Central to "Canceling Comedians While the World Burns" is the question of whether the western left wants to win. Watch my 50-minute discussion with the author.
There’s no mystery to what is happening. It’s about dismantling anything and everything that is even remotely tied to individualism. That, above all, is what the left despises.
All of these preposterous dated or vague terms of “corporatism” and “working class” (do wealthy people not work?) obscure the real philosophical difference:
It is either individualism or collectivism.
Socialism is collectivist
Communism is collectivist
Fascism is collectivist
State run mixed economies are collectivist with a pretense of liberty.
The goods and services in all of these centrally planned, dreary, shitty collectivist systems has to come from somewhere. So they allow for just enough pretense of liberty to keep *some* people working for the unearned benefit of others.
But ultimately the phony concern for the “working class” is just that: phony. What the left cannot tolerate is anyone being free of state compulsion. They simply cannot bear it. They have see people subjugated. And the politicians simply use the whole lie as a means to gain, consolidate, and maintain power.
I listened to this while I was cleaning my guns. That struck me to be pretty funny. Were it not for Glenn Greenwald, I would have zero exposure to Ben's new book. I always appreciate a nuanced discussion even if I don't agree with the conclusions. That is the marketplace of ideas in action.
To that end, Ben and Glenn touch on a number of very important issues. First, the left now exists to uphold the political hierarchy and the centers of power. They are able to maintain support through signaling on key issues without challenging established norms. This is not unlike the right.
Secondly, they both acknowledge that the left has been coopted by a puritanical brigade of assholes. Political and moral purity has displaced the liberal ethos of the innate human right to self-determination. Curiosity and humility has been replaced with moral certainty.
I was raised in the church but now, I consider myself to be an agnostic because the moral certainty for atheism and orthodox religion is too much to swallow. I choose the side of humility. I know what I don't know.
I am definitely not good or moral enough to be on team blue. I am not a proponent of a welfare state but the constant drone of moralism on the left is what makes me want to vomit. It is like an insidious virus that has infected every political issue.
It is just as creepy as it was on the religious right. I'm okay with going to hell if the religious left is who I can expect to find in heaven.
Is all the same yeah that leads to poverty, tyranny and death. The materialistic, secular leftists have no creed other than absolute power. Government is their god and they brook no opposition or apostasy to their creed.
Sounds interesting. I will listen. My husband and I were once upon a time left-leaning activists. We saw the 'left' turning into Pol Pot. So we ran far and fast. (Maybe it has always been Pol Pot, we were just too blind to see it.) I actually think populism is both left and right. It's all about the people, or it should be, as opposed to the neo-cons, the neo-libs and corporations. Amy has some interesting things to say about the left.
Well. I was so excited to listen and excited to read the book. But after listening to Ben speaking I don't want to, even though I would be happy for lots of "leftists" to do so. Besides his being boring (never you Glenn, never you) Ben showed his true stripe when he said that having built bridges (paraphrasing) we can "hope their attitudes will improve". This is just the kind of throwaway but revealing comment that makes people want to run in the opposite direction. Unconsciously he turns out to be the same kind of snobby ideologue he is trying to speak to in his book, who secretly or not so secretly agree with HIllary that "they" are "deplorables." This is especially interesting as he brought up the trans issues a couple of times and, in addition, the reaction and failure of the left when Bernie touted his endorsement by Joe Rogan. He didn't connect the two. Yet Rogan is hated because he has expressed concern about children and teens transitioning and I believe may also have heterodox ideas about women's sports. Is he one of the people Ben hopes will "improve" their attitudes? It seems to me Ben is coming from the same place as the rest of the Left in the Democratic Party without even knowing how what he says is heard by non ideological leftists and independents who want to free Assange but may also be pro girls and women or not want their children called racists.
Trump’s 2016 electoral victory broke many leftist brains. Some very intelligent people just couldn’t wrap their heads around it, and even though Trump has been out of the White House for 6 months, a lot them still haven’t recovered.
You really should get over it. Trump came and went, and yet we still have all our endless wars, upward wealth redistribution, crumbling infrastructure, record-breaking student debt, massive military spending, homelessness, environmental degradation, climbing CO2 levels, nuclear war threat, a hollowed-out industrial base, and no health care for millions.
