More Nonwhite Voters Migrate to GOP Despite Media Accusations of "White Nationalism" PLUS: Freddie DeBoer on his New Book, and the Self-Defeating Ethos of the Elite Liberal Class | SYSTEM UPDATE #144
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the primary theme of most of corporate media since 2016, at least after they finally were forced to give up on their twisted Russiagate conspiracy theories, Is that Donald Trump is a white supremacist bent on ending American democracy and replacing it with a white nationalist dictatorship.
This narrative has been bizarre for many reasons, starting with the fact that Trump attracted more non-white voters than any Republican nominee in years, and then increased that support when he ran for re-election in 2020.
So if Trump is eager to install white nationalist despotism in the United States, it appears that many non-white voters, including many black Americans and Latino Americans, are very eager to join him in this.
And empower him to succeed.
That seems... odd.
But what is really scaring Democrats, and I mean scaring them to their bones, is all new polling data showing that non-white voters continue to migrate away from Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to the GOP and to Trump specifically.
On Tuesday, the New York Times published an analysis of recent polling data headline, quote, consistent signs of erosion in black and Hispanic support for Biden.
It explained, quote, on average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53% to 28% among registered non-white voters in a compilation of Time's CNN polls from 2022 and 2023.
In other words, more than one out of every four non-white Americans have heard the corporate media telling them for seven straight years that Trump is a racist, that he hates them, that the Republican Party favors their suppression and even their eradication.
And yet they continue in large and larger numbers to express support for the white nationalists.
In some ways, that simply demonstrates that fewer and fewer people even listen any longer to corporate media or trust anything that they say.
But the heterodox leftist writer and academic Freddie DeBoer has a new book out that very well explains these trends even more clearly than that, entitled, quote, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
DeBoer uses his own experiences in academia Illustrative anecdotes and ample social science data demonstrate how insular, affluent, provincial liberal elites have almost entirely taken over media discourse in the United States, and how the themes and worldviews they propagate are virtually designed to alienate and sicken, rather than persuade and attract ordinary Americans, including many that might be inclined to vote Democrat, absent these pointless and out-of-touch perspectives.
DeBoer has long been one of the U.S.' 's best writers and most independent left-wing voices.
A reasonably positive review of his book by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Barton Swain, who himself is a fairly traditional establishment conservative, said of DeBoer, quote, At present, he is best known for writing derisive, occasionally very funny essays, castigating the American left for allowing itself to be gentrified into an effete, self-perpetuating ruling class.
I find his writing brilliant, puzzling, and reprehensible in roughly equal parts.
On Tuesday, we sat down with the Bohr for a wide-ranging interview about his new book, about his scathing critiques of left-wing politics, about his recent mockery of the AOC left in a New York Magazine article entitled, AOC is just a regular old Democrat, and about the reasons so many ordinary Americans, led by people of color, are finding Democrats and liberals increasingly repulsive.
We really enjoyed this interview and are confident you will too.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There's a very odd dynamic in American politics, which is you have most of mainstream corporate media that once dominated American political discourse insisting over and over for years now, ever since Donald Trump emerged on the political scene,
that Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy and that in particular he's a threat to American that Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy and that in particular he's a threat to American democracy because he wants to overturn democracy and replace They don't really bother to explain why Trump, who was in power for four years, never actually did that.
I suppose the three-hour riot on January 6th is, to them, some sort of proof about an attempt to install white nationalist dictatorship.
But whatever else is true, People who are not white in America, American voters who are either black or Hispanic or Asian or some other non-white race, watched Trump govern the country for four years and apparently decided they don't really believe in that narrative, or if they do,
They apparently support a white nationalist dictatorship, given that trends have been very clear since Trump's emergence on the political scene and continue to be, that non-white voters are increasingly migrating toward the Republican Party, and specifically Donald Trump, not away from it, despite these escalating claims that Trump is a racist criminal who wants to install White supremacist ideology and end American democracy.
Now, if you can think of anything that would scare Democratic Party operatives to their core more than this, I don't know what it would be.
It's a New York Times article from Tuesday, and the title of it is Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden.
And the article essentially argues, quote, it's a weakness that could manifest itself as low Democratic turnout, even if Trump and Republicans don't gain among these groups.
This is the New York Times warning Democrats heading into the 2024 election that the key constituency on which they depend Which is why it's so important to them to promulgate this claim of Trump as white nationalist, is abandoning the Democratic Party and moving to Trump.
Quote, President Biden is underperforming among non-white voters in New York Times-Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53% to 28% among registered non-white voters in a compilation of Time's Siena polls from 2020 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 non-white respondents.
The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden's support compared with 2020, When he won with more than 70% of non-white voters.
If he's unable to revitalize this support by next November, it will continue a decade-long trend of declining Democratic strength among voters considered to be the foundation of the party.
That decade-long trend of course coincided with the arrival of Donald Trump on the scene.
They include a chart, which we can put on the screen, that shows the Democratic share of major party vote among non-white voters, and here you see the chart that shows race and ethnicity.
And it's pretty clear just from this chart here, you see it, that the number of black voters, I'm a little bit dysfunctional with these pens as usual, but here are black voters.
And you see the trend is on a decline.
This is from 20 It's from 2012, 2016, 2020, and then projected in 2024.
So you can see from Obama's re-election until 2016, there was kind of a maintained graph, and then it just starts declining as Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden.
He might be preparing to run against Joe Biden again.
For all non-white voters, it's even steeper, the decline.
Among Hispanics, it's extremely steep.
And then just other non-white voters in general, it's just as steep as well.
So you just see the overall trend is basically a kind of collapse off a very steep hill.
Which, again, if you're a Democratic Party operative, if you're Joe Biden, if you're almost anyone who works in the corporate media, You look at this and there's nothing that will petrify you more, given how critical non-white support is for the Democratic Party.
Even if Biden maintains a 20 point lead, that is nowhere near enough.
The Democrats need an overwhelming victory among Black and Latino voters, and Asian voters as well, voters from the Middle East, in order to have any chance to win.
That's why calling everybody a racist and a white nationalist is so important to Democratic Party politics.
But if people don't see that for themselves, at some point they're going to start questioning it, disbelieving it, and realizing that the Democrats aren't doing anything for them other than feeding them this endless tsunami of rhetoric.
Now the Times article goes on.
With more than a year to go until the election, there's plenty of time for Mr. Biden to reenergize his former supporters.
Indeed, the Times-CNN data suggests that Mr. Biden could approach, though not match, his 2020 standing simply by reclaiming voters who say they backed him in the last election.
But the possibility that his standing will remain beneath the already depressed levels of the last presidential election should not be discounted.
Democrats have lost ground among non-white voters in almost every election over the last decade.
Even his racially charged fights over everything from a border wall to kneeling during the national anthem might have been expected to produce the exact opposite result.
There you're seeing the New York Times saying, look, we've done everything we could to reverse this.
We keep creating news cycles designed to show that Trump and the Republicans are racist and the Democrats are enlightened liberals who are on the side of non-white voters and yet, not only is it working, it's producing the opposite of our intended result.
Apparently, the people who are non-white and voting in the United States have more important things on their mind than kneeling during the National Anthem or Apparently they don't see that as necessarily a racist position.
And as for immigration, the beloved by the left African American journalist Jamal Bowie, who is a New York Times op-ed writer now, back in 2013 wrote an article in the American Prospect.
Warning that if the Democrats get too aggressive in advocating for opening the border or for immigration rights, the group of voters that are likely to lose are African Americans.
Because, said Jamal Bowie, black voters more than anybody are the first to suffer with increased immigration.
That's whose jobs are lost to immigrants, or at least that's who black people perceive their jobs get lost to.
Their wages decrease because the labor pool is expanded.
And Jamal Bowie, who would never say this now because immigration resistance of any kind is deemed racist and forbidden, back in 2013 warned Democrats that if you get too permissive about the border, it's African Americans who are likely to be the angriest because they're the ones who are going to pay the highest price.
