WTF is Going On?!?!? (w/Richard Wolff)

Decoding the current chaos.

Prof. Wolff and I spent this conversation wrestling with a central, uncomfortable question: are we watching the collapse of an American era, or have we entered a period where coherence itself has become a casualty? It sometimes feels like the zeitgeist can be summed up with three simple initials: “WTF!”

Here, Prof. Wolff and I work on separating the signal from the noise. We discuss the vacuum left by the collapse of ideologies, the grotesque theater of figures like Hegseth and Melania, performing roles they clearly didn’t create for themselves, the dangerous incoherence of the war against Iran, and the real possibility that Europe—stung by tariffs, excluded from war councils, and humiliated by a country it once trusted—may ultimately turn toward Russia and China for a better deal.

Neither of us claim to have a clean theory. These aren’t very ‘clean’ times. But we need to pay close attention and react accordingly, as we attempt to do here.

Selected Quotes

“A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”
— Rudyard Kipling, invoked by Richard Eskow

“When wine goes bad, it’s vinegar. Whatever vintage American wine was, we’re watching it turning into vinegar.”
—Richard Eskow

“The tariff attack was considered a betrayal. The war in Iran was considered a betrayal. For Europeans, these are levels of outrage their politicians have figured out are way too deep and way too wide to ignore.”
—Richard Wolff

“We don’t even have bad visions anymore. There’s a vacuum where there used to be competing ideologies.”
—Richard Eskow

“The best organizer for the left in America today is Mr. Trump.”
—Richard Wolff

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: You and I get questions of various kinds — some answerable, some ineffable, some barely comprehensible. Usually I can take a fair shot at most of them. But lately things have gotten so chaotic that I find myself struggling.

I’ve actually been working on a piece I keep setting aside called “The Age of Meaninglessness,”the idea being that perhaps the defining feature of this era is that it doesn’t mean anything. There’s a line from The Simpsons where someone asks, “What’s the moral of this story?” and Homer says, “There is no moral. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” Sometimes I think that describes contemporary history.

But I had another thought while wrestling with this topic. What came to mind, of all things, was a quote by Rudyard Kipling, who knew a thing or two about empires, particularly the British Empire. Kipling wrote that when a society is collapsing, “a people always ends by resembling its shadow.” And to me, that might be a key to understanding what’s going on.

It’s not that Trump and the people around him represent a disruption in the arc of American history. They’re as American as anything else in this country, except perhaps more so. They may be the distillate of Americanism: the greed, the arrogance, the assumption that power, particularly military power, will always prevail, the sexual obsession.

And it’s not limited to Trump alone—or as he apparently prefers to be addressed, “Jesus Christ.” It applies to the people around him too. Melania Trump going on television to declare she has never been associated with Jeffrey Epstein, which seemed like a national non sequitur. Pete Hegseth and his Narcissus-like fascination with his own appearance, rejecting photographers who don’t capture him flatteringly.

It all seems to me like a sign of something. When wine goes bad, it becomes vinegar. My working theory is that whatever vintage American wine once was, we are now watching it turn. But that’s just a thought I’ve been sitting with. What do you make of it?

Richard Wolff: I love this way of putting things, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Though I think it’s worth pairing it with a little exercise in intellectual humility, and here’s what I mean. You and I are particularly good, I think, at constructing analyses and narratives to make sense of whatever we’re discussing. I believe in that. I believe it’s one of the better things human beings do. The trouble is never to confuse the act of constructing a story with actually capturing how things really are. Always stay open to the aspects you haven’t yet understood or surfaced, because they’re always there.

One of the ways you keep yourself honest is by periodically saying exactly what you just said, and you said it very well. These are chaotically juxtaposed, jumbled phenomena that don’t lend themselves to any straightforward explanation.

