Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Tucker Carlson's new video series and how GOP'ers like Josh Hawley are trying to revitalize the strong man to fix what they feel is broken. Then, Max Berger of More Perfect Union joins Jared to discuss how the new jobs landscape affects labor union organizing.
To support the show and access additional content, including the extra Weekender show every Friday and live-shows, become a patron at patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I love saying that America is a systemically oppressive place, and that men are to blame, and that masculinity is to blame.
If you want to be a man, if you are assertive, if you're independent, if you display those characteristics that psychologists have associated with men for decades, then you're contributing to the oppressive place that is America.
That just isn't true, and it's time that we call that out, and it's time that we say to young men in particular, We need you.
We need you to be responsible.
We need you to get a job, and you can make this country a better place by being who you were meant to be, and we should call into that.
Hey everybody.
Welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
As always, I'm here with Nick Halsman.
Nick, how was your weekend?
How was Passover?
Passover was great.
I made the best brisket of all time in my grandmother's pot from the 40s.
I was a little bit worried it was made out of lead, but it turns out it was really light.
So I was like, it can't be lead.
But I actually did some research, thanks to some help from people on Twitter, and it's aluminum.
Alright, so disaster averted.
That's good.
Yeah, but it was a terrific brisket.
People came over.
We had a great time.
We remembered what my people had to deal with back in the day, and we move on.
Well, so we're going to have on the podcast in a little bit Max Berger from More Perfect Union, but before we do that, we need to talk about another group, Nick, that has gone through some real trials.
I mean, listen, you know, like some people who have like really, really dealt with it.
And that group, of course, Nick, are straight white men.
Yes.
Well, we're familiar with them.
We are.
And before we begin, we have to ask, are men OK?
I don't know if I can answer that question for you right now.
We have to pull this apart and figure it out.
Well, we do.
And we need to talk about masculinity in crisis, Nick.
Giant music right now.
You know, it's everyone who runs those stop signs that really burns me up, man.
Lawlessness.
We have this focus group that we've got to talk about in a second from the New York Times.
I have.
But listen, it would not be the Muckrake podcast if we did not talk about the advertisement that everybody, well, all the political sickos anyway, are talking about, which is a Tucker Carlson original.
And you've seen this video at this point, correct? - I have, I have. - Could you, if anybody at home hasn't particularly seen this, maybe they saw it in passing, can you give it a quick little summary from your mind?
Like, what do you remember of it?
Because this is a very engrossing, visceral experience.
It is, it is.
It's in your face and it is men.
It is most definitely in your face.
I mean, listen, George Takei described it as, I think the term was quote-unquote, so gay.
It's so strange what this thing is.
And, you know, we can have our jollies at this thing.
It's really troubling.
It is really.
It's really disturbing, particularly where this thing is going.
Nick, we've got we've got shirtless men wrestling.
We've got shirtless men picking up giant truck tires and throwing them.
They're drinking, I think, eggs.
Oh, yeah.
But you're you're you're burying the lead here, Jim.
You've got to build up.
Up to what eventually occurs after they're shooting weapons, after they're planting and chopping wood.
And then, as we've already heard in the preview for this show, The Spake Zarustra is playing, the drums are beating, and then we see a fully naked man up on a ledge with his hands extended, and he has a device That is, and I've checked on this because we care about accuracy, he is sunning his testicles.
You know, I think I now know what was in the case in Pulp Fiction when they open it and it glows.
Listen, I'm not going to lie to you.
I watched this thing like the Zapruder film.
I broke it down.
I wanted to see everything that was happening because on one hand, and I gotta tell you, we're making light of this, This is like some really terrifying stuff.
Like, it is basically signaling a new level of fascism that is approaching.
But I have to tell you, it is patently absurd.
Oh, well, and by the way, just to give some credence to what the guy is doing, you know, it was Easter of all days when I'm watching this, right?
And so I'm seeing the guy like, you know, Jesus on the cross with the balls being radiated.
I think the medical reasoning behind this is that you can increase testosterone.
By exposing your testicles to ultraviolet rays.
I think this is really what the medical reason is for.
Whether or not that's true or not, I don't know.
Wait, we're doing a podcast and maybe if people are watching on YouTube they'll see me do this.
Let's put some quotations around medical.
Okay.
Let's put some quotations.
Just to be on the safe side, let's put some quotations around radiating your testicles being a healthy testosterone raising activity.
I mean, it's probably about as medical as shining a light in your body to eradicate COVID.
That sounds probably around the exact same level of things.
I gotta tell you, I've watched the extended cut at this point because I would not be denied.
It involves Tucker Carlson.
And a reminder, everybody knows this, but just to set the scene, Tucker is a twerp.
Just an absolute nerd privileged twerp who is spending his time in Hungary talking about defending Western civilization and in his nasally voice he's talking about masculinity is under attack right and meanwhile showing all this stuff talking about literally radiating your testicles to try and raise testosterone The extended cut.
It's got JFK, Nick.
It's got rockets going off in the sky because we gotta have some phallus, right?
We've got strong, muscular men running here to and fro.
I mean literally talking about the fate of the species.
And I just keep watching this.
And on one hand, it's so absurd because, my God, men, get your shit together.
For real.
This is pathetic.
But on the other hand, that patheticness, it breeds really dangerous stuff.
Absolutely.
Listen, I'm not sure if I even need to talk much because you've literally wrote the book on this.
I did.
And you know, on one hand, it's really dangerous when men feel emasculated and they overcompensate by grabbing guns or engaging in violence.
This is a call to a revitalization, quote-unquote, of masculinity.
By the way, again, Tucker Carlson, the guy who got super upset about them making the Green M&M less sexy, right?
Like basically hosted like an hour of a show because he was so upset that the Green M&M was less sexy.
I'm going to read the monologue, Nick.
that opened this show.
Are you ready?
Because I'm going to do this in this weird voice that is assigned to this.
I don't know what else to say.
Please.
I cannot wait.
Once a society collapses, then you're in hard times.
Well, hard iron sharpens... Hard.
Hard... I've got to get through it.
I'm a professional.
Hard iron sharpens iron, as they say.
How do you feel about that?
inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive.
And then they go on to establish order so the cycle begins again.
How do you feel about that?
How does that make you feel deep down in your center, Nick? - It makes me feel kind of like, I guess, like dumb, Like it just sounds dumb and it sounds so unintellectual I suppose is the word.
It's like, you know, you like to think we're evolving and we're improving and we're progressing and yet this just sounds like Conan the Barbarian.
You know, like the men are pushing a wine press or something in their loincloths.
I was watching a little bit of Conan this weekend.
I just caught a couple minutes of it.
What a trip that is.
What if I told you that this entire monologue and this entire idea is based on some real ancient Greek fascistic proto-fascistic shit?
And that this is exactly what Steve Bannon and other fascists believe, which is that there's a cycle of birth and destruction and in good times men get weak, Nick, but then when things get bad men get tough and then they'll come up from the mire and the rubble and they'll fix things and put it right.
What if I told you that?
Does that sound about right?
Yeah well it makes me wonder like why is there there's always a very big um you know um what should we call it a uh a big thing about like the greek civilization in third fourth grade social studies whatever you know it's a big thing and it makes me wonder like what kind of effect is that having on our kids is that the new this is the crt for our our side i don't know but like if it's polluting these young boys to think that like they need to be you know throwing the discus you know with no clothes on i don't know what's happening
You know what's weird about Athens and what's weird about Greece, Nick, is that we think about it as the height of democracy and all these deep, deep thinkers and all that.
Do you know how they were able to do all that deep thinking and do all their democratic experiments?
Because it was a stratified society where they relied on slave labor.
Oh, I thought you were going to talk about how strong the wine was back then.
