Populism in the Time of Trump: A Debate

all right so thank you all for coming tonight's event is populism in the time of Trump we have with us American affairs and the nation but before we go ahead and get started I introduce the moderator just some announcements we have beer and wine on sale we do take card in cash also dissent has available for to buy subscriptions and sign up for their newsletter we'll be passing around a sign-up sheet to be in verse those MUFAs and two cents event sign up and on to that we have with us our moderator for tonight is Miriam Jung Shi T Miriam is the founding editor of must' magazine and she teaches at NYU law if you all have questions at the end there will be a Q&A so we ask you to hold it till then afterwards feel free to stay for drinks beer wine meet your friends make friends with your enemies if you'd like oh yeah thank you for coming we put my glasses on so I can identify ie see all your beautiful faces thank you so much for coming tonight to what I think will be an interesting potentially contentious potentially aggravating debate about what it means to sort of be a populist or what does populism mean in the age of Donald Trump so obviously I think we're all pretty aware of the political situation in this country and around the world in terms of the sort of resurgence let's say of populist rhetoric and so we are going to have representatives from the left and the right I guess talk about this so on my right are is the left we have Sarah Leonard who is an editor at the nation as well as dissent we also have Tim shank an editor at defense and then all my left is the right starting with Julius crime at the editor of the new publication called American affairs and then next to him his deputy editor oh my god I'm blanking out on your first name after going over it with you forever gladden happened who also teaches at the University of Notre Dame in the political science department so I'm going to stop talking each of our panelists will speak for about five minutes giving their perspective on populism in the time of Trump and then we'll have a debate and then a QA to follow all right so let's get going so the right will begin well thank you thanks to dissent and verso for hosting I really can't actually overstate how pleased both of us are to be at the source of books [Music] reading many versa volumes on the right it was always there's a guilty pleasure in that and here we are so very exciting now I realize that this event has been advertised as a debate and the boxing gloves and everything it's very dramatic but I'm going to use my time actually to argue that the most important aspect of today's politics is actually how much we agree both on certain philosophic perspectives as well as actual policy programs theoretically we are supposed to represent the far right and the far left polar opposites of the spectrum how is it then that we actually agree on so much including revising our trade policy to focus more on domestic workers support for universal health care less foreign policy intervention ISM better infrastructure concerned over inequality skepticism of a consumerist and atomistic culture and the desire to read politicize a lot a lot of issues and allow for seemingly radical political possibilities beyond the technical bureaucratic politics we have grown accustomed to read for example the essays of Wolfgang streak where Chantelle move Europe and compare them though them the left obviously and compare them with the essays an essay that we just published by Pierre mine own who is an unimpeachably rightist background the similarities are striking I just actually read a nice review of The Handmaid's Tale in jackal van which could have been would have been perfectly at home in many right-wing magazines and a similar review of the same thing by a rightist author that made all the same points that that is the reality and the reality is that it's we actually here I think our not we're not the left and right but we have not yet become the new center even though I suspect we have more in common with each other than either of us do with the self-proclaimed centers of our parties it is precisely the center that is composed of or based on a fanatical adherence to the ideology of neoliberalism if I can use that word and the task for those of us opposed to that form of liberalism call it the communitarian left and right is precisely to develop a consciousness of this reality and our common goals and to begin to act on them that is in my view the only alternative to the current politics of there is no alternative if I can use the leftist jargon which I rather like actually now certainly of course I'm not actually talking about the current administration specifically I'm outlining a much longer term horizon and certain aspects or there are certainly areas of disagreement that we can find and those need to be navigated and negotiated and hopefully we can begin to do that tonight but from my perspective these disagreements are mostly tactical and second-order concerns gladden here is the expert on the timely death of conservative fusion ISM for the last half century and maybe he'll get into that but I think the disagreement between us is perhaps is no greater and perhaps much less than the disagreements between the members of the conservative fusionist coalition that actually was quite successful for many years and if in 40 years from now we fixed our economy and restored a more communitarian civic culture and politics then we can go back to fighting about those areas of disagreements but as of today I firmly believe that we are the new center and we need to start acting like it [Applause] thank you very much Julius and thank you to verso books and everyone else for inviting us here I find that I prepared some of the same points that sorry I find that I've prepared some of the same points but as we were walking over here we were we were saying I was saying to Julius it was probably her it might be hard to convince the verso books people how excited we are to be here but in fact we are and if I sound incoherent at any point tonight it's not just because of ideology but because I flew from Paris just for the event and a few years ago I think I did have the feeling a few years ago when Julius 9 a few other people were regularly reading particularly I think we went through a phase of reading and discussing most of the works of Baudrillard which were which were republished not all of his books were published by verso but a heck of a lot of them were and they're highly relevant books in fact I was at a I was I I gave I gave I've I've been I've given a few talks on Baudrillard at right-wing conferences in past years and I just gave one not at a out of the right-wing conference but just at an academic conference earlier this year and in order to do that I reread his book America which was his travelogue travelling through the US and about 1985 and I found that he had this I mean with Baudrillard I can always only I only really feel like I understand it while I'm reading the book and then as soon as I try to translate Baudrillard into like sort of technical language or to or to rephrase it in academic terms since its kind of an impressionistic writing style I usually fail but what I was impressed by in in his book America is that he said that he said he already had kind of his finger on the phenomenon of parts of America that were being left behind and not only America but other parts of the developed world and instead of calling them the first or the third world he said there's there's a new world it's kind of part of the first world which is called fourth world which are the distant I called them the dis intensified zones and it seemed to me that that that you know although a lot of people who were reading at Baudrillard spoke America in 1986 or like who is is crazy you know French theorist whose corrupting American universities along with all the other French and European theorists but I found that actually at least that that that aspect reads quite quite well which is which is you know so much as to say that it's very important for us to have this discussion because very few other people are having this kind of across partisan discussion and basically to reap to reiterate Julius's point you know as you said you know we can go back to disagreeing over you know particularly also sorts of particular matters once the possibility real political action is restored but right now that that that that possibility is partly for close to us and in particular if we don't have these sorts of discussions then the kind of you can call to the neoliberal strategy or the globalist strategy of separating parts of the left and right on cultural matters will only feed into the the sense such as you got in in France in the most recent election that the sort of the globalist class or the managerial class is the only legitimate representative of centrism and everyone else disagrees on the left and on the right and all and although although of course they you know the potential for any sort of synthesis between between left and right on either on either certain economic matters or or even or even the restoration of political sovereignty or something like that might have difficult difficult obstacles which we'll get to it seemed to me a bit I mean there was very funny watching the watching the speeches after watching the speeches of after the second round of the of the of the French election you know many people have pointed out that marine lepen economic program had probably more in common with that as an aluminum shoal than it did with than it did with Francoise Fiona and so and and and and nevertheless the fanatical center seems to have won in France and it's one it's one many other places as well in this article by Pierre mo not that that Julia's mentioned he notes that an earlier day he's describing French politics but he could probably be applied maybe well we'll leave that question we could probably apply to other political context as well but he said in an earlier age both the left and the right were populist in a sense they identified a different they identified a different people the right always being associated with the national people and the left being associated with with the people of a certain kind of class but nevertheless there was there was a time at least in France when when both both the political left and political right were populist in this sense and although you know although this conversation is only one one sort of staff for instance in the discussion of how this how anyhow any sort of how that how that question might develop the only the only other thing I would say here is that what it is is is that the elements of both the left and the right have to realize I guess this is something that the left already realizes or has talked about for a long time but the right also has to realize that there is a kind of class war occurring in in them in developed countries but instead both left and right have spent a lot of the last 25 years at least since they since the end of the Cold War talking about the culture war instead and it occurred to me if I have been really clever at age 10 I could have written a book quite like Beaudry yards book the Gulf War never happened which consisted of three articles that he'd published