I’ve long appreciated the work of historian Keri Leigh Merritt. She joined me recently to discuss her latest book, An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America. To quote the book publisher, Smith was “a hugely popular, bestselling author in the mid-20th century, but today her name and legacy have been mostly forgotten.” The book offers a powerful new perspective on today’s civil rights struggles, as well as yesterday’s. That makes sense, since at its root it has been the same ongoing struggle for social justice since this country was born.

Smith’s novel Strange Fruit was a 1944 bestseller about an interracial romance. In addition to writing several books, Smith also wrote several pamphlets about racism that were largely directed toward fellow Whites. Smith herself was a white Southerner in a long-term lesbian relationship who co-published a Southern literary magazine with her partner. That magazine broke new ground by publishing the works of both Black and White authors.

Smith was also a longtime civil rights activist, working closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. The book’s introduction was written by Rev. William J. Barber II. “We live in a moment when the demons of America’s darkest past threaten to choke the life out of our experiment in multiethnic democracy,” writed Rev. Barber. “When racist authoritarians controlled both the tools of government and the engines of public life,” he continues, “there was a white woman in Georgia who could see that she had an interest in challenging that abuse of power. When she dared to speak out, she learned she was not alone.”

I was fortunate to discuss some of the many issues raised by the book with Keri Leigh, including: the relationship between Lillian Smith’s then-stigmatized private life and her empathy for the dispossessed and “Other”; the ways in which racism wounds and deforms the oppressor, making its erasure a necessary healing for everyone; the limits of zero-sum, self-flagellating “allyship” and the power of collective healing; and some lessons to be learned about rural America from Smith’s peaceful life in small-town Georgia.

In keeping with my usual practice, below are some selected quotes followed by a lightly-edited transcript.

(photo of Keri Leigh Merritt in video above by Sarah Witherington)

Selected Quotes

Keri Leigh:

• “Smith called white supremacy a psychosis.”

• “[She said] white supremacy is the reason why there were no great (white) artists in the South.”

• “Who are you at your core? That’s something that a lot of us are afraid to touch.”

• “We’ve had so many books… telling white Americans what not to do… But everybody needs heroes and heroines.”

• “Not all of change in America or anywhere is political.”

• “If you make somebody a meal who’s in mourning… that’s what ends up making the world whole.”

Richard:

• “It’s a ministry to the soul of the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”

• “It is warping you, it is mutating you, it is making you the misshapen fruit on the tree.”

• “There’s a woundedness in this Southern white soul.”

• “It’s a matter of redeeming and reclaiming yourself and becoming more fully human.”

• “Empathy is addictive.”

Transcript

Richard Eskow: Joining me now is a historian and writer I very much admire. Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian. She’s the author or editor of a couple of books, and she has a new book entitled An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America. The book went on sale at the end of September, and it is an excellent read.

Keri Leigh Merritt, welcome back to the program.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Thank you so much. I feel like I’m back with a good old friend. So thank you.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been years, but friendship isn’t measured by wall time.

So let’s start with this. Lillian Smith is likely a figure that people’s parents or grandparents—whoever was around in the mid-20th century, especially if they were involved with literature, books, politics, and so on—might have heard of, but she’s not well known today. Who was Lillian Smith?

Keri Leigh Merritt: I always describe her as probably the bestselling author and civil rights activist who should be known but whom you’ve probably never heard of. She was a white Southerner, born in Jasper, Florida, in 1897, and she spent most of her life in Clayton, Georgia, a tiny town in the northeast corner of Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains.

She was just a dynamo. In 1944, her bestselling novel Strange Fruit was published. That had all sorts of issues around it that we can get into, but she worked her entire life fighting for civil rights and pushing even liberal Southerners and liberal Americans farther to the left on integration and civil rights for Black Americans.

Richard Eskow: One of the interesting things about her to me, and one of my takeaways from your book, Keri Leigh, is this. I tend to think there are people who are progressive, for lack of a better word—who have good values and are fighting for social justice, what have you—but within certain social parameters. And then there are others who have a vision of society as it should be, and they’re uncompromising in that. In pursuit of it, whether through writing, advocacy, or anything else, they will cross barriers and red lines—social, political, and otherwise—that other people won’t.

The sense I got was that Lillian Smith was very much one of those people. She went where she felt she needed to go, and it didn’t matter who wanted to go with her or who wanted to stop her. Is that a fair read?

Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. And honestly, that’s what drew me to her. She’s a rebel, but she doesn’t suffer fools. She doesn’t take anything from anyone. She’s very hardcore in her beliefs, and I really admire that about her. She was totally uncompromising on questions of racial equality, gender equality, and all sorts of major social issues we’re still dealing with today.

She and her life partner, Paula, ran a magazine for years that taught white Southerners how to act properly, be good citizens, and learn to appreciate integration. They also ran a summer camp for girls called Laurel Falls, where they had girls coming from the most racist families throughout the South. They taught them about all of these moral issues, and even had local Black children come over and spend time with them, so there was integration even in the camp.

Richard Eskow: Since you mentioned Paula Snelling, we might jump right into that dimension of her life, because it seems to me to have shaped her approach to other issues as well. She was in a committed lesbian relationship at a time when that was pretty much unthinkable. The phrase of the era was “the love that dare not speak its name,” right?

People just wouldn’t even talk about it, and that was still the case 20 or 30 years later. So here she was in what would then have been considered a highly forbidden relationship. And her bestselling novel, the one that caused a great deal of controversy but really made her name in 1944, was Strange Fruit.

It’s about an interracial romance—another taboo idea in 1944, and surprisingly so even much more recently in American history. First, I wondered to what extent the interracial romance in Strange Fruit might have drawn an image or an emotional tone from her own experience in a lesbian relationship. Second, and more broadly, I wondered whether her role as what other writers of the time might have called a “sexual outlaw” somehow opened her sensibility to greater empathy, compassion, and understanding for other social outcasts of the time. Does that make sense as a question?

Keri Leigh Merritt: You know what? I’ve done so many interviews, and you’re the first person to put it that way. You put it so beautifully, and I think it’s 100% right. I think it’s part of the reason she’s left out of history today. But her sexuality definitely had a major impact on how she viewed the rights of all people.

Right after college, she actually went to teach at a Methodist girls’ school in China and spent three years there. Her first book—one publishers wouldn’t touch, which she couldn’t sell to anybody, prior to Strange Fruit—was actually about lesbian relationships between a group of white teachers and Chinese female students.

I think that was largely based on her experiences there. Unfortunately, the manuscript was ruined in one of the fires she had at her house, one of which, of course, was arson. But she wrote about these sexual themes throughout her work. And the interracial relationship in Strange Fruit is really why it ended up being banned not only in Boston and Detroit, but even in the U.S. mail. She had to reach out to her very good friend Eleanor Roosevelt and ask the president to step in and get the ban lifted.

Richard Eskow: I have to say, when I read the part about Eleanor Roosevelt and her role, it reminded me how much my mother loved Eleanor Roosevelt. My mother was one of the many Americans, especially American women of her generation, who idolized Eleanor much more than her husband. I think Eleanor, too, was ahead of the social curve in her views—remarkably so.

But that may be a slight digression. As for Strange Fruit, the novel that made Lillian Smith’s name, it originally had another title, which you write about. I don’t recall it, but it was changed to the title of a song that, as I understand it, was already popular at the time: the Billie Holiday recording “Strange Fruit,” which is about lynching and the strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

But her book is not about lynching. So what do you think drew her to that title in the end?

Keri Leigh Merritt: She had written about the concept of strange fruit in the magazine she and Paula Snelling ran for so many years, prior to the Billie Holiday song. She conceptualized “strange fruit” as basically white people—what racism and hatred do to white people psychologically, from a psychoanalytic standpoint.

She was big into Freudianism and studied psychoanalysis her entire life, so she wanted the title to concentrate on what racism did to white people. Of course, when her publisher pushed her to adopt the title Strange Fruit, which she didn’t really want to do, he tried to tie it closely to the song. He even introduced her to Billie Holiday, in this kind of famous scene. Billie Holiday later claimed the book was based on the song, but Lillian said, “No, that’s not true. And when I met her, she was honestly so high she didn’t even know what was going on.”

But this was a theme she had been writing about for years, and I think it really needs to be brought back today. We don’t talk about it enough in terms of racism and how it injures white people in many different ways, but especially from a—

Richard Eskow: Well, I’m really glad we opened the door to the psychological aspect, because that was another striking side of Lillian Smith’s work that came out for me in your biography, An Inconvenient Woman. Like a lot of truly transformative, radical political figures, she didn’t think about politics in isolation.

She didn’t even think about civil rights in isolation. And, as you just said, she didn’t think about social justice purely in terms of the people being oppressed by the system. She was one of those figures. I would say Martin Luther King was another, Malcolm X was another, and there are many others we could draw on from history.

I know she was not a religious person, or that was my impression. But my takeaway from your book was that she was, in a sense, ministering to the whole person—particularly when she was addressing white people. Not just saying, you should do this because you’re doing wrong to others, although that’s a deep part of it, and you should stop because it is wrong. But also: it is warping you, it is mutating you, it is making you the misshapen fruit on the tree.

In that sense, it almost seems like a clerical, clergy function. Do you get what I’m trying to say? It’s almost a ministry to the soul of the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic way to put it. Her third book of the seven she published, The Journey, concentrates a lot on her battle with breast cancer, but it’s incredibly spiritual. She calls white supremacy a psychosis, and says white supremacy is the reason there are no great artists in the South—that the South had no great white artists. That it represses people to such an extent that they can’t even create art. So she argues that the next major hurdle white Americans need to tackle is how to live within themselves—how to find new images of themselves, how to create an image of what they are that’s distinct and apart from whiteness and white supremacy.

And to your larger point about her not being particularly religious, I think it’s really important to note that her father, Calvin, was extremely religious—Methodist, but in the good Christian sort of way, not the Christian nationalist way we know now. Her sixth book is called Memory of a Large Christmas, and in it, Calvin Smith invites the entire chain gang—not just the officers, but the entire chain gang, both Black and white—to Christmas dinner with the Smiths.

This is in the late 1910s. So they’re literally having dinner with Black and white prisoners, some of whom are rapists and murderers. And he teaches his children that anybody can mess up; anybody can make mistakes in life. We all do. But you have to have kindness and goodness and treat people as you would want to be treated.

Richard Eskow: That’s fascinating. It makes me think of the Reverend Claude Williams. There’s a great story about him: when everyone was afraid to hold interracial prayer meetings, he threw his curtains open in Alabama and said, “Let them see how the true followers of the Son of Man behave.” It’s a courageous thing to do.

And I’m struck by her comment about there being no great Southern artists, because my initial reaction was, well, there are great Southern writers—but they all seem to write the poetry of great damage. Whether you’re talking about Faulkner or, later, Walker Percy, someone like that. There’s a woundedness in the Southern white soul, and I guess that’s what she was speaking to.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. She did not like Margaret Mitchell. She thought Margaret Mitchell got the history of the South completely wrong. She didn’t really like Faulkner. She did, however, like some of the white women writers, like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, who, to your point, write about exactly that. And in Lillian’s two novels, when she writes these white men who are struggling with their own racial identities, she makes them physically crippled, handicapped, or sick to represent their emotional handicap.

Richard Eskow: That’s fascinating. So take us through Lillian Smith’s biography a little. She’s born to a well-to-do family in Florida. The family has a financial setback—maybe not as severe as others, but enough that they move to their summer place. They start this camp, which she eventually takes over.

But she is also a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, and her nonfiction books are pretty bold for the time. They’re basically telling white America, “You’re doing this all wrong.” So how did she come to be the public figure she was for a long time—knowing Eleanor Roosevelt and, as you write, Dr. Martin Luther King, both of them advocates for her work? How did that life arc bring her there? We sometimes think of writers, especially Southern writers, as cloistered in their little towns, introspecting all day. But she had a very public life. How did that come about?

Keri Leigh Merritt: Well, she became kind of famous within Georgia and the South just by running her camp, because of how progressive it was. People knew who she was. Then she and Paula started what they called their “little magazine,” which ended up being one of the most famous magazines in the South. They were the first white people in the South to publish Black writers.

The magazine ran for well over 10 years and went through several names. It was mainly known as The South Today. Some of the articles she wrote there—again, about white supremacy and how to combat it, not only in other people but within ourselves—sold hundreds of thousands of copies as pamphlets across America.

So she became known as a writer through the magazine work. But she was also deeply involved in a number of grassroots social clubs and organizations, where she got to know many, many liberals and progressives throughout the South, both Black and white. And she maintained a huge correspondence with some of the best Black intellectuals, activists, and artists of the day, from W.E.B. Du Bois, who was one of the first people they published in the magazine, to Pauli Murray. They were the first to publish Pauli Murray, the first to give her a paycheck, and they even helped her get a Rosenwald Fellowship so she could stay at Howard Law School and become the amazing lawyer she became.

So it was this personal cultivation of relationships, in a way that many of us can’t fathom today.

Richard Eskow: And in a sense, perhaps it was a smaller universe of people. Speaking of small universes, one of the things that struck me about her story is that we think of somebody that radical, in the context of her time, as being a social pariah. But she lived in this little mountain town, and I think people liked her.

Did people just not know what she was up to? Or did they say, “Well, that’s Lillian,” and go about their day? It seems to me she had a pretty nice community there. Am I wrong?

Keri Leigh Merritt: No, you’re absolutely right. And it’s something that those of us who grew up in cities need to reconsider—our preconceived notions about what’s going on in rural America. Because she and Paula lived, I argue, relatively openly. And on Old Screamer Mountain, where they lived, there was a community of gay and lesbian couples who all supported each other.

When Lillian started going bankrupt from paying for her breast cancer treatment in New York, another lesbian couple, Lou and Ulmer, stepped in, helped her pay her bills, and gave her a big loan. The other people of Clayton knew what was going on. They certainly knew there were Black people arriving at the Clayton train station and being taxied up to Old Screamer Mountain, and they just let her live her life.

As long as she wasn’t bothering them, they didn’t care. And she would always hold interracial lunches, ice cream socials, barbecues, and things like that at her house, so they were attendees as well.

Richard Eskow: That fascinates me, frankly, perhaps more than it should. Any time spent in a small town, and any study of rural history—which you know far better than I do—teaches us what city dwellers should have figured out long ago but sometimes don’t. When you’re living that way, you see all of human expression, human experience, and human behavior, probably more so than in a city with its social classes, stratifications, and separate neighborhoods.

People have been around. They know that sometimes women like other women, men like other men, whatever. People have ideas that are unconventional. My theory is that it’s only when external stress is applied that these become fracture points. Otherwise, I think it’s often a matter of live and let live.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Right. She provided jobs. She held social events for them, so they loved her for that, and they could easily turn a blind eye, or use euphemisms, or whatever way they could find to deal with her lesbianism and even some of her more progressive social stances.

Richard Eskow: In addition to her social views and her lesbianism, she was also struggling with health problems and disability for many years of her life—the last 15, maybe. That’s potentially instructive, because she seems to have stayed very productive during that period, working around it. If I recall correctly, there’s one anecdote about her writing a speech but not being able to give it, so someone else gave it. But to the extent she could, she kept working, even with an ultimately fatal illness in breast cancer. I wonder if you had any takeaways about that.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Yes, for sure. Her 13-year struggle with breast cancer really shows how little progress we’ve made in our healthcare system, because it almost bankrupted her. That’s something so many Americans can relate to today. But she and Paula had several Rosenwald fellowships early in the 1930s, and for one of them they traveled around the South, interviewed tons of people with disabilities, and compiled all of this research.

A lot of it, again, got ruined in the fires. But if they had actually published it, it would have been the first study on disability in America. They also traveled to India, met Helen Keller while there, and worked with lots of people with disabilities. I think she just felt such an affinity, especially once she was diagnosed with cancer.

She literally had a number of her arm muscles taken out, in her right arm, which she wrote with. So it was really debilitating for her. And in the last few years of her life, she was on so many experimental drugs and so many steroids that it was making her paranoid and keeping her from thinking clearly.

Those last few years were hard for me to deal with as a biographer and historian, because you don’t really know what she would have been thinking if she hadn’t been on all these drugs. She can’t really keep up with the movement. She’s part of SNCC and loves many of its members. But when people like Stokely Carmichael come in and start advocating Black Power and moving away from nonviolence, she can’t evolve with the movement in that way. So it’s hard to know: Is that really her? Is that the medicine talking? Is it the paranoia? It does make it a little difficult.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. And of course, those last few years of her life were when the movement really rocketed forward. She died in 1966, so she was declining through Birmingham, the March on Washington, Selma, and everything else. It’s hard to avoid those what-ifs, isn’t it?

And I guess she was probably not yet 70 when she died—probably 69 or 70. So she could have had a few more good years in her to really be part of the conversation. Which brings me to my next question for you, Keri Leigh Merritt. So many figures from that time are still remembered and honored today—Black and white, though obviously the Black figures were the leaders of the movement. I don’t want to say she was forgotten, because there have always been people who remember her. But why do you think she slipped into relative obscurity?

Keri Leigh Merritt: Again, I think part of it is her sexuality. Part of it is that she’s a woman. But I think the other part is that what she was talking about is so relevant, and still raises so many questions that modern Americans have not been able to answer or grapple with. I think this is the missing piece.

We’ve had so many great books in the last 10, 15, 20 years telling white Americans what not to do, how not to be racist. But everybody needs heroes and heroines—people to look up to and examples of what to do. And she’s really talking about self-reflection and self-examination, and figuring out your identity apart from being a white person in America with all the privilege and power that brings. Who are you at your core? That’s something a lot of us are afraid to touch. We’re afraid to actually go down that kind of spiritual pathway.

Richard Eskow: I think that’s a great point, and I’m really glad you brought it up. It gets to one of the notes I had for you about the book, which was this whole concept that’s now framed as allyship—what it means to be an ally. And of course it’s important to be an ally.

But this is where I think her perspective, and the perspective of thinkers like you, is so important. If you’re a white American, this is not just a matter of what you do for others. It’s a matter of redeeming and reclaiming yourself and becoming more fully human. The whole notion of allyship seems kind of zero-sum to me—I guess that’s the way I’d put it.

“Oh, I have to give up something to be nice to these people my community has been bad to for all these centuries”—as opposed to, “No, I have something to gain. I have ways I can grow and improve and be a happier, more fulfilled human being if I explore the things in me that reflect what I and those before me have done, and that have warped me on the vine.” I think that is a lesson. But I don’t know why it got lost, unless it’s just too subversive for some people.

Keri Leigh Merritt: I think it really is. I think it’s completely subversive. It takes years and years of self-reflection and study to get to that point. And I will say that’s part of the reason I asked Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign to write the foreword for this book. I can’t believe he did it.

It was like the best day of my life when he agreed. I wanted that spiritual aspect, but something that wasn’t so myopically Christian—something that was—

Richard Eskow: Right.

Keri Leigh Merritt: —broader. We’re all humans, we’re all here together, and we all benefit from this kind of evolution in thinking. Her later books really grappled with this. She got into Jungianism and all sorts of philosophy and tried to weave it together. I don’t think she was always totally successful in writing it, but the ideas were there, and they’re ideas I think we all need to pick back up now.

Richard Eskow: I love that. I was definitely going to mention Dr. Barber’s foreword. I was so happy he did it, because I’ve always found him to be one of those leaders who is redemptive in his approach, if we’re going to use Christian terminology. As opposed to—I have to say—Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which is more like, you’re born into sin and you must flagellate yourself. As opposed to this vision of growing together that someone like Dr. Barber or Dr. King or so many others offered—and, at the end of his life, Malcolm X too, I would argue.

Lillian Smith definitely offered that too. It’s a move from allyship to growth and collaboration in the human community, I guess you’d say. So with that, I guess our last topic—and I think we’ve largely addressed it already—is: When people read this book, what do you hope they get out of it?

It’s now almost 2027. Lillian has been gone for a while, but she had insights very much worth bringing back. What can this book do for the people who read it? Who would you hope would read it? What’s your aspiration here?

Keri Leigh Merritt: Well, I hope everybody reads it, but specifically white people—specifically people who are looking for something more in life, who don’t feel they’re where they need to be, who don’t feel spiritually whole or fulfilled. And aside from what we’ve already talked about, one thing she was a big proponent of, and that we can all focus on, is that not all change, in America or anywhere, is political.

We don’t have to be so focused on the political, because I think that can be overwhelming to most people. It can seem insurmountable, especially today. But she really saw change through art. She saw that art—whatever form it takes, whether music, fine arts, writing—could actually change and heal society in a very real way.

She used her art to do that herself. But it’s about reminding people that you don’t have to be a big name. You don’t have to have a lot of money. You just start where you are. If you can make somebody’s day better in your community or your family, just start there.

If you make a meal for somebody who’s in mourning, if you can just have a conversation and rekindle that human spirituality between people—that’s what ends up making the world whole. It doesn’t have to be political.

Richard Eskow: Empathy is addictive.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely.

Richard Eskow: Right. So again, I highly recommend the book An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America. The author, Keri Leigh Merritt, has been my guest. Keri Leigh, thanks for writing this wonderful book, and as always, thanks for coming on the program.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Thank you for the terrific interview. Thank you.

Richard Eskow: We depend on your support here at The Zero Hour, so please give whatever you can at any of the links you see on your screen. Thanks so much.

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I wrote a long piece on a recent online debate over whether art or politics is more important. But then it occurred to me that there’s a simpler answer, because there’s a simpler question: Which is more important when? It’s like asking whether art or carpentry is more important. Art may take on great importance during a long sailing voyage. Painting, music, and dance are all excellent ways to pass the time and elevate the soul during those long days and nights at sea.

But what happens when the boat springs a leak? Without a good carpenter, everyone on the ship will die. And their art, beautiful as it may be, will die with them.

Politics is social carpentry. It holds the ship of human community together. That ship is like any other; if it fails, people will die.

The children of Gaza are still dying. The children of Yemen and Lebanon are dying. Children are dying everywhere, in fact: of war, of poverty, of disease. And with each lost child, a universe of potential art dies with them. Who, what, can even begin to measure that? If you love art, you must do politics.

Here’s the original commentary.

Two rock stars have been caught up in an argument that’s been heating up social media feeds—mine, anyway—for the last several days. One is former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, whose songs—“Comfortably Numb,” “Another Brick in the Wall,” and “Money”—are known to millions. The other is Metallica’s James Hetfield, whose credits include “Enter Sandman.”

The question has been framed as, “Which is more important: art, or politics?” At least, that’s how Matt Taibbi framed it in a recent column. My take? You lose the argument the minute you decide to join in it. And yet, I’m glad it happened.

Before we get to my (humbly offered) conclusions and my final verdict on the subject, it’s rock and roll time.

Star Star

It all began when Hetfield (see my note on names, below) opened a gig in Las Vegas by saying:

“... I just gotta say: Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit. We are here to forget about all the outside shit. Metallica’s agenda is love, energy, and heavy music, baby!”

Podcaster Katie Halper called Hetfield “a loser and a coward.” She then invited Roger (see my note on names below) onto her program, where he said:

“‘I’m apolitical’ is not an option. Nobody can step away from this. You are being killed. Gaza is just the first bit. They’ll get to you. Don’t you worry. They’ll either enslave you or murder you. Because that’s their ethos. This goes back, you know, 500 years, to the beginning of European white settler colonialism.”

Roger also said:

“Being kind is way more important than all that loud music and bouncing around and whatever. Being kind, having some empathy for your fellow human beings because that if we need that to spread through the across the whole world ...”

That would seem to be the heart of the disagreement. Roger Waters, whose many songs are known to millions, is making the case for empathy while James Hetfield, who wrote “Enter Sandman,” is arguing that art—a term that includes all forms of music—has a right to be apolitical.

Raising a Racket

It would seem to be the heart of the disagreement—but it isn’t, despite what Matt Taibbi says. Matt takes nearly two thousand words to make his case in Racket News (not that I’m one to talk about length) but I would summarize it as follows: The idea that art must serve politics is oppressive in a Stalinist way. By attempting to link art and politics, Waters and his supporters are following in the footsteps (according to Matt) of Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, or of John Lennon when he was writing diss tracks about Paul McCartney.

Chekhov, Auden, Yeats, Pushkin, Wilde, MacLeish, Baudelaire, Blake, Moe Howard, Louis Armstrong, Weird Al, Swift, Molière, Dostoyevsky, even Nikki Sixx: they all get name-checked when Matt steps up to make his case. I’ll say this for my dude: when he’s at bat, he swings for the fence.

What is “politics,” anyway?

First, there’s a semantic problem. Modern Westerners tend to see “politics,” consciously or subconsciously, as a series of scheduled competitions between public personalities representing a center-left or center-right political party, like the Republicans vs. Democrats in the US or the Social Democrats vs. Christian Democrats in Western Europe.

If you’re a follower of right-wing (later, Nazi) philosopher Carl Schmitt, politics is the division of other people into friends and enemies. As Schmitt wrote (and many others still believe), “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.”

If that’s what “politics” means to you, it’s easy to imagine that it pales in comparison to art that can elevate and inspire the human spirit.

It’s a different story if you see politics the way Aristotle did, as the elevation of a people through community-building and collective decision-making. “Now it is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily,” Aristotle wrote. He found a wisdom in the many that was lacking in the few.

Whatever your definition of politics, Matt is way off base when he writes, “No, not everything is political. Aren’t most things better?”

Better? When lives are at stake? If a child was starving to death on your front lawn, would you refuse to feed her because doing so would be “political”? Would it be “better” to crank up the volume on your Metallica track and let her die? Roger was saying that it’s impossible to avoid being political when people are dying and that will never change.

Matt’s Dream

To be fair, Matt’s argument reflects genuine idealism—a surprisingly naïve one, perhaps, but idealism, nonetheless. The idea that “art” exists on a higher and purer plane is a beautiful one, however sentimental. But politics and art are both aspects of the human spirit. To say one is more elevated than the other is like exalting my hand over my foot.

Matt was on much firmer ground when he wrote that “love isn’t apolitical, but a higher form of politics.” That’s exactly what Roger Waters was saying when he called for kindness, empathy, and humanity (although, to be fair, his comments about Hetfield were anything but kind.)

Matt loses the thread again, however, when he adds this comment about love:

“... one of its strengths is that it ‘does not insist on its own way,’ unlike the current crop of Twitter ideologues.”

It doesn’t? The quote from Corinthians is a nice touch, but Matt should know better; after all, he’s covered school board meetings in Loudoun County Virginia. If there’s one thing a school board meeting demonstrates, it’s that love definitely insists on its own way. It should. Even when parents are misguided, their fierce love for their children—and their insistence on protecting them from harm—is a covenant with the future, a binding declaration of loyalty to the promise of tomorrow.

At their worst, school boards and other local democracies are a demonstration of human instincts run wild. At their best, however, they reflect the higher collective wisdom of a unified community. That’s what Aristotle meant when he wrote, “The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.”

Anyone who has participated in a successful democratic action knows the feeling of excitement and engagement that comes with being part of something greater than yourself.

Hetfield’s Hat Trick

James Hetfield pulled off a simple hat trick. He convinced a lot of people he was above politics while being explicitly political himself. He knew about the recent controversies around free speech and Gaza: Macklemore being fired from Ed Sheeran’s tour, for example, or the censure and potential prosecution of Bob Vylan and Kneecap in the United Kingdom.

He could’ve kept silent about them, but he didn’t. He brought them up. Then he said that what those artists were doing was “bullshit.” Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if you say “politics is bullshit,” that’s a political statement. Here’s another: If you don’t want to be political, don’t bring up politics.

It would have been fine for Hetfield to say something like, “We know things are heavy out there right now. Let’s just have fun, love each other, and get into the music.” But no. He had to say the other artists were talking “bullshit.”

This is a common fakeout in certain quarters. Take Apalachee Don, the country/rock singer and rapper whose song “Everybody’s Fightin’” also calls on us to rise above politics. The chorus says, “The elephant’s mad at the jackass/Liberty’s headed for war/The left wing’s kickin’ at the right wing/And the bird ain’t flying no more.”

