The World's On Fire and There's Money in the Flames
Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dive into a troubling UN climate report and discuss how capitalism prevents humanity from saving itself while undermining democracy. Foreign policy expert and co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner stops by to chat with Jared about American empire, imperial realism, and the longterm effects of the military-industrial complex. To gain access to the weekly Weekender episode and so much more, become a patron at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Also, Jared's book AMERICAN RULE: HOW A NATION CONQUERED THE WORLD BUT FAILED ITS PEOPLE is being released in paperback this September with an additional chapter analyzing January 6th, Trumpism, and the pandemic. Pre-order today.
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They can't keep all of your kids home from school.
They can't keep every government building closed.
We don't have to accept the mandates, lockdowns, and harmful policies of the petty tyrants and bureaucrats.
We can simply say no, not again.
The United Nations report says the Earth is getting hotter.
Hotter than even most scientists predicted at this point, and that it is definitely the fault of humans.
That's what the report says.
This occurs as extreme weather around the planet sparks alarm throughout the global warming community.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton here as always with Nick Haussleman.
We got a jam-packed show today.
We're really lucky to have Daniel Besner, a U.S.
foreign relations expert and co-host of the American Prestige Podcast, who's going to join me here in a little bit for a conversation about American empire and the ins and outs of all that.
So hang around for that.
Before we do, we want to make a quick announcement that this Thursday, We are going to record a Weekender episode for the podcast for our patrons.
We're going to be answering your questions, so if you want to be a participant in that, you want to have your question answered by us, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, and of course that will get you the weekly Weekender edition and opportunities like this to answer questions.
In the meantime, Nick, I got bad news.
The UN climate investigation today, we were recording on Monday, August 9th, it released a report that, what's the word I'm looking for here, Nick?
How would you describe this report?
I would say, you know the notion of, like, why get out of bed because you're just going to get right back into it again anyway?
Demoralizing?
Yeah, that kind of feeling, I would suppose.
Why make the bed just so you don't get messed up again?
Like, that kind of thing is sort of my feeling.
It's crushing in a lot of regards.
You know, if you're listening to this podcast, unless you just, I don't know, get your jollies, like getting pissed off at us and, you know, listening to the leftists talk about things.
I assume that you understand that climate change is real and that we are hurtling headlong towards a climate catastrophe.
This report, which I think a lot of people expected to read this way, we discovered that not only has Has this been escalating, but we more or less have another sort of a finish line up ahead of us right now.
I'm going to go ahead and read a little bit from the coverage of this.
Not all is lost, however, and humanity can still prevent the planet from getting even hotter.
Doing so would require a coordinated effort among countries to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by around.
2050.
We can go ahead and cut back on the amount of carbon dioxide going into the environment if we make a concerted, international, aggressive push.
That's not great.
That's not great.
Because we, and this is what we want to talk about today in part, are the forces that keep us from actually addressing existential crises such as this.
But it is, it's not that hopeful of a situation.
Right.
I think the biggest concern for me would probably be the refugee crisis that's born out of all of that.
Because you'd end up having half of continents of people having to escape where they live to survive.
And that means other countries having to accept them and willing to accept them and treat them like humans.
That to me, for some reason, that image is the most powerful thing I can conjure up besides just roasting in some distant apocalyptic future where there's no food, there's no way we can't drink the water, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I wrote a sub stack about this last week.
And I was talking about how like this is, first of all, completely avoidable tragedy.
We know that this is real.
We've known that this was real.
Absolute conservative estimates.
The energy companies and the people around them knew that this was a problem going back into the 1970s.
And instead of taking care of the problem, instead of becoming part of the solution, they doubled down on what they were doing, and they pushed all of their money, resources, and power into downplaying the actual threat, undermining scientists and throwing out disinformation, and outlying themselves with the right in order to continue profiting off of the destruction of the planet.
But we now live in a position where in America we have this militaristic ideology.
We have this anti-immigrant ideology that has taken hold.
We've already seen refugees at the southern border, not just put in cages, but some of them forcibly sterilized, abused, assaulted.
We know that hate crimes have gone up in this era of targeting.
It's really obvious where that's going.
It's really obvious what the consequences of this are going to be.
Not just human suffering, but human suffering on a scale that is almost unfathomable if this continues going down the path that we are.
And so we have to ask ourselves, like, if we were aliens looking at this society, I do this every day, though.
You know that, right?
I asked that question.
Some of these tic-tac-shaped crafts that disappear, reappear, whatever.
If we were looking at this society, you would have to look at it and say, why in the hell Aren't you listening to the experts?
Why aren't you affecting some sort of a change?
And it really comes down to why this happened in the first place, which we're going to get into the history of a little bit today, which is capitalism, the extraction of resources, industry, the burning of fossil fuels, consumerist culture that makes sure that people are addicted to consumerist culture that makes sure that people are addicted to brands and goods and luxuries that have created a society where we have to live in denial of things like this because otherwise we have to make large, aggressive changes.
Well, we've done this for so long that we could complete each other's sentences and get to each other's points.
You kind of beat me to my big question to you was going to be, why do the powers that be continue to ignore these issues?
And what you just said, I can say with one word, money.
They think it costs too much.
That's part of it.
That is only what it is.
And it kind of makes sense and we can expand this out in a little bit as far as conversation goes.
It makes sense and it kind of boils down to the ideologies that we're dealing with from left and right.
And it leads to me being as despondent about the possibility of those two people sides ever coming together in the same sense of, are we ever going to get the climate under control as well?
It's the same despondent feeling for both of those things.
Yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and start with what you just brought up, which is the boardroom, right?
The companies that are profiting.
And let's be very explicit about this.
They are profiting off of the destruction of the planet.
Like so many things that we talk about on this show, there are different types of people involved in this.
Some of them have managed to convince themselves through delusion or denial that they're not part of it or that climate change doesn't exist.
There are others that simply worry about the bottom line.
Like one thing that we've noticed over the past couple of years is that you start seeing these energy companies, the ones who have destroyed the environment and created this problem, they have come out and said they're part of the solution, right?
They're going to make clean energy.
They're going to create these alternatives.
We're even seeing this push right now.
Biden is particularly pushing electric vehicles and different emission standards, all of this.
So eventually there's going to be a tipping point where the people who have made money off of this are going to see that they can make more money off of being a part of the solution.
The problem is that by that point we'll probably have blown through whatever line that we needed to cross because it's profit.
It's a matter of the bottom line and simply moving away from this is not only going to be a matter of companies not making money, but you want to talk about macro.
Capitalism says that it constantly has to expand, it always has to grow, and it's all about exploiting resources.
There is no emergency brake on capitalism outside of a market collapsing.
There's no global climate change, you know, emergency brake to pull, where all of a sudden we change everything.
We, I talked about this with Besner a little bit in the interview, The United States military is one of the largest polluters and has one of the largest carbon footprints of any entity in the world.
What do you do one day?
You just simply say, we're not going to carry out the business of American empire anymore?
It is a fundamental feature of capitalism and imperialism that has gotten us here.
And in order to take this on, it's going to take something that is antithetical to that.
Right.
And I'm glad that what we're doing here, and I hope it's clear, is drawing the absolute direct connection between capitalism and the environment.
That is the through line, that is the whole thing.
