Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign Hi, this is Dick Flax. I'm joined by, of course, my partner in crime here, Daraka Larimo Hall. This is the new season, beginning of the Talking Strategy, Making History podcast we've been on for. I don't know whether. How to calculate it. We started with a season.
First season was focused on the left and the Democratic Party.
I think it was a very fruitful ranging discussion about what was possible and what was needed, fundamental change in the party and interviewing a number of people with a lot to say. And the second season we called Socialism and Its Discontents. And that also was far ranging, wide ranging on what socialism means in history, in principle, socialism in Europe, particularly Scandinavia. Daraka had spent time in Scandinavia during that season, had a lot to report. We talked with some Swedish social Democratic activists and we talked about the failures of the left, the tendencies toward authoritarianism on the left, and the possibilities for what socialism might look like. So all of these two seasons are still, even a couple of years later, relevant to people, I think, who really want to delve into these issues, which I feel many people that we're in touch with would like to. So if you haven't heard these in the past, you still can get them. And then the third segment or season was provoked by October 7, 2023, the Israeli Palestine crisis, the war on Gaza. And we did. I think people are telling us, I don't know if you've heard this, Diraka, remarkable comments of being favorable to what we did there, because we managed to cover every conceivable perspective of, you might say, the left and the Jewish world and this whole set of issues, ranging from Meret's leader in Israel to Palestinian activists here, to people with a lot of wisdom on the overall situation.
And those two, I think, remain relevant. So I'm proud of what we've done. We could use more people listening and commenting, but I'm getting good feedback from people who are listening, the three or four of them. And I hope you. No, just joking. So how are you doing?
You've had a difficult and interesting problematic year. I know, like a lot of people, but in your case. But the new baby, I think is, you know, very auspicious for the future, let's hope.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
Hopefully she's able to have an auspicious life of some kind.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: I didn't know. I don't remember whether I said, we're actually doing this on New Year's Eve. So that's another auspiciousness about what we're doing today. And because that coincides as I've said with starting a new series of new season of this podcast and I'm going to turn it over to you, Daraka, because you've been thinking about this and have a way of formulating what you hope we can accomplish. So take it.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Well, I definitely have been doing a lot of thinking. Thank you, Dick. But yeah, I don't know how much I've come up with, but my idea about how to go forward is obviously very much driven by, informed by the incoming Trump administration and the wave of victories and seemingly upcoming victories of the far right in this past record setting election year. You know, no more people voted in this last year in elections around the world than any other year in history. Just tons of countries and the EU's elections all, you know, happening happened to fall in this last year. So I think that added the sense of just like doom and high stakes and stress to the year. And now there's a lot of conversations happening obviously about what is going wrong. Wrong, what went wrong. And I think our, our job on this podcast is to always look at things from a pretty high or historical vantage point and focus on what the, what people who identify, you know, as the democratic left, as the left that cares about rights and democracy and government by and for the people, what we can actually do to accomplish our goals, to stave off, you know, to stop the bleeding, so to speak. But what kinds of actions make the most sense strategically? How can we think about day to day activism in the context of making broader change? So like that's our, our wheelhouse, so to speak. So how do we think about that when, you know, there's a fascist influenced government about to take power in the United States again, and Democrats are obviously very publicly going through a set of conversations about how to respond, if to respond, et cetera. And we can maybe riff on that a little bit later in the episode about sort of what we see as the state of the union, so to speak. But we have to keep working, right? We can't give up and we can't give in and we can't just sort of tune out as some people are like openly advocating. I see all these think pieces about deleting news apps on phones as a good way to cope with fascism, which is, I just want to say, like an awful idea. You should be adding news apps on your phone right now, not deleting them, but still it's not clear like what to, what to do about it, what to do about things. And there's a lot of people out there that seem to have, like, very strong opinions that aren't really necessarily much changed from before the election, but are sort of repeated at a higher pitch. So sorting through that, I think, is another good thing that we can do this season.
