Trade Wars As Social Wars with Benjamin Studebaker

0:00Gerilim Welcome to Varnblog. Hello and welcome to Varnblog and today Benjamin Studeveca has returned and we are talking about a couple things we are going to start out with his article recently in Isonomia Quarterly

1:05but just a reminder of his prior works he wrote the Chronic Crisis of American Democracy, the way it shut and 2023 and then legitimacy in liberal democracies and 2024 which is now I think finally out in an affordable paperback version and this is handgintrally related to those topics but only tendentially I wanted to get you on to talk about geopolitics trade wars, social tension and then maybe launch off from that to talk about contemporary domestic politics. So in your in your piece for Isonomia Quarterly you explore how economic friction is being recontextualized and partially weaponized in modern geopolitics and that the trade disputes between the United States

2:06and global allies are not really just economic disagreements or to to put it in another way all economic disagreements are downstream of geopolitics because geopolitics is downstream of microeconomics macroeconomics not micro but big economics. Do you agree with that contention by the way that this is you know that the that a lot of these geopolitical tensions are economic but the way that they're being sold to the general public is completely misleading and the framing is just frankly wrong. Yeah there's discontent with the way the global trade system works. You know there's at the level of the world trade organization in particular which the United States is gradually disabled by blocking appointments to the WTO appellate body. It has made the WTO unable to hear trade disputes and therefore unable to enforce its own rules and that's a policy

3:11which sort of started with Obama and refusing to reappoint a couple of specific people on the grounds that he felt that they had ruled unfavorably against US interests and then Donald Trump in the first term refused to appoint anybody to the WTO appellate body and then Biden continued that policy and so now when there's a trade dispute there has to be some other way of trying to adjudicate it and the United States is tended to prefer bilateral discussions whereas the European Union and many of the allied states have tried to construct a replacement arbitrating party the multi-party interim arbitration arrangement but many states have refused to join that body and so that body is not really able to function in the way that the WTO appellate body was. So one of the things that you pointed out that this means US allies have actually been in a kind of bizarre holding pattern where they don't have a lot of actual sovereignty for geopolitical movement.

4:15They might have some sovereignty for domestic movement and their domestic production but they can't really do a lot geopolitically and because energy politics is downstream of geopolitics it also constrains their domestic politics in a very real way and you've really pointed out this is intensified under the Second Trump administration where the US is aggressively demanding allies make contributions to the global public goods by purchasing American weapons and liquefied national gas. There's been a lot of pushback on that but that has meant that actually NATO member states in Europe that are not the US have agreed to drastically scope up their military spending which was originally the goal in the first place if you go back to the first Trump administration that was stated explicitly. So you seem to think that this is actually playing into US hands and this is actually part of what the US wants. Yeah part of the strategy with the

5:19Europeans is to have them legitimate what the United States wants by framing it as anti-American policy. What the United States wants is framed as something which will increase your European autonomy. So back in the first Trump administration a lot of EU member states were only spending about 1% of GDP on defense even though the NATO requirement was 2%. And over the course of the first Trump and then Biden administrations European states were compelled to meet the 2% target with continuous pressure from the United States on the issue of Ukraine. If the Europeans want the United States to stay engaged with Ukraine then the Europeans have got to make their contribution and meet the NATO defense spending target. As these states were all getting up to around 2% and Germany still hadn't quite made it there it was at I think 1.9% in 2024. The United States said okay now we need to raise the NATO defense spending requirement to 3.5% on route to an eventual target of

6:235% of GDP. So just as soon as the Europeans meet the old 2% target the Gulf O's move on them. And Spain is the only state in NATO that has not signed on to these new targets. All the rest have done so. And they're now framing this defense spending as a way of increasing policy autonomy from the United States. But none of them are quitting NATO so they're all doing it within the framework of the NATO command structure. And they're legitimating it on the grounds that the United States poses a threat to them. So there's this deep irony in the policy because it's exactly what successive U.S. presidents at both parties have been wanting them to do. And indeed it goes above and beyond but the Americans have been asking for for years. I think this is actually interesting because one of the things that it becomes immediately obvious to me is that while this is often framed as a deviation under Trump from traditional American policy. This has been a consistent American demand intention

7:26at least since the end of the well the nominal end of the global war and terror. So since the Second Obama administration. And I find this fascinating. I guess one thing to ask I mean you're not European I'm not either but do you think the Europeans know that they're that they are doing this? Is this is this like a domestic selling point where they know they're complying to U.S. officials but are have figured out a way to frame it as anti-U.S. or is it really an ideological Brian spot? The European leadership knows the European leadership has a you know many Prime Ministers and so on have explicitly said that they're making these commitments and that they have to find a way to get the public on board with these commitments even though the public doesn't understand the depth of entanglement with the United States. The you know the British in

8:26particular I can't remember who it was but somebody in the last couple of weeks who's quite important said that the public doesn't understand the degree to which the entire British system is embedded within the American system at this point in ways that cannot be undone such that no matter what Trump does it can't really be in the UK strategic interest to disentangle at the level of the military and the security apparatus. And that I think has been the agenda for the Europeans for quite a while has been to keep the United States engaged in Europe in part for the purposes of deterring the Russians in part for the purposes of preventing the Europeans from potentially having to cover their own defense spending and manage their own internal security affairs. It's difficult European politics to legitimate say the creation of a European army. That's something that many European leaders have been interested in but they haven't been able to do politically. And if they're ever going to be able to do that it will be by pretending that

9:30a European army is a counter power to the United States. But you know in your article you basically say this is an illusion of a possible euro-gallism you know of return to you know this Macron era I mean Macron like Macron trying to bring up the specter of the gall and it's both farcical but also it's not just farcical in the sense that they don't intend to do it it's that it has at least three stops it to benefits to the United States. One of which is despite calls for more military integration with you know and arms trade with China that that's been relatively limited and NATO's not really seriously pursuing it but other things have been did it would improve the balance of trade between Europe and the United States is at least on paper which would give

10:34the GOP if not a real at least a nominal economic win that it would subsidize the growth of the US military industrial base without requiring more domestic tax hikes which is what the tariffs have been a backdoor way to do here and that it would actually really pressure on the US federal budget the way the Marshall plan did facilitating those tax cuts that Trump liked so much and leaving Europe at a massive tax disadvantage for economic growth so why do you think this is this is persuasive to so many people because to me it's like transparently a bad deal yeah I think the Europeans feel that they're not going to be able to move forward with the Americanizing neoliberal reforms that they were looking to do after 2008 without creating a different kind of physical situation

11:35and so if you make your budget more like an American budget then that will entail certain logics with regard to reform of the public services cutting of welfare benefits so increasing defense spending puts physical pressure on all other programs that makes it easier to make your opinion society and your opinion budgets look more American but for precisely that reason historically the European left has opposed increases in military spending and in the piece I give a few different examples of prominent European leaders who've been quoted saying if you increase military spending it's going to lead to an erosion of the social state and then this is going to lead to the spread of right wing movements in Europe it's been said continuously across many different national contexts for more than 50 years right but if you can convince people to raise defense spending on the grounds that this is necessary to keep out the Russians and that it's necessary to give you insurance against a volatile and untrustworthy united states then all of this can be achieved and it can facilitate the Americanizing of the European continent

12:39actually in the name of resisting precisely that process I think the first quote you give is Bevan all the way back in 1951 right like it's this is an old siren song and it also seems like this will be able to push through austerity particularly when combined with seeming energy crisis isn't and I've noticed this tendency that the Europeans have had recently to say want to deal with climate change by making it a military national security issue which is also entirely misleading and what it would do and how it would change the public framework so it does seem however that you know global anti-Trumpism is it's not just the

13:40democrats that use this as a legitimate ideology that this seems to be a center ideology all the way to you know tier starmer and macron and I don't I wonder how much of the how much of the European will left particularly in the center in north of Europe will will fall for this and I mean it does seem like the it seems completely discrediting domestically to central left politics I mean like you know we could talk about your starmer who seems to be and freefall but also as now having the labor government do things that the tours could never pull off including stuff like more or less ending the magnet card so

14:41how do you think this is going to go yeah there was a critique of starmer that came from Blair recently this like big 5,000 word Blair essay about problems with starmer and you know the objection from Blair is that the UK has to prioritize growth which means prioritizing AI and the tech sector and the net zero commitment gets in the way of growth so therefore has to be dumped and the one thing that the UK has to be committed to is an increase in defense spending to deal with new geopolitical threats around the world and therefore the UK has to first dump the net zero commitment make a plan to cut welfare spending over the course of the next few years with a view to eventually dropping the tax rate and that essay you know that Blair put out was fetted by a lot of people on the internet and in British politics all over the place and it caused you know Andy

15:45Burnham who is considering a leadership challenge against starmer to start having and hawing about what had been reported to be his initial plan to make Ed Miliband who is very committed to net zero chancellor of the x-jacker he's now suggesting he might keep Rachel Reeves in post so there's a little bit of a fright with regard to the net zero commitment here and I think this has a lot to do with the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran both of these things raised energy costs considerably increase the reliance of the European Union and the UK on North America for liquefied natural gas you totally change the energy supply chains in that regard and all of that of course comes back to Obama and his commitment to promoting share oil drilling you know under Obama share oil drilling took off massively even as he acted like he was interested in keeping it in the ground or not building pipelines all that meant in practice was that you'd stick the share oil on

16:47bomb trends instead of delivering it through pipelines it wasn't any kind of substantive commitment to you know not developing the share oil resources but anyway all of this is to say that as those energy prices have kicked up there is a perception that the net zero commitment is not something that can be met in a short enough unit of time to be compatible with keeping energy prices at a level that allows the AI sector to competitively develop in the UK and in Europe so now there is a lot of questions about whether they're going to stick with that it's an interesting issue because I find that it splits the parties in ways you wouldn't expect so it's got you know Blair who's opposed to net zero and you know Milliband who's for it and Burnham being contested by these two figures and then in the conservative party you have people like Theresa May and Michael go over for net zero

17:49and then right now it's not sensible for the front bench politicians to be for it politically so you know people like Kimmy Baytonak are not so it's a weird situation where both the conservative party and the labor party are having almost the same kind of debate internally about whether the net zero commitment facilitates something like a green new deal and therefore jobs in economic growth or whether it's placing a headwind on AI in the tech sector. I mean I guess we're going to have to see how the the AM market fares in the United States since it's taken up an interesting detour in the last week but who knows I mean I don't know I have thought a lot about this in terms of Europe because you know data centers need both land and power and Europe notoriously has neither so it's high density land and their energy situation

18:50has been precarious for a while although I guess France is in better speed there because of their nuclear development. I guess this gets us to like you know the constraints here because what it really proves is geopolitically and thus even to some degree domestically that US is Western European allies are very very constrained and like talks about leveraging China against the US are going and doing more trade deals with bricks or are even some grand Atlantis deal with Canada and letting the US rot which a lot of American progressives think is happening doesn't actually seem to be in the cards at all. Yeah part of the trouble is that the the European Union brought back the fiscal rules which had been suspended during the COVID pandemic and the only exemption is defense spend.

19:51So if a state like Spain refuses to commit to the defense spending it will just be bound now by the fiscal rules without the defense spending carve out that allows some states to smuggle various forms of investment through the fiscal rules and outside of Spain all of the other states have committed to the defense spending and are trying to find a way to make their state investments compatible with that. Now one of the things I think this is this is very interesting I wanted to float by you American military tech is notoriously overpriced even for us in the United States like it's one of our strategic disadvantages for dealing with a rod like it cost like it cost us something like a hundred times what it cost them to make a missile our missiles are way better but that doesn't matter when it takes a few million dollars to make one and about a year and there's no real way to increase productivity even with massive amounts of automation.

