Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Isn’t the Left Winning? with Bhaskar Sunkara

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/FACTUALLY and get on your way to being your best self.The term "socialism" has gained prominence in today's political discourse, yet it hasn't fully entered the political mainstream apart from moments like the Occupy Wall Street movement or Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the fervent following of MAGA, there's no socialist movement of comparable size and far-right politicians outnumber their left-leaning counterparts a hundred to one. Why is this the case, and does socialism actually have a shot at shaping future policy? To answer these questions, Adam is joined by Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, president of The Nation, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.Donate to Al Otro Lado at http://gum.fm/charity or sign up to volunteer at http://alotrolado.org/volunteer .SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, you may have noticed that I spend a lot of time talking shit about the wealthy on this show. How they hoard their wealth, go to war against their own workers, and are in the process of destroying the planet all to protect their precious golden treasure. And I think a lot of you might feel the same way. That might be why you watch this show

and you're not alone. The American economy has gotten more and more unfair and frankly fucked up over the past 50 years and people have taken notice. You don't need to be an economist to know that there's something bad about the top 10% of a society hoarding two thirds of its wealth or about a country where wages since

1979 have grown over five times faster for the top 1% than for the bottom 90%. As a result, in recent years we have seen left-leaning social movements coalesce in order to fight this injustice, first during the Occupy Wall Street movement, then in the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, and more recently, in the emergence of groups like the Democratic Socialists of America. The word socialism is now a part of our political conversation in a way it simply wasn't in 2008 or 2000 or 1992.

But while that's true, it still hasn't fully entered our political mainstream. You haven't seen a lot of socialist senators or even many members of the house yet. And here's the really weird part. The same is not true for the far right of our politics. I mean, the current GOP presidential candidate is open about wanting to cut the modest social safety net

we do have, reducing social security and Medicare, lowering taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting environmental regulations, all while enacting a wildly regressive, frankly fascist social agenda that will reduce the rights for women and target immigrants for deportation. I mean, I will grant that Bernie Sanders is very popular for a socialist in the context of American history, but there simply isn't a Bernie army the same way there is a MAGA army. There are a hundred times as many elected MAGA leaders as socialists in American government today.

Despite all of the left's successes, why is that? Well, to answer that question, we have an incredible guest on the show today. Before we get into it though, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. And if you like stand-up comedy, please come see me on the road.

This April, I'm gonna be in Indianapolis, Indiana, San Jose, California, La Jolla, California, a bunch of other great places as well. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's introduce today's guest. Bhaskar Sankara is president of The Nation magazine, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of a book called The Socialist Manifesto,

the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality. Please welcome Bhaskar Sankara. Bhaskar, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. I feel like it's long overdue because a lot of the issues that you write about in your work and that you cover are issues we've discussed on the show. Thanks for having me. I feel like it's long overdue because a lot of the issues that you write about in your work and that you cover

are issues we've discussed on this show. And you identify as a socialist and a leftist. I think that it's a really interesting time for those ideas in America, because on the one hand, you see them spreading or becoming more popular in the public to some degree, in the policy apparatus to some degree.

And yet the number of people, I saw a Pew research study, the number of people who have positive views of socialism is going down and is much lower than people who have positive views of capitalism. Take those broad surveys for what they are. But it's sort of like, is this growing or is it not? How do you feel about the overall prospects

for leftist politics and these policies in America right now? Well, I think 10 years ago, you could say socialism in America as a current, even as an opposition movement, was basically dead. And now you could say it's on life support. It depends on your perspective. You know, if you're just like, oh, she's doing good. She's only in a coma now. So she will see what happens in a couple of years. Yeah, exactly.

So I think that for for me, it feels fantastic. I became a card carrying member of the Democratic Socialist of America, not actually card carrying because they were too dysfunctional to actually get me a card at the time. In April 2007, there was about 5,000 of us and I was among the youngest members. I joined right before my 18th birthday. And today there's around 100,000 members of DSA, the Democratic Socialist of America. Jacobin, the socialist magazine I founded has around 66,000 or so subscribers.

There is a base and obviously between having Bernie Sanders as a self-identified democratic socialist, politicians like Alexander Ocasio-Portes, there is a small amount of highly visible democratic socialists in public life. And that's not something we had in the recent past in the US. And in that sense, it's doing great. Now, is it ready to storm the barricades and really change American society in a fundamental way. You know, maybe not, but for a opposition movement that's just, you know, getting its legs, I'm not too disappointed.

Well, let's talk about Bernie Sanders because, you know, when his first few campaigns, you know, they grew to such size, they ended up powering a movement. The movement continued in many ways, which resulted in the growth of the DSA. But if you contrast that with Donald Trump's movement, and I don't wanna create an equivalency there, but there are some similarities. His movement has taken over an entire party, and has the Democratic Socialist Movement. You can say, oh, there's a mayor over here, there's has, you know, the, the democratic socialist movement.

You can say, oh, there's a mayor over here. There's some state legislatures over there. You've got here in LA, you know, we have, uh, uh, I believe three city council people out of 15 who are members or at least associated with the DSA. That's, Hey, yeah, that's, those are, you know, successes for the movement. Uh, but you know, the MAGA movement, right the MAGA movement has representative senators, governors, et cetera, and hey, they don't win every election, yada, yada.

But in terms of the way that it has been injected into the mainstream of American politics in this stunningly swift way is kind of in sharp contrast to what happened to the Bernie Sanders movement or the relative success. So what do you credit that to? Or do you think that the comparison I'm drawing is false entirely, which you may?

Well, I think that it's always easier to organize big money and you get some organic backing from ordinary people in the interest of capital. So fundamentally, Donald Trump's appeal was, I'm a businessman. I know what to have, make deals. I'm going to cut a better deal for you, ordinary American, and also for American business in the world. And I think that's an easier appeal to make than, you know, my name is Bernie Sanders. I'm an outsider. I want to take on millionaires and billionaires. Can you loan me $27 and I promise I'll spend your money well,

fly economy and travel around the country getting my message out. And I think that the Sanders route was a lot tougher. Trump was tapping into, I think, a continuum of Republican politics. We don't even think of it that way. But the Tea Party to Trump, I think, had common threads. Of course, the hysteria that Trump whipped up around Obama's birth certificate

was kind of part of tapping into that old Tea Party base, but radicalizing it. Then he was able to with his own gifts as an orator, he might not appeal to everyone, but he obviously is a skilled communicator in a certain way and an entertainer. I mean, the guy will riff for three hours at a stretch about everybody he hates. And that's, just as a standup comic, that's impressive.