in liebherr ASEAN over the course of the first Gulf War called the Gulf War will not happen the Gulf War is not happening and then finally the Gulf War did not happen and I suppose if I had been really clever on you know just just before the 1992 GOP convention you might have said something like the culture war will not happen and then later the culture war will not happen and then finally the culture war culture war did not happen and what do I mean by that well I think it's pretty clear that the culture war at least in least in the way that we spoke we spoke about it which was never really a war came to an end with the obergefell decision and at least on the right that the only candidate who happened to be the candidate who won the election only one candidate realized that or admitted it and in the meantime during the entire period in which we were talking about the culture war which that which does indicate you know real issues that that divided and will still divide right and left to the extent that they're that they're prominent or not during that during that entire time the sort of phenomena which which which created the you know economic dislocations which are now manifesting themselves politically passed itself off in completely non-political terms so both in a way both the left and right political parties were sort of advertising aspects of the culture war to their own constituencies while actually doing nothing about it politically and in the meantime the kind of globalist economic revolution proceeded on on non political grounds as though it were the expression of economic logic and so here we are today [Applause] great I want to start by thanking verso for hosting us and Julie's and gladden for agreeing to come down here into the Lions Den to have this conversation I have a lot of respect to that choice so actually what I'm about to say the comments are pre-written but they track in lots of ways issue so you guys were discussing because basically great as I see it the question that we're here to discuss is what conservatives who loathe Paul Ryan have in common with socialists who can't stand Hilary Clinton the answer I think and here I'm going to depart with you Julius is I think not that much but before going into our differences I would explain why I feel this is a conversation worth having whatever our disagreements I can second Julius's description of the Republican Party as quote little more than a jobs program for failed academics and journalists close quote the same goes for your assessment of what a bipartisan coalition oblique governance has given us skyrocketing income inequality pointless Wars a sense that we've lost something crucial in our democracy your honesty on these subjects encourages me to hold American affairs to a high standard and here's where things get tricky now glad you are making a point just now about culture wars that you also discussed in the first issue where you told us that quote the culture wars are essentially over that's a really important argument for yours for your side and I understand why you brought it up today because if as you worked just laying out if battles over social issues have ended then the fight can shift local economy where populace on the left and the right might be able to find common cause the problem as I see it is that the cultural wars aren't over they've just changed shape the religious right is weakened but the all right is surging the Christian Coalition might be exhausted Breitbart isn't in this fight you're not allowed to call it truce on social issues in one breath if you're going to gripe about identity politics and the next especially when identity politics means any discussions about the realities of racism in the United States without understanding this shift I don't think of as an end I think of as a shift in the culture wars you can't understand Trump because the man is basically a cultural studies seminar come to life now gladden in your article you credit Trump's victory the loyalty and patriotism of middle America like most of the other people who have examined last year's election returns I have a different view Trump didn't crush identity politics he embraced it encouraging White's to assert membership in their tribe while providing just enough rhetorical cover that other voters would be able to vote cast their ballots for him without feeling too guilty and find their kids of course not all of those voters want to cover which is one reason that hate crimes rose 20% last year all this points to a deeper error at the heart of the american affairs project I was struggling your current issue by the Pearman on peace as well and I agree at that especially that definition of the different ways that less and right have interpreted the people that the less preferred Univ analysis has been class and that the right preferred unit of analysis has been the nation or at least that the rights preferred unit of analysis with the nation until the dollars crowd came along and like sold out this like Longshanks addition to the right and as I see it American Affairs is hoping to reclaim this nationalist vocabulary for the right to make nationalism great again I don't think it's going to be that easy nationalism has always always been bound up with race historically this has been the essential divide between left and right not class versus nation a class versus race now of course racism alone isn't enough to win an election but when combined with a host of other resentments support from spineless Republican establishment again seconding julie's on that point a tragicomic clinton campaign at grievances from voters who really have been screwed white nationalism made donald trump president which brings us to the most important subject what do we do now I believe that the great genic the great question for our generation is whether will be possible for us to create an egalitarian multiracial dye marker Malti racial democracy ideally while doing everything we can to stop the planet from being incinerated climate change incidentally is one of many cases we could point to where I don't think a politics of nationalism is going to cut it but on almost every front the biggest immediate obstacle facing us is Donald Trump the manipulation of racial anxieties divides a working class that should be united against a common enemy well as incompetence makes technocracy more appealing than anything Hillary Clinton could have done it's not enough to play coy or claim neutrality about Trump the more you postpone condemning him the harder it becomes to build a democratic movement that might actually succeed this ongoing disaster is all the more excruciating because in 2016 we saw an example of what such a movement might look like the next time someone whose room is subjected to a lecture on how political correctness has ruined Millennials and I assume that'll be like two days for some of you but ask why so many of the kids these days turned out to vote for Bernie Sanders he went over 70% of the under 30 vote in Democratic primary giving them a total greater than Clinton and Trump combined a Democratic Socialist with a multiracial coalition with a clearer sense of what it was fighting that achievements not a solution to all our problems but it is a start and when you have that why waste time with trumpism [Applause] so we've all said our thank-yous but I want to especially thank dissent which really conceived at this event and made it possible and where I've been lucky enough to not only work but I get to keep going home which is really really nice so I also wrote out my comments which I don't usually do but there was a lot that I wanted to touch on having read through the American Affairs material and taking up from the generous challenge of the American Affairs editors and really just picking up where my colleague Tim left off so sort of jumping off from there I'll just note that a pretty diverse coalition to counter capitals upward redistribution have been growing and it's not just Bernie Sanders right I think everyone in this room is paying attention in the last roughly six years not very long at all we've seen waves of organizing on the left so we had occupied and then black lives matter and then yes the Bernie campaign and now the explosive growth of organizations representing socialism reproductive rights immigrant rights I've heard the tired phrase identity politics used to describe these movements but that's just another way of saying they look like America in fact they look like it's future so consider Millennials who voted for Bernie as Tim mentioned and by 2032 the working class will be a majority minority so if you're a working-class American being born right now in the u.s. today odds are you're not white what's remarkable about this growing coalition is that it seeks to heal the divisions you know painfully and slowly that have prevented working people from organizing against those who dominate them for a long time so you see the black lives matter movement producing a platform that has a sophisticated economic program and wraps up gender justice under its mantle democratic socialists of America still pretty white organization is all for gone gentrification in Brooklyn and walking picket lines with AT&T workers so this is of course what I see as a promising step forward now many see Trump is a wave of the future and I understand that the man won an election despite relentless efforts to sabotage himself and like Bernie he became a vehicle for those who felt alienated and victimized by the political establishment and we know when we should be glad that people are fed up with politics as they stand but we should ask ourselves is trumpism really the best we can do and when you have a journal where you have freedom to imagine and plan why is this the agenda American Affairs tells us that nationalism is the answer to our problems they believe that capitalism isn't the problem but what theorist james Burnham called the managerial elite disloyal professional globalist with no ties to the nation who are the real enemies exploiting the masses and we can dig into this later but sort of acute dodge to avoid blaming capitalists and therefore replace class struggle with the nationalist one so these elites have to be disciplined by nationalism all the people I described earlier who have been fighting the excesses of capitalism for so long don't seem to be getting behind your plan and Trump's not only our Trump voters overwhelmingly white but so is American Affairs a masthead of all white men a first issue made of all white men and a second issue that has managed to squeeze in one white woman I wonder why I missed one translator oh she was a translator okay one and a half since you're all very erudite I'm sure I don't have to puzzle out for you why people of color haven't flocked to a nationalist agenda nationalism in America is always accompanied by paranoid attempts to purge the agents within interning Japanese Americans during World War two attacking Sikhs of all people as we geared up for war in Afghanistan and the hate crimes of course that we see today so when Trump stands up and says these are my people you know the most beautiful people the greatest people it has that George Wallace ring to it right he doesn't mean all Americans he means the people who are cheering his attacks