And it kind of actually comes down, because I don't know if I'd come up with this term, but we're in a democratic, we have democratic capitalism, is sort of what I kind of feel like we'd call what we're in, right?
So basically, there's democracy, but capitalism is sort of the through line here that dominates our government.
So people would go ahead and say you would either call that neoliberalism, hypercapitalism, something along those lines.
But yes, it is the idea that we have in theory representative government, but people have come to the belief that the best way for people to express themselves And here's where the rub is, and I just tweeted this out, this could be my best tweet of all time.
Democracy says, all men are created equal.
then control the political system.
Exactly.
And here's where the rub is.
And I just tweeted this out.
This could be my best tweet of all time.
Democracy says, all men are created equal.
And capitalism says, hold my beer.
You know what I'm saying?
Capitalism could be my best tweet.
It's better on the page, actually.
And it doesn't read as well.
But nonetheless, capitalism...
Capitalism is all about inequality.
We're going to try and stretch it and you try and take as much advantage as you can to get ahead as far as you can and then put the other guy down.
That's the whole part about capitalism that makes it work.
So how can you have these two things coexisting peacefully for longer than a couple hundred years?
That is why my concern is that, ultimately, a mixture of these two things could very well always turn into fascism.
And there's enough evidence in the past that would lead me to believe that that's a real possibility, even here.
But I also feel like the right, or the people who are capitalists, If that's what they truly believe in, then they probably don't believe in democracy, right?
Like you kind of have to be on one side or the other in some respect because democracy is all about everyone having equal rights, right?
The equal vote.
But that's not what capitalism works, how that works.
And that might actually give us a little bit more of a fundamental insight into the differences between the right and the left.
I don't know if it helps us get come back together at all, but I do feel like it might help explain just where they are and why they can't
See the reality that we're trying to you know impart upon them I think it can help us come back together or stitch back society When you actually lay it out in those explicit terms because you're a hundred percent right like the the entire Ideology behind the right and you know, we've been covering this Tucker Carlson Hungarian adventure, which by the way, I don't know if you happen to watch any of it.
He went full on Full authoritarian in this.
Like, he didn't even hide it.
He sat there with Viktor Orban and was just like, number one, he said, if you lose reelection, I think we can probably guess that Joe Biden caused it to happen, which is stunning to be on foreign soil and do something like that.
But the rights ideology is inherently anti-democratic.
The idea is that there are ruling elites in the hierarchy that are at the top of the hierarchy, Because they should be.
Because those are natural hierarchies of power and rule.
Democracy, even in America, like right now for the book I'm working on, I'm back in 1800, right?
Like when Jefferson beats John Adams.
They were terrified of democracy.
In fact, the biggest concern of the founding fathers, and they were creating a nation of aristocratic white male control that also was by definition a capitalistic society.
I mean, that's part of the reason America was birthed.
Is because it was right there at the beginnings of the system that we would come to call capitalism.
They weren't interested in people voting.
They weren't interested in everybody having a say.
The right inherently is anti-democratic and once you start explaining that to people who are getting all jacked up on either Trumpism or what Tucker is feeding them or what Fox News tells them, All of a sudden it becomes very clear, oh, you are part of an aristocratic, hierarchical, anti-democratic movement.
That's the truth of the situation.
And once you start having conversations like that, you can start having class solidarity.
You can start having a solidarity of one group versus another group and you can start breaking through the contradictions of the rights appeals.
So you're exactly right.
It is not conducive for democracy whatsoever.
And in fact, capitalism abhors democracy.
Because why should people who don't have a ton of money and a ton of influence, why should they have a say in how the government works?
That's why the wealthy and the powerful and corporations and special interests are the ones who have captured government.
They use their means, they use their affluence, and they use their power to hold sway over that machinery with the interest of pushing everybody else out.
It is, by fundamental design, an anti-democratic ideology.
Right.
You're just talking about Pelosi enforcing a mask mandate right now, right Jared?
That's how that works.
Do we have to?
That's the power that she is trying to amass.
And we'll get to Rand Paul in a second if we can.
I don't throw up.
I don't know.
I might throw up.
But but that's what he's accusing.
There's some sort of power that's gained by encouraging people to not spread a virus.
But before we get to that, I did a little deep dive and I researched just into this whole thing.
And I wanted to share the first paragraph or the first couple sentences of an abstract paper from some guy who studies like in Cambridge or something like that.
I don't know.
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But Wolfgang Merkel says, it's a good quote.
Capitalism and democracy follow different logics.
Unequally distributed property rights on the one hand, equal civic and political rights on the other.
Profit-oriented trade within capitalism in contrast to the search for the common good within democracy.
Debate, compromise, and majority decision-making within democratic politics versus hierarchical decision-making by managers and capital owners.
Capitalism is not democratic.
Democracy not capitalist.
We've shoved these two things together, right?
And it's as if it's the end-all be-all of ways to run a government.
But here's my only problem, Jared.
I like my Diet Coke.
I want my MTV.
So how am I supposed to be able to criticize capitalism like this and tell everyone it always makes things turn to shit, which I believe, while I'm sipping my Diet Coke?
How does that work?
Well, okay, multiple things here.
We're going to go from Adam Smith to Diet Coke, which I think is one of the most American transitions that we can possibly make.
So Adam Smith comes out with The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
Coincidence?
I think not, right?
This is the moment where capitalism as a system starts coming into focus.
And Adam Smith's idea of capitalism, the way he sells it to people, Is that it harnesses the selfishness of the human being.
And I want to remind people that this is still in an era where humanity is seen as wicked.
You know, we're all possessed of original sin, we're all wretched, we're all looking for salvation, and we're disgusting, and we don't have much in the way of like human worth.
So we have to figure out a way, and these pessimistic people figure it out, to harness that distrust, right?
There has to be a system where your selfishness Through no decision of your own helps other people, right?
And so what ends up happening is that that wretched, selfish human behavior eventually reverberates through the capitalistic system and supposedly helps people and brings them up and makes them better.
Well, real fast, let's flash forward before we get to Diet Coke to what we just started talking about, this climate crisis.
In order to address the climate crisis, all of the nations of the world have to agree to how to limit their carbon footprint.
They all have to pull back from it.
Well, guess what capitalism says?
While those other motherfuckers are over here pulling back on their carbon footprint, you don't!
You gain an advantage by not, you know, adhering based on these rules.
This does not work because basically it is a matter of game theory.
It's Prisoner's Dilemma.
How do you screw everybody else to your advantage?
When that happens, there's no mass action that is possible.
You know what I mean?
There's no way for everybody to get on the same page and take on something along those lines.
And that's at the nation-state level.
That's not even the corporation level.
That's not at the capitalist level.
That's not at the industrial level.
All of those levels are riddled through with it.
And you're riddled through with it.
And I'm riddled through with it.
And the person listening at home is riddled through with it.
And I'm sitting here with you right now.
I've been sitting here drinking my my seltzer.
I've been drinking a little bit of, you know, carbonated water.
You're drinking capitalism in a can.
Drinking capitalism in a can.
I love it.
I should be drinking tap water in order to, you know, knock down the amount of aluminum and production and, you know, plastic for plastic bottles or whatever.
You are living in a capitalist society, which is the same thing as being a fish who lives in water.
You cannot decide that water is unethical and so you don't use it.