No, it was much more about, you know what, there were some people who were able to think and rule, and then there were other people who were kept in slavery.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And it's almost like all these people, and I'm sure you've seen them on Twitter, and you've seen them on the Internet, who have all these Greek statues as their profiles, and they're always talking about Western civilization.
They believe in this idea of kyklos, which basically means cycles, right?
If you want to look this up, if anybody wants to get a little bit more familiar with it, look up the fourth turning.
It's the idea that history goes in these cycles and there's like a priest society and there's a warrior society and eventually it's corrupted and all that.
This is the basis of Steve Bannon and national conservatism.
It's the idea that we are in a downward spiral in this cycle and that only strong, strong hard men, Nick, they are the only ones that could possibly ever put things to right.
So if we're going to sit here and we're going to start, I don't know, radiating our balls.
And talking about throwing over tires and being strong, this is all leading to a place where men will say, guess what?
If you're going to put us in a corner, we'll go ahead and we'll take over society and we'll see what happens.
Yeah.
I feel like it's worth noting that the slavery that existed back then, like, you know, the Greek Empire didn't fall because enough people decided, hey, we don't want slavery and they had like a civil war or anything, right?
No one seemed to think there was an issue with that back then at all.
No, some men are born to be rulers and some men are born to be slaves.
It's almost like natural hierarchies.
Yeah, you know, by the way, but it is, you're right.
Does it make it better?
Let me ask you this.
Okay, what's his face?
Not Tucker, but the other guy after him.
Hamnity.
Hamnity does Krob McGraw or whatever, right?
He like, he fights.
So is it gonna make it better if it's like a guy who's like tougher to like expose all these things or not?
In the issue of accuracy, he sort of does MMA.
In the issue of accuracy, he sort of does MMA.
Like he will – he'll like go into the – like I beg everybody to go and look up videos of Sean Hannity doing MMA.
And it's just like this little dweeb guy who's like, hey, boss, hey, boss, I put on a really good choke, didn't I?
And the MMA guys are like, great job, Sean.
You did great.
You're a big, tough man, Sean.
But he loves that.
It's the whole thing where he's like throwing the football.
He's talking about it.
Was it Crott McGrott?
Crab McGraw something like that sounds like a Hanna-Barbera villain.
Yeah.
No, it's like Israeli hand-to-hand combat or something.
I don't know Oh, yeah, right.
Yeah, cuz I'm not a manly man.
I can't tell you well Listen, what a conversation this is now that we're talking about Sean Hannity doing his little MMA play He has like Dana White on from UFC and he's like Dana.
You've seen me before and Dana's like oh Right.
And by the way, the answer to my question, I think, is no, it doesn't matter if it's like some big, tough, you know, Hulk Hogan kind of guy, you know, insisting that it is.
But it does add to the comedy, I think, right?
When you have a guy like Tucker, who is this doughy, you know, Mozart laughing kind of guy, you know, doesn't represent anything of what he's espousing.
No, not at all.
I mean, Tucker is really pathetic.
And I mean, like, even watching him, you've seen these clips and these pictures of him, like, in his main small town, where he's wearing, like, a plaid shirt that he just got, you know, out of a package and he tucks it into his, like, khakis and he's walking around.
Like, it's total posturing.
I mean, all these people are incredibly weak and soft.
And that's the essence of this masculine thing, which is the idea that men, who by the way are terrified all the time and insecure all the time, that they need to go ahead and revitalize themselves and become strong again.
This idea that America and the world has become feminized and weak.
But actually, it's just a matter of weakness.
I mean, you have someone like a Josh Howley, and I'm going to make you play this clip in a second.
I mean, Josh Howley is like getting out in front of people at national conservatism conferences and saying the young men of America are spending too much time.
They're under attack and they're playing their video games and they're watching their porn.
And that entire thing is the basis of this new movement.
Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?
I I found the comment by one young man to a Wall Street Journal reporter particularly evocative and particularly heartbreaking.
He said, I'm sort of waiting for a light to come on so I can figure out what to do next.
And that brings us to this interesting article that we were reading in the New York Times, which is fascinating because, you know, again, I always like to go visit, you know, go to the museum and visit these different sections, you know, you can kind of study them in the wild.
And here we have, you know, interviews directly with, and it's not just white men, but they chose eight men, you know, at a certain age who are conservative to air their grievances.
Fascinating.
It was fascinating.
I mean, should we pull some of these things apart?
I mean, I don't know.
Yes.
So this is from a New York Times article.
The title is wonderful.
These eight conservative men are making no apologies.
And you'll actually find that they're making a lot of apologies.
And it starts off because the New York Times absolutely, it wants to legitimize conservativism.
It wants to pretend like there isn't some authoritarian movement that's dangerous in this country because if so it would have to move left and it would have to get serious about it.
So they have to legitimize this thing.
Here's the opening paragraph.
There was no talk of a stolen election.
No conspiracy theories about voter fraud or rants about President Biden's legitimacy.
That's not a conservative focus group.
That has nothing to do with the conservative movement, right?
No.
No.
And in fact, they don't probably know a lot about that stuff, right?
They've pushed it away.
It's gone.
It's not in their purview.
They don't know about it.
It's a deep-seated ignorance that allows them to hold those views, right?
If they really did look at some of those things that you just mentioned, there would be some pause, you know?
I mean, some of the guys were talking about how, even still, they're saying that they were praising Trump Because the other side who was criticizing him are just looking at like sound bites.
You know, that's the only reason why they think that Trump is bad is they hear these little weird sound bites about the random things.
I gotta say, Nick, we have spent hours and hours and hours.
I mean, would you even hazard a guess how many hours we've spent investigating Trumpism?
Yeah, it's hundreds.
It's up there.
I mean, but, you know, we didn't look further enough into it to see the problems.
And, you know, it's funny when you start looking at this, because we've talked about this with focus groups before.
They're absolutely worthless.
And they're with a bunch of people who aren't paying attention.
It opens with this, which is, if you can voice your biggest concern about the United States in a single word, what would they be?
I'm just going to go through the list.
Government spending.
Great.
Well done, everybody.
Inflation.
I guess.
Economy.
Okay.
Elitism.
I mean, kind of, but alright.
Disgraceful.
And weak.
And then one of the pollsters says, why weak?
And Joe, of course it's Joe, Says, this is not the America I remember growing up in.
Which, by the way, is the Rosetta Stone of all of this.
It's everybody wants the world to be the way it was when they were younger.
And they can't stand the fact that anything could possibly ever change.
That is the basis of white male aggrievement right there.
But the other basis of that is whatever world they think it was when they were younger was not the world they think it was.
That's the worst part about all of this.
It's like a built on a complete fallacy from the beginning.
That's what's so frustrating about all that's why you can't have a discussion because it's just you're there talking a different language.
Okay, and listen to this.
It's not even a different language.
It's like a completely different reality.
The pollster says, how free do you feel to just be yourself in society these days?
And by the way, most of them put up a zero.
They've got no freedom to be themselves.
Okay, I'm going to read a couple of them.
Robert, you're not free to be yourself anymore because of crime.
What?
If I go out, am I going to be a victim of crime?
That's a legitimate thing this person said.
Michael says, I live in Orlando and when we moved here, it was a beautiful place.
Now, right down the street, people are stealing stuff, breaking into cars.
Michael says, and let's get to the root of this thing, it's almost anything.
You can't mention Trump.
You can't mention Biden.
Joe says, I feel that social media destroyed a lot of the culture that we had.
Things used to be private.
Yeah, right.
Like how you treated your family and what you said and your racism and your sexism.
Christopher says, I'm one of those people that speaks out against cancel culture.
And by the way, if somebody declares themselves somebody who speaks out against cancel culture, I just kind of, I like to do one of these.
I like to put my hands behind my head, I like to put my feet up, just stretch and get comfortable.