Obviously affluent liberals ensconced in suburbs or other wealthy enclaves easily cheer for the border to be open because their communities aren't affected.
That's always been the case for left liberal ideology.
They love to insist that certain policies are so morally obligatory and it's racist to oppose them because they're never the ones affected.
And you're now seeing as more and more immigrants arrive in blue cities like New York and Washington, suddenly the mayors and other city officials and governors of those places who have been warning for years that it's racist to try and close the border are suddenly the mayors and other city officials and governors of those places who have been warning for years that it's racist to try and close the border are now insisting the federal government intervene and prevent It was fine for liberals.
When it was border communities in Arizona and California and Texas who bore the brunt of that.
Anyone who objected was told to shut up.
They're just being a racist.
They're just white nationalists.
Even though a lot of the people objecting were Latinos who are in the country legally.
We've seen, for example, in those border communities in Texas, the Latino vote overwhelmingly went to Donald Trump.
It's the reason he won Texas.
In 2020 against Joe Biden and why a lot of those districts turned.
So the New York Times is saying we thought calling Trump and Republicans a racist over their border policies would ensure that non-white voters would kept in line on the Democratic side, but apparently the New York Times says that's not working and we don't know why.
The reason perhaps is what Jamal Bowie said.
That non-white voters see immigration as a threat, even more than affluent whites, because they're the ones who pay the biggest price for it.
The New York Times goes on.
Weak support for Mr. Biden could easily manifest itself as low turnout as it did in 2022, even if many young and less engaged voters ultimately do not vote for Mr. Trump.
Vote for Mr. Trump.
There was an article, I wish we had it, Get it next time.
I think I've showed it before.
It was one of the most interesting articles I've seen the New York Times publish.
The reason Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin, which was one of the shocked states that caused Trump to win that election unexpectedly, and part of it was because she never bothered to go to Wisconsin, of course, notoriously, and they viewed that as arrogant, but a major reason is that black voters in Wisconsin, especially in Milwaukee, just didn't show up at the polls to vote for her the way they did for Obama in the prior two elections.
They just didn't vote.
And after Trump's victory in 2016, when liberal America was in shock still about that result, the New York Times went to Milwaukee and interviewed voters in black strongholds.
They went to barbershops and restaurants and other places in heavily African-American communities.
And they found black voters who didn't vote.
And they said, well, now that you know that you're not voting might have cost Hillary Clinton the election, elected Donald Trump, because non-voting in Wisconsin among Democratic constituents was what likely swung the election.
Do you regret it now knowing what you know?
And to a person...
These black voters who chose to abstain said, I don't regret it at all.
I only went and voted for Obama out of obligation because he was a black candidate, the first black president, but he didn't do anything for us.
And I don't think Hillary Clinton would have done anything for us either.
I don't regret going to vote for her at all.
So what's at least the biggest threat, as non-white voters migrating to the Republican Party, is non-white voters simply not voting for Democrats.
That's one of the reasons you see these vicious attacks on Cornel West, because they're petrified that he will have the ability, with his charisma and his long-standing stature among black Americans, to siphon votes away from Joe Biden, among people who don't really want to vote for Biden in the first place.
These fear tactics are just not working.
Many of Mr. Biden's vulnerabilities, like his age and inflation, could exacerbate the trend as non-white voters tend to be younger and less affluent than white voters.
Overall, the president's approval rating stands at just 47% among non-white voters in the Times-Siena polling over the last year.
His favorability rating is just 54%.
Issues like abortion and threats to democracy may also do less to guard against additional losses among Black and Hispanic voters who tend to be more conservative than white Biden voters.
The dirty little secret that a lot of these hardcore left liberal cultural policies or economic policies that appeal to white affluent left liberals of a kind who elected AOC and gentrified Queens do not resonate at all to African-American and Latino voters and in fact alienate them.
That's a major part of the book Freddie DeBoer wrote that we're about to discuss with him.
The article goes on, quote, they may also be less likely to satisfy voters living paycheck to paycheck.
Mr. Biden is underperforming most among nonwhite voters, making less than $100,000 per year, at least temporarily erasing this century old tendency for Democrats to fare better among lower income than higher income nonwhite voters.
So that class division that we're seeing as well, that Democrats increasingly represent affluent suburbanites and affluent liberals, and are losing lower income voters more and more, is also being exacerbated.
It's just now appearing in among the multiracial working class and the multiracial poor, and not just among the white working class and the white poor.
If the gap persists until the election, it will raise the possibility of the political realignment Unleashed by Mr. Trump's brand of conservative populism.
I don't think I've ever heard a newspaper like the New York Times admit that Mr. Trump's brand of conservative populism has unleashed a political realignment.
But it has.
It will raise the possibility that the political realignment unleashed by Mr. Trump's brand of conservative populism has spread to erode the political loyalties of working-class voters of all races who were drawn to the Democrats by material interest in an early era of politics.
Mr. Biden's weakness among non-white voters is broad, spanning virtually every demographic category and racial group, including a 72 to 11 lead among black voters, which we'll get to in a minute, and a 47 to 35 lead among Hispanic registrants.
The sample of Asian voters is not large enough to report, though non-white voters who aren't black or Hispanic, whether Asian, Native American, multiracial, or something else, back Mr. Biden by just 40 to 39 percent, a one-point lead In all three cases, Mr. Biden's tallies are well beneath his standing in the last election, meaning non-white voters are migrating away from the Democratic Party toward the Republican Party and specifically Trump.
Here's another chart.
And what it says here is, Mr. Biden's weakness among non-white voters is broad, spanning virtually every demographic category and racial group.
So this is basically just that poll that we showed you.
And what's amazing is the only demographic group where Biden is gaining ground, where the Democrats are gaining ground, is among white voters.
White voters.
So white voters are going to the Democratic Party.
Even though we're told the Republican Party are white nationalists and Trump is a white supremacist, but every one of these other demographic groups, black voters, all non-white voters, Hispanic voters, others, there's that steep decline off of a cliff away from the Democratic Party.
Quote, beyond voters who have flipped to Mr. Trump, a large number of disaffected voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 now say they're undecided or simply won't vote this time around.
As a consequence, his weakness is concentrated among less engaged voters on the periphery of politics who have not consistently voted in recent elections and who may decide to stay home next November.
Young people of color who make up a disproportionate share of non-voters are an important part of Mr. Biden's challenge.
He holds a 48 to 29 lead among non-white registered voters under age 45, compared with a somewhat larger lead among those over 45.
In contrast, there was little difference among non-white voters over or under 45 in their share of support for Mr. Biden in 2020, a result that's echoed in the self-reported recall 2020 voter choice of the Time-Siena survey respondents.
Now, right after the 2020 election, NBC News reported that even after four years of Trump, This trend was already visible in the 2020 election as well.
There you see the headline, Black Men Shift Slightly Toward Trump in Record Numbers Poll Show.
Most black men supported Biden, but overall Democrats have been losing black male support since 2008, according to NBC exit poll data.
Quote, support for the Democratic presidential candidate reached a new low among black men this year.
According to the NBC News poll of early in election day voters, 80% of black men supported Joe Biden, down slightly from Hillary Clinton's 82% in 2016, but significantly down from Barack Obama's level of support in 2012 and 20 in 2008.
In Obama's first presidential campaign, 95% of black male voters, 96% of black women chose him.
Four years later, support from Black women remained at 96% for his re-election, while the figure for Black men slid to 87%.
In 2016, when the nominee was Hillary Clinton, Black men dropped further to 82%, while Black women's support for Clinton remained high at 94%.
Biden came close to matching that this year, garnering the support of 91% of Black women, but support for the Democratic presidential election candidate in general appears to be slipping among Black women as well.
To a much smaller degree.
Biden still enjoyed the support of more than 10 out of every, 9 out of every 10 female black voters.
So these trends are undeniable.