And the guy gets laughs. It is a feat of oration, what he does. And he has a cadence, he has, just as a performer, I think he has his skills. Bernie always seems like he's a bit tired and fed up, which he is at this point, he has every right to be. But Trump was able to combine his natural gifts, this base that he had cultivated and radicalized a bit

with the Obama birther stuff, buying his natural gifts, the space that he had cultivated and radicalized a bit with the Obama birther stuff, with a lot of his own money and a very hollowed out Republican party, that he just knew how to pick a part. And by the time they realized that it was too late, they needed to stop him, it was too late. Whereas the DNC realized they had to stop Bernie, but it wasn't too late. You know, the Obama was able to make a few calls and, and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris and others were able to, from their perspective, do the smart

thing, rally behind Joe Biden, Joe Biden winning the election. So on their own terms, they made a good decision, but they were unable to stop Trump. But I do think that maybe a stronger comparison to Trump would be, and I say this as someone who's generally a supporter of a lot of his policies, would be someone like AMLO in Mexico, who's been able to combine some of his oratory and charisma and somewhat strong man personality, but combine it with a genuinely progressive agenda. I think Bernie was always in the United States

doing something a little bit different and a more difficult task, given our context. Mm, and yeah, draw that comparison a little bit more between AMLO who, in Mexico, like, and what Bernie did that's more difficult. Just pull that out some more. Yeah, I think that, um, first of all, AMLO was someone who ran multiple times for a president.

He arguably won in 2006. He had the election, again, some people say, stolen from him then, but either way, he was a very well-known national figure. Um, he is someone who came from a lot of the historical networks that they left, but he figured out that he had to leave and abandon some of those networks and ways of talking and try to articulate a more populist framework for explaining who he was to the Mexican people and what his appeal was about. It was not just the regular left-wing appeals

about redistribution and taking on the wealthy, but he combined it with this idea of fighting corruption and fighting to preserve the sanctity and purity of kind of Mexican republicanism in kind of a national popular sense. Bernie Sanders in the same way came from the hard left, really, in the national popular sense, Bernie Sanders in the same way came from, from the hard left really in the United States. He was a member of the young people's socials lead,

which just sounds incredibly anachronistic as if anyone, all the people I know who are members of the young people socially are like 85 years. Right. They're not young anymore at the reunions. They're all on walkers. Yeah. He, he joined, um, uh, in the, uh, the left that was before the new left, really, like he was interested in this when he was at Brooklyn college, uh, and later on at the university of Chicago. So we're talking about pretty early on in the 1960s, I actually know guy.

Um, I'm not sure he, he wants me to, uh, uh, cite him, cite him, but he's like, he loves to tell me stories about this period because he was a leftist in the late fifties and the sixties. And often you can't really trust all of his stories that he was told me. So then I told the Black Panther Party, your slogan shouldn't be free Huey Newton. It should just be free Huey. But so I think this is a great assault. OK, tell me he recruited Bernie Sanders to not just the Young People Socialist League. And that, I think, is established back that he did that in the University of Chicago.

But he recruited him to the the Shaq tonight. Um, you know, I kind of Trotsky oriented, uh, fraction of the young people socialist league, uh, in the, in the early 1960s. So Bernie was very steeply entrenched in the lab. I mean, Bernie, I used to do a joke on stage about how Bernie came to LA when he was running, uh running the second time. And he gave a speech about, you know, you should all be so proud you have the Dodgers, because we were all so sad in Brooklyn when the Dodgers moved to LA.

And I was like, wow, that's the moment I realized he was too old to be president. Like, you can't go around telling people that you remember when the Toshars left Brooklyn. Like that is the oldest school thing possible. That's like history books have been written about this. So he's steeped in that sort of like mid-century America in this very specific way. Yeah, and exactly, I think that was part of his strength because he both left behind that existing laughter and moved to Vermont in a place that he could really find a way to

influence politics at a bigger scale. But he kept a lot of its allegiance to the old bread and butter simple way of talking about things. And then often when people say that, that could be a euphemism for let's not talk about gay people, let's not talk about racial justice and so on. But, you know, Bernie Sanders is a product of the new left. You know, he's a product of the civil rights movement. He's someone who went to Vermont to try to farm, which is kind of just a crazy thought in and of itself, the kind of back to the land movement.

You would think they would maybe pick somewhere a little bit more fertile than in his book. I always wondered how he got to Vermont from Brooklyn. He literally, it was part of like the back to the land, like let's start a little homestead in New England hippie movement. I'm not sure if he intended to like survive by farming, but it was definitely, let's get a cabin,

let's get a little land. Wow. And in his book, the same book where he talks kind of about, you know, the New York trolley Dodgers or whatever, the Brooklyn trolley dodgers leaving town and him getting upset. You know, he also talks about surviving that first winter, which was one of the worst winters for, you know, in modern history in terms of temperature and whatnot, and not having proper heat and trying to find enough to burn to stay warm. So he obviously has a little bit of that hippie dippy left in him, but he had a very simple message. And he said the same thing in his first run in the early 1970s for office, all the way up

to his 2016 run, which was, um, millionaires control too much of this country's wealth. Um, he would give the same percentage, um, X percentage of people control Y percentage of the wealth, same framing, same syntax. And in a way, the, I think the very old somewhat-century New York ethnic accent combined with that straight talk, I think it resonated deeply in a lot of people. It made somewhat radical ideas seem accessible, comprehensible. Yeah, and it made him seem authentic.

This guy's been saying the same thing. It made it clear that he was authentic, honestly. This guy has been saying these same things for the last 50 years. He comes by it honestly, and we can take him at his word. But to your point about the, and I don't want to spend the entire time

relitigating the last couple of elections, but you're correct that there was a concerted effort by the Democratic party to beat him because Obama and that wing of the party thought that Bernie couldn't win and they teamed up to consolidate and beat him. And I've heard that narrative before talking to folks in the DSA, folks who are big Bernie supporters, ah, Bernie got screwed by the Democratic Party. But there were also people trying to screw Trump, maybe not as well.