Christopher says, I think that true patriotism is recognizing that regardless of what party you're in, we're all Americans and we should start from that premise.
Then we find more reasons to join together rather than find silly reasons to fight against each other.
Silly reasons!
Hey, that's not a bad sentiment.
We're all Americans here.
This is like Stripes, right?
We're all- we're Americans!
We're 10 and 1!
Whatever, now we're not even 10 and 1.
Um, you know, so I don't- I don't want to push back too hardly on that because that is nice, right?
Like, you know, let's start from that premise.
Yeah, but what are those silly things?
Oh.
What are the silly things that divide us?
Or what are the things that he wants to do that he feels like he can't do anymore?
That's the other interesting thing.
Right.
And on that note, I'm going to read this thing from Danny.
Danny says, I've been a realtor for 22 years.
First of all, that's a long time.
To be a realtor, that sounds like a lot.
I've lived in Orlando for 44 years.
I have a pretty damn good reputation.
I'm not being arrogant.
Well, sounds like you are a little bit, but that's okay.
About a year and a half ago I was the president of one of the homeowners associations in our community.
An Asian woman got into an argument with us.
I'm glad you mentioned that she's Asian.
That's great.
That helps with this whole thing.
I'm glad you decided to say that.
When I say us, I mean the whole board.
That night she went and wrote a review on my business page saying that I'm a racist.
She wrote a nasty review and Google won't take it down even though she wasn't a client of mine.
She never even bought a house for me.
She never did business with me.
She said that I'm a racist.
That's what's happening today.
And I gotta say something, Nick.
Maybe she did say that.
What's the consequence of it?
Like, did he lose his job?
Has he lost his entire fortune?
Is he living, like, in a pariah community?
What happened?
It's the fear that they're going to get called out for bad behavior.
I think this is the same guy who was complaining about all the cars being broken into, right, in Orlando.
Do you want to hazard a guess?
Did cars get broken into, like, 20 years ago in Orlando?
Never.
Never?
Not one?
Not one.
Just checking.
Just wondering.
People didn't even lock their doors at night.
God, can you believe that? - In that manufactured city that only exists because of Disney Man.
- Right, and now it's like the purge.
I mean, they must view it like the purge or wanna go to the purge at some point. - We've talked about this recently.
The mindset that they have is so ludicrously, like hyper simulated of what real life is.
Like they literally go around all day expecting to be cancelled, attacked, for their family to be pulled away by an army, thrown into FEMA camps.
Like it is such like a hyper sensitivity in terms of what could possibly happen.
But it's also manipulated all in the attempt to denigrate the left.
Yes.
So it just it's almost like they just continue to need an excuse to criticize the left and make all the you know whatever they can lash out at because they don't like it a different team and you know if you when you go to another another city's you know arena they yell at you and they boo and they do all that stuff well this is them kind of doing that and they can manipulate these other things To continue to make them, you know, make them feel better about their positions in a way, right?
Like that's what they're looking for because that's when crime comes in because it's easy, you know, it's Biden's fault or the economy, it's Biden.
We got to make sure Trump got all this, you know, criticism.
Well, we got to make sure that Biden gets as much as not more, even if it's not true, you know, and then it's easy to pick those subjects.
So, it's just a terrible place to have a way to live your life, basically.
It's awful.
And by the way, listen, I understand that men are having a hard time.
I understand that the economy has changed.
I understand the expectations have changed.
Listen to this, Nick.
This is from Joe.
Joe.
There's a lot of things you really can't talk about.
I was mentioning to someone in my office about the president appointing a Supreme Court nominee.
It was an African American woman.
I don't know about you, The alarm bells just went off.
I can't wait.
I assume that this is going to be a completely rational conversation that a person should be allowed to have in their office, right?
We'll keep going.
And I was saying, that's the most racist thing you could do.
What if somebody else was good?
What if it was an Asian?
What if they were anything?
And then when you speak to somebody about it, well, what are you, racist?
No, I'm not racist.
Don't say that in your office!
Don't do that!
Stop.
Yes, especially if you're talking to an African-American woman who has viewed her entire life as an oppressed class or oppressed race, rightfully so, having seen how unbalanced and unfair the entire society it is, and for the first time having someone that looked like her be nominated to the Supreme Court, who is unbelievably qualified, like yes, it's like this is what they're upset about.
They can't express themselves normally, but what are they trying to express?
Terrible shit!
Terrible!
By the way, we hadn't even talked about this.
Donald Trump, whenever Ginsburg died, said, I'm going to replace her with a woman.
Were there riots?
Were people overthrowing Carl?
No, it's not about that.
It's about this political identity and the fact that they literally want to be able to say anything that they want at any given time, no matter how racist, how sexist, how classist, how xenophobic, without any sort of consequence whatsoever.
That's what they want.
That's it.
That's all this is about.
Well, we're in the same demographic, basically, as a number of these guys are.
I guess the white ones, if you want to do a long race.
And yet, like, okay, are you worried about things that you might say, like in the classroom or out in public, that could offend people?
Yes, because I don't want to hurt people.
Right, and I'm the same way.
So, you can take it two ways.
You can say, great, I want to learn and I want to make sure I don't offend people and I'm a nicer person and I treat people well.
Or, it's a conscious decision to say, no, I want to say these awful things that are going to hurt people and it's not my fault if they're hurt by what I say to them directly.
That's just... Is that the definition of racism?
It's the definition of something negative.
I don't know what it is, but it's not good.
Listen, the entire point here is that these people literally don't want to live in any kind of a society In which there are limitations on what they feel free to say.
White cisgender straight men have always felt like they can say whatever they wanted at any given moment.
That's the entire thing.
I've had people say to me, particularly after my masculinity book came out, they say things like, well, I have to take a second to really think about what I say to people.
And it's like, yeah!
Yeah!
That's a good thing!
That's what everybody else has to do!
And it just so happens that now that we don't have industry, now that we're going into information work, now that we're going into offices where you have to share spaces and work with people, it doesn't cut it anymore.
You can't do this stuff.
Do you get the impression that, like, if they do say something bullshit or something horrible, And then they're called out on it.
They actually might feel bad.
And they're so against feeling bad about themselves.
They cannot let that creep in.
But what do you think about that?
Like there's probably an initial embarrassment.
Oh god, did I really, did I say something bad?
Whatever.
Obviously it turns to anger and like resentment and all the other things.
But I wonder if there's a moment there where they actually do have that feeling and then that's really what they're so afraid of.
Is to not have any kind of self-reflection, any kind of, you know, embarrassment feeling that, you know, that they did something wrong.
You know what I mean?
Well, I think it interferes with their identity.
It interferes with who they think that they are, right?
Which is that they're upstanding people and that they could never harbor something that is, you know, awful or that could potentially be seen as offensive.
All of this is basically this existential fear, and on top of that, that they might be, quote unquote, canceled.
That they might lose what they have, they might lose their jobs, they might lose their privilege, their affluence.
And all of this stuff sort of like comes together in like this white hot fear. - Well, you know, for a long time in America, in society, if you did something really bad, and you're plastered on the cover of every magazine that's bad, whatever, you would come out and say, gosh, I'm really sorry.
You go to rehab.
You do all these different things.
There's like a game that you played.
And then when you came out of that, everyone welcomed you back and everything was fine.
And at some point, it doesn't feel like what they think is if you say you're sorry, that's weak.
and we cannot be weak so I can never I mean by the way this is the Trump doctrine I guess and I don't know if it's that it seems like it's been that's right before that but right this is the other issue is they can't say they're sorry they can't acknowledge that there are anything wrong because that's weakness and we can never have weakness no matter what like where is that being taught because I don't think it's in the schools No, it's not.
It's being taught by exactly what you just said.
Before Trump came along, basically, sort of liberal society was teaching people, you have to treat people better, you can't say these things, you have to watch what you say and be considerate of others and at least tolerant.