You can make your decisions and your transactions, you can make those decisions, but we are forced into a system from our births that is destructive, but also a poison that riddles through us.
It is a constant existential dilemma that we all have to face and decide on our own.
And why it sucks so much now in 2021 versus other times where, because I was in the research I was doing earlier, like in the 50s, the dichotomy between the Republicans and Democrats were what's much more stark than, The Democrats in the 50s and the 60s were the poorer class, and the Republicans were the more educated and wealthier class.
And so as a result, the Democrats advocated for the poorer classes because that was who they represented more.
Not anymore.
Democrats are now much more of an elite.
It's now pitting two elite classes against each other.
And so, on top of that, now every politician is battling for their life every two, three, four, five, six years in these elections.
And Democrats have been put into a box where they cannot afford to sound like they're against any kind of capitalism.
And so as a result, they're bought off on that, and they've slid all the way toward that side as well.
And so I'm not even sure.
We've said this, I said this before, where at least it feels like to some degree the Democratic Party still wants to help people, and we have to discuss what the government's supposed to be for.
But in reality, you know, you're not going to find a Democratic candidate except for maybe Bernie, who's going to really go out and talk negatively against, you know,
Big capital capitalistic, you know companies and then the system itself Well, and and let's take a let's go ahead and look at that for a second We've talked about on this podcast before that split happens in the late 80s early 1990s where the New Democrats start realizing that they're not going to be Reagan and Reaganomics and they start looking at all these Corporations and all these special interest and also a lot of wealthy people who are pouring money into the Republican Party And they say we want to get in on that
We need to get some of that corporate money.
And by the way, at this point, they also start dipping their hand into what we would call big tech, right?
They start getting a lot of money from the people who are creating the infrastructure of the internet and the World Wide Web.
So they move away from the original base.
And this is something to keep an eye on because it's also going to affect this modern moment that we're in.
They move away from people of color and they move away from poor people and they move away from labor unions.
That was the original power base of the Democratic Party.
But they start moving over in here, and we find, like you were talking about, an economic consensus between the Democratic and the Republican Party.
They start believing in free trade.
They start believing in the idea that markets should make decisions.
So what happens when a Democratic Party starts trying to solve human problems, right?
Because they will at least come out and they'll say, we need to take care of poverty, we need to take care of inequality, we need to take care of all these things.
You start having means testing.
They start taking care of those problems the same way that a corporation would, right?
It's a little bit here.
It's a little bit there.
Let's test it.
Let's do this.
Let's do these big complicated programs that are really hard to follow.
And quite frankly, you have to do a ton of the work yourself, researching them, going into them, and basically doing it as a consumer.
Right.
It's the idea that you are then buying the product of health care.
You're then buying the product of social welfare.
And so what ends up happening is that that capitalism that you just talked about, which, by the way, the left has always opposed and has always tried to move towards either social democracy or some other system, depending upon what your flavor of ice cream is, that starts receding in the background.
And we reach this point where capitalism riddles through literally everything.
And at this point, I'm sorry, and I hate to be the person to tell you this, means testing is not going to solve the climate crisis.
It's not going to serve massive inequality.
It's not going to scale back corporate power.
It's not going to push back rising authoritarianism.
Those things are parts and parcel of the system that we are talking about.
Well, means testing is another way of saying millions will die, right?
Because that's worth the risk of whatever we're going to do.
It's utilitarianism is what it is.
It's the idea of, well, we can't save everybody.
Let's save as many people as we can.
That is one of the animating influences of the modern Democratic Party, for sure.
But I can't believe in your identification of when this all began that you miss out on the chance to just, you know, shit on your favorite guy, Ronald Reagan.
Well, Reagan, by the way, Reagan had no idea what any of this stuff was about.
And it more or less Reaganomics or, you know, trickle down economics, which is redistribution up.
He had no idea what was going on.
It was the product of think tanks.
It was the product of wealthy Americans.
And I want to make that very clear because you actually see economics move away from politics while it's dominating politics.
And you start seeing that sort of managerial class, that sort of think tank class, that intellectual class that starts pushing it to the forefront.
And then what do politicians do?
They go up like used car salesmen and huckster it up, right?
They sell it to the public and they put a shiny face on it.
Well, so it's the deregulation that began with Reagan in the early 80s, which I think destructed the norms that we had had in place since the Great Depression.
By that point, they had forgotten what happened in the 20s that led to the Great Depression.
And we had all these great, I mean, you can call them great whatever, regulations to prevent that from happening, which led to the biggest boom we've ever had in the country for decades upon decades.
Okay.
So, you know, the Arabs in the Middle East got upset that we were getting chummy with Israel, and so they raised the prices of oil, and then Carter gets screwed, and we all know what happened in our little mini-documentary about that.
And that caused a problem with our economy.
But once they began the process of deregulation, then it becomes accepted, and then even the left isn't going to push back and try and put more on it.
It was much more difficult.
Clinton certainly didn't do it either.
He was more than happy to So, Keynesian economics, that's the guy who we should all really like because he was always encouraging the government to just spend out of their crises.
It's what we saw in 2008, which got us out of the mini-depression that we were in.
It's what got us out of the Great Depression.
And it's what also led to the New Deal.
So, basically what I'm saying is, fuck Milton Friedman.
Oh, man, fuck Milton Friedman running.
I mean, we're never going to have a more definitive moment of this podcast.
Absolutely.
Fuck Milton Friedman.
Right.
And in case you're wondering why, he's the guy that came in and said, oh, the government can't get involved in anything at all.
We have to stop.
And also, he was really worried about inflation.
And we're worried about like the debt and rising whatever when it turns out it's all a hoax.
It's all fake It's not even an effect really ultimately now where we are And the idea that the government has to completely get out of the way of everything which leads me to my other biggest point Which is what is the point of government?
I know that a lot of the capitalists over there are gonna say well It's they're in charge of making sure with a good monetary system that functions for people or whatever you know what my reason you know what I think the government should be for Jared and The government's main objective should be to not kill innocent people.
How about that?
That's a great objective.
Because that covers everything.
It covers police.
It covers the climate.
It covers regulation for corporations.
I'm telling you, just don't have innocent people die.
But here is the problem.
And you just put your finger right on the pulse of the issue.
So we talked about this a while back when we were trying to explain to people what Tucker was doing with this illiberal democracy push and their fear of liberalism, which, by the way, I talked about in that Patreon episode the weekend or a while back.
And if you haven't listened to it, please do that.
Liberal democracy and liberalism itself, Is very much sort of rhinestoned up and shiny with the idea of liberty, democracy, equality, right?
But let me tell you what the original principle of liberalism is.
It's the idea that law is what protects people from one another, right?
It's taking the place of religious control.
It's the secular force that keeps us interacting with each other.
But what is the bedrock of that property?
The bedrock is that property is the main principle upon which all society exists, and that people have to be secure in their property, and businesses have to be secure in their property.
All of a sudden, what you just put forth, which is the idea that government should keep from killing tons of innocent people, or I would go ahead and add to that, it should keep rabid inequality, human suffering kept to absolute minimum, right?
And then all of a sudden we can get into the idea of what is a nation state?
Why do we have them?
