The Five Non-Negotiables for Building a New Progresive Movement w/Max from UNFTR
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Brad sits down with Max from UNFTR to tackle a pressing question: What does a bold, progressive platform look like after 2024?
They critically examine the Democratic Party’s lack of a cohesive narrative in the wake of the election and propose a new vision built on five non-negotiables:
Housing First
Civilian Labor Corps
Medicare for All
Election Integrity
Climate Action
These pillars are presented as essential to creating a more inclusive, human-centered society—one that’s prepared to confront the challenges of AI displacement, economic inequality, and the climate crisis.
Max also unpacks the economic and societal benefits of these priorities, calling for a united, grassroots effort to re-establish a progressive agenda. The conversation explores the ways organized religion intersects with socio-economic policy and how those links can either hinder or help meaningful change.
UNFTR's 5 Non-Negotiables: https://www.unftr.com/5nn
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
Today I have a great guest, Max, from UNFTR.
And it's no secret that since the 2024 election, the Democrats and the left in general have lacked a cohesive narrative.
There's been a sense of flailing.
A sense of needing to regroup but not knowing where to start.
One of the things that has felt palpable but has been hard to articulate is a platform that appeals to everyone that has building blocks that can be used by groups and demographics across the country regardless of who they are, where they live, and their socioeconomic, racial, or other background.
How do we build a sense of we?
A story that we can participate in.
One that is humane.
One that is inclusive.
How do we tell a story of our next chapter that is affirmative and is more than simply, if you vote for us, we'll let you do what you want and we'll mind our own business.
It's my opinion that human nature needs something to participate in.
A way to tell a narrative about who we are and where we're headed.
The problem with those narratives is they're often so exclusive and exclusionary that they often use the foils of one people group in order to bolster the status of another.
What I talk about with Max is a new platform from UNFTR and five priorities that are a starting point for that kind of story.
One of the things that we mentioned, and you'll hear me talk about this, is that But that bad guy doesn't need to be immigrants or minorities.
It doesn't need to be women or the LGBTQ community.
The bad guy can be climate crisis that's coming and is already here.
The bad guy can be the AI that is threatening to create inhumane situations and take away hundreds of millions of jobs.
There is a way to construct an understanding of the challenges ahead of us that will unite us.
That we might have a human new deal in the face of unprecedented crisis.
One that could lead to common sense reforms, but also a sense of fighting for a shared future.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Max.
He is an incredibly insightful and knowledgeable conversation partner and somebody with a lot to offer as we move forward.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
I am Brad Onishi and excited because I'm getting to talk to a familiar person and somebody who's a show I've gotten to be on and we've done collaboration.
have never had on as just a guest who I get to chat with on Straight White American Jesus, and that is Max from UNFTR.
Many of you know the show, Unfucking the Republic, and we don't usually, like, there's a conscious no profanity thing on our show, and I can explain to you why it's not because we're like So we are going to have to go down that road.
All that to say, Max, thanks for being here.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
And we have had, I think, a great collaboration and mutual respect for a few years now.
And I actually can't believe it feels like just yesterday that we sort of like both dove into these endeavors and now they're mature and the audiences have actually synced up in a beautiful way.
So there's actually a lot of overlap between the audiences, which is really nice.
No, there is.
And it means a lot to me that we get to count you as folks who you consider partners and collaborators.
I don't know if you know this, actually, Brad, but your listeners to our show have their own bucket.
They have their own name.
And again, this is the only time that I will try to refrain from profanity, but they're actually called Swashfuckers, which I think is just so cool.
Our listeners, they'll recognize themselves, is that they're like, oh yeah, no, I'm originally a swashfucker.
So anyway, that's it.
No more profanity for me.
I'll try.
No, no, no.
The profanity is out of the box.
But I'm just laughing because there's so many sacrilegious things involved if you think about Jesus.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Swashfuckers, there's a lot of sacrilege there.
There's a bunch of folks who are going to be so familiar with you.
There's a bunch that are not.
Let's start here.
UNFTR is a progressive outlet, video channel, podcast.
Tell us just the essence of UNFTR.
Why do you exist?
Well, there was a number of us that were actually together in political journalism for about 15 years, and then we got out of it around 2017, but we stayed together as a core.
And we always had this sort of intense curiosity, and one of the areas that we developed kind of a depth of knowledge and expertise in was civil liberties.
And so we were kind of, in the political journalism we were doing, we were kind of punching above our weight and we were eminently curious about how sort of the surveillance state had grown post-9-11 because that was really, from 9-11 to about 2017, that was really kind of when we were together at our apex.
