Upstream - American History and Much More with Matt Christman

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

What are the material conditions which underpin much of the bizarre phenomena taking place during this strange era that we’re in? What unites the conspiracy theories surrounding COVID vaccines with, say, the fanatical obsession with Russian election meddling? How does capitalism — and our economic, material relations within it — lead to a sense of powerlessness that manifests in attempts to explain the world that range from QAnon to Russiagate? In this conversation, we speak with Matt Christman, co-host of Chapo Trap House, one of our favorite podcasts, which was founded in 2016 and hosted by Matt, along with Will Menaker and Felix Biederman. The conversation includes many of the themes and topics mentioned above and discussed on Chapo, but begins with a conversation around Matt’s new podcast, Hell of Presidents, which he just launched with Chapo producer Chris Wade. The podcast tells the story of American history through a materialist, political-economic examination of the institution of the presidency. It might sound a bit wonky, but through this specific history Matt and Chris explore a wide range of topics, from the evolution of waged-labor to the many contradictions that this country was founded on and which we continue to experience today. Hell of Presidents is available through Stitcher Premium, but you can listen to the first episode anywhere you can hear Chapo Trap House.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one time or reoccurring donation at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you. Conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset is a natural reaction of people who have been radically depoliticized whose lives are mediated dramatically by narratives that they encounter in mass media as a way to make sense of their powerlessness, to narrativize their powerlessness, and sense everything that we receive through these structures are narratives of individuals, individual desire, individual agency, which of course doesn't really describe the systems that we live under, our narratives of individuals, individual desire, individual agency, which, of course,

doesn't really describe the systems that we live under, our explanations for what's going on, our highly personalized. Like, QAnon is sort of a folk recognition of the power of capital over our lives, but without the name of capital, because of the cultural associations that the people who are having these feelings and trying to express them are programmed with. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation we speak with Matt Christman, co-host of Choppo Trap House, one of our favorite podcasts, which was founded in 2016 and hosted by Matt along with Will Menaker and Felix Beaterman. The conversation includes many of the themes and topics explored in

Choppo, but begins with a conversation around Matt's new podcast, Hell of Presidents, which he just launched with Chappau producer Chris Wade. The podcast tells the story of American history through a materialist, political, economic examination of the institution of the presidency. It might sound a bit wonky, but through this specific history,

Matt and Chris explore wide range of topics, from the evolution of wage labor to the many contradictions that this country was founded on, and which we continue to experience today. Hell of Presidents is available through Stitcher Premium, but you can listen to the first episode, anywhere you can hear Choppo Trap House. Thank you so much for coming on upstream at I really appreciate it. Well thanks for having me. So yeah, we're huge fans of Choppo, which is I think where most people probably know you from, but you also just started a new podcast with Chris Wade, Choppo's producer. So I'm wondering, can

you tell us a little bit about hell of presidents? So it's an attempt to retell the history of the United States through the personalities of the presidency, the way you basically get in junior high and high school US history classes, but the entire time fixing them not to a narrative of sort of individual choices being made and instead fixing all of the presidents in their historical material conditions and explaining that the outcome of the presidency is largely dictated by those realities more so than the individual will of any person holding the office. Yeah, the first episode, which I love the title, Founding Daddies, starts with what's known

as a Shays Rebellion and sort of the Articles of Confederation and wraps up with George Washington's death in 1799. So I'm wondering if, yeah, can we start with some like basic table setting sketch a picture of what the political and economic situation of the colonies was during that time. I think we're all familiar with the sort of traditional narratives around the founding of this country and like the unification of the separate colonies and states and all that kind of stuff. But in this episode, you explore how it was really an attempt by the ruling classes and the unification of the separate colonies and states and all that kind of stuff.

But in this episode, you explore how it was really an attempt by the ruling classes to consolidate economic power and unlock capital. So, yeah, I'm wondering if you could lay it out for us. So, the articles of Confederation, which were established after the victory over the British, carried forth the stated ideology of the Patriots, which had been maximal liberty arrayed along state lines because due to the way that the colonies had been developed, they had developed sort of independently 13 ruling elites and economic structures around those elites.