Let me add a few observations. I follow European podcasts and news outlets fairly closely, and I would say the level of hostility toward the United States — not just toward Trump personally, but toward a broader America — has risen significantly. The sentiment seems to be: if Americans genuinely disagreed with Trump, there would be far more visible signs of it. Europeans don’t see demonstrations in the streets. They don’t see the Democratic Party mobilizing its base to register discontent. None of it.

And I find that deeply significant, because I think it is extremely dangerous for the United States. If you look at the approval ratings for the leaders of England, France, and Germany — Starmer, Macron, Merz — they’re polling at ten to twenty percent. They’re in worse shape than Trump. And they are going to be voted out by populations who feel a sense of betrayal by the United States — and whose politicians are now realizing that sentiment runs too deep and too wide to ignore.

The tariff attack was experienced as a betrayal. The war on Iran was experienced as a betrayal — not being consulted, then being excoriated for not helping in a war they weren’t consulted about in the first place. These are not grievances European politicians can paper over.

Richard Eskow: What’s interesting to me is that — and it’s a fascinating observation — when Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, turned against Trump, my first thought was that even their fascists seem more competent than ours. But in truth, and I know nothing you’ve said is intended to idealize Western Europe — which has many serious flaws of its own. We’ve talked about its alarming drift toward increased militarism, its refusal, largely at U.S. direction, to pursue a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, its rush to ramp up military spending.

But what you’re describing is important, because for better or worse — and in many ways worse — we have had a neoliberal social order that’s existed for roughly seventy-five to eighty years. And as urgently as it needs to change, its collapse hasn’t produced an alternative. Instead, people seem to be arriving at the conclusion I described at the start: that this is all just a bunch of stuff that happens, with no ideology or philosophy to make sense of it.

In previous generations, someone might have said the Communists have a handle on this, or the Socialists, or the Christian Democrats, or whoever. Now it seems as though people have rejected ideology altogether — not replaced it, but abandoned it — in favor of raw emotion. Whether it’s the AfD in Germany, Meloni’s movement in Italy, or others, the pattern is the same.

There’s a line — I believe it’s from the Bible — “A people without vision perish.” We don’t even have bad visions anymore. We just have a vacuum where competing ideologies used to be.

Richard Wolff: I think that’s true. On Meloni — as best I can read it, she was looking for a way to distance herself from Trump rather than remain wrapped in his embrace, which she had initially done. And Trump rather helpfully handed her the perfect opportunity when he insulted the Pope. Suddenly she could appeal to her base — who love the Pope — by positioning herself as the Pope’s defender against Trump. And that means yet another country whose popular opinion is now being organized against him.

Richard Eskow: And again, it’s not ideological. I think that’s exactly the right reading. Trump has become so unpopular in Italy that she needed a way out, and she found one. I suspect she has no great love for this Pope or his predecessor — if anything, my guess is she belongs to that strand of the Christian right that views the current papacy as dangerously liberal. But she found a way to wriggle free of his embrace.

Throw into that the loss of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — and again, his replacement, Péter Magyar, is ideologically indistinguishable from him. He was one of Orbán’s own functionaries until an opportunity arose. So we have this era of discontent and disgust that I have genuine compassion for, but that leaves a gaping vacuum.

I puzzle over what European publics are actually feeling in their gut. Meanwhile, the big event of the week in American media is Melania Trump disavowing Jeffrey Epstein — despite emails that apparently show her signing off warmly to Ghislaine Maxwell. I don’t know whether the media’s apolitical vapidity reflects the public mood or reflects an elite desire to distract. I suspect the latter, and that it’s simply reinforcing the vacuum. I don’t know if European media is doing better — I suspect it is, but from my British left-wing friends, I hear plenty of complaints about the BBC.

Richard Wolff: The BBC has moved significantly to the right. It’s striking to watch.

Richard Eskow: So is this the end of an era? The dawning of a new one? Or the beginning of an era where there aren’t any eras anymore — just, to go back to Homer, a bunch of stuff that happens? Can you make heads or tails of any of this, or is this one of those cases where we have to confess we simply don’t know yet?