And you do at some point like have to win, right? Like, you know, Bernie's argument or the argument of a lot of Bernie supporters were, well, Bernie would have beaten Trump, but okay, and would have beaten him the first time as well in the Hillary Clinton election. And okay, that's a hypothetical, but a good piece of support for the hypothetical

would be if he had won the primary. If you want to prove that your political movement has the, has the goods, has the juice to like sweep the entire country, then it would be helpful to win the primary first, you know? And, uh, Bernie had a lot of support, but it's like, Hey, was it, was it just that Obama screwed it? Well, Obama might not have been able to do that if he had had a massively more support than he did versus whereas Trump, you you know, a thought that I have is,

you know, you said Trump is running on the thing of being a billionaire, et cetera, or a very wealthy man who can make business deals. He was also running on pure hate, right? Just like powering of, there are people out there who are trying to screw you, there's people coming over the border, there's people you hate, I'm gonna take vengeance on them.

And so part of what I wondered is like, is that not currently in where we are in American politics, maybe just more powerful? Is there more support for that than for socialism and what Bernie and folks like you are asking folks to support? So I think it's worth keeping in mind. Well, first of all, let's concede.

Yeah, my view is that Bernie lost the election and he lost because in 2016, he wasn't recognizable. He wasn't considered credible until all of a sudden his message resonated. By then it was almost too late. So I think if he had started with his momentum against Clinton earlier, I think he would have credibly won. There was nothing the DNC could have done to stop him. He just got out of the gate a little bit slow in part

because this was always meant to be something of a protest candidacy. And I think he was surprised by how seriously he took you. So he went- But if his 2016 campaign had been his second campaign, not his first, things might've been different. Yeah, and I think been his second campaign, not his first, things might have been different. Yeah, and I think in his second campaign, I think by then the democratic field was just broken up into so many different camps. And it just happened to be that the Bernie camp was the largest of these many polarized camps.

But the Democrats had something that Obama, uh, that, you know, the Republicans didn't have, which was a big unifying figure that could unite the other camps. And ultimately it wasn't just a backdoor deal that Obama cut. It was a deal connected to various constituencies. And I think for a lot of, let's say black, um, voters, particularly older black voters in the South and South Carolina, they voted for Biden because their primary goal was to find someone who they thought was electable and find someone who they thought could be Trump.

And I think the rational kernel of it is not that Biden's policies would have been better in a vacuum from Bernie's policies, but that Biden was electable and they would bear the brunt of another Trump presidency. So in that case, it's a bunch of different actors acting pretty rationally. And I was a Bernie national surrogate in 2020.

I chalk it up as just losing, losing the game of politics. And if there was a backroom way for the Berniecrats to win, I would have loved to pursue that backroom way. Yeah, that's politics is making the phone calls, knowing the people, knowing, hey, this person, we have to get this person and their constituency on our side.

Like you can't wish that away. You have to sort of win that process to some degree. So, I mean, do you think that, sorry, please go on. No, but as far as your question on, is there a stronger constituency for hate in the US or for Trump sort of vitriolic appeals and for the Bernie appeals? I would say that when it comes to redistribution,

yeah, it might be a wash. there might be a lot half the country hoping for more redistribution in the abstract half the country still betting that they're going to strike it rich. So maybe let's hold off this redistribution stuff. I know I'm way behind on my mortgage and I'm in medical bed. But you know, I'm one good good move away from being wealthy. Of course, there's some aspect of that. But when you compare America to, let's say, Western Europe, I think you would find that Americans are one more welcoming of immigrants in a lot of countries in Western Europe. So Americans, for example, even a lot of people vote for Trump. One, they vastly overestimate the amount of undocumented immigration the United

States has, but more generally, they're for higher amounts of legal immigration and therefore tightening the border at the same time. So which is very different than some of these xenophobic appeals in Europe. A vast majority of Americans are for things like birthright citizenship. My parents came to the US in 1988. I was born in 1989. I would imagine that maybe not as commanding of a majority as it was in the past, but probably a majority of Republicans would agree that I have a right to be a US citizen. That's not the case in a lot of European countries. And most of those countries don't have birthright citizenship like we have throughout most of the Western hemisphere.

On a host of other issues, I think you'll find that Americans as a whole, especially young people, hold more progressive views than, um, their peers in the advanced capitalist world and, and Europe and even, uh, Japan, South Korea, um, you know, this, this, this, this is a, a good starting point for us from progressive, um, politics. And I think that we shouldn't let Trump's appeal maybe, um, make us too pessimistic about where most

Americans are on these, these issues. Yeah, I agree because, and I think that is what makes this contrast so interesting to me is that you feel the ground swell of support for these issues. I mean, it's literally just here on YouTube. When I put in the, in the title of something, Billionaires Capitalism, right? I get more views when I do that, right?

Because the audience is like, oh my God, yes, someone is saying the thing that I wanna hear, right? I can tell that there's an undercurrent. That's my job sort of as a comedian and broadcaster to know how people are feeling and to make things that speak to that that also line up with what I personally believe.

I can sense that undercurrent, as can so many other people. And the contrast between it and the electoral success is like somewhat fascinating. You see all these positive signs, but you also see, well, hold on a second. Why aren't politicians who espouse some of these policies doing better? But before we get deeper into that,

I'd love actually, I think we waited a little too long in the podcast to do this, when you talk about socialism and democratic socialism, do you have a capsule summary of what you mean by that? Because I don't want to, you know, people are maybe filling in the blank of what they believe that your political beliefs or project is. Well, fundamentally to me, socialism is about,

at a minimum, securing people's social and economic necessities by saying that people are entitled to certain things just by virtue of being born. So at the very least, that means the state as a provider of last resort for things like healthcare, childcare, housing, nutrition. So we're making sure we have that baseline of a welfare state. Secondly, to me, it's about extending democracy from purely the formal political realm

into the economic realm as well. So if we were to agree that democracy is a good thing at the ballot box, why shouldn't we have greater degrees of democracy at our workplace? And within those two broad sets of principles, I think you could have a lot of different forms. So I don't suppose that a centrally planned economy would be a great system to live under. I think there's certain both incentive and informational problems that arise in those systems. But you could still have markets where you have employee-owned or worker-owners controlling their workplaces and competing with each other to produce goods and services in a private sector for consumer goods and services, while also having a larger state sector

that secures things like healthcare or some of the big, what economists would call natural monopolies like our railroad network or things like that, where we feel like maybe it would be fine for there to just be one actor in this sphere, and we'd rather not be a giant corporate actor, we'd rather have the state where, in theory, we have greater scope to control the realm of state action. So as a democratic socialist, part of what I believe in is, in a sense,

a reconciliation of liberalism and socialism. So for example, I think rights are great. And it's great to have this idea that, yes, democracy is excellent in most spheres of life, but there's certain things where I don't want my neighbor intruding on my personal consumption choice. I don't want my neighbor or the majority of restricting on my ability to speak freely or to do my own thing. I think those are great aspects of liberalism and I think they're perfectly reconcilable with a socialism that tries to secure people's rights to develop into individuals that can truly reach their potentials and can participate in our society. Right now, I think we take for granted as Americans that a kid born in Fairfield, Connecticut is gonna have a radically different life

and life outcomes and opportunities as a kid born 20, 30 miles away in Hartford or Waterbury. And I'm doing very Connecticut examples in other parts of Connecticut. Oh, everybody is aware of the socioeconomic strata of different Connecticut cities and towns. I think we all know this. No, I know what you're talking about.