Jacobin? Bernie Fucking Sanders? Hilarious. This is the pseudo left you are mischaracterizing here. This further marginalizes the actual left by association with a fake socialist who supports of our war crimes complex. Sanders has voted for hundreds of billions in "defense" spending and runs away when challenged on his pathetic take on the terrorist state of Israel. This false conflation by smart people like Glenn Greenwald and Caitlin Johnstone and the like is extremely stupid... unless the goal is to erase the actual left. Greenwald claims AOC is of the left, for instance. This is a right wing talking point... just like calling Sanders a Marxist. AOC is a shit lib sellout everyday DemocRAT(ick) politician, not a a leftist. Glad I could help.
Your question of “ whether there is more overlap than people realize between the populist or anti-establishment wings of the left and the right,” is on point, as demonstrated by the fact of how surprisingly often I, a former liberal and now conservative, agree with your positions. Intellectually honest and open-minded persons of both left and right must have SOME shared ground because neither human nature nor physical reality care about our politics, and the payback for ignoring either (usually both) of them is a bitch.
What Burgis is seeing is what I call the angst of the bourgeois socialist. These are people who come from a more privileged background usually petti-bourgeois where they are somewhat protected from the day to day struggle of working class families. They have been inculcated with bourgeois values in growing up and they undergo a political awakening in which they reject these bourgeois values without having a clear analytical framework for doing so. In breaking with the bourgeois values they need affirmation. So they might look in the mirror and decide they are white, and therefore suffer from white privilege. And of course they look at you and say you suffer from white privilege. Therefore you should undertake a guilt laden regime to purge yourself of this. All of this has zero appeal to ordinary people who are struggling to cope with the hand they have been dealt by capitalism. Many ordinary people reject this “left” attitude.
DSA and leaders like AOC don’t always deal with this. For example they will publish some white guilt piece written by someone but will never publish anything that asks the question “why weren’t you self proclaimed socialists able to take the Bernie campaign and turn it into a mass movement?”
The ability to accept criticism and analysis is fundamental to any political organization, right left or center. If you get locked into “who are you” and identity politics and are you one of us then you can never move forward.
I attribute much of this bourgeois correctness on the left to not learning from the past and frankly to social democratic leanings of DSA in which participants think they can convince capitalism to turn over a new leaf by getting everyone to accept their cultural values. Not goin to work and never has.
The ruling class uses divide and conquer and we know that now. Both sides should be able to recognize and agree on that at least. The ruling class owns both brands of corporate media which talk almost nonstop about wedge issues and identity politics to gin up differences. Corporate media ignores important news about financial, investment, trade and tax policies which affect the standard of living of the 99% and corporate profits of the 1%. We're not supposed to concern ourselves with that boring stuff, and yet it affects our daily lives profoundly.
If the medium is the message and the medium is a corporate medium, then we should know what to expect from the message: ruling class corporate bullshit. The content of the corporate media is disguised as entertainment but the character of the message divides, brainwashes and confuses us. The news is confounding and confusing and that's on purpose, but the ruling class is not confused, they know what they're doing. The real news is that you are being fleeced and you're not supposed to know about that.
We need to recognize that we are being played. The tactic is to divide us and enrage us and so we should do exactly the opposite. AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene can go fight in the mud but the adults need to talk. Calm down and find some unity against "divide and conquer".
Sad this conversation produces only traditional left-right argumentation.
Yes to the right: any powerful state represents a threat of overreach and corruption. But it is no less true that there will always be a de facto state, whether we vote on it or it’s the king’s (or oligarchs’) mercenaries.
Yes to the left: if the state prioritizes the general welfare and a healthy unregulated dialectic, we could accomplish anything. But humans clearly struggle there as a historical rule.
So here we are. We have an authoritative state (as the right notes) controlled by private capital (as the left notes), and it, along with its functionaries in the media and elsewhere, keep us fighting one another while our current state raids our resources and tightens the chains.
Glenn, as always I am delighted with the quality of your journalism, being able to bring interesting guests for the interview, your talent to select one of the most burning current issues and your courage to honestly explore it regardless of how inconvenient or even dangerous such exploration could be for you personally.
This time, however, I am afraid you and your guest were looking for answers in the wrong corner. Having lived in USSR for the first 25 years of my life I can attest first hand that the perpetual search for someone to cancel (aka oppressor aka a new purge target aka "enemy of the people") is not a phenomenon coincidental to a few particular implementations of victorious socialism. Instead, it is the essense of the victorious socialism, its fundamental enabling feature.