Now, the New York Times had black voters supporting Trump at 11%.
And that was, as alarmed as that made the New York Times, that was less than a recent poll commissioned by Fox News that among black voters showed Biden leading only by 61 to 20%.
That's one out of every five black voters saying they would vote for Donald Trump.
And only 60% saying they would vote for Joe Biden.
Even the 2020 election, where there was a slide of black voters to Republicans, that was 91 to 8.
So we're at 61 to 20 now.
Now, one of the most ironic parts about this is that for years, Democratic voters were certain That having more and more non-white voters as part of the American demographic would ensure what they called an emerging and permanent Democratic majority.
This is the dishonesty at the heart of the claim that Republicans and people like Tucker Carlson support the idea of the Great Replacement Theory, that immigration is importing non-white voters into the United States and changing the demographic to make it less white.
That is not a claim Tucker Carlson invented or conservatives invented.
That is a theory that Democratic Party strategists have been doubting for a long time.
Here in the Atlantic in 2012, you see the headline, The Emerging Democratic Majority Turns 10, Why the New Coalition Could Be Here to Stay.
And they were essentially celebrating Obama's victory as a vindication of this thesis.
Quote, 10 years ago, John Judis and I argued in the emerging Democratic majority that the country's shifting demographics were giving rise to a strong new Democratic voting population base.
The first glimmerings of this emerging Democratic coalition were visible in George McGovern's disastrous 1972 campaign, we wrote, making the newly emerging majority, quote, George McGovern's revenge.
In the chapter with that title, we described the strengthening alliance between minorities working in single women, the college-educated, and skilled professionals.
So, that was the thesis, and here in the American Prospect, which is a very liberal magazine, you see This, discussed even more explicitly, but it's by the liberal writer Jamel Bowie, who I previously referenced, who's now at the New York Times.
It's entitled, The Democrats' Demographic Dreams.
Liberals are counting on population trends to doom Republicans to a long-term minority, and he argues they shouldn't.
Now, he's describing here how it's the view of Democrats, not conservatives, not Tucker Carlson, not white supremacists, That one of the benefits of immigration is that it will make the country more non-white and therefore more amenable to the Democratic Party.
That's their explicit strategy.
And it's unbelievable that if you now point that out or talk about it, you get accused of the Great Replacement Theory even though it's Democrats who invented it and have been trumpeting it for years.
Here's what Jamal Bowie wrote in the American Prospect, quote, if Democrats agree on anything, it's that they will eventually be on the winning side.
The white Americans who tend to vote Republicans are shrinking as a percentage of the population, while the number of those who lean Democratic, African-American, and other minorities is rapidly growing.
Slightly more than half of American infants are now non-white.
By 2050, the US population is expected to increase by 117 million people, and the vast majority, 82%, We'll be immigrants, or the children of immigrants.
In a little more than 30 years, the US will be a majority-minority country, meaning a majority of Americans will be minorities, what are now considered minorities, nonwhite voters.
By 2050, white Americans will no longer be a solid majority, but the largest plurality at 46%.
African Americans will drop to 12%, while Asian Americans will make up 8%.
The number of Latinos will rise to nearly a third of all Americans.
It's become an article of faith among many progressives that these trends, meaning demographic changes brought about by immigration, Set the stage for a new Democratic majority.
A decade ago, Roy Tishera and John B. Giudice popularized this argument in their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority.
More recently, Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine made a similar case.
Quote, the modern GOP, the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes, is staring down its own demographic extinction, he wrote.
Conservative America will soon come to be dominated in a semi-permanent fashion.
That has been the assumption of the Democratic Party forever.
Non-white voters are their property.
They automatically receive their vote no matter what.
And obviously the key to winning elections into the foreseeable future, Democrats argued, Was changing the demographic composition of the United States by making it more non-white through immigration.
That's the Great Replacement Theory.
That's what Democrats have been touting and trumpeting for years.
I just showed you the proof of that by the authors themselves of that theory, the advocates of it.
What Democrats did not count on, apparently, is that, as it turns out, a lot of non-white voters find them repellent.
The group of Latino voters in particular is close to, even now, when it comes to Democrats versus Republicans, particularly they seem to have a lot of affection for Donald Trump.
Exactly the opposite of what the corporate media thought it was doing when it disseminated all of these race-based trends and narratives about Democrats versus Republicans.
So Democrats are in a huge amount of trouble.
According to these polls, and it's not just political trouble, but it's a threat to their core identity of believing that only they believe in a pluralistic society, that only they are the protectors of non-white voters.
I think non-white voters are hearing this and running in the opposite direction at increasingly large numbers.
Whatever the reason, that little plan they hatched of staying in power by making America non-white, or more non-white as they put it, is not working because non-white voters are taking more and more looks at them and deciding that the last thing they want to do is keep those people in power.
Our guest tonight, Freddie DeBoer, is a longtime writer who, despite being a member of the American left, is a harsh and incisive critic of it, including for reasons very related to what we just discussed.
DeBoer has spent ample time among American academic elites.
He has a PhD in English from Purdue University, and that proximity has really bred contempt.
His new book is titled How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, and it documents with great insight, humor, and incisive critique why the elite liberal left is becoming increasingly insular and repellent to ordinary Americans.
We sat down with him on Tuesday, a couple days ago, for an interview we recorded for tonight's show.
We ended up discussing a very wide range of topics that form his critique of the mainstream American left, developed over many years, and we found the conversation quite enlightening and enjoyable and hope that you will too.
Here it is.
So, Freddie, we've been hoping to have you on our show for a long time.
I know we haven't asked you yet, but we have been hoping, and now we have this opportunity with your new book coming out to force you to come on, so I'm really delighted to see you and great speaking with you.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
Sure.
So, as somebody who has written books, I know that it is not a particularly fun process.
The idea of writing the book can be good and the process can be sometimes gratifying.
Just the entire process is a very arduous one.
The process before of getting a publisher and then after of finalizing and editing and promoting it.
By the time you're all done, even as a financial matter, You could probably find a lot of easier ways to make the same amount of money or more, given how much time you actually put into the book.
So I generally believe, and maybe this is a little naive, I don't think so, that in order to write one, you really have to have a strong motivation in terms of an argument that you want to make or a perspective you want to present that you think the world needs to hear but isn't hearing enough of.
In the case of your new book, what was the motivation?
What was the argument that you felt like wasn't being heard enough?
I mean, I genuinely just felt like I was going crazy because we had this moment just a couple of years before I sold the book.
I sold the book in May of 2022 to Simon & Schuster.
I was conceiving it sort of that spring.
Just a couple of years earlier, we had been in this moment in which everyone was talking about it as an utterly transformational political moment.
We were told over and over again that what we needed was revolutionary change, not reform.
People said over and over and over again that they were not going to take no for an answer.
It wasn't just that the activist class were saying these things, but that the entire establishment media was united in insisting that they were actually going to get those things.
And then from the standpoint of a couple of years in the future, it was just all gone.
I just didn't see anyone talking about the fact that this had happened and nothing had changed.
And I got the impression, and I do feel pretty strongly that I think a lot of people who had been enthusiastic participants in that moment, just wanted to push it into the rear view.
They were vaguely embarrassed by it.
But I think that if people are saying, we have these really deep and important social problems and they call out for change, we should take them seriously enough to say, okay, this didn't work.
Well, I remember you writing an article on your Substack.
I think it was probably last year, maybe it was the year before, but there was this whole, and there still is, this kind of whole debate or dispute about whether referring to woke ideology or the woke movement actually means anything, whether this is actually a legitimate means of describing this whether this is actually a legitimate means of describing this new movement.
And your article was essentially saying, look, damn.
Tell me what I'm supposed to call it.
Like on the one hand, you went out into the street and argued that radical, even fundamental or revolutionary change in how we think about race and policing was required.
You had these obviously very radical slogans like defund the police and abolish prisons.