And it was the elites of those states who came together to resist the demands of the British to not advance past the Appalachian Mountains, for example, and to maintain their position in the mercantile economic structure of the British trade empire. But they were doing it independently. They were not doing it as part of a nation or anything like that. They were doing it as these 13 separate interest groups. And so the system that they imposed after gaining independence, operated from those principles, maximal liberty for the state governments, the federal government existing largely to coordinate the actions of the state governments, the federal government existing largely to coordinate the actions of the state governments. But very quickly, it showed that this was a huge hindrance to

the development of capital in the United States, which if the United States was going to be a nation among nations, and crucially compete for resources and for wealth with other nations it needed to have a more centralized authority not only to regulate things like trade and tariffs taxation, but most importantly debt in the form of the bonds that had been used to fund the revolution and which were now held by just different states with different currencies and different by different states with different currencies, a different economic outlooks, all leading towards this sort of revolt of bondholders who got together with the Constitutional Convention

to reforge the country into a unified state that would bring all of that debt under one umbrella, under a federal umbrella, and then use that debt to create a state the same way that the British had. And it was very, the Federalist project very much was an attempt to recreate the British model of a central banking and debt in order to finance this new regime. I really appreciate the historical knowledge that you and Chris bring, and also just like

really insightful analysis. And I want to quote you actually from the first episode, you say, quote, the whole arc of American history is people in every generation having to freshly come to terms with the irreverable conflict between America's founding conception of liberty, which I would argue is uniquely American and the pragmatic necessities of government that allow for ruling classes to continue to rule and for economies of scale to continue to operate. I'm wondering if you can unpack what you mean by that for us. Well, the reason that you had the Articles of Confederation before you had the Constitution is because for the 13 separate elites within the colonies, the preference was for a maximal dispersal of authority. They were viscerally resistant to centralizing authority, but the lack of central authority was undermining the ability of the state project to fulfill its mandate to get them paid to create an economic environment where they could prosper.

And so the constitution emerges out of this negotiation between the states, none of which has the power to assert itself on any of the others to create a structure that can allow that. And then that's why, once it's enacted, you have this instant explosion of partisan conflict between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, because the state that's being brought into existence is abhorrent to ideas of liberty that the Jeffersonians and the middle colonists too, the middle class of Americans who provided the actual fodder for the continental army and for political movements afterwards. They wanted a liberty that was essentially, the reason I think it's uniquely American

is because the promise of America was always a land of barons without surfs, basically. A land where every citizen could be an independent landowner in a way that was impossible in post-Futile Europe, where land was still scarce and concentrated in its ownership. And so the idea of government to everybody really was abhorrent because it could only get in the way of the prerogatives of a landowner. And at the same time though, there needed to be a state, there needed to be a currency, there needed to be military force if they were going to fulfill this dream of landadness for people.

So you have a situation where Thomas Jefferson, who spent the first 12 years of the republic's time condemning basically everything that the Washington and Adams administrations did is unconstitutional because it exceeded the mandate of the Constitution and deciding to basically by himself triple the size of the United States because the underlying premise of a landed freedom required land and the perpetual seeking of land. And so just in that dynamic, you see the future play out and every generation gets to this point where the notions of independent, yeoman freedom come up against the exigencies of building a modern state, and the idea of what a modern state is becomes more complicated over time.

And it's always a period of political conflict, sometimes violent, sometimes not, but it's always a process of having that anxiety of lost liberty being ameliorated, usually by the extension of more land, by the promise of liberty being discoverable still on the frontier. And then this gets complicated when the market economy fully subsumes relations in the United States, and the prospect of being a free omen kind of falls away. And that is when we have the transition away from freedom as land owning, which it was in its original American context to freedom as the freedom to consume to one's preferred amount. And then our politics has been predicated

and our political economy has been built around that principle ever since. I really thought that the way that you described the role that slavery plays in that period was really interesting. This idea, like you write, the only way you can have a country that can develop its economic power in the absence of alienated government institutions that have the power to compel the citizenry to do things like pay taxes, is if most of the crucial productive labor is being performed by people who are outside of the concept of citizenship,

and are subject to private regimes of power. So yeah, I'm wondering if you can expand on that and bring slavery into this since it's such a huge part of the early founding of the country and onwards. So America was able to be at the leading edge of political liberty for commoners compared to Europe because commoners included European colonists who were by their skin color and their place of origin exempt from the most brutal alienating and painful labor required to build the country.