Why is the desire and the power of the nation state so much more important than our
Experiences and our lives the point is property is that people's property has to be Protected based upon this liberalism that we live with them because otherwise we'd have anarchy, you know cats dogs living together mass hysteria Yeah, I have to share my diet coke with somebody you would have to share your diet coke with somebody or I would actually go ahead to go ahead and reduce that that idea I would say that you have an entire house full of diet coke and
And you would have to share a few cans of Diet Coke with other people.
And you'd still have your Diet Coke.
And you could still have all the Diet Coke that you could possibly want, except for a few cans that go out to other people who would like that chemical mixture.
Well, I was picturing, like, I'm drinking it, enjoying it, and then I have to let somebody else drink from it, and then I have to get it back, and then continue drinking from that same can.
Which I couldn't do right now, if you ask me to.
No, I can't.
No, that gives me the willies, man.
No, but what we're talking about at this point is how society should be ordered.
You brought up Keynes, right?
And if we're gonna talk about Keynes versus Friedman, what we're actually talking about with FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Keynesian economics, we're actually talking about how to make capitalism work.
Right?
How to keep it from destroying itself.
Because it just continually immolates itself.
It just sets itself on fire, and then the train just runs off the tracks.
And then, inevitably, countries are there, and banks are there, and these forces are there to put them all back together.
Wait, wait, but that didn't happen for decades and decades after the regulations that were put in place after the Great Depression.
That's what I also want to stress, right?
But this is what happened.
But wait, but when is Make America Great Again?
What is it usually?
The 50s?
It is that time!
So go ahead.
That is the point of it, because what Make America Great Again is doing, obviously, is creating this fake American time period that never existed, but using very real and practical measures to oppress people of color, women, and vulnerable populations.
Now, to go ahead with the Keynesian idea, if you actually look at this, That is what saved capitalism.
It's what kept America from falling into the fascistic impulses of, you know, the 20th century fascistic movements.
But almost immediately, we all hear about the Red Scare, right?
Which, by the way, we had one Red Scare in the 1917, 1918, 1920, that area, which is when Russia first became communist, right?
We also have a second Red Scare.
And what we're told in our conventional history is, you know, that it was just like, we have traitors in the government and they have to be tracked down and McCarthy was after him and he had lists.
No.
That's not what the Red Scare was.
That was the scare.
That was the propaganda.
What they were actually doing is they were systematically taking the Keynesian people out of the government.
They systematically dismantled the New Deal that saved capitalism and kept America from falling into fascism.
And they took it out post-World War II so they could make as much profit as humanly possible off the mobilized industrialization of America.
So they took the brakes off after the brakes helped things.
They went ahead and took them off and that's where we are.
Do you feel like, because we're always a bit surprised by how diabolically genius a lot of this, even the Trump administration, how they were doing this.
Does it really?
I mean, that was really the behind the closed doors that they had.
That was the clear cut intentions of what the Red Scare was.
I think what probably happened is much like what's happening now, which is like there are segments who Wanted that.
Yeah.
Right?
And then there are segments who literally believed that anybody who backed the New Deal and anybody who tried to regulate capitalism, that they were secretly communist or traitors or dangers to the world.
You know, I read when I was writing American Rule, which by the way comes out in paperback next month, if anybody's interested.
New paperback comes out next month and has a new chapter on January 6th, the end of Trumpism.
The dangers that are still there.
So yeah, that comes out.
It's open for pre-order right now.
But I read a bunch of materials, man, that were Red Scare materials, right?
And it was this belief, and I know this is shocking.
It was people of color, women, and gay people.
They were all vulnerable to the manipulations of communists, right?
Oh, and by the way, labor unions.
Shocking.
Right.
All of these individuals were considered dangerous and liabilities.
And as a result, they had to be oppressed and put down.
So you're exactly right.
Some of them were in on it and knew what they were doing by getting rid of the new dealers.
But there were many others who thought that it was part of an ideological struggle with communism.
You know, it's funny because I've never really, you know, and I'm all up on contemporary American history and the Red Scare and Don't Fall Asleep, You Might Wake Up a Communist.
Wait, what's the movie?
Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Body Snatchers.
So, but I don't think I've ever heard anybody, you know, so eloquently posit the notion that this was really just an effort to dismantle the New Deal.
That's fascinating.
Although, wait a minute.
Maybe we have talked... Now in my recess of my addled brain... We haven't gotten as in-depth about it as we have today, but it's important to recognize that it's the paranoia.
It's always the paranoia that we're talking about.
They're coming for your guns.
They're coming for your family.
They're gonna make you slaves.
They're gonna put you in camps.
They're gonna betray you to the New World Order, to the Deep State, QAnon.
They're gonna take your babies.
All of those things Are stories that hide a material purpose, right?
Like, as Tucker's saying right now, he's like, oh, they're coming for Western civilization.
They're going to destroy our culture.
No, they want to get rid of free elections.
They want to get rid of, you know, individual liberties.
It's a story that hides the actual purpose underneath it.
And that's exactly what happened with the Red Scare.
Absolutely.
Well, I've got so much more.
We'll have to talk about this more in other episodes because there's so much more fascinating stuff about how, you know, the mismatch of capitalism and democracy.
And it is worrisome.
I don't know.
We probably are the longest living democracy that has merged capitalism like this.
There isn't any other, as far as I could tell, any other precedent for a government lasting this long without slipping into fascism.
Well, it's important to note that in our founding we were not intended to be a democracy.
Which is the whole point.
It's been the struggle of the people to recognize as much democracy as possible.
You know what I'm going to ask you now, right Jared?
You should do it.
Why do you hate America?
Because America was founded as a one-party state.
It was an aristocratic founding.
And then, and by the way, this is what I'm writing about in my chapter right now.
The moment that a second political party emerged, they're like, you're part of the Illuminati and you're out to destroy America.
And that's Thomas Jefferson, right?
Like it was almost immediate.
There is a problem in this, which is that democracy and capitalism and the government and the way that America has operated has been at the heart of these issues.
All right, so we're going to go ahead now and transition over to my interview with U.S.
foreign policy expert Daniel Besner, the co-host of the American Prestige podcast.
Stick around.
I think this was a really illuminating interview.
All right, everybody, as promised, we're here with Daniel Besner, who is a historian of U.S.
foreign relations, the author of Democracy in Exile from Cornell Press, and with Derek Davidson is one of the hosts of one of my favorite new podcasts, American Prestige.
Daniel, thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much, Jared, for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
And, you know, first time, long time.
Happy to be here.
Well, I wanted to go ahead and start this off a little broad.
You know, American Prestige and a lot of your work, I think, does an incredible job of sort of Demystifying American foreign policy.
You know, I think for a lot of people in the last few years, I think Donald Trump is sort of like a very obvious buffoon.
And some of the stumbles of American imperialism have sort of allowed the illusion of America as this grand force of good spreading democracy and equality and liberty around the world.
Has started to flicker a little bit.
And I think people are starting to investigate a little bit more, um, sort of the material conditions and the pursuit of power that have definitely led to, uh, America intervening in other countries, how it's handled foreign relations.
And, um, I was hoping we could go ahead and start, uh, you know, just with like a quick little overview of what are the defining features of what we would call the American century or the moments that sort of led us To this moment where we're at at this current time.
I think it's a really important question, and I'll actually start a bit before the so-called American century, because I just think it's important for listeners to appreciate that all of American history is foreign policy history, right?