You yourself said that you were demanding major changes, and so then you can't turn around and pretend like you weren't really asking for anything.
So whatever you want me to call this new vision you have, tell me and I'll call it that.
I think about this a lot.
I think the same is true when it comes to things like gender ideology and trans rights, which is obviously, when you're talking about radically changing the way we think about gender, about how we organize society based on gender, is there such thing as women-only spaces where only biological women can go?
Or now do we put biological men into those spaces based simply on their declaration that they are women and therefore they are women, based solely on that declaration?
These are, of course, major changes, which they often then turn around and deny they're making.
No, we're just, you know, kind of insisting that the attacks stop on trans people.
And I just wonder what you make of this kind of simultaneous and seemingly contradictory claim When it comes to the trans movement, the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement after 2020 that you were just alluding to, that on the one hand, they want to be radicals and insist that they're demanding fundamental changes in society and often are, but then on the other hand kind of dismiss that and say, no, we're not asking for anything other than basic fairness.
Yeah, so I mean, this, this, what I have referred to, and other people have referred to, I didn't come up with this term, but some people call it Voldemorting, which is in the Harry Potter series, there's a, you know, the character Voldemort, who nobody, you're not supposed to say his name, because it could like summon him or something.
And so you, you know, they call him like, you know, who or whatever.
And so Voldemorting is a term that I like, that is how sort of people talk about social justice politics, which is, you are not allowed to sort of name this thing.
Now, I find the term woke, in particular, to be sort of poison ground at this point.
It doesn't mean anything for almost anyone, so I try to avoid it.
The word appears three times in my new book, and each time it's in the context of somebody else's opinion.
I always have just used the term social justice politics because it's just as simple and it seems neutral.
But I think the fundamental issue is just that Yeah, the discrepancy between wanting to be a radical, but also wanting to act as though there is nothing even worth discussing in your politics, and I think what a lot of it amounts to is Um, if you can't name something, you can't talk about it.
And if you can't talk about it, you can't critique it.
And one of my biggest, um, uh, sort of, uh, disagreements with the social justice movement is that, um, I tell people all the time, you have to do politics, right?
Like you, like you, you have to do the same work of politics as everyone else.
I, you know, I mean, I spoke knowing I would get a lot of pushback.
Some people say, you know, who are you to write?
And I always just sort of say to them, like, this is what politics is, right?
Like, I am an interested observer, and I'm, you know, using my position to talk about I think that a lot of people just want to skip steps.
And what I keep trying to people and what critics are ignoring is I take this stuff seriously and taking it seriously means subjecting it to intelligent adult critique to say, is this working or not?
But I think that a lot of people just want to skip steps.
They want to just decide, OK, this is just what's righteous and I don't have to sort of do the work and avoid politics.
Let me just dig into that a little bit because obviously a major critique of your book as the title of it, I think, very adeptly reflects pretty much I think every component of your argument is geared toward this idea that there's this very unrepresentative insular group of kind of radicals.
There are city-based elites who don't have a lot in common with the vast majority of the population, and yet they have almost exclusive control over the discourse.
And so the way that issues get framed, the way that causes are defined, are the byproduct almost entirely of their very kind of provincial and unrepresentative perspectives on the world and interests and needs.
And we've all seen the data about the Democratic Party, which in the 50s and 60s and 70s used to pride itself, going to the 30s and 40s as well, of being the party of the working class, the working family.
FDR obviously defined what the Democratic Party was for a long time, the New Deal.
And unions were very important to the party.
And then starting in the 1990s, you start looking at the data, and increasingly, working class people are moving away from the Democratic Party and no longer identify with it.
The white working class is almost entirely gone from the Democratic Party, but increasingly, the other multiracial components of the American working class are migrating away from the Democratic Party, often to Donald Trump, often to the Republicans, despite the cavalcade, the kind of tsunami of messaging that Donald Trump the kind of tsunami of messaging that Donald Trump is a white nationalist.
You see a lot of Latino, a lot of black voters increasingly going to that party, even though the majority are still with the Democrats.
How do you explain that trend, and what do you think needs to be done if you're a Democrat to reverse it, if it can be reversed at all?
Yeah, I mean, something that I admit up front and several times in the book is I am a part of the elite class to which I am referring.
So if anybody watching at home is under any illusions, I have been an activist my entire adult life, anti-Iraq war activism and local housing activism in New York City.
Now I'm just moved and I'm trying to get involved in my local community here.
I also have a PhD, and I've written for the New York Times, etc., etc., and I have a book out, so I am not critiquing this from outside of it, I'm critiquing it from inside of it.
But the simple fact of the matter is...
Everyone knows that there is a layer of people who have broadly disproportionate influence in our society, who share certain sort of demographic features and cultural assumptions.
These people are, as you said, highly urban, so they are dramatically more likely to be found in urban spaces and really in a handful of small major cities than the American public writ large.
They're dramatically more educated.
It's not just that they have more bachelor's degrees in general, but they're much more likely to have attended an elite or exclusive college or university.
So I think a lot of people don't really understand this.
The vast majority of American colleges accept a huge number of the students who apply.
Many of them accept essentially every student that applies.
So going to an elite college is very rare.
These people have tend to have master's degrees or other graduate degrees.
These people have very low levels of religiosity, church attendance, things like that, over a religiosity.
And they tend to be a high income, or if not already high income, then upwardly mobile and on their way to high incomes in their in their given professions.
And they have a lot of social capital.
Even before they're financially rewarded, they have a ton of social capital and cultural kind of cachet that allows them access to places that most people aren't able to access.
Right.
And one of the things that you purchase paycheck at a fancy university is you are buying a vocabulary, right?
You're buying a certain set of social signifiers that you can say to people at your work or at your graduate program or on Twitter, right?
Or in the sort of dating pool in in North Brooklyn or whatever, right?
These people have a set of cultural assumptions that, on the one hand, they tend to have a lot of political positions that I like and that I agree with.
Again, I am sort of part of this of this milieu myself.
But they're living lives that are so distinct from that of the median American.
But even more than just the median American, they're living lives that are distinct from the median Democrat.
And so, as they pull farther and farther away from the ordinary people, but sort of consolidate more and more power in government, in academia, in media, in industry, You just inevitably see the rise of people who look at them and say, this is the source of my problems.
Do I think that a DEI officer for a Fortune 500 company who lives in San Francisco and has $60,000 in student loan debt, but it's okay because they make $300,000 a year.
Do I think that that person is actually responsible for the bad outcomes of a laid off iron worker in Detroit?
No, I don't.
But what I do think is there's been such a sort of constant refusal to engage in self-criticism, to recognize the difference between their lives and the lives of other people, and a refusal to try to understand where conservative politics come from, where nativist politics come from, where anti-immigrant sentiment comes from, that there's no ability to confront them meaningfully and intelligently.
You know, I want to ask you, I think such a perfect lens for understanding that point you just made that is an important point in your book, ironically, is the book review that was published in the Washington Post about your book.
And I want to get into the substance of it in just a second.
I think her view was pretty similar to what you just described as your view vis-a-vis the kind of elite class you're critiquing, which there are some things I agree with it, but by and large I find it kind of repellent.
I think that is a fair summary of what she said about your book.
But here's the review in the Washington Post of your book and the headline of it is, Should Progressives Want the Support of the Ruling Class?
In quote, How Elite Are the Social Justice Movement?
Frederick DeBoer argues that the left has failed to capitalize on the popularity of Me Too and Black Lives Matter.
And then the Article is written by the New York Times non-fiction critic and her name is Becca Rothfeld.
And if you click on her biography, it's almost like a caricature of what you're describing.
So if we can put that, we have that on the screen.
It says, Becca Rothfeld, Washington, DC.
Book Critic, Education, Dartmouth College, BA in Philosophy and German, the University of Cambridge, Masters of Philosophy in History and Philosophy of Science, Harvard University, ABD, and a PhD in Philosophy.