I like Apalachee Don, and I was with him on the whole unity thing. And then he says: “They’re takin’ prayer from our schools/Man and that ain’t cool/They said it’s alright being a lady if being a man won’t do.”

You can express your opinion, or you can call for unity. But if you try to do both at once, you’re really calling for everyone to unify around your opinion. That’s not being apolitical. It’s a political sucker punch.

Were Roger and Katie Wrong to Respond?

So did Roger Waters lose the argument by engaging in it, as I hinted at before? It’s true that he responded to Hetfield’s comments by saying you can’t be apolitical in times like these. In one sense you could say that he—and Katie, it would appear, was taking Hetfield’s deceptive comment at face value.

To be fair, however, Roger seemed anxious to take the discussion beyond Hetfield’s limited worldview. (His exact words on the podcast were, “Can we stop talking about this prick?”) And as I was writing this piece, Katie tweeted the following:

“You know what an apolitical person would do? STFU about the artists who DO talk about politics at their shows. You don’t have to wade into this.”

Exactly! That’s my point!

So the conclusion, it seems to me, is as follows: Art or politics? That’s the wrong question. They’re both expressions of the human soul. This conflict between two music stars—the one who wrote such classics as “Brain Damage,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and the “Enter Sandman” guy—turned into a debate that was, paradoxically, both misguided and worthwhile. Art is politics, and politics is art.

And all of it is human.

Additional Thoughts

Can I still love Metallica? Sure you can! (Good news, Ben Burgis!) The world has always been full of great artists with terrible politics. I loved Merle Haggard when I was a teenaged country singer, for example, even when he wrapped himself in a right-wing mantle with songs like “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” (“They love our milk and honey but they preach about some other way of living”; Ouch! That blow landed.) I still love Merle.

Sometimes that juxtaposition of great art and bad politics can be challenging. In my college days, for example, there was a lot of debate about the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline’s use of language was astonishing, even breathtaking; so was his antisemitism and his enthusiasm for Nazi Germany.

I’m not much of a metalhead (I rely on my friend Al and my son-in-law for recommendations there), but I admire the virtuosity and understand the attraction. So go ahead and listen to your Metallica. But be forewarned: some of their songs are, dare I say it? Political. “One” is an antiwar song that seems to be loosely based on Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun. Others, like “... And Justice for All,” “Blackened,” and “Disposable Heroes,” are equally polemical.

Maybe Metallica’s old records should come with a “bullshit alert.”

A note on names: A keen reader might observe some seeming inconsistencies in my use of names. I use the last name for “Hetfield” and the first name for “Roger” and “Matt.”

Here’s why: I don’t know James Hetfield, I don’t know anybody who does, and I’ve never seen Metallica live. I’ve been in shared spaces with Roger Waters and we know many people in common, so it’s more comfortable to refer to him as “Roger.” (I also saw Pink Floyd perform the entirety of “Atom Heart Mother” at the Roundhouse in London in 1971, which is a bonding experience of its own.) I know Katie, too.

As for Matt Taibbi, I’ve considered him a friend for a long time. He can say things that piss me off or infuriate me—he seems to do it more with every passing day—but that’s not a disqualifier from friendship in my book. I do have disqualifiers. They include racism, sexism, other forms of hate and bigotry, and advocating genocide. I haven’t seen any of those things from him, so “Matt” he remains.

Pink Floyd vs. Metallica: Which band is better? “À chacun son goût,” as the French say; to each his own. I’m much more familiar with Pink Floyd, but the running gag in this piece—listing Floyd’s many famous songs while only referencing one of Metallica’s—is just my way of jacking up James Hetfield for being a jerk. Of course “Enter Sandman” isn’t Metallica’s only famous song! There’s also “Master of Puppets.”

A final note: Free Palestine. Everything else is commentary.

Apologies to all readers for my seeming disappearance. To my surprise, some parts of this country are still off the grid—at least as far as the internet is concerned. We had a new episode of the broadcast done, except for the monologues, but it’s hard to upload video and audio without an internet connection. Some family complications added to the challenge of writing and publishing online.

On the upside, I saw the beautiful cricket in the picture above. I saw people I love and people I could learn to love. And I was reminded that this country is filled with astounding beauty, kind strangers, and the artifacts and fragments of a heartfelt and authentic American culture.

I also played this beautiful guitar, left behind by a dear friend who has moved on. It sounds sentimental, and it is, but I could have sworn I heard his voice in the wood and steel.

Everybody needs a break. This one was an accident, but it turned out to be a welcome one. If I had known it was coming I would have let you know.

“I’m just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding of being human.”
—John Trudell

You’ll find selected quotes and a transcript below. Before then, however, one more thing: In the video I quoted a speech given by Ernesto “Che” Guevara in February 1963 in Camagüey, Cuba, but I obtained the quote from a secondary source and used their translation. I wanted to be sure that it conveyed its meaning correctly, and I wanted to understand the context, so I tracked down the original speech and did my own translation (however imperfectly). Here’s my version. Think of it as a first pass; translation is a fine art which demands time and concentration.

We must remember that machines do not in any way compete with workers or enslave them the way they do under capitalism. All workers should see machines as liberators of their force. Machines will serve man when we end the exploitation of man by man. That’s what we seek. We see machines as instruments of liberation for the peasant, giving them time to develop in every way. Our machines should free us to accomplish everything we’re capable of accomplishing. They should help us reach the full extent of our human potential. That’s what we are all fighting for.

The human beings of the future will need hearts that are as pure and simple as the hearts of human beings today. But they will also need the ability to perform great mental abstractions so they can discover whatever new treasures nature may reveal—to all humanity, for the benefit of all humanity.

We have a gigantic task. We must struggle against imperialism, be an example for all the Americas, and carry on a fight to the death with no surrender. At the same time we must develop our own technology with our own engineers, so that we can continue to progress without outside help; so that we can stand on our own two feet ,with our own inventions, our own strength, and our own way of life as a strong and rich country.

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you can, please consider a paid subscription through Substack or Patreon. We really do need the support. Many thanks.

SELECTED QUOTES

Richard Eskow:

• “All online activity is labor.”

• “A runaway freight train is not ‘deciding’ to annihilate a town. It is not the super-powered human being of the future. It’s just badly managed technology.”

• “We are all laboring in a massive global machine: the data matrix, the data economy.”

• “The mythos of AI and of Silicon Valley seems to be an unconscious attempt to refute the fundamental reality of labor-capital relations.”

• “I hope we can convene some serious conversations about what it would look like to really view our technology as liberators of human force and spirit rather than as enslavers of them.”

Richard Wolff:

• “You’re not going to get out of the high-tech machine anything other than what you have programmed to go in there... there is no magic here.”

• “People without machines can live. We know that because for thousands of years they did. Machines without people sit there and gather rust and dust.”

• “In a capitalist system, technology is installed if and when and to the extent that it is privately profitable. And if it isn’t, it won’t be.”

• “Don’t ever think that the way technology is installed is in any sense neutral or fair or equitable. It isn’t.”

• “You have to see through the ownership logic to get to the basic labor logic. Labor produces.”

TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited using—yes, I confess—AI)

Richard Eskow: We’re going to do something a little different today and see how it works out. Everybody nowadays is hearing alarmist talk about AI, and those who follow this show, the Zero Hour Report, or my writing for various magazines may know that I’ve written a lot over the years about technology, about AI, about medical technology, about the intersection of human experience and technology.

It’s a very timely issue right now. I want to write about it some more, and of course I will. But I want to be informed by some inspired, even prophetic thinking from the left, primarily the Marxist tradition. I’m not an expert in that. I read, but Professor Wolff is. So I’ve found a few pieces of commentary that I think are very germane to what’s happening now. He’s kindly agreed to help me with this.

Before we do, I need to set the stage. I’ve been getting asked a lot about the panic talk, the hysteria talk. And this is one of the reasons I found myself struck by some of the Marxist writings, not only of Marx and Engels but of those who followed, Marcuse and others. Because every technological change is a kind of dialogue between human culture and technical machinery.

There’s a lot of thought that’s been put into that over the years. What we’re seeing now, I think, is a dominant billionaire, Silicon Valley culture that has a religion. And that religion is a millennialist belief that there’s going to be a new future where human beings are obsolete. You may remember that Peter Thiel had to hesitate when he was asked in the New York Times whether he wants humanity to succeed, to survive. There was actual hesitation, because they believe that what they’re building with software, with technology, is going to be better than humanity — that it’s going to replace humanity. Many of them believe that despite there being no evidence for it. A child loves a doll and may think the doll is alive. It’s not alive. It’s a doll. There’s a lot of projection going on. That’s part of what we’re seeing in the panic.

The other part of it is, as with so many faiths—let’s say the faith of the Church of England as practiced by the aristocrats of the 16th centur— it just so happens that their deeply felt faith intersects with their own economic interests. That’s what we’re seeing here, in my view, with Silicon Valley billionaires. And a lot of people are getting roped into it, including Steve Bannon on the right and my old boss Bernie Sanders on the left. I think he’s bought into it a little too much too.

I think the reality is that this is dangerous technology, just as a runaway freight train is dangerous. But a runaway freight train isn’t “deciding” to annihilate a town. It isn’t the human being of the future. It’s technology out of control. That’s what we’ve seen in these recent examples. But if you want to believe it’s a superbeing, you tend to believe it’s a superbeing. And if it’s in your financial interest to make everybody else believe that too — isn’t that convenient? Because now, all of a sudden, we’re not talking about the AI bubble. We’re not talking about the fact that they seem to be building excess capacity. We’re not talking about the flaws, the slop, the incorrect data coming out.

These companies were headed off a cliff, I strongly believe, in terms of economic reality — stock valuations, everything else. Now, thanks to their theology, they get to say: hold on a second, we’re building something so amazingly powerful you have to slow us down. Well, isn’t that convenient? It keeps the value of their stock inflated, because it’s going to be the future, just not yet.

So that’s my short version of what’s happening now. But as always, the working people of this planet, this country, this society, are getting shafted. That’s the other piece of it. My final thought, which I’ve said before, is that all online activity is labor. Everything you do online is labor. You send an email: it’s labor, because it’s feeding the large language models they call artificial intelligence. You scroll Facebook, stop here, stop there, comment, watch a video: labor. We are laboring in this massive global machine that is the data matrix and the data economy.

And that’s what I wanted to talk to Professor Wolff about. Rick Wolff, if I made you sit there too long while I rambled on, I’m sorry, but I needed to set the stage.

Richard Wolff: No, this is helpful. Every time we talk about this topic, you help me understand an area I know I have to learn more about than I’ve so far been able to. Very interesting. Let me react briefly to a couple of the things you said.

Richard Eskow: Please.

Richard Wolff: I was struck by the similarity to one point you made: that slowing down is a clever way for them to consolidate. These are companies that, in a very short historical period, have become monstrous, billionaire-creating global colossus enterprises. And now, in my language, I hear them wanting to consolidate their monopoly.

Richard Eskow: Correct.

Richard Wolff: And you have to have the government working with you, because you don’t want the government to break you up into smaller companies, which is how you could handle a monopoly situation. You don’t want that. You don’t want them funding competitors. You don’t want that. So, under the heading of making everybody safer, you can now consolidate so three or four companies that overlap anyway control the field.

I’ll give you a historical model of how that happened. At the turn of the century — the end of the 19th, early 20th century — when agriculture was going through a big consolidation in this country, millions of small farms were disappearing, replaced by what we’ve since learned to call agribusiness, or mega-corporations in agriculture.

We had, understandably, a flood of adulterated food. Desperate farmers, large and small, threatened with extinction, cut corners. They didn’t spend as much time making sure the animals were clean, that the people who plowed the land didn’t defecate where they were putting the seeds, and all the rest of it. We had terrible problems, which, by the way, are recurring now that we’ve cut away all the inspection, like Mr. Elon Musk with his chainsaws. So we’re all getting sick. This morning I read that we can’t buy ice cream anymore because it’s making everybody sick. Walmart, Target, the other big supermarkets, can’t sell certain ice creams because they’re contaminated.

What did the big companies do? They rushed in and endorsed government inspections and government mandates for the machinery needed to make sure the milk is clean, the broccoli is clean, the animals are clean. Why? Because the mandated machinery was much more expensive than any medium or small-sized farmer could ever afford. Only the big agricultural companies could afford it.

So they used the safety argument, and to some extent the genuine safety improvements they made, as a very useful way to consolidate a monopoly. And this smells to me like all of that.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. They’ve been pursuing antitrust relief. A perfect example.

Richard Wolff: Yeah. And the other thing that came to mind. Before I did economics, my parents pressured me toward the natural sciences, math and physics, and I did a lot of that even into college before I said I don’t want to do this anymore. There was a rule in physics: you can’t get out what you don’t put in. It may appear to you that that’s what’s happening, but that’s because you don’t understand everything that’s going into it because there’s a lot going in that you didn’t put in.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: It doesn’t mean it isn’t put in. You’re not going to get out of the high-tech machine anything other than what’s been programmed into it, whether you’re conscious of what you put in there or not. That’s another matter. But there is no magic here. You’re not going to get something out of nothing.

That’s crucial to Marx. Marx, early in the 19th century, was battling theories of economics before him that had magical outputs. People looked at agriculture and were overwhelmed. By the time Marx is writing, agriculture is the number one industry everywhere in the world. People spent most of their time cultivating land for vegetables, for meat. And they kept being mystified: you only have so many seeds, but you plant them, and the plants that grow generate many more seeds than the number you started with.

Richard Eskow: Oh.

Richard Wolff: So a surplus is what nature gives you. No, you only get out what you put in. You have to understand that things are being put in. You didn’t put them there, but they’re required, like the sun, like the water —

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: You take those away, guess what? It’s not there. So it depends on what your labor can do. You become not the origin but the handmaiden for nature to do what’s built into it. You’re not violating the laws of thermodynamics, where something happens out of nothing.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: The AI machines cannot give you anything other than what you put into them.

Richard Eskow: Yes—and what you compelled or persuaded others to put into them. Which gets me to the first quote I wanted to raise, bearing in mind my point that I believe all online activity is labor. More and more, our social as well as our personal and work activities are shaped by AI, directly or indirectly. We get instructions on how to do things. I built something for my cat; it’s a long story, but the instructions were clearly AI-produced, and that shaped the hours I put into it. People are obviously being forced to align themselves with AI at work. The way we interact with social media is increasingly influenced by AI. And I should add: I don’t think it’s intelligence. But since you mentioned the 19th century, Karl Marx strikes me as what Norbert Wiener or some of the 20th-century thinkers would describe as a systems thinker.

Richard Wolff: Mm-hmm.

Richard Eskow: He was able to see the workers in the factory and the machines of the factory as a whole, as an organic entity. And what struck me as a good way to start talking about AI is here. I believe this is from Part 3 of Capital. If not, you’ll probably correct me. Let me try to quote it as best I can.

“Past labor in the automaton” — meaning what I just described — “and the machinery moved by it, steps forward as acting apparently in independence of living labor.”

Think about AI now, acting apparently in independence of living labor.

“It subordinates labor instead of being subordinate to it.”

And then this powerful phrase:

“It is the iron man” — we’d say digital person, talking about AI — “confronting the man of flesh and blood.”

Later in that paragraph he writes:

“Dead labor” — meaning the labor of those who’ve gone before — “has been endowed with movement.”

It’s been reanimated, like Frankenstein.

“And living labor only continues to be present as one of dead labor’s conscious organs” — one of its limbs.

It strikes me that this is increasingly what AI and these platforms are doing with their reward-punishment systems, their little dopamine hits, the other ways they direct our activity. Dead labor — or dead so-called recreation that’s really still labor — has been endowed with movement, and we’re the limbs of this resurrected thing. Does that make sense to you? Does it fit with what Marx had in mind?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. Marx wanted the working class to understand — and I’ll put it a little more starkly than you — that the capitalist says: I’m going to give you a job. I’m going to put you to work with this raw material, this tool, this equipment, this machine. It’s a system. And the way the machines work, you have to stand over there, move your arms this way, look at that screen while you’re doing it. You’ve become an appendage of the machine. And since it’s the capitalist who presents you with the machine — you didn’t have to bring it to the factory, you didn’t have to buy it, the capitalist took care of it — the capitalist then makes the key move: I’m entitled to a piece of the output because I contributed the machinery, the tools, the equipment, and you’re just a small part of this story. You press a button to animate what I’ve brought.

And Marx says: but where do you think the raw material comes from? Who made the tool? The capitalist? Absolutely not — he doesn’t know the first thing about it. His great achievement was to buy what other workers, dead now, embodied in these machines, produced. Or, as I put it to my students: people without machines can live. We know that, because for thousands of years they did. Machines without people just sit there and gather rust and dust. If they’re not oiled, supervised, repaired, fueled, they don’t do a thing.

Richard Eskow: Right — if no one flips the switch. That’s enlightening, thank you. And the “dead labor endowed with movement” also struck me this way — take a lumber mill. Before there were mills cutting wood into planks and shipping them around the world, there were people doing that by hand. And it’s from watching people do that, long dead now, that investors, capitalists, got the idea to build a machine to do it. So I think of those dead woodworkers as also being part of the dead labor. Is that right?

Richard Wolff: That’s right, absolutely. It’s not only that — it’s how the workers did it that shaped the technology. That human behavior is what was in the minds of whoever developed the first machine, built the way it was built, because of what they saw and heard from the people who did it with their hands. That’s why the technology changes over time — as people learn other skills, they go back and realize, oh, I could make this machine a little differently, we could process more planks, or a different kind of wood. Over time this builds up. But there’s never an excuse for it to justify giving the person who bought the inputs a piece of the output. The output comes from the input — it doesn’t come from whoever owns the input.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: This whole ownership logic — you have to see through it to get to the basic labor logic. Labor produces. That’s why, for Marx, analyzing the value of things has to go back to the one ultimately scarce item, which is labor. Every community only has so much labor. It has to allocate it. You make the food, the clothing — every society has to distribute the labor. That’s the key question. Not the equipment it has — the labor. Because labor can make the equipment if you need it.

Richard Eskow: And what struck me as you were speaking, Rick, is that — in a way I don’t think they themselves understand — the mythos of AI and Silicon Valley seems to be an unconscious attempt to refute the fundamental reality of labor-capital relations. What I mean is: one of the foundational beliefs is that either now or at some point soon, these so-called artificial intelligences will no longer be designed by us — they’ll be designing themselves. And if they design themselves, bootstrapping themselves out of nonexistence into existence, then they can claim there’s no dead labor involved — it created itself. But of course this is a fantasy. Even when a system can design another program — which they do — that’s not because they’re creating something new. It’s because previous programmers, most of them hired, salaried workers, came up with the methodology for writing programs. And when the AI systems write programs, they don’t execute that methodology very well — that’s a separate, technical question. But the idea that they’re creating something out of nothing is, nice try — there’s labor going into it. Does that make sense to you too?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. It’s another way of explaining that, in the end, it’s the labor that keeps the whole thing going — which people intuitively understand. Someone has to turn the machine on and off.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: Oil the machine. Turn it off so you can oil it. You have to do this, you have to do that. It is human beings who have produced this totality. The notion that something can happen independent of these human beings — that’s the Frankenstein model. The notion that something dead can return to life.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: We kind of all know that can’t be done, at least not yet. I can’t predict the future any more than anyone else. Could there come a time when you could bring someone back who had, in some sense, died? Maybe. But for now, we don’t have that capacity. They certainly didn’t have it when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. But she wants to talk about what Marx wants to talk about: how capitalism, in a peculiar way, endows past labor, dead labor embodied, with power over us.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: We get together and produce something, and instead of we who made it happen deciding what to do with it, we can’t turn to the dead people who did the inputs, because they’re gone. That happened before. We have to replace it. So we take a part of the output and use it to pay for the inputs, to give the people who make the inputs the means to replace what we used up. Marx is very clear on that.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: We should take the output, use the part needed to replace the used-up inputs, and give the rest to the people who made it happen. We don’t do that. We take another portion, called surplus value, and give it to people whose only claim is ownership. What does that mean? It means they have the right to withhold from us what the community of workers produced. And that, as Marx would insist, is an outrage against the human community—that a subgroup of it can take into its own hands the fruits of other people’s labor, then threaten to withhold it from production unless they get a cut of the output, which then has to come from the living laborers who would otherwise have received it as wages. Therein lies the exploitation he rails against.

Richard Eskow: And it’s a good segue to the next paragraph, which I was struck by. Marx was writing at a time of transition from the worker as artisan, as independent craftsperson, to the worker as factory unit. Next paragraph:

“The living connection of the whole workshop no longer lies here in cooperation” — meaning among autonomous people.

“Instead, the system of machinery forms a unity” —

and here I’m thinking of AI as an engine of social media that we’re all connected into, a factory that virtually everyone is working in right now.

“The system of machinery forms a unity set in motion by the prime motor and comprising the whole workshop, to which the living workshop is subordinated” —

that means us, insofar as we’re workers. And then:

“Their unity has thus taken on a form which is tangibly autonomous and independent of them.”

In my notes I’ve underlined “autonomous and independent” — “a” and “I,” “AI” — because this so-called AI can act autonomously and independently, but only because it’s a cognitive digital workshop comprising all of us and our collective labor. It’s taken this subordination to a global scale. What do you think?

Richard Wolff: Yep. I love that the concepts translate so well from the original to now. You’re applying Marx’s categories and adjusting them for the technology that’s emerged since Marx died. It takes a different form now. But I agree with you. My instinct is that this is just the latest stage of automation: not the last, not the first, somewhere in the middle. It will continue. And each time a discontinuous jump is made, these same fantasies—for lack of a better term, these Frankenstein fantasies—begin to emerge: we’ve set in motion something independent of ourselves.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: And instead of us controlling it, it’s going to come back and get us.

Richard Eskow: Right, right. One more quote, if you have time?

Richard Wolff: Sure.

Richard Eskow: This one isn’t from Marx — it’s from Che Guevara, from a speech he gave in 1963. Remember, in the 1960s there was a big scare about automation too.

Richard Wolff: Yeah.

Richard Eskow: And the sociologist David Riesman was warning a few years later about a coming “crisis of leisure” — that people would have too much free time and it would create terrible problems. It hasn’t worked out that way. Che Guevara was speaking to a group of sugarcane workers in Camagüey, Cuba, about automation under a socialist system. This is what he said — a vision of what might be:

“We must remember that machines do not, as in the capitalist system, compete with workers or enslave workers. Workers must view machines as liberators of their force” — liberators, freeing their capabilities—“Machines are placed at the service of workers as soon as the exploitation of man by man” — we’d say person by person now — “stops. And that is what we are striving for. We are trying to turn machines into liberating instruments for peasants, so they will have more time for leisure, more time to study, to develop in every sense, to achieve the most important thing we must fulfill: individuals developed to the full. This is the aim we are all struggling for.”

At some point, I hope we can convene some serious conversations about what it would look like to carry this vision forward — to view technology as a liberator of human force and spirit rather than an enslaver of it. That’s my closing thought. What’s yours?

Richard Wolff: Before I answer — where does that Che quote appear? How do I find it?

Richard Eskow: I’ll find it for you. Havana, Cuba, 1963 — I believe February.

Richard Wolff: He—

Richard Eskow: I’ll get it for you. It’s not a common one — it was in a book, but I double-checked it, so I know it’s real.

Richard Wolff: Yeah, if you could send me whatever citation you have, I’ll track it down.

Richard Eskow: Isn’t it great?

Richard Wolff: My closing comment is a short parable I use in my teaching, and have for years. I’ll use ChatGPT as the example. ChatGPT enables a person to complete several reports, or several emails, in a fraction of the time it used to take — twice as productive. Here’s a simple version: a factory has 200 workers, and the employer pays wages to all 200. He hears about the latest AI, buys it, because it’s advertised as making each of the 200 workers twice as productive as before. If he’s a capitalist, and nothing else changes, here’s what he does: he says to 100 of the 200 workers, you’re fired — here’s your check, don’t come back Monday. I don’t need you, because the remaining 100, with this new tool, can do what it took 200 of you to do before. Same output, same price, same revenue — but now, instead of whatever profit I had after paying 200 workers, I have much more profit, because I no longer pay the wages of the 100 I fired. That’s extra profit for me. And doesn’t that make sense for me to do? I’m grateful to AI — it’s increased my profits.

Then I ask my students: what’s wrong with this story? They have no idea. So I tell them. The employer had a choice. He could have bought the machine and said to the 200 workers: I bought a machine that makes all of you twice as productive. So starting Monday, the work week is 20 hours for each of you. In those 20 hours, you’ll produce what used to take you 40 hours, because you have the new AI I purchased for you. I’ll produce the same amount, sell at the same price, earn the same revenue — but I’ll still pay you your full wages. My profit doesn’t go down, but it doesn’t go up either. Installing AI gave you leisure.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: It gave you half of every day to write poetry, to spend time with your spouse, your children, your hobbies, your passions. It’s a transformation of your life. And since you’re the majority relative to me, the employer, I’m giving an immense benefit to the majority rather than to myself in enhanced profit. But — and I glare at my students here — don’t you ever think that the way technology is installed is in any sense neutral, fair, or equitable. It isn’t. In a capitalist system, technology is installed if, when, and to the extent that it’s privately profitable. If it isn’t, it won’t be. All the opportunities to benefit the way Che Guevara described are excluded from the conversation.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. And of course, the design of the technology itself is shaped by these same economic imperatives. With that, I really enjoyed this discussion. Thank you for helping me clarify my thoughts on this, Richard Wolff — and as always, thanks for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: Thank you for pushing this as a topic. It’s one I know I have to learn from, and you’re a good teacher. This has been a good experience for me. Thank you.

“TrumpRx,” the Administration’s drug-purchasing website, is a scam, a pharma-backed and huckster-promoted bait-and-switch. It rips off the sick while pretending to lower drug costs.

It’s ugly, too.

I wrote about TrumpRx for The Nation. Here’s the opening:

The pharmaceutical sales business has come a long way since the days when traveling medicine shows toured rural America selling fraudulent patent medicines. For “Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment,” a medication that gave us the expression “snake oil,” fast-talking hucksters would stand on a horse-drawn wagon and tell the crowd that their simple mixture of turpentine and red pepper was harvested from Chinese water snakes.

To be clear, the Trump administration’s drug purchasing website doesn’t sell phony nostrums. The “TrumpRx” scam is in the premise, not the product. Trump claims that he has negotiated special deals with the drug companies that lower costs for working Americans and has created an easy way to purchase them online. Don’t believe the hype.

You can read the rest here.

My colleague and friend Sonali Kolhatkar has a new book entitled Breaking ICE: Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. From the publishers' description:

“In Breaking ICE, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents her conversations with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars on the frontlines of the fight. Through their courageous stories, Kolhatkar documents the impact of ICE violence, workplace raids, mass surveillance, and intimidation tactics, and how communities from Maine to California are organizing for a better world.”

Her introduction is also excellent! She lays out today’s stark realities under Donald Trump but she is also unsparing in her critiques of past presidents from both parties wherever they are warranted.

Please give the interview a listen. A transcript (lightly edited) is below. There's more info about the book here and more about Sonali and her work here.

This work is only possible with reader support. If you can, please consider a paid subscription through Substack or Patreon. Many thanks.

Transcript

Richard Eskow: Sonali has a new book out and I’m partway through it now. Her introduction is great. It’s called Breaking ICE, subtitled Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. I have to look down, sorry for that. So first of all, Sonali, as always, welcome back.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you, Richard.

Richard Eskow: And congratulations on the book. It’s really a great achievement. You interview a lot of great people in the book. And as I said, your introduction to it is also really excellent. So I guess we’ll start with the obvious, even though I suspect I know the answer. What was the inspiration for writing this book?

Sonali Kolhatkar: Well, I had been covering ICE raids since the Trump administration took power for a second time. Especially around last June, June 2025, I was in Los Angeles doing street interviews as LA was raided by ICE agents. I interviewed folks from North Carolina and Georgia, Chicago and Minneapolis. And around January of this year, when everything, especially in Minneapolis, was exploding, I did an interview with a historian named Yohuru Williams, who has been on the show frequently.