That was being performed by a subject cast of African slaves who did not fit into the public, who did not have participation in public government, and who were, yes, subject to private regimes of power that were not part of the political system. And that's necessary because if the people doing things like picking cotton or clearing swamps are full citizens, then you're going to have to pay them to do what is required to do there. And when it comes to plantation agriculture, it would be a non-starter because it is impossible to pay people enough to have them do that work if the prospect of living off the land exists, which for European colonists at that point it always did. Even if it was dangerous and uncertain, there was always the prospect of self-sufficiency.

And that's what kept people free from being subborn into a labor relationship, which they would have taken to be a reduction in their liberty. And they were free to have that experience because the most alienating labor was being performed by people who were not part of the equation. And so the political institutions could be more free because alienation at the bottom of the political structure would never be sufficient to overturn property relations, which is what the founders were very much terrified of. Another thing that I thought was really interesting is this idea around, you could call it wage slavery or just like wage labor that began to emerge during early American history, you write everyone

at the dawn of their Republic understood that to sell ones in labor was to enslave oneself in a real sense. And I think it's so interesting to think about where we are now in terms of how we take that so for granted, right? Like no one really thinks twice about the fact that we're selling our labor to someone in order to make a living. So, it's, yeah, so interesting to me this was sort of detested in early America. And I'm wondering, yeah, how did we go from that reality to the one where we're in now? Well, it's always a dialectical process. So we began with this idea that only freedom is freedom to produce

on the land, that the wage relationship is a fundamental breach of freedom, and that anyone who is put in a position of whereby they have to sell their labor to others for their whole life is fundamentally an unfree person. And as capitalism emerges in early America and the market relationship becomes more dominant, there is a sort of synthesized vision that ends up being encapsulated by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party that emerges to challenge the slave power. And their free labor orthodoxy is premised on the idea that capitalism and wage relationships are acceptable in a context where land is freely available, which is why the most significant domestic policy of the Republican party when they took power was the Homestead Act. And the 1860 election included a campaign slogan to vote

for Lincoln and vote yourself a farm. And if land is available for people then they can participate in the wage relationship in order to save the money to get land or to supplement their income that they have off of the land. But either way their access to land means that their relationship to the market is voluntary. They are never going to be compelled to sell their labor. They can never be compelled to sell their labor on conditions unfavorable to them. They never have to take a bad deal because they could always just grow crops. They could always fend for themselves. And that was the vision that sort of synthesized Hamilton and Jefferson that the Republicans carried forward into the reconstruction era, where it was just

destroyed by the reality of the emergent capital formations that came out of the war itself, which swallowed everything. And in the process, though, created a technological machinery that eventually encompassed the Western hemisphere and then after World War II, entire globe that allowed for the average American within the political subjectivity to have access to a degree of consumer ease and convenience that rendered the reality of that wage slavery less subjectively alienating. And that process is what sort of brought people along to accept the complete loss of their autonomy in exchange for access to consumption.

Okay, so let's branch away from hell of presidents and sort of broaden the conversation a little bit now. Something I really appreciate about you, which comes out a lot in Chappo, are your particular explanations and sort of attempts to make sense out a lot in choppo, are your particular explanations and sort of attempts to make sense of a lot of the craziness that we're seeing right now in terms of, you know, all sorts of things like vaccine conspiracy theories to cue a non-stuff. And I like that you sort of situate these, you know, sort of like weird beliefs and

abhorrent behaviors within, within a frame of power. And you talk about how people's powerlessness within capitalism leads them to construct their own reality spheres that are divorced from most of reality. So I'm wondering if you could just unpack that a little bit. How does it play out on the right and also on the left with liberals and Democrats? Since the neoliberal revolution of the 70s, all of the most important questions of economic destiny are off of the table for political debate discussion within the two parties, which means