on the rest of us all under the guise of making America great again which really raises the question who's America when you choose nationalism as your refuge from modernity you exclude all but the only people who have ever truly loved American nationalism white people especially men that's not what America looks like though I have the statistics that's your fantasy the imaginary American community to whom you claim loyalty in your pages it's a vision with a tenuous relationship to reality when you can only see ironically with blinders on the type they seem to distribute to serious Harvard men for some reason after reading your essay Julius about Burnham I read a sort of wonderful critique by Orwell of Burnham and after considering several disastrous predictions Burnham made during World War two all predicting the ultimate victory of whoever was winning at that moment Orwell argues that this tendency had roots quote partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power which is not fully separable from cowardice I would propose that American affairs is like Burnham in more ways than one the contributors don't necessarily worship Trump as I'm sure they'll tell you though at least one has joined his odious administration most of the editors are content to play footsie but they think that white nationalism is a great force that will shake up our elites because it won this time and they're willing to get on board alongside all its ghastly baggage it's a cheap short-term and cowardly political vision now it's not polite to call someone else's journal a crypto white nationalist project and my mom might be watching but I'll say your esteemed contributor Michael Anton who is a national senior national security official in the Trump administration he said just prior to your journal being born in an essay called toward a sensible coherent trumpism quote Islam in the modern Western compatible he later moderates this in the same essay by saying quote not all Muslims are terrorists blah blah blah close quote now what's remarkable about this statement is not the casual racism what's notable is that it conflates the modern West or America with Christianity whiteness certainly not with the people who actually live here when American affairs talks about nationalism it's a proxy for a white America they wish existed but doesn't and won't without something worse than internment just as William F Buckley at the National Review struggled to make segregation respectable 60 years ago will you make all right racism respectable by sticking it in a Harvard gown take it out of the hands of Milo and make it Tweedy again first is tragedy and then truly is farce alright then so so let's start with probably the core issue that sort of come up in the comments that were made which is on the one hand a desire by your publication and yourselves to put aside issues of identity and race for the sake of uniting around economic issues let's just say there are some others as well but economic issues seem to be at the forefront and then on the other side the insistence that you cannot separate the two that race and identity are extremely important in this country that in fact the recent Trump one was because of his play to identity issues and to just put a few numbers around it so there have been a lot of surveys there are always a lot of studies and there are a lot on this issue in particular and quite a few of them have concluded that the books so one statistic is that voters that made less than $50,000 a year voted for Hillary that voters in Michigan Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who who named the economy as being their number one concern voted for Hillary that the a Gallup poll that hold about 125,000 people found that those a voted for Trump were not those that had been left behind were not those that had been betrayed by globalization so what do you make of those numbers and in addition the comments made by by our editors on this side about the role of race well I certainly appreciate the very generous sentiments from the side of the table first off just to be clear I really don't care if you vote for Trump or not you can resist Trump all day you can do the protests and the marches and all that that's not what American Affairs is about the Trump to me is a sort of symptom of a deeper underlying change it's a it's a no his accomplishment is to show merely that the conventional modes of politics aren't necessarily going to be successful anymore but beyond that I don't see them as sort of a leader an intellectual leader certainly or even a sort of policy leader and you know if you want to vote somebody else be my guest I might too I don't know but I do think there's something instructive actually in the Trump phenomenon whereas even if you get Bernie elected he's going to face the same sort of internal resistance in his party there's going to be the same sort of it'll be a little bit different because he's on the left so its face will be different but there will be all these kinds of weeks and attacks and he's not really ready to be President all that all that stuff will be there too and so I don't know why you would refuse supporters on the right who might share that vision you know with respect to the first of all I should like gladden say this but gladden is actually a voting member of the Osage Tribal Nation so you know you shouldn't do violence against his heritage and looking around the room here if we're going to start counting faces or not going to do very good in this room either but I think the importance of the alt-right and that stuff has been grossly exaggerated I was talking actually to one one person who was a veteran of the new left movements in the 60s and 70s and he was saying how and he'd been to a lot of Trump rallies and stuff and he was saying how the media had kind of done the same thing we're in the 60s they would go find the one Stalinist at the rally and then ja these people are all you know Soviets and a lot of that I I think the first of all like white nationalism is not even a real I don't even know what that means but the extent of people that actually believe in that or you know it's a it's an extremely small number of group I would say there are far more people that voted for Obama in ona no.12 who ended up voting for Trump than there are any members of the or devotees of the L right or you know that movement and that stuff the other thing on on national I mean I would say if you want to get beyond the racial discrimination and that legacy the only way to actually do that is through nationalism now I know nationalism a loaded term it could mean different things I thought I had come up with this it turns out herbing crystal did but he sort of defined nationalism as you know patriotism based on an idea of the future and you left out in your litany of the pathologies of American nationalism you left out a very important one which was of course Lincoln was a nationalist and I would say actually in our history you know after say you know the the shared national enterprise of world war ii and stuff like that you tend to get a better sense of solidary and over overcoming those things that might have otherwise existed so we can debate that in nationalism and mean different things but that's the vision that I have of it and a sense of sort of white tribal politics I think would be very bad for the country and I you know most people the vast majority of people on the right think that too let's see yeah I mean the other thing I you know is just if you want to have if you want to oppose neoliberalism if you want to have socialism or communitarianism you need a community and how you define that of course is very important but if you want to just have global individualism then don't claim to be against the economic depredation so that social organization brings about I think I mean a climate change we can we can talk about that later for a lot I think I'll stop there I actually feel triggered by Julius's use of the term white tribal politics tribal politics is perfectly fine if you're talking about a tribe so at any rate he correctly describes my background the only the only the only the only thing I would add is that I when when Sarah was saying now I now forget to statistic because I'm not very good with statistics but she said that at some point in the future the working class in America will be majority minority and that's great and what I wonder was is whether the the left in this case thinks that there's any possibility for you know trans racial solidarity in the working class and if so what would it look like and I would posit as my as my provocation that when I said that the the culture wars ended with obergefell of course I meant that the the pseudo culture war in which nothing was actually decided politically but only through Supreme Court decisions ended at obergefell and that what happened asked and what happened after that on the right was that you know members of the Republican Party as I said I'm just reiterating this part continue to sell different forms of you or use different forms of social conservatism in order to be elected but the left also made an error and not I don't know if it's specifically after obergefell or what but but the error I think was what was too you know you know the the left had been part of a great cause which was successfully realized with the obergefell decision and after that because of the nature of progressivism they had to find something else and that seems to me at least in at least in college campuses in the last few years to have turned into an excessive search for you know small signs of racism and micro aggression etc and my concern is that the left might actually you know elite is that without objecting to what to what they've said about you know Trump voters and some circumstances the question would be is it possible both to acknowledge the forms of races of racism that are still present in society and our and and which are exploited politically but is there some way that they think this that that that that both continuing to push the antagonism between between between races through you know as I described it's sort of excessive identification of microscopic forms of racism might actually be preventing the form formation of some solidarity within the working class I don't if you could say what you mean by those microscopic forms should that came up in your essay to you and I actually want to talk about that but I was in I I assume you mean stuff like saying congratulations you guys is like some kind of terrible thing or something like that no I mean there's ever been these these sort of university things that have put out like lists of microaggressions and they include things like saying you know congratu can't say congratulations you guys because that might offend you know females or whatever okay so I'll take a first round than Sarah on the point about the same pencil be alright I'd say that I buy the argument more about so you know comparing it to 70s and 60s when all of these you know the media would focus on radicals and turns out they have any power that would make more sense to me if Jimmy Carter had appointed the editor of The Daily Worker to be a senior counselor in the White House but in our current case I think that the lay the land is different than the