He’s based in Minnesota, and he helped put it into historical context. Seven Stories saw that interview. My longtime editor there, Greg Ruggiero, saw it and asked me, do you have more of these? Because if we could put these interviews together and fast-track it, we could put together a really important book, a book that could capture this very historical moment that we’re in and also be a handbook for how people might engage in community defense against ICE.

And I was like, yes, I think I have a few interviews. And I ended up with nearly 20 interviews. I did a few extra interviews to supplement those I’d already done, where I thought we needed some extra framing. And basically, Greg was like, oh, and can you fast-track it?

Basically, could you put it together in six weeks so that we can have it published within a few months? And so I don’t know what possessed me to say yes, but I did. And the book is in two parts. I deliberately curated it. I really worked on how to create a through line, a flow. And so the first part of the book is people you may never have heard of, community activists, frontline people who do the hard work of figuring out how to distribute Know Your Rights cards, how to follow ICE agents and document them and alert the community, and how to protect the community.

Very nuts-and-bolts tactics. Some of the things that were in common, some of the things that were unique, in rural parts of the country and urban parts of the country. And then the second half is the storytellers, the academics, the historians, those people who can put it into a broader context, who can explain this moment that we’re in in a global framework, in a historic framework, in a framework around storytelling and how we move forward, and how we’ve come from history.

And so that is people like Robin D. G. Kelley and Josefina López and Ibram X. Kendi, Luis Rodríguez, Kent Wong, et cetera. And then I wrote a framing essay to try to tie it all together. And also, I’m an immigrant. I was born an immigrant. I’ve been in this country as an immigrant for 30-plus years.

And so I have a lot of personal relation to it. I wanted to really put together the framing around the post-9/11 anti-immigrant hysteria as the beginning of this latest chapter of anti-immigrant attacks. This country’s history is rife with differing and constantly changing notions of who gets to belong. This particular chapter we’re in, I trace it back to the months after the September 11th attacks.

Richard Eskow: And I appreciate that you did that because there’s a tendency to have a very short memory span sometimes in this country, even among progressives, when we talk about the immigration issue. So we need to understand that it’s been a long time coming and that, in fact, ICE didn’t even exist until the response to September 11th.

We had other ways of handling immigration, and other less-than-honorable ways we’ve handled immigration throughout the history of this country. But ICE itself is a product of 9/11. So you mentioned that the book, besides capturing the historical moment, also serves as a handbook, which it certainly does. I think there’s a third valuable service it provides, if I may, which is: nothing succeeds like success.

And the stories it tells of successful resistance to what seems like absolutely overwhelming force on the part of ICE. You point out in your introduction that ICE has more funding than most, virtually all, of the world’s armies. So when ICE descends on a city like Minneapolis or the countryside in North Carolina, wherever it may be, it feels like too much force for people to resist.

And so I think it also has that motivating factor of saying, no, we can fight back against this. We have, we are, we will. Here are some pointers on how to do it. So I appreciated that aspect of the book a lot.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Yeah, because the mainstream media isn’t going to tell these stories, right? The fact that a community organization might be successful in driving ICE out might be a footnote in a larger story. It’s not going to be a headline. And when we consume this news of what has been happening over the past year and a half, it’s dominated by the ways in which we are being bludgeoned, dominated by the ways in which we’re being terrorized and beaten down.

And constant exposure to that really can convince us that nothing we do matters, when actually it was the opposite. So much of people’s actions had an impact and mattered, and countless numbers of people were saved from ICE’s clutches. Far too many weren’t. But I think it’s so important for us to learn from these stories, to get the sense that when you fight, you win.

When you stand up for people, you will have some success. You may not succeed all the time, but you figure out what you succeed at and what you don’t. And that was so important. Ron Gochez, who’s one of the activists that I interviewed, is from Los Angeles. He helped start the Community Self-Defense Coalition in LA and heads this organization called Unión del Barrio.

And he pointed out how the enormous amount of resources that ICE and the government spent on going after undocumented immigrants in LA, in the end, over this two-month period last summer, they arrested less than 1 percent of the estimated undocumented population. So this was important context. It meant that what people did worked, and it meant that those same tactics, or some version of them, can be applied to the next place that ICE shows up, and that people didn’t just roll over.

They fought back, right? And that was so important to capture.

Richard Eskow: And you mentioned, when you were talking about how the book came together, that you’d interviewed a lot of people about this topic on your show, your show being Rising Up with Sonali. And so I assume most of these interviews were already done. You went back and edited them. Did any kinds of patterns emerge to you as you edited them and brought them together that maybe weren’t initially evident when you were doing the interviews in real time, as the events were happening and all of that?

Sonali Kolhatkar: The patterns were that some of the same kinds of things worked in a lot of urban centers. So you could apply Chicago’s tactics to Minneapolis because there were some similarities in culture, but mostly in geography. But then places like Maine, which is very rural and spread out, and places like Georgia, where the Hyundai factory or plant was raided, had to adapt.

And their way of adaptation was quite unique because they had to contend with winter, much harsher winters. That was another thing.

Richard Eskow: Mm-hmm.

Sonali Kolhatkar: They also had to contend with the fact that there weren’t big congregations of people, and so small groups of people had a bigger impact. The other thing that was really interesting was the way in which multiracial organizing happened differently in different places. So, for example, in Maine, the majority of Maine’s immigrants are from African nations, very different and newer immigrants, as opposed to LA, which has multigenerational families with mixed status, people who have been here largely from Central America and Mexico for 20, 30, 40 years who are undocumented.

So they’ve lived in this country for a very long time. Such different things were emerging. And yet one of the through lines that came about was this repeated notion that the government... no one’s coming to save us. We can’t call 911 and have cops save us because cops are part of the problem.

No one’s coming to save us. Even our local city council people have very limited resources. Only we can save ourselves. And that was such an important and very empowering message that I saw coming up over and over again. And of course, here in LA, the day laborers have their saying, which applies: only the people can save the people.

So that kept coming up. The other thing that I noticed was that people were building on the racial justice movements of 2020. They were building on networks that had formed, especially in places like Minneapolis. Those people who came and marched in the George Floyd protests had been there before, not that long ago.

So that was something really interesting that people were applying. And the other thing was that existing organizations were best poised to take on what was happening. It’s hard to build something brand new in the middle of a crisis.

Richard Eskow: Right?

Sonali Kolhatkar: You scramble. You have to figure out how to organize. And so the places where they had the greatest success were places where people had preexisting organized resistance that went back years, sometimes decades, and then mobilized the networks that they’d already built. So there were some really interesting common threads that jumped out at me.

I learned so much from these people that I had interviewed.

Richard Eskow: So I was struck in particular by the mention in the book of the fact that the Minneapolis resistance was able to build on the Black Lives Matter organizing that had been done during Black Lives Matter. That was particularly striking. And it makes me think, Sonali, of the fact that I interviewed the author of a book called 1999 about the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle.

And he talked about how those demonstrations, which had such a global impact, were also built on decades of organizing. So in a sense, it seems to be that when we’re in a crisis, whether it’s the ICE invasion of our city or town, or whether it’s Black Lives Matter or anything else, when we’re in the moment, it’s actually a good time to stop and look around and see: what channels have already been dug?

What institutions are in place that might be adapted to this purpose? Does that make sense? I think it’s what you’re saying, right?

Sonali Kolhatkar: Yes, exactly. There are a lot of things that can be adapted. One of the most moving parts of the stories that I learned and heard was how people were using things that they learned during the civil rights movement. Song, the power of song.

I think that was North Carolina, where Nikki Marín Baena told me that to bring the temperature down, they realized that people would hold hands and start singing civil rights-era songs. And I think people like Kent Wong, who I interviewed in one of his last interviews, he was somebody who cut his teeth during the civil rights movement, worked in the United Farm Workers boycott movement, and worked with Reverend James Lawson.

So that insight, that background, that historic analysis, I think, was very, very important because, again, we don’t just do activism in vacuums. We build on the work of our elders and our predecessors and our ancestors. And this movement is showing that. I think now the scary question is how to respond to ICE’s different tactics.

How to respond to the fact that they have changed the way they are attacking communities. The numbers of people they’re arresting are going up, and their tactics are not garnering as many headlines. So it’s almost more dangerous now.

Richard Eskow: One of the dimensions that was in my mind going through the book was, for example, one of your interviews is entitled, let me get it right, it’s with Yohuru Williams, “From George Floyd to Alex Pretti,” if I’m pronouncing Pretti right, about Minneapolis’s fight. As ICE oppression intensified, they even became unable to avoid killing white people.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Right.

Richard Eskow: And we had Robin, is it? The woman who was killed.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Renée Good.

Richard Eskow: Renée Good. I was going to say Robin Good. And we had Alex Pretti. And two things about it struck me as relevant to your book, because I am of that population that you rightfully describe in the introduction as the only remaining privileged population, a privilege which is conditional, we now know, but a privilege nonetheless. It strikes me that this is largely a movement of people of color.

And as these acts of violence show their willingness to take extreme measures against white people, too, who get on the wrong side of it, whether it’s killing Renée Good and Alex Pretti, whether it’s the horrific sentences you reported on recently for the protesters in the... well, the Golden Gate case was one.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Texas. Yeah, the Perry—

Richard Eskow: There’s the Texas one, which is the really terrible one. It seems to me that one of the services works like yours can provide is that the white population has a lot to learn from the Black and brown people of this country who’ve been through so much more and who have experience and leadership to offer. Rather than just getting paralyzed in terror: well, I’d like to protest Palestine, but I don’t want to go to jail for 35 years on a terrorism charge.

Well, maybe take a look at what the Black and brown people of this country have been through. Ask them how they deal with it. Does that make sense?

Sonali Kolhatkar: Yeah. That is reminding me of the fact that there were a lot of folks who, and you and I have talked about this before, when the ICE raids happened, were like, how can we just allow masked armed thugs to roam unaccountably through our communities? Why aren’t the cops doing something about it?

And that revealed an ignorance about who cops terrorize, right? There’s such a racial divide between the people who are policed most harshly and disproportionately and people who feel that police keep them safe because it’s really them who the police are sort of charged with protecting. And so it revealed this kind of ignorant attitude about what policing is.

And it was very important for me to bring this issue up over and over again, that armed enforcement has always gone after non-whites, and poor whites to some extent, but generally non-whites throughout the history of this country. And if we actually want to live in a country where everybody thrives, if we take money out of policing, any kind of policing, city policing to federal policing, and put it into the things that keep all of us safe, we will all be better off.

And this is an abolitionist idea that Black abolitionists and Black-led abolition movements have been putting out over and over again. And I think the greatest promise for a multiracial democracy is this kind of framework where we can learn from the vision of people who’ve been the most policed, the most harshly policed.

And all of us will benefit, all of us except the billionaires and the politicians who back them. We all benefit when we take money out of ICE and put it back into the things that were stripped for ICE, like food stamps, like Medicare, Medicaid.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Right? We will have money for Medicare for All if we want it, and we may have less money for the US military, which is perfectly fine. And that is something that Black and brown activists have been saying for generations.

Richard Eskow: One of the things that the book strikes well, I think, and it’s a tough thing to balance in my experience, is the long context of racism and xenophobia in this country and the totalitarian aspects of it with the rather startlingly unique stylistic differences, at least, that Donald Trump represents. But it’s important to have the broader context.

So in that sense, I wanted, first of all, to understand that this has been going on for a long time. I was glad you mentioned George W. Bush’s role in all of this, Obama’s role. I remember during Obama’s presidency compiling all the statistics on deportations and being absolutely shocked at how he had accelerated them.

As you mentioned, they were calling him deporter-in-chief at one point. Trump is taking it to his own unique levels. But one of those interviews that struck me was with Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote the book How to Be an Antiracist, on the Great Replacement Theory. This didn’t just pop out of nowhere.

It isn’t new. It isn’t unique to the United States. And how did that fit into your thinking about all of this? Because that seems to me to be driving some of the extremist views that are fueling the MAGA movement.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Yes, absolutely. The Great Replacement Theory, which Ibram X. Kendi writes about in his own book, Chain of Ideas, which I highly recommend, is such an important part of this conversation because he is putting it into global context. You can trace direct lines between the MAGA approach to white supremacy and Hitler’s project, and back to the project of enslavement and settler colonialism in the United States.

And there are many modern manifestations of it today, including in places like Chile, in France. And the perpetrators of this agenda meet very openly, have conferences, exchange ideas, have their ideas put out in things like Project 2025. And also, it’s so important that we acknowledge that liberal politicians, instead of taking a stand, instead of actually articulating that they’re for justice, keep trying to appease that right-wing racist extremist ideology.

So Obama did this, and Biden did this. Biden certainly undid a lot of things that Trump did in his first term, including removing the green card ban, which enabled my parents to be able to come here and live with me so I could take care of them. And so thank goodness for that little respite between Trump 1 and Trump 2 for many immigrants.

But he still doubled down on border rhetoric and didn’t completely undo some of Trump’s worst excesses. Instead, he could have gone a completely different way. So what happened was that in Biden’s last year in office, Trump, who was pushing for reelection, spent 2024 beating the anti-immigrant drum so loudly and not being opposed effectively enough by his opponents, by Kamala Harris, for example.

And so you saw public opinion shift: oh yeah, we need more immigration enforcement. And then Trump overplayed his hand, and now public opinion has shifted again, where people are like, oh no, that’s not what we want. One of the things that just keeps coming up for me is how malleable, sadly, public opinion is.

We’re so susceptible as a society to propaganda, and we really have to do better. And we need leaders who’ll do better, right? So we need to demand from anybody who’s running in 2028 that you don’t get to just be against Trump. You have to be against everything he stands for and say what you’re going to do instead, build up that better vision for a better world.

Richard Eskow: And I think that’s a perfect example in terms of public consciousness. If one person, or one side, is advocating forceful ideas, including xenophobia, racism, hatred of immigrants, and the other side is saying, well, we sort of agree, but we want to do it in a more moderate way, the energy that directs and shapes public thinking is with the first person, not the latter.

But before we conclude on this, certainly I want to say that brings us to, I think, your final interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, who is somebody I admire a lot, who is a historian and commentator, political analyst, and has written a lot of great books, including a book I love, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

And you’ve entitled your interview with Professor Kelley “Resistance and Solidarity in an Age of Fascism and Genocide,” which, can it get more timely than that for a topic? So what did Professor Kelley have to say?

Sonali Kolhatkar: Robin is such an amazing person. He did the foreword for my previous book talking about abolition, A Police-Free World Is Possible. And one of the big reasons why I wanted to bring him on, and I did so also at the urging of my editor, Greg Ruggiero, was that he brings that historical framework, and he’s a historian.

And so he was able to articulate so beautifully that this is not new, what we’re experiencing in the United States. It’s not just age-old globally. It’s age-old here in the United States. And I wanted to ask him, how do you define this word that we just bandy about, the F-word, right?

Fascism. What does it really mean for us, for you as someone who studied history? And he was able to define fascist authoritarianism as basically something that routinely violates human dignity. And then there’s so much history. We lived in fascist times that people don’t necessarily currently think of as fascist times.

They use different words, right? Mass enslavement and dispossession, Jim Crow segregation, et cetera.

Richard Eskow: Mm-hmm.

Sonali Kolhatkar: And so I think he was able to be so clear about what fascism is and how all those things in the past that we haven’t labeled fascism were indeed fascism. And to apply that framework to today was really, really important. So I’m so glad we were able to bring him in.

And for folks who want to get a copy of the book and read it in its entirety, they really should. But also this week, Truthout is reprinting Robin’s interview as a standalone, so that if people want to see an excerpt from the book, they’ll get to read Robin’s interview in Truthout this week, the week that the book comes out.

Richard Eskow: And that’s such a great point, by the way: fascism is a continuum. It’s not a switch that gets turned on and off. So I think that’s an excellent point. I don’t know if you have to go now, but in any case, I highly recommend the book. Again, the book is Breaking ICE.

Because I couldn’t... it didn’t sync to my computer. Breaking ICE: Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, by Sonali Kolhatkar, available at fine booksellers that are not Amazon everywhere, and probably at Amazon too, but we don’t want you to go there, right? So yeah.

Sonali Kolhatkar: And the book’s official publication date is September 15th, and the first-week sales really, really matter for those who keep track of things like bestseller lists and stuff. So if you’re thinking of buying the book, do it this week, please. I really appreciate it. It’s published by independent publisher Seven Stories.

My local independent bookstore is taking pre-orders and orders and sending them all over the country. Actually, if you order it through Vroman’s Books, that’s Roman with a V, Vroman’s Books in Pasadena, you can get a personally signed copy because I can just walk into the store and sign it for you.

So they’re taking personal pre-orders, signed, through Vroman’s Books. But otherwise, yeah, just support the kind of work that the activists in this book are doing and get a copy of it. And we need to spread this notion that we are winning, but we have to keep working at it.

In other words: us.

As the New York Times puts it,

“The findings … reaffirmed scientists’ understanding that temperament and disposition are shaped not by a few particular genes, but by thousands of tiny variants that can be expressed in different circumstances. The sheer scale of the project also brought new statistical power to the study of personality genetics, giving researchers a tool kit to investigate the biological mechanisms behind how we think, feel and behave.”

It’s an important study, but one that lends itself to misinterpretation. Our environment and experiences shape our personalities, too—through epigenetics, the process that (simplistically) turns these DNA “switches” on and off—and perhaps in other ways as well.

I also suspect this will lead to a new round of heated debates about topics like free will and the question of whether consciousness can ever be separated from the physical body. In the short monologue above, I concluded with a somewhat more immediate concern.

I spoke with economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about one of the Washington Post’s many salvos against Social Security, which is one of the most successful (and rightfully popular) government programs in US history. The Post’s latest pitch is one that’s been used unsuccessfully in the past: why should rich folks get Social Security?

If you feel that the rich have too much (as I do), there’s a much simpler solution: raise their taxes. Why come up with this complicated scheme instead? Dean helps us unpack the answer.

We also spend a few minutes at the end of the conversation talking about the AI bubble, so stick around if you’re watching.

I’ve appended some selected quotes and a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Read: “The Rich Own the Media. They Want to Take Your Social Security,” by Dean Baker

Selected Quotes

Dean:

• “Cutting Social Security is not a moderate position.”

• “It’s important to understand that it really matters how debates are framed.”

• “What they really want to do is get their foot in the door so they can have big cuts to the people who are lower down, because that’s where the money is.”

• “They want to convince us there are all these seniors who are living too well.”

Richard:

• “We already have a mechanism to use when we think rich people are getting too easy a ride: progressive taxation.”

• “They talk as if the United States government was a pension plan with an army.”

• “If I get $100,000 worth of medical treatment in a year, I’m not $100,000 richer. Other people are getting the money.”

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here. Many thanks.

Transcript:

[intro clip]

Richard Eskow: And we are back on The Zero Hour. As always, I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow. And. as always, I look forward to welcoming economist Dean Baker. Dean Baker is with CEPR, the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He wrote a great piece recently about an editorial I saw in the Washington Post. They’re up to their old tricks of maligning Social Security, and of misleading the public about it.

This must feel a little like being back in the saddle again, Dean, because we’ve been talking about this for years. You’ve been writing about it even longer. First of all, welcome back to the program.

Dean Baker: Well, thanks a lot for having me on.

Richard Eskow: Oh, it’s always a pleasure. And as I explained to you before we got on, I’m going to be looking in strange places because of some technical problems here. So if you’re watching this, don’t mind my wandering gaze, I’m really paying attention. Now, this piece, this blog post, was entitled “The Rich Own the Media. They Want to Take Your Social Security.” I love the plain-spokenness of that title and I think it pretty much sums it up. So what has Jeff Bezos’s paper done to take our Social Security lately?

Dean Baker: Well, let me just point out what I was saying to you before we started. It wasn’t an idle comment. I don’t mind picking on Jeff Bezos, but it’s not him alone. It’s important for people to understand that it really matters how debates are framed. Let me give an example: if I said I wanted to kill 100 kids, everyone would rightly be appalled. They’d say, what are you talking about, why would you do that? And suppose I then point to someone else and say, well, they want to kill 200 kids, so I’m the moderate one. That’s nuts. We’d all agree that’s nuts. But that’s kind of what’s happening in the Social Security debate. People say, oh, some folks want big cuts to Social Security, we don’t want to do that, we’re the moderates. That’s exactly what’s happening here, and it’s why it’s so important not to accept their framing of the debate.

Again, I don’t know Jeff Bezos personally, and I don’t have anything against him in particular. But whoever owns the media gets to decide how the debate is framed. And the point I was making is that cutting Social Security is not a moderate position. That doesn’t mean we can never have any cuts under any circumstances, but the idea that the program is out of control or overly generous, that’s just nonsense. And when they try to make that argument, they’re being completely dishonest.

I’ll be specific. I won’t get into all the numbers, but here’s what they do: they look at what a typical person pays into Social Security versus what they get back. So they took someone who makes $50,000 a year on average over their lifetime, which is actually a bit below average, but let’s go with it, certainly not high income. And they look at what that person gets back, which is more than what they paid in. And they say, see, the program is too generous.

But what’s the average benefit? It’s a little more than $2,000 a month, so about $24,000 a year. I don’t think anyone would call $2,000 a month overly generous. Someone getting $24,000 a year is not living high on the hog. No one thinks that. So when they talk about cutting benefits, they say, well, let’s just go after the people who get over $100,000 a year in Social Security. Okay, fine, that’s more than most people get, sure, but it’s still not a fortune. And how many people actually get $100,000 a year in Social Security benefits? Virtually no one.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: So it’s a bait and switch. If you actually look at their source, and I happen to know the source well, you can calculate how much those higher-income people paid in taxes versus what they’re getting back in benefits. And you’d find that higher-income people actually get less in benefits than what they paid in taxes. Now, I’m not crying for those people. That’s the design of the program. That’s literally the whole point. It’s an insurance program. If you were fortunate during your lifetime, good for you, and when you retire you’ll get more than someone who was less fortunate. But relative to what you paid in, you won’t do particularly well, just like insurance. I’ve been fortunate with my health insurance. I haven’t needed many benefits, and I consider that a good thing. But if I had needed them, they’d have been there. Same idea with Social Security.

So what they do is this bait and switch. They point to the fact that people are getting paid more in benefits than they paid in, and then when it comes to deciding who to cut, they focus on the high-end people and say, they don’t need that. And you could argue that’s probably true for most of them. They don’t need it, but they paid for it. People get a lot of money in interest on bonds too. They don’t need it, but they paid for it, and none of us gets that upset about someone earning $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 a year in bond interest if they paid for it. But what they really want is to get a foot in the door so they can eventually make big cuts to the people further down the income scale, because that’s where the real money is.

Richard Eskow: I want to underscore a couple of things implied in what you said, Dean. First, let’s not individualize this around Jeff Bezos. I have no particular affection for the guy, but this has been going on for decades, as we know. Pete Peterson and others have been sponsoring these lines of argument for a long time. This is a well-practiced routine. And the idea of targeting people at, say, $100,000, that’s always the foot in the door. Once you’ve said some people shouldn’t get too much from Social Security, you’ve opened the door to lowering that threshold. Now it’s $50,000. Now it’s $25,000.

But beyond that, the entire premise is fundamentally misleading before we even get into the specific deceptions. It’s misleading because we already have a mechanism if we think rich people are getting too easy a ride in this economy, which I do: progressive taxation. You could make the same argument about public schools that a Democratic presidential candidate made about college in 2016, saying I don’t want to pay for Donald Trump’s kids to go to college. You could say the same about elementary school. But there are other ways to handle that. With schooling, it’s usually property tax: a more expensive property, a higher tax bill. There are all sorts of mechanisms. But once you start cutting benefits, even at $100,000, which is at the high end of the Social Security payment spectrum, there’s not a lot of money there. So what you’re really doing is creating a rhetorical argument for cutting benefits for a lot of other people. Am I right about that?

Dean Baker: You’re totally right. We could tax more, and we already have the revenue. I won’t get into great detail, but this whole crisis narrative, that by 2032 we won’t be able to pay full benefits, ignores the fact that we actually have the money coming in. We’re repaying bonds held by the trust fund. The money is coming into the Treasury. So this idea that we suddenly won’t have the money in 2033 or 2034 isn’t accurate. I like the idea of keeping a separate trust fund so we can have an honest argument about that, but we can’t pretend we don’t have the money. It’s there. That’s how we’re paying benefits now, and Congress would have to change the law for that to stop, but right now, we are paying full benefits.

In terms of how we think about this, your point is exactly right. A lot of people were saying in 2016 that it was a little silly to argue we shouldn’t pay for Trump’s kids to go to college, because we pay for a lot of things Trump’s kids benefit from. They use the streets. They don’t pay a toll to use the streets. Maybe we could set up barriers and charge rich people to use the streets, but that would be a foolish way to handle it. It’s much simpler to just raise their taxes. We already have the tax system in place. You just make it higher.

But the other point you were alluding to, and this can’t be emphasized enough, is that they’re lying when they say they want to cut benefits above $100,000. It’s not even the beginning of a serious proposal, for two reasons. First, there’s very little money there. Second, and I’m assuming these people aren’t stupid, you don’t even need to know economics for this, just common sense. The only way a couple has $100,000 in combined benefits is if they deferred collecting until around age 70.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: So imagine you’re not the stupidest person in the world, and you see that if you have over $100,000 in benefits, you lose them. What do you do? You start collecting at 69 instead.

Richard Eskow: Right, right, right.

Dean Baker: That’s exactly what would happen. And again, I’m giving these people credit for not being the stupidest people in the world. They know that. They know this proposal would get them literally nothing. So why propose it? To get a foot in the door. They’re lying from the word go.

Richard Eskow: There’s another angle here too. You’re right that I hadn’t thought about that side of it, but there are websites, and people with higher incomes have financial advisors, who fine-tune exactly when to apply for Social Security. But before we get further into the shell game here, you also mentioned something very important: that this is social insurance. It’s a form of insurance, and you can always find a case that looks regressive or unfair if you squint at it that way. Take auto insurance, which isn’t social insurance but is still insurance. A wealthier person might have a bigger claim, probably will, in an accident if they have a nicer car. That could look regressive. If I pay auto insurance premiums for 30 years and then have an accident while I’m doing fine financially, someone might ask, why is that guy getting all this money? But that’s not the point of insurance, is it? Insurance is a smoothing mechanism. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Dean Baker: Yeah, I think it’s a well-designed system, and I want to be clear I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s well-designed in the sense that if you’re a higher earner, you pay more into the program and you get a higher benefit. So it’s progressive in one direction: if you pay more in, you get more out. But as a percentage of what you paid in, you get back less. Using rough numbers, for the first roughly $12,000 of average income, you get about 90% back. For the next $40,000, you get about 33% back. And above that, say above $50,000, you get just 15% back. So the share shrinks, but the dollar amount grows because you earned more. I think that’s a very good structure. Those exact numbers could be adjusted, but the underlying principle is sound.

And the insurance point applies clearly here too. Even someone from a relatively well-off background who gets a good education could have an accident or an illness and end up unable to work much of their life, or only able to work part-time. They thought they’d be a high-paid lawyer, but it didn’t work out that way. In that case, they’ll get a relatively high benefit relative to what they paid in. That’s exactly what you’d want from a system like this. So in my view, the basic structure is very well laid out, even if the specific numbers could be revisited.

Richard Eskow: Now, further into the Washington Post editorial, they begin by saying something like, to get the federal debt under control, start with the retirement state. That phrase annoyed the hell out of me, honestly, because this is what people do when they want to seem dispassionate but are actually using loaded rhetoric, as if the United States government were just a pension plan with a very large army attached. I don’t know if you had the same reaction to that phrase, “retirement state,” but to me it’s set up in a rhetorically inflammatory and misleading way, because there are plenty of other items in the federal budget.