that in a country that has had its working class neutered by home ownership and by taft Hartley, by the entire a new deal counter revolution that has gathered stream throughout the second half of the 20th century. Just a quick note the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 was a federal law that limited the activities and power of labor unions. It has been described as one of the biggest blows to labor and one of the biggest betrayals of the working class in modern American history. That means that there is no real way for regular people who have no class consciousness or

organizational instincts or capacity to assert any control of economic destiny. And so there is a real felt sense that as things get worse, that there is nothing that can be done about them, that they become sort of natural and that leads to a Intensified feeling of powerlessness which I think often gets sublimated into a anxiety about being deprived of Consumption, I mean the the second amendment fixation among a lot of people boils down to the fact that what once was a Promise of liberty that was guaranteed by subsistence and access to land, which would include a firearm, you know, next to the fireplace to protect it, is

now represented in the firearm itself, and it's only in the firearm. And so access to just buying these symbols of a freedom that's been gone for centuries becomes incredibly important. But I think that the conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset is a natural reaction of people who have been radically depoliticized whose lives are mediated dramatically by narratives that they encounter in mass media as a way to make sense of their powerlessness, to narrativize their powerlessness, and sense everything that we receive through these structures are narratives of individuals, individual desire, individual agency, which of course doesn't really describe the systems that we live under, our explanations for what's going on are highly personalized. Like QAnon is sort of a folk recognition of the power of capital over our lives, but without

the name of capital because of the cultural associations that the people who are having these feelings and trying to express them are programmed with. And so it becomes instead of a description of a system that is alien to human interests that is only serving this sort of algorithmic churn towards capital accumulation. They repopulate it with a bunch of evil people or lizards who all have specific sexual usually desires that they're using this system to perpetrate. And that makes more sense, given everything else that they absorb in the culture, but because they can't name the reality of it, it requires them to get more and more broken and ridiculous. I mean, the vaccine thing specifically, if you have been fully alienated from all the major institutions of power, if you blame the institutions of power as they exist for why things keep getting worse worse no matter what you want, then you develop a instinctively oppositional relationship to them. So if the

government says, and the science, scientists say, and the media says, that the virus is dangerous and the vaccine is safe, then by definition the opposite is true. And there can be no reaching that perimeter because you're talking about fractured landscape where people from different cultural backgrounds are choosing their own adventure. And that means that the terms and structures of public discussion and the events that we talk about have fundamentally different connotations depending on where you end up in that contest. And so everyone is basically telling a story in their own head to make sense of their powerlessness.

And the very fact that we can't communicate means it's going to get more and more absurd because we are more and more left to our own devices and how to make sense of a world that gets more and more scary and alienating. Yeah, it's interesting at thinking about the vaccines. Today, I heard on the news, I think that most workplaces have been given the green light to require vaccinations if they want to among their employees. I thought it was really interesting that we live in a country where employers are given the sort of the right to do that, and yet the government is still unable to mandate or

require vaccines for every person who wants to parse his patent and public life. Like that would be seen as a huge form of like tyrannical oppression. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. Like more broadly and also maybe specifically too. Like you think that the government needs to take a more authoritative approach to vaccines. And yeah, just this sort of like interesting tension between, you know, how we allow workplaces

to dictate things to us in a way where we would never let the government do that and be okay with that. Yeah, I mean that's that was the whole Reaganite turn is that in the crisis of the 70s when the promise of eternally rising wages for workers was ended and workplace leverage in the form of unionized private sector organizing became too spiral to its death. The Democrats under Carter response was, well, you know, you guys should find some more meaning outside of the market. You know, you don't need all this consumption. Go to go to church or something. But of course, to make meaning, you have to act in your life. You have to be able to act to build meaning and in a fully-marketised society you don't have that ability.