20:53I am a little bit out of a loss to wonder how we're going to provide all this. I mean and yet it's also clear to me that there is no real alternative that the Europeans and the British find acceptable and like turning to the Russians that they're definitely not going to do that trying to peel China off from Russia and their strategic alliance while the energy situation makes that with the street of her moves makes that less likely. There just seems to be a thousand cul-de-sacs that Europe is stuck in and I'll just tell you a lot of my audience gets mad when I talk this way they think I'm some kind of American showmanist or something but I'm just like no Europe got into a thousand strategic traps that it doesn't seem to be able to deal with it and it keeps on bringing down governments right and left in the EU. I mean like you know

21:54I'm beginning to wonder will we ever have a very long sitting German government? Will a French president have a parliament that's in his own party again? I have no idea. This is a part of my wrote this piece because I sympathize with the allied situation. I'm not somebody who thinks that it's a great or wonderful thing to tear apart European social programs. I think that the healthcare system is important. I think that the railroads and the public transit and I have a huge respecter of the European university systems. I went to European universities. So I have a lot of respect for a lot of the things that have been built out there and a lot of Americans do a lot of Americans get very into European and Japanese culture and visit and have connections to these places and admire all sorts of things about these ways of life. And of course these ways of life were built with the help of the United States which facilitated and created physical space in the post-war era for the construction of all of this stuff.

22:56So part of my aim in this piece is to think about how the allies could turn this situation around and the first thing that they would have to do is to get a sufficient level of energy autonomy, not for the purposes of breaking away from the United States and doing your own thing, but so that they can actually engage in trade wars, not real wars, but trade wars on a sufficiently strong footing that they might actually be able to extract and not just trade concessions I think, but the goal has to be political concessions because the history of the last 10 years is that because the allies don't have any kind of voice in DC politically, the United States takes foreign policy decisions that cause enormous disruption to European supply chains. And then this just puts the Europeans in a supine position where they have to buy LNG and they become more energy dependent and now Japan as well, Japan recently made a deal to invest in a last-gen liquefied natural gas in exchange for gas shipments. And it looks like a nice deal

24:02for the Japanese because since they'll have a stake in the company, they will be able to profit from purchasing their own gas effectively. But this creates a relationship of dependence that makes it harder for the Japanese to challenge the United States and demand things from the United States because Japan will be dependent on the United States for energy. So I think there needs to be a cultivation of energy autonomy, but not for the purposes of trying to break away because the allied states aren't in position to be able to successfully do that, but for the purposes of getting representation in DC specifically so that they can influence and affect what US presidents choose to do in foreign policy so that you don't get into a situation where the manner in which the United States is choosing to handle Russia or handle Iran is imposing enormous energy costs which drag which make the production of everything more expensive, which cause all sorts of European industries to lose ground and to look on competitive and non-viable.

25:09I mean we definitely see this with like Germany going from like the workshop of the Western world WTF man. I mean basically I know that sounds insulting. What more has been saying recently, were he was scolding the population for not working hard enough? The problem is not that the Germans aren't working hard enough. It's that instead of buying all of this cheap Russian gas like they used to do, they now have to import this very expensive LNG. Well I think it's interesting because one of the things that your paper really wants us to do and you begin to lay this out in your mouse little bit here is to reconceptualize what trade wars were actually for. I mean because historically 19th, early 20th, 18th century even trade wars were either mercantile or they were about national decoupling an off-harchy. And the reason why we kind of turned against trade wars is it was true that when you do trade wars for this reason you usually just have a war. Like just it just

26:11becomes a straight-up shooting war eventually. But you're kind of arguing that effectively what the Americans are doing is indirectly taxing the Europeans and that the trade war kind of should be used not for this kind of autarkic narrative because we all kind of know that's not possible, particularly for just resource and land constraints reasons, particularly for the Europeans. I mean so that what you actually suggest they should do is use trade force to get concessions to integrate into like a more common tax market and more common regulatory structure since the rules-based international order and quotation marks which has always been kind of imperial anyway. But has no longer been seen as in the interest of the people who set it up. And so the Europeans

27:14insisting on that leverage. I mean I watch so many things even even from politically knowledgeable people in Europe who find the Europeans reliance on this to be an other joke. And this leads me to the second thing that you can tend and this I really want you to talk about because I haven't you know I've studied ancient history and I tried to explain to people the concept of social wars versus versus civil wars and what those distinctions are and how we flatten them out in the 20th century and but you actually think we should view this as like a social cold war basically. Yeah why is that and what are we learning from this like this Roman social war model? Right so civil war is where among citizens of a polity a social war is a war between a state and that states allies and it's a struggle for the purposes of changing the way in which that state relates to the allies. So rather than a war of independence and in the you know the last hundred years the

28:14focus has been on thinking in terms of imperialism and therefore on independence and national self determination. I'm proposing that we move past that and instead think in terms of a struggle which is about changing the relationship among the units. So it's a struggle which is not about breaking apart the social relations and eliminating them. It's about reconfiguring those relations and changing how they work and I think in particular you can use a social war to struggle for civil rights. So you can use a social war to get civil standing and I think that ultimately what the European should be aiming for is you know some stuff that might seem crazy for me to just say it today and 2026 but I think they should be trying to get electoral votes. They should be trying to get senators. They should be trying to get members of Congress even and they should be trying to get this without having to give and they're a policy autonomy or they should be demanding that also is part of this that many of the social programs that they have be taken up by the United

29:19States so that they aren't operating at a competitive disadvantage. Instead of the Europeans developing a budget that looks more like the American budget the Europeans should be trying to make the American budget look more like a European budget. And how do you think the Americans should end? I mean this is one of the things that I have often been been pushing out now because what we see now is tech sector development and it ties to the military industrial complex here you know on our soil leading to what would amount to if they actually pulled it off a social reproduction crisis that could like not just divide the country like I do think like if pushed to the extreme could lead to a possible civil war. Now I think that's usually now used it way too early and way too hyperbolicly but I'm not saying it's likely but the fact that it's non-zero actually concerns me.

30:23Why should Americans who care about this want this too? Like you know like I mean why should we give a shit about Europe at all? Like I think if we look at our own society we've reached a point where you know what's the horizon for this project what are the new ideas for what the United States can be they revolve around concentration of an enormous amount of wealth in the hands of a small number of tech companies. These companies using this wealth to develop an ever more elaborate military and intelligence gathering apparatus. This thing being the thing that you export to other states around the world so that they can copy elements of this and you know what are the Europeans buy from American defense companies they buy you know like and a real border defense towers. You know they buy stuff so that they can securitize their population and they can copy various elements of American policy. This is that a very inspiring horizon for the future and as long as

31:27states are stuck in this competitive game where it's about trying to win at the level of attracting tech companies to your territory and about trying to win at the level of having fielding a military that's competitive with China's. If we're thinking in terms of geostrategic competition it's really going to limit what we can ultimately do and become over the course of the century. All of the interesting ideas for what we could do with our technology to make life more livable and more pleasant have all come from the allied states. All of the inspiring visions people have had since World War II of life have come out of Japan and Germany and France and the UK and the Scandinavian countries we should find a way to get these kinds of ideas in dialogue with what we're doing in the United States but it requires that we qualify the competition that's currently dominating and dictating how people think about what to do. And the way to do that I think is to create something

32:32larger that has more weight in the market. Find ways to combine the market power of the Europeans with the Americans without ruining the European social model and destroying the things about Europe that are interesting and the process of doing that which is currently I think the trajectory. I mean it does seem ironic that to save the European lay of life what they're doing is doing a military build up which of course is not as massive as the United States because no one in the right mind would do that but it does seem incredibly parasitic and what I was thinking about about these tech companies is they're not just parasitic on the worker on rents or whatever you want to say they're also parasitic on other productive parts of society and quite literally actually I don't just mean like oh they're stopping investment and no they're dependent on the prior investment in that but also limit our ability to do that even in the private market not just in the public one

33:34and they're very volatile as we are talking about right now and their capex expenditures versus their revenues are insane like you know and this has been talked about a lot but it really does seem that is there and one of the reasons why I think a lot of these tech companies have gotten so interested in getting tied into the military is like well that's usually the one spending apparatus where you can be totally around sure and so it's kind of a a backdoor bailout in a lot of ways although even that has seemed to have limits as Palantir has run into lately but I do think that you're right that there that there's a kind of bleak diagnosis on the horizon here the most Americans seem to be able to imagine is Euro socialism on a city level which isn't really possible weird paranoid techno effno religious nationalism and even undoing things like the 13th and 14th amendment delusions about an AI God at the expense of hyperscale centers that use double the

34:45power of my state where they're going to build it although apparently that's running in the problems now and then paralyzing self hatred and self-flagulation where like no one can imagine what like if an American map did come to power at a national level there is no realistic idea about like changing what the imperial apparatus is it's either like we just don't engage with the rest of the world at all so you have left Turk or Carlsonism or whatever which is not even fair to Turk or Carlson to be honest or basically any continuation of the status quo and while you don't mention this like the you are seeing more of this with Israel you know more and more technological integration and stuff with Israel not with Europe I kind of think one of the things I was fascinated

35:47with about this is I was like this guys give us as in the United States a way to start thinking about what we could do by hating with this that isn't also this self hatred or our political negationism or whatever because the other thing I think we can see and we I don't know if you and I agree in the reasons why but like even both right and left in the United States pretty much hates itself and I'm sure there's I would say there's political economic reasons you say there's structural reasons for that we might even agree on some of them but but that maybe that by incorporating it by by using trade as a leverage to not just change European foreign policy but also American domestic policy maybe that could give some people some hope of a more realistic grounding because you know the other thing is like the United States and China and it's the city's trap so it's

36:55the like the historical analogues are at the moment really quite bad how do you feel about that yeah the United States needs more of a direct stake and peace prosperity and order in Eurasia right now there are too many cases where the United States can go we have liquefied natural gas and two modes we don't have to care about what happens in Eurasia or we can withstand a crisis in Eurasia for longer than the states based in Eurasia can withstand it this creates I think a negative incentive the United States has an incentive to disrupt and cause trouble in Eurasia because it thinks it can inflict more punishment on rivals than it will have to endure itself if the United States had integrated politically to a much greater degree with some of the territories in Eurasia those territories would give the United States a direct stake in maintaining peaceful and prosperous conditions for human beings in Eurasia and it would become a lot harder for the United

37:59States to have all these wackadoodle you know adventurous foreign policies that involve a lot of risk for people in Eurasia but not much for Americans so Americans don't think seriously you know don't take seriously what all of that will involve and to give another example addition to Russia and Iran you know the adventureism in Iraq kick doff you horrible refugee crises that devastated European countries and produced racial tension produced religious tension helped the right to reframe the post 2008 crisis in a way which was advantageous for it and all of this is connected to an American foreign policy which thought ah we can take an experiment in the Middle East and try something and it won't ultimately cost very much even if it fails to the United States and if if there are costs they'll be paid by other states in the region that are competitor states you know this way of thinking where the United States just doesn't take seriously risks that involve Eurasian lives

39:02you know I think this is something that could end but it would require that the United States actually have skin in the game in Eurasia the United States needs territory and people and GDP in Eurasia so how do you think that would happen so I think the Europeans would have to recognize that they're in a situation where either they're going to be Americanized against their wills in ways which utterly deform their form of life or they're going to participate in the Americanization process in a way that allows them to change what it means to be American to actually I think revitalize potentially if they were to play it right the whole concept of being American and one of the things that's happened recently is that American leaders have been making ethno nationalist arguments that sound like you know early 20th century European you know identities and meanwhile the European