You see, the fundamental issue of the victorious socialism is that the wealth redistribution (aka "expropriation of the expropriators") can only work once (and only if corruption among the victors is at most moderate -- which it never is -- but for the sake of argument let's assume it is "this one time"). After that first flimsy "success" in handing out little something to those ruled to be entitled to it, it invariably turns out that the free dough is over and nobody wants to bother to dutifully deliver qualify goods and services when they may be redistributed / shamed / rules of the game changed arbitrarily. Then the victorious leaders of the socialist party or movement instantly get in trouble with their entitled followers. Should the leaders happen to be so naive as to tell those followers the new order does not work for them as they feel it should simply because they don't put in enough effort in constructive activities, they are immediately and violently replaced. The new generation of the leaders come to the same situation and the cycle repeats until a not-so-naive leader comes to power who understands the drill -- which is the necessity to permanently search for the next oppressor who ate everbody's pie.
Because the socialism is not YET fully victorious in US, you guys have not seen the funniest part yet (and God Forbids that you and I actually get to witness it). It is convenient to think that the cases of intolerance and cancellation you observe are the temporary abominations of the "democratic" socialism or its, speaking figuratively, schoolyard illnesses. In reality these are actually weak glimpses of things to come, all having one common cause: a very human desire of each member of the entitled majority to distinguish themselves, get recognized and respected, get "what's theirs" in a society where "becoming filthy rich" is a prohibited or "despicable" goal (or where it is made virtually unachievable by a network of perpetually and arbitrarily changing game rules).
Now, I think I understand why you and Ben Burgis may be so puzzled with these "illogical" cancellations you have observed recently. I think both of you are bright, smart and hard-working individuals. You certainly might have come through some hostility and struggle but you are unlikely to be in a mood of a loser who is trying to get what's rightfully theirs by finding the next oppressor or an expropriator to expropriate. Unfortunately, you are in a small minority among the people for whom the socialism is supposed to "work". Please portray in your mind a typical person who is hoping to benefit from socialism, then add to it your best shot at the picture of the victorious socialiasm and try to imagine what such a person will feel, think and do when the today's "oppressors" have all been defeated and their wealth redistributed / expropriated but the person still feels they did not get enough out of it (is it ever enough?). Try to honestly answer for yourself a question: "What will such a person then do?". Will they work hard to create goods and deliver services for other members of the society and come to terms if / when they don't get the expected (by them) reward from it?
Or, having smelt the blood (having gotten the "redistributed" goodies) once they will be looking for any reason or a pretext to purge / cancel / expropriate the next better-off victim (sorry, "an oppressor") they can think of? Remember, in absense of undefeated "filthy riches" the next enemy will likely be the individual who got rewarded / recognized / respected in the previous round regardless of how that happened -- via inherited wealth / birth privilege, personal talents, hard work, having been ruled entitled or a combination of the above.
I think both you and Ben Burgis recently felt these gentle trial bites but did not know them for what they were (a mundane dirty fight for power -- which is at this stage a power to have voice, suppress your voices and control the narrative -- at that the actual narrative or its usefulness for "common victory" is not important as it is the means, not a goal). Your surprise is understandable given where you, and especially Ben, see yourself on the political spectrum and how much you have been doing to advance democratic socialism. For a good student of the History of Socialism, however, what's happening is not a riddle at all. Being at the very left of the political spectrum or even being a bolshevik did not help Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and numerous others. Being at the ostensibly moderate left did not help Bukharin & Co (of few millions). In fact, their policital views did not matter to their destiny. What mattered was that the beast of victorious socialism, the need for "the masses" to be pointed at new enemies in response to their perpetual question: "Where is MY piece of socialism?".
Glenn, I am Canadian who has come up with these ideas for a new party which combines the populist left and populist right goals. What do you all think?