Dean Baker: That’s right. These are two very popular programs, so if you said outright, let’s go after Medicare and Social Security, people would rightly be furious. So they use this phrase, “the retirement state.” These programs are popular because almost everyone benefits from them, and they’re also both very efficient. I’ve done the calculations a thousand different ways, and the basic story holds: private pension systems, or private 401(k)s, cost about 40 times as much per dollar of benefits as Social Security does. To my mind, that’s a genuinely great story. Same with Medicare. It’s far more efficient than private insurers, and we have the data on that, by a factor of five, maybe ten, depending on exactly how you count it. So why you’d be looking to cut two programs that are both hugely popular and remarkably successful at delivering their intended services at very low cost, that’s absolutely crazy to me. But instead of saying Medicare and Social Security directly, they use this term “the retirement state,” which sounds almost neutral.

Richard Eskow: And just to close the loop on this sleight of hand, Dean, your basic argument is that they claim it’s unfair for a couple making $100,000 a year from Social Security to get back more than they paid in. But the group they’re pointing to doesn’t actually get back more than it paid in. Do I have that right?

Dean Baker: That’s exactly right. If they said, look, people are getting $100,000 a year and that’s unfair because they get back more than they paid in, they can’t actually say that, because by their own calculation, those people get back less than they paid in. So they have a choice. Either they say we’re troubled by people getting back more than they paid in, in which case they’re going after people getting $2,000 a month, and that looks ridiculous. Or they say $100,000 is too much, but then they can’t claim those people are getting back more than they paid in, because it isn’t true. So it’s a three-card monte. They get you to focus on the people who genuinely do get back more than they paid in, then they pivot to targeting high earners, where that claim doesn’t actually apply.

Richard Eskow: And you’ve mentioned a couple of times this $2,000 or so average Social Security income figure. I think for women it’s even lower, something like $1,800. Is that right?

Dean Baker: I don’t have the exact figure in front of me, but yes, women on average get lower payments than men. I don’t know that it’s exactly $1,800, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

Richard Eskow: Yeah.

Dean Baker: So again, if you’re talking about cutting that, really, is that too much money?

Richard Eskow: Right, exactly. And beyond that, to argue that a woman shouldn’t get back more than she paid in, after standing on her feet for 40 years as a factory worker or a short-order cook, you name it, that somehow she shouldn’t be able to make ends meet in retirement because it offends the sensibilities of the Washington Post editorial board... I’ll give them credit for one thing: they’re smart enough to know that’s not a very effective argument to make directly.

Dean Baker: Right, and that’s exactly why, instead of making that argument, they make a totally dishonest one instead.

Richard Eskow: Right. And then, as you point out, they pivot to talking about shifting the system toward 401(k)s. Which, first of all, involves gambling to some degree on investment performance. But it’s not just riskier, as you’ve pointed out, it’s also a lot more expensive to run, isn’t it?

Dean Baker: That’s right. The average 401(k) has administrative costs of over roughly 1 percentage point a year. Now, one thing people get confused about, and I’ll try to explain it simply: that 1% is charged annually on the stock of money you have invested. The cost of Social Security, by comparison, is about 0.4% on the flow, meaning 0.4% of my annual benefit. The reason I distinguish stock and flow is this: if I want to get, say, $30,000 a year out of my 401(k), that money has to sit in the account year after year after year. Let’s say I start contributing in my twenties and pull the money out in my late sixties or seventies. On average, that money has been sitting there for maybe 20 years. So I was paying 1% each year for 20 years to generate that benefit, which means I end up paying about 20% of what I eventually receive. For Social Security, I’m only paying 0.4%. That’s the comparison: it’s roughly 40 times as expensive. That’s a lot of money essentially going down the drain.

Richard Eskow: Right. That’s a very important point. And then when we pivot to Medicare, you make another excellent point that I think rarely gets emphasized, and it shows how much they’ve stacked the rhetorical deck with these extreme framings. You point out that yes, people on Medicare cost more on average in healthcare than younger people. That’s a known actuarial reality. But that money isn’t going to them. If I receive $100,000 worth of medical treatment in a year, which, by the way, I actually do because I have a chronic illness, I’m not $100,000 richer. Someone else is getting that $100,000. A pharmaceutical company that could manufacture a pill for 70 cents is charging $20 for it. We could go on down the line: corporate-owned doctor’s offices, surgery centers, hospitals, profits baked in at every step. I think it feeds into this “greedy geezer” myth, that seniors are just spending hundreds of thousands like it’s water. Your subheading, I believe, was something like “Big bucks to hospitals and drug companies are not benefits to workers,” which is a great point. What have I left out that’s important there?

Dean Baker: The important thing is that it could be much less. We pay more than twice as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries. If you take the average of Germany, France, and Canada, the countries we used to compare ourselves to before Trump, we pay more than twice as much per person on healthcare. If we got our costs down to that average, our lifetime Medicare payments would be very similar to what we get back in benefits. So if someone says we’re paying too much for Medicare, I’m totally on board. Let’s cut the payments to the drug companies, the medical equipment suppliers, the hospitals. Let’s do that. But that’s not what they actually want to do.

Richard Eskow: They want to—

Dean Baker: They want to deny people benefits instead. And this comes up, it’s a bit of a sidebar, but with the Trump administration, when they talk about fraud in Medicaid, they make it sound like there’s this widespread abuse, and, you know, they’ll bring up undocumented immigrants who aren’t even eligible for the program in the first place, as if people are running off with the money. But insofar as there’s fraud in Medicaid, it’s going to providers. It’s not that some immigrant is pocketing large sums. Worst case, someone got a doctor’s visit paid for that maybe shouldn’t have been covered. But if someone is getting big money out of the system, it’s not the person receiving care. It’s literally not possible for it to be them.

Richard Eskow: And of course, the entire discussion about the federal deficit heated up recently because it passed the $40 trillion mark, although I suppose the value of the dollar has changed, so I’m not sure if that’s in constant dollars or not, but whatever the case, it reached a new high with real significance. But I haven’t seen much of that conversation focus on... I’ve heard plenty of people say we can’t afford the social contract, we have to cut Social Security and Medicare, we have to cut Medicaid, we have to cut anti-poverty programs. I haven’t heard nearly as many people say we can’t afford to sustain the level of corporate profits we’re currently paying for. In Medicare specifically, I think it’s a classic example. Nobody’s saying, hey, these margins, we’re happy you’re doing well, but maybe not quite this well. I know that sounds radical, and I am somewhat radical, but I’m making a broader point here: isn’t this more of the same kind of skewed framing you’ve been describing?

Dean Baker: Yeah, it comes down to what you choose to focus on. They want us to believe that people receiving Medicare and Social Security are living too well. I don’t mind if you want to say that about a small percentage of recipients, and honestly, taxing them more would be the best way to address that. But the vast majority of people aren’t living especially well on these benefits. Yet they want us to focus on that rather than on corporate profits going through the roof, or the tax burden, or the rich getting ever richer. Elon Musk, I don’t know exactly where he stands today, but he had a trillion dollars at one point earlier this year. There’s plenty of money out there. It’s just not going to the federal government. It’s not supporting people in this country. And that’s exactly why they don’t want us focused on it. They’d rather convince us that seniors are living too well.

Richard Eskow: So, to close out this part of the conversation on the assault on seniors: the good news, to me, is that despite decades of effort from Washington Post editorial board types (and, in fairness to Jeff Bezos, the paper was pretty rough before he bought it)...

Dean Baker: Absolutely.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. So, that said, the public remains strongly behind these programs. It’s no longer the case, as it was when you and I were railing against this 12 or 15 years ago, that both parties simply assumed these programs would have to be slashed, that “moderate” position of 100 kids instead of 200. There’s been real pushback, real progress. So in that sense, I feel more hopeful than I might have 12, 13, 14 years ago. What about you?

Dean Baker: Much more hopeful. The reality is overwhelming majorities of people across the political spectrum, even Republicans, support Social Security and Medicare, often over 80%, sometimes as high as 90%, depending on when the poll is taken and exactly how the question is phrased. There’s overwhelming support for these programs. That’s why it’s so difficult to get political traction for cuts, and why they resort to this subterfuge: “We like the program, we like the program, but what about just the people getting more than $100,000?” Because they know that’s a tiny share of recipients. Honestly, if you just said, fine, let’s shake hands and agree to cut benefits for people getting more than $100,000 and then stop talking about it, they’d run out of the room, because they know there’s no real money to be saved there. But it’s a hugely popular program, so they have to keep coming up with these tricks to get a foot in the door.

Richard Eskow: And by the way, Social Security income above roughly $25,000 is already taxed, so it’s not a complete free ride even for that hypothetical couple making $100,000. But before I let you go, Dean, and I apologize because this is completely unfair, we probably need a separate conversation for this, but you’ve been writing a lot about the AI bubble. Briefly, the more I read about it, the more I worry. The picture for a while has been that the AI companies themselves are the ones taking on the risk, but now I’m seeing signs that other financial institutions are exposed too. Something about JPMorgan Chase, something about hedge funds, the SEC looking into an investor fund that nearly collapsed. Are you worried this AI bubble, if and when it bursts, could pose a broader risk to the financial system?

Dean Baker: Yeah, I’m worried it could lead to a recession. The stock market right now is worth around $75 trillion in total value. If we had normal price-to-earnings ratios, it would be worth about half that. I don’t know that it’ll fall all the way back down, but a loss of $20 or $30 trillion in market value is a very plausible scenario. That’s almost certain to trigger a recession, for two reasons: we’d see a huge fall-off in AI investment, which is massive right now, and it would hit consumption hard. A lot of people have $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 in their 401(k)s. If that gets cut in half, they’re going to pull back on spending significantly. So that’s almost certainly a recession if the bubble bursts.

I’ll give you two reasons I’m fairly confident it is a bubble. First, at the end of the day, it comes down to how much you can actually sell the AI for. Nvidia, the chipmaker, is making a lot of money right now, and they are. But they’re selling their chips to the hyperscalers, the data center operators, largely Microsoft, Alphabet, and a few other big companies. Those companies are betting they can sell the output to firms like Anthropic and OpenAI, the two biggest players. The question is whether those companies will actually become hugely profitable. Everyone involved says, oh yes, absolutely.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: But there’s no real evidence for that. In fact, a lot of good analysis has found that the vast majority of tasks people want AI to perform could be handled with much simpler, cheaper models. They don’t need these massive hyperscaler systems. Chinese AI models reportedly cost a tenth of what ours do.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: So I don’t think the big profits are actually there. The other part of the story, and it’s surprising to me it doesn’t get more attention, is that we have economic growth projections. Projections can be wrong, of course, but people in Washington generally treat the Congressional Budget Office as the authoritative source. If the AI story were true, that these companies are about to become hugely profitable, we’d expect to see a massive surge in projected productivity growth. We don’t see that.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: Maybe the CBO is wrong. They have been at times. But they’d have to be hugely wrong here, and these are the same people who treat CBO projections as authoritative on every other issue. Suddenly, when it comes to AI, they act like the CBO has no idea what it’s talking about. So either the CBO doesn’t know what it’s doing, in which case stop citing it as authoritative on other issues too, or it’s roughly right, and we’re not going to see the kind of economic growth surge that AI proponents are promising.

Richard Eskow: And if we don’t see that growth, the ripple effects could be significant. We’ll also be left with a lot of torn-up land around the country where ground has been broken for data centers. A friend of mine in rural Wisconsin sent me a video of himself driving past one of these mega-centers. It just went on and on. I don’t think people realize the scale of these hyperscale facilities. They’re massive, and if they go into full operation, they’ll be massive consumers of energy too.

Dean Baker: And water. That’s exactly why, in my view, the sooner this bursts, the better. It doesn’t help anyone to have it drag on for another six months, a year, two years. I don’t have a crystal ball. I was warning about the housing bubble, and it lasted way longer than I expected. I was warning about the tech bubble in the ‘90s, and that lasted a long time too. So I don’t know how long this will go or exactly what will trigger the correction, but I’ll say this: the sooner it happens, the better.

Richard Eskow: You were, by the way, in closing, one of the lone voices warning about the tech bubble back when almost no one else was saying it. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but afterward, I remember Alan Greenspan or some other policymaker saying something like, nobody I knew was saying this would be a bubble. And I thought, well, maybe you need to meet some new people. So, with that, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, thanks as always for your great work and your great insights, and thanks for coming on the program.

Dean Baker: Thanks, Richard. I really enjoyed the discussion.

Richard Eskow: Me too.

Just something to think about …

(FYI: I’m going to try to publish something every day, or close to every day, even if it’s small. I consider an experiment—and a kind of self-test.)

It was 1974. I was trying and failing to make my way in the world. I had spent every dollar I had on my first car, which threw a rod the first time I took it out onto the highway. I worked a temporary job for a week so I could buy an old Volkswagen bug that some guy in the neighborhood had built from spare parts. The paint on that car was mostly red—except for the hood, which was blue, and the right rear fender, which was a non-specific shade of green. All of it was shot through with rust.

I knew that vehicle was a risky proposition, but he only wanted fifty bucks for it and I’d only earned sixty. I needed a car for a job interview across the bay, so I bought it. I really, really needed that job.

The interviewer’s face made it clear that I wasn’t going to get it. The VW’s little engine was making a threatening sound as I made my way home down back roads, headed toward the bridge in the oncoming dusk. It began to rain, which is when I discovered that the windshield wipers didn’t work. And then Dolly Parton’s voice came through the tinny radio:

“If I should stay, I’ll only be in your way ...”

I pulled off the road and cried.

That was not my first encounter with Dolly Parton. Raised on rock and roll, I had discovered country music as a teenager in upstate New York when Merle Haggard sang “Mama Tried” on a network TV variety show. The following week, George Jones sang “A Picture of Me (Without You)”. I would sing country music for the rest of my life.

I lived for the broadcasts I could catch from WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, late at night, when the “radio bounce” off the ionosphere was just right. Porter Wagoner and Dolly (his “girl singer,” as they were called back then) were my favorites, and that led me to her solo records.

She could write, she was smart, she was funny—and she could tear your heart out with her voice. None of the obituaries I’ve read this week have mentioned the song that first hooked me on that voice. Like many of her early songs, “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” is about a young woman who makes the wrong choices and descends into tragedy. It’s a tale as old as the hills, as old as the songs passed down through the generations that lived and died in those hills. But she made it seem fresh. And the way she sang them! The melisma when she sang the word “mountain”—it felt like you could fit a whole dictionary in those two syllables.

Were those songs melodramatic or emotionally over-wrought? I guess you could say that, although nowadays any criticism of Dolly would be treated as heresy. But I had spent most of my then-short life shutting down my emotions. Songs like Dolly’s forced them back open.

Besides, she never played the victim for very long. Songs like “Dumb Blonde” and “Just Because a Woman” were subversively feminist, even if the coastal elites had never heard them. “This dumb blonde is nobody’s fool,” one said. “My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I’m a woman,” said the other. And “To Daddy,” with its twist ending …

By 1974 I had already seen Porter and Dolly play a country music package show in London’s Wembley Stadium and a concert in Berkeley. (I can’t remember where they played that show, but I do recall that a few members of the Grateful Dead waited on line with us to get Porter and Dolly’s autographs.)

A friend and onetime bandmate of mine texted me yesterday when the news of her death came out. “You helped me realize what a force of nature she was,” he wrote. I’ve been a Dolly Parton evangelist for a long time—one of millions, as it turns out.

People on the left are honoring Dolly today for her embrace of marginalized groups, for her warm spirit and her charitable works (including distributing books to poor schoolchildren). John Nichols reminds us that, in the words of The Nation’s headline for his piece, “Dolly was a proud union sister.”

That she was, but she was also that rarest of creatures: an American who seemed to transcend left and right in the very best of ways. Politics? Dolly practiced the politics of love. People loved her because she seemed to love them. Love was her most radical quality. It was her most Christian quality, too. Her love was made radical by the breadth of her embrace. Poor, lonely, White, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, atheist, Jew, Muslim: nobody seemed to be outside the circle.

(When Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens was detained by US immigration and denied entry in 2004, he was on his way to Nashville to record his song “Peace Train” as a duet with Dolly.)

Her radical acceptance extended to people that might have seemed to exploit her. I was struck by this exchange with interviewer Jad Abumrad, who pointed to a picture of her with Porter Wagoner. As Abumrad puts it, “Mr. Wagoner in his pimp jacket has his arm around her as if he owned her.”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that,” Dolly replied.

“... When he hired me as a singer, he was just hiring what he thought was a ripe, pretty little girl. But I was a serious writer. He didn’t know that. I was a serious entertainer. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know how many dreams I had.”

How many women have felt the proprietary embrace of a man who didn’t know “how many dreams she had”? And how rare for any human being, having been mistreated, to be so empathic in return?

It raises the question, however naïve: could a true politics of empathy change the world? We’ll probably never know. Dolly Parton may have been the last unifying force the American community will ever see. She may have been the last true American.

I hope not. Everybody loves Dolly Parton, and everybody knows how to cry. In fact, everyone who has struggled in this life knows exactly how I felt when I sat and wept in my “Car of Many Colors,” one rainy evening on a back-country California road all those long years ago.

I’ve made a Spotify playlist of some songs Dolly wrote and sang, leaning on heavily on the early country years.

I spoke this week with Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about what he calls the “mutual delusion” driving both sides of the Ukraine war. He writes, “Hardliners on both sides in the Ukraine war are pursuing a chimaera in the hope of a miracle.”

Lieven adds:

“It is hard to know what would be worse: if we are being deliberately lied to, or if these retired officers and security ‘experts’ heralding imminent victory for Ukraine actually believe this nonsense. Most probably, the political, bureaucratic, media, academic and think tank consensus in Europe has now become so monolithic and absolute that they do believe it, since nobody is saying anything different ...

“The situation on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine now resembles the stalemate on the Western Front in 1916 ...”

“There is a sort of delirium in Europe,” he told me. Please give our interview a listen. A (lightly edited) transcript is below.

Link:

“Mutual Delusion,” August 7 2026:
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mutual-delusion

This work is only possible with reader support. Please help with a paid subscription through Substack or Patreon. Many thanks.

Transcript

[begins with intro excerpt]

Richard Eskow: Let’s start with your piece that was published about a week ago, headlined “Mutual Delusion,” which begins: “Hardliners on both sides in the Ukraine war are pursuing a chimera in the hope of a miracle.” You went on to say briefly that Moscow seems to hope Ukraine’s defenses will collapse.

First of all, is that still your summary of the situation, that there is a sort of chimerical pursuit on both sides?

Anatol Lieven: Yes, I think so. Not, of course, among sensible analysts in either Moscow or Kyiv, but undoubtedly there are highly influential hardliners, including, it seems, among the Russian generals, who do hope that somehow the situation will be miraculously transformed in their favor.

I would say that if the Russians go on and on and on slogging away, and if they’re capable of continuing to slog away, they have a better chance, not of a complete victory, which is impossible now for Russia, but of a greater victory than Ukraine does. But the Russian advance on the ground for the past three years has been agonizingly slow. Casualties have been enormous. The Ukrainians, in my view, have actually succeeded. They’ve won a great victory simply by slowing the Russians down and preserving more than 80 percent of Ukrainian territory. But unfortunately, and unfortunately encouraged by some of their Western supporters, they have been holding out for terms that Russia will never concede to.

There’s one Russian demand which I understand very well, and which every Ukrainian says to me no Ukrainian government can agree to, and that is withdrawal from the remainder of the Donbas region that Ukraine still holds. But Ukraine is also trying to, well, the Ukrainian government, at least, not, I think, a great many ordinary Ukrainians or even some more sensible members of the Ukrainian elite, the Ukrainian government is still demanding the right to join NATO, the right to have European troops on Ukrainian soil, and refusing to grant any language protections to the Russian language in Ukraine.

Basically, if those positions are maintained, just as, on the other side, if Putin’s demand for the rest of the Donbas is maintained, they rule out a compromise. So do the positions adopted not just by the Ukrainians, but by the European Union as well.

Eskow: And I think before we get into the delusions, precisely what those are, and you’ve begun to outline them, I also want to give you my impression, and you tell me where I’m right or wrong.

If I recall correctly, within the first year of this war, both the U.S. head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military officer in this country, and his equivalent in Ukraine seemed to agree that it was more or less a morass, that it was a stalemate, I believe, is the word that was used. And since then we’ve seen enormous, it seems to me, resourcefulness on the part of the Ukrainians in adapting and using drone technology and other, perhaps unexpected, strategies to resist. But still, years later, it seems to me that the assessment those two generals made, perhaps it was early 2023, is still essentially the same.

Am I wrong about that?

Lieven: No, you’re absolutely right. And the tragedy, and I would say also the profound culpability, of the Biden administration and European governments as well was that, instead of being willing to recognize that reality, they went on demanding that Russia withdraw from and hand back all the territory in Ukraine that it had conquered, not just since the start of the war, which actually, in the peace talks at the start of the war, Russia offered to do, but since 2014, including Crimea.

Well, there was no way that any Russian government could possibly agree to that. What they were basically saying was: There is going to be no peace settlement. Our goal is complete Ukrainian victory, although their own, as you say, best military experts and leaders had told them that that was exceptionally unlikely to happen.

Eskow: And there’s another dimension of this conflict that concerns me that never seems to get, I shouldn’t say never, rarely seems to get discussed in the mainstream media in the West, at least that I’ve seen.

And it’s this: There’s a lot of talk about Ukraine’s possible victory, or partial victory, or whatever. But what seems to be left out of those equations is that they’re assuming this remains a ground war, a war of inches as it is now, and disregarding the fact that Russia has the capability, as horrific as it might be, to escalate. If Russia doesn’t want to give something up and they’re struggling to win it on the battlefield, they have missiles, they have tactical nuclear weapons, they have all sorts of weapons of mass destruction.

In a sense, it almost feels as if, I’m sure this isn’t the case, but as one who’s been attacked as a so-called Putin apologist myself for suggesting a peaceful end to this war, it seems to me they have a more benevolent view of Putin’s intentions than I do. Because it seems to me that either he or his generals might, at some point, insist on escalating this war if it doesn’t go their way, in ways that would be tragic and potentially destabilizing at levels we can’t even imagine yet.

Am I being melodramatic about this?

Lieven: No, because this is what Russian hardliners have been urging Putin to do. But so far, he has always rejected that. I’ve talked to people who formerly advised Putin, and they say Putin knows perfectly well that to threaten really credibly to use nuclear weapons, in the hope that the West would back down and abandon Ukraine or force Ukraine to make a peace settlement on Russian terms, would require that if the West refused, Putin would actually use nuclear weapons.

Well, at that point, of course, not only would Russia be utterly discredited in the eyes of the entire world, including the Chinese, who have warned very strongly against this, but it would invite, indeed could almost compel, Western nuclear attacks on Russia, which would, of course, lead to universal catastrophe. Putin, I think, knows that perfectly well.

The risk is not of an intentional, deliberate use of nuclear weapons, but that there will be some kind of clash which will then lead to escalation, and both sides will be trapped into a path toward full-scale war between NATO and Russia, which neither side actually wants. That is why I always say the situation now is more like, it’s not like Europe before 1939, when Hitler was planning universal domination. Putin has no such agenda. It’s much more like the situation before 1914—

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: —in which all the states concerned thought that they were acting rationally and defending vital national interests, but the result was still catastrophe.

Now, for an example of the kind of clash that could lead to such escalation, as you know, for a year or more now, sometimes the Americans but more often the Europeans and British have been seizing ships with Russian cargoes, the so-called Russian shadow fleet. Now, this has absolutely no sanction from the United Nations. If any country were to do that to us, we would describe it as piracy, which is what not just the Russians but the Indians and the Chinese describe it as.

Well, so far Russia has not retaliated against that, of course, above all because Russia is wholly, totally outclassed at sea by NATO navies. But Putin has now threatened that if the Europeans continue to do this, Russia will start seizing European ships, not, of course, American ones, and perhaps not even British or French ones, but ships belonging to smaller European navies. That, of course, will cause a huge crisis and, on top of the war in the Gulf, a surge in maritime insurance rates.

If, of course, you then have a military intervention by European navies to stop that, then there is a chance, a really strong chance, of something which, thank God, we have managed to avoid for four and a half years, which is a direct military clash between NATO and Russia.

Eskow: And in trying to understand NATO’s position in this, and I understand that, well, first of all, NATO is essentially an artifact of the Cold War, and that it was U.S.-led for many years, it seems now that NATO is not a unitary organization by any means anymore, and that Western Europe and its members may have a slightly different agenda.

It seemed as if they had a dramatically different agenda from Donald Trump when he came into office. Joe Biden seemed to be a leading belligerent when it came to Russia and Ukraine. Trump was telling a different story about how it wasn’t America’s war and that sort of thing. Now it seems as if the leading advocates for ongoing war may be in Western Europe, and Trump is sort of going along with it. Is that your understanding?

Lieven: Pretty much. Of course, the Trump administration is completely distracted now by the war that it launched against Iran. But also, it did try pretty hard to bring the two sides to an agreement, but it could not get the Ukrainians, the Europeans, or the Russians to give up demands that were simply unacceptable to the other side.

But, of course, in addition, America is now selling weapons to the Europeans to give to the Ukrainians. America is providing absolutely critically important satellite intelligence and targeting intelligence to the Ukrainians. But this war is not now actually costing America anything, except, of course, in terms of higher international oil prices. Trump, at the moment, seems content that this war should simply trundle on as long, of course, as it doesn’t escalate in ways that threaten the United States.

It should be said, though, that the Europeans themselves are divided. Southern European countries are much less committed to Ukraine than are some of the Eastern Europeans and Scandinavians. The Scandinavians, of course, at the same time are looking over their shoulders with deep fear because of Trump’s threats to Greenland, which would, of course, if implemented, split NATO down the middle.

And then you have, within European countries, both right-wing and left-wing oppositions that are opposed to further aid to Ukraine. And we have to see, it won’t change the government in Germany, but we have to see what happens in two German, or East German, state elections next month and how successful AfD, the right-wing populist party, is.

But above all, next spring there are presidential elections in France. If Marine Le Pen and Rassemblement National win, I think there could be real French opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine at the present level. The key, the absolute vulnerability of Ukraine compared to Russia, is that, in effect, Ukraine’s entire state budget and by far the greater part of its war effort are being paid for by the European Union and Britain.

If that aid is stopped or significantly reduced, Ukraine will either have to agree to Russian terms or will be defeated. Russia, for its part, although Ukraine has done some serious economic damage, still pays for its own war effort. That gives it, in the long run, a critical potential advantage over Ukraine.

Eskow: Because it’s not dependent on the largesse of some third party.

Lieven: Exactly.

Eskow: Speaking of Western Europe and third parties, as you know, last month was Bastille Day in France, and French President Emmanuel Macron declared on that occasion that Europeans were ready to defend their continent, and I quote, obviously in translation, “with blood if necessary.” And he brought together 25 leaders to show their support for Ukraine.

I must admit, I don’t get shocked by a lot. I was shocked by the vehemence, a little bit shocked by the vehemence, of Macron’s rhetoric. And I’m not sure what precisely they think they’re defending themselves against. Are they seriously thinking that Ukraine is the first front, and then the Russians want to roll through and take Paris?

What is this about exactly? Can you help me understand?

Lieven: Well, there is a sort of delirium in Europe. You see everybody in the establishment, not just in government and in the administration and bureaucracy and the security services, but in the great majority of the media and the think tanks. Indeed, in Britain, every think tank and all the media are saying exactly the same thing. And this being so, a lot of people, including politicians, believe it because they’re not hearing anything else.

Now, of course, behind a lot of this is the belief, which is not unfounded, and which has, of course, been assiduously stoked by the armed forces themselves, that European countries have allowed their armed forces to decline to a very great extent, even to a potentially dangerous extent. And you need to spend more money on them. But, of course, money is very tight.

How do you get European publics and European parliaments and political parties to support more money for the military, even if this requires cuts in health services and social welfare? Well, you’ve got to persuade them that if you don’t, the Russian bear will come and eat their children.