comparison let's on on the dosa story and I thought the invocation of Lincoln was really fascinating because if you go back and read the lincoln-douglas debates which you know it's good Strauss the enzyme figure you guys have done several times one of the things that's really striking is you see and some of the additions they reprint the audience reactions to what they're saying and there are these amazing moments when the audience just start bursting out into chants of white men white men with seemingly no provocation well actually no chance of provocation because Lincoln and Douglas are both conceding the necessity of government thinking Douglass's words like of buying for white men essentially and of course Lincoln takes a different road eventually but focusing on one picture to the exclusion of the broader swath of American history which before and after Lincoln is defined to focal parties based solidly upon white nationalism erases a struggle that's necessary to grapple with an ordinance and our own conditions and this is where I'll start by saying like why I think this is conversation is I see you too in American affairs as a project but Journal of former conservatives who have realized we have rejected the line on local economy so now in order to get the coalition all we need to do is get you to come over to the rest of our side on culture issues we're halfway there the job is almost done so this means that I have to make the case for the necessity of recognizing the significance of these culture issues if we're going to build a successful coalition that's going to do something about the problems that you do acutely identify that's the question like it's a question that you can't you can't Ally these issues as just tactics because one they're bound up with some of the deepest questions about in American history and as consequence they're central to charting our path forward which again to repeat a point I made in the talk is why taking a position on Trump is so crucial you can't dodge the question it is the decisive issue that we're facing at the moment I don't give it strategy that can inform that position and I think it calls the entire project into question I'm sorry yeah I would echo what you said and of course with with regard to Anton he's not the one Stalinist in the crowd he's 1 out of 10 contributors to the first issue of the journal but what something that really jumped out at me was you referred to to the necessity of community of community for realizing a democratic project and I think that's actually an interesting thing to delve into because that's heavily emphasized in your magazine and it's also something that all leftist think about a lot how do you organize accept within communities something that really disrupts my community is when my neighbor gets deported or I don't know when someone is subjected to brutality by the police these are things that happen commonly enough in Brooklyn although less deportation here than some other places because of our politics and so this really comes down to what you consider your community to be and so one thing I sort of wanted to to sort of dig in on was we believe on the left in building communities through solidarity and when we talk about you know when you talk about the problem with microaggressions for example that's a great way to not build solidarity so what I mean by that is that I actually don't think the left spends a lot of time think in my organizing experience which is just a small part of what many other people do do not sit around debating whether someone said you guys and therefore needs to be expelled I think that the obsession of the right with idiosyncrasies of college campuses betrays in infantilism on the right because why else would you be obsessed with debating 20 year olds instead of your peers so when we think about building coalitions there are lots of examples of how multiracial coalition's are being formed in America and of course are difficult to form because we inherit an incredible legacy of racism which is reproduced in various ways across generations not only in terms of belief in ideology but in the statistics we all know about housing and wealth and so forth they're very concrete the idea of referring to it as just a legacy is ridiculous and so you know you can look at any number of things that are happening in the u.s. right now so the fight for 15 campaign which I would add you know to say that the left was obsessed with the oberfeld decision alone and then once we got gay marriage you know like the left was over like the number of campaigns that were operating during that time for a range of other things including fair wages is enormous so that was one particularly diverse campaign because so many people who work in the fast food industry are low-income workers of color recently I would point to actually black lives matter has really brought to the fore the problem of racism in the criminal justice system particularly cops but more recently prosecutors and so there have been a couple of DEA election they've been fascinating for the ways in which they take the priorities of a predominantly black movement and they bring into that movement a large number of white activists immigration activists a pretty wide range of community members and they got rid of their DEA in Philadelphia they got rid of their DNA cago with coalitions like this all of which include labor working people and so if you want examples of coalition's they abound and they're growing and they're fascinating to study and to try to replicate but to simply say you know that they don't exist or you know they could never come together because the left is obsessed with microaggressions just betrays an ignorance of any left outside of a college campus a follow-up point on gladdens question about possibility of left hook organizing across racial lines thinking about what the future of American politics might look like one example that a lot of people have been pointing to recently is California where you see a country that went through a demographic transition that looks like it's going to be and the rest of our future pretty soon and one hopeful sign from my perspective is the utter evisceration of their Welcome Party in that state like one sweet taking care of that threat then you guys can come over and we can deal with like me with the neoliberal side together but it doesn't seem if we're looking for sort of terrifying omens of what truly multiracial democracy would look like that California the best instant one the best instances we have is going to give you that image now that can be proud for other reasons but just politically it seems to me a useful point to make so to get away for a second from the really important issues that we've been discussing and talk about some of the policy based issues that that your magazine is focused on and let's take immigration as a starting point so again the call is to bring to bring together the left the right whatever you want to call it around shared issues a share our shared perspectives on issues now correct me if I'm wrong and I know that your magazine is just getting started but looking at what you have put out there so far on immigration and it wasn't very much I think I just saw blurb you embrace a Canadian model which I'd love for you to explain and and and also I think mentioned rejecting the h-1b visa as potentially causing a downward causing downward pressure on on wages and otherwise not being got cleared and contributing to American productivity what is how do you see the position that you're staking out on immigration as one that members of the Left can embrace well just to start with the the Canadian system basically assigns two points or priority based on a person's skills or whatever they bring to the country so it basically prioritizes high-skilled immigrants I do I do see I do I do believe that the country's immigration policy like like basically all of its policy decisions should be designed to benefit the citizens currently what I would say we have now as though is actually it's not even we don't even right now I have a loose immigration policy we simply have no immigration policy at all and it's really the worst possible outcome especially if you're concerned about lower wages you can just go back and read Milton Friedman's work on the desire to import illegal immigrants to undermine any welfare state and and it you know it's not just me I think there there are serious people on the left here in Europe elsewhere who have pointed out the basic reality that if you have unlimited immigration it makes it very difficult to sustain a healthy welfare state so I have you know I'm very open to debating the exact contours of what our immigration policy should be but there has to be one and there has to be a rules-based system and I think once you dealt with that actually a lot of the concerns about deportation stuff would would would abate quite naturally and on the h-1b I think again that's another area where immigration system seems perfectly designed with the benefit of employers and depressing wages in mind where by bringing in an immigrant tying them to a specific employer so they can't get another job without losing their visa and all things like that it seems probably the worst way to do it from a wages perspective on the question of immigration I was actually struck by your sighting of the Canadian examples model as well if for no other reason than for the fact that I think some 20% of the Canadian population was foreign-born compared to 13% in the United States which at leaves from our perspective of building multiracial democracy seems also good but I was struck that you would adopt that for yourself I think on the question of the priority of immigration more generally I mean it's one of those issues that just seems like it's going to continue to be social science of death its effect on wages you can point to one study on Miami workers that's been cited quite generally on how it has an effect I think the argument was that it could push down wages for non college-educated workers native-born workers up to 30% and then I could point to a study from the Center for Global Development just this week that challenge has something profoundly and concluded that the overall assessment was if anything negligible I think the more important thing that matters and something that we've known at least since the Ketty if not before is that the real issue to focus on is the skyrocketing economic inequality brought about in this country by the explosion of compensation for the one percent which is not happening because people are being brought in to pick strawberries in California that's not what Goldman Sachs executive comp salaries executive compensation is tied to if we want to focus on the issues that's really mattered with the limited resources that we have think immigration is at best a distraction from the more fundamental sight that we need to be waging yeah I don't have much to add I mean I would echo that and I think it's sort of peculiar to aim at fixing the economic condition of working people in the Midwest by banning immigration which is not aimed at their jobs while ignoring the fact that the 0.1% has usurped a massive amount of the wealth and to develop an analysis at which it is not core to take back the wealth from