And then we were out of the business for a little bit and then starting in COVID, I had this burning, I'd never stopped writing and I had this burning desire to continue telling these stories as I watched the world evolve.
And then took the time during that period to start the podcast, which was really just audio essays ruminating on the things that we had developed and the theories we developed over the years to kind of, as we said, explain how we arrived in bizarro America, the funhouse mirror version of what was originally intended.
And that was really the whole setup to it.
And people jumped on board pretty quickly and they were just like, yeah, I don't understand why.
It's like everybody woke up one day and they're like, how did, what, what, what, really?
We're here now.
Can we go back?
Is there a back?
Should we even go back?
And there seemed to be no vision for the future.
So we tried to put those two together, started the podcast, started the website, started an email newsletter, and then eventually transitioned everything over to the video environment as well.
It's been a labor of love that has also tested my soul.
That's, yeah, I know that feeling.
One of the things I appreciate about your work, A, is the, you know, you use the word essay.
I feel like Whenever I interact with your content, it's curated, it's designed.
I often feel like we put out these things so quickly that we're doing our best to share stuff with folks quickly.
But, you know, when I get to your shop, I'm like, wow, this is beautifully crafted work.
The other thing, though, that you do much more than us is we spend so much time on the religious right, Christian nationalists, the American right writ large.
You have really coherent and incisive criticisms of the Democratic Party, of the kind of center left in the United States.
Some of those critiques I think people are used to are kind of the Twitterati version, which don't feel sometimes helpful at moments.
When I interact with what you're doing, I very much think, oh, this is helpful.
This is a deep historical dive, a deep policy dive into the failings of neoliberalism or the neocons or...
And I'm wondering where that comes from.
You know, what created that in you and your cohort to kind of like be a check on some of the rightward leaning impulses of the American liberal establishment?
I think one of the reasons that we found one another in this very fractured ecosystem is because we have a similar model.
And as judgmental as the outcome of our work may seem to people, it actually comes from a place of intense curiosity.
And whereas I came up on the journalistic side, you came up through the academic channels.
Those are cousins.
It's about looking at what is and then not accepting it in its current form, but unpacking it and saying, okay, what was the road that we took to get here?
And you see the steps and the missteps and all the events along the way, and that's how we...
Started, in our opinion, started very firmly in 1954 with Brown v.
the Board of Education.
That was sort of like the tipping point where there was an establishment presence with deep pockets and a deliberate attempt to...
The really interesting part is that we started saying a couple years ago, if we see a return to Trump, the second term of Trump, in my mind, would officially mark the end of the neoliberal era.
And it would actually sort of be this incredible bookended period of exactly seven years, which you can see is like about three generations, three, three and a half generations.
And that's an epic.
That's how these things typically develop.
So we are in, in my mind, the most fascinating, interesting times.
And with the same fervor and desire that the people starting in 1954 took us off the rails, that's what we're trying to encourage people to create within themselves right now to put us back on the rails.
And it's kind of that simple, but it's also unbelievably complicated.
I could not agree more with that.
What I've been telling people is I saw the Harris campaign as one of the last attempts at a kind of neoliberalism that was based economically in everything you're talking about, in going back to the Clintons and well before them.
But then culturally and And so, hey, you know, I'm Tim Walls.
If you vote for me, everybody will mind their damn business.
And it was almost good enough to win and beat Trump, but it wasn't.
But there was that last gasp of like, hey, if you vote for us, you can be whoever you are.
You can have a mixed race family.
You can be gay.
You can be into Dungeons& Dragons.
You can be super into pickleball.
Whatever American you are, you go for it.
It's awesome.
Welcome back into our big tent.
And it's a party.
Let's dance and let's do it, right?
But there was no we.
There was no story of we.
There was no story of like, yo, if you vote for us, we're going to do this in the world together.
We're going to tell a story of saving something.
Restoring something.
Making something.
It felt to me like a, yeah, there's a big tent and you all can just be listening to earphones and whatever music you like, you all can do it alone.
And leave it to us.
Yeah.
We got it.
And we'll take care of it.
The establishment's got it.
You're right.
There's no connective tissue in that message that would bring people into the fold in a meaningful way.
And there's no building of like a story that says like what the right does as somebody who like, you know, unfortunately for him, sometimes spends most of his life like reading right wing, like the annals of right wing history.
Like Paul Weirich knew it in the 70s and 80s and 90s.
He keep telling people when you approach people, you got to give them a worldview.
You got to you got to answer the ontological existential questions of their existence.
And if you invite them into a cosmic narrative.
The kitchen table becomes the cosmos.
The kitchen table becomes the universe.
And the kitchen table translates into the government they want.