40:04leadership have been trying to transcend all of that and get past all of that and they've been talking about being European like it's something anybody can be so they've been thinking about being European like it's being American while the Americans have been thinking about being American like it's being a nationality from a particular European country so in some ways what the Europeans are doing at this point is more American than what the Americans are doing and so there is I think a possibility of interfusing these things together in a way that saves the American project from itself and which would also therefore save the European project from being consumed by a bad kind of Americanism which is the negation of the European and I'm seeing a lot of people lately talk about European and American yeah as if these are two different civilizations and I think this is just really unhelpful yeah because it none of it's true in the in the slightest the Europeans and the Americans if it so much should do with each other for so long the legal systems the political

41:07philosophy there's been so much interchange culturally you know between the two for so long that treating them as if they're completely different civilizations is just that helpful there's been a divergence in form of life very much to do with the way in which the Europeans in the Americans have managed the whole post world war two system and the way they've constructed it together and they still have the capacity to construct something together if they think about themselves as doing that and take seriously that they they can be part of constructing this if they think strategically about it and for so long the Europeans have been thinking about this too much in national terms national European leaders try to influence the United States on the basis of personal relationships Blair with Bush you know Sarcos and Anobama you know they're these efforts by you know specific European leaders to use personal charisma or something to influence US foreign policy and it's been very ineffective the Europeans need a much more concrete connection to the United States to be

42:11able to influence its development and trajectory now I think this leads me to a couple of questions you and I both know what the left response to this we're going to is going to be that we are suggesting renewed imperialism and you know I consider myself a Berlin anti-imperialist and yet I don't know how the return to 19th century nationalism goes when you just kind of ignore how that led to the creation of the current system in the first place and we now have nuclear weapons killer drones and chemical weapons that we couldn't imagine in the 19th century so such conflicts led to the creation of this system would potentially be human extinction level now I'm not trying to scare monger I don't necessarily know that it would be but I don't know that it won't be either

43:16and I think that's fascinating when people you know we'll talk about I mean a lot of a lot of left politics around like a lot of this is just to me just I have long noted this tendency of people to have milk toast politics domestically but then be maximalist on foreign policy because frankly they have no effect on it anyway and it doesn't really matter what they say so maximalist moral posturing can get a whole lot of traction because there's literally no skin in the game and no accountability for and that goes in both anti imperial and imperial directions like you also have right when you're saying in saying shit because again there's no skin in the game and there's no accountability and they're not going to have any effect on them even our military industrial politics much less our relationship to eurasia at all but it does seem to me that we get caught up in minor narratives

44:19and minor spats out the example you give in your paper is the Greenland event which you know I saw how even liberals responded to that like oh we're gonna in NATO there's we're potentially tensing towards world war and you know my immediate thought about that was okay I'll entertain that for a minute but part of me thinks that there's no way the American central command would even let that happen like not a million years so when I thought about that I'm like okay this has to be for some other reason you talk about the idea of k-fave that a lot of this is like a illusionary fight that allow people to save face or pivot basically to legitimate other stuff that if you have a k-fave fight you go look if we attacked Greenland you wouldn't be able to defend it because you haven't invested in the defense of the Arctic this is a spectacular way of saying please invest in the defense of the Arctic as part of your NATO contribution that's how I took it

45:24it was a demand a very pointed demand for NATO contributions in the form of Arctic spending there were NATO summits you know prior to that discussion which were focused around Arctic defense spending as a collective endeavor European countries made commitments to Arctic defense spending but they were sluggish about allocating the funds and speaking as if you know if you won't make these these moves and defend the Arctic then the United States will have to defend the Arctic for you and it doesn't want to do that for free so you'd have to compensate the United States perhaps in the form of mineral rights in Greenland you know this was a way of negotiating who was going to pay the cost of Arctic defense particularly with regard to Greenland and it was done in a ridiculous way which had a stupifying effect on the public and caused a lot of Europeans to become all the sudden very willing to support Arctic defense spending which was precisely what the Americans had been asking for it explicitly you know in the year leading up to the whole thing

46:28I think this is particularly obvious with Canada there's a harder problem when you deal with Mexico but like us for example the current Canadian government has taken strong rhetorical stances against the United States and even like pointed out some quote-unquote imperial truth that might even agree with but then when you actually see what they do they still capitulate to the United States dominance because their economy is totally dependent on it and and the ability to pivot again to China our Europe as a consumer of last resort or to integrate your infrastructure well that's really hard for Canada because oceans and if we aren't backing up the blue water trade that's an even bigger deal and then it seems to me that like what you actually get is a lot of domestic anti-Americanism which I can even understand because the rhetoric at hand but it seems to be

47:31a smokescreen for renegotiating integration from a prior regime but the same thing is going to happen the integration is going to happen and the relationship is quite different in Latin America you know but it seems to be the Canada for example is even a more acute case of what you're talking about happening with you and while it has really really you know accelerated Canadian nationalism Canadian national identity because and I might anger I have a profound Canadian relationship it might anger them when I say that most of their national identity is just they're not us what which is in some ways like you said with this whole like idea that we are separate civilizations or even like really different national cultures the Ontario accent is the same as New York's the I mean with a slight difference on vowel pronunciation but it's almost like it's very hard to do when I lived in Korea nobody Europeans or our Asians could tell Americans

48:36and Canadians apart unless they asked us about a healthcare system and I find that fascinating because like you know for a country whose identity and I say this is a person who at one time had dual citizenship is not the United States well when the rest of world approaches us they're like well they I treat you yeah I talked to you guys the same way because you basically share culture I find this interesting though you know why do you think people have been doubling down on the specter of of early 20th century late 19th century nationalism geopolitically and economically when when it also seems like why on the air would you do that you could more be the more you you vulgarize like that the more easily you are rated by multinational corporations yeah I think it's because it's the thing that's readily available to hand is people become discontented with the

49:39post-World War II order because the post-World War II order failed to reform itself after 2008 in a way that would address the various grievances with it and then began to break down in so far as the United States stopped cooperating with the WTO and began to force it to become dysfunctional people have looked to historical examples which is the usual thing people do they start looking for what's the most recent time and which the things that are in the way I didn't apply so what's the most recent time in which the post-World War II system wasn't around and you could do things differently it was the early 20th century it was the 19th century but this isn't the only other way things can be done the post-World War II system is just one of the many different kinds of internationalists and super-nationalist visions that we could have had at the end of World War II and that we might yet have going forward if we can open up our imaginations a little bit in terms of how we could structure things part of the trouble is that people don't seem to think that

50:42we can make anything new all they seem to think that we can do is break what we have and then end up in competing nation states that are going to be in heavy security competition with each other and I you know when I say all of this I am saying this out of love and respect for the allied states I would never talk you know promote any version of this which would make them become territories with no representation or without civil rights the whole point of this idea is to expand the civil rights of your plans and then to get Americans things like healthcare that's the purpose of this I'm going to ask you a question that is not mentioned in your article but it does interest me do you think this kind of thinking could help us avoid a deciduous trap with China yeah so I think that you know the way that we act uh regard what's going on with China you know I think comes out of you know the article the article for ice anatomy or the title is your trade wars or social wars which is a play on a book by Michael Patterson Matt Klein called

51:46Trade Wars or Class Wars which I think is a really helpful book for thinking about why there's a trade dispute between the United States and China there's an imbalance of consumption and production in the world today there are some states that have been hyper optimized for consumption and others that have been hyper optimized for production and the states that are hyper optimized for consumption struggle to produce efficiently and at good prices as you were saying US manufacturing struggles to produce efficiently but conversely the states that have optimized for production suppress wages and suppress consumption significantly and this creates a mutual interdependence and it also creates a lot of of dysfunction internally within the two different entities that are imbalanced and this was talked about a lot in a euro crisis with regard to how Germany became this very dominant manufacturing base as the countries that were derisively and wrongfully called the pigs you know including Portugal Italy Greece and Spain those states lost

52:50their capacity their manufacturing capacities and were optimized to consume the things that Germany produced and then this was moralized production was valorized as good and consumption was condemned as bad and then the pigs were framed as as having been pigs as having been slavinely like geriating states that have you know not consumed in an efficient way but if the European Union were constructed in a way that created a physical debt union then it wouldn't have been the case that this would have been so imbalanced there would have been a way of managing those internal imbalances in a way that would not have caused horrible disruption or cuts to social services in southern European countries in much the same way this imbalance which gets moralized by people as the United States being decadent and not being able to produce and China being virtuous and therefore having production advantages this misses for one the total reliance of production upon consumption Germany becomes a dominating manufacturing power because it creates a capacity to consume in

53:54southern Europe and in the same way China has to create a capacity to consume in the United States to become a dominant manufacturing power and and conversely the United States to become this consumptive power had to outsource a lot of production to other parts of the world you know so as to a free its economy up to become more financialized and to become you know more able to move resources around in a way that would facilitate continuing consumption so if we're discontented with this because it's an imbalance which has had negative symptoms in both places and the Chinese you know consume much less than they produce proportionally Chinese workers are terribly underpaid relative to the value of what they produce and have a standard of living that is much restricted relative to the value of what they produce in terms of how much room they have in terms of their the spaces in which they live you know these giant apartment buildings that have these tiny flats in them you know it's not adequate for them either in all kinds of ways

54:55there I think needs to be more cooperation to bring about a rebalancing of these things and if this cooperation is just done at the level of nation state diplomacy it's not going to be sophisticated enough to successfully resolve the commercial disputes that it's trying to adjudicate because it's going to take it in terms of national interest and that's going to create an appearance of opposed interest when really there are a lot of people in both countries that would benefit from certain common arrangements but in both countries there are entrenched interests that are driven either by they benefit from the United States being very consumer oriented like say Walmart or in China the various construction companies that benefit from China being very production oriented these sectoral interests get in the way of a deal of an arrangement that could be mutually beneficial and could actually make more sustainable the growth in both places one of the things I find very interesting is that what you're actually to me proposing is something

56:01like using the European American allied relationship to create what would effectively be a mixture of bank or from the Cancun experiments that were never tried which is to have a like neutral non-national global reserve currency because I think that would be required frankly and then also what would be creation of a maybe more democratic question mark international governing order because the UN is not I mean the UN has got a thousand cul-de-saxon it is not very efficient what it does it's if you look at his primary mission all it's ever really done has failed I mean seriously I don't think that that an honest leftist can could really go to back for the UN's historical success record and the IMF has basically been good at imposing austerity at people which has made it very unpopular worldwide bricks does not really seem to be a counter order

57:05nor you know despite what I hear like I'll be frankly utopian MMTers in the United States say that they're gonna just turn on their domestic consumption by money printing which I'm like a no they're not and b no they're not and c that doesn't even make sense because to have their money at like a reserve currency the way dollar does it have to do policy like the dollar does and that would actually destroy their domestic production capacity and if there's no one else to do that co-duction capacity in the world then the entire world economy falls apart what the fuck are you talking about I did sorry for my choice language but it really does seem ridiculous when you you're thinking about it as a world system they're thinking about it as if you have a closed system or that you could create a closed system and it's too close to otarky really well I mean that's the problem with the miniaturist otarky right it's a problem with my problem with the MMT is it like

58:05is it operates as if otarky was possible and its basic model is an enclosed system I mean the whole coachek tokenized model is basically only possible the way it's described in very simple states which yes kind of existed you know I don't know but you know and there are situations there are moments in the world economy where you could do something that an MMTer suggests that you do and have it be functional I think in that when the many of these countries were at the zero lower bound in the years immediately following 2008 you could do a lot of of monetary supported physical spending without running up unsustainable debts but you can't do it now that's not something you could do in just any situations certainly not when you have supply chain crises elevated inflation rates that's that's something that the markets are going to wear and even the central banks don't cooperate with it so you'd have to read you know capture the central banks and you'd have to do that you know against the resistance of the markets right and then also you have to deal with the fact