You have been strapped to the mast. You have been compelled. Your time is not yours in a real sense. And that is not really a reasonable expectation. The only people who could have come to that conclusion are sort of the hair shirt liberals who by that point taken over the party after the sort of the death of the effectiveness of organized labor as a pressure group within the Democratic Party. The Republicans under Reagan had another pitch, which is there will be no freedom from

the market. There can be no freedom from using the market, and that means being unrestrained by government, which is the thing preventing you from feeling the full freedom that you could as a small business owner or whatever. And then they sanctified that by protecting those members of the working class and professional class who had managed to get a house by that point. And home equity became sort of the new homestead act and the new font of liberty was home ownership. Even though you couldn't grow crops on it, even though you couldn't sustain yourself outside of capitalism, you still had a home which means you had more freedom than those who did not have that equity in the system. And we've been living with that ever since.

So now a significant portion of the population views government as the only repository of tyranny unless it's big tech telling them they can't post whatever they want. That's the only reactionary alienation from private sector now is in the form of a reduced consumer experience that comes from not having your grandkids like your posts. And so people will put up with a lot more from private sector than they will from the public. And honestly, I think that it's just, it's not

worthwhile to even think about the question of the government making people do things. The government has lost the capacity to depend on a degree of popular confidence to do anything like that. The horses are out of the barn. And that's because the government has been the horses are out of the barn and that's because the government has been in front of everybody's face making choices that have emisorated and alienated people without any consent, without any real consultation for 40 years. So speaking of governmental woes, Chapo did a ton of work around the time of the Democratic primaries in support of Bernie Sanders. And I guess I'd like to get a better understanding of your views on electoral politics, especially after Bernie's law, sort of this like post-Bernie era of politics. Do you see electoral engagement as sort of a dead end?

Do you think that the left should be focusing on, I don't know, taking over the Democratic Party, building a new party, or do you think that maybe there's more leverage in other avenues or even just things like mutual aid efforts and taking care of ourselves? Like, what are your thoughts on all of the above? I think that the Sanders campaign should have been a significant wake up call to people

who had, myself included, who had believed that there was a sufficient connection between whatever we were all doing to try to press forward a socialist case or a social democratic case to the American people and the people who needed to hear it in order to move the center of gravity of the general electorate to the left, that that connection is essentially non-existent and that the people who need to be reached are really outside of this framework. And so I'd say that that really does put a damper to me on a lot of ideas about federal electoral work because it just seems to me that the numbers just aren't there for any coordinated and effective socialist base to assert itself at the federal level.

I do think, though, that there are local races where local power can be built, because the numbers are different, because the ability to coordinate and the ability to support a candidate and discipline a candidate and provide support for a candidate once they gain office to pursue their agenda is much greater at the local level. So I would say with all these things, there is no broad brush, there is no totalizing conclusion to draw. There is just individual instances where you have to apply your reason to the situation and ask yourself, okay, what is the real possibilities here? Is this a chance to build real power and assert it and change things in a way that might build towards a greater political project?

Or is it a parasocial investment of emotion, rooting for a protagonist basically, or yelling at them so that you can sort of sublimate your powerlessness through this engagement of the spectacle. And that there's no one answer to that question. People have to ask it themselves. Your listening to an upstream conversation with Matt Christman, co-host of the podcast, Choppo Trap House. We'll be right back. I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man of the aperture, Bob, but here I'm touching with focus a moment, not in approval, bury your heads in the bar, that there's neocolonials

A woman and myself are women, that they're nation nation's state Now place a face of horror, do that now I'm causing strain We'll try again, but now what we do is what it's cross-lord Is it fossil, yes, this is cross-lord And I'm just a kid, I can't pull the fuck out of it I'm a spider shit shit What a stupid world And it's beautiful No regard for the Christmas of all What a stupid world

Herb of Storn, tired, discolored, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, Dispose where that dog man's new body goes You can tell by this mouth I just need a hoe With this fireman over, strength apart her ghost You can get what will be said To mature the pain, I've been up on restricted labor laws Death can fight this place, come to death swallowing Don't ask me, don't ask me Let us make the light And the heart turns us And the concert Let us make the light

And the heart turns us And the heart turns us Turn to light Can you stop me for me? What a stupid world That was, and we thought nation-states were a bad idea by propaganda. Now back to our conversation with Matt Christman. To set up my next question, I guess I need to maybe ask you to just first give a brief summary of Chop-O-Trap House.