And Trump blew that door wide open.
He came along and made it a political and social identity that you can just say whatever you want and actually revel in it.
And to be honest, like we've talked about this before, Donald Trump is a weak, weak, like just sad man.
Like there's nothing quote-unquote masculine about him outside of his attitude, but he's constantly getting hurt, he's constantly getting upset, which I think a lot of these men really relate to because deep, deep down masculinity is about overcompensation, about insecurity.
But he was able to create this public persona where it's like, no, you're not weak.
Like he even said this about the military.
It's been feminized.
It's become weak.
Right.
The idea that America had somehow or another moved over away from masculinity into femininity.
And that's what these people are now getting into.
And it's going to turn into a very aggressive reactionary movement.
And that's what we're seeing take form right now.
And it used to be like you'd see people who served in the military then run for office.
And there was a bit of a, what was it, that you get a little shine from that.
That was a good thing.
John F. Kennedy, like way back in the day, these war heroes would come back and then serve John McCain.
But I wonder if now that's going to be bastardized to just sort of mean masculinity and toughness.
And we're going to just kick ass and take names and we'll figure out the whole democracy thing later.
I mean that has to be one of the reasons why a guy like Josh Hawley could get elected is because he was sort of talking about his service and then Dan Crenshaw.
Some of these guys really feel like that's what their claim to fame is and it works.
That's what's scary is it works in where they're running.
Yeah, and listen, I want to talk about the absolute absurdity of this.
So, two things.
One, the person asked, like, who is your ideal role model of masculinity?
They say Jason Statham, Denzel Washington, and Tom Brady.
Jason Statham is paid to fight people on movie screens, choreographed fights.
Denzel Washington seems cool as shit, but he's also a movie star.
That's how you know him.
Tom Brady?
Tom Brady?
Do you know how pampered Tom Brady is?
I mean, my lord, this person is not their idea of masculinity, but it's all popular culture.
Now, let's go ahead and move down here a little bit.
All of a sudden, they're asking about feminism and what is happening with masculinity.
I'm going to read this thing from Danny.
I'm going to read this, Nick.
Let it wash over you.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Danny says, look at fashion.
Look at the newer generation of how people dress.
How men dress.
There's men and there's women and there's masculinity and femininity.
Which, by the way, none of that is true.
But that's neither here nor there.
And there's no reason to destroy one in order to make the other one better.
I'm not trying to get into a negative men versus women thing, but I'm seeing masculinity under attack.
And I'm seeing men wearing tight skinny jeans with no socks and velvet shoes.
And it's cool to wear pink.
I don't mind wearing pink.
It's a cool color.
And I'm not saying colors belong with a certain gender.
It's so funny.
This is what we were talking about earlier.
Every time you speak, you don't feel comfortable enough to say what's on your mind.
Or you have to almost give a disclaimer.
I have no problem with pink.
But when we go out to a club or dinner or dancing, you see some of the younger generation wearing very feminine clothes.
Blatantly feminine clothes.
That is a hot mess of straight garbage, Nick.
Again, don't you think you've seen people wear skinny jeans like a hundred years ago?
Like, that's the thing.
They're trying to make, right?
He's trying to make it seem like it's new.
It's a new thing that I'm seeing.
But again, this is also like the whole gay marriage thing.
What could possibly bother you living in your house but someone who's in another city is doing, you know, to expound their love to somebody else?
How does that possibly affect you?
How would it affect you if you're out at a club or at a restaurant and you see somebody else dressed the way you don't like them in a certain fashion?
How is that a thing that you'd be worthy of talking to the New York Times about?
I know!
Like, these kids and their fancy shoes!
What?
Velvet?
No socks, Jared!
Can you imagine the blisters they've got on those feet?
Oh, it's terrible!
I want to hold them down and put socks on them right now.
I mean, what the f... This is insane!
It's insane.
That guy's a serial killer, I think.
That's insane!
Patrick Healy, a show of hands question.
Do you think sexism is a major problem in America today?
Nobody raises a hand.
And do you think racism is a major problem in America today?
Nobody raises a hand!
It's literally identity politics.
It's a bunch of men who feel like the world is out to get them, that things have shifted.
It's aggrievement politics.
That's all that this is.
It's about a cloistered group of people who not only feel aggrievement and as if they are under attack, they've got an entire political party and a demagogue and a group of demagogues who tell them, you are under attack, come vote for us.
That's all this is.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to know, like, what these people look like that he is seeing dressed strange because I have a feeling that there might be a common thread there, appearance-wise.
But either way, if you want to argue, like, I'm trying to run this through my head right now in terms of, like, the masculinity thing.
It's like, yes, I can't afford to look non-masculine or to look weak And if I accept anybody else who I think isn't not, you know, tough then that makes me weak in a way, right?
In a way.
And meanwhile I can tell you there are people that dress the way he's describing that could probably take on 10 guys at once and kick the living shit out of all of them.
You know what I mean?
Like we have every kind of person in this country and meanwhile and by the way would that be the movie version where he discovers this he gets he goes to beat somebody up who's like oh look at how he's dressed whatever and that person just destroys him and then buys him a beer afterwards it's got nothing at all to do with anything the color pink nick Whether or not a person wears socks with their shoes, what type of pants that they wear.
By the way, everything that I just described is consumerism.
It's literally what is being sold to you, this identity that's being sold to you.
Which is what this is all about.
It's about living through products and creating a character that goes out in the world.
The difference is that people like you and I can sit here and start to dissect it.
And understand where it comes from.
And other people are like, what do you mean?
It's not real.
Of course it's real.
And they get so mad and they get so angry at the idea that any of this is a construct because they are so lost in the construct.
They could never possibly move outside of it.
And it makes them angry.
And it makes them violent.
And it makes them capable of violence.
And what we're talking about here today, man, it's really funny what the Tucker video was.
And this focus group is absolutely absurd.
This is the base level foundation of authoritarianism.
That's what it is.
Authoritarianism relies on aggrieved men who feel like they have to recapture their masculinity and then of course an authoritarian party or demagogue who tells them we can do that.
You know, it's weird to me because the way I process things, the way I learn things, even from an academic standpoint, how do these people learn anything?
Like, I can't understand, you know, because to me it's like I'm open, I'm listening, I'm taking in information and I can assimilate it and learn it and put it in my brain.
And I just, I can't believe, I don't know what process they must go through to do that because it seems like so little gets through in terms of these things that, like, how else would he learn math at this point?
It's very strange to me.
Well, it's funny you say that because the governor of Florida has now banned a bunch of math books because they contain critical race theory.
And quite frankly, let's just be straight up about this.
These people aren't fans of book learning.
And by that, I don't mean that they're stupid.
I really don't mean that they're stupid.
I mean that they resent the idea that anybody has information that they don't already know.
Donald Trump gave us a wonderful view of that.
He hated experts.
He didn't need to talk to epidemiologists whenever the pandemic was hitting.
He knew everything.
Remember what he said?
My uncle was a scientist.
Everybody's very surprised by how quickly I understand this stuff.
That's the whole point is these people, they, they're not willing to even admit a momentary thing of weakness.
Maybe they don't know something.
Maybe they don't understand something because any of that, that makes the Jenga tower fall.
You know what I mean?
It takes one piece and suddenly this whole thing comes down because masculinity I don't know.
I don't get it.
Never did get it.
Just unbelievably brittle. - I don't know, I don't get it, never did get it, and we're doomed.
- Well, Nick, I don't know what to tell you.
I thought maybe we would go and get that sunning treatment together, but I'll cancel the couples treatment.
No, I'll go.
I want some more testosterone.
I'll do whatever it takes.
We'll just go on a mountaintop and spread our hands out and look off into the distance.
I have no problem doing that, Jared.
Just name the place and time.
I love it.