59:09that no country on earth even a relatively research high one like the United States has everything they need to run a modern economy you know we don't have enough rare minerals without I don't know blowing up New York and mining underneath it or something I mean like I'm kind of joking but I'm also kind of not so yeah and yet you know as you point out like the the idea that America and China at at complete odds is just not really true since we need their mineral capacity and they need our energy I mean they can get energy from from Russia but the two things that you can for that you can say despite all their massive planning and massive coordination and production China's not food secure ever has never been ever in its history actually and it's not energy secure either yeah and it doesn't have the consumer base in part because you can't have everybody in China

1:00:14living in these very large houses with space for all sorts of consumer stuff there just isn't enough space in most Chinese homes to purchase and store all of the things that Americans purchase and store you know the suburban house with all of the rooms for the things that you buy that have been made all over the world yeah and and the logistical system for distributing that for for moving it very quickly from place to place it's a huge and the financial system for financing the debt that Americans take on to be able to sustain buying all this stuff it's very difficult for other states to achieve anything like the same final consumption per capita which in the United States is an excess of 40 grand you know final consumption per capita and you know in most allied states it's around 25 and in China it's around 10 and there's been strong pushback from from the from the CPC on increasing domestic consumption strong pushback so when and I have some left MMT or friends who are totally

1:01:21baffled by this and I'm like I'm not because they can't really they lose a lot of their structural leverage right now if they do that if nothing else because we have leverage for being the consumer of last resort and they have leverage for being the producer of first resort like yeah um and neither one needs to be minimized or treated you know with this Dan or morally you know it talked down these are all important roles it's just a little imbalance and if there was a mechanism for cooperating then that imbalance could be overcome and rectified but we don't have a mechanism and because we just naturalize the post world we're too ordered or we imagine just stepping out of it into the 19th century you know those are really the only two things people do there's no serious thinking about how to create structures which would actually allow the cooperation to be fruitful hmm so I guess the immediate thing that comes in mind though is we have

1:02:25this addivistic nationalist system it activated I think everywhere in the world and in fact as I pointed out when people were complaining about Trump I can actually manifest it in Europe and Asia before it manifested here you know by the before the the global war on terror was even really fully winding down we started seeing this turn towards white wing nationalism in Europe because of the instability of immigration from both climate change and geopolitical issues and we also saw this from destabilization and and the Philippines leading to you know a want for a strong domestic law and order candidates we saw this some degree we've seen it in Japan not nearly to the extent we saw it in the Philippines but nonetheless and we've seen it a little bit in Latin America yeah there was a book by Joshua Kerlantzik in 2013 I think it was democracy and retreat about all of that stuff yeah I suppose the

1:03:31thing is about like you're you kind of have this dialectic of like the way through this you know this imperial morass is actually ironically not the coupling but re-coupling as equals and I think you know you don't say this but I think it actually implies a kind of a global skin in the game which means new forms of cooperative governance that would be you argue kind of forced upon the Americans by trade war as you pointed out with the social wars that the Italians lost me or terribly but they still got the rights and stuff that they were asking for because the the cost and inconvenience of of the war meant that the Romans were like fine your citizens to shut up you know to put it very simply but it's effectively what happened yeah as little as they know it would totally change what it meant to be Roman and make it possible for people who lived

1:04:32on the black sea to become Roman right but one thing that I do I do I do wonder is how deep do you think this provincialism goes both in the both in Europe and the United States when proposing something like this and do you actually think trade wars could mitigate against that adivistic impulse yeah I think certainly it could be done what I'm talking about is possible at the level of just could you do it the question is can people have this horizon or imaginary and not even just people but the states in question can the states think about this is something that can actually empower them rather than weaken them and to do this we have to kind of get past the 20th century paradigm which assumes that the way to get more autonomy is with a greater level of separation

1:05:33and political disintegration or or devolution a lot of the time coming together allows you to have more sustainable differentiation at a lower level that differentiation and plurality depends however on there being some level of unity at a top level and I've written also a series of pieces on super national federalism for the strike council that kind of explored these ideas of constructing a different kind of super national entity not for the purposes of crushing the autonomy of people but for the purposes of qualifying the competitive drives you know commercial competition with regard to capitalism and then military competition with regard to war so that it's possible for people to engage in forms of cooperation that currently look on competitive I think the only way to make space for socialism would be something like this hmm I if you know I have been struggling with

1:06:36this too because the the socialistic impulse for because of our anti-imperial drives and in fact the anti-imperialism right now is probably the dominant form of socialist engagement even amongst people who aren't particularly Marxists and unannounced or anything like that and in situations like would would Gaza and Israel I pointed out that as long as this remains a zero-sum game one genocide or the other is inevitable and that that has never made people particularly comfortable and you know I don't want to get too far into it but I've actually thought like it would take an international coalition to enforce this and basically force integration in that particular area but that's what it would take no one really wants to do that no one really wants to commit to it although maybe that'll change as that as that conflict spirals into greater conflict in the in the in the region I don't know but this idea that national autonomy actually helps you sustain

1:07:44national cultures or whatnot I think the experience of Yugoslavia if nothing else proves that that's not true but yeah and people talk about neo-colonialism there's a recognition that having independence does not guarantee the ability to differentiate or to take a different route and oftentimes this is thought about too much in terms of just you know the IMF you know is intervening or western states are intervening militarily but it's the structure when you have a large number of competing states that are all trying to get investment this compels them all to behave in broadly the same kind of way if you have a large number of states that all have security concerns this compels them to behave in largely the same way if to protect people from these things a little bit if you want to be able to see other kinds of behavior emerge and I think the point that you make with regard to Israel and Palestine is insightful if social relations don't tend to just sit where they are if social relations aren't becoming civil relations if there isn't political

1:08:49integration to come with economic integration then economic integration tends to change the power dynamics and the relationships over time in ways that produce discontent and then that discontent tends to result in attempts to revise the social relationship which if there's no civil political horizon become hostile and militaristic and so if we can't think in terms of the civil and the political at the level of the world anymore because we no longer trust the post-World where two institutions they've been seen to fail us or to impose neoliberal capitalism so we're going to turn away from that and we're not willing to think about any other way of structuring the world apart from breaking apart and taking apart the the various types of relationships that have previously existed the outcome of that is going to be hostility I don't think it will necessarily be a world war or a civil war but I think it you know the very least it would be something like cold work too with the United States trying to build a containment ring around China and trying to force

1:09:52states around the world to pick sides and this would be terrible it would be a horrible waste of human life a horrible waste of our resources you know just the terrible waste of our potential and it will make this whole century and our whole lives so shitty and unpleasant you know it doesn't have to be like this but we do have to be able to to avoid that kind of outcome to be able to reimagine civil and political relationships with people who are not currently part of the national territory all right I mean you know this is one of these ironies where I've talked about like well for example I mean we don't get to vote on a U.S. monetary policy either it's controlled by the Fed which was deliberately political and liberals who previously hated that now that they're not in power love it that's a whole another discussion but I do think it's quite interesting that like there's a real truth to the fact that like well U.S. monetary policy affects the entire planet and yet

1:10:54they don't have a saying at all and you just kind of have to hope that the Federal Reserve board cares and their mandate tells them not to care their mandate tells them to care about unemployment and inflation in the United States and if the United States doesn't include unemployed people in Europe or Japan if it doesn't include the inflation rate in Europe or Japan then the Federal Reserve is bound by its rules to not care in fact the Federal Reserve would be disobeying its congressional authorization act if it cared yeah and that's just such a a tragic waste and this goes back to you so much of the instability in European politics is rooted in the collapse of Bretton Woods in the Nixon Shack in 71 which then set the Europeans into a tailspin figuring out how do we stabilize our currencies it forced them to create the ERM the European exchange rate mechanism forced them to create the European unions so that they could have the euro and then this produced a kind of forced and and rushed integration on the economic level that was never

1:11:58properly politically thought through and that has continued to produce crises and antagonisms and it's had a disintegrating effect on the Europeans over time and this is something that the Europeans recognized when the Nixon Shack happened as terribly dangerous for them and they've been trying since 71 to manage the consequences of that and they're not able to do it on their own it's a huge problem that the Federal Reserve and the Nixon administration took the view that the Europeans don't need to be considered I find this very telling I mean one of the one of the great historical tragedies is even though I think that Cain's floated this because it was better for British imperialism that ironically I also think it would have been better for the world if we had had not a gold standard for for exchanges between the allies that Brent Woods was but a true international currency you know the whole bank or idea that I think that ultimately would have

1:13:05been better for everybody including the United States because we now have the problems of having the B basically we can't really do our domestic product like like one it's not true that we're not productive but we are too expensive to employ a lot of people in it and attempts to alter that relationship like with tariffs or whatever actually break up our supply chains which actually make us less productive which is happened under the Second Drop Administration. Yeah so you know the great irony there is is actually somewhat similar to the irony you're talking about the like one of the ways to save European life is instead of like fighting Americanization go no we're going to embrace it and also we're going to actually make demands of you for once a similar with us is that our attempts to re-nationalize our industrial production which has been all abandoned by the Trump administration anyway but it actually broke up our supply chains and made our own production

1:14:06harder and has had many downstream effects I do think one of the things that I really liked about your article is like we just have to admit that imperialism or not we're in a world system you fight it worldwide and you can do it peacefully or you can not but the cost to not right now given the technologies that exist is up to an including human extinction. Yeah and this idea that you have a revolution in one country and then export it you know militarily or you inspire a bunch of military showdowns at a lot of different places it's a different question now versus back then it really is it's a much more dangerous kind of situation you can't get people to take these kinds of risks to human life in a world with this kind of weapon system and with the legacy of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, World War II people know about how badly out of hand these things

1:15:10can get and one of the things people do all the time they get dissatisfied with trade and with commerce and with social relations so they go okay let's have military competition instead as if that will be any better you know and conversely when people get defeated militarily they know okay let's have commercial competition instead you get stuck in this back and forth between the hostile strange relationship and the social exchange trade relationship but you never move beyond that ping pong back and forth between these two very limited kinds of competition but allow for only a very narrow range of behaviors and people naturalize this and go well human beings just can't get along across these differences as if it were fundamental to our cultures or fundamental to what we are biologically but it's just because we've structured everything in this quite narrow way and we're not able to see how narrow it is because we've been in it for so long I think that's that's really crucial although you know I will tell you how much pushback I get when I tell people like

1:16:15the West failure nation state is fundamentally modern and this has not always been true Fno centrist has pretty much always been true but like that's not the same thing as a nation state it's just not and there's also been mitigating factors to Fno centrist until it's not like we always engage in it and and people are like what do you mean I'm like well if we always engaged totally Fno centrically frankly we would be so inbred as a species we would have already died out like I mean it really does you know if you study kinship arrangements and like quote unquote primitive peoples you start seeing like people even when they're Fno centrist starts trying to find a way to be inclusive because even if they don't have gene theory they kind of know that if you only marry your cousin you have problems in a few generations what are the French they're Celts

1:17:18and Romans and Franks and Vikings to right yeah what are the British they're Celts and Romans and Angles and Saxons and Vikings yeah right what are the Germans they're Germans and Romans and then different Germans and you know it's so on and you know the Angles and the Saxons and the Franks are all originally Germans yeah but people say well that's too far in the past you can't reference any of that none of that counts well when when do we decide that all of the sudden these are fixed fundamentally different epic assences in modernity in modernity people decided all of that that wasn't how anybody thought about things you know prior to just really 200 years ago you know even a modern state you know comes into existence before people think about it as a nation state Natio and Latin is a much more general term that can just refer to any kind of group anything you know it's in classical Latin it's a very flexible word yeah that's true and