Expansion West, the conquest and deracination and genocide against Native peoples was foreign policy.
You know, Manifest Destiny is foreign policy controlling the Western Hemisphere, as was announced in the Monroe Doctrine as foreign policy.
So just to emphasize that the whole history of the country is to some significant degree, the history of foreign policy.
But the American century begins, I would argue, during World War Two, if not earlier.
And it's announced by Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, in a famous essay.
titled The American Century, where he essentially argues that the United States needs to take over from Great Britain and create a world order organized around American principles, a Pax Americana.
So the American century is really defined by something that experts term world order.
And what they mean by that is sort of a very specific hierarchy that exists internationally and is defined by specific rules and norms.
And the world order created in the so-called American century is a world order defined by the American interest.
And it's organized, I would say, around two specific polls.
And these are polls that are transpartisan, that both sides of the political spectrum agree on, the major sides, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
And that's first that the United States should be, um, the, uh, it should dominate the world through what is called armed primacy, which really just means military dominance.
And then, uh, that the United States should also dominate the world economically.
Uh, and that's primarily through the dollar, right?
The dollar is the international reserve currency countries need access to the fed and things along those lines.
And so through those two, um, polls, military.
and economic hegemony that United States governs the world.
And then there's also sort of the third poll, which I think is much less important, but that's also, you know, the cultural sphere, cultural hegemony, what was called in the 1990s, Coca colonization, you know, Michael Jordan being the most famous image in the world in the 1990s today, probably someone like LeBron James or American Michael Jordan being the most famous image in the world in the 1990s today, probably Now that that was a component of American dominance, but I think it was less causally important to creating the world order than other than other polls.
You know, what's funny about that is so the project I'm currently working on, I'm retracing so-called Western civilization going from Rome, and I'm currently in the 19th century breaking into the 20th century.
And, And that idea of the American order, or sort of the evolution of the British Empire, actually,
Weirdly enough, right there at the beginning of the switch over in the centuries, you actually had a lot of British sort of imperialist who already started to recognize that the empire of the British, which was based on white supremacy and free markets and the exploitation of people of color around the world, particularly the global South, had already started to lionize the United States as the successor.
To the British empire and had already started to talk about in this really bizarre prescient way that the United States and England should join in like an Anglo American alliance.
Yeah.
English speaking people in order to push, um, this sort of, um, you know, white supremacist, capitalistic domination.
And the, the, the move from that alliance, of course, which starts taking place in world war one and world war two.
I think that that idea of that white supremacy, the quote-unquote English-speaking domination, the way that they start using euphemisms and all of that, in a lot of ways the racial and capitalistic components of this pursuit start getting laundered behind notions and mythologies of American exceptionalism, humanitarianism, the spread of democracy.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, and I think that's a common thing to so-called liberal empires.
You see it in the civilizing mission of the British, in the writings of someone like Richard Kipling.
You see it in the French, basically the same exact thing, Mission Civilatrice, this idea that colonialism is good for the peoples who are being colonized.
And the idea of sort of a hierarchy that is based on race.
Uh, existing in the world and that it's, you know, the white man's burden, the famous, uh, Kipling phrase to, um, to, to basically lift up other peoples.
What's, what's interesting is that there, there's sort of different poles of that.
Some people say that, you know, lifted up to, uh, so the, the peoples of what we today call the global South of what was then called the backwards world, uh, would have their own sovereignty.
And some says, some people say like maybe at some point in the future, and there's disagreements within that frame.
But that sort of civilizing mission is, I think, inherent.
And you get that in the United States, I think, reflected primarily through the notion of democracy and self-government, which is the idea that the United States would bring democracy to the world's peoples.
And that's expressed, of course, most prominently through Woodrow Wilson and his 14 points.
And, of course, famously, Woodrow Wilson, very much someone who had an idea of a hierarchy of race growing up in the Reconstruction era South, influenced by, you know, a PhD in political science, or I think it's political science, political science or government.
Yeah, and that social sciences are not as institutionalized when he gets it.
But anyway, he's using these ideas in order to basically establish this idea of a global order with the United States and white people at the top of it.
And so I think that's absolutely central to the entire project.
Now, of course, after the end of World War II, you can't quite be as explicitly racist because of the Nazis.
And so you get a lot of, you know, arguments about culture, you know, arguments about underdeveloped nations with obviously, you know, the most developed nation being the United States.
And it's, you know, not a surprise that the United States has intervened most viciously in non-white nations after 1945, Korea, Vietnam, you know, today drone warfare in Southwest Asia.
And so I think there's a lot of similarities and a lot of continuities between what was going on in the 19th century and what's going on today.
So, So with all of that, that's sort of, um, the message that sort of goes out ahead of it, the soft power that of course is going after hearts and minds trying to, uh, convince people that America is this champion of, of again, good and equality that hides sort of the, uh, The material pursuits behind all of this and parts of the supremacy and the hegemony that's behind it.
I find it really interesting, and I'm glad that you brought up World War II, because a lot of people who might not have looked deeper into history Might not understand that immediately after defeating the Nazis, the U.S.
welcomed Nazis within the fold and started welcoming fascists in as sort of a weapon to fight against the Soviet Union in the coming Cold War.
And so what we see with that is this, you know, I would call it a cynical politics, but I think that's sort of downplaying what actually occurred at that time and what we've been watching over the last Well, my entire life and in the last few decades, this sort of idea that whatever America does is automatically good.
And whatever America attempts to do is for the betterment of civilization.
And meanwhile, that sort of cynical, pessimistic machinery that hums underneath the surface has held sway over our politics.
Since at least the end of the Cold War, and I think for a lot of people who might not know that history or know the specifics of it.
It is sometimes confusing and confounding why what some people would call the deep state or the military industrial complex that continues to go forward regardless of who the president is or who's in power.
I think that the disconnect between that idea of what America is doing and what's actually happening underneath the surface, I think that that disconnect has led a lot of people to not necessarily understand the actual conditions Of who we are and what we do.
Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday.
And I think it would be useful if people approach the history of the United States.
And we're talking about 1945 after 1945 here.
Imagine that we were the bad guys.
And I think if you if you take that frame, you could see that the United States has done an enormous amount of damage to the world.
I mean, there's At least famous among foreign policy people, events like the CIA's intervention in the 1948 Italian elections, or the way the CIA helped overthrow Mohamed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953, which is of course why Iranians really don't love the United States and haven't for a while.
The U.S.
helped install the Shah, who was brutal.
The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, or Allende in Chile in 73, and there's more and more and more of those.
So if you see, I mean, the United States always justified those actions by saying that they were in the interest of sort of democracy and capitalism.
So there was a myth of American innocence or at least American exceptionalism that was coterminous with the United States' rise to what historians call globalism.
And so I think those things are foundational.
And you see it after the end of the Cold War.
Um, you know, the Cold War ends, right?
The reason that the United States has this mobilized society, at least theoretically, is to defeat the Soviet Union.
So first, the Cold War ends in 89.
The Soviet Union collapses in 1991.
So why do you still have this, you know, totally mobilized society when there's absolutely no power that can challenge it?
And you see the adoption, particularly after Rwanda in 94 and Bosnia in 95.