I love it.
Well, we're going to go and talk with Max Berger of A More Perfect Union, and we will be right back.
All right, everybody.
We are here with a guest, a long, long time coming.
I've wanted Max Berger to be on here.
Max is on the editorial staff at More Perfect Union, previously with Justice Dims, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Bush, co-founder of ifnotnow.org.
Max, thanks so much for being here.
Yes, my pleasure.
So, you know, one of the things that I've been keeping track of, and I know that you have as well, is it feels like labor right now is having a moment.
And by a moment, I mean, it's lifting itself up out of like the dying embers.
Yes, exactly.
This has been absolutely tamped out intentionally and systematically.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you are seeing in your work and how you're feeling about this, because it certainly seems that everything from Amazon, Starbucks, and some of these other challenges that we're seeing around the country, what's the sense that you're getting from this?
Yeah, I think, you know, last year, there was this very strange and contradictory kind of set of data that we got, which on the one hand was that we had this historically tight labor market, we had, you know, workers reporting incredibly high levels of Frustration and, you know, high kind of turnover, right?
Like the Great Resignation, which was really people switching jobs.
And somehow, at the end of the year, when they showed the data for organizing, it was not looking like there were really new unions being formed.
And I think what we're seeing this year is sort of the lag in that data, where now people are actually Out organizing, and it took a little bit of time for kind of the frustration that people were feeling over the course of the pandemic to begin to translate into this upsurge of labor activity and I would suspect at the end of this year that we're going to see like a really different set of data.
And as you mentioned, the fights at Starbucks and Amazon are just absolutely transformational in terms of their potential and what they could mean for working people.
You know, I saw a great take the other day that somebody was talking about how essentially every, you know, service outlet in the country in a major metropolitan area right now, you know, any kind of
Um, you know, fast food, any kind of like local retail or, you know, national retail outlets like anything that, you know, working people have been suffering at in terms of their conditions for a very long time is now what in labor speak they refer to as a hot shop right now is
Organizable in a way that if you were to call an election, you'd have a decent chance of winning, which is just an unprecedented level of support for joining a union in terms of the last, certainly the last 40 years.
And I think we're at this moment in our history where capital has spent the last You know, 40, 50 years just systematically crushing labor institutionally and taking as much as they can from working people.
And so people are just they've had it.
They're up against the wall.
And we're in this kind of tight labor market, thanks to the fact that the Biden administration is running the economy pretty hot.
And so structurally the you know all the all the conditions are there.
And so we're starting to see people take this incredible leadership, and for it to really catch on, and, you know, I think, in the US, one of the biggest obstacles to labor organizing is the law.
Right like for for a long time you know if you ask people would you like to join a union a lot of people would say yes even a majority of people would say yes and yet the private sector is only eight percent unionized so what we're seeing now I think is not just um you know there's this enormous organic demand for labor for people joining unions but the Biden administration has been I would say you know I'm more than happy to to to criticize them across the board or you know on the
Coming up short, which, you know, there are plenty, but when it comes to labor and specifically the NLRB, they've been very, very good.
And so I think workers are in a pretty favorable environment.
And the fact that there are now these examples, you know, courage is contagious, solidarity is contagious.
So I would expect that people are looking at what's happening in Amazon and at Starbucks and saying, hey, like, We do this, too.
So I think that that will that will continue to spread.
And it's really just a question of, you know, how hard corporate America is going to come down on them and whether the Biden administration can can have their backs to the extent that they need to.
Yeah, and I'm glad you were you were talking about the idea of courage because I, a lot of our discourse in this country gets very very compressed down and just becomes very very thin.
And the idea is, well if people wanted a union they would form a union and as a result they don't want unions.
The absolutely oppressive system of trying to crush these efforts.
I mean, the reason I think people like us are very excited about what has happened with Amazon and Starbucks is because these are monolithic corporations, massive, almost limitless resources that they've been using to try and destroy any sort of nascent labor movement.
The amount of money, the time, the energy.
I mean, there's people might not know this.
There are entire industries Of anti-union people who come in, advise you how to take this stuff over.
A lot of them, by the way, are parts of things like the Democratic Party.
I mean, it's a really insidious sort of a movement that happens.
I was wondering if you could talk about how big of a triumph this is in the face of massive, overwhelming resources and power.
Yeah yeah it's you know it's always a little tricky talking about this stuff because there's some part of you that wants to in explaining how big of a deal it is to overcome all these obstacles like I'm always a little scared to be like it's really it's a lot for me it's really really you know you know it's like almost illegal to form a union and I don't think that people who have ever tried to do it or been a part of it necessarily have as Clear of a sense of all the obstacles that go into it.
But the biggest thing is that on the enforcement side, anything that's that the employer is banned from doing, right?
All the things that if you were an employer and you wanted to crush a union that you would think about doing.
You want to fire workers.
You want to threaten people.
You want to intimidate people.
You want to tell them that you could shut down the company.
All those things.
The enforcement is so minute.
That even if the company is found guilty of breaking the law and doing every single possible thing they can to crush the union, that's essentially priced in to them deciding to do it.
The fines are Minuscule compared to the scope of what's at stake in the labor fight.
And so from the corporation's perspective, they're like, sure, we're going to hire these lawyers.
We're going to come in and they're going to run these captive audience meetings where we're going to present our case in the election.
And what they do in these meetings and in all kinds of other ways in the worksite is remind the workers that if they unionize that something, maybe everything is at risk, right?
And it's very scary if you haven't been through it before.
I mean, I think it's scary even for people who have been through it before.
And so workers feel incredibly disempowered, they feel scared.
And as you mentioned, you know, a lot of these, some of these firms, not all of them, some of them are very specialized in labor management, right, who are come in and get paid, you know, exorbitant amounts of money to suppress the union.
And they have very sophisticated tactics at this point, because they've been doing it for a long time.
So, you know, they will help you Come up with the materials, do the training, put stuff around the work site, figure out how to communicate with the workers, all this stuff.
In certain instances, like Amazon, you see top people from those union suppression firms being hired internally to basically the HR department so that they have their own internal Union busting team at some of these big corporations, like you said, the, you know, limitless resources that just throw everything they can at the problem and you have those people go out and you visit the worksite and do all the things that they can do to scare people.
And in other instances, you know, some of those same big firms, for example, we just saw Global Strategy Group, which is a major consulting group that does a lot of work with corporations and also big Democratic Party entities, was revealed to have done some union suppression stuff for For Amazon.
So some of these firms are definitely kind of playing both sides of the aisle, and it's really gross that Democratic Party candidates and candidate, excuse me, committees, you know, are willing to work with folks who are suppressing labor unions.
But that really just puts in some form of context just how incredible of a victory it was, in particular that they won in Amazon, in Staten Island, because Not only were they taking on the largest corporation in the country, but they were also taking on that company essentially by themselves because they didn't even have the support of a formal labor union.
They were independent.
I don't know if it's like I don't know if you're a Premier League fan but it's like they pulled a Leicester but like the year after getting promoted or something like it's like I don't know how to explain it's like this is an absolutely incredible it's a number 16 seed won the NCAAs like it's like this just doesn't happen like it's like a pickup team coming in and beating the 96 Bulls yeah yeah exactly right it's like just the kind of thing that you Any of the examples you would use sound preposterous.
It's like, yes, that is exactly what happened.
But I think it also goes to show that if we're in a scenario where working people are just absolutely unwilling to accept these conditions, that there's only so much the corporations can do.
So I think that that's a pretty optimistic place for us to be.
Yeah, and I'm glad you said it that way.
And we were talking a little bit before we started recording about this.
The entire dominance of labor relies on people feeling powerless and feeling alone.
I mean, I don't think people really understand necessarily like how much alienation I mean, it's been a godsend for so many corporations having people work at home, not even being in the same space together.
what agreements they've made.
