This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comIn the second half of the podcast, Richard and the gang discuss the multiple American “revolutions” and the complete lack of consensus that characterizes the current age. Are we headed for a breakup or a “Holy War”?
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|---|---|
| I think the right, as negative as they are and is lacking in clear policy proposals, in a weird way and in a kind of horrible way, they have the vision. | |
| And so let me try to prove what I'm saying. | |
| As we know, there's been a general trend of liberal hegemony. | |
| There's liberal hegemony in academia. | |
| There's liberal hegemony in the media. | |
| There's liberal hegemony to a large extent, maybe not quite as much in corporate America. | |
| I could go on. | |
| And so the conservatives aren't entirely incorrect when they say that like, you know, The liberals are in charge. | |
| They're the deep state or whatever. | |
| And there's some interesting studies of voting patterns by profession. | |
| And so I can go back and look it up and just take my word for it at the moment. | |
| If you're a corporate manager, if you are working for the government, if you're working in a university, et cetera, you are... | |
| A liberal. | |
| If you own a small business, if you work with your hands, you're much more likely to be a conservative. | |
| So there's a class dynamic at play there that is actually really significant because institutional power is what it is. | |
| It's institutional power. | |
| Getting rich, running a small business, you can go buy a jet ski. | |
| You're not really impactful on the culture at all, in fact. | |
| That person working for $30,000 a year at an art museum has more cultural impact, or a journalist working for the same amount for Politico or whatever, has more cultural impact than a guy with $10 million in the bank and three jet skis at his lake house. | |
| Just is what it is. | |
| It's maybe a real serious blind spot among conservatives that they are kind of more interested in that type of life as opposed to being an institutionalist. | |
| So the liberals are kind of defending liberalism. | |
| And one of my criticisms, and in fact, I've even gotten fairly caustic or... | |
| Poisonous with some of my criticisms of these liberals are just wringing their hands and fretting about conservatives. | |
| Like, in a way, conservatives are pushing the envelope. | |
| Liberals are worried about, you know, J6 was a threat to democracy, and Trump's election is a threat to democracy. | |
| And, you know, some of these... | |
| Conservative gatherings just get out of hand. | |
| They're basically just fretting over the conservatives being raucous. | |
| But the question is, what is democracy? | |
| What is it exactly that you're protecting? | |
| What are you putting forward? | |
| What is this threat? | |
| To what is this threat? | |
| And the reason is that liberals are kind of the conservatives at this point. | |
| Managing and maintaining liberal hegemony. | |
| And the conservatives are the ones who might be dumb and politically violent and crude, etc., etc., but they're the ones who are kind of directly confronting it. | |
| They're the ones now talking about a fucking holy war. | |
| I mean, you can't, against the deep state or against the enemies of Jesus or whomever, But you can't really put it more pointedly than that. | |
| And so the left at some point had the Soviet Union as an embodiment of utopia, as the end of history, as something to shoot for. | |
| Before that, it had a kind of idea of utopia that it could imagine. | |
| And now it's really bereft of those things. | |
| In a way, overly complimentary to say that AOC is a communist or a Marxist or something. | |
| She sounds a lot like a liberal who's, I don't know, more favorable towards labor unions. | |
| She sounds kind of like a, I don't know, suburban white girl who thinks trans is Kind of cool or something. | |
| Or drag queens are cool. | |
| There's no there there. | |
| Stalin would laugh at an individual like this. | |
| And to be fair, I'm not even completely hostile towards AOC. | |
| I think she's fine. | |
| But an actual leftist who understood himself as in a revolutionary scenario would just laugh at this bourgeois pretender. | |
| Who claims to be a leftist or who's leading the left or whatever. | |
| And so the liberals, precisely because they're in charge, don't really have a motive or a kind of revolution. | |
| Now, the conservatives, there's no doubt that they have next to no policy promotions. | |
| Their rhetoric is stupid and nuts, and their rallies are... | |
| Dumb, whatever. | |
| But they're the ones actually pushing for some kind of paradigmatic change, whether it's a national divorce, whether it's a holy war, whether it's firing half the government, | |
| whether it's banning abortion everywhere, even in the online space, whether it's sending women back to the kitchen and I mean, I don't support any of these things, and many of them are kind of LARP-y or silly, but there's something there. | |
| There's a there there. | |
| They're not just defending an establishment. | |
| And so I do think that at the end of the day, if we are headed towards a chaotic situation, which I think might very well be the case, I do think it's going to be like all of these dumb energies that in many ways we make fun of. | |
| I think that they will impact. | |
| They're going to be the aggressor. | |
| They're going to strike first. |