I'm talking a lot.
what I'm getting at here is you've spent a lot of time thinking about a new, a new story and a new platform that is going to bring us back to the, you know, where we were headed at one time or get us back on track as you've put it.
I mean, is that the right way to, to kind of approach what you're doing?
And even before we get there, I do want to dig back into our personal history for a minute because one of the criticisms that I took early on when I started putting the show out there consistently was that people discerned a very dismissive attitude toward organized religion in what I was putting out there.
And I would say, well, that's a different thing.
I'm interested in how organized religion helped pervert the economic and socioeconomic doctrines that you're basically living under right now without knowing to call it as such.
But I'm not interested in bringing organized religion into the fold.
And it was a huge miscalculation on my part to be dismissive of the positive elements of faith.
And one of the things that I actually learned from listening to you and Dan and also from our early conversations was, I need to actually stop dismissing this and assuming that all of the principles that were coming in from faith were somehow dismantling the socioeconomic structure that we were trying to build together cooperatively.
there is a lot to borrow from the right-headed sort of, you know, the positive-minded organization principles of faith-based, you know, institutions.
So I just, before we went on, it's something that...
Having the opportunity to actually say that to your audience, that that was one of the core influences that Swag had on me was, I think, instrumental in us helping to build a stronger profile for you on FTR and kind of just do better.
Well, that's, yeah, I think that's really, that's amazing.
And it's not often, you know, it's so hard as folks who create content every week and put things out in the world for us to admit when we feel like we've, you know, needed to change direction or recognize a blind spot because...
It's one of those moments where you'll get killed on social media or somebody will say, gotcha, you know?
And so that's amazing to hear.
I think one thing that we've gained from you all is just an unflinching look at the inequalities and injustices and misguided approaches to our economic system, the inequalities that are just pervasive there.
This is impossible, but would you give people who aren't familiar with your work like...
and that might set up where we should maybe head back to in 2025.
The, where we were headed was, was, I think the, we started to see some of it.
So when I say the seeds were planted in 1954, 1954, in my opinion, was sort of the awakening of the neoliberal front that didn't even know to call it as such.
But there was an alignment in the waiting between the Evangelical strain of the white Christian nationalist, you know, presence in the United States.
And then an economic philosophy that was born out of the, you know, really Friedrich Hayek's work in Mont Pelerin society.
And they're all sort of circling and dancing around one another, but yet to sort of land on a narrative or have a triggering event that might make their narrative sort of sound and feel right to the public.
If we think about the great strides that were made post-World War II, which is really – the war is the backdrop to what we call the Bretton Woods era.
The Bretton Woods era, starting in 1944 with the reorganization of the monetary system and the order of money in the planet, was the foundation for U.S. hegemony in the world that I think we're just now – The public is beginning to understand how key that moment was and how lucky we got on the heels of the war to be the center of global finance.
So along with global finance, and this will kind of play into the narrative of the five non-negotiables that we'll talk about, because we were able to surge positively out of the war while Europe wound up repairing itself and the Asian markets were still very much in the nascent stages of figuring out what they were going to look like, And Russia was completely obliterated, having lost 30 million men in the war.
It would be decades before they would ever catch their footing again.
So we had a clear playing field and a green field opportunity to reinvent what liberal democracy looked like under a modern liberal capitalist structure as the world's reserve currency and basically the credit institution of the world.
And along with that...
We were finally able to break from the Jim Crow era laws that we saw.
Like, even though the franchise was extended to black Americans in 1870, it needed to be recodified in 1965.
I mean, that's how long it took to break the actual institutions.
But it was because it giving, extending credit to women.
Credit was something that was reserved for white men up until the early 60s still.
And some of that actually through redlining continued through the end of the 1960s as well.
So we're talking about introducing modern economic success, the height of the labor unions, the height of progressive taxation where we had the highest progressive marginal tax rate in the country where people just – inequality wasn't a notion because rebuilding the country was actually a patriotic thing.
Even the elites wanted to do.
All of these things coalesced to create a circumstance where we all rose together.
It wasn't perfect.
It wasn't the period that we want to, quote unquote, make America great again to because we were still a work in progress.
But in terms of economic mobility and the ability for most citizens to somehow participate in the real functioning economy and society, that was the period of the greatest growth, not just for U.S. history, in the history of the world.
It was the greatest period of mobility and social mobility that the world has ever seen.
The event that the Hayek version of the Montpelier society wing that became the classical neoliberals, the white evangelical Christians, and then the billionaire libertarian class, which was really where the money and the thinking had to come from, that unholy alliance really came together during the stagflation period of the 1970s, which was a direct result of exactly ending the Bretton Woods era financial system.
So that's sort of the setup that we have.