I mean, it's been a godsend for so many corporations having people work at home, not even being in the same space together.
And what happens is the veneer, which is a very, very thin veneer cracks.
And the moment that people are just like, I am literally tired of this shit.
I don't care if I get fired.
I will walk away from the job.
All of a sudden, that momentum and power changes.
I was wondering if you could talk about, like, not just how optimistic this makes you feel, but how you see that this is the possible alternative.
Because we're going to have to talk about fascism and authoritarianism here in just a second.
But I was hoping you could talk about that a little bit.
Well, yeah.
No, I mean, and I appreciate this.
I know that this is something that you talk about a lot and write about a lot.
But I think that You know, the American ideology of individualism and the way that that then forces people causes people to internalize their suffering as a result of their own failures and limitations and not, you know, the result of a crushing, you know, capitalist oligarchic system that exploits them and
Takes advantage of them and keeps them from supporting each other and having the basic things that they need to thrive, you know, it's in the United States is one of our biggest obstacles to forming any of the kinds of solutions that are going to be necessary in terms of labor or in terms of authoritarianism, obviously those things are deeply deeply intertwined.
You know, I think part of what is interesting about this present moment, and I think it is also very generational, I don't want to solely, you know, kind of define it in those terms, but I do think that, you know, for folks who are under 40, under 35, this notion that the institutions that we grew up in basically work, and that if there's something going wrong, that it's like our fault, and we didn't do something right, just is not, that is not, no one thinks that, you know?
It's a ridiculous thing, yeah.
And I think that really does change the context that organizing is happening within, right?
Because you start to then understand, okay, my life is really fucked up right now, right?
I can barely pay the bills.
I can barely put food on the table.
Either went to school or didn't get to go to school and it didn't result in things that I needed to or I, you know, don't even have those opportunities to begin with.
And you really come out of that thinking okay something really needs to change.
And I think for a lot of people that is now starting at.
At work, because we've tried at the ballot box, and not to say that those efforts aren't important or won't continue to be important but we've seen that that's, you know, only one kind of terrain of struggle.
And so I think there are millions of people who understand that the reason that their lives have been as hard as they are is because They were put in a position where they don't really have a chance to succeed.
And that the only way to change that is by getting together with all the other people who were put in that same situation, which is most of us, you know, close to all of us.
And to decide that we were going to come together and we're going to change things.
And that that doesn't mean we're just going to go out to the ballot box every two or four years, but that we're going to stand together with the people in our workplace who are also being exploited, who are also suffering.
Build a union, you know, to change things from from where we are.
And I think that is a very hard thing to put back in the bottle.
You know, I don't want to be overly optimistic because this stuff does take a lot of time and we are up against a lot of structural institutional barriers.
But I think I'm in this moment right now that probably a lot of people can relate to.
But, you know, and I think There's the Gramscian metaphor of the interregnum really does a lot here, where when it comes to the spirit of the people and sort of the forms of consciousness that are forming, I am just incredibly optimistic, more so than I ever have been in my life.
I'm just like, wow, people are really sick of this shit and they really, really want things to change.
And I think our Really thirsty for genuine connection and solidarity, which is not something that a lot of Americans have ever really experienced, you know, like historically and I think Bernie's campaign and social movements that have happened over the last five or 10 years have also given people some taste of what it means to be a part of a collective.
You know, some form of collective action and have some collective agency so that these problems and these challenges that you're facing could potentially change through your participation in this mass entity.
So people are like, oh, I want more of that we need more of that those are the ways that we're going to Get out of this, and then you start to look at the institutions that we're operating within, institutional arrangements, both in terms of law, in terms of politics, in terms of our economy, and it feels a lot less optimistic.
You know, the extent of the barriers that we're up against are pretty huge, especially in this country, and so we just have to build a wave high enough to crash over them, and You know, depending on who I'm talking to and what hour of the day it is, I will either lean into making the optimistic case or the pessimistic case, because I think they're both pretty valid.
I think you and I are alike in that regard.
Listen, I understand a lot of my corners being a prophet of doom.
Like, I get it.
And chronicling what power and all this does.
But I have to tell you, for me, I look at the systems of neoliberalism, everything is stacked.
On the other side of the deck.
I mean, and literally everything is, I mean, government is completely controlled by capital at this point.
Basically, every system at this point is just completely for crushing labor unions.
I mean, that's the original founding idea of neoliberalism, the ordering system of the world.
But for people to still say, you know what, damn it, I deserve better.
I think that's like miraculous.
I really do.
And I find that inspiring on a daily basis.
Totally.
And I think that we're at this point now where the systems are transparently failing and so are delegitimizing themselves.
And so they're kind of zombie systems.
There's a leftist political party in Spain that my friends and I have Long been fans of called Podemos, which comes out of the anti-austerity movement of 2011.
And they have a saying basically like, you know, the rulers govern, but they do not convince.
Right.
Like the people in charge right now.
And I think that this is You know, where, where a lot of the desire, the demand, the organic demand for fascism comes from right is like a is a pervasive sense that the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism are failing.
And so, people are just inherently attracted to Anti-systemic orientations that aim to sweep aside the entire order and the rise in the organic demand for some form of fascist politics is in itself a indication example of the crisis and the failure of neoliberalism.
And so it's really just a question of can we constitute enough popular power to transform these systems towards more democratic egalitarian and socialist means of representation and distribution of resources, because the systems themselves don't work.
And now most people recognize that.
So it's just a battle for who takes control of the vacuum.
And there's a lot of debate these days about, like, is neoliberalism dead?
Because it still seems like it's kind of You know, it is the operating order.
And I think that's true, right?
I don't want to make it sound like that has changed, but I think that its ability to convince both elites and the public of its viability is pretty severely crippled.
So it is kind of this zombie system that I think Is likely to be replaced within the next 10 years and I think that's both what's so exciting and both then so terrifying because it could just as easily be, you know, fossil fuel fueled.
Fascist authoritarian dictators around the world stepping into that void and creating a new model, or it can be, you know, green social democracy, basically.
And I don't think that I don't think that the Macronist, Bidenist, you know, kind of restore restorationist You know, kind of allowing neoliberalism to live on has a future as the governing philosophy across the globe, I don't think.
At least not with a smiling human face.
I think that's the thing about neoliberalism is it for the past few decades, and I think Trump was one of the reasons why.
I always say it's like driving for hours at a time and forgetting that you're driving and then waking up and realizing I'm like behind the wheel of a speeding automobile, you know?
Like Trump was the moment I think people had to wake up and they were like, oh, a lot of the smiling veneer that we've had this, you know, saying the right things about caring for people and wanting to lift people up that not only was that bullshit, but that hid like a really like inherently fascistic system.
I think, and what I'm really concerned about is that we are leading up to a crossroads I'm with you.
I think there's a real opportunity for some sort of a democratic movement some sort of a revitalization of the individual mass politics.
But I think neoliberalism has a hidden sort of move, which is they love authoritarians.
And if people, because it used to be, go to work, and you'll be able to afford the car, you'll have the kids, you'll have the house, you'll have all those, that's the deal.
You put in your work, you put in your time, you live the quote unquote American dream.
That's gone.
And so now there's nothing that makes people want to go to work outside of fear of, you know, houselessness or abject poverty or suffering.
Eventually, somehow or another, they have to sanctify the system again.
And that's, I think, where you see a lot of these national conservatives talking about removal of Christian nationalism, or basically just making sure that people go in or they get their skulls crushed.
It feels like it's sort of a divider time.
And we're going to see that sort of come into view.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
I mean, I think that there's there's like a lot of overlap between neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
Obviously, there's the history in Chile and other places, but I think the there's this choice that happens.
And I think we can talk about this theoretically, but it's also really clear when you talk about it in terms of actually, you know, discrete choices made by specific institutions.
