policy than his politics to being just like a minimally competent human who's not constantly plagued in scandal? Because if it's this type of an election, with the economy that we have, with a president who's done a lot of the things that the left has said that they want him to do in a post-COVID world against someone like Trump who has some strengths, but also massive negative things associated with him, including the entirety

of the sort of media and political apparatus is against him. If this is where we are, we're in really deep trouble. And so I think that like any questions about where culture war goes, are ultimately questions of what does post-Trump America look like? Post-Trumpism America look like. I don't know the answer to that, but I, for one, find it very scary. Yeah, absolutely. That is the big question. So if you were to have advice for those people who are genuinely concerned about social progress and a more fair and equitable society, what are the tactics and then how do those tactics fit under a strategy to meaningfully advance these issues in ways that are going to matter to the people who they matter for the most?

Well, look, like, I think that Joe Biden, like all American presidents is a war criminal, and I think that he is vastly short of anything like a genuinely moral standard. I also think that he's the best president of my lifetime. I think that there's a lot of lefties who sort of want to deny this for whatever reason, but the Democrats are just objectively far, far to the left where they once were. I would challenge anyone to go back and read the 2012 Democratic policy platform and compare it to their current policy platform and tell me that it's not a party that has moved, meaningfully to the left. There has been a lot of heat and noise around labor right now,

and there's been some prominent strikes, which are encouraging. That doesn't matter until we get the percentage of people in unions up, right? Like, we're at about 10% right now, a union right, in the workforce. And no amount of high-profile strikes are really going to make any difference until we get more people in unions. But look, I just think that if that guy that I was just talking about emerges, right? If the republic, the disciplined Republican who is not as addled and scandal plagued and stupid as Donald Trump is emerges, I can easily see the Democrats saying, okay, we have a meaningful threat from our right. We have to move right and become the Clintonite party again in order to win. Look, all you can do is keep pressing on. I'm not planning on dying

anytime soon. I bring up the child tax credit every time I do. any press because it has to be on the lips of every progressive person. If we could get that thing made permanent right now, we can't because of Joe Manchin, but if it's possible to win a couple more seats that are actually held by liberal Democrats, we could pass a permanent child tax credit expansion. And that kind of program, once it's on the books for a few years, becomes very hard to get rid of. This is part of why the Republicans fight so doggedly against them because cutting that kind of program, once people have sort of worked it into their budgets, is extremely unpopular. It's also the case that, you know, look, we're fighting and winning on abortion. Abortion is a winning

issue for the Democrats. I think that this is, I think this sort of this Roebuid thing is the definition of a conflict between what activists wanted and what a party apparatus wanted because I think what Mitch McConnell and the other leaders of the Republicans probably would have loved as if the Supreme Court had kept Roe v. Wade technically alive while sort of there was more nibbling around at the edges that reduced abortion because overturning Roe v. Wade has proven to be a really powerful organizing tactic for the Democrats. And I think that that demonstrates that there's a lot of progressive sentiment in this country if you can harness it. But, you know, like I said, I want to see who leads the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in 2028.

I can tell you with a great deal of confidence, it's going to be not Mike Pence and not Kamala Harris, but who it is going to be is, I think, a mystery to everyone. Just to, for benefit of our American listeners, there is a very generous child tax credit in Canada, children under the age of six of low-income families received $7,500 per year per child, $6,000 per year for child six through 17. And the numbers are pretty, this has been in place since 2016, and the numbers are pretty impressive in terms of the reductions in child poverty across the country.

It's been one of the big policy successes in Canada. There aren't many, but this is one for the last. 10 years. Yeah, and the other thing about the American Child Tax Credit is it actually costs less money than you might think the projections are, it's actually not as expensive as you might imagine it to be. So I just, I think that it's a no-brainer if I for. Yeah. Freddie, you know, you'd mentioned labor strikes are its major strike by the American auto workers. You've had, you know, a summer of labor unrest, rightly in response to inflation and, you know, declining purchasing power on the part of workers.

Do you sense that labor could be part of the solution for achieving some of these social outcomes? Because what I find interesting is that often in social justice movements, and again, this may be a reflection of our discussion earlier about class, that the proposed solutions, or at least a lot of the discourse, doesn't seem to really put labor and labor issues at the forefront. that as you note, it puts issues of often of identity and perceived and real injustices that various groups face as a result of racial, sexual, and other identity indicators that they

bring into the public square, whereas labor seems to be kind of Freddie left on its own. Am I right about that? Is the social justice movement today kind of maybe to? strategically committing an error here in not elevating labor and the gains that labor is starting to make as one of the key things that people should be supporting care about these issues to really advance the causes that they want to see. Look, the left is labor, right? Like, the left of liberal left is labor.