The adoption of the idea that the United States is going to stop genocide worldwide, and that that is, of course, you know, using American military power for so-called humanitarian ends.
Now, of course, after 9-11, you don't really need the pretense of stopping genocide in order to justify American military hegemony, because you have, quote unquote, Islamic extremism being referred to to justify the sort of military industrial complex and military intellectual complex, by which I mean the think tanks That you know, create the ideas of the American empire and what you're seeing now, I think, under the late Trump and early Biden administrations is the advent of China as the, you know, the threat du jour.
And I just want to emphasize to people who are listening that in my opinion, as a foreign policy expert in a world where there are 750 American military bases, China has somewhere between one and three.
That's what we think right now.
In a world where the United States spends more, I think, than the next 10 countries combined on its military, the U.S.
really isn't at any risk for anything.
And so we need to question why exactly we have this totally mobilized state and this totally mobilized military, which we spend an enormous amount of money on, and which I think actually hurts the United States' culture at home, you know, with the flyovers and the violent video games and stuff.
Not saying those things cause Yeah, I want to talk about that in a second.
Before we do, though, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the bill of goods that Americans were sold in terms of empire and American hegemony was that it would make them safe and it would make them prosperous.
It would make life better.
And in that regard, obviously the money and the resources that have gone towards the military industrial complex and conquering and the maintaining of these bases and innovations and weaponry that basically have just been sold around the world for profit and power.
But on top of that, even the stated goals of the military industrial complex have failed, which is one of the most amazing things of all of this.
We were, we did an episode, I want to say it was a month ago.
Where the intelligence communities release their threat assessment and more or less to read between the lines of that assessment.
It's an admission that the national security state has failed to protect Americans.
It has failed to create sort of the American hegemonic project that has been pushed for in totality.
It now is more uncertain than ever.
And if anybody read the news this morning, this is being recorded on Monday, August 9th, the UN has just released an absolute shocking report on global climate change.
And, you know, it's not a surprise that that report or that the articles around it did not mention that the United States military is one of the biggest polluters and has one of the largest carbon footprints in the world.
And so there's no way to look at any of this without understanding that this project has been just a resounding failure.
Is that right?
Yeah, I would agree.
I mean, I think you could look at the American military as being the handmaiden of rapacious global capitalism that has literally destroyed the world.
I mean, that's how I view it.
It provided the security.
I mean, don't hold back on that.
Don't hold back.
At this point, that's just empirical, right?
Like we've extracted so much from this world and we've created so many pollutants and greenhouse gases and everything that we're literally cooking the planet.
And that was all made possible by the U.S.
military, which defended global capital flows, in my opinion.
And I mean, I think the project failed.
It was doomed to fail.
It's interesting, in my opinion, like the universality of the American idea that you're going to basically force the world to adopt North Atlantic, really American principles, Anglo-American principles, and also French and German.
But so the North Atlantic community principles was absurd and is rooted in the country's Puritan past, which has this universalizing and totalizing vision that I think was actually projected onto Marxism-Leninism.
Which there's elements of it in Marxism, Leninism, but I would say by the 40s, the Soviet Union was not doing global revolution.
You know, it might have helped decolonizing states from the 50s to the 80s, but it really didn't have the power to do what the United States did.
And so I think that that, you know, that that project was doomed from the beginning.
Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought that up about the Soviet Union, because it's funny the way that the story of the Soviet Union was sort of told or at least sort of communicated through education.
Was that the Soviet Union as a nation or as an entity was this constant threat.
And meanwhile, the idea of communism needs worldwide revolution and a stateless world society without borders.
And in that way, even the most ardent supporters would say that that project failed to reach critical mass and was not actually a threat, but made an incredible opponent and an incredible threat to Crack down on the left to crack down on markets around the world like you were talking about deposing any leader who did not openly accept capitalism or get within the American line.
And in a way, it was the best possible thing that could have happened to worldwide capitalism and the growth of global capitalism.
Correct.
I mean, I think that's right.
It's already in the 20s when Stalin's talking about socialism in one country, you know, so it's it basically provided an excuse.
I mean, and also beyond that, I do think the people who created the state system in the in the 40s were genuinely traumatized by World War Two and the rise of Hitler.
Like, I don't think they were just like faking it.
But I do think, you know, by the 60s, when that sort of, you know, first generation fades from the scene, It's kind of absurd for generations of Americans to pretend that the Soviet Union was it was an existential threat.
It very clearly wasn't.
And I think like it's obvious today that that the United States just keeps on cooking up existential threats like terrorism or or or China in order to justify in order to justify what it does in the world.
And we actually probably disagree about this one, which I'm about to say, and we don't have to go into it.
But I think that also leads to the threat inflation at home.
And helps helps and increase the powers of the domestic security state as well.
So you have sort of a bidirectional flow of empire abroad and empire.
I completely agree on that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So so I think that we've also wound up in this country securitizing our national apparatus in a way that, you know, reflects what's going on abroad.
And you see this in the work of someone like Stuart Schrader, who shows how, you know, we don't like militarized policing at home.
Right.
All those tactics and strategies, even all those weapons were first tested abroad.
Right.
So they're tested abroad in the global south, what was in the 60s and 70s term, the third world, and they come home.
And this is exactly what happened after 9-11.
You know, you get the overt militarization of the American police that are basically using surplus goods created to fight a war on terror that didn't really need to be fought.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, that does I cut my teeth in politics in 2003.
You know, I was a college undergraduate, I was listening to a lot of music, reading a lot of beat poetry, and all of a sudden you have the run-up to the Iraq War.
You know, everything that came with that, the surveillance state, the growth of the federal government, surveilling the people, and the more research that I do, particularly with conservative counter-revolutionary governments, that is always the means of bringing the empire back home.
Because why would you not?
As you push towards empire and you put all of your resources towards conquering, exploiting people around the world, Inevitably, that takes money from the nation, creates discord, creates violence, creates revolutionary movements.
And you have to suppress those.
You have to look at them as if you were an enemy.
And I don't think that there is a far jump or even a walk to looking at how that has led to the nation state viewing its people as an existential threat.
And I think When you start looking at how empire has worked, I mean, what is it?
It's Foucault's boomerang, correct?
It's that, uh, it's, it's always going to come back home the moment that you have to start viewing the people under you as the threat that you view the people outside of the nation.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And of course there were always populations that, you know, one might refer to as internally colonized, which was a black radical critique, I believe from the 1960s.
First, indigenous native populations, and then, of course, people who were brought over from Africa and then other, you know, populations over the course of the next few centuries, people from the U.S.
territories like the Philippines and Puerto Rico, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's just now that that's expanded to sort of the imagined subject of American history, right, which is a white person.
So now, like, everyone is now subject to a militarized police, not, of course, in the same exact way.
The communities of color are differentially affected.
Um, by that, but I think that, you know, as a, as a general trend, we see the overt militarization of American policing affecting all segments of American society in a way that hadn't necessarily been the case.
Now, of course, unless you're rich and if you're rich, you're able and Glenn Greenwald, I believe had a book about this about a decade ago, just showing how, if you're rich, you basically are in a different justice system, um, effectively.
And so we, we have a lot of bad things that emerged from this, uh, or at least partially this imperial apparatus.
Yeah, and I think America is an incredible innovator of that idea, that sort of malleable, spotty sort of idea of the law and the way that the law works, who it protects, who it attacks, and who it is for.