Right.
But like the way I've always thought about it is just that the alliance between the kind of corporate America would rather lead Right and have have their agenda be the dominant part of the kind of right of center political coalition and have the racist, you know, nationalist authoritarians as the We understand that that's sub rosa all the time.
And actually what generates most of our mass appeal, but we'd like to like, keep it a little bit sub textual.
And what has happened over the course of the last five or 10 years is like that, that, that, that has been inverted, right?
So like that, the, the, the, the fascists are more out front now and they don't have an organic, the, the neoliberal, the neoliberal quad neoliberals are not, don't have an organic base, right?
Like there's no one who's following the chamber of commerce.
A very small group of people.
Very, very small.
And the Chamber of Commerce is really interesting because that's what I was saying about the discreet thing, like they have, you know, threatened to pull all their funding from any candidate who voted, who would have voted for Build Back Better, right?
But they have resumed funding for the Republicans who were supportive of the insurrection.
Yeah.
Right.
So business, the institution that represents the interests of business and politics, the foremost institution, has decided that social democracy is more, you know, small baby step in the direction of social democracy is more threatening than trying to overthrow the government.
And so it's just one of these clear choice points where, okay, I don't know if capital is inherently fascistic necessarily fascistic, but their support for neoliberalism has led to this crisis of legitimacy and when given the choice between giving up a small amount of their wealth and power or siding with the overt fascists.
It's not much of a choice.
And they've made clear where they stand, you know.
And the more theoretically inclined people would say that that's that there's something inevitable or inexorable about that or that that's inherent in neoliberalism.
I don't know.
I just know that historically that's where we're at and that that choice is is before us and that's what they're choosing.
So I wanted to read a tweet that you wrote, which I think is very succinct and dead on.
It is, if Republicans take power in 2025 and move us more dramatically towards authoritarianism, it will be due in part to the timidity and corruption of Democrats who failed to stop them.
I think that's 100% correct.
I think it's undeniable.
We have reached a point where we're now looking at the November midterms.
The Democratic Party, for the most part, has no explanation for why the Biden agenda has stalled.
It has really no desire to talk about the fact that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are there as vetoes for corporate entrenched power in Washington, D.C.
There is a real, like you say, timidity to even talk about what's happening within the Republican Party.
I was wondering if you could talk about where you see that coming from, what you think it is, and if you see any kind of movement out of this, because I got to tell you, there was a really good op-ed today by Elizabeth Warren, who, and this is just a quick out of context quote, but for anybody who knows what's going on, these are shots fired.
She called out out of touch consultants.
Which in the democratic world is, that's some heavy pipe swinging.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.
So after the 2016 election, this is a little bit of a, I'm getting there, I promise, but after the 2016 election, I met up with a friend who has spent a lot of time working in What scholars refer to as kind of backsliding authoritarian regimes, right, like countries that were more democratic that have since become more authoritarian.
And one of the things he said to me was, you know, when you go and you talk to the opposition politicians in a lot of these countries, It's really scary because, you know, they think that they're just going to be back in power in the next election, that they don't realize that the game has really fundamentally changed, that it's no longer kind of the rules of the game that we understand under democracy.
And a big part of the reason that the authoritarian was able to rise was because the opposition party was pretty corrupt and not very functional.
And so they really can't do a great job of mounting an opposition once the authoritarian rises because they weren't doing a great job before.
And I think about that quote all the time.
Because I think, you know, that really does represent a lot of where the Democratic Party is and has been.
And, you know, another anecdote that I think explains a lot of this is in 2016 after Trump's election.
I think the following night, I somehow got snuck in through a friend of a friend to a big donor political confab.
I'd never been one of these things before, but it was fascinating.
Nancy Pelosi was there, Chuck Schumer was there, and they were trying to kind of, you know, get people to feel less depressed.
And I'll never forget, Chuck Schumer was like, you know, We got it wrong.
Trump was a bit more serious than we thought.
And, you know, he was he said some stuff about trade that we we probably could have been better on.
And when it comes to stuff that he's right about, we'll work with him.
And when it comes to stuff that he's wrong about, we'll try to fight him.
And, you know, hopefully we'll get him next time.
I just remember thinking, this man has no idea what the hell is that he has a completely different planet.
No idea.
So I think, you know, there's part of me that's inclined to give a more Structural explanation, too.
Like, as a voter, as an American, as a person, as a Democrat, I do feel like it's worth mentioning the extent to which individual people, classes of people, are very corrupt.
That, you know, and I think in some ways the biggest bias is for 40 years the people who've been in power have been operating under neoliberalism and so are used to Losing or playing on their opponent's terrain.
And I think you see this, especially with people like Nancy Pelosi, who otherwise are pretty sharp in certain respects, but really don't understand that sometimes going on the offensive is helpful and good.
And I think it's really shocking the extent to which Democrats have abdicated responsibility on some of these basic questions of democratic accountability, accountability, where The Ginny Thomas stuff, how slow it took them, it was for them to, you know, launch the second impeachment.
Bad of a job they're doing prosecuting any of the January 6th stuff, like all this stuff, which isn't even the political economy stuff, right?
Like you think there's not there's not a pro overthrow democracy lobby, right?
Like there's you would think that that would be a relatively easy place where they could really press the advantage and go on the offensive.
And yet they can't.
And I think it's because they just have such a deeply embedded loser mentality where they spent the last four years Basically playing on their opponent's turf under neoliberalism and so don't know how to win.
They just don't know how, can't even think about it.
The only way that they can think to be is to take this defensive crouch and to try to wick bunker and just wait it out.
The other explanation that I want to give, though, that I do think is worth saying, it's a bit bloodless, but it doesn't feel sometimes as interesting to people.
But I think it's important.
It's like, I think we're really also witnessing the collapse of the party system in America, where we don't have a functional constitutional design.
And, you know, we are kind of just lucky that it's worked as relatively well as it has for as long as it has.
There's other reasons why that's the case.
Long story, but short answer is I don't think it's going to last that much longer.
And so if your veto point is the most pro-Trump state in the country, and it's a guy who got elected by 270,000 people, you're going to be totally subjected to the insane whims of that individual.
And unfortunately, the National Democratic Party does not really have very much leverage over Joe Manchin.
Joe Biden does not get to tell Joe Manchin what to do, and there's not really much he can do to force him to do what he wants.
Sorry.
So, you know, I don't mean to absolve anybody of guilt.
And sometimes when I make the latter argument, people hear that I'm saying like, oh, Democrats aren't corrupt or aren't incompetent or aren't weak or pathetic or whatever.
I'm like, no, no, they're all that stuff, too.
But I do think that we'd be living in a very different world in which, you know, Joe Manchin was the 51st.
The 51st Democrat and there was potentially a deal to be made on Build Back Better like we this conversation would be a very different conversation.
And I think that more people need to take seriously the structural argument, which is, it is scary and I'll just say there are not easy answers for the structural concern you know structural argument.
By liberals or the left, right?
Like liberals just want to say, just keep voting, just vote more, just more Democrats and everything is solved.
I don't really buy it, right?
Certain types of leftists or socialists will tell you, we just need more labor power.
The biggest problem is that there is more labor power.
And I actually am like, no, no, we do need both of those things.
Actually, that unto itself does not solve the question of having a political system that can't pass laws and really is only designed to represent the interests of very wealthy people.
And that has to change.
So I think at some point, if we're actually going to get out of this, we actually do need some really big political reform to be on the agenda.
And more people need to start thinking about how the hell we actually do that.
Yeah, and I think to go ahead and wrap this thing up I think whenever the Democratic Party changed particularly in the 1980s and started moving towards, you know, the DLC sort of model.
This was after decades of labor being systematically just eradicated.
And by the time you get to stagflation in the 1970s, that's neoliberalism is already setting in.