But look at UPS, right? There was a lot of joy for people saying that there, you know, UPS drivers are making too much money now. UPS, though, like, you know, the Teamsters who organized UPS threatened to strike, they were coming right up to the day when it was going to happen. And UPS caved a number of demands and gave them a significantly better contract than what they had initially offered. I mean, the most basic reality is UPS made a bad offer to their workforce.

The Teamsters organized a strike. and UPS then in response to that gave them a significantly better deal than they had initially offered. That deal didn't come because UPS are cool, good people who wanted to reward their workers because it were like a family at UPS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They did it because the Teamster said, we have the ability to inflict hundreds of millions of dollars of losses on you, and you can do the math and decide whether paying us what we're worth is going to be better than what it's going to cost you to have this strike.

And UPS was forced to make the sort of rational calculation, say, oh, no, wait, we need our workers and we need to pay them better if we want to survive this. That's how it all has to work, right? Like the long term, we've had a little bit of squeezing finally. I mean, I'm 42, almost my entire lifespan that we've been seeing. a widening of socioeconomic inequality. The absolute top is still going up relentlessly,

but the relative sort of bands have squeezed a little bit in the last couple of years for the first time, I think in my lifetime. If we want to continue that process, there has to be the fundamental mechanism where people say, I have my labor power. If you don't give me what I want, I'm going to withhold my labor power. Absent that tool, which of course is organized through a union, I don't, I don't know how we get better deals for a lot of people.

Freddie, let's end on an optimistic note. As you say, you've spent your life in the trenches fighting for a lot of these causes. If you're to kind of survey what you see up there right now in terms of changing public attitudes, changing economy, you've talked about some of the political risks. what are you most optimistic about? Where do you think, if someone's thinking to themselves, I really should invest more time and effort and energy about social justice and social progress in my life. And I want to be smarter about that.

Where should they go? What should they do? Sure. So the first thing I would say is stay optimistic. Okay. In my teenage years, a Democrat said that the era of big government was over, repudiated a minor, you know, sort of music and activist figure, So Sister Solja, to great fanfare from his party.

Gutted our welfare state in a way that tripled extreme poverty among black Americans, signed a bill that criminalized gay marriage on a federal level, ran a campaign in 1996 that was so conservative, his Republican opponent accused him of stealing publicly accused him of stealing the Republican agenda, right? And that was the sort of left, the more left party in American life when I was a teenager. The Democrats are sort of permanently in shambles and they have never been anything close to a left wing party that I would be happy about in my life. But they are getting better and they're getting better because people are forcing them to go that way. So you can achieve, right, change over time. It's not impossible. In terms of getting involved,

I always tell people to start local, okay? You look at a group like the Democratic Socialists of America who are sort of a broad, generalist socialist organization. To me, the best thing about them is how their local chapters push people into sort of issue-specific, work in housing, in criminal justice reform, and environmental issues, et cetera, because that's where politics actually happens. If you just are like a socialist and you debate socialism on the national level, you're never actually going to get involved at all, right? So get local, find something in your community, find a group, go to a few of their meetings, check it out, see if they sort of are on the level that you're on, and just work, right? Stuff envelopes, hand,

out leaflets, set up a table on a street corner, knock on doors, work a phone bank, answer questions on a hotline, et cetera, et cetera, get involved locally and do stuff that is actually observable in the real world and not just through a web browser. And over time, good things will happen. Yeah, great insight. Someone we recently talked to on the mug dialogues, David Brooks made a good point, which is, you know, think up. your associations and groups that you have in your life. How many are online and how many are offline? Do an audit. And you're probably going to be a happier, more engaged, more, have a more kind of meaningful life. If you start to think about that ratio and try to correct

more just in-person, offline engagement around the issues, causes, and ideas that you care about. Well, Freddie, DeBoer, thank you so much for coming on the Monk Dialogues today. us a lot to think about. And I've really enjoyed this far-ranging conversation with you. And I know our 100,000 strong monk members really appreciate your analysis and insights. Yeah. And I will just underline that I will lead state the social justice movement is in bookstores now. So yeah, we'll have a link to the book in the show notes. So grab a copy, dig into this. Predate Boer's got a lot of interesting ideas that deserve our attention and focus. Freddie, be well.

We'll talk again soon. All right. Thank you. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Frederick DeBoer. He certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com.

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