And then they went on a, what I would consider a 70 year winning streak to dismantle all of the,
Like, my wife is from a small town in the Northeast, and if you get her mom and her sister, her aunts together, You know, they wax poetically about how their dad was a truck driver and, you know, no college degree and mom didn't work, but they owned a home, right?
And, you know, as you said, was that extended to everyone?
No.
Was this a perfect, idyllic society?
Not at all.
In the same years, my dad was being turned away from renting apartments because he was Japanese in Southern California.
So I'm not making it out to be that way, but we are referencing a period where economically...
That's just not even a thing I consider because the odds are so stacked against me, even though I work a job and a side hustle and I drive Uber, it's just not going to be a thing.
This leads us, you know, there's so much in between there.
And if people want a behemoth of a deep dive, they just need to listen and watch your content and dig in.
It brings us something, though, that you've just unveiled, which are...
And I think they're pretty amazing.
And I got a chance to dig into all of it.
And I think there's the building blocks here of a message and a story that I think feels so coherent and something that so many people can just intuitively say, oh yeah, that makes complete sense.
And if somebody were to offer me this as their platform, I could get on board pretty easily.
So you've got Housing First, a Civilian Labor Corps, Medicare for All, Election Integrity, and Climate Action.
Happy to take all five in turn, but how did these come together and why did you want to provide like building blocks for a progressive left platform in this current moment we're in?
So I think that you and I probably had a little bit of what we were talking about before and then as we, before we got on mic and then afterwards.
You and I probably had the same pit in our stomachs during the Harris campaign where we realized, like, this is not a platform.
This is not a party.
This is not actually connecting with as many people as they believe it is.
I don't really trust the polling, and I don't think this is gonna end well for us.
The accelerationist wings of the right and the left are kind of thrilled in this moment because they, for each of us, And from the ashes of that, each one of their visions will suddenly spawn because it will just make sense.
And then there's the rest of us saying, you know what?
I actually don't want this all to burn to the ground.
Can we do better?
Can we recognize the mistakes from the past and do better?
And then we looked at the Democratic Party, and we didn't see it.
We didn't see ourselves in it.
We didn't hear a comprehensive narrative.
We didn't even understand what they stood for.
And we were saying...
I took a lot of heat from our core listeners during the campaign who were quite literally saying, please shut up.
Stop criticizing the Democrats in this moment.
I was like, listen, our audience, us, our little thing here, we're not big enough to influence the outcome of the election.
What I'm trying to do is set up warning flares that, oh my goodness, they don't see.
The freight train that's coming, and the freight train is we're even going to lose the popular vote.
And the reason for that is that if you asked anybody that was not going to vote for Donald Trump, well, why are you, outside of not voting for him, voting for her, I got different answers across the board.
And so it was this idea that this is an opportunity for us to actually rebuild the framework, and a lot of us are really good at criticizing, and very few are good at saying, well, what actually do you want?
The setup for all five as a kind of a package deal is as much a story about what's in those five non-negotiables as is what's missing from that.
Because most of us have something core that drives us as an engaged citizen in this country that is actually not on this list.
And that is very deliberate.
So, for example, since day one, our organizing principles have been ultimately...
We stand for Indigenous rights.
That's just what lights my candle personally, and I always try to surface that in our narrative.
If you ask anybody else, everybody has their own thing.
And there's overlap, but everybody's got their thing that really gets them motivated.
When I look at this and I think about platforms and I look at the past and I look at success, there are two premises that you have to kind of buy into before you even look at the five.
The first is that, And I'm not saying that because I don't believe in third-party efforts.
I'm saying that they have actually, like, won the game.
They're not in the process of sidelining and foreclosing on third-party options.
It's over.
It just cannot succeed.
And if you want it to succeed, we're actually going to have to get back into office and work for the next 15 to 20 years to undo what's been done.
That's a different discussion, but it's like one of those, like, you have to buy into this before we have the next discussion.
And then the real foundational principles of the five non-negotiables is that a society that lives in economic precarity makes bad decisions.
But a society that lives in good times, a la the post-Bretton all the way through stagflation.
When there's economic mobility, safety, security, and you are not worried about the other financial shoe dropping to ruin your entire life, we give ourselves the grace to make better decisions for those around us.
It's in those moments when we are economically, financially secure that we become our brother's keeper.
And outside of that, we don't behave that way.
So those are the two kind of underlying principles that lead us into what the negotiables are.
And we can sort of talk about like the order of them because there kind of is an order to them.
Sure.
But those are, you know, that's sort of like the foundation of why we arrived at that.
Just real quick on what's not there.
You know, you mentioned indigenous rights.