There's not much of a choice otherwise.
And at that point, I mean, you're losing 49 states to Ronald Reagan, you know, that you you have to have a decision.
And as a result, the Democratic Party has been chasing the tail of the Republican Party pretty much ever since.
Yeah.
And I for me, and I would love to hear what you have to say about it.
It comes down to not just Labor needing to be resurgent in order to put pressure on the Democratic Party to look at them at a constituency again, as opposed to the random centrist voter in Dayton, Ohio, a white voter who's terrified about civil rights, right?
But you also need some sort of, I think, a grassroots anti-corruption, pro-democracy reform movement And I think when you bring those three things together and all those pressures sort of counterbalance, I think I think that's sort of the solution.
I mean, that's a tall order.
That's a that's a really stiff cocktail, but it feels like that's where it's at.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that those are the elements.
I feel like there's a lot of questions about how that works in practice that we're going to have to figure out over the next 10 or 15 years.
And like, there are big questions about strategy too, right?
Like, you know, so I think that's right.
And I think what's really difficult for me as somebody who has been, you know, if I have found historical analogies helpful to me at different points in history that I'm trying to understand, okay,
You know, particularly when we started getting involved with what became Justice Democrats, we were very clear about the need for intervention that was around the crisis of neoliberalism, a new alternative, and that we were sort of engaging in the beginning of this 40-year struggle to realign the Democratic Party back towards working people, and that it was going to take some time, but that we could take over the party in the same way that the conservative movement took over the Republican Party, and that part of that was political, and that was what we wanted to be a part of.
And that was like a very, maybe oversimplified, but like very clarifying historical analogy that really provided a lot of context for the kind of decisions we needed to make in terms of intervening in that dynamic and building power strategically and thinking about the scale of both institutions and just time that we needed.
And what is really confusing to me about what you just said is that I'm like, what Historical and like, you know, Ryan Enos, I believe, is a political scientist from Harvard the other day who was, it must have been months ago at this point, was trying to figure out what the historical analogy for this moment was.
He's like, is it the fall of Rome?
Is it 1939?
Is it the Gilded Age?
Is it, you know, and it's like, yeah, all of it and all those.
But so just in terms of, you know, and even on the most basic level, there's a question that I've been starting to grapple with a lot more, which is, You know, engaging with daily politics, engaging in electoral legislative politics, formal politics, I think is going to continue to be very important.
But we're also in this moment where those institutions themselves are incredibly unrepresentative and really obstacles to change in a way that I think has been true of other kind of revolutionary moments throughout history.
And I think you see this with the run up to January 6 with, and it's hard to explain to people what it's like to have been in these, in this mindset, but it was like, on the one hand, we were dealing with COVID and trying to have a fight about the COVID package.
And on the other hand, it was really clear to me and some of my other organizer friends, like, they're going to try to overthrow the government.
And so you had to simultaneously do parliamentary politics, legislative politics, and kind of extra parliamentary social movement, you know, civil resistance style politics.
And I'm like, this is fucking hard to figure out.
You know, it's really hard.
So I think as we in the next five or 10 years, that that type of thinking and having to choose between those different modes of politics, Is going to only become more prevalent and important.
And it's really, I like to get on here and, you know, give big pronostications about what I think is going to happen based on some kind of historical analogy.
And I'm like, bro, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't, I couldn't tell you.
I could not tell you.
I do feel very confident that the Republic that we have right now Will not survive the decade.
And whether that happens as a result of some form of democratic transformation or as a result of, you know, a more consolidated authoritarianism, I could not, I couldn't tell you.
Or a decentralized balkanization.
You name it, there's so many.
Or anything in between.
Yeah.
But I do feel, I do feel relatively convinced that the center cannot hold and that we need to start Preparing for that eventuality in a much more rigorous and strategic way.
And as I always say, it's solidarity.
You're exactly right with all that.
But I mean, it doesn't matter what ends up happening one way or another, whether it's forming labor unions or just forming communities or just relationships.
It's got to be solidarity.
Yeah.
Or social movements or political parties.
Like, it doesn't matter.
You know, it's all the same.
Absolutely right.
And I think that that cultural stuff does come first.
Like, people need to feel a connection to each other and a possibility that things could be better.
And that's why stuff like this is so important.
Absolutely.
Max Berger, one of the best that there is.
Can you tell the good people where to find you?
I'm on Twitter.
You should come check out more Perfect Union at perfectunion.us.
Absolutely.
Wonderful, wonderful people.
Thank you so much, Max.
All right, we are back, and that was Max Berger of The More Perfect Union.
Some, actually, not just informative stuff in that, but a little bit of optimism in there in terms of where labor unions are going.
And I have to tell you, masculine individualism is one of the reasons why forming unions and solidarity is kind of really hard.
Because masculinity has told men that they don't need to rely on others.
They can never form those necessary emotional, solidarity, intimate bonds.
This stuff goes hand-in-hand, unfortunately.
Right.
I mean, although it's a little bit weird because, like, the Teamsters, you would certainly think were the manly men who, you know, also did that.
But now, I have to say, the right probably looks at the Teamsters, too, as being bad, right?
Because they're bad for business, right?
Even though they do exemplify, you know, the masculinity that they're talking about and looking for.
It's just another dichotomy that they can't square and then shove down into their brain anyway.
Well, Nick, I mean, you know, bringing this into the realm of movies very quickly, this is why the joke of Dr. Strangelove is so funny.
The idea that Colonel Ripper is so frightened of the communists taking the manly essence, right?
Because the entirety of, like, communist fear, and that includes labor unions, it includes any Democratic movement, any protest movement, it was always communist because the idea was that they were weaker than everybody else.
It was this fear that anti-masculinity, this femininity, was going to come in and take over.
And I gotta tell you, authoritarianism is absolutely obsessed with this stuff.
The idea that manhood is under attack and that collectivism in any way shape or form is going to come in and just eradicate it and basically do it as a matter of basically war on Western civilization.
And they get to their adult lives sort of assuming like if you were going to talk about gender identity for instance to a third grader that that discussion would lead some a kid who hears that to Well, you've heard me talk about this before.
Like, during civil rights, everybody said, you know what, people of color are just, they're easily manipulatable, right?
They're just so naive and they're not smart enough to understand.
So the liberal traitors and the communists on the outside are manipulating them and making them march and making them do these things.
They look at the same thing with, like, trans people.
They say, oh, these people, they don't know what they're doing.
They're being led astray by these satanic, demonic powers, these liberal traitors, these outside destroyers.
It's the exact same thing.
It's the exact same lines.
It's the same story.
And unfortunately, it's pretty effective.
Yeah, there must be something.
Maybe it's genetic.
There's something buried deep in some code or something that the other causes fear and some sort of strange response.
I don't have that.
And I don't know.
I mean, but I think I was raised that way.
I mean, I think my mom spent a lot of time making sure that we were exposed to all different types of people for that reason.
I suppose in America, you can go You know a long distance in certain areas and not encountering anybody else.
It doesn't look like you I gotta tell you I am so grateful for my mom and for my grandpa because I gotta tell you Nick like watching that video that Tucker Carlson promotional video like I could have very easily become one of those people that was just like I Yeah, take your shirt off and chop down a tree and then go sun your testicles with a machine and that'll do it.
And we got to run it.
Like you're exactly right.
It's like the people who put in the work to ensure that we didn't go that direction.
It's huge.
It actually is huge.
It's life saving.
It's society saving.
Those types of things are things to be very, very grateful for.
Absolutely.
All right, and we are grateful for you, as always.
You keep this show ad-free, editorially independent, and just trucking along.
We couldn't do this without you.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to become a patron of the show, support the show, but also to gain access to our weekly additional show, The Weekender, which airs on Fridays, including some of our hangouts, the Muckrake community, all that good stuff.