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: Now, that said, if Macron meant by that that European countries would have to fight if NATO itself is attacked, well, that is what NATO is for.

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: If they are not prepared to do that, you might as well wind up NATO now. But, of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO. If, as European hardliners are urging, he means that Europe should send troops to fight in Ukraine, that’s a totally different matter.

European publics are strongly against this in general. Most European governments have said no to it, including even the Poles and the Germans. And Le Pen’s party, Rassemblement National, has said categorically it will never send French troops to fight in Ukraine.

The British go on talking about this, but last year the former head of the British Army, General Dannatt, pointed out that the British Army is now so small that to send just one brigade to Ukraine permanently would basically mean using the entire deployable British Army, which, by the way, would mean there were no British troops left over to defend existing NATO members in the Baltic, for example, which, of course, is ridiculous.

Much of this is hot air. But it’s still dangerous, because every time a Western leader says these kinds of things, it strengthens the arguments of hardliners in Moscow—

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: —that Europe is implacably hostile to Russia, and there is no point in seeking any kind of settlement in Ukraine because the Europeans will never agree to it, and therefore the only thing to aim for is military victory.

Eskow: And speaking of NATO and the obligations of NATO countries when attacked, I think that concern for me was heightened a little bit.

We’re speaking on August 13th. On August 10th, it was reported that a Ukrainian drone attack hit the city of, I’m going to try to pronounce this right, Nizhny Komsomolsk, Russia, which is well beyond the front lines. At least 13 people were killed, according to initial reports, and 39 or 40 others wounded. They struck civilian and industrial sites. There’s also an oil refinery there. There’s talk of a child being killed.

Obviously, one fear is that, you know, a stray attack striking a school, as happened in Tehran, might escalate things dramatically. But the other is the concern that the more, and the more boldly, Ukraine attacks deep into Russian territory, killing Russian civilians as part of a NATO-backed effort, that may spark a direct response.

I think Putin may have even threatened a direct response to NATO. But doesn’t that, it strikes me as a highly risky strategy.

Lieven: Well, yes. You only have to turn it around. If the territory of the United States itself were being attacked by somebody’s missiles provided by Russia or China, and to a great extent targeted by Russia and China, well, you can imagine, of course, the United States would retaliate directly against those countries.

It would never accept for a single second that those countries were neutral or not parties to the war. Of course, Russia has not retaliated directly because the Russians are desperately anxious that NATO should not intervene directly on the side of Ukraine. But as you said, there is always the risk of some catastrophic accident that would compel Putin to respond militarily against NATO.

Now, that said, of course, you can’t blame the Ukrainians for bombarding Russia. Russia has been bombarding Ukraine for four and a half years now.

Eskow: Sure.

Lieven: But Ukraine is at war with Russia. We are not at war with Russia. And indeed, all our governments have said repeatedly that they do not want to go to war with Russia.

Well, if they’re sincere about that, there is a case for them being a great deal more careful. Because, as you said, if a Ukrainian missile goes astray and kills a couple hundred Russian schoolchildren, Putin will, I think, attack NATO targets. Not in Britain or France, but in the Baltic States, especially because the Russians believe that the Balts have been allowing Ukrainian drones to fly over their territory on the way to attack St. Petersburg.

I don’t know whether that is actually true, but what is certainly true is that, until recently, they did nothing to stop this happening.

Eskow: And Ukraine is also, since we mentioned Tehran a couple of times, has also now intercepted an Iranian vessel bound for Russia, as I understand it. Some people have said this may have been a strategy on Ukraine’s part to position itself as essentially a military ally of the United States in the Iran war.

What did you make of that action?

Lieven: Well, on the one hand, Iran has been supplying Russia, not, of course, since the American-Israeli attack on Iran, but previously they were supplying Russia with Shahed drones, for example. But it is also true that, for very understandable Ukrainian reasons, since the start of the Russian invasion the Ukrainian government has been doing everything it can to drag the U.S. and NATO into a direct confrontation with Russia.

Now, NATO has always backed away from that. And partly, of course, because Putin’s nuclear bluster has been completely, or deliberately, I would say, often misrepresented in the West. He’s not been threatening to use nuclear weapons simply for the sake of it. And indeed, I don’t believe there is any chance of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine unless NATO troops appear there.

But the point of these nuclear threats is precisely to deter NATO from taking a direct part in the Ukraine war. But I think one thing is certain: If NATO did join the war and it looked as if Russia was facing defeat, well, that’s what Russian, you know, it’s no different from us during the Cold War.

The U.S. nuclear deterrent was there to be used if it seemed that we were being defeated on the ground by Soviet conventional forces. No different with the Russians. If they see themselves facing defeat on their own borders in Ukraine, then yes, they will use nuclear weapons.

Eskow: And maybe to wrap up, Anatol, it seems to me that, to summarize the history as I see it, and you, of course, correct me if you think I’m wrong, there was a lot of provocation of various kinds leading up to this.

I think this war could have been avoided. That said, Ukraine is the wronged party here. They were illegally invaded by Russia. That said, there are only so many ways out of it, and those appear only to be reachable through negotiation. And it doesn’t seem as if negotiation is on anyone’s agenda right now.

Perhaps it would be on Ukraine’s agenda if they understood that the West was not going to support them in an indefinite war that was mainly killing Ukrainians. Certainly a peaceful settlement in that case would be better. But it seems to me as if the only solutions are ones that are not politically acceptable among any of the involved parties at this point.

Is that accurate?

Lieven: Well, I do not know. Most of the Russians say that the demand for the whole of the Donbas is non-negotiable. Well, certainly that’s what the hardliners believe.

It has been suggested to me that if the West were to offer, and Ukraine were to offer, serious compromises on other key issues, because, of course, a lot of this is about being able to present, and this is true for Zelensky as well as Putin, the eventual settlement as a victory for Russia or for Ukraine.

If we perhaps, and I don’t guarantee it by any means, but perhaps if we were to give Putin enough things in other areas that he could declare victory, perhaps he would give up this impossible demand. On the other side, Russia will never accept that Ukraine be in NATO. This has to be explicitly ruled out in any peace settlement.

Because that was the key reason why Russia went to war. If Russia accepts that, it accepts defeat. Well, the former and most successful Ukrainian military commander, General Zaluzhnyi, who was pushed out by Zelensky and is now ambassador to London, said last week: Look, Ukraine is never going to get into NATO because Western countries will never fight for us. This is meaningless. Let us seek alternatives.

Well, he is a very influential voice. If the war continues into next year, as I fear it will, and if Russian attacks, as they are doing, do terrible damage to Ukrainian electricity, and the Ukrainian population has a very hard winter, and millions more people, of course, flee and emigrate to the West, it could be that by next spring you’ll have a situation in which the Ukrainian government will be willing to offer compromises on wider issues.

But it is essential then that the Europeans also come on board. And, of course, the United States and the U.S. Senate, because what the Russians are afraid of, and with very good reason, given what the Trump administration has done in the past, and, of course, they think Clinton as well, is that any agreement made today could be torn up by a U.S. administration after 2028.

They want a consensus between all the Western powers, and they want something signed and sealed. That will be very, very, very difficult. But, as I say, if the whole Ukrainian position does seem to be crumbling, then perhaps, perhaps it will be possible. But not, I think, this year.

It will take another dreadful winter. It will take tens of thousands more deaths on both sides.

Eskow: Well, it’s tragic that it’s come to this. But as always, Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, thanks for your excellent research and analysis, and thank you for coming on the program.

Lieven: Thank you. It was a great pleasure.

“Genocide deniers” have been social pariahs since World War II, and rightfully so. The term was first used to describe some fringe political figures on the fascist far right who claimed the Holocaust never occurred. It was a hoax, they insisted, and a slander against the German people. No one, especially no one with liberal views, would have considered joining them as they denied the reality and horror of 20^th-century genocide.

The new genocide deniers are a very different breed. They often see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and liberal. On some issues, they often are. But their reaction to Israel’s violence against Gaza, the 21^st century’s most visible genocide, is to dismiss its true nature with the wave of a hand.

The most visible of the new genocide deniers lately has been former pop star Boy George, whose song, “We Will Dance Again,” earned wide publicity for lyrics such as, “You say genocide, I say war/When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for.”

(I confess I haven’t listened to the song, nor do I intend to. That’s not based on any moral objections, but on the widely-reported fact that the music was generated with AI. My psyche has been polluted enough by AI music, which is the esthetic equivalent of microplastics in the brain. I don’t need to hear the backing track to respond to the lyrics.)

An entire essay could be written on the words “when you’re attacked,” but anybody who still doesn’t know about the 78-year brutalization of Palestine clearly doesn’t want to know. (For many years, I didn’t know either. Some of us have had to deprogram ourselves.) What caught my eye, however, was that flat declaration—“You say genocide, I say war”—that caught my eye. He’s not calling the reports from Gaza a hoax, but that’s the signature move for the new genocide deniers. They don’t deny reality; they deny the meaning of reality.

These deniers don’t seem to believe that knowledge, research, or legal authority have any bearing on this issue. Anyone with a platform can issue a ruling and expected it to be respected.

While Boy George is the current face of the new genocide deniers, he’s far from alone. Social media is filled with self-declared experts on the subject, from random strangers to pundits with some level of online visibility. Take, for example, the ‘centrist’ blogger Noah Smith, who declared on X that “Israel hasn’t yet committed genocide.”

Noah Smith makes Boy George look like Dag Hammarskjöld. At least the Boy tries to justify his position, however ineptly. Smith apparently thinks a simple declaration typed on his keyboard should suffice. And who is Noah Smith? According to his blog, he’s a former economics professor and columnist. “Basically,” he writes, “I’m just a guy who writes about economics.”

(This serves to strengthen my longtime suspicion—based on personal experience as well as observation—that an economics background is more likely to impede critical thinking than improve it. The smart economists I know have had to deprogram themselves, too.)

What’s especially irritating about Smith’s highhandedness (yes, I’m irritated; why hide it?) is that he’s responding to a reasonable observation by Shadi Hamid, a political scientist who possesses actual expertise. Hamid had tweeted:

“It’s frustrating that a lot of otherwise smart people still don’t know what the legal definition of ‘genocide’ is. It does not mean trying to kill every single member of a group. Pro-Israel commentators keep saying things like, ‘if Israel wanted to, it could have killed every Gazan’ as if this is some sort of defense of Israel’s morality.”

Hamid is right. There isn’t room enough to list all of the official bodies, NGOs, and experts who agree with him, although I have placed a partial list at the bottom of this page. Here is Smith’s full reply:

“Israel hasn’t yet committed genocide. But they very well might, in the near future. And if and when they do, the Palestine movement won’t have any additional accusations to make; they made them all preemptively.”

To the casual reader, this may look like an attempt to be reasonable. It is not. It is an example of what online culture calls “concern trolling,” where the commenter pretends to care about others in order to belittle or dismiss them. And, as Nathan J. Robinson points out, the mention of the “Palestine movement” implies that only pro-Palestinian (or is that “pro-Hamas”?) partisans make this claim.

Some American Jews struggle when they hear the term ‘genocide’ applied to the actions of the State of Israel. This is especially likely if they, like me and many others, were raised with an idealized image of that state. The genocide charge, however well-documented, triggers pain, cognitive dissonance, and—sometimes, tragically—an unwillingness to accept the truth.

The new genocide deniers are different. Many, like Boy George, are not Jewish. What drives them is not a history of generational trauma or a partisan upbringing. They have other motives. Some of them are defending the pro-Israel right. Some are defending the Democratic Party establishment. Some are just in love with their own voices. Whatever their motives, however, they share an arrogant disregard for both the rule of law and the importance of knowledge.

They may not be the brutal extremists of old. When it comes to genocide, however, they are deniers just the same. In the end, to deny a crime is to share in its evil.

The following have affirmed that Israel has conducted genocide in Gaza (partial list):

UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry
International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)
Physicians for Human Rights Israel
Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)
B’Tselem (Israeli human rights group)
Amnesty International
Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor
International Federation for Human Rights
Center for Constitutional Rights
Doctors Against Genocide
Mennonite Central Committee
American Friends Service Committee
United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People
European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights
Human Rights Watch
Christian Aid
Médecins du Monde
Defence for Children International
Oxfam
Melanie O’Brien, genocide scholar
Martin Shaw, genocide scholar
Omer Bartov, genocide scholar

Charges of genocide against Israel are under review by the following:

The International Criminal Court (ICC)
The International Court of Justice (ICJ)

Video: Richard Wolff and Richard Eskow.

As Professor Wolff and I discussed in this conversation, Republicans are exploiting public rage by directing it against an individual rather than a system. It’s not necessary to idealize Anthony Fauci to see what’s going on here. People are furious about a system that has exploited and sickened so many of us. By focusing that furyon Fauci, they’re drawing attention away from a greed-driven healthcare economy that gives us so little but costs us so much.

That rage made Luigi Mangione a folk hero when he was arrested for shooting an insurance executive. That’s a shocking indicator of public desperation. In a more hopeful sign, primary voters chose public health physician Abdul El-Sayed as their Senate candidate in Michigan.

As John F. Kennedy said in 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Here’s hoping for a peaceful revolution that benefits all of us.

Selected quotes and a transcript are below.

This work is only possible with reader support. Please help with a paid subscription through Substack or Patreon. Thank you.

Selected Quotes

Eskow:

“Fauci represents an otherwise faceless elite that is controlling their lives.”

“For-profit health holds people hostage to an economic system that could literally take their lives at any time.”

“There are two things you can do about this sick system: You can find a scapegoat like Anthony Fauci, or you can fight for a better system.”

“If the institutional leaders of this country are determined to close off all avenues for peaceful change, they’re playing with fire.”

Wolff:

“I have all my life marveled at and felt completely horrified by the spectacle of healthcare being organized as a capitalist enterprise.”

“They argue that whatever maximizes profit maximizes the quality and the quantity of healthcare. If you believe that, the rest follows. But if you don’t believe that, the result is an abomination.”

“That’s how capitalism works. It makes everything subject to its logic, if not directly, well, then indirectly.”

“It’s the same system that produces inequality. And I think that, underneath, it’s tearing the country apart.”

Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: I’ve been fascinated, and horrified in many ways, by the interrogation of Anthony Fauci by Republicans in the United States Senate. Fauci is, of course, the former NIH director, former health czar, and go-to person for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the COVID epidemic. It certainly led me to ponder a lot of things.

He’s also become the source of all sorts of demonization on the right, much of which, as others have pointed out, is self-contradictory, that he downplayed the pandemic but also didn’t do enough to protect American lives, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the underlying issues, first, the pandemic itself, and second, Dr. Fauci and people’s feelings toward him, have gone largely unnoticed or unremarked upon.

With the timeliness of the Fauci inquisition upon us, and we’re speaking on Thursday, August 6th, the Senate is considering a contempt of Congress action against him for pleading the Fifth Amendment, which is itself an extraordinary sight: a top American scientist and government official pleading the Fifth after receiving a blanket pardon from a past president.

But all that aside, I’ve given you a hint of the context in which I view these Fauci hearings. To start off, what’s yours?

Richard Wolff: Mine is kind of simple, and maybe too simple, but I’ve marveled all my life, and felt completely horrified, by the spectacle of healthcare being organized as a capitalist enterprise. In other words, undertaken by people who are both self-consciously and publicly engaged in a profit-maximizing activity. Once you make it a capitalist enterprise, it’s governed by the rules of that kind of enterprise.

And that kind of enterprise depends on generating a market for whatever it is you make, and saving money in the production of it. If you marry, as we do in America, a capitalized healthcare system with the advertising business, well, what do you get? You get exactly what we know we get. And, by the way, this does not exist in many other countries. You get direct-to-consumer advertising by the device maker, the drug maker, the practitioner, the hospital, whatever it may be. They’re all busily advertising, making money.

So the only way to believe in this system, if you’ll pardon my editorializing, is to believe the following nonsense: that whatever maximizes profit maximizes the quality and quantity of healthcare.

If you believe that, the rest follows. But if you don’t believe it, the rest is an abomination. I don’t believe it, and therefore, for me, it is absolutely an abomination. I live in New York City. My doctor is located on Park Avenue, a very ritzy area of the city. Why? Well, it turns out more doctors are concentrated along Park Avenue than anywhere else in the world. That’s not a rational distribution of healthcare, that’s the opposite: irrational.

Why? Because it’s very prestigious. They all want to be able to say, “I’m a doctor, and here’s my address on Park Avenue.” That’s worth a great deal in building up a doctor’s practice. So the doctor will spend the big bucks to have an office on the first floor of a building on Park Avenue. It’s very typical, if you walk down the avenue, it’s one doctor’s office after another.

Similarly, a drug that’s advertised on the evening news or in the pages of magazines that come to your home is going to be the drug you hear about, that you talk about, that you ask your doctor about. They’re building demand, that’s why they have an advertising budget.

And if you know anything about the economics of healthcare, I’ll give you one example. It’s a standard joke we use to explain this to economics students. We ask them to name a well-known over-the-counter medication. They do, Tylenol, or whichever one it might be. Then I show them a statistic: what does it cost to make the little pill in that jar? The answer is three cents, six cents, ridiculously low.

What does it cost to distribute it? Five cents, ten cents. What does it cost to advertise it? A dollar. And what does the final price cover? So it turns out, if you understand advertising, the healthcare industry charges enough money to pay the advertisers, and it’s the people who pay for that. This is craziness.

It means that promotion by the producer generates the profit maximization, but in direct relation to how much money you’re prepared to spend on advertising. It has nothing to do with the science of healthcare, or with any kind of healing mentality. It’s crazy.

If you go into a drugstore, one of the big chains, CVS or Walgreens or any other, you’ll see how the shelves are lined up. Whatever is advertised is at eye level, so you’ll go and pay for it. It’s so blatant that the big chains will put Tylenol on the shelf, and right next to it, the generic equivalent, the exact same medication, at a markedly lower price, under the store’s own name. Because it’s so crazy, even within capitalism, you can make a profit without all the rest of it.

And then, when you add that Americans are financially pinched, well, then they’re either going to do without medication or buy the cheaper version. And the minute you allow cheaper medication, you’re inviting a real problem with criminality in how these medications are composed, using the same materials but altering the process to save money.

I read the other day that there’s now a serious problem in the number of Americans who, in polling, say they’ve forgone a meeting with a medical practitioner in order to save money. That number has gone off the charts. And there’s your proof of what suffers as a result: medical care.

Richard Eskow: I was going to point this out, and I will now, because it’s very important to the context in which I view all this. I think, in many ways, the hostility toward Fauci as an individual, it stands for many things to me, it’s a proxy for many things.

But one of the things it’s a proxy for is the fact that Americans are in a deep state of anxiety, understandably so, about their own healthcare, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. US statistics on healthcare have always been far worse than those of any other developed country, both in terms of life expectancy and other measures. The number of people who have turned down or avoided needed medical care, as you just mentioned, has always been much higher here, and is now rising even further.

And while rank-and-file people may not necessarily want to, or be inclined to, ascribe this to corporate greed, although I think more of them do than liberals and centrists are willing to admit, I think there’s a profound anxiety, and I think Fauci has become representative, to them, of an otherwise faceless elite that’s controlling their lives.

So if they can take vengeance through their elected officials on Fauci, it brings them some sort of catharsis. And to me, this ties into the fact that drugs were unaffordable. Everybody who’s an adult now remembers, somewhere viscerally, even though we seem to have collectively forgotten it, that more than a million Americans died from COVID, and that many of those deaths were unnecessary. They didn’t have to happen.

People will remember the famous story from that time about a young teacher who, quote-unquote, “had health insurance.” I put quotes around it because I was once at a conference, health economics is one of my own areas, where someone asked, “What do you estimate is the number of people in the United States who are underinsured?” I said, “One hundred percent.” Nobody in this country has adequate insurance, if you define insurance as protection against financial catastrophe. Some people may have resources elsewhere, but the insurance itself doesn’t provide that protection.

So you have that uncertainty, that fear. And let’s be candid, the initial response to COVID under Trump, through a project I forget the name of, was better than one might have expected, I guess. But it was carried out through Abbott Laboratories and other private corporations, so it had to take their interests into consideration.

A lot of Americans may not know this, but we let an awful lot of people in India and elsewhere die in order to protect our patent rights. And people may or may not know that the NIH, which Fauci directed, is deeply embedded with drug corporations. There are studies pointing out that many of these privatized, patented drugs were developed at public expense, using public resources.

Then the NIH allows drug companies to patent them and overcharge everybody, especially Americans, for them. Even insulin, developed for diabetes: the three scientists who discovered it in the 1920s gave the patent away. They each had to take a dollar to make it legal. I think you and I talked about this once, I did the math in my head and figured that dollar would be worth about $53 today, adjusted for inflation. A little more now, but that’s roughly it. They had to structure it that way as a legal formality.

And patent gamesmanship is still being used to overcharge people for insulin, people are dying of diabetes because of it. So we have this whole context where the for-profit system you describe, extending to doctors, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, diagnostics, and so on, holds people hostage to an economic system that could literally take their lives at any time. And on some level, they must know that.

So if Dr. Fauci gets his roasting, however unfair it may be, setting that aside, there are going to be people who take satisfaction in it. Along with the Rand Pauls of the world, who hate any government intervention in human lives. Add to that the fact that public health is a collective endeavor, and we are not a collective country. And add the fact that yes, serious mistakes were made in the management of COVID, we probably should have opened schools sooner, et cetera.

What we’re seeing, I think, is a deep well of frustration erupting now, one that runs much deeper than one personality, or even one pandemic.

Richard Wolff: Yeah, and I think we shouldn’t be surprised. I agree with everything you said. This is a government, particularly under Mr. Trump, but the Democrats did it too, that likes to find scapegoats the moment its polling shows there’s an issue like the one you just described: a suspicion about the healthcare system, an anger, a resentment. That’s a message they can use. So, let’s find the appropriate scapegoat.

If American income and jobs have been under duress for the last 30 years, let’s blame poor immigrants from Central America, as if they had anything to do with that, other than wanting to do exactly what every ancestor of every native-born American came here to do. Unbelievable scapegoating. And I think that’s exactly what happened with Fauci.

To show you how insidious it is, I’ll tell you a story. When I was teaching at Yale years ago, I got to know scientists working in the medical school, at the local hospital, which is owned and operated by Yale, or in one of the university’s academic departments. They were being made to sign agreements, as a condition of their appointments, that if they discovered anything of commercial value while employed as a Yale professor, the university would be a part owner of it.

In other words, university finances have become built into this whole apparatus. That’s how capitalism works, it makes everything subject to its logic, if not directly, then indirectly.

As to your point about people avoiding care because they don’t have the money, I’m sure that was well understood when insurers, some years ago, decided to convert policies that once allowed you to visit a doctor three or four times a year at no cost. They changed it: now there’s a copay every time, $10, $20, $30. And the same thing was applied to drugs.

They must have known, because it takes only a moment’s reflection to see, that if something is free, people will take advantage of it in a way they can’t or won’t if it costs money. And even if the cost is small, what happens? The additional profit generated isn’t significant on its own. But if a significant number of people don’t go, aha, that was the point. They don’t want them to come. They don’t want them to discover they have a serious illness, because then they’ll have to pay out the claim for it.

The longer it’s postponed, the longer the premiums collect interest without having to be paid out. This is grotesque, but the logic is right there in the capital. They’re doing what a good businessman does: if you have to shell money out, you minimize it; if you’re taking money in, you maximize it. It’s disgusting.

And then to watch Mr. Fauci be, it’s like watching a poor Honduran family get grabbed by ICE, having the children yanked away from the parents, stuck in a detention center where they aren’t properly fed, housed, or clothed. It’s disgusting. This treatment of immigrants had nothing to do with solving the problems of the American working class. And yet it’s the acceptable way, under our existing system, to cope.

And if they find Fauci guilty, and do what, put him in jail? What in the world does that accomplish? Is it going to make the CDC behave any differently? Is it going to change the drug industry? It does nothing. Nothing.

Richard Eskow: Well, it will, theoretically, make people frightened to intervene on behalf of public health for fear of being held accountable for it later. On the point about financing, I think it’s worth adding some context, because health profit-seeking is really multiple economies preying on each other.

You have the drug economy jacking up prices horrifically. With the multiples you mentioned for over-the-counter medications, when you get into prescription drugs, something that might cost pennies on the dollar to manufacture might retail for $1,500 a month. The multiples get insane.

Then you have insurance companies preying on top of that, marking up prices as much as they can to the buyer, usually an employer, or, on the ACA marketplace, an individual, and chalking the difference up to loss. Inadvertently, I wrote about this at the time, the Affordable Care Act encourages that, because it allowed insurers to charge a fixed percentage over cost as profit. So why would you control costs if lowering them meant reducing profit?

So you have that dynamic, but also a pain threshold beyond which buyers simply won’t buy. You have for-profit hospitals. You have the buyout of physician practices by large corporations. Everybody is contending against everybody else. Nobody is pursuing the improvement of public health.

And to top it off, on your point about prevention and public health, there’s no money in it for insurance companies, who are supposed to be the financial intermediaries, because they operate on one-year contracts. There’s a good chance that employer or individual will sign with somebody else next year, or move to a different plan, an HMO or whatever. So why should an insurance executive put money into making sure I get all the tests I need to preserve my health? It won’t help them, it’ll help some other insurer down the line. It’s not their problem.

So you have this insane system. All of which, if you’ll permit a seemingly radical pivot here, gets me to one of two things you can do about this sick system. And we won’t even get into the kids, the distancing, and all the rage over that.

You can find a scapegoat like Anthony Fauci and cheer in the town square as they call him a witch and burn him at the stake, metaphorically speaking. Or you can fight for a better system, which gets me to this week’s primary elections.

Richard Wolff: Right.

Richard Eskow: Because a physician, a public health physician, no less, who, unlike some other victorious candidates in Michigan, doesn’t describe himself as a democratic socialist but seems closely akin to that movement, he calls himself, I was corrected on this, “a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.” Okay, whatever. But he has very left-leaning ideas by US political standards. He’s pro-Medicare for All.

He won despite a massive outpouring of funds in favor of his primary opponent. Some of that money came from pro-Israel groups, but some of it, no doubt, came from health lobbies and others. Also, in Michigan, I believe two democratic socialists won House primaries against mainstream Democrats, and a democratic socialist defeated an incumbent mayor in Ann Arbor, granted, a progressive city.

So, despite the media’s yeoman efforts to proclaim otherwise, you have this juggernaut of the left continuing to move forward, with Medicare for All as one of its key issues. I don’t know about you, but I see the Fauci roast and the victories of the left as two sides of the same coin, ideologically speaking. Am I making too much of the connection?

Richard Wolff: No, no, I think you have to make that connection. No matter what the media says, I don’t believe the shift in public opinion, away from supporting Israel and toward being more supportive of Palestinians, which is real and important in this country, would, on its own, have offset $60 million spent on the other side, plus the endorsements of Senator Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He wouldn’t have won on that alone.

I think there are other factors. One is this: nobody could have missed the roasting of Fauci, and yet here’s a doctor running in Michigan who’s making sense about what happened and admitting the system is broken. All my doctors here in New York admit it’s a broken system. They take different positions on what ought to be done, but nobody defends it. Nobody.

Here’s a third factor: I think you’re beginning to see the MAGA coalition break apart as its different factions no longer cohere, and when they don’t, it’s around blatant issues, like the ones we saw in Michigan. For example, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t go along with the Israel line anymore. That’s done, and it will fracture the coalition.

The second and more important factor, I think: Michigan is very much a working-class state, built around Detroit, the center of our automobile industry, weakened now, but still significant. People there are reacting to the decline in working-class conditions of life. They’re angry about it, and they’re not going to vote for conventional politicians, because they rightly sense those politicians have presided over 50 years of decline for them.

They don’t want them on the Republican side either, that’s why they went for Mr. Trump. He was at least something different. Having a senator with a name like Mamdani’s is something different too. It’s like people here in New York voting for someone named Zohran Mamdani...