You're talking about like where I grew up on Long Island versus Brownsville, Brooklyn, right? Or pick your neighborhood where you're like, oh yeah, that's the bad part of town and this is the good part of town, right? Yeah, we just take for granted that, you know, some kids going to public schools in some neighborhoods, we're not even like Britain where, yeah, of course, we ship people out to fancy boarding schools are going to have different

outcomes. But public schools, we take for granted that some of them are going to produce doctors, and lawyers, and engineers, and other schools are going to produce dropouts. And that's not normal for a rich country where we could easily solve that problem, not even through socialist revolution, but through tax and transfers and investments and jobs programs and a host of other things. Yeah, I thought your answer was interesting there because you sort of gave us the entire scope, all the way from the minimal to the maximal version of socialism. You ended by talking about, you know, a substantially different economic system that has a lot more state action, worker cooperatives that are competing with each other. We could dive into that.

But you also had on the other hand, talking about simply expanded social welfare programs of the kind that we're already used to. Like we already provide in America many of the types of programs that you're talking about. We have a somewhat socialized version of education. We have public school K through 12. We do not have that for higher education.

And we could talk about ways that we could expand that for public education so that your zip code does not determine how much, you know, that we don't fund public schools via property taxes, meaning wealthier areas have better schools. And what I find really interesting is that in the last couple years,

we have tested a lot of the most immediate socialist ideas, if we wanna label them that way. During the pandemic, there was massively increased, welfare payments of general kinds to folks during the pandemic. We had expanded tax credits, child welfare, et cetera, unemployment benefits, and those had huge beneficial impacts on people's lives that

then a couple years later were removed. Also, going back to the 2020 election, when Joe Biden came into office, he at least acted as though, you know, he was going to be much more of a, I don't want to say a socialist, but he was proclaiming himself sort of the next coming of FDR, right? He was going to do New Deal style stuff. And he did some of it, giant infrastructure spending, etc. Anti-trust enforcement. Those were all things that I expected an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders president to do, not a Joe Biden.

And so it feels on the policy level, holy shit, some of these things have become not impossible in America, even if we're not sure if they're gonna stick around. Do you have any view on that? Yeah, I think that one interesting, first of all, I think that the infrastructure bill was a positive development. It was like over a trillion dollars of funding for roads, bridges, mass transit, rail service.

Obviously, that's better than what we would have gotten from a Trump administration. Obviously it's a policy success. But I guess that sometimes the United States, the reason why a lot of Americans feel like, oh, well, we're already trying massive socialist style spending in the US and we already have this massive welfare state, but it just doesn't doesn't work is because. We tend to have quite inefficiently designed programs, so when we do spend money on welfare, we needlessly mean tested and we waste time and resources and we weaken these programs by saying you have to be this poor to use it. Not only that, it does create real incentives and disincentives

and it creates resentment towards, let's say if you want to use this category, it's kind of a made up category, but the lower middle class feels like, oh, well, I'm struggling, or the working poor feels like I'm struggling, but I don't qualify for something that I qualify for if I just worked a little bit less. And you end up dividing up working class people that have a vested interest in protecting a lot of the same programs. And those people who might be working

and might not qualify, for example, for Medicaid would benefit from living in a community, because they already live in these areas, with their neighbors who are able to access good health care and things like that. So it's both the design of the programs isn't great. And often we tend to create programs where we allow prices and corporations to push prices sky high for certain things like healthcare.

And our solution to the problem is by subsidizing the poorest so they're able to access this market. But we're doing nothing to address the cost of things. So with education, we're doing this, higher education, and with healthcare, whereas in other more state-ified systems, you're able to find ways to more radically reduce cost. And that's a reason why we spend a larger percentage of our GDP on healthcare than other countries like even the UK, which has a system more expansive than Medicare for all, our main demand of the United States, but an entire national health service.

So I often think that even things that the build back better, kind of what emerged out of it and what actually got past the infrastructure bill, I question the design of some of those things. Are we just subsidizing willy-nilly a lot of green companies? Sure. I'd rather subsidize them than other forms of capital, but are we actually controlling the outcomes of these subsidies or are we just throwing money at things? Right. Are we just giving money to more corporations that we like maybe a little bit better, but

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I know that I constantly catch myself wishing for extra hours in the day. But here's the thing, the problem isn't as simple as lack of time. It's that we often have trouble prioritizing what's actually important to us. Whether that's seeing friends, talking to family, or even kicking back with a good book.

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or just getting stuff off of your chest. So if you're thinking about giving therapy a shot, you might check out BetterHelp. They say it's all online, super flexible, and fits right into your busy life. You just answer a few questions, and they say that they will hook you up with a licensed therapist. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time, Staying on healthcare for a second. So much, so many times when we describe,

Hey, here's a, here's what they do in Europe. Here's how they organize a system or here's how we could tweak our current subsidies to make them better, et cetera. We're talking about improvements that just in literal fact would be better. Right? Like when we talk about the American healthcare system, we can go down this list of it's so expensive, it's expensive because of multiple insurance companies and because the capitalist incentive. If we had a single payer system,

we would have better health outcomes, everything would be cheaper, and this is being done around the globe. It's sort of like incontrovertibly better in every way. And yet in the United States, what is, you know, should almost be, hey, there's an asteroid headed towards Earth, let's look at it, it's up there, this is real, you know, we know this for a fact,

becomes a political position that, you know, rises and falls in popularity. And, you know, I'll say right now, Medicare for All, that is the socialist and the sort of birdie movement, ask, it's also sort of faded in popularity again in our politics. It's less a part of our politics than it was five years ago.