Richard Wolff: A little confession is in order, though I wouldn’t abandon analysis entirely. I’ve been asking various people — you, but others too — about the Melania speech, which I hadn’t intended to watch but found myself watching anyway. I couldn’t quite work out what she was saying. I understood she was emphatically denying any connection to Epstein, repeatedly. Then I spoke to my daughter, who said immediately: something is about to come down the pike. Someone warned Melania that Epstein-related files are about to be released, and the contents will not be favorable to her or Donald. So she got ahead of it — made clear she has nothing to do with any of it — and notably gave the statement without her husband standing beside her, as though she were distancing herself from him.

Everything I know about Washington suggests that how she was dressed and every word she spoke was written for her by the team around her. But the urgency of the statement felt real.

I had the same feeling I had years ago watching her explain her husband’s comments about women’s genitalia as merely ‘locker room talk’ — you could see her reciting a phrase she had been given.

What struck me separately was watching Pete Hegseth describe the blockade of Iran as ‘successful’ — two days in. You cannot assess the success of a blockade in two days, and there is no evidence it was working. Rather than just chaos, what we seem to have is: things just happen, plus they are all declared successful, as though there were a coherent strategy behind them achieving intended results.

Everything about this war — more than most — screams mistake and misjudgment. The majority of Americans opposed it from day one, including Trump’s own base. They didn’t understand what Iran had in terms of missile capability, drone capability, or the range and accuracy to deliver them. The list of things they apparently didn’t understand is extraordinary.

And I’ll add one more, because I think you’ll appreciate it. A French newspaper — centrist-left, something like Le Monde — asked a very sharp question: if a blockade and the bombing campaign share roughly the same objective — pressuring Iran to change course on nuclear development and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — then why on earth would you bomb first? The logical sequence would have been to blockade first, showing seriousness while avoiding mass casualties, and then escalate militarily only if that failed. Instead, you bomb, it clearly doesn’t work, you call it off, and then you impose the blockade. The paper presented this not as strategic analysis but as evidence of why Europe cannot trust the United States.

Richard Eskow: They were saying it approvingly, or —

Richard Wolff: No — as a symptom of unreliability. The framing was: we have been burned by this betrayal, and we must learn from it. That was the encapsulated message.

Richard Eskow: I want to return to that in a moment, but I feel compelled to note something that struck me when you juxtaposed Melania Trump and Pete Hegseth. Melania’s professional career was as a model — her job was to appear a certain way in front of a camera. I would argue that Pete Hegseth is essentially a model too: a superficial character who got his position based on his looks and his television performance, with all the hollowness that implies. A lot of Trump appointees fit that profile.

It made me think: maybe what we’re watching is community theater — a really bad production where everyone is genuinely bad at their role.

But returning to the more substantive point — what you’re describing is a Europe that has developed a deep, widening aversion to the United States. And you have European leaders who don’t share that aversion by inclination — they are NATO-oriented, broadly pro-American — and yet they have been pushed around by Trump to such a degree that who knows what their private thoughts now are.

Here’s what I keep thinking: if a more conventional American president came along — another Obama or Biden type, someone who spoke politely, seemed reasonably educated, wanted to rebuild relationships — Macron and Starmer would presumably be relieved. But I’m not sure they would become any more popular with their own publics. If that’s right, then the question becomes: what are the long-term implications for the United States and for Western Europe of this estrangement?

Richard Wolff: If I’m reading Europe correctly, they are going to be voting for people who openly identify as European nationalists — or more narrowly, as German nationalists, French nationalists, Italian nationalists — because the project of forging a united European identity has stalled, and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon. The very force of nationalism at the national level works against overcoming it at the continental level.