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: ...something they never would have done before. But it worked as a signal: “I’m not your regular politician.” For the mass of people, that’s what all the ugly, naughty racism of Mr. Trump signaled to a whole swath of the working class, finally, somebody who isn’t the usual Clinton or Bush, boringly self-repetitive.

And I think they’re winning on these grounds. The more different a candidate is, even names you’d have thought would be childishly easy to attack...

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: ...turn out to be badges of positivity for them.

Richard Eskow: So what’s the Democratic Party’s response to these victories, to the win and immense popularity of Zohran Mamdani, to the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and to the wins of these other candidates carrying an even more, let’s say, politically loaded label, socialist?

For some of them, the response is to line up behind these candidates. But from more and more of the mainstream Democrats, what we’re hearing is that “these people have no place in our party.”

Richard Wolff: Mm-hmm.

Richard Eskow: So this is setting up an internal conflict within the Democratic Party. And obviously, the Democratic Party as an institution is deeply beholden to large donors. But if I were a health insurance executive, or a pharmaceutical executive, bankrolling the Democratic Party, I’d also bear in mind another story in the news this week, which I have to approach carefully: the pretrial hearings of Luigi Mangione.

Richard Wolff: Right.

Richard Eskow: Because here you have a figure who is startlingly popular, according to the last polls I’ve seen, for allegedly committing the murder of a health insurance executive.

Richard Wolff: I’m...

Richard Eskow: It brings to mind the quote attributed to John F. Kennedy, probably written by Ted Sorensen or Schlesinger or somebody, that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. It seems to me that if the institutional leaders of this country are determined to close off all avenues for peaceful change, which you and I support, they’re playing with fire.

Richard Wolff: Yeah. And let me add, even setting aside these electoral races, the economic inequality in this country is literally off the charts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a graph a couple of days ago, via Axios, showing the share of total income that goes to labor relative to what goes to capital.

When you take the revenue from anything, a hamburger, a software program, part of that revenue pays wages and salaries, and the other part goes to the owners, the employer.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: And the line showing what goes to the non-supervisory worker bounces around, but it’s unmistakable, and the graph starts in 1947.

Richard Eskow: Mm-hmm.

Richard Wolff: It runs to the present, and it’s just an endless story of decline. You’re literally in a country that celebrates capitalism for making the already-richest person on Earth, Mr. Musk, even richer, and in that same two-week period, shows a decline for the working class, roughly 170 million Americans, going into the toilet. It’s the same system producing both results. And I think that’s what’s tearing this country apart underneath everything else.

Richard Eskow: I think that’s a great point, and maybe one we can revisit. I haven’t seen that graph in a while. I know that in 1968 there was a dramatic split that began and widened over the following decades, and the last I saw, the working-class line had flatlined. But now it sounds like it’s nosediving, and it’s literally life and death.

Richard Wolff: RJ, I’ll make a note, and when we’re done today, I’ll send you an email with the piece I did that has that graph in it, so you can see it.

Richard Eskow: Great. And maybe we’ll discuss it next time. So, as always, Richard Wolff, thanks for such a fascinating and engaging discussion, and thanks for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: My pleasure. These are important conversations, and I think we do a service by exploring them and making explicit the feelings and thoughts a lot of your audience has already generated for themselves.

Richard Eskow: Well, I certainly hope so, I aspire to that.

I have a new article out in The Nation on the exploitation of GLP-1s by Trump, Big Pharma, and tech billionaires. It explains how they’re using it to create a permanent “medical caste system” of haves, have-nots, and people in between.

Excerpt:

“This medical caste system could quickly worsen economic inequality. Studies have shown that groups with certain health problems consistently earn less and have more difficulty escaping poverty. Among them are women with obesity, people with mental illness, and the physically disabled.”

Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Old habits die hard, and apparently few die harder than the mainstream media’s habit of slanting its reporting toward the political establishment. That was apparent again in the coverage of this week’s primaries—with one surprising exception.

The headline for Politico’s coverage of the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan reads, “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” The article begins, “Progressives didn’t get the earthquake they expected. Moderates are relishing in their stronger than expected showing.”

That’s the takeaway to the once-improbable victory of a progressive Muslim against an establishment candidate in a critical swing state? (See correction below.)

Any real understanding of Tuesday’s Michigan results must begin with the flood of outside spending—$60 million, at last report, including roughly $32 million from AIPAC—against the eventual victor, Abdul El-Sayed. It’s true that El-Sayed’s opponent, Haley Stevens, performed significantly better than public polling had suggested. But that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Research by political scientist Thomas Ferguson and others has measured the effect of last-minute cash infusions in races like Donald Trump’s in 2016. They can shift votes dramatically at the eleventh hour, confounding polling expectations in the process.

The $60 million cash tsunami for Stevens isn’t even mentioned in Politico’s 950-word article, which merely says in passing that El-Sayed “quickly recast his narrow lead as a victory against the barrage of spending against him”—as if that was a whimsical notion on his part.

“The progressive wave never materialized on Tuesday night,” the outlet insists, “igniting fresh questions about the potency of the movement.” To buttress this claim, Politico writes:

“Progressive Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence won his primary for Michigan’s 7th District, but largely because two more moderate candidates had split the vote. Democratic socialist Donavan McKinney is still locked in a tight race with incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar for Michigan’s 13th District. And over in Missouri, progressive Cori Bush’s comeback bid fell apart.”

McKinney won his race. So did Yousef Rabhi, a democratic socialist who ran against the incumbent mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Combined with El-Sayed’s and Lawrence’s victory, that’s four wins in Michigan—wins that Politico claims will “ignite fresh questions” about the winners.

As for Cori Bush’s loss: Don’t Politico’s readers deserve to know that Bush was outspent by a 27-to-1 by an opponent who was flush with AIPAC and other outsider cash? Doesn’t that add some much-needed perspective?

New York Times political reporter Reid J. Epstein doesn’t do much better in a write-up headlined, “The left wins a nail-biter in Michigan: Here are eight takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries.” In the first “takeaway,” headlined “The left beat the establishment, but the results showed its limits,” Epstein writes:

“Dr. El-Sayed campaigned hard against the Democratic political establishment. That was enough to win, but enough voters backed Ms. Stevens to suggest that the establishment still has plenty of influence. Ms. Stevens showed strength among Black voters in Detroit and Flint and carried most of the state’s interior rural counties, aside from a few with college towns and resort communities.”

Does that result really “show the limits” of the left? This first “takeaway” makes no mention of the massive campaign spending El-Sayed had to overcome to win his race. One could just as easily—or more easily—conclude that overcoming this much cash is a sign of the left’s strength.

Epstein does mention AIPAC’s $30 million—eventually, in takeaway #3—and concedes that it suffered a serious setback. But he doesn’t mention the other $30 million in this race. More importantly, he fails to connect this lavish spending with the voting results he characterizes as a setback.

“The establishment still has plenty of influence”? It still has plenty of cash.

Ms. Stevens’ strong performance among Detroit voters undoubtedly had roots in that community’s history of ethnic division. It was buttressed, however, by a series of outside-funded ads which (falsely) implied that Barack Obama had endorsed her. Another ad emphasized her relationship with a prominent Black church leader in Detroit with a problematic history of anti-Muslim as well as anti-LGBTQ comments, which served as a not-so-subtle reminder of El-Sayed’s Muslim faith.

At least one major news outlet got it right. Surprisingly, it was Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. Under the headline, “El-Sayed edges out establishment candidate in crucial Michigan Senate primary,” this was the Post’s lede:

“Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who built a surging progressive movement in Michigan, overcame a massive spending disadvantage and opposition from the Democratic establishment to win Tuesday’s nationally watched Senate primary, the Associated Press projected.”

That’s all a news outlet has to do to get a story right. It’s not necessary to replace a pro-establishment bias with a bias toward the left or any other ideology. All that’s needed is context. In today’s money-driven electoral system, reporting that excludes or downplays the role of big money in politics lacks context. The Democratic Party could change that at any time, at least for its own primaries, by banning dark money and big donors from its own primaries, but it has chosen not to do so. That’s also important context for Tuesday’s results.

The billionaire-owned Post’s article also said this:

“Tuesday’s primary race spawned tensions within the Democratic Party, including over the party’s political identity, support for Israel and the role of money in politics.”

That’s undeniably accurate. Those tensions are likely to shape the party’s future for the foreseeable future.

(CORRECTION: The original article described candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a ‘democratic socialist.’ Although sometimes characterized that way, Al-Sayed does not describe himself that way. “I’m not a socialist,” he has said. “I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.”)

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War, campaign coordinator of RootsAction.org, and host of Talk World Radio. His latest book is War is Still a Lie, the third iteration of a 2010 publication (then called War is a Lie). In it, he skillfully dismantles the deceptions and misconceptions that have been used for centuries to persuade people to fight and die.

The book is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about war and peace. Please give our conversation a listen. (Selected quotes and lightly edited transcript below.)

https://davidswanson.org

Selected Quotes

David Swanson:

“There has never been a war launched without a pile of lies, and very often those lies are literally recycled from previous wars.”

“Bravery is admirable. But heroism requires combining bravery with goodness, with some strategic improvement of the world for other people.”

“The great peace organizations, like Veterans For Peace, will tell you the way to honor veterans is to stop creating more of them.”

“There has never been a single documented case of PTSD from lack of war.”

Richard Eskow:

“If my neighbor and I disagree about the hedges, we don’t start saturation-bombing each other’s houses. Our natural instinct is to talk about it. That, and not war, is human nature.”

“When we arm another country ... if two neighbors are in a fistfight on the street and I hand one of them a machine gun, I’m morally responsible for the deaths that follow.”

Subscribe now

Transcript

Richard: First of all, David, welcome back to the program.

David: Great to be here. Thanks.

Richard: I think it’s an important book. It addresses so many of the questions people have about the necessity, or lack thereof, of war. But let’s start with this: I believe you first wrote the book in 2010, re-released it in 2015, and now again in 2026. So what’s changed, and what hasn’t?

Actually, let me back up. What’s the fundamental theme of the book, as you see it?

David: So I wrote this thing in 2010 called War Is a Lie, and I thought I’d update it with each war, or each year, but that didn’t turn out to be feasible. I updated it in 2015, War Is a Lie, 2nd edition. This time, a lot had gone by, a lot had changed, not just in terms of wars and politics, but in the types of lies being told, and which ones people were actually believing.

So I changed the title slightly and called it War Is Still a Lie. I explain that it’s really the third edition of War Is a Lie. I wrote a new section looking at how things have changed, and I tried to hit the highlights, that section alone grew to almost 100 pages in what’s now a book of well over 500 pages.

The idea was: in 2010, if anybody said “war,” Iraq was still the big topic, with Afghanistan a close second, and of course, as always, World War II somewhere in the background. People told me Iraq was a fluke, an exception, a violation of the norm, that wars were normally good, just, rational, fought for decent purposes, and grounded in truth and righteousness.

I knew that couldn’t be right. So I went and read, war after war after war. U.S. wars, other countries’ wars, ancient wars, recent wars, and I couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t built on a pile of lies. Including, yes, God forbid I say it, World War II.

There were recurring themes, similar lies used to start wars, to escalate them, to keep them going, and later to repaint them as “good wars” once everyone had forgotten how unpopular they actually were at the time. So I didn’t write a chronicle of this war, then that war, then the next. I wrote about the lies as themes, everything they tell us about war is a lie, and here are some of those lies. So I built chapters like “Wars Are Not Fought Against Evil,” “Wars Are Not Launched in Defense,” “Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity,” and so on, with examples drawn from throughout history and across the world to support each theme.

Richard: One of the things that came to mind when I was reading it was a quote from Howard Zinn, I’ll probably mangle it, where he points out that people say, “Well, the American Revolution was justified.” And he says, well, Canada got its independence from Great Britain without a revolutionary war. Or, “The Civil War was justified”, well, Great Britain ended slavery without a civil war.

One of the things I kept thinking about while reading the book, David, was the liberal audience, the kind of audience that thinks of itself as decent, humane, not warlike or bellicose. You quote an acquaintance of yours, someone I gathered was fairly liberal, saying that George W. Bush was the first president to lie us into a war, to actually tell a lie to bring us into a conflict. Which is deeply ahistorical, isn’t it?

David: Of course. There has never been a war launched without a pile of lies, and very often those lies are literally recycled from previous wars. It’s the only form of recycling the Pentagon has ever really embraced: recycling the lies. You’ve got not just the lies about the Lusitania, that no one was warned, that there was no ammunition aboard, and so on, but Franklin Roosevelt essentially copying the Lusitania story with various ships assisting Britain before the U.S. officially entered World War II, because it was such an effective, proven way to turn public opinion against Germany.

You have stories going back to World War I about German atrocities in Belgium. It’s not that Germany didn’t commit real atrocities there, every country does, in every war. But specific, fabricated stories about particular children being attacked were recycled from 19th-century wars and reused in World War I propaganda. There’s not always a lot of creativity involved. Sometimes it’s genuinely inventive; sometimes it’s crude and still works.

But there are no wars that aren’t built on lies. It’s just that sometimes the liars are really, really bad at it, or they simply don’t put in the effort. Telling everyone a war is about giant stockpiles of weapons that you’re about to discover don’t exist is spectacularly bad lying. It’s not “lying” in contrast to truth-telling, it’s just incompetent lying. I didn’t think anyone could top that until Trump came along and justified a war on Iran as necessary to reopen a strait that his own war on Iran had closed. That one was dead on arrival, and credit to the public, we largely didn’t buy it.

With Iraq and Afghanistan, Afghanistan especially, and arguably Iraq too, a majority of Americans polled were in favor at the start. It took a year and a half or so in each case before polls consistently showed a majority saying, “We never should have started this.” And I’d hoped people would catch on faster when I first wrote the book. But even then, you still had a majority saying, “Don’t end it, we never should have started it, but don’t stop now.” Because at that point you’re killing on behalf of the people already killed on your own side. It’s for the troops. The troops shall not have died in vain, unless, of course, we kill even more of them for no purpose.

That dynamic has faded somewhat now that we’re not fighting large ground wars with thousands of U.S. troops dying. It’s no longer driven by that “troop-ism.” It’s not about revenge either, a disgusting and legally baseless justification for war, but a very established and, apparently, respectable one when it can be deployed.

Richard: And effective, effective because it speaks to something primitive in the human brain. That, and the fact that we’re no longer seeing mass American casualties the way we did in Vietnam —

David: People are still dying. Just not Americans.

Richard: Right, I hope I qualified that by saying U.S. soldiers. That reminds me of a line from David Graeber, the anthropologist, who said that in a way, the ironic legacy of Abbie Hoffman and the 1960s peace movement is this: American boys, as it was framed then, before we had a gender-integrated military, aren’t fighting and dying the way they used to. We’re just killing other people now. That’s the legacy.

Which is maybe a good way to transition into something you write about in this latest, 2026 edition, that we’ve lost something you call “Iraq War syndrome.” Go back ten, eleven, twelve years, and there was a real sense that the country had been chastened, that this wasn’t a good idea, that it cost lives, hurt a lot of people, and probably shouldn’t have happened. That syndrome seems to be gone now. Was that part of why you put out a new edition?

David: Yes. I hope it’s not 100 percent gone, but it’s greatly diminished. It’s striking that both the “Vietnam syndrome” and the “Iraq syndrome” get labeled as diseases, as if a moment of clarity, where people recognize that wars are horrific crimes and decide not to repeat them, is itself a pathology.

It’s also worth noting: go back before the gender-integrated military, when for millennia wars were fought almost entirely by men. At some point we said, “Let’s add women to the mix.” We could just as easily have said, “Let’s subtract men.” And you’d have had nearly everyone, except a few unusual anthropologists, screaming that it’s human nature, it’s written in our genes, in our economics, it’s unavoidable. And yet if you look closely at any specific war, you find it was carefully engineered by people who wanted war and profited from it, and who worked hard to avoid peace. Still, people insist war is inevitable. Not a single documented case of PTSD from war deprivation, not one person on Earth suffering from a lack of war. Nearly everyone tries to avoid it. And then we’re told it’s just human nature, and we casually add women to the killing.

Why not subtract men instead? Wars keep happening, and we’re told they’re normal and inevitable, even though 96 percent of the world’s governments don’t wage war anywhere near the way ours does. But things have changed over the past twenty years. It’s true that we stopped killing “our boys.” But people generally don’t believe that. Polls have asked Americans about Iraq and Afghanistan, and a majority typically believed most of the war’s deaths were U.S. military personnel, when in reality it was 3 or 4 percent. And people actually resented Afghans and Iraqis for not being grateful for the “service” of having their countries destroyed, their land poisoned, their people killed.

That’s part of why we now hear, “All our money is going to Ukraine and Gaza, we need it here at home.” As if the money could possibly all go to just 4 percent of the population. In reality, there’s so much of it that you could transform the entire world with a fraction of it, and yet it’s not benefiting the people of Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, or Afghanistan either.

When we try to sanitize war by hiding the “wrong” casualties, or by hiding casualties altogether, as Trump does even with these relatively small numbers, it doesn’t mean people aren’t dying. Air wars are often deadlier than ground wars, they’re just more one-sided, so it’s harder for us to see. We have to get to a point where we actually care about that. And maybe we’re getting closer, because the war on Iran is deeply unpopular.

Richard: It is. And I think access to information beyond U.S. mainstream media has helped with that, far too slowly, but it’s helped shift perceptions of what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as people see for themselves through social media and other sources what’s really going on.

But what strikes me is how much hasn’t changed in how we think about war. A while back, I gave a talk for which I laboriously researched the anthropological literature on whether all human societies wage war. I could have saved myself hours by just reading War Is Still a Lie, it’s all in there. War is not some essential part of human nature. In fact, I’d argue, and I think it’s implicit in your book too, that it’s actually human nature not to wage war. When my neighbor and I disagree about the hedges, we don’t start saturation-bombing each other’s houses. We talk about it. That’s human nature, resolving disputes through conversation.

But there’s this strange willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to war, especially, I’ll say it, among people who might be considered the “good,” respectable segment of society. You might expect hostility toward peace from people written off as deplorable by some politicians, but I’m talking about the people who insist that war is simply part of human nature, that we’ve exhausted every other option, that there’s no talking to “these people.” I once wrote a column about a professional medical ethicist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who argued that all pharmaceuticals should be withheld from Russian citizens because of the invasion of Ukraine, which would amount to the mass murder of cancer patients and infants. A medical ethicist arguing this. And a well-known liberal commentator, it turned out, when I looked into his background. So what’s the barrier here? Your book is obviously an attempt to break through it, and I think it does a great job, but why is there such fertile ground, even among people who’d claim to know better?

David: The good news is there’s less and less of it, 80 percent of Americans want to end the war on Iran. Maybe 70 percent falsely believe they have no power to influence government behavior, and that’s the big lie that needs to be overcome: the belief that we can’t get organized and actually change things. As for the other 20 percent who think the war on Iran is great, or beneficial to them or the world, or believe Iranians are simply evil and need to be killed, that’s a tougher case. But there’s rarely an insanity out there that doesn’t command at least 20 percent support. How perfect do we really need this to get?

I do agree that far more Homo sapiens have lived their entire lives without ever coming near a war than have come near one, it’s not even close. But I think it’s important to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that we’re responsible for whatever we choose to do, and that we’re capable of doing almost anything. You can call mass murder “human nature,” and you can call peaceful cooperation “human nature”, but you’re never going to dissect a human being and find some discrete thing called human nature. It doesn’t exist, except as the lamest possible excuse for things people are ashamed of but want to keep doing anyway.

Then there’s the question of those of us who oppose a given war, why do we oppose it? Is it because of the illegality and mass murder, or because gas prices are up? Look at the politicians, the so-called opposition, we have an online action at RootsAction where people can email Democrats in Congress urging them not to oppose deals that might end the war on the grounds that “any deal is a bad deal.” Of course a deal to end a war is always going to look worse than never starting it. But the real question, if we’re not drunk on partisanship, is whether a bad deal that ends the war is worse than continuing it and risking escalation, or even nuclear war. And you have Democratic senators and representatives, nearly all of them, who won’t say a single word about the illegality, the mass murder, the cruelty, or the sadism of a war, they just want it “properly authorized,” or they’re upset about gas prices. That leaves me with real questions about how far we’ve actually come.

Richard: Along those lines, and I suppose it depends on whether you see the glass as half full or half empty, we see, in terms of support for the genocide in Gaza, and the incipient genocide, if it isn’t already past that point, in the West Bank, that ordinary Democrats and Americans in general are turning against these wars. Their leaders aren’t. There are structural reasons for that, and we can work to raise awareness of them. That’s the good-news piece. But we’re still, and this is one of the most delicate parts of your book, sacralizing warfighters.

You have a chapter titled “Warriors Are Not Heroes.” That’s a genuinely touchy thing to say in America, across the political spectrum. You argue that it’s possible to be brave and courageous without being a hero. Tell us about that distinction.

David: Well, obviously you can jump in front of a train, that’s very brave, but does it do the world any good? You can risk your life to murder a group of children, and that may be very brave, but it’s also evil. Heroism requires combining bravery with goodness, with some strategic improvement of the world for other people. Otherwise it’s not something you’d actually want to emulate.

If you just look at warfighting in isolation, ants are clearly braver than Homo sapiens. But from a distance, ants slaughtering each other also looks pretty absurd. Are we going to glorify the cause of one particular colony of ants? Probably not.

I saw that movie everyone’s talking about, the Odyssey adaptation.

Richard: Oh, you saw it?

David: I did. And in many ways it deglorifies war and puts veterans’ issues front and center. According to the film, the Greeks were lied into the Trojan War for economic reasons. Every warrior was coerced into fighting through threats against their families and towns. The war itself is shown as boring, wasteful, horrific, evil, and traumatizing, it destroyed the rule of law and spread fear and insecurity across the known world. Odysseus takes so long getting home because he’s recovering from moral guilt, horror, PTSD, and grief. Everywhere his troops go, there’s raping and pillaging. He encounters the dead, who ask him, “Why did you lie to me? Why did you abandon me?” The whole thing is portrayed as filthy and disgusting, except for the misplaced glorification of bravery.

And then, at the very end, what does Christopher Nolan do? He keeps the ending where Odysseus locks fifty people in a room and slaughters them out of revenge. After hours of “war is evil, war is traumatic, war is pointless,” you land on revenge as the payoff.

Richard: Revenge.

David: Why not just apply that same logic backward to the Trojan War itself? If revenge can purify locking fifty people in a room and murdering them, it can purify an entire war, as we’ve seen with Afghanistan, Syria, and so on. There’s still progress to be made.

Richard: Which brings up another sensitive point about warriors as heroes. I had three uncles who fought in World War II. One of them was engaged in hand-to-hand combat, a tough guy, a street kid from New York. Late one night, after a few drinks, his, not mine, he said something to me. He said, “Guys like me, who did what I did, we should be locked away on some island somewhere, kept away from society.” I asked why. He said, “Because we’ve killed people.” I said, “And?” He said, “And we know how easy it is.”

There’s something in that. I’m not trying to stigmatize all veterans, but glorifying them does neither them nor society any favors. They’ve been damaged, moral injury, psychic injury, psychological injury, if not physical. And glorifying them can actually box them in, making it harder for them to seek help for what’s been done to them. Does that resonate with you?

David: Completely, 100 percent. The great peace organizations, like Veterans For Peace, will tell you the way to honor veterans is to stop creating more of them. That doesn’t mean being hateful or bigoted toward existing veterans, it means we should stop pretending there’s no impact. There’s a documented rise in domestic violence among people returning from war. There’s an uptick in racist violence following U.S. wars. Mass shooters in this country are disproportionately veterans, people trained to shoot by our own government and thanked for their “service” in doing so. Statistically, almost no veterans become mass shooters; they’re a tiny fraction of the population. But they are disproportionately represented among mass shooters. If that correlation existed with redheads, or with gay people, or with Portuguese speakers, we’d have study after study on it. But because it involves people trained and thanked by the government for shooting people, it’s treated as irrelevant to even mention, offensive, even.

Richard: A lot of this is considered offensive to bring up, which is exactly why I went straight into it, because I think we need to get past the taboos around discussing war. Which brings me to my next question: why do you think these conversations are so hard? Even with people who seem entirely reasonable, I’ve been stigmatized, attacked, banned from certain spaces, simply for saying we shouldn’t escalate the Ukraine-Russia conflict, or that we shouldn’t have supported various bombing campaigns in Gaza. It’s as if it’s considered more hateful to oppose hate and murder than it is to support or rationalize it. It feels like the last real taboo in political conversation. Am I exaggerating, or getting this wrong?

David: No, this rot starts at the top. The U.S. government actively conflates peace activism with leftism, and equates opposition to genocide with the very violence it claims to oppose, rather than treating support for genocide as the offensive position. We’ve had people effectively abducted off the street for writing op-eds against a genocide. People sent to prison for decades for opposing genocide, or for opposing paramilitary violence on American streets. This isn’t a moment to worry about sounding hyperbolic, it’s genuinely over the top.

But there’s one easy thing you can say to people who insist you must support the war in Ukraine, or the war in Israel: just wait a year or two, and you and all your friends will come around to agreeing with me. Look at U.S. polling on Ukraine, it went from the most impressive propaganda success I’ve ever witnessed, in terms of sustained public support, to a majority now wanting the war over. When we used to say, “End the war, stop the weapons shipments, stop blocking negotiations,” the most common counter was, “We’re doing this for the Ukrainian people, it’s their decision, and the polling shows they want the war to continue. What business do you have saying anything, just because you happen to live on a planet that could be destroyed if this goes nuclear?”

Well, now look at the polling in Ukraine. A large majority now want negotiations and compromise over continued war, whatever the consequences. It’s true the polling once said the opposite, but wait long enough, and it changes. So why not be early? Why not get it right sooner?

Richard: Right.

David: When fewer people have died, fewer have been displaced, hostility is lower, and there’s a much better chance of reconciling and building something everyone can live with, why wait? Because you know you’ll get there eventually. You know the fever, the madness, will eventually break, and you’ll have to negotiate peace or destroy the world. So why not get there sooner?

Richard: And I want to add to that excellent point, what’s always gotten me about that “it’s up to them” argument is this: if two neighbors are in a fistfight on the street, and I hand one of them a machine gun, it doesn’t matter that “he wanted it”, I’m still morally responsible for the deaths of the other guy, his family, and the rest of the block. In a court of law, I’d be an accessory. So this argument that “it’s up to them” doesn’t hold. What they do may be up to them, but what we do is our own moral choice and our own responsibility. That’s always driven me crazy, along with the reflexive “so you like Putin? How much is he paying you?” line of attack.

But I don’t want to dwell only on the negative, David, because your book also discusses some genuinely constructive tools. Before we wrap up, I want to touch on those. One is the Kellogg-Briand Pact, right? And maybe others, some international legal mechanisms that could actually help prevent future wars?

David: There are quite a few existing laws we could actually use, both U.S. laws and international treaties the U.S. is already party to, like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which I mention often because I wrote an entire other book about it and the activism that produced it. I like that it states, simply, that all war is illegal, full stop. The UN Charter says essentially the same thing, with a couple of very narrow exceptions that virtually no actual war ever meets. But the existence of those loopholes, which most people understand only vaguely, allows for the pretense that any given war must have somehow qualified under one of them, or that a “good” war like Afghanistan must have been properly authorized because Iraq, by contrast, was clearly bad.

Beyond the treaties, U.S. domestic law is extensive too. We can always write more laws, everyone gets excited about drafting new treaties, and it’s wonderful to create one banning nuclear weapons, even though we already have a treaty requiring the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and, most people don’t realize this, all weapons generally.

Richard: Right.

David: But every shipment of U.S. weapons to Israel violates at least a dozen existing U.S. laws.

Richard: Including the Leahy Law, presumably, the one that prohibits arming forces with a record of human rights abuses?