I'm sure most of our listeners are familiar with it, but yeah, I'd love to know sort of like when it came into being and sort of what your aim you think is with the podcast, why you do it personally, and then I have a follow-up after that. Well, it started out of three guys who were watching the 2016 presidential primaries with this growing sense of app lexie as a media narrative around Bernie Sanders became completely overwhelming and he just wanted to express our vent our frustration about it. And so we got on the internet to complain like everybody does. It's just the unmanned customer service line.

And it struck a nerve because a lot of other people felt the same way that they saw one thing with Bernie and that they were being told in every media, not just on television, but in all the think pieces and everything online that it was something else. And they felt like we were affirming along with the rest of the country. And then Trump just won, shocked most people, I'll admit, we didn't see that one coming. We thought things hadn't progressed that quickly, they had. And so the show became a vindication sort of of people who had said that the Clinton agenda and her as a candidate were flawed because the Democrats had always been able to push off resistance under the Obama years by saying counter rings, he won. I mean, even though he was losing, you know, thousands and thousands of state legislative seats and governorships, he was still popular in one reelection handling. But then Hillary losing kind of showed the emperor to be

closeless and a lot of people kind of flocked to hear an alternative, something that could critique both sides, especially as the Democrats got wrapped up in this psychodrama around Trump and hating Trump and believing him to be a Russian agent or a dictator, and we sort of were there to provide a counterpoint, did not engage in either of the narratives that were being sort of hegemonically reproduced. And then when in 2020 happened, we all understood that if Bernie ran again, we would be there to support him as, you know, the avatar of a vision of politics that would be broader than the possibilities that we have been offered by the two parties. And then he lost. Our impidence was pretty graphically

displayed. And then Biden was able to win barely campaigning as a senile kind of ghost figure of a decaying democratic party that is zombified essentially and now we are in in this state of uh i guess everybody after burning who cared about that campaign has been having to reassess their priors and what they want out of things and for me me now the show is more than anything, it's an entertainment show for me and my friends to goof on the news and for people to listen to it work and enjoy themselves. And that's all it ever really was. And I think we always understood it to be that. And we always tried to separate it from politics. There was just that brief period when we were campaigning for Bernie, we were doing shows in primary states and people were showing up to Canvas with us that we kind of convinced ourselves, at least I know I did, that oh my god, this is more than just a podcast, this is actually part of something.

And it was, but the thing it was part of was not enough to really change the equation. And so for those of us who care about the future, care about our fellow human beings and the planet, you know, we also have political requirements of us. We all have to keep our eyes open and keep ourselves at all times ready to assist wherever we can. But podcasts and online political discourse in general, I think, aren't that? That is entertainment. And that's fine. Everyone needs entertainment, and I'm happy to provide it. But that really is the extent of it, I think. It's interesting to hear you say that. And I think that you definitely touched, I guess, on some of the response to this follow-up question that I had. But I'm going to ask it anyways, in case you want

to add to it in any way. I'm assuming you're aware of the sort of the choppo and like, broader, I guess, dirt bag left is what it's referred to as often. That was- I hope not. I hope people stop using that phrase. Well, it was, yeah, it was used by one Andrew Morance published in the New Yorker recently. And yeah, basically, he argues that Chapo has sort of, like I don't know, maybe jump the shark

or something writing that, quote, at its worst, Chapo derides any attempt at sincerity as try hard or cringe, better simply to shit post our way out of and await our climate-induced collapse. And we- Okay, yeah, we'll shit post-waited. No, no, I know, I know. No, I just want to say real quick,

before you respond that I hated the piece, but yeah, just want to know what your thoughts were on it. The assumption embedded in that piece is that there is a podcast to listen to that is politics. There is a podcast to listen to that will actually be productive in some sense. And that, to me, is nihilism and insanity. That is saying I'm going to post