So there's no pillar here of indigenous rights.
And what I think I hear you saying is that the five pillars are not trying to overlook or dismiss the...
Or black lives mattering or, you know, immigrant, there's no illegal person, you know, however, you know, whatever issue it is we want to bring to the fore that is in the current moment desperate and a true threat,
it's that the non-negotiables you've presented, I guess the way I read them, are assuming that Every human life matters, meaning indigenous rights have to be something that's always there.
The emphasis on immigration reform, racial justice and equality, it's not that these things are being left behind.
It's that they're being pulled into the kind of non-negotiable foundations of the progressive vision.
I mean, is that a fair way to capture that?
What do I need to understand there?
What am I missing?
No, I think you're hitting it on the head.
There's two parts of that that balance each other out.
One is the belief system that gets you to this place, and the other is, well, what do I want to do about it?
A lot of what the Democratic Party did is they took the what do I want to do about it piece, and they tried to kind of shoehorn it into policies that were uncomfortable for some people that didn't understand why we were doing them.
So when we talk about these movements, And, you know, the quote-unquote, you know, woke culture, DEI improvement.
There were really legitimate arguments against things, policies like affirmative action, because they didn't address root causes.
They tried to fix things after the fact.
Is affirmative action net-net a very good thing?
Yeah.
Is it enough?
Never.
So all of those things that we talk about like that are meaningful to us, indigenous rights or even Great.
That's a belief.
How do we do that?
Abolish private prisons, fund the criminal justice system, make sure that cops aren't doing social visits and mental health protection, have addiction services.
There's a million tributaries that stem from something like ending mass incarceration and having a better society.
Instead of getting lost in all of those things, the argument here is, Well, how do we create the circumstances for us to have those discussions specifically because we believe in trans rights, LGBTQ rights, indigenous rights, that Black Lives Matter, that we want a better, more functioning society for the impoverished in this country.
We believe in social safety nets.
Those are the belief systems that get us to the place to say, how do we fix the actual infrastructure of the political and economic apparatus so that we can actually put the policy tools in place thereafter?
And I feel like the Democrats have taken the middle part for granted for so long, and then, when they get the opportunity to govern again.
They try to just shove the policy prescriptions down our throats without doing the work in the middle to actually make people believe that they know how to govern.
Right?
Does that feel- Yeah.
And know how to govern and have a story to invite them into.
And I'll come back to that.
But yeah, let's talk about the five non-negotiables.
Sure.
Is housing first?
You said there's an order.
Housing first, is that number one or do you want to start somewhere else?
So housing first, I do believe there's an order.
So housing first is actually a philosophy.
Okay.
The right to shelter.
is sort of the foundation of that first principle, that first non-negotiable.
We want everybody to have a roof over their heads because that leads into that shelter and not living in economic precarity.
And that really derives from the housing first model that was developed, I think, in the late 1990s and applied with success in multiple instances, including the most successful programs in the Veterans Administration to provide housing for veterans and track their health and their mobility as they move around the country.
So when we talk about housing first, it's recognizing that housing is the way to get somebody stable so that you can administer the services that are required to help them get back into a functioning society.
Maybe that looks like a job.
Maybe it looks like even just being able to accept entitlement programs so that they can live and be in this world without...
It's a handout unless you do the math on it and realize that somebody that lives on the street has a physical cost to society but also economically.
there are costs to that that far outweigh what it would take to actually house that person.
If we want to be a moral nation, if we want to lead with morality and empathy, So it is sort of a first principle, but the first three non-negotiables do have to kind of procedurally be done in tandem.
But as a first principle, I like housing first because it sort of not only accomplishes something politically and economically, it says something about who we are, which gets back to your question of housing.
Who are we as a country?
Which means who are we as a party?
I want everybody housed.
Because when we know that they're secure, we can then do the work to get them back on their feet.
Yeah, I just couldn't agree more with this.
We've moved now, but for most of the last six years, I've lived in a downtown neighborhood in a place where there's a lot of unhoused people.
And one of the things I've...
But if I were the kind of person, and I'm rarely this kind of person,'cause I'm terrible, my wife will tell you, terrible budgets, terrible at anything financial, and you know, it's a headache for her.
If I were to think about just pure economics, I would think about the fact that
They're also just, that cost you're talking about goes down, whether it's the ways that we police, the ways that we incarcerate, the ways that we have these temporary fixes, and all of that changes economically.
So I love this idea, the idea of housing as a human right.
Makes sense to me.
You can be ruthlessly economic about the whole matter and come to the same conclusion, and that's one of the things that I love about it.
You don't have to buy into this is better for the social fabric of the nation.