- Abolish identity politics, abolish critical race theory, discourage ad-hominen attacks from political office
- Legalize weed, mushrooms, cocaine and pardon all non-violent/non-second crime non-dealers
- 30 million population universal health care + private health care / public option + import drugs from safe countries + price transparency + drug price matching with foreign countries + violent felons become ineligible for 3 years after serving sentencing
- Minimum wage tied as a factor to the top salary of the franchise owner and salary of the franchise owner tied to the salary of the top executive of the company
- School choice / Vouchers + Encourage trade school + Make universities co-sign student loans + scholarships based on GPA
- Abolish corporate sponsored mass immigration: immigration of labour ONLY for those who come as students for 4 years (or their retired parents) and work to become permanent residents after 2 years of graduation and 3 years of PR to become American citizens. Non-past students do not get H1B visas. Companies must pay equal pay to immigrants as American nationals. Remove loopholes.
- Voter ID
- Opportunity zones
- Abolish insider trading for congress & senate
- Term limits for congress & senate of 12 years maximum
- Trim the bloat from federal government, trim military budget to make it efficient, fire unneccesary administrative work/bureaucrats, societal issues must be dealt at the state level
For every goal, hire anti-establishment representatives from populist left & populist right to debate and achieve the end goal. For example hire Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, Jared Kushner, Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz to achieve the goal of "Stop forever regime change wars, non-intervention, middle east peace deals".
The irony of the premise of Burgis' title is that we (meaning those populist leftists who financially supported) sent people like Omar, AOC etc. to Congress to act with the urgency required of those recognize, well, the world is burning. The minute we raise our voices in pointing out that they are not doing so, the first to gatekeep are Ben Burgis. If "the world is burning," then holding up the CARES act until monthly $2k checks or one lump $10k check is in it(Looking at YOU, Sen. Sanders), or Force The Vote(looking at YOU, the squadlets), were absolute no-brainers. Alas, for those like Burgis, this is no more than an exercise in high school clique in-crowd identification.
I enjoyed the video. Glenn, your questions were great. They were the ones I wanted to be asked. I especially enjoyed Ben's responses. He really tried to respond with meaningful answers. I feel I learned a lot from this video. Keep up the good work.
There’s no mystery to what is happening. It’s about dismantling anything and everything that is even remotely tied to individualism. That, above all, is what the left despises.
All of these preposterous dated or vague terms of “corporatism” and “working class” (do wealthy people not work?) obscure the real philosophical difference:
It is either individualism or collectivism.
Socialism is collectivist
Communism is collectivist
Fascism is collectivist
State run mixed economies are collectivist with a pretense of liberty.
The goods and services in all of these centrally planned, dreary, shitty collectivist systems has to come from somewhere. So they allow for just enough pretense of liberty to keep *some* people working for the unearned benefit of others.
But ultimately the phony concern for the “working class” is just that: phony. What the left cannot tolerate is anyone being free of state compulsion. They simply cannot bear it. They have see people subjugated. And the politicians simply use the whole lie as a means to gain, consolidate, and maintain power.
I listened to this while I was cleaning my guns. That struck me to be pretty funny. Were it not for Glenn Greenwald, I would have zero exposure to Ben's new book. I always appreciate a nuanced discussion even if I don't agree with the conclusions. That is the marketplace of ideas in action.
To that end, Ben and Glenn touch on a number of very important issues. First, the left now exists to uphold the political hierarchy and the centers of power. They are able to maintain support through signaling on key issues without challenging established norms. This is not unlike the right.
Secondly, they both acknowledge that the left has been coopted by a puritanical brigade of assholes. Political and moral purity has displaced the liberal ethos of the innate human right to self-determination. Curiosity and humility has been replaced with moral certainty.
I was raised in the church but now, I consider myself to be an agnostic because the moral certainty for atheism and orthodox religion is too much to swallow. I choose the side of humility. I know what I don't know.
I am definitely not good or moral enough to be on team blue. I am not a proponent of a welfare state but the constant drone of moralism on the left is what makes me want to vomit. It is like an insidious virus that has infected every political issue.
It is just as creepy as it was on the religious right. I'm okay with going to hell if the religious left is who I can expect to find in heaven.
Socialism-Communism-Progressivism
Is all the same yeah that leads to poverty, tyranny and death. The materialistic, secular leftists have no creed other than absolute power. Government is their god and they brook no opposition or apostasy to their creed.
Sounds interesting. I will listen. My husband and I were once upon a time left-leaning activists. We saw the 'left' turning into Pol Pot. So we ran far and fast. (Maybe it has always been Pol Pot, we were just too blind to see it.) I actually think populism is both left and right. It's all about the people, or it should be, as opposed to the neo-cons, the neo-libs and corporations. Amy has some interesting things to say about the left.