1:18:26any ethnois could exist with relative autonomy in a state you know that's where you had stuff like ethnarks and satrapes and whatnot yeah and this was there was never a assumption that the state had to be linked in any way to an ethnoes or to an attio and usually the assumptions that states would contain a lot of these things and that they could have relations on the basis of the civil law or on the basis of religious commitment at other points hmm I mean you know it kind of makes a point that I make that that I will say kind of cuts against you know I otherwise die hard marks is them which is like whiteness is constructed as a failure of christian dumb like which I think is undeniably true and that this is you know both super problematic but also it wasn't an attempt at inclusion that didn't really work until you got into the settler

1:19:30colonies in the United States yeah and Christianity is a supplement to to Roman civil identity yeah and that's something to make up for that when it goes and it's it's no you know longer able to politically sustain that because the territorial ethno longer exists I think that we kind of are stuck though both both in the general public but also in the left because I will tell you that like in Marxism the national question is a question that I feel like the Marxist answer makes the least sense because it's like okay we need to create nations even what they didn't exist so that we can build up their their national civic infrastructure and great nation states so we can then abolish the nation states through politarian cooperation in an international and just at this point from the experience of the Soviet Union and the various

1:20:33Soviet national projects we know that didn't work like it it did create some new people that really hated the Soviets that did not probably exist but it did not lead to this next step of like automatic integration because the proletariat would I guess automatically see that they have joint common interest which I also found fascinating because you would think 1914 would have proven that everybody and then even a lot of the Pan-African or Pan-era projects were undermined by this undermined by the large number of territorial states created out of the collapsing empires this is you know one of the things that I like to bring up about the Middle East is that there are like three states in the Middle East that would exist independently of the breakup of the colonial empires you know probably Egypt Turkey and Iran and all of the other states are created out of the territories of these empires and exist mainly to get in the way of those three states and to

1:21:33prevent them from constructing larger political attitudes and nationalism is one of the things which restrains and prevents Egypt and Turkey and Iran from cooperating with people living in the other states and frustrates any kind of Pan-era project yes I mean people think about like the Pan- they don't think about but they should think about because I don't think a lot of America's know that this even happened the the Pan-era of state attempt between the Egypt and Syria yeah which lasted not very long but frustrated both by the fact that Israel exists in between the two states but also by the fact that the Egyptians approached it with this Egyptian nationalist attitude that made it very difficult for the cooperation with the Syrians to be sustained so I guess this brings us back to for me the lack of domestic imagination in the United States because you and I both get called doomsaw all the time we've talked about this before because you know I

1:22:36keep on telling people know that won't structurally work know that won't structurally work no you can't build socialism just in New York city not even New York City just New York City there are rational imperatives why this won't work and by insisting on it and putting so much emphasis on it populistically or whatever you are creating the incentives for a massive backlight yeah New York City is a financial hub that relies on its integration into the all global capital system and it has an enormous amount of existing infrastructure which heavily limits what you what kind of form of life you can have right well I've also pointed out though this is also why you can't export the New York model the New York GSA model for example to the rest of the country because I'm like part of this is based on the fact that mom Donnie has inherited even no Eric Adams did try to finish destroying it a forage infrastructure that survived even the near bankruptcy of the city in the 70s that has never existed in the southeast and in the far

1:23:42west and including that is in California so this infrastructure that you try to export to other areas you know electorally or whatever will not work beyond that there are two major threats to mom Donnie one if we're quite honest his entire ability to balance a budget which you may have seen on social media progressives and last to celebrating as if it was some kind of miracle I'm like okay it's a re-amitization trick that you can do once it's bailouts by the New York state government and then it's hoping that Trump doesn't crush you by being more punitive and what it misses and I think you I was trying I've been trying to get people to look at this and even friends of I knew I normally consider very smart don't want to but I'm like London proves to me that this idea

1:24:43that because there has been a legal restriction on stock trading that creates a monopoly on the New York stock exchange we know that's ending the New York stock exchange itself has moved branches out to Texas knowing that like there's going to be competition there once that happens and we're not even dealing with capital flight to another country we're just dealing with capital flight to another city and state yeah right of which there is nothing we go you you can do right that the entire tax apparatus of New York City collapses almost overnight yeah there's nothing that compels the financial services sector to be concentrated in New York City and it's one of the easiest sectors to move from place to place it's you know office space it's not something that requires a lot of large-scale industrial engineering to move around from one place to another place right it's which and it's not going to happen there's not going to be a movement of the financial sector out what's going to happen is that he's never going to do anything that will actually

1:25:46cause them that level of grief he's going to do a lot of performative stuff like talking about taxing people's second residences that raises Paul Truman's money that poses no serious threat to that sector it's going to look good on social media and he's going to try to string enough of those kinds of things together that people don't notice that's substantively very little actually changes about the city I mean for me it's like build a blasio boo with pink paint which you look I would rather have build a blasio than anthropomo I know that you actually would not but but I find this very frustrating when I'm like there's an austerity wall coming very quickly and you guys are ignoring the municipal bond problem that you can only re-amateurize these pension things once you can only fix bad deals once and the entire way this is structured is dependent on revenues going up in New York City and there is no larger economic

1:26:51indicator that that is going to happen and it's not like you could just build about your data centers in New York City all the land is being used right now I always said you know if you were going to try local socialism the thing to do is do it in places where there's land that's undeveloped or or not very expensive that you could develop in some way that would be impressive to the people who live in their agent yeah here Utah Wyoming or Indiana yeah where you also don't need that much of political threshold to get political power like like do a lot of party is not well organized and it would be easy to you know but they don't try these things because they are not willing to talk to the people who live in these places in such a way that they would want to take part I mean it does also mean with dealing with some of the the uglier parts of the American system in the late 20th century that no one wants to talk about like how did we offset de-industrialization going all the way back to the 60s prisons military bases and then the subsequent

1:27:57petite bourgeois apparatus to service those which does really it does make a lot of those places pretty politically reactive I'm not going to lie but it's not because people want that I mean if you talk to a lot of rural people it's not like they don't want the prison there they just know they don't have it they don't have any jobs nobody's offered another development model and what the Obama administration saw was that the rural county saw negative job growth during the a recovery that they were supposed to be grateful for yeah so that's what they you know are expecting out of people on that they're told are on the left and till somebody demonstrates an actual capacity to generate growth in these places why is there going to be any trust and and the other thing that you and I have both talked about and you are pro-feteration even at like a supernatural a national level I am maybe a little bit more centralist but I admit that we live in a federalized society for you know and in country structurally strategically in a bunch

1:28:57of ways and I'm just like you can't do national politics from two metropoles in a in a place where you have you know 50 different sub-polities and thousands of different sub-sub-polities that you have no influence over no ways to affect the legislature from and yeah you might get a mayor not I'm not just talking about Mondani but you might get a progressive mayor yes he wasn't endorsed by the DSA which is more just their structural deniability claim with Brian Johnson and Chicago which has been a disaster because you didn't understand about market are mayor Lamamba and Jackson Mississippi that went nowhere because Jackson doesn't control even even it's a lot of its internal municipal spending it's owned by the state legislature and that's the other thing that happens very quickly you know even before anybody would leave New York City they would complain to Albany about anything that was making them think about doing that and then there would be a possibility of the autonomy

1:30:02rolled back right so you know what we see is because Mondani is a good politician he's going to frustrate his own base because they're going to expect him to do more and then the ones who don't will be like oh well they're so used to neoliberalism no one's going to hold them accountable for that I've literally seen that argument made and I'm like one why should you want that like why do you want oh we don't hold anyone accountable for not delivering on their promises because they nominally are we're a member of the DSA and you know gotten a progressive stack once why don't you actually do anything they just want him to serve as an inspiration to other candidates like him and then you know just keep delaying and putting off the expectation that something actually get done so that people see any sort of proof of concept indefinitely which has been the failure of progressive politicians since the 60s I mean we could even say that like it killed LaGuardia in New York all the way back in the FDR administration because when the New Deal money ran out

1:31:08so did his programs like I just find this to be incredibly politically naive and also it's you know at a time when people are talking about anti-imperialism and I'm like yeah you're you seem to be I mean one of the big yeah a lot of things that people get mad about my money is stuff that like oh he's signaled something to the Zionist group that said he wasn't totally hostile to them even though he's an anti-Zionist or oh he can't get rid of Tisha or whatever else and I'm like okay yeah he looks like a chump because Tisha is playing him I'll give you that but but beyond that it's also like well what do you expect them to do like and the sad thing is cities could be really interesting you know cities could differentiate into all kinds of different things if they had a reliable capacity to tax at a rate that would allow them to actually have enough resources to try stuff but the only way that you're going to have an environment where cities

1:32:11can do that is to have some protection against the competitive impulse to try to compete for highly mobile jobs highly mobile tax-based highly mobile wealth and that requires cooperation in a much higher level but trying to do it in the cities when you've not established any of that indeed where the position of the higher level units is that the lower level units should be pushed into competition for the purposes of homogenizing them and getting them to behave yeah it just conflicts fundamentally with the way the whole world system is presently structured you know not to mention the way the US federal government is presently structured where the state government many of these states well I mean I've even pointed out that you might have progressive countries suing New York for bond promises because they can do that because once you introduce a bond reallocation which has been a real limit in like Chicago you open yourself up to international trade courts it even goes beyond domestic law and and people just will say

1:33:17stuff and you like well that's priced into bond right I'm like what are you talking about the assumption is that no one will ever do anything like that because it would be economically insane it's not priced into anything you know that stuff is considered non-credible crazy people policy the assumption is that no one will do it if somebody does try to do something like that completely stuns the market and there's a run like when let's trust tried in the UK to do something wildly out of step you know it's possible to do stuff that's different but you have to create the preconditions for that and that's not something that can just be insisted on at the level of a city or national government yeah it does require international corporations internet I mean because well things that even people imagine on the left like when they get all super boner parties look okay well Bernie could come in the power and just forgive all these debts and I'm like no he can't no again and again he cannot and you're like what and I'm like no he would be driven into an international court within within a few weeks and also Congress we did and you

1:34:22probably even see him get impeached I don't know what you what you're thinking don't point did Bernie Sanders say he was going to rip up the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO that was never part of the discussion that was all just sitting there in the background and nobody was wanted to ask about it or talk about it well I mean and it also deals with a with another thing that you and I have talked a little bit about but like like you know you and I both believe in socialized healthcare and we think it's super important I as a person who just got another surprise medical build a day I really think it's important but at the same time I have to admit that like when I hear people talk about like okay we talk about the big beautiful bill and what it's doing to the healthcare sector and how many jobs is gonna cost and how much is gonna cost the you know US job economy and I just go okay what do you think actually rationalizing the cost structure of socialized medicine would do

1:35:27it would be even more devastating to the job market and healthcare I'm not talking about you know just all the insurers and all that although you have to do something about too I'm talking about all the logistics jobs I'm talking about all the the bureaucratic oversight I'm talking about these and instead what you're seeing is financial consolidation that shouldn't even be legal where you have single parties owning all parts of the supply chain and occasionally you'll get someone on the left who's read some early 20th century or late 19th century stuff about socialization say oh but that's good that monopoly means they're easier to seize and then we can just seize that monopoly and and go about it and I'm like okay that was a theory in Germany in the 1920s what happened yeah yeah and one of the things that nobody talks about is when the socialized healthcare systems