You don't have to buy into that at all to just recognize the economic benefits of not having people live in economic precarity and on the streets.
I'm also, though, at this moment, I'm pretty tired of the economic arguments.
Like, we've been listening to the neocons and the libertarians tell us for years, how are you going to pay for it?
And it's like, y 'all are going to do trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the highest 0.1% of this society.
We're never listening to that again.
You don't ever get to tell me how are we going to pay for it.
Ever, ever, when we talk about You don't ever get to tell me what a waste.
Because you just gave money to the richest 800 people in this country so they could buy more islands and yachts and caviar while the rest of folks are struggling with how to recover from a hurricane in St. Louis.
So you don't ever get to tell me.
Ever again, how are we going to pay for housing?
Like, never.
I don't want to be critical, but I think you're just not patient enough because those are the job creators, Brad.
They are the ones that will lift us all up if we just get off their backs.
You're right.
Just let them cook and they'll take care of us.
Yeah.
Every time I see Howard Lutnick on TV, I'm like, that guy cares about me and other people getting jobs.
Oh, man.
And you know what?
I got to tell you, as a New Yorker, like watching Trump and Cuomo and Lutnik and all of So the worst New Yorkers have the highest profile right now, and it's driving me crazy because it's like, how did we let these guys get out of here?
And how is everybody looking at us being like, stop sending us your exports?
It's the worst.
At least the Knicks are good.
Okay.
So number two is Civilian Labor Corps.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
So this one is like my favorite one.
And I think it's the one that's going to sort of take the most for people to like get their head around.
Agreed.
But I love every bit of this.
So take us through it.
Civilian Labor Corps.
So there are a couple of pressures on us right now as a society.
The first of which is the AI revolution.
How much of it is real, how much of it is not.
But in a lot of cases, perception is reality.
And some of the closest estimates coming out from the people that follow us closely is that globally, about 300 million jobs could potentially be displaced.
In the United States, about 30 million jobs can be displaced by AI.
In my day job, I see it.
And those are like, those aren't like, Nobody's there to check my groceries out anymore.
We're talking about, like, people in healthcare who make really good money being replaced.
I mean, am I right about that?
You are 100% right.
The professional managerial class, the PMCs that everybody loves to hate, aren't necessarily going to be around for that long.
Even more so, the people who are in the middle of the service economy.
An economist in the 90s named Giovanni Origi came up with a formula for the end of hegemonic empires and what it looks like in the multiple phases.
The manufacturing phase in the beginning of their growth cycle, the service phase right in the middle where they sort of export those jobs and they get into a service economy, and then the final phase, which he calls the financialization phase.
The United States has been in the financialization phase of the economy.
Since just after, since I would say the last underpinnings of deregulation during the Clinton administration.
And so we're coming towards the end of what would normally be considered a cycle if you map us against historical corollaries.
In that moment, what happens is that there is an even bigger sucking in the middle of the jobs that are required to sort of prop the whole thing up.
We're seeing it in real time.
So graduates don't have jobs to the extent that they did coming out of school today.
Versus five years ago.
Forget about historically.
I'm talking five years ago.
In the middle of the economy, this idea of retraining has always been a fallacy.
But what economists have been right about in the capitalist society is what Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction.
The idea that through history, when capitalism creates a disruptive event, it takes about two full generations to completely not retrain.
Which is a fallacy, but turn over the type of economy that we have so that new people coming into it are doing entirely different things than their predecessors did 20, 30 years ago.
AI will not afford us that luxury.
AI is not a creative destruction.
It's creative implosion.
And so we are going to see jobs coming out of the middle.
The other thing to know, though, about the job market specifically, and this is where we have to really look at hard data, If you look at the employment figures, there's prime-aged employment.
There's employment writ large of all of the people that are above 18 basically till death.
That's how they measure these figures.
62% of our population is considered employed in some sort of full-time endeavor.
Not the gig economy, not part-time, not precarious part-time holiday employment all the time.
83% of the population, however, of the prime-age labor population is participating with a full-time job.
That's between the ages of 25 and 54. That's how the Fed, for example, looks at economic policy.
Are those people working?
Then we're fine.
Those numbers are beginning to deteriorate.
As the boomers age out, the number of participation figures in the actual workforce could even decline below 60%, could go into the 50s.
If you have fully one half of this population not in the labor corps, that is crisis level that we have never actually seen in all of history.
So we have to be prepared for this fundamental reality.
But I have to pin the civilian labor corps to the third non-negotiable because they do go hand in hand.
and that's Medicare for all.
And the last thing I'll say on this before we kind of break is, Medicare has about a 2% administrative cost, whereas private insurance has about a 13% administrative cost.