And then it says, Becca Rothfeld is the new non-fiction book critic at Book World.
Before joining the Washington Post, she served as an assistant literary editor of the New Republic and worked toward her PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, where she focused on aesthetics.
And the History of Philosophy, her debut essay collection, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2024.
Now, Freddie, it might come as a great shock that this person with this background decided she doesn't like a book that was analytically critical of the exact culture and milieu in which she has spent apparently most of her life, certainly all of her adult life, I just want to think a little bit more about this.
You know, I remember when I was in media, when I worked for media outlets, The Guardian and Salon and especially The Intercept, there was all this talk all the time about the need to diversify newsrooms.
And what they always meant by that was, we want to get a bunch of other Becker Rothfelds, we just want them to be gay or non-binary or black or Hispanic or whatever, but all come from the same socioeconomic profile, the same kind of, the same set of 15 colleges, you know, you get a black person who's
parent was a partner at Goldman Sachs or a Latino whose partner is a partner in a major law firm and somehow you've diversified the newsroom and yet never does diversity include things like why don't we get people from some other colleges or people who didn't go to college or people who are from different classes or who are living different classes.
What do you make of the fact that so often diversity is about everything other than kind of trying to balance the Becca Rothfelds of the world?
Yeah, I mean, the problem is not that generally, it's not that the people who sort of define this diversity narrative have no interest sort of in like advancing poorer people or people who might have come from different backgrounds or who might not have the same sort of educational opportunity.
It's usually not sort of consciously expressed that way.
The problem is that all of their networks are built in a way that they just literally have no one else in their milieu than these people, right?
In other words, if you are someone who works at an elite sort of media publication, and you put out a call for applications for a new job, First of all, in order for anyone to sort of apply to that job, they're going to have to themselves have a certain amount of savviness and have a certain sense of, I can get this job, I know what this job is, I know how to frame my documents, etc.
So you have a pipeline problem that people who come from really different backgrounds can't get in.
You know, the whole industry runs on personal connections and networking and having a friend get you a job, or at the very least, someone who, you know, follows you on Twitter and thinks you're funny.
And so there's just no chance, even if someone sort of has an intention to, like, elevate somebody up from below in this way.
It's just not going to happen at scale.
But even beyond that, the sort of vision of success that a lot of people have for diversity is precisely to make more diverse people into members of this upper-class PMC lifestyle.
So, if you look at Affirmative Action, I'm a supporter in theory of race-based affirmative action.
I say in theory because in practice the institutions that are putting affirmative action in place don't actually care about racial diversity.
They care about what's best for their donor class.
We had a huge spasm, an explosion of interest in affirmative action after the recent Supreme Court case.
It was front page news for weeks and weeks.
If you actually look at the size of the population of, okay, black high school students applying to colleges who might be good enough to get into an elite college, but are not quite good enough to get in without needing affirmative action, You end up looking and you see that the number of people, the number of human beings who can actually be helped by this affirmative action at Harvard and schools like that is just tiny.
It's just an absolutely infinitesimal part of the American population and of the black population writ large.
There's just all manner of other issues that are of more relevance to the black population in the United States.
Why do we fixate on it so much?
Because they think that the way that you sort of create racial justice is that you diversify the faces on the board at the Washington Post, you diversify the faces at the Ford Foundation, you diversify the faces in the faculty lounge in the Princeton Anthropology Department.
They can't conceive of a different sort of vision of success than pushing people into this pipeline.
So they... I want to ask you about the being critique of the Washington Post.
And before I do, though, I want to preserve what you just said, because I think so much of the book and the critique it raises is based on the distinction that you're drawing that I find so critical between this kind of superficial diversifying.
I mean, there's all that data that shows that if you do affirmative action based on race, you end up benefiting basically very rich people who just happen to have a different race.
It's like the most superficial kind of diversity possible.
But the main critique of, I think, this Washington Post article, and I think it is a critique that is often made primarily by people on this kind of left that defends these sort of social justice issues, the way they express themselves in elite institutions, is that you're not really using data.
That what you're essentially doing is just kind of trolling endless amounts of examples and picking the most Kind of embarrassing ones are the ones that place this ideology in the worst possible light.
Some sophomore at Oberlin saying something really cringy or some student activist group at some college when they're 20 year olds doing something that pretty much everybody would find is ridiculous and absurd but that it doesn't really say much.
about broader trends.
Now, one of the things I found so hilarious about this Washington Post review is that its main critique of your book was what I just said, namely that you make a lot of assertions and don't actually offer a lot of substantiation for them.
In fact, the book review alleged, basically for one of your core views, the book review said you only offered one example in the entire book, and this was a major flaw of your book, that you make this broad sweeping assertion and only had one example.
As it turns out, and I recognize this almost immediately, you have multiple examples where you kind of dig deep and show how they
Exemplify this trend and the Washington Post ended up having to append what of course is designed to make it look like a very trivial correction where it's barely visible and if you read it you would think it was just like very insignificant correction but in reality it was completely fundamental to the review where they said, correction a previous version of this article misstated the number of examples DeBoer used to illustrate a point.
He cited several examples of progressives, quote, defending riots in 2020, not, quote, a single example.
The article has been corrected.
So they were trying to basically say that your critique of Black Lives Matter and its defenders, that they were going so far as to defend riots, they said you only could find one example.
And in fact, you had multiple ones.
Everybody who remembers that time period understands and remembers that that was actually a major component of the defense of not just Black Lives Matter, but the need for this radical social justice movement in general.
But I want to ask you about that critique.
It's been something that I used to believe in quite a lot, that the people who spent a lot of times focused on college campuses and academic institutions were kind of picking people in their most embarrassing and undeveloped phase.
These are 20 and 21-year-olds.
I'm talking about intellectually.
They're adults, but, you know, it's a period of time where people are, especially who are kind of coddled and come from middle-class backgrounds, they're not on their own, they're kind of, you know, expect, they kind of have the luxury of just saying dumb things along their way developmentally, and that by focusing on them, you're kind of purposefully choosing the worst representatives of this ideology to critique.
Is there any validity to those arguments?
Yeah, well, I mean, just to start with, even like the correction says, I have several examples.
In fact, I have nine references to different specific examples of people arguing in defense of riots, as well as reference to two different polls.
I, you know, I fail to see how that's not a fairly robust bit of evidence that people were defending riots at the time.
And in fact, I mean, just they just were.
I just find it so strange to pretend as though a lot of people weren't defending riots at that time.
If you go, for example, just today the New York Times put out a An article about a story from Detroit, and they refer to the uprising of 1967 in Detroit.
Detroit, that used to be referred to as the riot of Detroit in 1967.
But one of the things that happened in 2020 is people sort of busily updated their thesaurus and changed riots to uprising.
If you go to Wikipedia, for example, race-based riots now are almost always described as uprisings rather than riots.
Which is a good example of the kind of milieu we were in.
Anyway, look, in the early 2010s, I was pointing out a lot of examples of illiberalism on American colleges that I thought was really destructive.
Oberlin students were trying to get professors fired because of their political views.
Amherst students were trying to get their fellow students formally punished by the university for disagreeing with them.
The student activists at Wesleyan University tried to get the campus newspaper, which was over 100 years old, Shut down because it had run an article that was critical of Black Lives Matter.
There's many, many more examples.
The first thing I would always tell people is look like I just care about about campus.
I care about what happens there.
I don't think that the sort of the defense that, well, this is just a sort of little campus thing.
Who cares?
Well, I was I grew up on a college campus at the time I was all that was happening.
I was in grad school.
I was in academia.
I've been in academia most of my life.
And I think those places should not be hot houses of censorship.
I think that they should be free and open places and that they should sort of let liberalism in that sense reign.
But the other problem with that attitude is those people have an annoying habit of becoming the ruling class.
Right.