I think that's one of the reasons why America was sort of able to dominate within the quote-unquote American century.
I think it was the idea that You could, you know, stand at home and talk about liberty and equality and meanwhile funnel unbelievable amounts of money and support to, uh, you know, small F fascist dictators around the world, right?
That were there specifically to run undemocratic crackdown societies in which they had complete us support, uh, whether explicit or under the table in order to hold down their people to keep them from Overthrowing a system that was based on U.S.
interests.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right.
And you could point to so many examples.
I mean, most famously Saudi Arabia.
Right.
And but you could also refer to Mubarak in Egypt and a bunch of other dictators around the world.
There's a famous essay, if anyone wants to explore justification for this, by Jean Kirkpatrick called Dictatorship and Double Standards from the early 1980s.
That's worth looking at.
But yeah, no, I think that's that's right.
And also, you know, America has helped arm the world.
All right.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you.
I find this concept endlessly fascinating from the first time I heard you say this.
And so I think this is absolutely central to the entire American project.
All right.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you.
I find this concept endlessly fascinating from the first time I heard you say this.
I want to say I heard you talk about it on on Parsons Nostalgia Trap podcast.
I was wondering if you could get into the concept of imperial realism, both in culture, politics, What's your perspective on this idea?
Sure.
So obviously, that's a play on Mark Fisher's famous essay, Capitalist Realism.
And in that essay, he quotes Frederick Jameson, who has the famous line that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
And I was just thinking about that in the context of American imperialism, that even With all of the failures of the past 20, 30 years, you know, most famously Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, you know, the horrible drone wars that I mentioned earlier in Southwest Asia.
I mean, it's even with all of these failures, you know, the most we're talking about is like Biden putting fewer troops in the Middle East than total.
Meanwhile, what's actually happening is that climate is ravaging the world.
We have global pandemics, we have incredible inequality within and between nations, but no one's talking about taking down the American empire.
Instead, we're allowing all of these processes to ravage, you know, ordinary people here and abroad.
So that really got me thinking about sort of the cultural ways that hegemony is maintained, hegemony in the Gramscian sense of cultural hegemony.
And I think there's an imperialist realism that permeates American society.
Like I mentioned earlier, flyers at football games, you know, constant, constant encouragements to to thank the troops.
You know, just I was in Las Vegas the other day.
Someone's eating a burger and it said, you know, experience the world or something along those lines.
So it just, you know, totally defines our culture in a way, what I refer to as an ambient militarism.
And I think this also gets into what I think of the role that culture plays in actual history.
Personally, I don't think culture really engenders change.
I'm an old traditional materialist in that sense.
I think economic and political and security transformations are the primary things.
that get things, you know, moving materialist transformations.
But I do think culture is really important in maintaining particular systems.
And so I think what has happened in the United States is that this imperialist, realist culture has helped maintain a system of military hegemony of armed supremacy and, you know, economic supremacy that has defined American politics for decades.
Yeah, I find that fascinating.
I grew up in a household full of veterans, particularly like a grandfather who fought in World War Two.
And I have to tell you that So, I grew up in the 80s into the 90s, and the general idea behind war and militarism was that this was a generation that would rather have not gone to war, that these are all defensive measures, that, like, we went to fight a war so that we wouldn't have to fight future wars, right?
That old chestnut, the idea that it's making the world safer democracy.
But I started to notice beginning in 2003, and I guess you have to go back of course to 2001, but you started to notice that all of a sudden it became a very aggressive type of militarism.
It became this thing where one of the defining characteristics of being an American was being willing to go in like Toby Keith and put your boot up the ass of somebody.
And what's really interesting to me about that is that, of course, comes at a moment when fewer Americans actually fight wars, right?
The establishment of the all-volunteer force in 1973 means that we're creating a janissary class.
So most Americans don't fight wars, particularly most Americans of the middle class and up don't fight wars.
It's mostly fought by people who grew up around military bases in the South and the West.
And so we have this thing where America is still the globally dominant hegemon, but without an experience of actual warfare.
So you get the simulacrum of experiential warfare through things like video games, through, you know, things like constant remembrances and references to military stuff, through, you know, cop shows, through war movies and things like that.
So you get a generation of people, particularly, of course, young men who have this like hyper militaristic attitude without ever having experienced war.
And so I think you get a lot of, you know, war type cosplay at home, but that nevertheless helps maintain American hegemony abroad because people keep on voting for, you know, the defense budget for, you know, the bases, et cetera, et cetera.
Or at least they're not, you know, organized against it in any serious way.
Well, and you know, that's the strange thing about it is so much of it, I think, has to do with the consumerist identity, particularly of white men in America who are not working the jobs of their fathers and their grandfathers.
You know, there isn't necessarily the same economic deal that they have.
Meanwhile, they're spending their, you know, Middle class earnings on giant militarized trucks.
They're wearing like fascist type, you know, leaning clothing.
They're drinking black rifle coffee.
You know what I mean?
That the entire lifestyle of that.
But the weird part that I think is strange, not only in the LARPing that's going on there with gun culture, with, you know, separatists, militias, all these groups.
What I find very strange about it is that they have largely coalesced around Trumpism, which, you know, you've talked about this pretty regularly, is in and of itself sort of a backlash.
Against imperial venturism, right?
Going out, finding these wars, intervening in other countries.
So they are LARPing as interventionist and imperialist in the homeland, but are obviously against going out adventuring and somehow or another engaging in actual wars.
It's a strange dichotomy.
Well, they're against Iraq.
Right.
Are they against America dominating the world?
I would say probably not.
I mean, that's something like Trump.
Trump wasn't closing bases, right?
He wasn't fighting wars in Iran, so he doesn't like those sorts of what, you know, were used to be referred to as brushfire wars.
But they're fine with the structure of the empire, or most likely they just don't think about it.
But again, that militarism, as you suggested, come home and was reflected, I think, on events like January 6th, you know, where you get this sort of like simulacrum of an insurrection.
Um, and sort of like just trying to create meaning out of this, you know, system that they, they feel like they don't have control in because they don't have control.
I mean, I, my, I'm of the opinion that this is another idea that I've been developing is that I don't think we live in a mass political age, but I think we have the language of mass politics and we have even the structures of mass politics.
So we have this weird moment where people feel that they need to express themselves through a mass political formation.
But most of the actual power is, you know, in norms, in rules, in the administrative state, basically in things that are totally outside democratic accountability, I think, by design.
So we have – that's a very strange thing which is happening, which you have these mass political formations that aren't actually mass political formations any longer because they can't have the effect they did when the brown shirts were able to actually help take over Germany.
when Mussolini marched on Rome and actually took over the government.
I don't think that's possible any longer in the same way in those specific cases, because we essentially have a professionalized bourgeois military class that is not going to align with, you know, the masses to take down the government.
I think as was demonstrated, we have a, you know, mass professionalized judiciary that is going to enact conservative principles.
But isn't going to give the keys of the state away to the rioters on January 6th.
So we have this very strange moment.
At least that's how I view it.
Yeah, I think that simulacra is exactly the right way to describe it.
I think so much of mass politics in this country has been consumerized.
It's the idea of like consumer expression through what you wear, what you say on social media, how you carry yourself, the hobbies that you're a part of, the demographics that you sort of consider yourself, particularly marketing demographics.