1:36:31are being created in the post-war era healthcare was a much smaller percentage of GDP so the amount that you had to compensate people as part of constructing these systems was much much lower as as a percentage of GDP you get something that's 17 percentage GDP either you need an incredible amount of money or you have to engage in a lot of austerity as part of taking the thing over and if you're going to do that then you have to somehow deal with the unemployment that creates you have to make replacement jobs you have to do something else that's going to be costly too now I think all of that is worth doing and that it can be done if you think seriously about it but when people act like you can just you know magically all of the sudden have you know the government take on 17% of GDP where currently it's only dealing with you know social security excuse me Medicare Medicaid and CHIP you know that's just an enormous amount of the economy to deal with if you don't

1:37:31have a mechanism for being able either to raise the tax base to do that or a mechanism for being able to manage the unemployment that it generates if you cut down on the layers of ways you know and I used to write pieces where I think through this yeah I think but yeah I wrote Requiem for a dream about Medicare for all for sublation a little while back you know I think you could cut healthcare in the United States to something like 14% of GDP but this would be difficult you'd have to find something to do with the 3% and with the large number of people that are employing it's doable but it's much more doable if you do it in cooperation with other states in other parts of the world you get common tax rules that allow you to raise the level of tax necessary without driving out your your jobs and your your capital it requires a much more serious interest in coordinating with other people than has here to foreman shown by anybody right I mean this includes the UK which you have

1:38:38experienced within Canada which I do where I'm like well I mean Canada's literally promoting suicide as if I was to like paying more to prevent childcare system and if you don't even advertise it you have to find a way to sustain the tax base for it and at this point because it's unthinkable that you you'd raise the tax rate the obsession is with growth and therefore with accommodating the tax sector or in the case of Canada accommodating the share oil sector to generate enough growth to be able to sustain a health service I agree to pretty much can't be done it cannot be done domestically there's no domestic there's no singular domestic constituency for it that has any power and a concentrated way yes there's a diffuse demand for it there's been a diffuse demand for socialized medicine since the fucking fifties but it takes a lot to do and it's and the other thing that I have talked about is like it as I talked about this before and people

1:39:39do not like when I talk about this was the same point you made it would have been easier to do in 1930 and set up but even the countries that did it Britain Canada etc have run into structural problems right because at this point the tax base that you need to be able to sustain a good high quality service is not compatible with the level of growth that they're trying to attract so you get into a lose-lose situation where either you to promote growth to fund the health service you have to cut the tax rate to the point where you can't fund it or to raise the tax rate to fund the health service you lose the growth that's necessary to fund it and so as the health service degenerates they have to make all these compromises and privatize all of these elements and at this point you know in Britain the political consensus is that this is just going to happen one way or another everybody in the labor party is for some level of NHS privatization and for further cuts to public services the only question is how quickly to do it what sort of plan you

1:40:41should have the degree to which you talk about it in public it's horrible yeah I mean yeah I always told people you don't have to look far for dystopian future in America you just have to look at Britain and just scale it up like credit to the brits they talk very explicitly about the problems that they face you know this debate recently between Starmor and Blair you know where Blair writes the 5,000-word thing and Starmor writes the sub-stack piece and you know then people like Theresa Mann gove and you know Miliband they're all saying different things about you know net zero and whether it's compatible with having the growth and having the AI and the tech company support to achieve the growth targets it's very honest and open discussion of macroeconomics by you know front bench or former front bench politicians in the pages of major newspapers the quality of the discussion in the UK is still significantly higher it's it's under siege because the reform party in the green party

1:41:43want to Americanize the hell out of the political discourse in the UK and turn it into sloppulism but right now still in the conservative and labor parties there's still enough vestigial norms of having a real conversation about what you're actually going to do that involves some level of public comment that you're able to actually see some of these debates they actually still occur in a place where you can you can look at them and it's possible to track them in the states the conversation has become so empty with regard to all of this I do want to ask you why do you think it is that there are no longer like for example I have all my critiques of elite discourse around economics but I used to be able to read the Wall Street Journal and get the kind of news you now have to go to the financial times for when I go to the Wall Street Journal now not just in the editorial page which has always been bat shit but you know chomp ski back in the 90s would say oh

1:42:43but read the actual reporting now the actual reporting is ideological yeah the FT has become you know anti-ac for being able to have a newspaper that talks about the economy yeah and left this mistake it for left-wing newspaper because it actually talks about economic issues in a real way and I'm just like it's not a great deal they know that leftists read it sometimes they do include little saps oh winks and nads they like to do that sometimes they they know that it's part of their subscriber base but it is I did find it very interesting and it was very telling that that you know and this is not true for for brutal the general British newspapers I think I think in general British newspapers are really bad but not the the political discussion parts of it by that I mean like the on the debates you're talking about between politicians that happen on the press and also I will say BBC and channel you know British television anchors and whatnot

1:43:48are willing to take oppositional stances to politicians in ways no one in America is because of fear of losing their their their their audience because they're effectively audience captured but the audience actually is so effectively politically captured that in part because the the MPs are always competing for leadership positions in front bench positions so you can attack a particular person and have it be to the benefit of other people in their party so it's not as if if you attack a Democrat you must be helping a Republican if you attack say Andy Burnham you're potentially helping Kier Starmer you're potentially helping West streeting you're potentially helping somebody else maybe Angela Rainer at Millabend who might think that they ought to ultimately end up in the chair so there's ways to to do it that still seem to be potentially to the benefit of other members of the political class well I think this is the thing that's important to think about because you and I have both also been on a kick where I hear about utopian fixes to the two party

1:44:50system like if we only had a ranked trust voicing or if we only had mandatory the big one 20 years ago as mandatory voting and I'd be like Ireland and Australia they're their their problems about these things are not as acute as ours but they still exist they still have depoliticization they still have anti-politics they still have a vulnerability the sloppulism it is not fixed by these reforms it is an exacerbated by it I'm not saying these reforms would be bad but they don't fix what you're saying they're going to fix yeah all the same trends are still affecting all of these states the european states are all have these programs under siege by the competitive international environment with no political integration it affects everybody no matter what reforms you have and one of the things that drives me crazy is that people will say we'll blame the lack of these reforms and then they'll always say well of course those reforms wouldn't be enough anyway and they always try to have it both ways and they'll often write pieces

1:45:56you know talking about how horrible and terrible it is that in the european countries things are being rolled back and they'll say at the same time that those reforms would be the silver bullet if you enacted them here yeah and then they'll say well of course it wouldn't be a silver bullet you would still need to do all sorts of other things you know so should people be caring about this should be a priority there's no serious thinking about it and I think it's in part because people tend to just write whatever it is that they can sell currently to one of the magazines if there's a moment right now where they're people are looking for excuses or explanations for why this or that candidate didn't win something about dark money will always sell with one of the magazines you know something about the voting system will always sell for one of the magazines when a candidate loses an election that people think should have won as an excuse for why they lost well even the Sanders campaign has dark money at this point what are you guys on? like like you know I've covered all the weird money that shows up and like you know our revolution

1:46:57and whatnot post our revolution superpacks and and and the the way they intersect with with you know millionaire and billionaire money even now and I'm like well this seems to me to be frankly a revitalization of the status quo by pretending you're opposing it and it is not it's not politically viable and I agree with you like you know people think oh well you mean raising taxes on on you know everybody I'm like to some degree yes but actually what I really mean is stopping tax competition and like it infuriates me that these data centers are getting sweetheart deals where they can just farm things and then not pay property taxes yeah not just tax breaks not just subsidies but oftentimes the actual spending that's done to facilitate infrastructure spending to facilitate and make cheaper the building and stuff

1:48:02and like people are complaining the other day in British politics about infrastructure spending more than a billion pounds to facilitate the building of a universal resort yeah and it's just it's just it's just it's maddening me I mean in the United States we now have more money being spend on AI infrastructure than on any other infrastructure at all and like I've been pointing out there's a capex weakness in this I'm not people will take me a segment to somehow I'm anti AI I'm actually not but I am anti the way AI is being implemented and rolled out and and thought through because I like you think this could be a radical technology that we could all benefit from in real ways it doesn't it is not teleologically oriented that way because it's not designed to be right now but it could be we could we could we could set up these data center smarter we could start trying to deal with the energy cost it you know by putting efficiency incentives into the

1:49:04the learning models themselves as the Chinese did because they were forced to a deep seek there's all kinds of things we could do we're not doing them and then you know my favorite cockamamey thing that I see right now is seeing sandbite men free get on stage with Bernie Sanders not for the nationalization of AI which you and I both know would not happen for a variety of structural reasons even though I would like support it if it could happen it's not going to not in the current environment but like this 50 50 share stake thing and I'm like okay so that's it's going to tie us all into managing data centers at the expense of the rest of the economy in some ways because now we have to keep it profitable to keep both stakes up and you know the the AI infrastructure is already tied in the military industrial prop but plompex like crazy does the state need more incentive to hyper focus on that particular sector at the expense of everything else yes just it just seems like this sounds good if you don't if you're thinking only one step ahead

1:50:09and what I liked about your article about thinking about trade wars and social wars is it is really about thinking four or five steps ahead instead of just one because I think right now this is even true for capital like I've thought a lot about like you know the liberal imperative capitalism and its long-term development and all that and how it seems like now because of some very technical things that I could explain to Marxology but I won't because I'll spare my listeners you have to deal with that all the time anyway that we don't really have a good vision for profitability in ways that would help the general economy and I mean that literally by why the AI numbers went cabloony in the last few weeks and it's because there is positive job growth and now it's positive job growth and shitty jobs that can't outpace inflation

1:51:16but there's positive job growth and then the AI market started tanking immediately and I was like that plus a little bit of pushback on the SpaceX IPO from the S&P 500 seemed to just crack you know this capex problem and in all of a sudden it's like I was telling people well it is goal-comfort that we have to rely on the rationality of certain sectors of capital for stability to stop self-countitalization at this point like and we're selling that to the future but but then you know I'm like do you really expect though people to just you know right now the best the best argument against AI is it's not actually more efficient than human labor and that's right now mostly true depending on the sector you're talking about that won't always be true and I do wonder what people think that means

1:52:19yeah and part of the trouble is people think you know that they're that what we're talking about when we say human labor is what's fundamentally valuable about human beings you know so when people say oh AI can do this work they they seem to be devaluing what human beings can do but I think people have to remember that a lot of the jobs that currently exist do not make full use of human capacity they are predicated on human beings who have you know it can be stunted in various kinds of ways but nonetheless can do limited kind of functional job because they have a limited kind of functional education that is trained them to do these limited things a lot of the work that we're you're talking about getting rid of is not work that allows for full human flourishing or development you know so yeah this is important it will be a good thing yeah I think this is important because I've talked about like yes I do agree that the way we're currently using AI leads to cognitive degeneration here's the thing that's because it's we're using it in that particular way I mean

1:53:20like there's also truth in the fact that just having books means that I have less of a memory than an ancient right you don't have to memorize an oral you know the entire oral path to see and be able to repeat it they use the early value that you know even when writing was a thing when it wasn't completely widespread reciting poetry was a huge part of ancient education right and and also people oh poetry I'm like no dude poetry was like how you taught people out of farm like go back and read those those eucolics and and and whatnot they weren't all just about celebrating nature they were also telling you how to do animal imagery and gross shit yeah it's a part because poetry yeah helps you remember to make it beautiful helps you remember these important things right and and I I tell people that like I do agree with you that AI is doing the things you're saying is doing right now and I don't think it's worth the current power water

1:54:25and energy cost but the idea that it has to be this way is also a limiting like so our options are to either forego this technological development all together and go back to more tedious forms of human labor because it's more because it's more labor-consumptive and that somehow that'd be good or to or to like continue developing it the way it's being developed which is going to be a massive energy suck and it's not yet currently all that super helpful for for very many things and I hate to tell you guys that this is to come back to your point of your essay you also can't control this in one nation it's along as this is a national project you're going to be in a way cream grain what nation should do use it you you would have to come up with an international framework for how to incorporate and limit this and that requires such an international framework to exist