What happened in the early 2010s with these sort of canary-in-the-coal-mine situations on American colleges and campuses is when people would defend what was happening to me, they would do exactly what you talked about, which is they wouldn't say, oh, this is good.
They'd say, well, who cares?
It's just a little thing over there.
Why do you care?
But then that ideology went on to sort of colonize our media class, our major nonprofits, all of academia, much of industry, right to the point where, you know, Raytheon flies pride flags in front of its corporate headquarters, right?
If you just say, oh, they're just college students, so who cares?
You're ignoring the fact that these are the people who go on to be columnists at the New York Times someday.
These are the people who go on to be, you know, muckety-mucks in influential non-profits like Sunrise.
These are people who go on to get jobs in presidential administrations or to be staffers for powerful senators.
So I just think that the notion that it just happens on college, who cares, doesn't make any sense when you consider the way that all that stuff moved from college into our entire culture.
Yeah, there's so much reporting about how all that dysfunction and that infighting where everyone's accusing each other of being like a racist or using the wrong language or whatever as revealing of bad character is now infiltrated almost every major liberal and progressive institution.
They're all imploding because of that exact same kind of infighting that used to be so evident in college campuses.
And of course, given that these institutions of power draw from these college campuses, we just saw in the person who reviewed your book has a kind of maybe, even for that precinct, a kind of more educated and a higher pile of credentials a kind of more educated and a higher pile of credentials than Certainly, that's the similar way that these institutions draw from and find people who then end up running them and filling their ranks.
And so, of course, they're going to reflect Those sorts of viewpoints that have become prevalent in Collins' institutions.
Now, I want to ask you about that because, you know, Freddie, when I first started writing about politics in 2005 and it was 2003-2004 when I was being influenced by a lot of the internet writing that I was reading and concluded that
Left-wing views, particularly on major issues like the war on terror, really were not represented in the corporate media because the corporate media really had sided with Bushini and kind of the broader parts of the Democratic Party establishment that wanted this war on terror, that was looking at militarism and the war in Iraq.
Obviously, it's liberal magazines and newspapers that help sell the war in Iraq, along with conservative ones.
And it did really seem to me like the media was not liberal as people like Rush Limbaugh had long been claiming, but in fact was just kind of servants of establishment power.
If you look now, you know, 15, 20 years later during the era of Trump and after the era of Trump, It's amazing how often you'll find not just liberals but people on the left celebrating the corporate media.
You know, Naomi Klein has this new book out, you know, 15 years ago she was heralded as one of the great leftist minds because of the Shock Doctrine, which is actually a good book.
And she has this new book out, and every day you pick up the New York Times, and there's some glowing profile of Naomi Klein or some New York Times op-ed writer who's singing her praises.
There are, when your book, for example, when your book came out in the Washington Post, deployed this obviously highly educated leftist to critique it from a left-wing perspective.
Almost every leftist I know was cheering her work.
They're constantly saying, oh, have you read the latest Jamil Bowie New York Times op-ed or seen this great?
segment on CNN, there's obviously so much representation of left wing ideology, at least when it comes to these culture war issues.
Not necessarily on foreign policy, I don't even know anymore what the left wing view on foreign policy is rather, not necessarily on economic policy.
But certainly in the culture war, it is pervasive.
And yet there's still this need to believe that the American left is somehow hated by the corporate media, that they're not represented in it, Even at the same time, they're constantly applauding the work that comes from it and seeing themselves and people among their ranks who fill the positions that are in there.
When the New York Times, for example, published that Op-Ed by Tom Cotton, the conservative Republican from Arkansas, calling for the National Guard to be deployed to quash the riots.
A huge part of the New York Times newsroom objected from a very kind of left-winger perspective, and the Op-Ed editor ended up being fired because of it, showing the power of the left in these media corporations.
Do you agree that there has been this transformation?
How do you think of that?
Because a lot of the book is about The reason why a lot of this is happening is because of who controls the discourse, and the discourse is being controlled by people who have embraced this very narrow, kind of a feat, you know, cosmopolitan view of politics.
How do you see that transformation within corporate media?
Yeah, so I think that like media bias is multifactorial and multivalent and multi other words.
I'm sure that I can pull out.
It operates in many different levels at once.
You know, I often look at like the New York Times and I and I lay this out in a few different ways, which is the New York Times drives me crazy all the time.
I also think that it's a remarkable institution that does a ton of really great and important work.
You know, there's just not a lot of organizations left in the world that are sending people to Syria for three months to produce one 3,000 word piece and has the resources to get that done.
And I think that the people who do the actual reporting work at the New York Times, People just really care about getting the facts right, and I think they do a good job of it generally.
I also think that, look, it's a liberal paper to its core, right?
But we have to distinguish liberal from leftist, right?
It's hard to imagine... Let me just interject there, because what I want, that's basically what I'm asking is, it's always been a liberal paper, even when it was selling the Iraq War, and I know a lot of people insist on the distinction between liberal and left.
And oftentimes it is a reasonable distinction.
You saw that distinction play out most recently, I think, say in the war between the Bernie Sanders supporters and Hillary Clinton's.
That was kind of a left versus liberal conflict.
But when it comes to cultural issues, the sort of social movements that you're describing, is that really a cognizable difference these days?
I mean, I want it to be, right?
Because I am someone who carries a flame for a particular vision of what being a leftist is that is not congruent with the sort of cultural issues.
But look, here's how I'll put this.
You have to understand that so many of the people who are involved in fighting for liberal causes or left causes or whatever, are people who have emerged from the academic system as people who are people of, you know, sometimes you hear this term, people of the word, right?
Meaning they are people who live in symbol, they are people who live in art, they are people who live in slogans, they are people who live In writing, they live in sort of ephemeral, but often very influential and powerful sort of linguistic worlds, okay?
So again, like I just mentioned before, right, like a lot of places don't say riots anymore to talk about race riots, they say uprisings.
That's a sort of classic sort of 20, you know, 2020-2023 liberal concern, right, is Changing the words for things, because these people feel like words are where they have power, right?
They feel like words are words, symbols, ideas.
They think that that's the world in which they actually like have the currency to be able to sort of enforce real change.
And so they are extremely sensitive to the perception that they're losing ground in control of culture and in control of change.
I think one of the reasons why Elon Musk buying Twitter was so sort of psychically devastating to some people was that it was a space that was largely controlled by sort of like the hall monitor liberal left.
And it's not controlled by them anymore.
And so they police those things very carefully.
And if you look, for example, I talk a fair bit about the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial in my book.
And I think what made that so disturbing in part for many sort of left or liberal people is the sort of justice for Johnny Depp movement was the sort of thing that Liberals usually have on lockdown, right?
Usually it's like that is the sort of thing, the hashtags belong to the liberals, what trends on TikTok belongs to the liberals.
And I think a lot of them are sort of feeling like they're losing some of that cultural power.
And so in these institutions like the New York Times, where they still have cultural hegemony, right?
Unlike with foreign policy or some of the economic reporting, et cetera, like they grasp even more tightly.
Yeah, I mean, it relates, and so I want to ask you about it.
You had an article in New York Magazine that created a little bit of a stir, kind of Freddie DeBoer-type stir in July, so I guess just a month ago or so, and the headline of that was, AOC is just a regular old Democrat now.
And the argument essentially was, when she was elected, she was supposed to represent this kind of insurrectionary blow to She was going to be this left-wing threat within the Democratic Party.
I remember, Freddie, I interviewed AOC in mid-2018 when almost nobody was paying attention to that race and nobody knew who she was.
Ryan Grimm, the Washington bureau chief of The Intercept, had told me he thinks, "Oh, you should pay attention to this primary challenge in Queens." She probably won't win, but I think you'll really like her.
And I interviewed her, like, for an hour, you know?
And her argument, I mean, it was like music to my ears.
It was very much this idea, I mean, everything we just talked about, that artificial diversity is not just meaningless, but it can be really damaging because you just put a bunch of black or Hispanic or gay faces on status quo politics, and you lead people to believe there's some sort of You know, revolutionary politics taking place that's fundamentally changing things and all you're really doing.