Well. I was so excited to listen and excited to read the book. But after listening to Ben speaking I don't want to, even though I would be happy for lots of "leftists" to do so. Besides his being boring (never you Glenn, never you) Ben showed his true stripe when he said that having built bridges (paraphrasing) we can "hope their attitudes will improve". This is just the kind of throwaway but revealing comment that makes people want to run in the opposite direction. Unconsciously he turns out to be the same kind of snobby ideologue he is trying to speak to in his book, who secretly or not so secretly agree with HIllary that "they" are "deplorables." This is especially interesting as he brought up the trans issues a couple of times and, in addition, the reaction and failure of the left when Bernie touted his endorsement by Joe Rogan. He didn't connect the two. Yet Rogan is hated because he has expressed concern about children and teens transitioning and I believe may also have heterodox ideas about women's sports. Is he one of the people Ben hopes will "improve" their attitudes? It seems to me Ben is coming from the same place as the rest of the Left in the Democratic Party without even knowing how what he says is heard by non ideological leftists and independents who want to free Assange but may also be pro girls and women or not want their children called racists.
Trump’s 2016 electoral victory broke many leftist brains. Some very intelligent people just couldn’t wrap their heads around it, and even though Trump has been out of the White House for 6 months, a lot them still haven’t recovered.
You really should get over it. Trump came and went, and yet we still have all our endless wars, upward wealth redistribution, crumbling infrastructure, record-breaking student debt, massive military spending, homelessness, environmental degradation, climbing CO2 levels, nuclear war threat, a hollowed-out industrial base, and no health care for millions.
Jacobin? Bernie Fucking Sanders? Hilarious. This is the pseudo left you are mischaracterizing here. This further marginalizes the actual left by association with a fake socialist who supports of our war crimes complex. Sanders has voted for hundreds of billions in "defense" spending and runs away when challenged on his pathetic take on the terrorist state of Israel. This false conflation by smart people like Glenn Greenwald and Caitlin Johnstone and the like is extremely stupid... unless the goal is to erase the actual left. Greenwald claims AOC is of the left, for instance. This is a right wing talking point... just like calling Sanders a Marxist. AOC is a shit lib sellout everyday DemocRAT(ick) politician, not a a leftist. Glad I could help.
Your question of “ whether there is more overlap than people realize between the populist or anti-establishment wings of the left and the right,” is on point, as demonstrated by the fact of how surprisingly often I, a former liberal and now conservative, agree with your positions. Intellectually honest and open-minded persons of both left and right must have SOME shared ground because neither human nature nor physical reality care about our politics, and the payback for ignoring either (usually both) of them is a bitch.
What Burgis is seeing is what I call the angst of the bourgeois socialist. These are people who come from a more privileged background usually petti-bourgeois where they are somewhat protected from the day to day struggle of working class families. They have been inculcated with bourgeois values in growing up and they undergo a political awakening in which they reject these bourgeois values without having a clear analytical framework for doing so. In breaking with the bourgeois values they need affirmation. So they might look in the mirror and decide they are white, and therefore suffer from white privilege. And of course they look at you and say you suffer from white privilege. Therefore you should undertake a guilt laden regime to purge yourself of this. All of this has zero appeal to ordinary people who are struggling to cope with the hand they have been dealt by capitalism. Many ordinary people reject this “left” attitude.
DSA and leaders like AOC don’t always deal with this. For example they will publish some white guilt piece written by someone but will never publish anything that asks the question “why weren’t you self proclaimed socialists able to take the Bernie campaign and turn it into a mass movement?”
The ability to accept criticism and analysis is fundamental to any political organization, right left or center. If you get locked into “who are you” and identity politics and are you one of us then you can never move forward.
I attribute much of this bourgeois correctness on the left to not learning from the past and frankly to social democratic leanings of DSA in which participants think they can convince capitalism to turn over a new leaf by getting everyone to accept their cultural values. Not goin to work and never has.
The ruling class uses divide and conquer and we know that now. Both sides should be able to recognize and agree on that at least. The ruling class owns both brands of corporate media which talk almost nonstop about wedge issues and identity politics to gin up differences. Corporate media ignores important news about financial, investment, trade and tax policies which affect the standard of living of the 99% and corporate profits of the 1%. We're not supposed to concern ourselves with that boring stuff, and yet it affects our daily lives profoundly.