And if you get into the pharmaceutical sector, you realize that
If we collapse all of those, we are going to literally put millions of people out of work for the greater good and benefit of the society, but it's also going to free up about $600 to $800 billion annually of spending that goes into administering healthcare in this country.
for worse outcomes and, you know, basically to make bloated middlemen rich.
What are we going to do with those workers?
We cannot just pull the rug out from under them.
So the idea of a civilian labor corps is just to recognize that there are, there's a freight train coming with AI and the aging of the boomer class.
And then there's the piece that we're actually going to do.
Which is Medicare for All.
And we're going to actually forcefully, at the same time, put a lot of people out of jobs.
If the government doesn't then somehow step in with a Tennessee Valley Authority-like solution in each pocket and region of this country to put people to work in non-inflationary, meaningful job guarantees, then we're just going to leave people out in the cold.
So this all has to be done in a comprehensive suite of policy tools.
That take care of our people, to give them shelter, to give them health care, to give them meaningful work so they're not living in economic precarity.
And then and only then can we begin to look to solve the things that really ail us in the culture and in society as we build towards the future.
In the Civilian Labor Corps, the jobs that you envision people doing, the meaningful work that people would be doing under this New Deal-like set of policies.
Would be in many cases to combat climate apocalypse and climate change.
And that's the fifth non-negotiable, which is climate action.
So there seems to be a pin in the Civilian Labor Corps, not only to Medicare for All, but also to climate action.
Is that the right connection to make?
Without a doubt.
Without a doubt.
And again, when I say non-inflationary, the real danger to any sort of economy is inflation.
That's the one thing that...
Even a sovereign currency issuing reserve currency country like ours, inflation is the one thing that can break us.
So the fear is always the classical theory of wage price spiral, which is, okay, well, if suddenly everybody's employed, then that's going to cause inflation because demand's going to go through the roof.
That's not historically accurate.
It's just a very convenient talking point of the right wing because they're relying on some very anachronistic, you know, type of models.
But it is enough to a degree that if, for example, if you work in defense contract, if you're a defense contractor, you don't contribute to inflation because that's not consumer related.
Nobody's actually taking the money that comes out of your job.
If you, all of a sudden, if we just sent everybody to work at Kellogg's.
Okay, you have to go work at this consumer or you have to work at Pfizer or you have to work at whatever.
Those consumable, durable and non-durable goods, all of a sudden that will add to the cost structure and will create inflation.
When we talk about climate resiliency, when we talk about sucking people out of the private insurance industry but maybe hiring them into the government to be claims adjudicators and administrators because they have some expertise at it, when we move all these people around the functioning economy.
They're going into places that are technically non-inflationary, but have a positive benefit to society so that we can all live.
So more park rangers, more people doing climate resiliency projects, more people working on housing initiatives, more people working on administering health care, but from a government's perspective, when we move these people around with an actual plan, it should not create an inflationary environment, but it will put people in a place where they can actually feed their families.
You could see them in housing.
You could see them as housing.
And you could see them in food sustainability.
You could see them in, right?
Well, that's another thing when we talk about climate action and climate justice is one of the things, one of the backs that we're going to have to break, unfortunately, for the people that are in that business is the protein production industry within this country.
And that also implies that we're going to have to have greater biodiversity, less monoculture, which means we need more farmers again.
And that doesn't have to be like, oh, we're going back to the 1700s.
We need more farmers with modern equipment, but also serving their regions instead of growing something in Indiana and then shipping it off to Guam.
That doesn't make any sense anymore.
That's an unsustainable way to think about agriculture and food production.
And the protein industry is the biggest contributor to climate change, but they're also the ones that are taking away biodiversity and actually limiting the foods that we're able to consume in a re from a regional perspective.
So again, you're 52. Reverse engineer what you want the world to look like.
You know, when you're my age, how do you want things to be?
Do you think things are great now?
What do you want it to be?
And then work yourself backwards and say, well, how would I get there?
And you're going to come up with some very logical answers that look a lot like we're talking about right now.
Yeah.
The fifth one is election integrity.
I think this one is the most intuitive to people.
You know, you've got to get the money out of politics.
You've got to get the dark money, the Citizens United money, the Elon Musk money out.
And if you look at our peers across the world, this is something that's already in place.
The limits on spending in places like Germany or the UK, there's already...
Places that do this fairly well, and I don't think most of us need convincing that Elon Musk being able to give $250 million, which is, you know, something like the akin of $44 to most of us, to buy a presidency, it just doesn't make sense and it's not fair.
Whether that's the president or whether that is somebody spending a million on a state legislature seat in order to primary somebody in Texas or a county supervisor, $50,000 payout in Ohio, whatever.