the people who took all the wealth seems confusing at best can I just interject here I talk about immigration because she asked me about it I wasn't like trying to make it a priority no I'm happy to ask you about taxes now yeah no I I just I sense there's this desire to sort of call us a white nationalist and and like that's the debate I don't know why I think I've never said it you know the reason we only wrote like that quarter paragraph on it is because we actually do see it as a much smaller element of the much larger TV I'm just trying to say that like you know we can focus on these differences but we don't have to well to be clear I'm actually trying to focus on policy issues and immigration so your magazine sets out five or six different issues that you're focused on immigration is one of them right the next one I want to ask you back is taxes I could just interject because Jill is I wouldn't wanted to date you if I thought you were white nationalist obviously I don't like this would not be a conversation worth having if that were the case I think that your magazine has offered an incorrect analysis of the state of American politics today but I think you did it in good faith I think this is a conversation worth having I'm just trying to persuade you that this is an important force worth dealing with so that we can actually start building on common ground but until you do that I don't think we can have that conversation that's why I'm not charging you with that at all but I mean what do you want me to say sit that I'm right no idea because I mean I think I think we can have this you can go back and forth on this issue and I don't think it's productive I think you want to have a conversation about policy right so let's have a conversation about policy so we'll talk about taxes what is your position on taxes I find policy really boring actually um well you started Romney thank you we do have yeah I don't know you should read it sometime we we as we outline is pretty straightforward I mean I think I see I see corporate taxes is kind of bound up with trade policy and and therefore I you know would be inclined to support a lower nominal corporate rate which would be countered by a bat a more traditional VAT well like most of the world does know are the corporate taxes lower corporate taxes higher fat and what about well new created do that what a personal times have personal taxes you know this this issue the importance of this issue especially on the right as the cure-all for all economic ills of course we don't agree with that and especially when we're having these supposedly bitter debates over 39 versus 35 percent top corporate tax rates that doesn't make any sense it's not important issue anymore and you know we certainly are not you know looking to lower personal taxes is like an important issue if you wanted to lower taxes maybe the payroll tax would be important the other thing that I think we're more focused on is for the most part not only of course the most people not pay the upper income bracket tax rate but even the people that are nominally in that bracket don't pay it and that I think is actually a very interesting issue to think through all of the new ways of tax evasion and avoidance and figure out exactly how to deal with that because until you do that again you can have all the hot you can raise taxes all you want and it won't have the effect you need and it's very tough to build the kind of solid aristocrats if you can't actually get people to to pay taxes gentle Texas we also find policy pretty boring too probably okay well alright so so okay talking a little bit about populism and who are the people so in in when you talk about American populism now who are you talking about I read your article and you speak a lot about I'm sorry gladdens article on the anxiety of American conservatives is that correct with the title and you speak about sort of the Reagan Revolution in terms of the coalition that they were able to build between people who are in favor of a liberal market and people who have more socials or social conservative values and essentially what that coalition did was bring in sort of the white middle-class Democrats right into the Republican Party is that correct so do you have a who is your target audience for this populism that you're proposing yeah I am I don't under I don't understand that question in fact I think that I mean the it's pointless to speak about salt the possibility of solidarity if we don't intend to include everyone in different aspects and my and my bill the only sort of general question I was intending to raise earlier and for which I you know raised the question of the left talking about microaggressions and of course if I think about university campuses I can't help but think stuck on one but the question is I mean you know there many different right I mean we already have a multiracial working class and a multiracial Society and so do we intend politically to do this into to present an appeal to the American people as a whole on important matters of economic policy foreign policy and and and and the return of and the return of all questions to a client to the possibility of political decision or not and so it sometimes sometimes in listening to the discussion thus far I don't really see what the issue is you know we're not we're not arguing about what the 2016 campaign should have looked like in fact we certainly you know as I think Julius was getting at having ever addressed immigration and the terms in which it was framed by the by the Republican candidate in 2016 and I would much rather have a debate over you know again not not so much policy but on the question of immigration I'd be much happier to debate and discuss the different the different social science questions that are that that are raised and which and which are important in order to frame correct policy on immigration but you know again sort of just sort of dilating on this on the on the question for another moment I mean I see no reason why questions of policing shouldn't be of importance to people on the right to again if they take if they take their if they take their solidarity seriously and so I would be I would be very interested in in in pushing the right toward addressing those questions and we hope to do so in future issues after all we've had only two thus far and to cite only a case that I happen to know a little bit about which isn't an American one but you know there was a very severe problem in policing in Northern Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 when the when the Royal Ulster Constabulary was a 98 percent Protestant organization policing Catholic neighbourhoods as well and it was the in and it was the and it was part of that initial what in that case was a religious disparity which had driven the formation of sort of community policing organizations like the IRA that was a joke but anyway and and in it and initially initially a initially a community policing organization and so they created a new policing service they abolished their previous one they abolished the Royal Ulster Constabulary and replaced it with the Police Service of Northern Ireland with the intention of making police forces representative of the communities that they that they governed but it but it seems to me that the that that framing questions first in terms of potential solidarity that could be realized on a political level versus first first raising raising the sort of obstacles to that potential solidarity obstacles such as the persistence of American racism which still have to be confronted could yield sort of different the political outcomes so what what what what Sarah and Tim were describing earlier when they someone they cited you know examples that they're more familiar with than I am I'm going to you know particular community or community or social groups that realize the kind of you know cross racial class solidarity that they're envisioning I mean is is is is is is is the future one of potential real solidarity in on a political level or is it simply you know or will that be forever for close to us by the need to sort of confront all of the issues that stand in the way of that beforehand so why don't you all respond then we'll open it up for questions yeah so I guess something that's been earnestly sort of frustrating to me about your project is I also think that there are potential alliances to be made among people who are all being kind of screwed over right and when I make arguments against the arguments that I perceive in your journal what I'm trying to do is not condemn anyone who cast a ballot for Trump actually and in fact I'm interested in those people what I am criticizing is the way that I see this journal reacting to that political moment and trying to form an ideology from it that I think is a restaurant of faulty critique and is unproductive and so one element of that that I found in our conversation is it's very clear right that in the last election one coalition was overwhelmingly white and more mail and one was more diverse and somewhat more female right this is not Albert versus Hillary hahaha yes no I wasn't but yeah one of the one of the things that we sort of gathered from this election right was that there are people for whom a somewhat populist message resonates on the left or the right and they can go either way we can we can that's what organizing is that's what political persuasion is people can move left or right and it's our job as political people on the left - hopefully persuade them that this analysis and this course of action is going to be more successful so I think when we talk about political constituencies what's been frustrating for me is it seems like you guys can't see why those coalition's haven't already gotten together there's like nothing standing in the way like why wouldn't they be on the same team and that's confusing to me because it seems so obvious to me and I think almost everybody else and you know I think particularly this comes out and sort of bits and pieces although it's largely not articulated when you talk about constituencies and when you talk about identity politics you refer to the less alliance with urban progressive constituencies that lack real traction wonder who that is but the but but the frustrating thing right is that these sort of slippery alliances are the very work of the left-right it's to put together people who have common interests but not necessarily common backgrounds to struggle against probably capitalism but more often like their landlord and it's frustrating to see that coming from the right there are no overtures like oh you know we would love to have more help from the right on controlling police that would be great go for it do by all means work on that issue that'd be awesome and while we're trying to make it over to you it seems to be very hard but you cannot do it and this is what is so frustrating or you won't make just for a raffle if you let our finisher comment then you can until you are willing to grapple with what America actually looks like on the terms of the people who are not yourselves which is just like a baffling omission from your journal and I think something that the left actually understands very well when we talked about identity politics and I'm so sick of the term what we're saying or