She called them Trojan horses, where they come in and their real goal is to cast the appearance of promoting one side but really they're there to promote the other.
And she talked about the intersection of race and class and how important it was to focus on class because we had so much more in common based on class than we do other kinds of identity politics.
A whole bunch of things that you would be very recognizable as representative of what that left-wing movement was supposed to be.
While still maintaining kind of an existence within the Democratic Party, it wasn't some, you know, radical movement in the sense of overturning the entire system.
And yet, as you say, AOC is just a regular old Democrat now.
I think you can make a very similar case for Bernie Sanders.
And so when I asked you, you know, is there really a meaningful distinction anymore between left and liberal, at least when it comes to cultural issues and how we think about social justice and race and LGBT issues, and even the example you gave about, you know, how we won't call them riots anymore, but they're uprising, that seems to me to be a, not just a liberal kind of cause, but a left-wing cause to justify the use of violence against property and political causes.
Do you see this kind of AOC is just a regular old Democrat now as representative of this broader merger between what in 2016 had been this very sharp distinction between establishment liberals and the left?
Or do you see this as just kind of AOC out on her own, changing for her own reasons, not really reflective of anything broader?
You know, I think that if I could go back in time to 2018 and, you know, use some sort of mind reading device on AOC, I'm guessing that she was aware of the potential to sort of get sucked into the Democrats machine.
But when she thought about it, she probably thought it is some kind of like.
Sort of explicit corruption in other words like that.
Oh, we'll give you this.
We'll give you this committee seat or whatever If you know, you know if you vote for this this bill that you don't really want to vote for or you know We're gonna we're gonna pump a lot of money into your reelection campaign if you just go with the flow, etc And the things like that kind of thing, that kind of like really explicit sort of corruption in that sense, is easier to resist, right?
But I think what happened to AOC is just that she got into the machinery of party politics, and she's seeing these people every day, and she doesn't want to be uncomfortable all the time, and she doesn't want to be an outsider in her own party.
Now, you can do that.
Maxine Waters is someone who has maintained distance from the Democratic Party machine as a, with her constituents, very popular representative for many, many years now.
In terms of like the left and liberal distinction, I mean, I think in terms of these cultural issues, You can underestimate how scarring 2016 was for many people who call themselves socialists or leftists, who are Bernie supporters, because they were not used to being called racist.
And the Hillary Clinton sort of playbook, the playbook for sort of defending Hillary and for advocating for Hillary, the entirety of the 2016 primary was you called Bernie supporters racist and sexist.
And so you had a lot of these young people, many of them were very newly minted socialists, people who don't.
I didn't have like a long standing sort of background in politics who hadn't had the seasoning that some of the older types like me have had.
And they came out of that very scarred.
And I think that they lost the stomach for being called racist and sexist.
And it sort of compelled them to sort of gravitate.
Towards a sort of typical Democratic Party identity politics line.
And I also think you can see that in the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign.
I think you can go through and look at his rhetoric, look at how he had sort of changed from his focus.
You know, he was laser focused on class issues in 2016.
In 2020, he went out of his way I think not just for him, but for his staffers.
He went out of his way to sort of say, I'm not racist, I'm not sexist.
And I think that, I mean, part of this is just that he knew that his people had to go on and get, be able to get jobs in politics and didn't want to go through another bruising fight of being called racist and sexist all the time.
And it was just an incredibly effective disciplining technique from the establishment of the Democratic Party.
Yeah, I think it's very well observed and very well stated.
I think self-interest so often plays a big role in this.
I mean, when I was looking at Becca Rothfeld's credentials before, and we're thinking about like the socioeconomic background of a lot of like our most famous and influential black pundits or Latino journalists and the like, I mean, you can see why
There's a huge interest in defining people who are privileged or who are excluded from privileged circles based on race or gender or sexual orientation because that way these people who have extraordinary privilege from a socioeconomic perspective still get to claim victim status because they've venerated race and sexual orientation and
Gender where they do get to claim that above class where they don't And I think you're right that part of why the left used to just kind of Avoid the culture war and identity politics in this preeminent way you have now really kind of turned to it is in part because they kind of feel like they have something to prove that they were widely vilified as racist and and misogynist and so embracing these liberal
kind of bromides about race and gender is one way that they prove that.
I think though, and this leads me to the Wall Street Journal critique of your book, which I found much more interesting than the Washington Post one.
I think another part of that though is that if you want to prioritize foreign policy or civil liberties or the U.S.
security state or censorship or whatever, and even increasingly economic policy, it's very hard to find ways to take a lot of pride in the Democratic Party or to justify why you're loyal to the Democratic Party as opposed to some other party, including in some ways the populist expression of Republican politics, because there you are going to have to cheer the CIA or endless war in Ukraine or the U.S.
security state pressuring big tech about what to censor.
Whereas, you know, if your focus is on trans issues or abortion or guns, the distinction is a lot clearer.
And I think, there's a Wall Street Journal review of your book, and it's by someone named Barton Swain, who's an editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Don't know him very well, but I think both from this review, other stuff that I've read, the fact that he's on the Wall Street Journal editorial means he's probably, I think, someone who's a conservative, not in a Donald Trump populist sense, but more in the tradition of Reaganomics, Bush-Cheney, kind of neoconservatism, militarism, but more in the tradition of Reaganomics, Bush-Cheney, kind of neoconservatism, militarism, and He's a more traditional Republican, and yet he's also somebody who really loves your writing.
He says sometimes it infuriates him, but sometimes he finds it hilarious and very thought-provoking.
I just want to read you a couple of paragraphs from his review of your book, and I want to ask you about it.
It relates to everything we've been discussing.
He says, quote, 50 years ago, a gifted writer such as Mr. DeBoer, beholding the facile anti-Americanism of his fellow leftists, would have long since migrated rightward and become a neoconservative.
That doesn't happen anymore for reasons I don't fully understand, something to do with the post-T Party's GOP populist gauchery, perhaps, or the fact that the typical young political agitator today has publicly expressed so many of his opinions by the time he's 25 or 30 that there is no going back.
No one's saying it all.
So Mr. DeBoer, 43, persists in calling himself a Marxist.
But is he one?
He knows his own mind better than I do, but I think he is not.
Neither Marx nor his followers cared much about Melanin gains or the sort of Mr. DeBoer mentioned in the connection with the George Floyd killing, banning chokeholds, restricting qualified immunity and so on.
Mr. DeBoer wants an aggressively redistributive state.
As he is fully as much a liberal as those he disparages as incrementalists, the difference between him and the liberals he despises is one of zeal, not doctrine.
Now, I believe that if you were sort of this benevolent dictator and able to design our political system from scratch, I do believe in what you say about your own politics, that you would pick up, you know, Karl Marx and you would kind of align the system you are creating with his economic principles.
But within this system that we actually live in, the kind of complexity of it, is there any validity to what he's saying that, to some extent, That the actual critique that you're making makes it very difficult to believe that you are this just sort of dogmatic leftist who plants yourself in left-wing politics and says, this is my worldview and it kind of defines my outlook on things.
He has a hard time believing that based on his familiarity with your writing and with this book.
What about you?
Yeah, I mean, first, I know neoconservative is a word that has several different valences, but that one is very funny for me because, I mean, I came to politics through anti-imperialism, through opposition to the Iraq War, through a deep commitment to sort of counting the United Can I just interrupt here, Freddie, just so we don't get off on a path that I didn't mean to push you on, but if you want to talk about it, feel free.
That is the word that I actually ... I obviously read that paragraph, those two paragraphs, because I thought it was interesting.
That was the word where I thought he kind of went wrong.
I was following his thought pattern until he got to the point where he's like, Freddie DeBoer, and those type would, at this point, become neoconservatives.
I don't think that makes any sense.