And so it's such a strange state of affairs that again, a single payer system, better in every way, anyone who dives into the data, it's very hard to argue that it wouldn't be. It's very hard to defend the current system. And yet it seems so far from us being able to implement what's like truly a common sense reform. Why do you think that is and what do you think

the prospects are in the future for that kind of program? Well, I think in this case, what's interesting is you have a chunk of the American public that is already covered under a single payer system, be it retirees and also the poor and veterans as well who are covered through the VA in an underfunded system, but a system that's closer to the British NHS than anything else. So that chunk of Americans are already covered by socialized medicine.

Then you have a chunk of Americans who have stable jobs, either they're lucky enough to have the old union jobs and be a part of that 10% of the economy that's covered under union contracts, or their manager or professionals or others who have stable healthcare. So then you have to kind of go down the list until you find people who are getting really squeezed by the current system. Now, the new system would be better for a lot of people. One, if we retain current spending for Medicaid and Medicare, then we would, in a system where we're better able to control cost, we could actually provide more services under Medicare, Medicaid. If we had employers no longer responsible for health care, then workers in America would

be able to use that extra bargaining power to demand not just the platinum healthcare benefits or their employers to pay for their HRAs or these others tax-affirmed programs like FSAs and HSAs. If anyone's listened to this from the UK, they'll probably just think we're insane with these acronyms, but this is how convoluted our system is. But they'd be able to use that bargaining power that's often spent by unions talking about these private market benefit schemes and actually use it towards wages or hours worked or conditions or something more bread and butter. So a lot of people would benefit from the new system, but if they feel like they're getting enough from

the current system, and if they're also in a perverse way, maybe benefiting from the fact that there's 20, 25 million people who are essentially either not insured or who are unable to access their benefits because of how high the deductibles are, they have the advantage of having, let's say, shorter wait times than in other systems. It doesn't really equal that because in practice, you'd always encourage more doctors to join and if people are worried about oh, in single payer systems, you can see your primary care care position right away. But if you want to see a specialist, it's sometimes longer or sometimes the state kind of does its own triage

where if you really need to see a specialist, you'll see one tomorrow. But if you need to see, you know, a dermatologist for a cosmetic skin condition, then you might have to wait three, four weeks. Right. That sort of thing. You could just pay specialists more in the system. You could you could you could find ways to to to to fix this. But I think that the constituency that really is materially motivated to go out there and to change U.S. health care is actually not that massive unless we have a politician, a movement, articulating the benefits in a clear and concise way like Bernie did. The entire Bernie

campaign, many of the people I know, doing Workaround Medicare for All were already insured by good employer sponsored plans. So it wasn't just self-interest. I think it was about tying it to a broader vision of change and taking on a really powerful forces, you know, that the medical industry. Well, it's not just the medical industry though. It's also like the, a lot of the public has a vested interest

in the current system. You mentioned unions, which would not have, unions in the United States generally bargain for healthcare and they have to spend like maybe one out of every three cycles. Oh, we gotta make sure we shore up our health insurance plan. We gotta make sure that the plan is really good. And hey, if there was a state sponsored health insurance,

they wouldn't have to do so, right? They could just focus on wages instead. That argument's true. And yet many unions have not supported Medicare for All because the members think, well, hold on a second. I have great healthcare now. I don't know what this plan would be like. Maybe it would be worse.

A, there's a huge education hurdle. But then also sometimes the leadership of the unions is like, well, healthcare is what we provide. Like that is why people are excited to be a member of the union is because they get the healthcare. So if we don't give healthcare, how do we know that we can get our members to show up, you know, if we need to go on strike, et cetera.

Maybe they won't need us as much anymore. And so those are, and by the way, those are ways that, you know, good people, you know, in good faith in the movement can end up, the incentives push them in that direction. And so it seems like there's still, even though it all pencils out right, there are sort of institutional barriers, even in folks who you would think that as a socialist,

you would be in the movement with, with folks in the labor movement. It's like an internal tension there. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think that there's a lot of unions who basically don't trust the government to create a plan as good as what their members enjoy now, or at least they feel like the union members feel that way

in the private sector. I mean, there's also some other unions that are afraid that if there's a continued push to make union membership volunteers, so kind of open shops instead of closed shops, that having kind of access to health insurance and people get accessing those plans through their union membership is a potentially really important part of keeping people in unions. But I think these are ultimately pretty short-sighted. I also think it's short-sighted for US industry as a whole, particularly, let's say the US auto industry that's competing with, historically competing with labor in Japan and in Germany, places that

the state plays a much bigger role in health provision, but are at a competitive disadvantage. I think the counter is that employers like having this major benefit that everybody needs tied to employment because it keeps people at their firms. And again, they make the calculation that it may be the control that they get over workers and this leverage is more important than the savings. But I think there's a host of small businesses and others that would benefit from not having this burden. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that it's short-sighted. It's a sort of short-term or current benefit that some of these actors currently enjoy,

but that is preventing them from a greater long-term benefit. And yeah, I'm just curious from your view, how do we make progress on it? You said, you know, it sort of needs a leader like Bernie spreading the message, but Bernie did the best job of it anyone's done in 30 years. And you know, again, you know, the wave rolled in, but then, you know, went back.

And so are there, you know, in terms of this, just looking at socialized medicine, how does one build progress towards that over the next few decades? So the reason why I keep mentioning Bernie as someone who's obviously my politics are probably a step or two to Bernie's. Bernie's left in certain ways,

and I was a member of the socialist movement way before the first Bernie campaign in 2015, 2016. But I keep mentioning him because I think that we're in such a hollowed out political environment that we actually need big national politics and politics to the level of communications and politics to the level of almost like a national kind of populist articulation, the way that Trump provides it on the right. I think Bernie for a time is providing on the left to break through this hollowed out environment, to break through and to re-engage people with politics.

So in the 2016 campaign, you saw for the first time, Trump and Bernie both rallying people by the tens of thousands. Yeah. It was displays that obviously there was a little bit of this in Obama's 2008 run, but it's something that reminds you of politics in another country, not politics as we've known it growing up in the United States.