So I've been thinking about this under, like, the rubric of three Rs and not reading, writing and arithmetic, but three words, concepts that I think we can keep in mind and that we can talk about in terms of concrete fights happening, policy fights happening, political fights happening, et cetera. But, you know, there's sort of three different things that we need to be doing and thinking about all at once. One is reform, the other is realignment, and the third is resistance. And all three of those words are loaded. And all of them have enemies or, like, opponents or people that are sort of triggered by them, which, you know, hopefully we can join our conversation with other ones that are happening in different parts of the left around those terms. Each of them are distinct. Each of them have a lot of historical salience. Right. And are tied to broader trends in American political development and, you know, social justice activism and so forth. And, yeah, I thought we could spend a little time this episode talking about the uses and misuses of each of these terms and, you know, what. What we'd like to. How we'd like to define them and how we'd like to make them useful to the. To the left today.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Well, that's very good. I mean, I like that just the 3R concept because it continues your talent showing, showing your talent at creating. Catchy and intriguing.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Well, you'd think they'd catch. I feel like. Well, they catch between you and I. Like, both of us are like, hey, that's catchy.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: We started with. Why did we start with the underpants problem? Right.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Oh, right.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: That was our first episode. And I won't go back to explain it.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Still, that also hasn't caught on enough that listeners who haven't heard that episode are probably right now being like, oh, God, what did they start with?
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Can't resist. But saying, this is going to be a complete tangent. But I. But I've been spending time with my young grandsons. Oh, good. And they told me all about something called spivity. Toilets.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Skibidi. Toilets.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Spivity. And this is skibidi. Oh, you know about it.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: You know about it.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: But also, similarly to you, I know about it, like, from checking in on pop culture. Not because I participate.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: I have the scholarly insight that somehow the underpants set the stage for other creators to figure out related kinds of themes so from underpants we go to toilets. But anyway, but they told me my, my grandson said yesterday that Skibidi toilets is dead.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Which is good, I guess. Good news.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yeah, probably.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: So like everyone in America, we're diverting attention from the Trump time that's impending by having this great repartees. So we three Rs. So you said we might kick around a little bit what each of these words might mean and how we might deploy them as we plan, figure out what we're going to do in this season. So what do you mean by reform specifically in this matter?
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let me say first, an important point is that we have to be doing more than one thing at, at, at a time. And that we can't think only about winning back the presidency, which is a mistake that's been made before.
And you know, be like, look, we got to do whatever we can to get a better person in there. Like a person who's not a fascist. Like the bar keeps getting lower. Right. Last time it was like not a Christian fundamentalist neocon idiot, like, you know, Princeton Charlie Aristocrat. Like, that's not that. And then now it's, you know, not Donald Trump. And that's like a fine conversation to have. Well, we need to do that. Right? But there's like, obviously that's not enough. We need to be, we need to live in a world in which Donald Trump cannot be President of the United States. And we need to live in a world in which, you know, policies that are humane and sustainable and solidaristic are being implemented. And that's what we need to think about. So the first thing is like to shift our thinking and in a way be more like Republicans, not in the way that centrist Democrats want us to be, more like Republicans. Not by taking their policy or their values or their frames, but simply borrowing back the strategies they stole from the like mid century left and the reformist left, as I'll get to, right, like taking those things back and playing harder ball, longer term goals and you know, thinking about changing America and changing society, not just winning one election at a time. And that's something we need to get back to. And that to me, that is about thinking about reform and realignment and resistance all at the same time.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: So I think what I'm taking from what you're referring to right there is the Republican and right wing burrowing into the grassroots of America over the last 20 years or so in ways. And at the same time, the labor movement in many localities was drying up, which was One of the foundational, grassroots, institutional ways that the Democrats and the liberal left were maintaining on a local level. So that.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: That's one example. I think that's one facet of the whole picture.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that was one of the things I learned in our first season from people like Jane Kleb and others, Theta Skoc, who talked about this very thing as fundamental to the future of democracy and the Democratic Party. So you said that's one thing you mean by reform.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Well, I was saying that's one aspect. Like there's one. The decline of the labor movement as part of people's daily reality and as a, as a counterbalance to rich people and corporations in the economy. That, like, that's a huge part of the, the big picture of the ascendance of the far right or like the current situation. That's what I meant. Let's think about what it means to be a reformist and to push for reforms. It means to change things.