you know usually this critics way of describing people but people are saying that my particular group of people is oppressed in this particular way and then other people once they can see that if we're doing good organizing say I want to be in solidarity with you to throw off that oppression and I hope you'll be in solidarity with me and that's how you build stuff right to frame identity politics as a dividing thing that in your words balkanized the country is no way to build any political coalition and until you can see that this coalition that you want can't exist and this is just speaking of coalition's the point about Bernie voters a lot of old white dudes in that mix it's a great disappointment it's a good one a point well taken and I think it points on surprisingly to the strength of our argument because what you see is a campaign that wasn't based on a type of Nationals message of the type that American favors and certainly drove American greatness the blog that preceded this journal was so sympathetic to what you saw with Bernie was an ability to get Trump ich boaters all those old white dudes on board and then alder Jim Lee diverse coalition Bernie carried African Americans under the age of 30 just like he carried in overwhelming numbers white people on age of 30 that was something that defied the stereotype that was presenting the media and that's why I have hope especially as significant as those Trump voters are now they're not getting any younger and if you want to win an election not just in 2020 but in 2030 2040 2050 you need to be looking ahead and when I thinking about the future brings me back to the present and the possible point I made an introduction the consequences of not taking a strong stance on Trump now it's not a choice that it's a choice being thrust upon us and this is if you want to make this alliance you can't avoid that question and what I'm especially worried about for American affairs I mean I start off by saying that one of the things I admired about the journal was you're astute a suit diagnosis of the total corruption of the Republican Party establishment and glad and you point out that this DC infrastructure has been built on a lie essentially this insane notion that the Tea Party just wanted I think it came from a this point the Tea Party was only about the Wall Street Journal editorial board policy right you understand this was a canard that people are telling themselves Republicans didn't understand what their voters wanted though something that's led inevitably to 2016 what I don't want to see happen is you guys make the same mistake about Trump voters now and misinterpret this year in which white people learn to love identity politics as an embrace of nationalism when it was for just operating in a profoundly different register once we have that conversation and can agree on those common facts then we can move forward potentially together but not until then well we've we've spoken against any formation of white identity politics ad infinitum so I won't do it again but I think to some extent it's very puzzling to us because we actually don't care about the Republican Party but you guys still seem to care a lot about the Democratic Party and it's puzzling because we've gone through it and we have seen the incredible disconnect between the rhetoric and the institutions that we're supposed to admire for instance oh you know how great the entrepreneurs are and and things like that but it turns out they're all just a bunch of rent seekers but I think that the left hasn't recognized that you know your heroic regulators are really regulating anything they're just rent seekers too and they're going to go and join the companies that they supposedly regulate as their first chance the ultimate left institutions the universities are engaged in a vicious war against graduate student unionization indeed I've heard it from an employee of Harvard that they're actually waiting for more employees more commissioner's on the NLRB from Republicans before they press the issue and we've gone through all of that with the right institutions and we see what a joke it is and and hopefully maybe you'll see that's a joke too and what this project is not about is not never been about justifying the Trump administration or anything like that it's trying to set out a new version of new vision that leaves all this stuff behind and I think whatever one thinks at Trump he did create this moment or this moment he provoked this moment and we have to try to take advantage of it in a new way and that's what we're trying to do everybody finds a reason not to act politically it seems to me and on the on the on the notional right this consistent of basically intentional strategy of removing the things that they care about namely the market from any kind of political intervention and apparently on the Left what it consists in is not allowing us ever to get to the point that we look at the things that oppress everyone equally in say in favor of setting up a you know relentless series of conflicts that we all have to go through which will end in what you know then we'll get then we'll get to then we'll get to class all eternity again I mean not to dwell on the not to dwell on the Northern Ireland example but you know two years before the good variety agreement you've still got bombs going off in England and bombs going off in Northern Ireland not that not that everything is perfect there but they but they but they at least chose a I mean maybe ironically the left at least and it's in the form of its current spokesman here lacks a sufficient attention to conflict resolution because the strategy that Sarah outlined is basically well before we ever get to addressing the way that currency exchange markets can immediately affect all the possessors of a certain currency first we have to have a block-by-block you know in serie series of not conflict resolution but conflicts and that's the part that amazes me because I mean all that all that I intend to do at least for the moment is call attention to the issues which should have some sort of political political bearing put on them if indeed we live in a democracy and that includes all the issues that all the issues that we've raised and even before you get to the point of saying that you know say our immigration policy should be X or Y first don't you have to have some sort of democratic control over your actual polity which would also go hand in hand with having that with having that polity be able to be able to act with respect to determining what its economic future would be like and so my only concern from the from from the discussion is that is that we shouldn't introduce conflict where there might be some path for conflict resolution and the great thing about conflict resolution is that you still have to acknowledge what the conflict is really quickly really quickly I wanted to make just a quick point of clarification which is that I don't think either me or Tim has any particular position in defensive the Democratic Party and in fact I haven't been accused of patent a long time so thank you for making me seem respectable again and in fact I recently published in article excoriating the president of Harvard University for her labor policies so I don't know if we would recognize those institutions as being of the left and then I would just say to gladden having raised the seemingly innocently the question of why do we have to have all these conflicts why can't we just have unity within the working class men there is historiography I could introduce you to because we've been asking these questions for a while and I think it's it's a comfortable position to be able to ask why can't we have unity within the within the working class that the left has been working on for kind of a while and that we actually have developed some strategies for but has of course been shaped profoundly by America's legacy not just of slavery and anti black racism but of immigration and all of the complicated social forces that shaped the US and it does sound as if you guys might like to come over to the left and learn some stuff like you're new to the terrain we've been working on this show you don't come on over all right thank you so let's open up for questions keep your questions to questions and not statements I will cut you off if you start making declarative statements so let's do three questions at a time you know keep it clean folk you know they're children somewhere maybe watching this but ya know ad hominem attack let's just be decent for thirty minutes okay yeah do you wanna can everyone raise their hands if we have a question I'll point to three I think this calls for progressive stack we'll learn what that is one set it - can you come up and three quote and if your questions directed somebody just mention their name this is not - anybody in particular put it into the American affair son I think there was a question posed earlier which was who's the target audience for your populism and I would ask what is the binding force of your populism so insofar as I can detect something new in the kind of nationalism you're proposing it it mostly seems to be gestural the right these days talks about baudrillard I see Gramsci quoted on the right a lot there is an attack on neoliberalism but what would preserve nationalism this time around if not ethnic or racial identity that didn't preserve civic nationalism the last time it was tried in this country that's the question I'm an anti-abortion socialist Roman Catholic and I'm curious my questions for sarin for Tim at what point would you join a political coalition that was more culturally right-wing or less culturally left-wing let's say more economically left-wing so at what point do the economic questions from the cultural ones for you you know where does that happen how absolute are they how does how does I relate probably had one more on the stack and you would yeah to the american affairs guys you are using the word working-class solidarity I think you even said and I'm really curious what you actually mean by that and to the dissent folks if I may ask you what do you think the value is of rhetorical moral blackmail so on that point it depends on who you're blackmailing on the question of cultural issues verse is economic issues I don't think that politics works that way I think it's impossible to make a statement about something like that in the abstract but to the extent to the left stands for anything that stands for emancipation and that's a battle that's worth fighting and that's not something luckily it's not an issue I think we're going to be presented with anytime soon but there are you probably have more astute commentary on the actual tactics of politics um no I would echo that you of course can't separate them and so it becomes the negotiation right so abortion politics is a perfect example wherein it's often framed as a cultural issue but obviously if I'm forced against my will to bear a child it will upend not only my emotional but my economic life so you know there's always a negotiation I mean this happens less what sorry less on the left and more within the Democratic Party but there's always this negotiation between pro-life democrats and the rest of the party the sort of date haunt that's usually reached is you can hold those politics but