Yeah. Arena rallies for political candidates. That's not something that people were doing for Al Gore. Definitely. Or it'd be like a once a year, you know, they'll just do it at the DNC. You remember he did the weird thing where he kind of rebuffed Bill Clinton a little bit

and aggressively made out with his wife, Al Gore. I don't remember that, but I'm going to look it up after this show. Kind of a it was kind of a like, I'm Al Gore and I love my wife. I'm a wife guy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, I think that in this environment, that's so hollowed out. One, it means that even a group as small as as Democratic, Socialist

America or others, small groups like Justice Democrats or Sunrise can actually make a difference because, and on the other side, obviously the anti-abortion activists and the Christian right can kind of make a huge difference too, with a small group of highly motivated organizers in a hollowed out political environment can have disproportionate influence. But I think that the goal of campaigns like the Sanders campaign has to be to spur people out of this malaise, then get them motivated and activated and give them a language that they could use, a framework they could use, a set of demands that they could identify with. Where Bernie failed was that he wasn't successfully able to carry on his campaign, even in a limited form, through some permanent organs. So in other words, he tried to do our revolution, which kind of went nowhere. And he

tried to do these other efforts to make his campaign permanent, but that's not something he was particularly good at. So it was up to us on the far left to build organizations like the Democratic Socialist for America. Whereas I think that socialist politics in America is obviously what I believe in. I think it's important, but I think there's probably a broader base of for egalitarian pro working class politics in America that uses, probably is more ideologically diffuse and also uses a different sort of language than the socialist left does in the United States,

but that fundamentally stands for a fairer deal for working class people and stands for defense and expansion of important social programs like Medicare for All. When you say a different sort of language than the socialist left, what do you mean? Than the current socialist left? Well, I think the socialist left right now,

we are activists, but without a huge social base. So a lot of us come from working class backgrounds and a lot of us are involved in campaigns that do connect with a lot of working class people. Like for example, there's a lot of DSA members who are actively involved in tenant rights struggles that do have an important base. But fundamentally we joined DSA in ones and twos.

So we often create a hothouse where certain language and ideological distinctions that are not really that important or consequential to people's lives day to day take on greater consequence. Right. A lot of people reading books and getting very heated about them in closed door meetings is what you're talking about. Yeah.

I'm about to do the meet that I wish the meetings were closed doors. So sometimes they go viral. Yeah. When the, the, the, the internecine arguments. Yeah. And again, I think building a base of cadre would think about, um, you know, some of these, these, some of these more theoretical points, or are committed, or keep alive some of this old language. I actually think it's useful in certain ways.

But if you're not connected to a real social base, you're not challenged to try to articulate your ideas in a way every single day, in a way that wins over ordinary Americans and all their complexities. You know, the Yang to Trump to back to Yang to now RFK, Junior Curious, Teamster, like literally someone I spoke to yesterday. Right. curious, um, teamster, like literally someone I spoke to yesterday. So, um, um, and who's a person of color, by the way, which makes it, you know, I, I think that's, that's a lot of this election. Cause even a lot of our priors about, about, um, well, you know, um, Hispanic

voters and others, uh, with, with vis-a-vis Trump, like is not going to be true in this election either in the RFK junior factor is something that I personally just have not considered much until recently. Now it just seems like he's not going to go away and he's going to get his 15%. Maybe I'm just hoping only eight of those 15 will be from Biden and the rest will be from Trump. You think he is going to get 15, you think RFK is going to get

15% of the popular vote? I think that, uh, well, the, a lot of, I think, polling would have them close to that. I think in reality, as we get closer to the election, it'll become more and more polarized. I think that, you know, that RFK vote will dissipate back to both Trumps. Probably 55% of it might go to Biden. The rest will go to Trump. And I think that the best bet, I'm one of the few people and I feel like the few people in the world are just thinks that Biden's gonna win. If only because I feel like he's been hit so hard with all these negatives for so many months that it's only going to go up from here. And Trump between his legal trouble and between just the sheer amount of vitriol

that a portion of Americans have for him, I just feel like the negative polarization as people like to call it of the race will skew in Biden's favor because we already lived through Trump and we have, I think, concerns that the next four years of Trump would be even worse. And I just feel like that's that's the thing that will motivate people who are quite discontent with

Biden like myself to vote for him. And I would vote for Biden if I was in a swing state. I'm in New York, so I'll vote for Jill Stein or something. You know why I vote for Joe Stein? Why? Stein asked me, hey, Bosker, you know, vote for me in 2016. I'm like, when? No one else hit me up. I'm not sure if it's an effective way to to win a national campaign. She personally asked you. Yeah.

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and believe that all families belong together, then join me in supporting Al Otrilato and donate today. You can find the link to donate to Al Otrilato in the description of this episode or go to gum.fm slash charity and donate today. You can also consider volunteering with the organization, which offers opportunities that are both in person and virtual. The best way to get involved is by filling out an application on their website at allotrolotto.org volunteer. Thank you so much. You were talking about somebody who speaks to an actual group of working people that reminds me of say Sean Fain, who is saying, you know, a lot of those ideas, why do we even have billionaires,

et cetera, things that maybe Bernie could have said, or that, a lot of those ideas, why do we even have billionaires, et cetera, things that maybe Bernie could have said, or that a DSA leader would say, but he's saying them to his actual members, who he is, who he is understands, he knows them well, and he's trying to get them to go on strike or sign a union card or whatever it is. And that's like really rooted to their struggle.

It's not, you know, someone like myself at a DSA meeting with a college education saying, hey, here's what I think would be good for some people who I haven't met, for example. And that's a real difference that is meaningful perhaps. Going back to the national election though, you, there were people who said the same thing that you just said, I'll vote for Jill Stein because I'm pretty sure that Biden's going to win.

You did say you'd vote for him if you lived in a swing state, but there are people who said similar things in 2016 and other people are very mad at them because everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. And hey, I can just, you know, I can do whatever I want, right? For that reason. And I think this year, something that is really going to give Biden a lot of trouble is what's happening in Gaza right now,

the support for Israel, et cetera. And it strikes me that this has been such a wedge through the entire left. The, you know, you had DSA members writing an open letter that this has been such a wedge through the entire left. You had DSA members writing an open letter about why they're leaving DSA because of da-da-da-da-da-da go down. They wrote, DSA national leadership put out a message that was et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You've had this happen at leftist groups, at meetings throughout the country, in local democratic parties, et cetera. And I've heard a lot of people say, hey, this is, regardless of how you feel about that, we are talking about, we're talking about America's economic needs, right? And building socialism in America,

this is a, maybe this is not a distraction because we are a part of what's happening in Israel, but it's a very, you know, it's such a wrench to be thrown in at such a vulnerable moment. And so I'm curious to get into that piece of it. How do you think that the, you know, Israel's offensive against the civilians in Gaza has affected your movement? Well, I think among DSA, if anything,

having the focal point of solidarity work with Palestine has been a uniting factor in the organization as a whole. I think there are some older members who objected to some of the rhetoric used right after the October 7th attacks. And I think their argument was basically you're using rhetoric that is preemptively condemning Israel for the response rather than focusing on the actual attack in

which hundreds of civilians died. And also using rhetoric in some cases that maybe it was more appropriate to national liberation movements in the sixties and seventies than it is to, um, and Islamist group like, like Hamas. I think that obviously I try to aim for some of the, you know, in general, try to aim for broad based rhetoric that tries to speak beyond the converted. So I think there's probably some truth in that and some of the initial communications.