So I think you're right, is that this entire American empire project, which more or less, uh, went above and beyond representative government or, uh, anything even approaching something that, uh, uh, Americans could control.
And I think Woodrow Wilson, of course, sort of pioneered that idea.
Of course, he said that politics and society and administration should be amazed that we gaze upon without any understanding of how it works because the elites are supposed to take care of it.
Capitalists are supposed to take care of it.
And meanwhile, what we're left with is the simulacrum of social media, where we get to tweet our way into what we believe are representative politics or change through how many retweets or likes that we get.
And then meanwhile, our political identities have become our consumerist demographic identities.
And we've been completely detached from the political process.
And that idea is so horrible that I think people sort of Shut her away from it and sort of are reviled by the idea.
But I think that that is more or less the truth.
Yeah, I mean, it's horrible.
I mean, it's totally anti-democratic.
But I think from a left perspective, step one is really identifying the power relations of a society.
And I would say both the George Floyd protests and the January 6th Uh, riots basically demonstrated the limits of mass politics at least in this particular moment.
And I, that's a very bad thing from my perspective, obviously I align with the sort of the demilitarization of the police.
I don't align.
Um, I'm glad that they weren't able to kill on January 6th to kill any Congress members and that, uh, and, and things like that, of course, but I'm talking about, you know, with the George Floyd, the demilitarization of the police, it really hasn't gone very far.
And I think that's because there's very limited ways for ordinary Americans to actually transform Politics, and I think that is a foundational structural problem in institutions like the Senate, the electoral college, the process of gerrymandering, the creation again of this administrative security and national security state that is very difficult to affect.
So we live in one of the most anti-democratic moments at the same time when we have social media platforms that make it feel like everyone has a voice.
So that's a very, that's a very, I think, complex and difficult situation that we find ourselves in on the left.
So I have to ask you before we let you go, you know, a lot of writings are on the wall right now.
I think the anti-democratic moment that you're talking about is absolutely true.
American empire is not slowing down.
I cannot foresee us closing our bases.
I can't see a budget coming out from the Republicans or the Democrats that is going to necessarily cut into that budget unless we have a major social movement or the left gain some sort of a foothold that seems almost impossible right now.
Although, you know, there are always movements that arise and I keep saying this that are surprising, but then in the future seem inevitable.
How do you see this playing out?
What do you see this imperial realism doing?
What do you see the reaction to the anti-democratic moment?
Like if you're sitting here gazing off in the future and being honest with yourself, how do you see this thing playing out?
So Marx once said something that's a pretty famous quote.
He basically said the working class, the proletariat, would either become conscious of itself, Or it would be in the, in the world, the mutual ruin of the contending classes, I think is something like that.
And, and Auf Deutsch in German, it's, it's, you know, whatever.
I hope we're not in that latter moment.
So what I'm hoping is that some sort of exogenous shock happens where people really feel the, um, existential, existential angst of something like climate change, or there's a gerund, you know, the gerontocracy finally, you know, passes from the scene.
And there are new generations of leaders who actually understand the moment.
Hopefully they're not Pete Buttigieg edges, um, or something along those lines.
Um, personally, I don't see any mass movements coalescing for a variety of reasons.
Most important, I think capitals like capital, you know, let's pretend it's an actor.
You know, it obviously is blah, blah, blah.
Like I stated, it's many actors, but capital has successfully so.
um, transformed labor relations through the establishment of the gig economy, that it's very difficult to have the social solidarity upon which any sort of working class organization relies.
I think the failure of the Bernie campaign partially reflects that, right?
That the whole theory was that you'd get people who were alienated to come out, but for probably many manifold reasons that didn't happen.
And one of the reasons is that, you know, if you're working for Uber, you're working for, you know, a grocery delivery service, you're working for McDonald's, you're, you're constantly running around, you're in debt, um, because real wages haven't risen in 45 years or something.
Uh, Then it's going to be very difficult to organize and labor unions.
So I see that as being a very difficult project.
Now, maybe we could try it, but you're asking me for my, this is my analysis hat, not my organizer hat.
I don't see any other mass movements coalescing.
I mean, the anti-war movement of Vietnam happened because the bourgeoisie was afraid of dying in the war.
Once Obama won in 2008, the anti-Iraq war movement petered out, indicating that Americans don't really care.
Not much about imperialism.
They care more about, you know, partisan politics.
So I'm very pessimistic, absent an exogenous shock, which one, of course, can't predict.
So in 1788, it's not like the French aristocracy would have thought that they would all, you know, a lot of them would be killed.
Killed in four years.
So it's very unpredictable to see what happens.
And so some something, an exogenous shock might occur.
What that would be, I don't know.
But looking at power relations as they stand now, it doesn't look great for the left or any sort of transformational politics.
Yeah, I agree on that.
Um, I think the hope that, uh, that people can sort of hold on to is, is like you said, the idea of things that could possibly come up that aren't necessarily, uh, seeable or predictable.
But that being said, the American Empire Project is pretty substantial.
But we want to thank you for coming on.
I just want to go ahead and recommend to everybody the American Prestige Podcast, a relatively new podcast.
Y'all are already kicking ass and already hitting a stride.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks so much.
Yeah.
Please, if anyone wants to subscribe, we're on Patreon.
We're going to have monthly AMAs.
We're going to have bonus episodes.
I will examine culture.
Um, and so yeah, we're, we're getting going, but we, you know, people seem to enjoy it and please check it out if you can.
Uh, we would appreciate it.
Highly, highly recommended.
And, uh, Daniel Bessner, where can the good people find you?
Oh, I'm on Twitter at D Bessner.
Um, and, uh, yeah, just look for me there.
Yeah.
The best place to have like substantive political discourse.
Actually, it's funny you mentioned that.
I have a, uh, you know, a fairly big piece coming out on Twitter in the nation.
in the next few days.
So, you know, maybe people could check that out and sort of think of my thoughts about Twitter, because essentially I don't think it's possible to log off.
You know, this is reality now.
So I think you've got to deal with that.
So, so yeah.
So people might find that interesting in the next few days.
Yeah.
I find it both fascinating and absolutely horrific that the public space has been fenced off and commodified by social media companies that have their own political, uh, ideologies and plans and pursuits.
So I'll, I'll, I'll be looking forward to that.
Thank you so much, Daniel.
Thanks, Jared.
Take it easy, man.
All right, everybody, that was my interview with Daniel Besner, U.S.
foreign policy expert and co-host of the American Prestige podcast.
Thank you to him.
Big, big fan of his.
Check out his work.
A reminder that this Thursday we're going to record a question and answer episode of The Weekender.
If you want to send us some questions and gain access to The Weekender, which, by the way, I think our episodes on The Weekender have been Really good.
It really has been.
I mean, first of all, hanging out with you is always a pleasure.
But no, we're getting into things and I think getting deeper into discussions that people are really responding to as well.
And then the Discord is a whole other world that you're part of in the Patreon that makes it worthwhile.
I agree.
So if you want to be a part of that, go over to patreon.com slash muckreg podcast.
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We really, really appreciate your support.
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So we really, really appreciate you.
Alright, so we're going to be back again this Friday with our question and answer episode of The Weekender.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me, SMH.