If the medium is the message and the medium is a corporate medium, then we should know what to expect from the message: ruling class corporate bullshit. The content of the corporate media is disguised as entertainment but the character of the message divides, brainwashes and confuses us. The news is confounding and confusing and that's on purpose, but the ruling class is not confused, they know what they're doing. The real news is that you are being fleeced and you're not supposed to know about that.
We need to recognize that we are being played. The tactic is to divide us and enrage us and so we should do exactly the opposite. AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene can go fight in the mud but the adults need to talk. Calm down and find some unity against "divide and conquer".
Sad this conversation produces only traditional left-right argumentation.
Yes to the right: any powerful state represents a threat of overreach and corruption. But it is no less true that there will always be a de facto state, whether we vote on it or it’s the king’s (or oligarchs’) mercenaries.
Yes to the left: if the state prioritizes the general welfare and a healthy unregulated dialectic, we could accomplish anything. But humans clearly struggle there as a historical rule.
So here we are. We have an authoritative state (as the right notes) controlled by private capital (as the left notes), and it, along with its functionaries in the media and elsewhere, keep us fighting one another while our current state raids our resources and tightens the chains.
So what are WE going to do about it?
Glenn, as always I am delighted with the quality of your journalism, being able to bring interesting guests for the interview, your talent to select one of the most burning current issues and your courage to honestly explore it regardless of how inconvenient or even dangerous such exploration could be for you personally.
This time, however, I am afraid you and your guest were looking for answers in the wrong corner. Having lived in USSR for the first 25 years of my life I can attest first hand that the perpetual search for someone to cancel (aka oppressor aka a new purge target aka "enemy of the people") is not a phenomenon coincidental to a few particular implementations of victorious socialism. Instead, it is the essense of the victorious socialism, its fundamental enabling feature.
You see, the fundamental issue of the victorious socialism is that the wealth redistribution (aka "expropriation of the expropriators") can only work once (and only if corruption among the victors is at most moderate -- which it never is -- but for the sake of argument let's assume it is "this one time"). After that first flimsy "success" in handing out little something to those ruled to be entitled to it, it invariably turns out that the free dough is over and nobody wants to bother to dutifully deliver qualify goods and services when they may be redistributed / shamed / rules of the game changed arbitrarily. Then the victorious leaders of the socialist party or movement instantly get in trouble with their entitled followers. Should the leaders happen to be so naive as to tell those followers the new order does not work for them as they feel it should simply because they don't put in enough effort in constructive activities, they are immediately and violently replaced. The new generation of the leaders come to the same situation and the cycle repeats until a not-so-naive leader comes to power who understands the drill -- which is the necessity to permanently search for the next oppressor who ate everbody's pie.
Because the socialism is not YET fully victorious in US, you guys have not seen the funniest part yet (and God Forbids that you and I actually get to witness it). It is convenient to think that the cases of intolerance and cancellation you observe are the temporary abominations of the "democratic" socialism or its, speaking figuratively, schoolyard illnesses. In reality these are actually weak glimpses of things to come, all having one common cause: a very human desire of each member of the entitled majority to distinguish themselves, get recognized and respected, get "what's theirs" in a society where "becoming filthy rich" is a prohibited or "despicable" goal (or where it is made virtually unachievable by a network of perpetually and arbitrarily changing game rules).
Now, I think I understand why you and Ben Burgis may be so puzzled with these "illogical" cancellations you have observed recently. I think both of you are bright, smart and hard-working individuals. You certainly might have come through some hostility and struggle but you are unlikely to be in a mood of a loser who is trying to get what's rightfully theirs by finding the next oppressor or an expropriator to expropriate. Unfortunately, you are in a small minority among the people for whom the socialism is supposed to "work". Please portray in your mind a typical person who is hoping to benefit from socialism, then add to it your best shot at the picture of the victorious socialiasm and try to imagine what such a person will feel, think and do when the today's "oppressors" have all been defeated and their wealth redistributed / expropriated but the person still feels they did not get enough out of it (is it ever enough?). Try to honestly answer for yourself a question: "What will such a person then do?". Will they work hard to create goods and deliver services for other members of the society and come to terms if / when they don't get the expected (by them) reward from it?