Let's just get the money out of the elections, right?
You know, and also, again, you come at things from more of an ecumenical perspective.
Is that the right way to say it?
That's nice of you to say.
It's nice of you to say.
We should, as just good people of any faith, I feel so bad for him because he's such a good person.
He has such good intentions.
Hey, Elon, if you hear this, we're rooting for you, pal.
And I hope your stock rebounds because you've lost tens of billions in value.
Yeah, it's tough.
We lost Jimmy Carter and now Elon's having a hard time.
Yeah, Jimmy Carter, no.
No one mistake what I'm saying.
Jimmy Carter, you know, not everyone's favorite president, but a very humane and moral guy and somebody who spent a lifetime trying to do good.
So, Elon Musk is the opposite of that.
I was making a joke.
Please don't email me.
Okay, so here we go.
I've got to let you go, and I don't want to, like, take up your whole day, because I'm not kidding.
I could stay here for two hours and talk to you about this.
I just want to throw one or two more things at you if you have time, and then I'll let you go do better things.
But you have developed something that I think the more you dig into it, the more it is a holistic system.
That the civilian labor corps is really designed to be something that says we can't create an economy that's out of control inflationary, but we can also put people into places where they're...
The other thing, though, and this is going to sound weird and you may hate this.
And if you hate it, that's fine.
As somebody who has spent so much time studying the way the right wing movements win elections in this country.
I have come to a conclusion and some people are going to just be really upset right now.
I think you have to have a big bad other.
In order to motivate people, I think you have to get people to see something that they are fighting.
And then you have to invite them in a story that says, if you come with us, we're going to be the ones who are the good guys in this narrative.
And renew.
Now, that can go so demonically, diabolically terrible.
Make America Great Again and everything related, because that turns racist, it turns xenophobic, it turns populist in a manner that is district.
I don't want to go that route.
But as a real do, is say, not only this is the story we're inviting you into, but this is the epic battle we're going to fight.
I come from the conservative Christian world, and when you go say to that 36-year-old insurance salesman or guy who's working at Costco and doesn't feel like he's got enough to feed his family, but he just doesn't feel like his life's very exciting, and you say to him, you want to get in here in an epic battle against the demons and perverts who are trying to destroy our civilization?
What do you say, Harold?
You want to come in with us?
Let's go save the world by being real alpha men for Christ.
And Harold is like, I'm down.
I'm down, bro.
Let's go.
Okay?
And you see that all over this country with young men.
Here's my point.
I see two big bad others in the five non-negotiables.
One is AI.
One is climate disaster.
And the people that are behind them are the ones that would deny climate disaster is real and don't care about St. Louis because who cares about St. Louis?
That's what the president seems to think.
St. Louis just had a terrible tornado, etc.
And then AI is something that I think increasingly, you give it two years and I think people are going to be like, mad.
Like, yo, I had a career where I made $220,000 a year as like a pulmonologist and AI now does my job.
I had a career as somebody who made $80 an hour doing this, right?
And now that's gone.
Like, 0.01% of the people benefit from AI in terms of finances.
The rest of us are just getting taken over.
I need a story that's like a human new deal.
Like, I see what you've got here is like not a green new deal.
The green new deal is built into this.
This is a human new deal.
Like, our climate...
I don't care if you're Napa Valley.
I don't care if you're the Rio Grande Valley.
I don't care if you're New York City.
I don't care if you're Asheville, North Carolina.
Climate disaster is coming.
And it's already come.
It's already come.
Asheville, you didn't think you were in the hurricane alley, and you are somehow.
Florida?
What's going to happen next hurricane season?
We don't know yet.
California wildfires, I've lived through them like three times.
If you want to invite me into a story, give me a human new deal that's like, we're going to do everything we can to make a society where your kids cannot be flooded, not be on fire, not be destroyed, and the AI bots.
If you all want to get in here with the Jedi Star Wars story, we're going to fight the bots and we're going to build a human society.
I'm on a roll.
You've got to stop me.
But this is what got me pretty excited about spreading the word here.
I think the thing that drove me the most bananas during the Harris campaign was that You can find all the info in the show notes or go to axismundi.us, axismundi.us.
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I am so grateful for this conversation.
I'm so grateful to As always, we'll be back Wednesday with It's in the Code, Friday with the Weekly Roundup.
Thank you for all of your support.
Thank you for making this show happen.
I love it.
You guys are killing it.
Everything you're doing is just so tight right now, man.
It's great.
The thing is, Dan Miller, he wears cargo shorts.
He's a dad's dad.
He's uniquely talented at decoding the Christian right.