It means to have a policy in which you, perhaps not all at once, like reform can be gradual. Gradual, exactly. But it means that you're transforming things. You're forming. You're changing the structure of an institution, you're changing the structure of a social relationship, you're opening them up to new groups of people, whatever. It means actual change. And I think that the Democratic Party used to be the party of reform or used to be a reformist party, a party that was like, we're going to reform the economy, we're going to reform higher education, or we're going to, you know, we're going to reform these things and take on big projects that, that, you know, have a lasting impact. And somewhere over time, we stopped being a reformist party and we were a party of policy.
So we were a party not of changing the financial institutions or like the system of finance, but like, you know, putting people into the positions who like workers a little more than the people. The Republicans would. Or, you know, they still love corporations and big banks and so forth, but, like, they're going to have better policy. They're going to. Policy is about budgets and where you spend money. Policy is about what can be done technocratically in an institution to, to not even change the institution, but just have the institution produce better outcomes because you're putting in better inputs. Like, I don't want to go like, too far down the rabbit hole of making the fine, finer points between, like, Paul's, you know, policy and reform. I'm sure we could use those terms interchangeably in some cases, but I Do think that I'm describing a lowering of the horizon, you know, that's happened in the party since, you know, since Clinton and, and, and then worldwide in social democracy over the years from a movement that is going to use democratic power, even shared power, coalitional power, not absolute power to change the economy in favor of working people stopped doing that and started just doing policy and being like, we'll spend, we'll spend 20 units of monies on education and the conservatives will only spend 10 units of it. And so we're better. So I want to go back to being that reform oriented movement and start pushing for fundamental change. And I think, you know, if you go back, if I can take you back to the awful days of 2015 when people were trying to make a really, really huge difference between.
Wait, no, that wasn't 20, was it? No, no, sorry. It's all a blur. I guess this would have been 2020, 2019, 2020. But you know, making a huge fine point about differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And like Elizabeth Warren is, you know, just a liberal and Bernie Sanders is a socialist or social Democrat or something. But what, what puts them both in the same category in terms of how they talk about politics is they were both talking about structural changes. Bernie used the term revolution and Warren used the term reform. But they're both reformists. It was all reform. This is what being a good reformist means, is talking about making fundamental changes. So do you see the distinction?
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think it's very, not only see it, I think it's very illuminating to me. I had never thought of it quite this way. We comparing a framing as reform or policy. In other words, the policy frame, as I'm hearing you, is the Democrats are putting forward, well, we can govern better the system that we have. And so that prompted me to think beyond what you said is Biden has made what really can be understood to be a fundamental reformist move with what is called industrial policy, which is a reference real reform. Industrial policy was anathema for quite a while, especially after Clinton or during Clinton and beyond. Industrial policy is a deliberate effort to use government intervention to define investment, large scale investment in the society. And Biden is claiming, but it's almost under the radar that he's claiming that they've made major moves in this direction with the so called inflation. Even the names of the measures that they took don't describe the meaning and the scope of what they did.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: It's a good example and I think this is no real shade to Biden. Because I think he would have wanted to go further and make it more.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Of a reform, more manifestly reform.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: But that's hard to do without Congress. What would have make it more, give it more teeth, right, is like there's like new agencies involved, there's you know, longer term mandates and institutional structures to make sure we always have an industrial policy as opposed to, you know, I take your point. I mean, I think it's.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Well, not only that, I mean, what you said, the distinction you made, policy versus reform. So calling something industrial policy doesn't ring any bells to any normal human being. What is industrial policy? And, and yet we fall into that vocabulary. This is really.
And the reason for that is because there's such a fear of, quote, socialism unquote, that you don't call it anything socialistic. You call it something very.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And it's stupid. I mean, obviously there's like a long history of liberal reform of reform coming from a variety of ideological sources. Like, the thing that I like about it as a framework for thinking is that it should be reform should be the, the, the, the milkshake that brings us all to the yard. Like it should be the thing that the socialist left, the part that's not doing like Lenin cosplay, like the, and, and liberals, like true actual liberals that are like, you know, have an ideology should. And then, you know, progressives and environmentalists and like everybody, like everybody, we should be able to agree that the agenda needs to be bolder. It needs to be about making real changes so that they're not undone election by election.