myself until the climate destroys itself. That is saying I'm going to lock myself into these petty arguments and disputations about who that's a good podcast to listen to and what is a problematic podcast to us do while the ocean rises around me. Because I guarantee you, if you think that this shit is politics, then you will miss your shot. You will miss your ability to do anything that matters, to feel like you are, even if it's not going to save the world, just your sense that you are contributing to the greater well-being of humanity, that you are a actor and not just a passive victim of history, is going to go by the wayside if you have invested these aesthetic questions with political import. That sort of brought up for me is, and I'm more interested and personally for you personally,

as opposed to necessarily the podcast, but I'm wondering, I guess for lack of a more nuanced way of putting it, are you feeling at all optimistic, or are you as this guy in the New Yorker writes, Shapo's very fatalist, and I'm just wondering what your thoughts are in terms of your hope. Like do you think that there's a way out, like a practical or an achievable way out of sort of this like doom spiral that we seem to be in in terms of, you know, everything climate

change, the pandemic, you know, class society, all of that kind of stuff? Yes, but it's not going to be posted into existence and it's not going to be coordinated from the online sphere. It's going to come from people fighting for their lives and fighting together in a way that renders all of the questions that seem to make political progress impossible. The stuff that people argue about on a cyclical calendar because they cannot be resolved, these questions exist to be bandied about to replace the actual political struggle that we don't participate in.

And on the ground political struggle, we'll clarify a lot of these questions as they emerge, but most of us have no experience, including myself, of what that actually looks like. And people talk about how things keep getting worse, and that's true. And that means, yes, it's bad's bad to say that there's no real possibility of change through conventional channels is to sort of accept a likely collapse

of quality of life but a lot of the things that keep us in this frozen position are built into that quality of life and to those expectations. And as they change, as people feel that they have less to lose, they will act. Are they going to necessarily act effectively? No. But they're going to act. And I think that for a lot of people, that doom comes because we can't imagine anything else then being cocooned in this precarious bubble where we can pursue our pleasure, sort of, at our discretion, but at the cost of any sense that we are in control of anything,

and that our lives are our own. And as long as that persists, yeah, it's going to be very difficult to imagine change. But conditions, the conditions that create that feeling, are clearly changing. And so that means people's relationship to the world is going to change, but conditions that create that feeling are clearly changing. And so that means people's relationship to the world is going to change too. Their motivation is going to change. Their relationship to other people, their faith in other people is going to be challenged by the immersion conditions. And that to me is the real hope for the future. But I think that trying to invest people emotionally in the pageantry of national politics is anithetical to kindling that hope. And so for me, that New York article read like something by one of the lotus eaters,

trying to convince you that the lotus is actually really tasty and that you're being a narcissist for not wanting to eat it. There is no, there are no politically helpful useful podcasts. Because the questions that they're asking are ones that don't relate to anybody's life. They can't because they're not relatable if they're specific. They're only relatable if they're generalized. But if they're generalized, they're not relevant. When we first started this podcast, one of the stickers that I designed said

the revolution will be podcasted. We don't have that one anymore, but I think that's just kind of funny to hear you say that. And I think I agree in a lot of ways too. I think that this online podcast realm is its own separate thing. And sometimes it's really easy to get caught up into it and think that it is more substantial or meaningful in a larger way than it is. And yeah, I appreciate you sort of addressing the question about that article. And I just have a couple more questions for you. Della, my co-producer for upstream, wasn't able to make it today, but she did have a question

for you. She was listening to, I guess you are on a podcast, a history podcast, and you mentioned that one of the favorite things that you like to do is think of a historical moment and how, if it had turned out differently than it had, what are current world would look like? I don't know if that rings a bell for you, but I'm wondering if it does, if there's something, like an example, that you have something that you have thought of changing and how that would unfold if we had sort of an alternative history of a certain event.