David: Yes, the Leahy Laws are violated by these weapons shipments and by direct U.S. participation in wars that are, in practice, foreign wars. There are even efforts underway right now in Congress to force a vote, essentially asking, “Do you support the Leahy Laws?” And if the answer is yes, then what do you make of the shipments to Israel? Meanwhile, buried in the Pentagon’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, there’s language effectively merging the U.S. and Israeli militaries in ways that may eliminate the need for future votes to give or sell Israel unlimited weapons. So there are good and bad trends happening simultaneously.

Still, I think we need the rule of law, however imperfect and biased it currently is. We need to universalize it, democratize it, and stop inviting war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington to be applauded, while countries that actually respect the law are bound to arrest him under an outstanding warrant. We can’t do without the rule of law. But we have to be honest about how imperfect it is, and about what needs to change.

Richard: Absolutely. And people may forget that the Biden administration explicitly rejected the rule of law when it came to Israel and Gaza, and the Trump administration has disregarded it even more flagrantly. So I think it’s worth respecting an imperfect institution before we try to improve it.

One last tool I want to mention, and please add anything I’ve missed: I was fascinated by a passage on page 449 of my copy, the idea that one powerful way to ease public anxiety about disarmament, and to actually defend a country, is to train the entire population in unarmed civilian defense. When everyone refuses to cooperate, resists, and sabotages an occupier, occupation becomes essentially impossible. And you make the point that governments resist adopting this, not because it lacks a track record of success, but because training a population to resist injustice from abroad also trains them to resist injustice at home. I love this idea, honestly, I’d flip the sequence and start with resisting injustice at home. But either way, this reframes disarmament and nonviolence, which people tend to dismiss as fuzzy, abstract, “granola” thinking, as something genuinely gutsy, if you consider what Gandhi endured, what King and his followers endured, the real courage it took to face those beatings. Where does this idea come from, and how do we talk about it more?

David: Gandhi is a huge part of where these ideas originate. There’s a list at worldbeyondwar.org/list documenting successful nonviolent efforts to block invasions, overthrow coups and dictators, and prevent wars, situations where people were told, “It’s war or nothing,” and instead used mass protest, shutting down government functions, redirecting troops, and nonviolent noncooperation, and succeeded. There have certainly been failures too, but the scholarship shows that predominantly nonviolent campaigns succeed more often overall, and their successes tend to last significantly longer, on average, than victories achieved through violence.

Look at how the Baltic states nonviolently expelled the Soviet Union, that had nothing to do with NATO. Some of them understood something like the “Singing Revolution”, it sounds like a hippie fantasy, that they sang the Soviets out of their country, but they actually did it. They understood this power well enough to write laws establishing a national agency for unarmed civilian defense and to train the population accordingly. Of course, over time, it got diminished, marginalized, folded under conventional military defense. Why? Because no government really wants a population skillfully and strategically capable of resisting whatever injustice that government might impose on it. And Lithuania, like the rest of Western Europe, has since become fully invested in the NATO arms economy.

I think we need to recognize, first, that the perceived need to defend ourselves against evil invaders and occupiers is vastly overblown. If you disarm, demilitarize, build cooperation, uphold the rule of law, and work toward peace, invasion simply isn’t going to happen. Hitler isn’t coming for you tomorrow. But for people’s peace of mind, it helps to know this tool exists, that a population can be trained to be effectively unoccupiable. When everyone refuses to cooperate, refuses to obey, sabotages the occupier at every turn, you don’t need a single gun. In fact, you’re better off without them. There are dozens of documented examples of this working.

I think it’s important for people, and for international bodies like the UN, to recognize that on the rare occasions when peacekeeping has been attempted without weapons, it has succeeded far more often than the many failed, armed peacekeeping missions that don’t actually keep the peace.

Richard: And when it comes to war as an alternative, this country’s track record of actually winning wars over the past 75 years is pretty poor. So it’s not even a case where you can say, “Well, at least it works.” It doesn’t work, and it’s genuinely destructive. I love this idea. We’ve actually seen glimpses of it in the resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and other cities, the early stirrings of mutual aid, cooperation, Signal and Telegram chains tracking where enforcement is happening and what to avoid. It’s inspiring, and we’re seeing it here in the greater D.C. area too.

David: And the U.S. didn’t start losing wars after defeating the Nazis, it’s been losing wars not just since 1812, but since long before there even was a United States. There’s no such thing as “winning” a war, any more than winning a hurricane, as the late Jeannette Rankin used to say. They’ll point to Venezuela-era interventions as the exception among dozens of failures on their own terms. But even there, the damage to the rule of law and to foreign relations is real, and the blowback hasn’t even fully arrived yet. It also helped inspire the ongoing disaster in Iran, because Trump apparently believed he could pull off something similar there. So I wouldn’t put war on the scoreboard as a successful institution just yet.

Why do we accept an outbreak of “explosive diarrhea” as business as usual? Why is food contamination, a scourge we once largely conquered, making a comeback? And when a company that has poisoned the public tries to cover it up so it can keep poisoning us, why do so many of us seem to think that just the way the world works?

The latest article from Sonali Kolhatkar (Zero Hour Senior Correspondent and so much more) provides some much-needed context for the current outbreak of cyclospora infections. From deregulation to climate change, this horrific outbreak is the result of deliberate political changes.

If things don’t change, this will happen again and again. As these words are being written, in fact, the FDA says a new outbreak of cyclospora has appeared which is not connected to lettuce. Which raises the metaphorical (and literal) question, When will we decide we’ve had enough of this sh*t?

You’ll find selected quotes and a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Selected Quotes

Sonali:

• “We’re relying on market forces to keep us safe, and that’s not a public-health strategy.”

• “Food safety shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

• “We have to be able to rely on government to keep our food safe.”

• “We need to break up food monopolies and strengthen small farms.”

Richard:

• “Nobody’s going to run for office saying ‘our party is objectively pro-explosive-diarrhea.’”

• “How is the market supposed to correct a failure when consumers don’t even know whose product they’re buying?”

• “Whenever you centralize an entire system around a handful of giant players, one failure threatens everyone.”

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Transcript

Richard: So you have a new piece out, and it’s about the tainted lettuce story. Give us the brief overview, if you would.

Sonali: Many of your viewers have probably heard that we’re supposed to be avoiding lettuce right now. Thousands of people—largely in the Midwest, with Michigan a major hotspot—have been affected. Something like 7,000 people have been documented as infected with cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection in a similar class to E. coli and salmonella. It’s not as fatal as those, but it’s incredibly difficult, with symptoms that have been described as explosive diarrhea.

Nobody wants that. It’s left people debilitated. Even people who’ve recovered have been left with weakened immune systems—kind of like COVID, where getting it is terrible, and generally you recover, but some people remain affected long-term.

This is a very serious thing, and the federal government hasn’t quite been able to pin down the origin of the contaminated lettuce. But right now, all indications point to one of the four major providers of fresh-cut salad greens in the United States: Taylor Farms. Taylor says it’s still in the middle of its investigation, but that seems to be it.

There are a lot of implications around this story that I get into in my piece.

Richard: I want to talk about them. Let me start with the meta-story here. Not too long ago, as a friend or an editor reading your piece, I would have said that the phrase “nobody wants explosive diarrhea”—which appears in your piece—was unnecessary, Sonali. Normally, an editor would flag that.

But we now live in an environment, and this is a given, where we’re dismantling regulation and where greed and corporate interest are influencing our politics to such a degree that it’s made all the old logical assumptions so hazy that it actually becomes necessary to spell things out like that, doesn’t it?

Sonali: Yes. And the reason I put that in there—it’s interesting you bring that up—is that the implication of our current system is that this is just something we have to live with. We must accept that, in the interest of the free market, in the interest of letting big producers and big companies do what they need to do to feed us—and of course their goal is to make a profit—we have to pay the price for their business practices.

And if that means 7,000 people getting explosive diarrhea, so be it, right? That’s the implication behind it. But these are preventable issues. In the piece, I identify three main problems: First, we have fewer and fewer food producers, processors, and distributors, which means that when one company has problems, those problems spread throughout the country because these companies are so large. Second, we have far too few regulations, and the ones we do have are currently being dismantled. Third, we do not support or sustain small farms—in fact, we’re weakening them and making life harder for them.

Small farms are where we ought to be investing. A localized food industry is a lot more resilient than a centralized one, where a single bottleneck can cause massive disruptions in supply. So those are the three issues I identified.

They’re not rocket science. It should be something we take for granted—that government regulates our food supply and its safety. But right now it’s largely voluntary. It’s shocking that we don’t have more infections than we do.

Richard: People may also minimize the severity of this illness when they think about diarrhea in general. First of all, this form of it is exceptionally painful. And as you say, it can cause long-lasting or permanent damage. I’ve read this disease can last six weeks or more. That’s horrific.

I got something similar in India forty years ago—though I didn’t get it from the people of India or the food of India. I got it on my last day in what was then Bombay, when someone took me out for dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which is, you know, the elite—

Sonali: Top hotel, yeah.

Richard: Right, a hotel originally built, I believe, for British Raj administrators. I don’t know the full history, but I can tell you from personal experience: you don’t want it. You really don’t want it. You spend your time literally thinking, “How am I going to get through the next 30 seconds?” And it affected me for years afterward.

Sonali: Yeah.

Richard: So given the severity of this—and no one’s going to run for office saying “our party is objectively pro-explosive-diarrhea”—that’s exactly why I bring it up. The policies that led to this episode, and that will almost certainly lead to more outbreaks and epidemics going forward, are treated as a given.

As we dive into the specifics, I don’t want to bring my own bias to your reporting, but it seems to me this is a massive failure—even though I think the news media is trying to tell the whole story. I won’t rap them as hard as I might on other kinds of journalism, but I still don’t think they’re conveying that this is a straightforward case of cause and effect: you do A, B, and C, and this is what happens. I don’t think the general public grasps that. Am I wrong?

Sonali: Look, we pay taxes so that the federal government can protect us. That’s the whole point of regulations—it’s why we have laws about the kinds of toys you can sell toddlers. We need federal regulators ensuring our food is safe. Currently, food safety monitoring for bacterial infections runs through a very weak system called FoodNet, run under the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 10 out of 50 states participate. It’s already extremely weak, and it was monitoring for about eight different kinds of infections.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Trump administration made monitoring voluntary for six of those eight. So now only two are mandatory: E. coli and salmonella. Cyclospora, the infection that’s now spreading, is one of the ones FoodNet is no longer required to monitor. That’s part of why they can’t find the source of this contamination. It’s shocking—we’re relying on market forces to keep us safe, on the idea that producers won’t want to hurt their bottom line because people will stop buying lettuce, so we’ll just leave it up to them to ensure the safety of their own product.

Okay, maybe that works eventually, except you first have to wait for thousands of people to suffer before market forces correct themselves. It’s different in places like Europe, where the regulatory systems are much stronger, and we deserve those same protections. But Taylor Farms, like many big corporations, is busy using its profits to lobby the government for fewer regulations. And it turns out the CEO of Taylor Farms is a big donor to the Trump administration and Trump-adjacent super PACs, and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars directly lobbying the government to dismantle regulations.

So this is a direct outcome of actions our government has taken in favor of big corporations and against the public and public health.

Richard: I’m glad you raised that: the corruption of the process through lobbying, and the power of these monopolies, or near-monopolies, this concentration across every aspect of food production and distribution. And then there’s this mythology, which I can’t believe anyone still gives credence to, that the market will take care of it. Since I read your piece this morning, I’ve been doing a little research on Taylor Farms myself. How can the market address a product failure when you don’t even know you’re buying that product in the first place?

Sonali: Right.

Richard: What struck me most in researching Taylor Farms—and this took some digging—was tracking down all the final shelf brands of packaged lettuce that actually originate with Taylor Farms. A lot of those are marketed as, say, O Organics at Safeway. Signature Select, also Safeway. GreenWise at Publix. Simply Nature at Aldi. Some of the Trader Joe’s bagged salads. 365 by Whole Foods.

People think they’re getting something wholesome there. It strikes me that what they’re doing isn’t just subverting market forces—they’re tricking people into thinking they’re buying a healthier product when they’re really just buying the same factory-made widget anyone else might sell.

Sonali: Exactly. And what they’re also doing is giving people the false impression that there’s competition and diversity on the shelves. If you go to a big supermarket that sells ten different brands of bagged lettuce, chances are you’re only looking at products from one or two companies, repackaged under different labels. Some of these are companies directly owned by the same producers. There’s no functional reason to sell lettuce under two different labels—except to give people the illusion of choice. This kind of capitalism, in particular, is charlatanism. It plays on our sense of agency, making us feel like we’re making real choices when there isn’t a real choice at all.

So people are starting to go out of their way, because they’re realizing that bagged lettuce from the store could be dangerous. They’re seeking out small farmers at farmers markets. And when I looked into how the Trump administration has undermined small farms over just the past year, I was shocked. Trump courted small farmers to get their votes, and many of them supported him. But he has cut program after program under the guise of fighting DEI initiatives. He’s cut programs that benefit farmers broadly. He’s taken away disaster aid programs. He cut a program that matched small farmers’ produce with food banks—so that low-income people had access to fresh food, and small farmers had a stable source of income. It was a win-win that benefited two important groups, and he cut it anyway.

Over and over, small farmers are going out of business. They can’t handle competition from these giant producers. So there are fewer options left for people who want to eat lettuce. We’re told we’re supposed to eat fresh food—and the government has fully failed the American people on that front.

Richard: You want to know what else I found out about Taylor Farms along those lines, Sonali? I think you’ll find it interesting. Going back to your article—in April 2024, Taylor Farms acquired FarmWise, an agricultural robotics company specializing in precision weeding and thinning.

So, the small farmers of America are supposed to compete with this robotic, industrial-scale operation that cuts corners every way it can—including, apparently, adequately cleaning fecal matter off its lettuce, since that’s the likely source of the cyclospora outbreak. And they’re supposed to compete with that. Meanwhile, many inner cities in this country—including the one where our studio is located here in D.C.—are food deserts. People there would be desperate for healthy, farm-grown food. But they can’t get it. The Trump administration—

And one of the other things you point out in the article, which I think is important, is that most people buying those organic-sounding brands—Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and so on—don’t realize they’re helping fund Trump’s MAGA super PAC. That’s something I learned from your article.

Sonali: Yes. Imagine that: a bag of lettuce helps the profit margins of a company that directly supports MAGA Inc., a Trump-related super PAC. This is what we’ve come to. There are people struggling with joblessness, immigrant farmworkers laboring in vulnerable conditions and being scapegoated—while the billionaire owners of these farms automate jobs, dismantle the regulatory apparatus meant to keep us safe, and funnel their profits into strengthening those same systems, getting richer and richer at the expense of our public health.

Something has to give. We have to push back hard against this system. That means breaking up food monopolies. It shouldn’t be that a handful of corporations control so much of our food production and distribution. We can’t survive without food. We shouldn’t be so dependent on a system this concentrated.

I draw an analogy to the war on Iran, which exposed the fragility of a globalized energy system where the majority of oil passes through one narrow geographic chokepoint. It took just one unprovoked war to throw global oil supplies into disarray. We have similar bottlenecks in our food distribution system because of these food monopolies. It’s a weakened system. When a handful of giants control so much of what we rely on, all it takes is one of them failin, or something going wrong with one of them, to throw huge parts of our food system into disarray.

So we have to dismantle these monopolies. We have to strengthen small farms and small farmers. We have to strengthen the regulatory apparatus that tracks infections and shuts them down quickly to keep us safe. These are simple solutions, but they go against the bottom lines of massive corporations and the MAGA agenda. It’s time for us to push back.

Richard: That’s so well said, and so important. Let me try to sum it up: what you’re describing is fragility. Whenever you have a highly centralized system like this, with just a few major players, a breakdown in any one of them paralyzes the whole system. People simply aren’t buying lettuce right now. It’s undemocratic. It exacerbates inequality. It feeds political corruption. It forecloses creative solutions to real problems. It contributes to unemployment.

Frankly, reading your article, I found myself feeling a little nostalgic for those partially true, partially mythic stories of ancient honor culture. I found myself imagining a world where Bruce Taylor—a third-generation inheritor of wealth, not unlike Donald Trump, and the CEO of Taylor Farms—would have felt he had no choice but to commit ritual suicide in the face of the harm he’s caused to so many people. Instead, as you point out, news recently emerged that representatives from Taylor Farms called the White House to try to delay a recall of their lettuce. They’re trying to sell more of this product even as it’s causing a horrific disease outbreak. What kind of person does something like that?

Sonali: It’s monstrous. And the fact that they felt bold enough to directly call the White House to hold off on a recall shows just how broken the system is. The government is supposed to be the watchdog, ensuring checks and balances on a private producer whose product can harm public health. Instead, they picked up the phone and called Trump directly—which, given who Trump is, shouldn’t surprise us. He likes having that kind of power. He likes people coming to kiss the ring, so to speak, and he likes being the one who determines what happens next.

The fact that Taylor Farms felt emboldened enough to ask the White House to stop a recall shows the sheer hubris built into our system for corporate players like this. It should never have come to this.

Richard: And they’re still mincing words with the government, even though the epidemiologists have been very clear it’s their lettuce that’s the problem. They’re still pretending otherwise, that it’s erroneous.

So let’s close with your final paragraph, if that’s all right, Sonali. You write that what will help prevent future outbreaks is restoring and expanding regulatory agencies’ ability to track infectious outbreaks, and breaking up food monopolies while sustaining and strengthening small farms. Then comes a line that may make people a little queasy, but you had to write it: the question is whether the federal government will have the guts to do what it takes to protect the American people’s guts. I think we already know the answer to that one, under current circumstances, don’t we?

Sonali: Yes—they do not have the guts to protect our guts. Which means we have to have the guts to take them on. It’s important for us to understand the power dynamic at work here. The government is supposed to work for us. And I think the solutions, as I mentioned earlier, really are simple. What matters is our ability to ensure that government is actually protecting us through these regulations.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Every single one of us, no matter our party, should be able to trust the food on our plate. And if we don’t trust the food on our plate, we should be asking: whose job is it to make sure our food is safe? You have the uber-libertarians, the Ayn Randians, who think the best government is no government at all. What are people supposed to do—set up a home chemistry lab to test their own lettuce for bacterial infections? Is everyone supposed to become an urban homesteader, growing their own lettuce, their own protein, everything themselves? We have to be able to rely on government to keep our food safe.

And I didn’t even get into the climate impacts of all this in the piece—that was outside its scope. But the practices of big agribusiness fuel climate change. A more dispersed food system, relying on small farmers, would use far less fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer and would align much better with better climate outcomes. And as the planet warms, parasitic infections become more likely, because these parasites thrive in a warming climate. All of these issues are tied together. And the solutions all involve pushing back against corporatism, big companies, and a weakened government.

Richard: And if we don’t do something about it, the only survivors in a few years might be Taylor Farms robot workers—like WALL-E, sifting through the wreckage. I don’t think that’s the future we want.

Sonali: It’s not even the future the billionaires want. They just haven’t thought it through. Right now, the vineyards of France are burning dangerously close to Bordeaux. In the billionaires’ bunkers, there will be no Bordeaux wine, because they will have destroyed the climate that produces it. If these people think they can secure a future for their own children while continuing the practices they’re engaged in, they’ve got another thing coming. You can’t have robots build the future for you that all of us, together, could build for one another.

Richard: No Pinot Noir: that’s hitting them where it hurts.

When I think about the left-wing reformers who are winning office as Democrats, I recognize that they need to govern alongside people who differ with them. That means compromise. It also means that politicians can’t lead the struggle for transformative change, at least not on their own. Movements lead, and sometimes they give rise to people who can also be effective in elected office.

I also worry that the party will absorb each new generation of reformers into its culture before they’re able to change it.

When I caught up with Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, we started off by discussing his recent column arguing that today’s AOC wouldn’t have endorsed the insurgent AOC of 2018. She’s holding back on endorsements for challengers who are doing exactly what she did to get elected, and she recently endorsed Hakeem Jeffries for House Democratic leader—even as he sent colleagues a letter pledging to keep arming Israel.

From there we went to a couple of Norman’s other recent columns. Topics included the failure of institutional conformity in the Democratic Party, its moral and strategic failure on Gaza and Palestine, the myth of “insider expertise,"and the interplay between class, social forces, and personality in the shaping of history.

I enjoyed the conversation very much. I hope you do, too. There’s a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Here are the columns we discussed:

Today’s cautious AOC would not have endorsed the AOC of 2018
My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
Why the Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future

Selected quotes

“When people lead, leaders will follow. If we don’t lead, they’re going to follow each other.”
— Norman Solomon

“At what point are you changing the party, and at what point is the party changing you?”
— Richard Eskow

“It’s stunning that [AOC] has made it a policy not to endorse any challenger to an incumbent Democrat when that’s how she got into Congress in the first place.”
— Norman Solomon

“It’s not about the celebrity figures. It’s about the movements that make them.”
— Richard Eskow

“It’s called democracy. We all take our best assessments and we push.”
— Norman Solomon

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Transcript

Richard Eskow: Welcome back to The Zero Hour.

Norman Solomon: Thanks. Very glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: I want to start with this piece, because I thought it neatly encapsulated the situation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I get asked about a lot. I think anybody identified as being on the left probably gets asked about her a lot. The headline, and I believe this piece itself was not from The Hill, though the headline was, read: “Today’s Cautious AOC Would Not Have Endorsed the AOC of 2018.” I thought that captured a shift people are concerned about with her. What inspired you to write it?

Norman Solomon: It occurred to me that when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into Congress, it was by challenging someone who seemed almost unchallengeable, Joseph Crowley, the fourth-highest-ranking Democrat in the House. It seemed impossible. She had no prior, quote-unquote, experience in office. She’d tended bar, and she was a terrific activist. She won, and it stunned people.

Now, in 2026, as someone with a lot of well-justified clout on the left and in national political discourse, she’s declined to endorse any of the candidates trying to ascend the way she did, mostly, by the way, people of color who’ve won as Democratic Socialists in deep-blue districts in the last few weeks. They’re on their way to Congress, and frankly, no thanks to her. Now, I know it’s complicated, when you’re in office, you have to choose your endorsements carefully. But it’s stunning to me that she’s made it a policy not to endorse any challenger to an incumbent Democrat, when that’s exactly how she got into Congress in the first place.

Richard Eskow: It is striking. She deserves credit for helping Zohran Mamdani early on in his race, though that wasn’t a House race. I always worry about progressives getting elected and then joining what I’ve called the Democratic Borg collective of the power elite. To their credit, many of them haven’t done that. Bernie resisted it for a long time, he was always strategic about when and how he worked with insider groups. I didn’t always agree with him, but he was careful about it, and we could go down the list.

One of AOC’s first moves in Washington was joining a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office, which got her in a lot of trouble. Now she seems to have taken the position that challenging an incumbent is outside the rulebook. But that’s not only how she got into office, it’s supposed to be how democracy works. So what do you think is at the root of her discomfort?

Norman Solomon: She’d be uncomfortable dealing with some of her colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus if she supported challenges to incumbent Democrats. It’s notable that some of the best members of Congress, not just her, got there that way: Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, who hopefully is coming back after being ousted. They got there by challenging people considered entrenched.

There’s a saying that we do political analysis, not psychoanalysis, so we never really know what’s going on inside someone’s head. But it’s pretty clear she’s aspiring to higher office. She may run for the Senate seat in 2028, whether or not Chuck Schumer runs for reelection. There’s also been increasing buzz in the media about her running for president in 2028. In either case, the traditional pathway is not to alienate the powers that be in the Democratic Party, and she seems to be taking the opposite path.

Just as I finished writing this piece for The Hill, news came that AOC had endorsed Hakeem Jeffries, the current House Democratic leader, to continue in that role next year, whether or not he becomes speaker. To me, that reinforces the concern, and maybe the reasonable guess, that she’s trying to curry favor with people in power. And nobody on the Democratic side of the House is more powerful than Hakeem Jeffries. Nobody is more pro-Israel, either, arguably, or certainly, no one is more powerfully pro-Israel.

Just days before we’re speaking, Jeffries sent an extraordinary “Dear Colleague” letter to every House Democrat, saying he’ll oppose any cutoff of weapons and military aid to Israel. He didn’t have to say that, even if he was personally going to vote against an arms cutoff, but he went out of his way to pledge his allegiance to the IDF, using his leverage to stop more Democrats from breaking away from the “Israel, right or wrong” line and voting against arming a government that is clearly engaged in genocide, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights groups Physicians for Human Rights Israel and B’Tselem have all documented.

And yet here’s this guy, in the middle of summer 2026, using his leverage to keep arming a genocide. In that context, it looks especially bad that AOC went out of her way to say, “This is our leader for next year.”

Richard Eskow: This gets back to a conversation you and I, and I think many of us, in various configurations, have had before: the fact that AOC, and candidly Bernie too, endorsed Joe Biden for reelection a year, maybe two years, before the campaign started. My memory’s a little hazy on the exact timing. But this was despite the fact that he was, at that point, supporting the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and he continued to do so, with no leverage used for humanitarian relief there or anywhere else.

It raises the question: at what point, as a politician who’s supposedly a change agent, are you changing the party, and at what point is the party changing you? In that race, who’s winning? Because it seems to me that in both cases, AOC traded away leverage, not just on a political issue that, according to the polls, would favor her, but on a moral one. So it makes me wonder: am I missing something here? I admit I’m baffled.

Norman Solomon: “Gratuitously early” is one way to describe AOC’s endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries as Democratic leader. The vote won’t happen until at least November, when the Democratic caucus decides on its leader for next year. That leader, speaker or not, has tremendous power and leverage over how the Democrats in Congress behave, over caucus positions, and especially over committee assignments.

It’s a bit like a labor leader going into negotiations with management and already giving up so much before any negotiating has even taken place. As you allude to, Richard, I think AOC, for whatever reason, decided to endorse before there was even a negotiation. She did offer an explanation: she said in her announcement that she’d met with Jeffries and was pleased he would support public housing in New York, which matters to her. I found that explanation baffling at best, and at worst, just not credible.

There are really only two possibilities you could draw from AOC’s explanation. One is that Jeffries is so unreliable and unprincipled on humanitarian issues that you have to cut a deal with him just to get his support for public housing that New Yorkers need. Or, on the other hand, he’s someone you can depend on, in which case, why would you need to cut a deal in the first place? Either way, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I don’t want to impute purely selfish motives, but these are politicians, she’s clearly ambitious for higher office, and I think that’s probably the most specific explanation. And then there’s the more generic one: if you want to get along with your colleagues in Congress, you don’t tell them you’re going to help remove them from office.

Richard Eskow: I’ve studied politics for a long time, as you have, Norman, and perception matters a lot. It’s hard to quantify, hard to predict. But the strength AOC brought to her initial campaign, to the House, to what quickly became political celebrity, was a combination of refreshing energy and an unsolemn, I don’t want to say rebellious, but a playful, in a good way, attitude. I thought it was a great moment when she told a hostile witness, “I was a bartender for years, I know how to handle men like you.” She has real gifts as a communicator.

But every gift is double-edged in politics, I’ve come to believe. The gift of being a facile communicator can quickly turn on you if people feel it’s not backed up by substance, character, and commitment. Her youth and youthful energy could equally turn against her if people start to feel there’s something superficial about her. I’m not saying this because I can predict the future or read people’s minds, but if she’s ambitious for herself and her career, and she clearly is, I think she’s playing a dangerous game.

Norman Solomon: On that note, trust can seem ineffable, almost abstract, but I think it matters enormously in the longer term. Let’s face it: if she runs for president, or even for Senate in New York, the right-wing guns will be trained on her, metaphorically. They really hate her, just look at right-wing media. She’s going to need her base to turn out. She’s going to need, as Mamdani had, tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers willing to go door to door to counteract the corporate and militarist assaults, in media and in politics, that are sure to come, and that have already existed for years.

I’ve gotten pushback from progressives who say, “Why are you picking on her? She’s in Congress. She knows things you don’t. She understands tactical complexities you don’t.” I think that’s a very hazardous attitude. We saw it before, when almost every Democrat in Congress refused to say a negative word about Biden running for reelection. We were told, “They’re the pros, they’re the experts, who are we to micromanage them?” Well, it’s called democracy. We all make our best assessments and push, because that’s what activism, organizing, and participatory democracy are supposed to be about.