1:55:32which is why all these radical decoupling and whatnot don't work for me I was thinking about this when I was talking to someone earlier today about you know de-growfico socialism I consider myself an eco-socialist people who mistake me for like a bright you know develop mental eco-socialist and I'm not but I also say like well do you really think you're going to be able to control the environment by municipal decentralized agriculture because that is what a lot of people put on offer I was actually laughing that despite all the marksology cohe sato just use marks to arrive at the same thing Murray Bookchin did 30 years ago yeah and you know meanwhile you have people who are currently hungry in Sri Lanka because of rising oil prices making it difficult for them to get food yeah these are people who just don't exist in these discussions they're not taken seriously as mattering the stuff that happens to them is not treated as important it's just terrible the level of talk about that because it's a global food system that

1:56:35requires an enormous amount of yield to have prices on the current market system that are low enough for people in developing countries to be able to buy food for their kids right you have this seriously reckoned with no I mean like the idea that we're going to move somehow overnight move I think my the most the most strange one is the half-horse socialism possibilities like we're going to rewild half the planet how you're going to do that we're going to mandate global veganism how you're going to do that when you've also decentralized a agricultural production so you can't really move stuff in one place to the other and there's plenty of reasons what there's plenty of regions where veganism really isn't possible without a global food chain you're you're like I'm sorry it sounds like you might accidentally pull pot Cambodia like half the planet and to your point about the AI you know the the only person who has tried to say anything about how AI might be governed at a global or international level is the only person in high politics who

1:57:38runs an international structure which is the pope yeah yeah and we have such a dearth of imagination at the international level the pope is running at a plus 30 you know net rating simply because he's talking about at the level of the planet doing something about this right and and while it's right it's like like what it is I mean he's not even saying that he's no no many people have criticized it from the other direction that it's too positive about AI because he doesn't regard AI as something which can feel love or can engage in you know choices about final ends so he doesn't see it as a threat to be able to do those things so the people who think that AI is conscious regard him as being naive or a useful idiot for the you know the sky net oh boy oh man the consciousness debates about AI just make my brain hurt

1:58:43although ironically sometimes that I wonder if like now you guys have proven to be that maybe people aren't conscious but that's obviously an absurd premise but anyway I do think I do think though I really like this article not not just because so what people think about what internationalism would look like and maybe even a reframing of what anti-imperialism is other than decoupling because the one thing I will say is no no power has ever wanted decoupling for very long I mean like how did China become the the miracle did it became in poverty reduction after you know after the collective period did not work although it did it wasn't as bad as it said it was I'll say that but it didn't work was integrating into the global financial economy and then people will be like oh well they did it on their own terms like yeah they did but they still

1:59:44integrated into the global financial economy and you have a communist state with billionaires in it I don't know and they were welcomed in they were welcomed into the WTO they were given you know they were welcomed by Richard Nixon there was an attempt to bring them in in part because of concern about the Soviet Union and belief that bringing them in would be helpful it did generate an enormous explosion of cheap consumer goods in North America in the 80s and 90s and 2000s which was part of what allowed for the de la generation of the Soviet Union because it wasn't able to produce cheap consumer goods internally and it didn't have access to a market to which it could outsource and it remained in hack to its heavy industry which it couldn't displace and yeah et cetera et cetera and I think also that it that allowed I mean it allowed American development it allowed neoliberalism to seem viable in some ways because the the the cheap commodities that it that it was able to produce after you know the globalization

2:00:52of the currency also enabled us to be able to ignore a service inflation and this I've been trying to you know for a while get people to understand China's growth is part of neoliberalism China is neoliberalism it's just a part of neoliberalism that we don't talk about or think about as part of neoliberalism but the whole transformation of China occurred in and through what we call neoliberalism out here I would even say it happened through both neoliberalism and auto-liberalism and I think people underestimate how severe it was because I'm like they stop funding the education of girls in the countryside it's like it was pretty severe and it used to be that neoliberalist would argue for neoliberalism on the basis that it was lifting people out of poverty in China they used to explicitly argue for it on that basis right and also left issues to explicitly critique China on that basis see David Harvey's book that he's now recanted that part of but it just seems to me

2:01:55I don't want to get too deep into like interlephs stuff but there seems to be like this attempt to pretend that like the tensions in the communist fear of the world didn't happen so we can so we can just pretend that like China's socialist and it's not implicated at all by neoliberalism today or it's been Maoist the whole time right yeah it didn't help with the global war on terror and all kinds of stuff and and also that they were super copacetic with the Soviet Union except for that dirty kushchev and that's the only problem that ever happened and you know they totally want undermining socialist movements in other countries to to help the Americans as part of that trail right and these are these are weird sectarian groups that have fringe views that require ignoring things that you can discover in a Wikipedia article yeah but they do I will tell you amongst amongst zoomers they have a lot more important they I will say

2:02:57they don't have the sticking power so you see these things come up and these like fads of like ignoring certain trends will pop up fly through the the internet and like you'll have 20% of weird radicalized zoomers picking it up and then they will kind of I don't know read a book and realize that it's more complicated than that yeah but they won't say anything about it so I put my faith in the ability of the young people to read yeah the young people who can read will never stick with this kind of stuff for very long because it's too brain dead and it conflicts too much with stuff that you can easily discover by opening relatively simple easy to read books not even anything complicated the people who actually will fall into this stuff and get suckered by it are people who are not going to be of any use to any movement in any case anyway because their ability to think about stuff and read and engage with anything is so limited that you know they're really just being conditioned by watching videos on the internet I am going to ask you a question where this

2:03:59this area is an area where I pick up a lot of points from Freddie DeBor but diverge from him because he doesn't think there's a problem and I do I agree to him that it's not merely an educational problem that is a social problem but I think it's a severe problem and that is like literacy of all sorts not just traditional literacy I mean media literacy numeracy etc is in rapid freefall and before people just oh it's stupid Americans it's worldwide with China being kind of an outlier but only kind of it's still it's still happening there's just not a severe yeah and even in the places where it hasn't happened to the same degree the education systems in these countries are under heavy pressure to adapt reforms that will have these effects your carestirmer is considering equipping all of the kids who are falling behind with you know AI assistance on tablets and none of this is proven and there's no reason to think this will help any of them but it will generate revenue for the tech companies and it's an attractive stop to them and it makes it seem like he's doing something about

2:05:02the problem yeah I just love how serious educational issue very serious particularly for anybody who's interested in a kind of mass politics you know if you're an elite theorist who thinks that you can get what you want with some you know tiny number of people who are able to read then it's a different story but for anyone who's got any interest in anything large scale it matters greatly that we've got you know a population that is becoming less literary that is becoming more dependent on the video form and also which increasingly can't even watch full-length movies or full-length sports games but is limited in terms of the attention span to short form video that's the next level and the sports leagues are already concerned about this they can't get kids to watch full-length basketball or baseball games and how do you monetize the short form video content for these sports leagues which they've typically given out for free imagining it will get people to watch full-length

2:06:04games and to pay for cable and pay for streaming services and so on it's a major problem not just the pivot to video but the move to short form video which no one has been able to compete on without producing extraordinarily stupid content if you look at what dominates Instagram or TikTok or YouTube shorts it's incredibly thick very very dumb stuff that is able to compete within the very short form absolutely I could say this from experience because I tried to start cutting my videos in a short form as an advertiser for for long form and I quit doing it because the short form people didn't come they did not watch the long form videos the responses I got were antagonistic and people could not understand my arguments and that's just called me stupid and I'm like okay well we're freaking about this forced decides and if you ever see me then run like if you really want to go this way then like the way that you this actually is because I just have to physically dominate you and while I'm 40 something and probably can't do it as easily anymore I am turning

2:07:08with a browser so you should consider what you're doing and they're like and I'm like I think violence is stupid so I don't want to go there but if you really think that that's how you're gonna integrate it like violence becomes the only pair of social I mean the only social option and I do think this is really bad for the left because I do think a lot of these memified things get brought up but unfortunately what worries me is you see left academics cow-tow towards it a little bit because they think they need to stay relevant that maybe they can sneak in some smarter stuff later but I just gave up on it because I'm like I just don't I don't want to argue with people just call me dumb because they don't understand my argument because I can't listen to more than three minute clip and I can give you two depressing anecdotes that are not roof of anything but they are ubiquitous enough that I have a problem I'm a teacher in Utah you think do the can I have a seat or I do that would be a problem the reason why it's not is my

2:08:10students do not have the attention span to watch my videos and this includes honor students I've had several tell me I found your stuff it was interesting but I couldn't watch something for more than 10 minutes so your videos are too long like what are you doing making 15 to 30 minute videos and I'm like I make three and four hour videos sweetie like um like because some of this stuff can't be distilled and like well if you can if you know something you can make it simple I'm like no some stuff you really can't not not like that not in a matter of time as well as a matter of explanation yeah and then there's the whole dialogue form you know a lot of podcasts there's a dialectic there's a dialogue a back-and-forth that develops that you requires a certain amount of of movement in the conversation that you can't simply produce or command in a short unit of time you know and I as much as I like making one hour or two hour-long podcasts I always think that my books are the best things I make and only a small percentage of the people who watch my stuff on

2:09:12the internet actually buy and read my now very cheap legitimacy and liberal democracies with Edinburgh University Press you know but to me you know that is the best thing that I've ever made and it's because I can actually sit with each line I can try to make sure that all of the stuff fits that my usages of words fit together across a very large space of tax I have time to be able to work through you know tensions in my argument and figure out you know how I want to deal with very very complicated issues that there's just no way you can do that in an extemporaneous format no matter how much reading and how much writing and talking you do outside of it you know you can bring some of that to it but you can never bring as much to you know any kind of video even a long form videos you can do with the book and the crazy thing to me is that there's you know the people who read books there's the people who watch long form videos but this is a niche thing long form video now long form video is around where the novel was in the 60s it's something that you do if you're you know

2:10:17a little bit edgy you know you fancy yourself a kind of educated a little bit you know artistic person but it's no longer the primary way in which culture is disseminated and developed you know now we're you know to the short form video and that the edit you know the thing that they really young kids lover those edits with the music and and this is just all about a vibe it's like you know mystery ritual cult stuff from lady antiquity you know that's just about creating a woo woo kind of sensation in a lot of these videos yeah all these like hard hard style remixes of songs you know that are you know kind of booming of fascistic beat and then the military imagery and all of this oh yeah I find this weirdly fast today but I also found that like we do see a lot of times I'm short form videos is like summer women who are obviously positioning themselves as sex objects also trying to sneak news in like I'm just like okay like wow

2:11:24and I don't want to sound like that there's no counter tendencies and zoomers there are there are that I have known people to get fed up with this and go re-books really truly but it is no longer the general chained and to support your point on on long form video not even in like what we're doing not like in this long talk show format but like in a narrative format I used to teach only for from 2019 to about a year ago a litten film class that when I first offered it because it allowed you to read two books and watch a bunch of movies was so in demand that we could we had to cap it because like it was like 200 people wanted into the course I have trouble getting 40 kids into it now and I quit I actually passed it onto another teacher because it was so hard to build up because so many kids did not want to do it and it was clear that many of the kids in the class were were actually not watching the videos and relying on