That is a severe problem for them. They are acutely aware that virtually all significant high-tech development is either American or Chinese. All the major breakthroughs are American or Chinese. Europeans talk about needing to spend trillions to rebuild anything competitive, and they can’t generate the political consensus to do it. Even now, when they are spending on military, they’re spending on a French military and a German military and an Italian military — not a unified European one. That guarantees inferiority. You are never going to match the United States or China with that approach.

And the result is that the United States doesn’t consult you before going to war against a country whose missiles can reach most European cities. Iran chose not to use them that way this time. Next time, they may not make the same choice.

Richard Eskow: The implications of that are enormous. One possible outcome is that the forty-year project of European integration simply falls apart — that the gravitational pull becomes: the European institutions in Brussels don’t respect us, America treats us like an afterthought, and therefore Germany for Germans, Austria for Austrians, Hungary for Hungarians. Don’t you think that’s a genuine possibility?

Richard Wolff: Yes, I think we need to start taking seriously very large strategic realignments that we would have dismissed not long ago. Mark Carney gave that speech at the World Economic Forum where he said, essentially, this is not a passing phenomenon — this is a historic shift — and was met with applause. He had more courage than any of the European leaders in the room. And I think he’s right: this is changing the way Canadians think about the United States fundamentally. He’s gaining popularity precisely because he took on the role of leading opposition to Trump, while his opponent Poilievre didn’t and has suffered badly for it.

Richard Eskow: I appreciated his boldness, though I found the speech itself appalling in a different way — a blueprint for reconstructing the same defunct global elite on a slightly more decentralized scale. The liberals applauding it had no idea what they were applauding.

Richard Wolff: And if you had any remaining doubts, Carney made his position clear a few days later by enthusiastically endorsing the war on Iran — despite not having been consulted about it.

Richard Eskow: So before we close — we’ve been talking about a United States that has damaged its relationship with Europe, that is staging this odd puppet show with these hollow figures like Hegseth and others, increasingly going it alone. What does it actually portend for America if it has genuinely, perhaps irreversibly, alienated Western Europe?

Richard Wolff: As a final, perhaps provocative word: it means that both in Europe and in the United States, though in different ways, you are going to see an argument emerge from unexpected quarters — sooner rather than later — that the entire strategic posture has been a mistake, and that the only rational alternative is to sit down with Russia and China and work out a mutually livable coexistence rather than continuing this cycle of endless warfare with its enormous costs in lives, money, and standing.

And if Europe were to move in that direction — which, given the depth of their sense of betrayal over the tariffs, the economic displacement, the reports that VW’s leadership has been in meetings with the State Department about moving headquarters to the United States — then the question for Europe becomes: why stop at merely stepping back from the American alliance? Why not find a partner who will offer a genuinely better deal? Russia and China might be very willing to offer one, in the context of preparing for whatever the United States undertakes in the years ahead.

I think we are going to be seeing very large changes.

Richard Eskow: We do live in interesting times. I was telling someone recently that if I ever have a tombstone, it should read: ‘Well, that was interesting.’ It’s never dull, is it?

Richard Wolff: No. And as someone on the American left, there is a certain irony in the fact that the best organizer for the left in America today is Donald Trump. He is genuinely radicalizing people on a daily basis — a good number of whom are then moving leftward, some quickly, some slowly. It’s unmistakable to me.

And I’d push back on the American media’s insistence that all the populism in Europe is right-wing. That’s simply not accurate. What you’re seeing is the center collapsing, with both the right and the left doing better. The country I follow most closely is France, and there the left is at minimum the equal of Le Pen’s movement, and I would argue more powerful.

Richard Eskow: In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party seems to have struggled, but the Green Party has rebranded itself as a genuinely left-wing force and just won a parliamentary seat. Their polling is strong. It’s a fluid situation, and more will be revealed.

But perhaps Mr. Trump is such a powerful recruiter for the left because he is, after all, Jesus — and Jesus, with his first-century, small-c communist lifestyle, is simply making known where his sympathies really lie.