you don't impose them on anyone else I mean the those things are are inseparable and I think it often depends on sort of where you stand whether you can see how they're linked up and so of course within any growing coalition and those are actually going to be tension someone sees it as economic someone sees as cultural and you it's it's messy these coalition's are messy but economics and culture are not separate just one follow-up point on that it's just like falling off of like gladdens article which just declared an end to at least one phase of the culture wars it seems like when the left is gaining traction on the subject now isn't the time that we have to start making compromises on that front these are battles that we've already won it doesn't seem likely to go backwards and thinking about American affairs contributor my client and his I'm sure some of the people in this room know he Brits article called the flight 93 election right that came out before the election when kind of viral the thesis of the piece was that in he's in proud Trump supporter he said that in this election you either change the cockpit or you die that the right was in such a tenuous position among other reasons because the left kept on winning these cultural battles so and that's the case I feel like I don't need to get in the way of a good thing what do you mean by me working what do you mean I were solidarity I took that question kind of more in the sense of the binding forces citizenship generally and we can get very philosophical out it but I'm perfectly content to just take legal citizens right now today and a desire to see that the elected American government elected by those citizens actually looks after the interests of those citizens and yes that includes all those citizens but I'm content with just legal American citizenship right now [Music] I don't know if you're a part of the move and I don't know what the movement even is what I'm saying is that the point is that legal citizenship means something more than a formality that it becomes the primary identity if you will and it is the primary basis on which government policy is evaluated as opposed to abstract notions of globalism and so forth yes I guess that helps I just need to know the right cliche but what was what was the other question Oh working class solitary I think glad news they were all altering him but I think it's basically just a sense of a consciousness of more economic issues that unite the entire class as opposed to say cultural divides another issue I yeah I mean the only the only supplement I would add to Julian's first answer is maybe citizens or members of the state and so as long as we have a nation state which we claim has some sort of democratic basis I don't remember who I'm addressing now as long as we have and as long as we have a nation state which claims to have some sort of democratic basis than it should its assert itself and act in the manner that nation states do otherwise we should have we should abolish it and have some other form of political organization another sign that that's fine say I mean but when to laugh when's the last time you heard you heard somebody on the right state that you know I think it's but I don't think any one talks like that actually and and and so if our discussions have made one thing clear it's that often the stakes of political debates are not clear at all and the questioner was very right to pose to pose the question in order to clarify it and the answer is that we have a nation state and either we should continue to have it or we should abolish it but when talk abut we never talked about that so at least left and right can agree that instead we try to dance around it you know by in all in all the ways that politicians do oh and about and then and and about and about what is what is what is working-class solidarity I again do we want people to have jobs and do we want them to have a future which do we want to have a future that ordinary people would want to be a part of I mean there are a lot of things that threaten the very existence of the working class first there are a lot of people who don't work at all and a lot of people who who simply put together strings of part-time jobs in order to try to make a living and there are a lot of people whose jobs are going to be subject to probably some other waves of automation which we are told again in a non in a non-political manner that according to the laws of economics the replacement of people by machines is always good because it simply frees them up to do something else it we have we really have no idea whether that will hold in the next round of automation or not maybe a will or maybe it will maybe it will turn people toward doing all sorts of jobs that they don't actually want to do and that's my answer to the question more questions nope hey I'm industry defining worst class solidarity you talked about legal American citizenship it strikes me that since your journal is based around nationalism that's a kind of cold way to define the project traditionally people who've written about nationalism written about what it means to them and a sort of more romantic level or at least in terms of the values they feel that they can get to you through nationalism specifically what does nationalism mean to you hi I was curious who would you like to see running 2020 open question all right two questions for our friends on on the right so the critique I wonder if you could go a little bit Youngman when you talked about critiquing neoliberalism is that a critique of capitalism and what you know how do you see what do you see is the main prongs of ways to confront some of the problems that you were talking about strings of part-time jobs and all of that sort of stuff around neoliberalism and then when the left or someone who is considered considers myself too leftist I did feel sometimes a little bit uncomfortable with the only calls for building broad solidarity coming from the right and not because I don't understand I do very much understand why we also need to be looking at issues related to gender race ethnicity nationality set but I would like you to speak a little bit more about class and where you see that fitting in and how to build class solidarity in a way that perhaps also takes into account a large percentage of the Trump voters come here one more question ma'am I think we should always whine nationalism is important is that the right way to say it just to think about how do you think nationalism both practically and symbolically is significant or insignificant or will be so just to discuss Nationals a little bit more specifically how do you think similarly sure oh sorry so is your critique of neoliberalism also critique of capitalism and how do what are some suggested fixes for neoliberalism yeah basically it is but I do think one area the right might be helpful to the left is we do have to understand the reality and I think a lot of the left does but what we're confronting is not Adam Smith 18th century capitalism I have called it managerialism you know there are other names for it but it's a very peculiar form of corporate capitalism in which the multinational corporation becomes in a way the more powerful body than the sovereign state leading to all the things that we discussed previously and of course there's a lot of different policies I guess the only thing I would you know aside from the traditional welfare state items that we've already sort of discussed and endorsed I do think there are some you know the one area that may be the right might be a little bit helpful is understanding much like how the right has done and that just because something is a corporation and private sector doesn't mean it's creative and helpful in the same way I think sometimes the left has relied too much on sort of nonprofit litigation and kind of an expert technical technocrat driven attempt to curb these organizations actually only ends up making them stronger and really the only way to do it ends up and I apologize for retreating into cliches again but in the interest of time a more sort of democratic popular populist base reposition of these issues as a way to to restore some of the things we want the most I was just going to say for those who are asking questions on nationalism as far as I can tell the only recent political assertion of nationalism was not actually the American campaign of 2016 but brexit and the best article on brexit was published in dissent magazine about a year ago called the left case for brexit which is also a piece which is not driven by sort of romantic assertions of you know cloudy visions of what being British really ought to mean but about a very practical question that if one has any political goals be they left political goals or right political goals Britain's membership in a political institution which was designed to impart to remove political issues from popular processes of decision making then the initial way to respond to that is through reasserting political sovereignty and so I refer you to that article some solidarity well so yes we'll take the clicks thank you for that gladden on the point of actually before I talk about solidarity which I do want to get to just one a second well point out to Julius it's like yes we're with you on the limits of liberal technocracy and the efficacy of like leading in as a solution the class struggle or any problem where it's actually addressing like this is a conversation that we've been having on our side for quite a while and something that again was one reasons why I thought this is a conversation that would be worth having for us on the point across on the point of class solidarity and the insert bring interpreters and really sort of like the aversion in point that gladden and Julius I think you guys made in different capacities as well sort of aversion to dividing a coalition before you've actually built one point taken on this conversation that we're having tonight isn't the type of conversation that we always need to have there are different moments locally where you focus on different issues I'll just say that for me politically one of the most decisive moments of my formation though it came pretty late in the game was occupied and we are the 99% and in terms of mobilizing a coalition that is trying to bring in as broad a group as possible ninety nine percent seems like a pretty hefty number to me and again this is not now a cure-all we don't have an occupy president right now but if we're we don't I also don't think we need to go that far look into that just in the corner to find models of potential strategies that could be very effective yeah and um we're supposed to say who we want in 2020 do you have a good one for that I think well I say I think one lesson to take from 2016 is that you shouldn't it's too far ahead about these things my initial reaction is like Oh God and you want that Chelsea but I will say that seems like the DNC has made sure that keith Ellison is going to have a lot of free time on his hands which could be interesting yes that's a good idea on neoliberalism and capitalism I would say yes for us also this is a critique of capitalism certainly and I guess probably in one minute I will not attempt to give my full analysis of I capitalism's bad but I will say that sort of touching on the