2:12:27AI summaries and also when I told them to review the video they confused an AI summary with a review and didn't understand why I was like no a review is not you just telling me what the thing is about would you obviously didn't even watch it anyway yeah and people used to do this with spark notes and novels and now it's all the way down to you know movies the thing that used to be the break and the easy thing the layup you know now this is impossible to get people to actually do it's a huge problem yeah and no it's not the case that we can just rely on short form video content to reinvent art and culture in some other form such that everybody gets the same benefit it does matter that people be able to conceptualize concepts you know develop what they think an abstraction means and apply it and you have to be able to write to do that and to be able to think in a precise and methodical way and video the image doesn't generate that kind of thinking

2:13:34yet generates a vibe it generates a kind of it's more like a psychedelic experience relative to the text absolutely and I do find the idea that we can't do anything about this frustrating because I'm like no we can't fix it we cannot fix it just with formal education that is absolutely true I agree with Freddie on that but I'm like the idea that we just can't do anything is foolish but I do think to come back again it would take international coordination to just say okay this is junk food you can have a little bit of it but it cannot be the majority of consumption sorry yeah it would take coordination but you know people just act like any time one of these things happens the whole post-World War II order is to be taken for granted and if it's replaced it will be with terrifying nationalism and those are the only choices so you have to cling onto this post-World War II system that can't protect us from any of these things much less empower us to

2:14:36do anything to make a world that's actually worth living in I do think that if I have like my my strategic failure of the left in its imagination is frankly and you know I wrote a whole book on this now with Daniel Todd and I will also say writings really helpful writing to someone also is really really helpful because I could tell you when you full shit and you have to like make some concessions if not a co-writer you need to really get out of there but because you know there's there in writing there's a dialectic between the sociality of it and the individuality of it that comes out because it's an individual act you kind of have to do even when you're collaborative writing I still have to like write down things by myself even when I'm working with someone else but then I have to take all the social learning all the dialogic stuff that comes before before that you know for me years of talking on podcasts like decades actually talking on podcasts being still down

2:15:37and engagement with other thinkers and what was a relatively short book because I won because it's easier to publish and too because I think people might read it maybe but it's really important that we do this and I think you know one of the things I told people is like well if you ever been on like left-tick talk or left-instagram if you think left-twitter is bad or a left-facebook was bad the vapidness and easy manipulation of like left of the left video formats and short form really is underdisco. People might complain about bread tube versus bread tube or any of that but I'm like all that's actually not as relevant as it was six years ago and this has happened for really really quickly I mean the the fact and I really did and this I will sound like you know even though I'm not anti-AI I'm not anti-video obviously how could you but the domination of

2:16:43short form videos is perfectly correlative with the decline in literacy and developed world it is like one-to-one correlations even down to the date you started seeing it and before that there was an argument to be made that actually even though you weren't building up extensive reading skills or intensive reading skills like close reading you weren't getting that from the internet but people were reading more on the internet and the odds and early octines even if they were reading left novels which was problematic for points of intention and long and long for debate but at least they were reading and when you got to tick-tock, Instagram and vines that started dropping off precipitously worldwide because it's such a short content it's short content that's designed to get you to watch each you know to keep watching more short content so when you start with it it's well I'll just watch a short content a short thing and then I'll get back to my serious stuff but it's designed to hook you on that so you think you're only committing a very

2:17:45small amount of time to it and then before you know it an incredibly incredibly vast amount of time is gone and it used to be that in these kinds of windows when people wanted something to do they would have to embark on something that if they wouldn't finish it in that unit of time they would make a significant contribution to it they would start a book they would read a chapter of a book that you know that you would you would do something more serious in those intervals or when you wanted a break you know you'd get a magazine you get something that gave you something more substantive to deal with and now because you have this easy option of just in any situation without paying any kind of subscription fee without purchasing any kind of specific volume you just have these short form videos people waste entire days of their life you know huge amounts of time on this stuff that doesn't stick in your brain doesn't teach you anything doesn't make you a better person and encourages intellectuals' swath because since it feeds you stimulus very very readily

2:18:48without you having to engage with it on any level it degrades over time a lot of the intellectual muscles which come from trying to find meaning and make connections out of something longer and bigger yeah I mean people understand this when you talk about the effects of my journey on your physical body and I'm like muscle mass and whatnot they don't they they really ignore it on brains and I don't and again neither one of us I would be very clear neither one of us are anti-technology and one of us are what I like I know this about you I know that obviously my entire project will be hyper paradoxical if I was but I do think it's a real problem because I I think a point you made back like half an hour ago and this would be my last point I one of the things that makes me somewhat unique amongst Marxists and it's not in my book but it is in a lot of the thinking that went into my book is this complexity system thinking notion about specialization that you invoke more and more high level energy intellectual energy and specialization and you see

2:19:54a general degradation of skills and to you have an elite that are so specialized they can't really think outside of very very very narrow constraints and then you have a general public that also can't really do anything is so specialized when there's an economic change I can't really adjust that there really is no other option for them because they spent you know their life specializing on this very specific human limited skill that you know as you were talking about it's actually kind of mind numbing and you do need some of this complexity and divisional labor and whatnot for a complex society I don't know how how you don't have it but to the extent that we have it today it leads to both an incompetent general public and an incompetent elite that is not incompetent on its specialization but a specialization is so narrow that you know what else can they do and I think that does lead to them like even the business sector and even the military which is an area that I used to think had natural checks against this being easily conned by grifters because no one

2:21:00has enough to sculpt information and knowledge and general skills to put it all together to see how to deal with the grifting right so then you don't have a coherent unit that's capable of crowding you know that you don't have an aristose you don't have a demos you don't have a unit that can crack and your path dependent and you're just struck as stock following institutional and structural imperatives that you lack the capacity to revise right well I mean and Tanger says these systems just die like that he doesn't say it's inevitable he has like night examples in history where they don't but he's like but more often than not they collapse due to their energy needs and over specialization modernity is that you know modern systems are designed explicitly with less virtuous people in mind you know these modern systems were created after my discused Persian letters you know after Viko's new science with a view to how do we create a social system that is operable by people who are degraded with regard to their capacity for

2:22:04political activity with regard to their ability to collectively cooperate and take decisions together who when they try to do this tend to get into civil conflict with each other of the kind you know Hobbes describes in the habit yeah people who we're going to design a world where they don't have to think about fundamental values because if they think about that they'll get into conflicts with each other we're not only do they not have to think about it but we ensure to some degree that they don't think about it because we regard this tendency as dangerous in people and insofar as it reappears likely to result into talitarian or horrific you know abusive tyrannical acts yeah so the thing that's really bizarre about modernity is that it's designed to be compatible with degenerated people and as we keep going further and further in modernity we make people who are less and less able to independently organize stuff and we just keep trying to find out can modernity work with people who are even less able to do this kind of stuff than the previous generation of people who are even less socialized and even less able to independently cooperate

2:23:10how how degenerated can people be and have modern systems still work how advanced is this new science of modernity can it take on board and work with even extraordinarily limited narrow subjects I mean the problem that I think you have is something that Peter Turchin and Co turn out which is you have both an overly competitive and degenerated elite too and so this idea that modernity is like okay we're going to include everyone in politics oh shit that doesn't work so now let's create a politics where they can all seem included and I'll have a say but not have any effect on anything and I do think this is a great irony of like liberal democracy you and I both say we've said this both explicitly if you think you're going to get rid of the administrative state you're on crack but but you know particularly immediately like that's not going to happen overnight but at the same level it is odd to me when I hear the great starwarts of defending democracy

2:24:14from the progressive left defend the administrative state and until very recently because it's been taken over by reactionaries the judiciary the two least democratic areas of government and I'm just like you really don't have faith in civil institutions which sometimes actually do what you want but you don't even have faith to let that happen yeah there's a real tension between modernity and republicanism and the attempt to unite those things has always been very fractious yeah it's uh I guess part of me is a small r republican and that like I don't feel like we have any other way to have massed politics which is what you'd need for class equalization and I do get the frustrations with with you know okay well you know every cook may be able to govern but they can't run a nuclear submarine and I'm like okay I can't your point um but also if you have a

2:25:17non-competitive elite class they also eventually won't be able to run the nuclear submarine but they have the keys to it so yeah yeah the question is can we use can we create modern structures which create space for the development of human capacities as opposed to just narrowing and emptying people into more and more specialized roles is there a way to bend modernity around a little bit to the point where it generates a flourishing of people's abilities is opposed to just the closing up and if the answer is no I don't know that there's a human future which by the way some of our tech overlords have just decided that no there isn't and that's okay and I'm like whoa oh you know I mean Peter Teal has almost all explicitly stated that maybe like the world will be better without people in it if it was only run by our profit maximizing robots oh who's that world leaving for but anyway these guys who are disgusted by their own employees they're

2:26:18disgusted by the people that they themselves have shaped and helped to create oh yeah it's it's hilarious that like oh no the socialization that we impose on you we don't like it but I mean I do think this is something that I have critiqued Marxism for was the assumption that more more centralization would always lead to more and more socialization and skilling of labor which has just seems to have reached a zenith in the 1960s like and at this point skilling and socialization don't obviously go together go all right like like completely unrelated to each other almost yeah indeed maybe even opposed so thank you Ben for your time we've been talking for about two and a half hours working people find your work where are you writing these days it's been delightful I'm you could find on my about page on Benjamin Soutu Baker.com most of the stuff that I read externally I've also got a sub stack these days that where I write stuff more informally

2:27:24and you know of course I am very keen to and I'll do it one more time plug my paperback of legitimacy and liberal democracies which is the best thing I've ever made and it's currently the cheapest any book I've ever published has been or is likely to be for quite some time yeah I would I would tell people read that book I will super damper with it because I do think if we don't do it actually speaks to the question of my book with Daniel Tutt which is like why does dumb populism keep on emerging left right in center and why is that pluralism stuff in my second book I think really maps on well and and I think it's an interest especially because you come at it with a very different literature from when I tend to drop on in that second book so we come add to some of the same themes from very different bodies of literature it's very interesting yeah I was actually thinking about that because I was like you and I come like I come from almost a structural economic like mostly Marxist analysis Daniel comes at it from like from a Marxist psychoanalytic

2:28:29and sociological way and you come at it from like a structural structural functionalist I should not say structuralist because that's a very specific meaning a structural functionalist analysis of the way states interact it we've all kind of come on to similar problems in why this populism keeps on emerging and why it can't do anything because essentially what it's promising I think we all agree is impossible under current constraints but then when that fails people don't try to imagine something new they just flip back to like well another world is not possible low as me I have to compete in elections and I can't come up with a strategy that wins elections other than populism therefore I'll just reinvent populism again it seems to be where people are at yeah I I literally thought that because I'm like Anton and Anthony Morello and Anton Yeager like like a year ago we're declaring left populism dead and I'm like well it wasn't in Mandani one and we are right back in the cycle of people trying to do this again and you're even seeing them dust off move from the

2:29:34cloud again and like I could I could go on for a whole hour just about move in the cloud like well I think it's totally damaged a lot of Marxist rights but yeah if you know I don't like to blame theorists for things because of course the things that happen have structural causes but if I was gonna blame theorists for things the cloud move yeah I also think one of the things left us need to do and particularly Marxists who say they care about structural things is quit like blaming stuff on intellectual genealogies however I also agree to I would make a special exception for a cloud because it did feel like oh I you just came up with a left justification for utter capitulation and made it look like it wasn't that well yeah but anyway thank you so much Ben I really enjoyed this conversation and you will probably be back on the show eventually anyway so thank you for your time thanks for having me it was great it's fun

2:30:51thank you for listening to Varmuaga for more you can find us on youtube at Varmuaga or under my name Cedar Varmuaga we also have a patreon under Varmuaga where you can find additional shows audio of everything on both this channel without ads and audio from all the solos on the youtube channel music was provided by bitter lake with permission thank you