And that is, let's just call that reform. Because I also want to defend this term and the concept from the left, I mean that, you know, again, because of the Leninist detour. No offense, but some of the rhetoric of the new left, absolutely reform was a bad thing. Like it became. Because it was, it became a maybe false dichotomy between taking actions that fundamentally shift power in society or don't, or people, you know, and then sort of confusing that with like methodology. And whether you wanted to, you know, hang bourgeois from lampposts or go into elections, like we got like all of that got overwrought.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: So I think we agree on what I'm about to say, which is that reform of the kind that we are, you and I are interested in and in foregrounding is reform that deals with power as well as benefits. And the welfare state framework sounded like to the left, more people, to the left was that's just reforming capitalism to make it Work better by putting more benefits in people. I think that, so we want to get beyond that kind of thinking.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And we might want to do an episode and maybe bring somebody in to talk about, to talk about that debate, like how it was that those we kind of got derailed historically into that false dichotomy. And also like a little bit about the left's, like, nihilistic tendencies on the left which are coming back because of despair around.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Trump of, you know, things just have to get like, really, really bad and then we'll take a great leap forward. There's no way to take like a smaller step.
So anyway, so that's, that's the reform piece. Then the, the second word, which is, you know, a little more arcane. But, but like popping back into popular discussion in some place, in some circles because of this election is this concept of realignment. So realignment has a general definition in political science and then it's been given a very specific definition in the context of socialist political strategy and strategic debate. And you know, this, and we've talked about this before, Dick, that like, we've gotten a bit confused about what it is over the years. And I think like, the debate about political strategy within DSA is like a really interesting example or sort of like encapsulation of that confusion. So realignment is the term that political scientists use for political change between and among parties and the movement of groups of voters from party to party, as well as the, yeah, the ideological and like, issue and policy changes in parties. So again, generally the, the, it's just describing those movements. Did a party move from only having, you know, middle class suburban voters to then getting urban upper class voters? And did it change its policies in order to get that or in response to it? This is like the kinds of questions of realignment, you know, that, that political scientists are always, you know, debating and talking about and looking at. It had a particular salience, as you know, you know, back in the 50s and 60s because, sorry, in the United States because our political parties were not ideologically coherent or fixed. They were, you know, regional and sectoral. They were in the process of becoming much more ideologically distinct. And the, and so like the movement of black voters from being staunchly Republican to staunchly Democratic during the New Deal era, the emergence of the, of organized labor with a base in the north among immigrant, like white ethnics, these things changed the, the way that the Democratic Party won elections and the way the Republican Party won elections and the parties became much more coherently a party of Left and right and a party of differing competing coalitions, except for the fact.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: That the, that that New Deal realignment left the white supremacist Southern Democrats exactly in power, in power in the south and really in power in this. In the Congress. And so the battle in the 60s of the Civil rights movement really underneath it, and really part of its strategy was a further realignment. And this was a big realignment.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: To drive the racism out of the Democratic Party and to change.
And that included, of course, making the franchise available to the African American population.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Of the United States in coalition with Labor.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Based in the North. Right.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: That was what we all, even when we were Capital R revolutionaries in the New Left. I think this goal that I just articulated was understood to be what had to happen and did happen by 1970 and 72, that period, partly, of course, because of the civil rights legislation that Johnson conceded to and, and, and supported when he was president. The Southern Dixiecrats, the Dem, the Republican Party, took over the South Southern white vote. And the black vote was not enough to counterbalance that in many cases. But in any event, that's the big realignment that I lived through politically when I was young.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: And that's where it took on a salience of a conscious political project. People were talking about we need to do. We need realignment of the parties to kick the Dixiecrats out, push them to the Republicans and, you know, gain other constituencies because we're now a coherently liberal progressive coalition. And a debate within the Socialist Party about whether or not to continue to be an independent political party also used that vote, that same concept to say. Or factions within it said, look, this realignment project that is winning, like we're winning, we are beating the south. You know, we are. The labor liberal Civil rights coalition appears to be ascendant. We can keep pushing and this party will, you know, become or become something like a Social Democratic party. The Democratic Party, well, we don't need to have our own small party that wins a few percent. It's better to be part of the Democratic Party and make it into a Social Democratic Party. And that question.