things we've discussed today beyond expropriating the wealth of people who do the work something that capitalism does is impoverish our community lives by making sure no one has time to do anything except to work it sucks and it's like a shitty way to be human and so there's an effective level of this as well and one that plays into a lot of the community questions we're discussing which capitalism is incompatible with and on the class question I think that's a great question and I was actually feeling a bit that way myself because we're usually having these debates with liberals and so we're the ones talking about class the entire time and they're telling us that you know whatever leaning in is good and it happens but but so I I'm glad that you raised it and something that I think a lot of people on the left are thinking about in something that we frequently argue about with liberals you know there's a lot of I think admittedly terrible rhetoric from liberals during the election about how you know those coal miners were going to get their comeuppance when they realize that their Trump candidate was actually going to cut their health insurance and that's disgusting and I want to be clear that that's disgusting and so something on the left that we have to think a lot about is so if you take coal miners as an example coal mining is extremely hard work that is bad for your health and one of the reasons it's so bad for your health and for the environment is that it's run by a bunch of capitalists who are incredibly irresponsible and abusive towards their workforce and so something that's interesting project for the left right now and there's a lot of new thinking on this is how do we make an energy transition that's compatible with climate change and the larger sort of like global issues that we face and is beneficial to the workers who are through no fault of their own are going to have to make a job transition of some kind how do we how do we make sure those people have money and work if they won't work I care more about giving people money than work but and that's a that's absolutely crucial for what building the coalition is going to look like and what the policy agenda of that coalition is any candidates you'd like to throw out there nominating for 2020 I'm not going to name any specific individuals because I don't want to doom their campaign immediately but I would like to see a candidate and I don't care who it is I don't care which party they're in but that understands the underlying issues that played out in different ways in both the Trump and Sanders campaign and you understand the good parts of that and what what unites them and is able to focus on a radically different politics that deals with the challenges and face now rather than refighting and re-litigating the battles of 1990s that don't even matter anymore so Kanye 2020 okay he's a friend of Trump so maybe yeah sure mm-hmm let's do two more questions really short ones anybody what and the time Oh we'd you know Mike Rosario sorry you want to answer to the nationalism question yeah do they not answer it just an actual office the straight-up question what is national doesn't mean to you forget the fact that the personnel Skiing of the British accent don't need to know about break okay what is national thank you I suspect gladden had that answer he would have given that answer no matter who asked the question because it's the SA is just that good oh but I actually do I want to echo his point I want to actually state I I don't want to get into all of these cultural it flourishes about nationalism I think that actually is where nationalism can go very astray as we saw with German nationalism which got into the very romantic elements in soon of course much worse I think it's much better to simply focus on the real practice practical sort of Anglo American British sense of the nationalism which tends to be very concrete very simple very very pragmatic and that's that's the vision I have maybe you can have to follow that door words okay shoot two quick questions hi I have a question for Julius and you mentioned Sanders and I wanted to know what were your what what do you think the limitations of his campaign way ok one more I guess my question is uh you know one of the reasons uh you know everyone on this dais obviously our you know dedicated to to real inquiry and one of the reasons Trump was elected is because he doesn't sit on on panels like this and because he is not done question question which arm so my question is how do we how do we form like a politics that can really kind of get the narrative back to things that are grounded in like actual reality and that can't be kind of just just dismissed so kind of quickly how do we bring credibility and back into the political realm okay so let's start with Sanders or the limitations of this campaign I think his biggest limitation is running in the Democratic Party which is too strong to be taken over by an outsider as the Republican of the Republican was too weak to resist one and and how do we how do we refocus I have no idea but I think it doesn't make sense to kind of be two pair I mean people ask me all the time you know what if this fails and stuff and it's like I don't care it's still worth doing so just the only way to do it is if we actually start doing it and sort of get out of these conventions and I know that's probably the the most kind of dreamy left this thing I'll ever say but here's the place to do it I guess but I don't know any other way and if we worry about it we'll never do it yeah just in terms of like private having a grand of politics providing plausible solutions to problems that people face in their everyday life like that's what politics should always be about and then linking the practical solutions to larger visions of social change and actually this is I'll be brief about this but the point that I've worried about with the American Affairs project where I think that technocracy and populism share more in common than the analysis so far has allowed I think that they're two sides of a really shitty coin and that a properly functioning democracy would have a place for an option that was better than either of those and I think that building a coherent ideological politics which is something that it's obviously a concern of intense than issue of intense concern for us that's what democracy at its best can look like and that's a project that we in our non running for office capacities are dedicating ourselves to yeah I mean I assume that you are here because you think it's worthwhile and want to debate these questions because they feel urgent and it's certainly our you know part of our job to to sort of at least try to facilitate that I mean I I think in terms of creating narratives that resonate with people to refer back to occupy actually something that sort of charmed me that that happened during that time was previously people had not talked a lot about their their personal debt and it was a subject of a lot of shame it's still a subject of a lot of shame and one of the small bits of occupy was this tumblr that someone made where people were posting pictures of themselves holding up signs that said their debt on it you know like fifty thousand dollars of medical debt and holding it up or holding it up in front of their face some people you know really were ashamed and it created the idea of debt as a collective problem instead of an individual problem it's not your fault and that was an incredible renovation in our politics at that time and had it had a tremendous emotional effect on a lot of people I think and has only grown since and what we saw with the Sanders campaign some of what resonated was actually speaking to those realities in a really blunt way without euphemism you know you're in debt rich people took your money from you and you should have free college because you're a person you should be educated you should be able to flirt and that's the sort of practicality combined with a vision that I think Tim is talking about and that I think we hope to pursue and that is really a community in itself the pursuit of those goals so I'm not sure I'm not sure in retrospect that this has become a point of confusion but populism is not the description with populism in the title we'll announce our picture the populism like the title was populism in the age of Trump that is not translated as American Affairs in the age of Trump populism is a phenomenon it's not the campaign a platform per se of every article in the issue of every article in our issues you know which have you know diverse subject matter and I I don't I don't I don't see the yeah I don't see for example the phenomenon of populism in the very you know complicated discussion of how electricity markets work in issue two so I at some point at some point I feel that term got disconnected from you know its place as a political phenomenon in the US and Europe during an age of you know during the current stage of sort of neoliberal political hegemony and God applied to us and so secondly in response to the question I which I take to be the what do we do question there was an early and there was an earlier remark that well maybe these guys are just throwing around like names like Baudrillard in order to you know win some sort of you know sympathy with audience but they were there there were two specific parts of Baudrillard project that of course as the way as happens when one reads any political writer as a political person oneself get modify modify and the two parts that the two parts that i take from him and obviously apply in probably different ways but are a better but-but-but are something that I think I share with the left active sense of political possibility is is one which Baudrillard had a relentless diagnosis of all the things that stand in the way of political change whatever that may be and he was a very pessimistic person on that account particularly because of his media theory which is something I'm also interested in we could have a discussion about maybe our next discussion and then and nevertheless through his concept of reversibility a sense that nevertheless some sort of radical political change is actually possible and put and and and how we could how we could say that this I mean there seems to be more evidence for that for that now than ever not only in the American case but also in cases like brexit also even with the triumph of the fanatical center in France through a party which didn't exist a year ago and a and and a by French standards ridiculously lot young presidential candidate so I think a first step you know not speech right is is to attempt to give speeches before diverse audiences consisting of those who are not necessarily ones normal political allies and so I think everyone's done that today okay great thank you to all our panelists the descent in nation to American Affairs the versa I was interesting and thanks to all of you that's it we're done [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Verso Books

Views: 7,193

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: Dissent, American Affairs, Dissent magazine, Julius Krein, Gladdin Pappin, Sarah Leonard, Timothy Shenk, Trump, populism, debate

Id: IF-KMbS6-dk

Length: 103min 30sec (6210 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2017