But as a whole, I think, in a moral and ethical sense, I think DSA kind of got it right, which is that the, um, there was definitely going to be a huge and disproportionate Israeli response on a largely civilian population. And I think a lot of the Democratic Party, particularly younger Democrats, much less the far left, are united in thinking that Israel's actions have been disproportionate, that it's targeted civilians, and that there needs to be an immediate ceasefire. I think you're even hearing those sorts of things in tepid ways from the Biden administration itself or from figures within the State Department, which shows a pretty wide spectrum of belief. So I do think that Biden hasn't exhibited the courage that he needed

to. I think he's done just enough that history won't say that he was Netanyahu. And I think that's honestly spin his his his goal. He hasn't been he's been probably thinking himself, well, I don't want wanna spend enough capital to end this because the last time I spent a lot of capital on a foreign policy issue, his correct decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, I got so much flack for it, but I also don't want people to think of Netanyahu,

so I'm going to do like the various, the hot mic moment, which I actually do as a hop, do you think was a hot mic moment, but it might as well have been staged at the State of the Union. This is where he was like, oh man, Bibi's gotta cut that out, man, or whatever, like to somebody off the mic, yeah.

Well, and he managed to just make it as awkward as possible because he's Biden, so he's talking about a Jewish prime minister, so he's like, I need to have a come to Jesus moment for Bibi. Ah! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, Jesus moment for BB. Is there a Jewish, is there a Jewish counterpart to the phrase come to Jesus? Uh, neither of us are the ones to answer that question, but, um, I'm curious. Anyway, please go on.

No, but I think, I think, I think that, um, that hopefully, uh, as time goes on, um, uh, that those efforts accelerate and accelerate and there is some sort of resolution. But I think this is something that history will really condemn Biden and his administration for. I think that you could count in the thousands of lives the amount of people that would have been saved if Biden had acted sooner. And again, even from the NARA standpoint of Israeli defense, I don't think there's a credible argument that killing several thousand more

civilians in the operation is going to make Israel safer as opposed to continuing, you know, the conflict and and and perpetuity. That being said, I actually am not of the opinion that Biden's actions will be a decisive factor in the race in November 2024. Really? I say this with using my words carefully.

I don't think this is a good thing, but I do think that a lot of voters, if the Israeli assault ends in the next month or two, a lot of voters will kind of move on by then. And again, I don't think they should, especially with 30 plus thousand people dead, but I think they will move on for them. And again, I don't think they should, especially with 30 plus thousand people dead, but I think they will move on from them. The news cycle will move on, like we've seen time and time again in these sorts of cases. And also the real politique will overwhelm people. And some of this

is very rational. We choose once every four years, not who we want to be in charge in a positive sense, but we often have to choose who we, for on the far left, who we want to be in opposition to. Or for ordinary people, like who's the lesser evil. And I think that for a lot of people, that's going to be Joe Biden.

And I think among a lot of voters in places like Michigan, I think they're gonna feel the pressure to vote for Biden. I think given the constraints of our political system, it makes perfect sense that those people would vote for Biden. Then again, I do feel like the credible threat of exit is an important way to actually influence mainstream Democratic Party politicians.

And that's a tension, that's a balancing act between listening to people's concerns about a second presidency, but also wanting to be oppositional enough that we could actually be a pressure group from the outside. And I think that DSA members at an individual level in the organization has tried to do that balancing act. But sometimes I think they don't get enough credit for how well they're, they're, they're, they're doing that.

I think the DSA, no endorsement is in and of itself, not allowing members to do what they want and to make their own decisions. And the vast majority of those members will vote for Biden and swing states, but it also maintains DSA as a credible oppositional force and a democratic party that really does need one and an American civil society that does need one. I really appreciate your description of it as a balancing act because there's a constant tension

between, you know, if folks say, I can never vote for Biden because of his support for Netanyahu or the United States' material support to Israel, well, that's something that you have to accept. And yet you're like, well, hold on a second. There are two alternatives here. And, you know, we don't want the worse of the two. But if you go vote blue, no matter who,

then you remove the ability to put any pressure on. And so you do need to find, like both things are true at once, and you need to find a middle between them. And I agree that I have seen some DSA groups, I think being sophisticated politically in how they handle it. I guess my broader concern when,

apart from my deep concern for everybody in that region, and for the citizens of Gaza, when all of that went down, and my concern about those specific policies was the left has a reputation and a history of splintering throughout groups, not limited to DSA, throughout its history. And I saw splintering happen

just in my own political waters here in Los Angeles, splintering occurred. People who had previously been in coalition in the movement with each other suddenly said, I can never fuck with those people again. And on both sides of that. And if you are interested in political change and you understand, hey, that requires everyone

to get on the same side or everyone to push in the same direction, regardless of your feelings of the actual policy, like to see the splintering can be difficult and lamentable. And so I'm curious how you think about that broader issue within left politics of, you know, backbiting, people will complain about purity testing, I don't really like that phrase, but that's a common complaint that you hear,

et cetera, that sort of perennial problem. And how can the leftover come it? Well, I think that the splintering is pretty common in a lot of like-minded ideological groups, or even just groups in general. We just happen to live in society where there isn't that much organized activity anymore.

This is the old kind of Putnam, like bowling alone description of how it out our social lives and our society. This has come up on this show so many times. At some point I gotta get, he's not dead, is he? I gotta get him on the show to talk about it. Cause it's come up over and over again. I think Robert Putnam is still around, but he must be pretty old by this point. He's around. I take credit, I don't take credit, Jacobin I think should

take some credit for its resurrection because we published a few articles about it a couple issues ago. So I think we got, we got some of the left talking, talking about it. But if you look at the history of the American political right, if you look at the history of religious groups, especially a lot of the words we used to describe, um, um, well, the left, like sectarianism, like where does this come from? This comes from the million different splits of, of religious groups into sectarianism, like where does this come from? This comes from the million different splits of religious groups into sectarian groups. And I think in general, it's something that I personally like to avoid. I like to try to be one ecumenical, but have my beliefs, but figure out how do you create

a box where we can have different ideas and then have contestation within that box? But like you said, still move together in the same direction. And that's different than a line, you know, a box has room for, you know, eclectic decisions and debates over tactics and strategy. But as long as you figure out here are five core principles, here's where aligned on that we can move forward I think sometimes when it comes to you know an issue like Israel Palestine I think if our demand right now is ceasefire now I think that is a pretty broad demand that can incorporate a lot of different voices

including liberals ionists and and and others everyone from liberals ionists to kind of revolutionaries to people who believe in democratic one state. I think we can all be in that tent together and we can decide, you know, debate 67 versus 48 versus, you know, one state solution, you know, some other time or within that tent.