Right. It was the under. You know, even though it was a fight about the Vietnam War, it was still part of the underlying fissure that like, basically broke up the Socialist Party in the early 70s and, and, and gave birth to what became DSA. If you go back to the original meaning of it, here we are in 2024 and say from 1972 or so, there was a Socialist project of realigning the Democratic Party and making it more social democratic and like that has failed. That didn't happen. It failed that. If that is indeed a benchmark and the project of realignment, it didn't realign the Democratic Party into a social Democratic party on economic questions. The story of the Democratic Party since 1972 is just a march to the right and to, you know, neoliberalism and away from social democracy, of course, as has been the story of the Social Democratic parties around the world in many ways.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Right, exactly. Yeah.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: So that's part of a global problem. But the Democratic Party has moved to the left since 1972 on a range of other very important issues and values questions and so forth. And again, if you think about realignment as this narrow thing about did we make it a socialist party or not? It doesn't seem like a very attractive idea. If you think about it back in its original sense, that realignment is just a description of, you know, how, of like how parties build majorities or pluralities. Realignment is just always happening. And if we're not actively moving and pushing to align the Democratic Party in a particular way, other people are going to move it to align in a different way. And the Republican Party is definitely going through, like, in a mode of consciously trying to realign American politics to build a majority that cuts deeply into the, into a, you know, traditional Democratic majorities and changes up their politics and their rhetoric and so forth in order to accomplish that. It's a precarious project, as we're seeing with their recent civil war over immigration.
But they're doing realignment. And so I want to, I want to, I want to bring it back as a description of one of the things that the, that the left needs to be constantly engaged in. Not a thing that we did once and tried and worked or didn't, but in fact, something that needs to be constantly done or it will be done to you.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Well, can we sharpen that to be. The specific focus of, of the coming period is the working class vote and predominantly the white working class vote. But we are being told, and I need to personally want to check out the basis of this, that it's not just white workers, it's black male voters, it's Latino male voters, male. So gender and race play a big part in divisions within the working class.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: That's always been true.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Always. And, and that, but the surprise or, or, or distress is not only that, that there are workers who see voting Republican as if they're going to vote at all as a better way to go than to Stick with the Democratic Party. Trying to diagnose that's going to. Something I would like to spend time with you and maybe others that we can recruit. But also. So that's the most immediate, that's in some circles being called dealignment, meaning that the traditional working class base of the Democratic aligned with the Democratic Party is no longer aligned with the Democratic Party.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Though I find, I think the term dealignment has always been confounding because these same socialists who came up with this focus on moving the Democratic Party, you know, as, as the party was moving away from them and moving away from us on, you know, core values and policy focus and so forth, that word started, the de alignment word was, was common and it, but it, it evokes the idea that what we're going is back to a period of the parties not being meaningfully different.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: And just being like these sectoral coalitions or whatever. And, and, and, but that's not what's happening. It's still, it's a contest. The party, the Democratic Party is still very different from the Republican Party. And you'll notice when people are trying to make the case like, oh, this is de alignment and both parties are for the working class now. So that's not a fissure or whatever. What you see is a lot of horrible thinking about the importance of issues like access to abortion and you know, trans civil rights, you know, affirmative action, a million other things. They're like, because the Democratic Party is still very different than the Republican. The Republicans continue to become more and more racist and reactionary and the Democratic Party isn't. And so it's still aligned, that's still alignment. Right. So I don't understand why people keep wanting to use the word dealignment when what is just happening is realignment.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Well, I think, I think the only way I could understand that, it's not that important really to understand it, but is that the dealignment is happening in the working class. That is that if, if the Democratic Party could count on a base that included workers of, of all races and genders, that's been going away for a long time in terms of white male voters, working class voters. And it's the big scare of the past couple of years has been, is it now the case that even among non white workers, especially male workers, that's happening? So that's what I think.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Right? No, you're probably right. That's just dumb. I mean, you're probably right that that's what they mean. But it's like our bookshelves are groaning with the books about like the white working class in the 60s, like going, you know, turning to the right and then you go all the way back. And from the, from as long as there have been elections in capitalist countries, there's been a share of the working class vote that's gone to the right always. And that has been growing like in a linear fashion since the 70s.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: All right, so, so let me just tack on to this particular realignment part of the theme that you just alluded to. But I think we could get into maybe because others have not try to understand why the pattern of the Democratic Party that we're talking about here is paralleled in the social Democratic parties in Europe. And that's not new either.