In American history, the big one that always sticks with me is the ascendancy of Andrew Johnson to the presidency after Lincoln's assassination. Because I stress on the show that we're talking about events that are determined structurally, but that in crisis points, specifically things like war, a lot of those contingencies multiply. The contingency of history explodes in times of conflict where the conventional mechanisms that are governed by structures break down. And the Civil War is certainly one of those. You had the southern half of the country, which was dominated by the Jeffersonian hostility to Central Authority and a most dedicated to an idea of liberty as being freedom to dominate the land as one sees fit with no obligation to anyone outside of one's family. And that force had been a noose around the neck of American development throughout the

early 19th century, and it was thrown off by the victory of the Union Army. And at the most important moment of initiative when the federal government would be able to dictate significantly terms to this newly defeated part of the country about what the social, political, and civic and economic status of the millions of slaves who had been considered non-human and were now being brought under the umbrella of American citizenship was going to be. And instead of Abraham Lincoln, who was a figure who had developed and matured throughout the process of fighting the war and at every point, sort of accepted the necessity

of challenging conventional American notions of liberty in order to pursue a real social justice that would have allowed the American government to be truly representative, perhaps, and to allow, for example, the working class to assert itself through democratic instruments in a way that they weren't able to do afterwards when the working class was able to finally emerge self-consciously in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. We get Andrew Johnson, a vicious, petty, wildly racist, small white, basically like the small whites of San Domingo and Haiti, who was fully devoted to re-enshrining the rule of the

planters who had just been defeated with minimal loss of their authority. And the outcome of that has been catastrophic for America. And to me, also does not seem like much of other things in history to be predetermined. I don't think there's any America where the end of the Civil War sees the abolition of racism by the turn of the 20th century or something, but there are situations where the ability of black southerners to assert their humanity through political mobilization would have been much greater. With the Lincoln presidents or my dream fantasy cast Benjamin Butler, who was asked to be Lincoln's vice president 1864 and declined it. So again, very contingent

moment. Oh yeah, it's so fascinating to think about that kind of stuff. It actually reminds me a lot of Oliver Stone's mini-series, the untold history of the United States, where he spends a lot of time exploring the historical upset of Harry Truman, replacing Henry Wallace as Roosevelt's vice president during his fourth term, and sort of just looking at how a Wallace presidency would have led to a dramatically different and like potentially less disastrous outcome in terms of the Cold War era. But yeah. So yeah, I guess I just have one more question for you for you wrap up and that is I'm not sure if you're familiar with are you familiar with the upstream metaphor Have you heard that at all? No.

It comes out of medicine, really, and like public health. But the idea is, so you're like standing at the bank of a river and you see a body float down the river, and it's a baby, and you jump in, and you save the baby, you pull it out. And then the next day, you're again at the bank of the river, and you see another baby, and then another baby, and you keep again at the bank of the river, and you see another baby, and then another baby, and you keep jumping, and then soon the whole village that you're a part of is diving into the river, saving all of these bodies that are floating down.

And the idea is at some point, somebody has to go up, river, and figure out where these bodies are coming from. And so that's sort of what upstream means, it's like going to the root causes. And one thing that we like to ask all of our guests is if you were to go upstream, what would you see sort of as the root causes of all of these challenges that we're facing today globally in the United States, more specifically? If you were to go upstream, how would you sort of characterize the root issues? Well, I mean, it's obviously good to say capitalism. I think at a personal level, because that's all we can really speak from.

It is a lack of faith in anything outside of ourselves. Because that more than anything is what traps us in this techno prison that we're in, where we're all doing things that we don't want to do. We're all allowing things to get worse because we don't want to give up the comforts and the validations that we have been able to gain from our engagement in the system. And to us, because of our isolation from each other, that becomes the only thing that's real to us are those feelings. Is that matrix of desires? And our politics end up just being us trying to reify those things, even though those things are compensatory and

sick-discossing, because it's the only thing that's real to us. So I'd say that the atomization created by totalized capital and that's consumer mandate that defines people without they're even knowing it by their consumer preferences and creates identities based specifically and only around consumer preferences that makes it impossible to act in a coordinated way to change things. Matt Christman, co-host of the podcast Chapo Trap House. Upstream The Music was composed by Robert. Thank you to Propagandhi for the intermission music. Upstream is a labor of love.

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forward slash sponsorship. For more from upstream, visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at upstreampodcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It really helps get upstream in front of more ears. Thank you. I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool, I'm a fool you