Or, having smelt the blood (having gotten the "redistributed" goodies) once they will be looking for any reason or a pretext to purge / cancel / expropriate the next better-off victim (sorry, "an oppressor") they can think of? Remember, in absense of undefeated "filthy riches" the next enemy will likely be the individual who got rewarded / recognized / respected in the previous round regardless of how that happened -- via inherited wealth / birth privilege, personal talents, hard work, having been ruled entitled or a combination of the above.
I think both you and Ben Burgis recently felt these gentle trial bites but did not know them for what they were (a mundane dirty fight for power -- which is at this stage a power to have voice, suppress your voices and control the narrative -- at that the actual narrative or its usefulness for "common victory" is not important as it is the means, not a goal). Your surprise is understandable given where you, and especially Ben, see yourself on the political spectrum and how much you have been doing to advance democratic socialism. For a good student of the History of Socialism, however, what's happening is not a riddle at all. Being at the very left of the political spectrum or even being a bolshevik did not help Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and numerous others. Being at the ostensibly moderate left did not help Bukharin & Co (of few millions). In fact, their policital views did not matter to their destiny. What mattered was that the beast of victorious socialism, the need for "the masses" to be pointed at new enemies in response to their perpetual question: "Where is MY piece of socialism?".
Glenn, I am Canadian who has come up with these ideas for a new party which combines the populist left and populist right goals. What do you all think?
- Freedom & Liberty Workers Party
- Free speech absolutist: pardon Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Ross Ulbricht, Kyle Lamar Myers and others from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whistleblowers
- Big Tech/Corporations/Banks with over 1 million daily active users in the USA should be declared public utilities
- Right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Abolish the ATF.
- Stop forever regime change wars, non-intervention, middle east peace deals
- Abolish identity politics, abolish critical race theory, discourage ad-hominen attacks from political office
- Legalize weed, mushrooms, cocaine and pardon all non-violent/non-second crime non-dealers
- 30 million population universal health care + private health care / public option + import drugs from safe countries + price transparency + drug price matching with foreign countries + violent felons become ineligible for 3 years after serving sentencing
- Minimum wage tied as a factor to the top salary of the franchise owner and salary of the franchise owner tied to the salary of the top executive of the company
- School choice / Vouchers + Encourage trade school + Make universities co-sign student loans + scholarships based on GPA
- Abolish corporate sponsored mass immigration: immigration of labour ONLY for those who come as students for 4 years (or their retired parents) and work to become permanent residents after 2 years of graduation and 3 years of PR to become American citizens. Non-past students do not get H1B visas. Companies must pay equal pay to immigrants as American nationals. Remove loopholes.
- Voter ID
- Opportunity zones
- Abolish insider trading for congress & senate
- Term limits for congress & senate of 12 years maximum
- Trim the bloat from federal government, trim military budget to make it efficient, fire unneccesary administrative work/bureaucrats, societal issues must be dealt at the state level
For every goal, hire anti-establishment representatives from populist left & populist right to debate and achieve the end goal. For example hire Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, Jared Kushner, Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz to achieve the goal of "Stop forever regime change wars, non-intervention, middle east peace deals".
Glenn YOU KNOW BETTER.
The Left's Political Culture is NOT Alienating, it's NEO-LIBERAL Culture that's Alienating and the Neo-Liberals ARE NOT FUCKING LEFT.
Please stop with this redefinition, Glenn... YOU KNOW BETTER.
The irony of the premise of Burgis' title is that we (meaning those populist leftists who financially supported) sent people like Omar, AOC etc. to Congress to act with the urgency required of those recognize, well, the world is burning. The minute we raise our voices in pointing out that they are not doing so, the first to gatekeep are Ben Burgis. If "the world is burning," then holding up the CARES act until monthly $2k checks or one lump $10k check is in it(Looking at YOU, Sen. Sanders), or Force The Vote(looking at YOU, the squadlets), were absolute no-brainers. Alas, for those like Burgis, this is no more than an exercise in high school clique in-crowd identification.
I enjoyed the video. Glenn, your questions were great. They were the ones I wanted to be asked. I especially enjoyed Ben's responses. He really tried to respond with meaningful answers. I feel I learned a lot from this video. Keep up the good work.