I know you're about to say, if anything, you find anti-imperialism and anti-war more vibrant than ever, so do I. I probably despise neoconservatives more than any other single group within our political culture, so I don't understand the thought pattern that says you would have become a neoconservative.
I think what he is saying that seems to make sense to me, maybe I'm just imposing my own judgment on it, but either way.
I think what he's saying is that there's a lot of populism, a lot of working class populism evident in your writing and your politics.
I certainly see it.
And that in reality, in the system in which you live, that kind of working class populism, in fact, does not typically reside on the left anymore, but resides in other places, including the populist right.
I'm just wondering if, At least as I see it, our political system has kind of transformed and turned left and right and what that signifies.
Do you find yourself a little bit confused about where you are in terms of how you're oriented now and the way that you suggest?
No, I mean, you know, you suggested before that sort of social issues are sort of clearly defined in that sense.
But look, I am a pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-etc.
That stuff is not what I tend to write the most about because it's just not sort of what I'm most interested in.
But I think the basic problem is that there's just a failure to understand what the left tradition actually is.
Both, I mean, this is the kind of thing I say that drives people crazy, but like to me, like the only people who understand Marxism worse than American conservatives are Americans who call themselves Marxists.
Like it's just, it's a tradition that is, so many people have received through so many layers of a bad game of telephone that even the people who call themselves socialist or Marxist tend not to understand the doctrine.
I'll give you an example that sort of pertains to this whole conversation.
Whenever the sort of class versus identity fight comes up online.
So the book has a whole chapter about why class first messaging works better for us.
Whenever that fight happens and some people are saying we should focus on class issues and other people say no that's racist.
I'll go and I'll find things that Bobby Seale.
Who was a first-generation Black Panther, or Fred Hampton, who was a first-generation Black Panther, or Huey Newton.
You just copy and paste some of their quotes, like Bobby Seale has a quote.
Ours is not a race struggle.
Ours is a class struggle.
And you put that into the conversation, but you don't tell them that it's a Black Panther quote.
And then they read the quote and they say, oh, that's so racist.
That's such a white man's sort of class-first racist response.
And then I'll reveal that it's a Black Panther saying it, right?
Look.
To me, the essential distinction is that I want to radically transform the economy in a way that I'm sure Mr. Barton Swain would not like at all.
I think that value is generated by workers and that that value is then expropriated from them by the ownership class, and that we should remake our economy in that way.
My populism simply stems from the fact that the entire history of the left is an up-from-below history.
Eugene Debs said, you know, I, I, he said, I would be ashamed to rise up from the ranks.
When I rise up, it will be with the ranks, right?
Like that's what, that's what the left is, or that's what it was.
And that's why I'm so offended by the current state of things, right?
Because like knowing that for so many people, the left is defined by some Harvard asshole who works for the Atlantic is deeply personally injurious for me.
Yeah.
Yeah, I totally get that.
Your book makes this critique, as does your work in general, really well, and I actually have a ton of more stuff I wanted to ask you based on the book, but just in the name of time, I'm gonna just pick one last question that I wanna make sure while you're here that I talk to you about, and obviously encourage people to read the book for the rest, as well as subscribe to your sub stack, which I do, and have from the beginning.
So I wanna ask you,
One of the concerns, just like capitalism in general, one of the dangers of it is that when you create economic inequality, and especially when you create extreme economic inequality like we currently have, you do have this large group of people that will constitute the majority who are not well served economically by the current system, and there's always the danger that they will realize that and start to unite in a way that will be deeply threatening to the status quo.
And I think you're exactly right.
I mean, Martin Luther King as well, who's obviously now whitewashed and known for this like kind of very unthreatening and benevolent anti-racism movement, was obviously way more fixated on class than history wants you to remember.
And the idea of a multi-racial working class of people uniting across class lines or based on common experience due to class is something that I think petrifies The establishment and elites more than anything else.
And this has been something that has been discussed for two centuries in terms of politics and capitalism.
How do you avoid people uniting based on class?
And one of the things that the culture war does Is that it takes people who could easily unite and who have a lot more in common than they have differences due to their common class status and it divides them based on religious disputes or cultural conflicts and the like and one theory is is that this is kind of a nefarious plot
By elites to keep people divided by fixating on and fighting over the cultural war and making sure that they hate their neighbor more than they hate the people who really wield power in society.
Do you think that's as intentional as that theory suggests?
Do you just think it's kind of a natural byproduct of things or do you think at the end of the day the culture war is just organically that important to how people view what matters to them in their lives?
I mean, I don't think we have to think about it in terms of a conspiracy.
I think that we know that there is an attempt, a constant attempt by politicians to focus on culture war issues to obscure their sort of shared perspectives on the sort of the bedrock of a constant attempt by politicians to focus on culture war issues to obscure their sort of shared perspectives on the sort of the bedrock of American capitalism, the That's not a conspiracy.
So look at Donald Trump, right?
Trump is, we're told, is somebody who's new and different from the Republicans.
He's a break from the tradition of guys like Paul Ryan, who was a, you know, extreme sort of economic conservative and like a really sort of like a wonky sort of conservative.
He's a break from the Wall Street Journal editorial board style of conservatism, etc., etc.
He's this populist.
He won't touch Medicare.
He won't touch Social Security.
He's going to put up a tariff wall, etc.
What's the one really big piece of legislation that Donald Trump got passed in his four years in office?
The one major piece of legislation he passed.
Right, tax cut for the rich.
Although he did end up defeating international trade deals that people like Bernie Sanders have argued have been hauling out the industrial base of the United States and shipping jobs overseas and the like.
And, you know, I think if you look at how Donald Trump ran in 2016, of course, there's a big gap between what you promise you're going to do to a campaign and what you try and do or what you can get done.
I mean, within the Republican Party, there probably wasn't much to be able to do other than cut taxes for big corporations, because that part of the Republican Party that believes in that still is the dominant wing, without question.
But the way he ran in 2016, and in terms of not just condemning Bush-Cheney, foreign policy orthodoxy, but also Reaganomics, and the idea of, as you said, I think Steve Bannon's plan was, let's get into office, do a bipartisan infrastructure deal with the Democrats, create jobs, spend a bunch of money, raise taxes on corporations, and The wealthy and then use that money to build the wall.
Do you think there's anything genuine at all, forget Trump, but like in the kind of populist wing of Republican or right-wing politics, despite what Trump ended up not doing, either because he couldn't, he didn't have the will or the political ability to get it done?
Yeah, it's genuine.
And I agree with some slices of it the way that I would with anything.
I think that we should not forget George W. Bush, although he lost a popular vote in 2000, he ran as the compassionate conservative, which was explicitly branded as a more economically populist sort of Republican Party, because that was what was seen as sort of being necessary to defeat Clintonism.
It's important to say that, you know, there's a perception in the media, because of how the media is composed, that there's a sort of, well, economically right, but culturally or socially left, like libertarians, like, you know, that's sort of a big part of the conversation.
But if you actually look at the polling, a much bigger part that's not represented basically at all in our media is Economically right, excuse me, economically left, but culturally and socially right.
And I think that Trump, look, he promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare, which is an absolutely enormous issue for a ton of voters.
And then after he did that, he said, I will destroy your enemies.
And that was enough for a lot of people.
So we're going to have you back on.
We're going to talk a lot more about that.
As I said, I have a ton of other stuff ready that I've been wanting to talk to you about, both because of the book and just your general worldview on SubSec.
We were remiss in not getting you on the show until now, so we're going to correct that by having you back on shortly.
The book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
You can also find Freddie's work at Substack.
You can start reading some of that that's available outside of the paywall.
And I think he's one of the more interesting and important voices in independent media.
And of course, people who are part of independent media rely on other people paying for their work and subscribing.
So I hope if you check out his work and like it, you will do that as well.
Freddie, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.
We really enjoyed it and hope to see you again soon.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
I appreciate it.
Have a good night.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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