Richard Eskow: It’s not about the visible figures, the celebrities. It’s about the movements that make them succeed or fail, and that guide and pressure and encourage them. There’s a sad irony in seeing some of the people who came to power because Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton now using the same rhetoric to defend their choices that Hillary’s supporters once used against the Bernie contingent, “They’re the insiders, they’re the experts, they know what you don’t.” Well, you know what? In a democracy, if you know something I don’t, tell me, because that’s how democracy works.

Norman Solomon: That reminds me of something formative for me, and for many people of my generation, during the Vietnam War: we constantly heard that Lyndon Johnson knew things we didn’t, so why should we think we knew better than him? Year after year, I was a teenager at the time, 1965, ‘66, we were told the Democrats in Congress understood the war in ways we didn’t. The message was: butt out, and trust. But we can’t afford to trust, when circles of power so easily seduce the people inside them.

Richard Eskow: People remember, from those days, at least the title of David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest, about the Kennedy people who went on to serve in the Johnson administration, Robert McNamara and others. What people forget is that the title is ironic, the “best and the brightest” made a mess of things.

That gets me to another piece you’ve written recently, Norman, the one headlined “Why the Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future.” I’m sure some people think, “Enough about the Biden debate disaster”, but we’re still talking about it, and not just you and me. This ties directly into what we were just discussing about AOC, doesn’t it?

Norman Solomon: Very much so. As it happens, two of my political heroes, Bernie Sanders and AOC, supported Biden right up until the last minute, until he announced he’d drop out. Patterns really matter. Political cultures matter, even when we have trouble putting our finger on them. There’s a conformity that’s magnetic, especially for people who want to ascend, or be taken seriously.

We saw that dynamic play out. Not to boast, but just to be factual: at RootsAction, we launched the “Don’t Run, Joe” campaign right after the 2022 midterms, and we couldn’t find any other sizable national group willing to join us. We heard privately from some who said, “Yeah, Biden shouldn’t run”, but they were afraid of losing access. The same was true for Democrats in Congress. Only one or two were willing, in 2023, to say publicly that Biden shouldn’t run. This has consequences, and we’re living them right now.

Some people watching might ask, “Why focus on Democrats, when we have this fascistic Republican regime?” And we certainly do focus on that. But the underlying question is: how do we defeat them? Can we do it the way Kamala Harris tried, splitting the difference and, to put it mildly, disrespecting the base that was horrified by the genocide the U.S. was supporting? The question answers itself. We need a departure from this willingness to reinforce the establishment and disregard the polling.

There’s one more piece here, going back to both the 2024 campaign and what we’re talking about with AOC: polling over the last twelve to eighteen months has been very clear, about 75% of Democrats don’t want to keep arming Israel. They believe Israel is engaged in genocide. And still, one of the best progressives in Congress just endorsed for leader someone who came out in favor of continuing to arm Israel. It may be a cliché, but it’s true: when people lead from the grassroots, leaders follow. If we don’t lead, they’ll follow each other, right over the cliff.

Richard Eskow: I get that question a lot too, Norm, “Why are you always so hard on the Democrats when we have this authoritarian Trump who’s so terrible?” My answer is always: that’s exactly why. Trump wouldn’t be there today, in my view, if Democrats were listening to activist movements and the popular will.

I get it, on one level, I’ve been close enough to the seats of power to understand that shifting this massive institution, the Democratic Party, from a large-donor model to a small-donor, popularly-funded one, is a major job. I get that it’s intimidating, that it’s a radical career change for a lot of people, that a lot of well-paid consultants would have to find other ways to make a living. I get all of it, the institutional momentum behind the party as it currently works.

But I think it’s not only good policy and good for the country, it’s the only way to win. Polls keep showing that. Where they don’t, it’s often the phrasing of the poll that’s the problem. The classic example for me is Medicare for All, which polls extremely well, unless you ask, “Would you support government-run health care even if it meant a big hike in your taxes?” Which it doesn’t necessarily have to mean, and which would be more than offset by what people no longer pay in premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

So we have an agenda that would make the country safer and healthier, and yet there’s institutional resistance to it. To me, that should be a dividing line: do the politicians I support understand that, and want to work with the grassroots to overcome it? When you bring up the Biden debate performance, there are a million reasons behind it we haven’t even gotten into. But one of them is what the psychologist Stanley Milgram called obedience to authority, and we, as a movement, and the Democrats as a party, should not be so obedient to authority, especially authority that’s misled us so often. Sorry, I’m ranting a little. Let me turn it back to you.

Norman Solomon: No, that’s key. The huge gap between how Democrats, and often the country as a whole, poll, and the positions taken by Democratic Party leadership, is political malpractice. The vast majority of Democrats don’t want to keep arming Israel, for instance, and yet we have an institutionalized model that says those views don’t really matter compared to other factors, namely, that autocrats and the wealthy can write six- or seven-figure checks.

The reality is that successful campaigns have to be inspiring, that’s how the current mayor of New York got elected. A friend of mine gave a keynote to a state Democratic Party recently and asked, “How many of you would like to be campaigning alongside Chuck Schumer if you were running for office?” Hardly anyone raised their hand. I think it’s similar with Jeffries. What does that tell us? That the party’s ostensible leaders at the very top are found uninspiring, which translates into failing to drive turnout, which is essential to winning elections. Every cycle, come October, it’s a turnout election, and yet this so-called leadership is deadening rather than inspiring.

Another element you touched on, Richard, is the campaign funding model within the party. Without inspiration, you can’t do what Bernie Sanders did, averaging $27 donations. I don’t think the people running the DNC, or leading the House and Senate Democratic caucuses, really see small donations as the key. It’s the old line, if you don’t have the hammer, everything doesn’t look like a nail. They don’t inspire people, and no wonder the DNC is in such dire financial straits right now.

Richard Eskow: I get the challenge this poses to their mindset, even conceiving of a small-donation, popularly-funded party is alien to them. But I think they’re approaching a kind of freeze-up point. The only way they can raise money is by clinging to policies people don’t actually support, just to keep the fundraising going, which lets some people make a good living as consultants without significantly winning elections. Or, they decide they actually want to win, and build a coalition of people who do. Otherwise, they risk freezing in place, in a kind of stasis. What do you think?

Norman Solomon: That brings us back to where we started, the fact that Capitol Hill is, de facto, an insular bubble. You’re dealing with certain callings, certain pressures. I think a key question for those of us at the grassroots, progressives and others who want humane, progressive change, is whether we’re going to be a counter-pressure or not. Are we going to leave the field to the corporate interests and militarists who dominate that milieu on Capitol Hill? Or are we going to provide counter-pressure? Of course, it has to be the latter. That’s essential.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Before you go, Norman, I want to talk briefly about a piece you wrote called “My Conversation with Karl Marx About Donald Trump.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what you were exploring, in channeling the late Karl Marx, was the tension between class struggle as the engine of history versus the historic, transformative personality, in this case, Donald Trump, as the engine of history.

Trump poses a real challenge to the left in that sense. I believe class and economic struggle are major drivers of history, and that there are tectonic forces at work, but individuals can also shift the course of events at certain moments. This is a challenge for the left, because so many centrists and corporate politicians have used Trump’s personality as an excuse not to offer better policies for the working class, which has created a counter-reaction. It’s a delicate balance. Is that a fair read of what you were trying to do with the Marx piece?

Norman Solomon: Yes, that’s largely what I was after. It is a delicate balance. I’m one of many people who, especially over the last year and a half, have been trying to reconcile a fairly solid analysis, that social forces determine what happens historically, in the present and future, and that we want to strengthen the social forces for good rather than for corporate militaristic evil, with the fact that along comes Trump, not just leading a cult of personality, but embodying a force, as an individual, that’s been genuinely transformative.

It’s a word that can sound academic or jargon-y, but dialectically, these are truths in conflict that coexist. I found a quote from Marx, writing to Engels, essentially saying: I never claimed that everything that happens is purely because of economics, people who say that aren’t being accurate. The basis of it is economics, and class struggle, but other factors are involved too. That’s the real world.

Richard Eskow: Right, it’s the gasoline and the match. The gasoline won’t catch fire or explode without a match. On one hand, there are clearly global social forces at work in the rise of the right and demagogic leaders, Orbán in Hungary, Le Pen in France, Farage in Great Britain, some in power, some out. There’s clearly something global going on: alienation against the elite, in the absence, in my view, of a valid left to challenge it. So that’s the structural side.

But on the other hand, would we be in this situation without Donald Trump specifically? I’d say no. I could go further and say he’s intensified the contradictions, to borrow that phrase from the ‘60s, “heightened the contradictions.” We don’t know how it will turn out, but we know we have to stop Trump and Trumpism if we want to create space for real transformative change. At least, that’s my view. I’m not sure Marx, or anyone else, would disagree.

Norman Solomon: Definitely, we need to roll back Republican power, it is fascistic power. When I hear some on the left say it doesn’t matter who’s individually in office, I think that’s, at this point, a kind of hallucination. It clearly matters who holds power. With the right wing running the executive and legislative branches, and much of the judicial branch, we’re entirely on the defensive, there’s no capacity to implement good policy, only damage control. That’s why getting them out of office is the imperative for this midterm election, and for 2028 as well.

Richard Eskow: The other reason to get these people out of office, as dissatisfied as I am with the Democratic Party, is that I think the sum total of human suffering in this country would be somewhat less if the far right were out of power. I don’t think a party deserves a laurel wreath for basic decency, but at least some measure of human decency might return. I’m not so cosmic that I think I know how much suffering should be tolerated in the short term because something magical might happen in the long term. I think we owe it to people to relieve suffering, to give them space to breathe and survive, and then show them what a better world can look like.

Before we go, I’ll give you the last word, there’s a great Marx quote I’d heard before, apropos of Trump. He wasn’t writing about Trump, obviously, in 1869, but he described a cult existing around a tyrant, and how the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” That sounds very much like the current president of the United States. But I’ll give you the last word.

Norman Solomon: That’s an amazing description by Marx, I believe of Napoleon III, and as you say, it fits the dangerous, vicious clown now serving as president. I do want to invite people to check out my latest book, which is free and available online in various formats, at blueroad.info. It’s called The Blue Road to Trump Hell.

Richard Eskow: I encourage people to do that. You and I have talked about it on the program before. Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, thanks for these recent pieces, which I got a lot out of, and thanks once again for coming on the program.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Richard.

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here.

Many thanks.

I spoke with Sam Rosenthal of RootsAction about their campaign to replace Chuck Schumer as Senate Democratic leader. The reasons include:

• Schumer’s allegiance to a hawkish, AIPAC-friendly Israel policy that’s badly out of sync with where Democratic voters now stand (not to mention immoral),

• his tepid opposition to Trump, and

• his instinct to intervene in primaries on behalf of “compliant” establishment candidates — Janet Mills in Maine, for example, or Haley Stevens in Michigan—even when they’re demonstrably unpopular.

We closed by discussing what a post-Schumer Democratic leadership might actually need to look like—and why, on issues like Israel and health care, the party’s voters and its leadership class are no longer speaking the same language.

As Sam says here, “What bugs (Schumer and other party leaders) most about Trump is that he’s indecorous... What should be bugging them is that people in this country still can’t afford health care.”

Please give it a listen. (Transcript below.)

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here.

Many thanks.

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard: At Roots Action, you folks are working pretty hard on a campaign to get Chuck Schumer out of his position as minority leader. So if you don’t mind, let’s start by having you tell us a little bit about that.

Sam: Yeah, thanks … What we’re saying is that Chuck Schumer, while he can remain a senator, should no longer be the leader of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate. And that’s because we feel Schumer is increasingly out of step with the party—certainly out of step with the base.

More and more, he’s drifted from a leadership role within the caucus to being a representative who upholds the traditional, establishment-friendly order in the Democratic Party. I think that order is starting to fall apart. We’ve seen, primary after primary this year, voters choosing candidates who represent an alternative to the traditional establishment in the party.

Schumer is unwilling to relinquish his hold on the party because he wants to continue to be a bulwark against the more progressive elements within it. So what we’re saying is that Schumer is no longer representative of where the Democratic Party is, or, according to voters, where it should be going from a political and strategic perspective, and he should let go of the reins and let someone else step into that position.

Richard: When I think about Schumer and the Democratic Party, three things come to mind where this dissonance you’re describing is most apparent, at least to me, and I’m probably overlooking some. One is opposition to Trump: whether Schumer is being forceful enough, clear enough, in that opposition. I think, for example, of his acceding to Trump’s budget deal at the start of Trump’s second term.

Second is Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel and the Israel-Palestine issue, where polls show a dramatic shift among Democratic voters—very much in contrast with where Schumer stands. And the third is the broader issue of war: opposing Trump’s attack on Iran, and how to oppose it.

So have I left out any critical issues, do you think?

Sam: I don’t think so. I think those are all right. Maybe the only thing I’d add is that we’ve seen Schumer, this year, pretty reliably backing establishment-friendly candidates, even in instances where those candidates aren’t polling well in their primaries and don’t seem to be preferred by anyone except the consultant-donor class of the party.

I think that puts him at a further remove from where the energy in the party actually is right now, which is with the grassroots—with activists who want to see more progressive candidates running for Congress. So it puts him further out of touch. And I think everything you just described can really be summed up this way: Schumer is representative of a politics, and a Democratic Party, that no longer exists.

He’s representative of the politics of days of yore. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, this would have been the Democratic Party mainstream. But there’s a lot of evidence it isn’t anymore. Things like giving a blank check to Israel, a thirst for more war and more confrontation in the Middle East: these are deeply unpopular policies now within the Democratic Party and, increasingly, across the country, across political parties and tendencies.

Schumer, being a poster child for this type of policy, is really damaging the brand of the Democratic Party. He’s one of the most unpopular major political figures in the country, even among Democrats. He’s someone who, I think, is either unwilling or unable to go where the energy among party activists is.

Just to touch on a quick, contemporary example: the war in Iran is incredibly unpopular. This is something Donald Trump started unilaterally, under false pretenses—really, almost no pretense at all. He simply decided he was going to start bombing this country. And during a pause in the fighting—before this latest round started, when Trump was negotiating with Iran—we saw Schumer put out a video effectively taunting Donald Trump for not having gone to war with Iran sooner, for not having attacked the country with more force, more gusto.

That’s just a clear indication of how far Schumer has drifted from mainstream Democratic Party policy on this issue. It’s not popular with the base. But we see that Schumer, as an Iran hawk and an “Israel right or wrong” supporter, has clamored for military conflict with Iran for a long time. And if it were a Democratic president perpetrating this war, I think he’d be happy about it.

Richard: Well, we’ve got a lot of issues on the table now, which is good. But one thing that struck me about his response to Trump’s highly unpopular attack on Iran is that, stylistically—and not just stylistically, but in content—it has this hall-monitor tone to it. It’s less “this is morally wrong, this is tactically wrong, we’re against it” and more “you didn’t ask us permission first”—as in, we would have granted it anyway—“you didn’t follow the rules.” It’s a kind of tattletale posture.

I’m glad you brought up the old model of the Democratic Party, because it reminded me of something—this was on the House side, but—Ryan Grim, when he was at The Intercept, published a slide deck that party leadership gave to newly elected Democratic members of Congress. I can see you remember it. Among other things, it told them to expect to spend two or three hours a day fundraising on the phone with big donors.

The party is still evolving, to be clear, but the voters are way ahead of the party as an institution. The old model was: first and foremost, keep the donors satisfied. I don’t know Schumer’s personal ideology, but that means keeping AIPAC donors happy about Israel, keeping the defense industry happy with how much money gets allocated to the Defense Department, and so on.

So you have, both stylistically and substantively, this growing gulf between “the party” meaning the voters and “the party” meaning the leaders. Schumer can’t even fake it, it seems to me. There are other senators who can at least pretend they’re not in opposition to the voters on these issues, but he seems tonally and substantively completely out of step. Would you agree with that?

Sam: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest failures of Chuck Schumer’s leadership is an inability to recognize how much politics in this country has moved on from the model he’s familiar with. It’s stylistic, it has to do with policy, it has to do with his general approach to politics in this country.

There’s a wing of the Democratic Party that, since 2016, has been waiting for a return to politics as usual, and they’ve failed to recognize that there’s no return coming. There’s no going back to pre-Trump, pre-2016 — even pre-Bernie — style politics. We’re in a fundamentally different era, and it requires a different approach, with different policies.

When you look at someone like Schumer, what you see is an implicit — sometimes explicit — promise to voters that he can take them back to the politics of yore. Joe Biden was part of this trend too: some sort of return to respectability, decorum, procedure, doing things the right way. The error the establishment has made is thinking that’s what voters want — because that is what their donors want. These are people who are materially very comfortable, and what bugs them most about Trump is that he’s indecorous, that he’s crude and mean to world leaders who are supposed to be our friends.

What should be bugging them is that people in this country still can’t afford health care. People are getting priced out of their housing. People can’t provide for their families even when they’re working four, five, six jobs between two parents. Those are the policies we want to see our elected officials picking up and running with. But all Schumer offers is, “We’ll go back to doing things by the book. Elect us and you’ll get a return to a rules-based order, a more predictable cast of leaders” — where, as Joe Biden said, nothing fundamentally will change.

That’s not what people want. People want things to change fundamentally. It’s just that the way people want things to change is out of step with what Chuck Schumer and his friends in the political donor class want. So instead of resolving — or even approaching — that tension, what he’s saying is, “I can take you back to a time when you didn’t have to check the news every day.” And that’s just not what people want anymore.

Richard: Right. And we’re talking about more than recent events — a 40-year or longer history of the decline of the middle and working class. That decorous “my friend, the distinguished gentleman from New York” style of governance included the bipartisanship that was so celebrated for a while — the kind that wanted to cut Social Security, that let the minimum wage lapse, and on and on. People don’t want to go back to that kind of decorous elite rule, it seems to me.

I also have to add — and I feel a little bad saying it, because it feels unkind — Schumer is also a terrible communicator. A terrible face for the party. He communicates old politics in his posture and his style. But there were a lot of questions I wanted to put on the table. Let’s start with this one: you mentioned Schumer’s involvement in primaries around the country. Let’s start with fundamentals — why would the minority leader get so involved in primaries around the country? Why would he weigh in on who he wants as the nominee for, say, the Maine Senate race, or anywhere else?

Should that really be his job? It seems to me the primary voters in a given state are the ones who should decide that, and the party should do what it can from there. I can understand weighing in if someone’s truly alarming — but have the big-donor Democrats gotten too involved in the primary process? And if so, have they done so on behalf of big donors?

Sam: Yeah, I think they have. There’s no rule that says party leadership needs to be involved in primaries at all, and I think probably they shouldn’t be. It’s a little tough — we want to have it both ways. I’m happy when Bernie Sanders endorses people and goes on the campaign trail for them, but Bernie is representative of a social movement as well as being a senator, so that’s a slightly different scenario.

Schumer is certainly able to endorse if he wants to. I just don’t think it’s wise politics, because ultimately he’s in a unique position as leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus — he has to corral members after they’re elected. So it would behoove him, or anyone in that role, to sit on their hands during primaries and wait to see who’s elected. These are all future colleagues, people he has to work with. There’s not much advantage to putting a thumb on the scale — especially for someone like Schumer, who, by and large, doesn’t even campaign alongside the candidates he’s supporting in primaries.

Take Maine, for example — which has turned into its own train wreck. Before that, we saw him actively pushing Janet Mills, who was polling terribly. She’s another representative of the old guard — old in age and old in tenure within the party. It was clear the electorate wasn’t interested in her, and he kept pushing anyway. I think, as he eyed a potential return to the majority — or even remaining minority leader against a thin Republican majority — he was thinking about who’d be compliant, who’d be easy to whip when it’s time to get votes for more aid to Israel, or to block left-leaning legislation coming out of the House.

He’s thinking about making his own job easier by saying, in effect, “We don’t want any rabble-rousers in the Senate.” The kind of politics that someone like Graham Platner — disgraced as he now is — represents: a more populist, progressive politics. Those people are a problem for Chuck Schumer. I think his approach was to get ahead of it, so he wouldn’t have to deal with people like that once they’re in the Senate. But the net effect is that he’s been supporting candidates who are really uninspiring, and it only further toxifies the party’s brand, because the most powerful Senate Democrat is seen running around the country promoting people who frankly don’t often have a chance of winning and aren’t well positioned to represent the Democratic Party.

Richard: And he didn’t back off the Mills endorsement even after poll after poll showed she was doing very poorly. So it wasn’t just the initial choice — it was sticking with her. Which raises a slight digression, Sam — feel free to tell me I’m out of my mind, because I acknowledge I may be. But part of me thinks the Democratic Party establishment — setting aside Platner’s personal issues for a moment — would rather, given the choice between a Graham Platner type politically and Susan Collins, have Susan Collins, even if it threatens their majority. Because they’d see a Platner type as a threat to their agenda, whereas they see Susan Collins as a Republican they can work with.

Sam: Yeah, I completely agree with that. Take an example that’s still live: the Michigan Senate race, where we have Abdul El-Sayed running — a progressive backed by a lot of left groups, RootsAction included — against Haley Stevens, who’s sort of the platonic ideal of an AIPAC-backed candidate. She’s taken tons of money from AIPAC. A cycle or two ago, she ran against Andy Levin, a Jewish member of Congress from a family with a long history in Michigan and national government, who was seen as insufficiently pro-Israel. AIPAC backed Stevens instead, and she unseated Levin.

What we’re hearing now from the Democratic establishment is, “We can’t let El-Sayed win — he won’t win in a general election.” That’s their line. But when you look at the polling between Stevens and El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, the Republican in that race, it’s actually about the same — they’d both have a similarly good chance of beating Rogers. So what’s the real problem? What are Democrats actually worried about, and why are so many establishment figures putting a thumb on the scale for Stevens? It’s because they don’t want El-Sayed in Congress.

Their order of preference is: number one, Haley Stevens — that’s the best outcome. Number two, Mike Rogers gets the seat — that’s the second-best outcome for them. And the worst outcome, for them, is Abdul winning the seat. I think this is really representative of how that wing of the Democratic Party sees its job right now: keeping the lid on, keeping business as usual going. The fewer potential sources of agitation, the better, as far as they’re concerned.

Susan Collins is a well-known quantity — they know exactly how she’s voted, term after term. She’s predictable. A Platner type in that seat would have been a wild card, someone they wouldn’t know how to corral — and critically, someone not beholden to the establishment the way Janet Mills was. That person is a creature of the outside, not the establishment, and those people are hard for the party to control.

So the real fear is a surge of left candidates winning their seats, as we’ve already seen in some House primaries this year — because then the Democratic Party actually has to start telling voters what it stands for. Does it stand for a kind of Republican-lite politics — the Republican Party, minus a rude sexual predator like Trump at the head of it — or does it stand for actual progressive policy that benefits working people?

They haven’t had to answer that question for the last ten years, because all they’ve had to say is “we’re not Trump, we’re not Trump, we’re not Trump,” without ever having to say who they actually are. That’s a horizon they’d like to avoid. They’d rather run against Don Jr., against JD Vance — people heavily identified with the Trump universe — so they never have to tell voters where they actually stand: on aid to Israel, on Medicare for All, on the minimum wage. These are questions they haven’t had to speak to in a long time, and they’re hoping they don’t have to anytime soon.

Richard: And they’re between Iraq and a hard place with their model of politics — because if they side with their voters on these issues, they alienate their donors, and they don’t have an alternative model the way a Sanders or an El-Sayed does. But to close things out — you’re running a campaign, available at RootsAction.org. Are there any good contenders to be the next minority leader, or perhaps majority leader down the line? Is there anyone in the Senate — I know it’s not going to be Bernie — anyone you’re thinking of? Or is that getting ahead of ourselves?

Sam: It might be a little ahead of ourselves, in the sense that there are some Senate races this cycle and next — heading into 2028 — that could be very determinative of who’s more representative of the face of the party. But the answer I’d give is: we want to see a Democratic caucus leader, majority or minority, who’s more aligned with what the base says it wants.

Right now, for example, support for sending weapons to Israel is basically an 80-20 issue within the Democratic Party. So why would we have a Senate Democratic leader who’s on the 20 side of that split? It makes zero sense. We want someone who says, “We’re done sending weapons to Israel. We’re done with the special status we’ve conferred on that country — this is a rogue state, and we’re not going to deal with them as we would an ally anymore.” Someone who says we need to fix health care in this country with a single-payer, Medicare for All system.

Someone willing to accept that the affordability crisis — around student debt, housing, health care — is driven by profit-seeking corporate models, and that Democrats should legislate as a check against those entities, not in lockstep with them, figuring out what Aetna wants, what BlackRock wants, and then passing legislation that benefits their purposes.

It’s really a question of policy. I don’t want to get too horse-racy about it, because it becomes about personality, and it’s really not a question of personality. We want someone who’s a fighter, certainly someone who understands we’re in an urgent moment. But above all, someone in step with the base — in step with what voters in this country, especially younger voters, who’ll make up an increasingly larger share of the electorate, are saying they want. That’s the answer I’d offer right now. In a cycle or two, it might be more pointed, but that’s where I’d leave it today.

Richard: Well, thanks for this — a really great discussion. Maybe one of these days we’ll talk about Hakeem Jeffries too. But where can people go to find more information about your work on this, your group’s work on this?

Sam: Go to RootsAction.org — you’ll find our Schumer petition there, along with a lot of the other campaigns we’re working on.

Illustration: “The Horse America throwing its Master: King George III unseated.” (Pro-revolutionary English cartoon by William White, 1779.)

Above a brief message from me and The Zero Hour for the Fourth of July. A slightly-edited transcript is below, followed by my response to the New York Times’ list of “definitive” movies about America.

Transcript

Well, it’s the 4th of July again. They’re calling it the 250th birthday of the United States of America, which brings to mind at least a couple of quotes. One is from a poet I quote a lot, William Blake. In “America: A Prophecy,” the spirit of America encounters the spirit of insurrection, of revolution, of rebellion, of human assertion—of self-respect. And the spirit of America says to the spirit of revolution, “I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let thee go.”

So on this, the 250th birthday of the American Revolution, that’s my feeling toward the revolutionary spirit.

The other quote is from a source I don’t cite very often and would not necessarily want to be known for citing, and that’s the Eagles. The Eagles, you may recall, had a song—I think it was the Eagles—that said, “What do you do when your dreams come true, and it’s not quite like you planned?”

I wasn’t born yesterday. I know that the American Revolution was a conflict of economic interests. I know the class dynamics. I get it. I get that slaveholders were creators of this revolution. I get that. I get the silly naivete of the musical “Hamilton.”, Hamilton didn’t own slaves, but he certainly administered the trafficking of them. Read up on that if you like.

So I’m not naive. I know that when I say the dream didn’t quite work out as was planned, I’m thinking of people like William Blake and the British rebel movement—people who saw in the American Revolution a spirit of self-assertion, a spirit of independence, a spirit of insurgency, and they thought that spirit could set all of humanity on fire.

It hasn’t quite worked out the way that way. In fact, this Fourth of July, it seems the only thing we’re setting on fire in the middle of this heat wave is .... Well, let’s put it this way. Normally we grill hot dogs on the Fourth. This year, in the middle of this heat wave, we’re grilling ourselves.

The spirit of revolution that has been so often celebrated as part of the American legacy has not worked out as planned. But I still have faith in the spirit of revolution. So rather than going for detached cynicism, and even though I understand the true motivations behind the American Revolution, I still believe in the American Revolution.

So if you’re hearing this on the 4th, or if you’re hearing this after the 4th, my sentiment remains the same towards this admirable spirit of independence and assertion of our rights, that task that is not done yet: I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let you go.

The Real American Movies

Forget the New York Times list of the “definitive” movies about America. That’s just a bunch of critics talking. These are the films that really get it right!