The Labor Party has been struggling for many decades now on, you know, is it a genuinely labor party or so some of it in all these countries isn't. It all isn't. Isn't a common thread that all have an electorate that is much more diverse than a simple class analysis would make sense.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: This is what Bernstein and Luxembourg were arguing about.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: So we need.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: Okay, right, so yeah, so we need to think of realignment as, as the norm, as like the just this is the struggle that we're in and you know, not like a linear tactic that's going to get us to the promised land. It's just like the thing you have to do to maintain democracy, let alone move a progressive reformist agenda.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Part of the sort of centrist critique of the left is or of the Democratic Party is that it is dependent on what is being called the elite college educated base. And the notion that this is elite is itself, I think an oversimplification. And so the point is there's something implicit in that critique is you can't have a common ground between college educated and non college educated workers, which is absolutely what is unacceptable. We have to find those common grounds. And that's possibly something that we can explore as well.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: So the last word in our little trip ditch here is resistance. And I'll tell you, I like reformism and reform and I like realignment. I actually for the last several years have really bristled at the use of the term resistance. It's always felt sort of self defeating because if you're a resistance, you're just protecting yourself really or trying to harry the enemy. A resistance is waiting for the allies, right? A resistance is biting time until some change that's going to allow you to be something other than just resisting. People on the left would talk about resistance, you know, 20 years ago and just always, it always felt self marginalizing, like aren't we trying to build a majority to win power and don't we sometimes win some power? Why are we talking about resistance now? Under Trump then the term resistance got adopted by, you know, all kinds of folks. Liberal centrist Republicans. Republicans, exactly. Republicans who didn't, you know, want to go. Yeah. Who are not fascist, like anti fascist or non fascist conservatives. So because of that, because it kind of like went mainstream for that moment, there's people on, on the left often talk with derision about the resistance libs, you know, and there's like all kinds of great critiques and not great critiques both of how the center left did under Trump and how they're doing now and so forth. But we do have to do some resistance in the sense of wherever we can, pushing back on, halting, slowing, you know, blunting the assaults on civil liberties and human rights that are going to be unleashed this time. And, and there's really no other term for it than resistance. It's not, we're not going to win big policy victories at the federal level in the next four years. We will be able to do that at the state level, which is why thinking about reform and thinking about realignment is so key. But part of what we're going, we have to do and we have to always be able to do because you know, as long as well, it's always going to be a part of political struggle in a federalist system like ours with so much happening at the state level, but especially while the Republican Party is in this radical right posture, really anywhere they take power, there's just going to have to be a lot of defense. And so, you know, we need to rehabilitate that, that word, you know, snap. And frankly, I think we're going to miss the resistance libs. Like, like anybody who was like, ah, pussy hats. That's so lame. Like, God bless those people. Like, I wish people were taken to the streets now. What we're seeing instead is just a lot of really, really, really scary capitulation and, and normalization of just. Yeah, fascist ways.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: Well, I'm hoping that what you just said is not really the main tendency.
My sense, my hope, more optimistic as usual sense is that what's going on with people, because I think I feel this in my own self is we need to, we don't know quite what actions are going to be necessary, but we have to be in the back of everyone's mind, I think is if there really is mass roundups of people or other scenes of that nature, just as happened after Trump took office first time. There are mass direct actions that follow from that to try to prevent it.
So direct action, it's hard to plan in advance for the direct action that might be triggered by or made necessary by certain kinds of actions by state power. And I know something about sort of legally grounded immigrant rights folks, and I think they're trying to figure out what are the scenarios under which various steps by the Trumpists would be taken and what kinds of responses they can prepare for that include legal, you know, all kinds of legal maneuvers as well as. And so. So I think it's. Yeah. Why the mass Women's March was planned for in 2017, right after inaugurate Inauguration Day. And I think there's. I keep seeing online there's talk of marches, but I don't see much. Any organization really around that.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And I don't want to make a fetish out of one particular action. It's totally fine if this cycle, it's a different thing. And there's no need to, like, make anything into, like, an annual event and just make it a parade. My point is that from, again, Republicans, through all like, the mainstream Washington beltway, you know, liberal thought bubble, I don't know. And certainly, you know, elected officials, just like grassroots progressive organization, like everybody and then just, you know, your neighbor and your cousin and just like everyone you knew were on. Not just like sort of on alert to take more action if shit came down the pipeline, but were in a posture of just rejecting everything that came from the Trump administration and from Trump and keeping alive a feeling that this isn't normal and that it's not legitimate what's happening. And instead what we're seeing is a lot of legitimation and acceptance and, you know, along with the good, necessary mea culpas about not doing enough for or talking enough with the working class or working class people. I see Democrats being like, you know, it was really, we need to be more like Trump to. They don't say that, but all the examples that they give of how they're now they're listening to the working class is all to do what Trump says. I'm very worried about the labor movement. I think there's a very large minority but large section of the labor movement that is just chomping at the bit to make deals with Trump. I think that there are sections of the labor movement that are also anti immigration who are gonna sign off on at least part of Trump's immigration agenda. You know, and even if they're not supporting the roundups, they're not going to be helpful in stopping them. That worries me. So not having that. And then you have a, you know, governors like, like Gavin Newsom who was like all in, is going to prove that he's relevant to the country by being the anti Trump is now like, oh, I got, I got to be able to go to Iowa and talk to Trump voters about how they should vote for me even though they voted for Trump. So maybe I won't be the anti Trump anymore. And all of that is how you get authoritarian rule. It's by the lazy and self interested actions of a constellation of folks and groups, not just one election.
[00:43:45] Speaker A: So the scope of your 3R triptych, as you called it, is very ambitious in terms of the ground we could cover. And you haven't even mentioned, which I would in terms of resistance is the situation in higher education where a McCarthyite attack on student dissent and particularly on the Palestinian solidarity movement is very much underway. And that scares me a lot and has nothing to do with Trump per se.
And we, we may or may not want to get into all of that.
So this is, we have to, you and I have to figure out. And if anyone has any suggestions on people we could invite to talk or particular focuses within the three Rs that we should do, please let us know. We'll be working hard on air and also in the real world, both of us, I think, as we hope others will.
The good news to me, I'm always looking for the hope sign. So the hope sign to me is the utter clownishness of the Trump world.
Here's the world's richest man who is pretty fascistic in himself and it's useful to keep calling him President Musk to offend Trump. So anyway, those contradictions and behaviors may mean that these people are just prone to wild overreach and bizarre self serving activity that will be feeding a positive resistance and positive, I think humor is going to be an important part of resistance. By the way, let's not make it too grim if we can help it.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: Grim and funny is what I aspire to.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: So is that we could call that granny.
We're going to be grunny.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: All right. That's going to be viral.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: Happy New Year. Happy New Year, Daraka.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: Hey, Happy New Year, Dick.
[00:45:57] Speaker A: Happy New Year to your family and.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: And to yours and to everyone listening.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: And we'll see you on the other side, as they sometimes say. Meaning the other side will be 25.
All right, take care, guys.
[00:46:10] Speaker B: All right. Bye.
[00:46:11] Speaker C: We've been down that sorry road before they let us hang around a little longer than they should have it's too late to fool us anymore We've seen the ones who kill the ones with.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Vision.
[00:46:39] Speaker C: Cold blooded murder Right before your.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Eyes.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: Today they hold the power and the money and the guns it's getting hard to listen to their lies I just gotta wonder what my daddy would have done if he'd seen the way they turned his dream around I gotta go by what he told me.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Try.
[00:47:23] Speaker C: To tell the truth and stop Stand your ground.
Don't let the bastards get you down.