But I, so I actually think that the left in general has done a pretty good job solution some other time or within that time. So I actually think that the left in general has done a pretty good job and being led by groups, like the solidarity movement, a lot of the great actions have been by groups like Jewish Voices for Peace that have abused, I think, really inclusive rhetoric and have talked about the fact that their core members are Jewish Americans and here's why they're concerned by Israel's actions. And I think, again, that's different than having a left that was so pure that said, you can't say one word about Israeli civilians or you can't say one word about two states

or whatever. And if you say that, you can't be part of our Ceasefire Now movement. If it was like that, then I would say that we're in a moment that's too sectarian. I think that for now, the rhetoric I think is very good. The demand is broad. And also the rhetoric is about our basic human values is about that the right of

you know, you know children have access to nutrition and people cannot be under under siege and against collective punishment You know things that I think are really broad but we're going back to you mentioned Sean Finn before and I think that part of his appeal is that he's both a Leader in the labor movement. He's both someone with a huge base of support through the UAW with ordinary working class people, but also he draws on his Christian values when he talks about his socialist values, when he talks about being an egalitarian, and when he talks about where wealth comes from and how the fruits of one's labor should be distributed. And I think that's really powerful.

And when I think about what kind of left-wing rhetoric can actually reach 100, 200 million Americans, I would imagine it sounds something like like that. I agree with that. Like that. I agree with that. And looking forward is how I'd like to end here. You opened by saying over the last 10 years, moved from socialism being dead to being on life support. First of all, that's pretty impressive because a resurrection happened in the middle there,

which is a miracle. So let's say that's an accomplishment for your movement. I would love for you to paint a picture of 10 years from now, right? Because you've said, hey, we need these charismatic leaders. I don't see someone stepping up in electoral politics to take the Bernie Sanders crown currently.

You know, I don't see, no one is running for president this year with that sort of overtly socialist politics. So how does, and by the way, DSA membership I've read has slightly declined or at least plateaued for a little bit. So in terms of growth, after we've seen a lot of growth in the last 10 years,

how does the movement continue growing and where do you see it in your rosiest view? Well, my rosiest view, I think that a lot of the younger people who move left on key issues, we can connect with them and get them to engage in politics. And we connect with them, we tell them, you know, engaging with politics isn't just about a having a persona online or having a set of likes and dislikes, but actually being

involved in a union. And if you're in a workplace that is unionized or can be unionized, it's getting involved in your local community. It's either connecting with groups like DSA or Jewish Wars for Peace, some of the far left groups that I that I mentioned, but also means for people who are maybe have different persuasions politically, connecting with their local, um, you know, even becoming a delegate at the DNC, something I wouldn't do in a

thousand years. And, and, and, and my mind isn't worth my time, but for other people, that might be how they, how they connect with politics. Look, taking over your local chapter of your local party is very powerful politically. You have to sit through a lot of really shitty meetings, but like you show up to another of those meetings, you could be running the place within a couple of years. Yeah, or getting involved with your local abortion access

campaign or a host of things, but still identifying broadly as being on the left or being part of any egalitarian current. And a current that basically says we don't want a world where people get by and get ahead through bullying or where we allow people to achieve exalted positions by being bullied. We want a world in which ordinary people can work hard and be able to take care of themselves and their families. And to me, Trump embodies the very worst of Americans. He, one, is personally pretty detestable, even though he's occasionally funny, we could

acknowledge. He's someone who just constantly brags about being a bully. And his version of deal making is zero sum. Whereas I think our vision for the United States, for the world is a very positive sum vision of expanding justice and expanding prosperity and the world being a better place. And I think that's a message that 60% of the United States and 60% of the world can get behind. I don't think we'll ever get a full 100, but I think that that appeal for that is far greater than whether DSA,

I think we have declined a bit 85,000 or 100,000, either way it's a country of 330 million people. So I think this broad based movement in which I think socialists have a really important role to play. Connecting, I think these values, which are really commonly shared with the idea of struggle. Because struggle means that it's not just we have this nice set of shared values we can all march towards, but there's there is a small minority of people who do have a vested interest in keeping people divided

and keeping everything from our workplaces structured as undemocratically as they are, to our tax code written in the way it's written. You know, and that's, I think, what liberalism has often missed, this theory of politics and these theories of conflict. So I would love socialism to be a complimentary piece of the puzzle, changing liberalism,

and then in turn, being shaped by the people we're interacting with who aren't socialists. I think there's really a broad movement that we can build in the here and now. Yeah, and I've seen that happen. I mean, in the Writers Guild, in the Writers Strike, we have 10 to 12,000 members, depending on how you wanna count,

and there are genuinely folks from all political persuasions. There are Republicans and Democrats and all other sorts of folks in the union. But the one thing that almost everyone in the union, 95%, 99% of people in the union. But the one thing that almost everyone in the union, 95%, 99% of people in the union agree on is that the bosses are trying to screw us and then if we fight back, we can win, right?

And so there's people who I know I disagree with them politically on many things, but you know, we marched together in solidarity and we know that we stand there going, hey, but we're doing this together right now. And that feels more important, more powerful, and separate from who we voted for for governor or whatever, or what cable news channel we watch.

It's a politics that we live rather than simply identify with and click a button about. And the fact that so many people responded to it around the country and with, in my view, the reason our strike went viral nationally was people watched it and said, I wanna do that too. I faced that in my job. How do I do that in my life?

That to me was really evidence. These are ideas and a struggle with a broad appeal if we can fucking figure out how to harness it. Yeah, I think you proved it through practice too. You had your theory that we can make change, you brought together a diverse coalition to make change and people saw the results, so now it's gonna be easier the next time around.

Now with the Bernie campaign, with all these other struggles, the key is to actually rack up victories and to give people a sense that politics isn't just something I'm going to do for fun when I have free time between the ages of 18 and 26, the time in our lives where we have the, for many of us, the most free time, but that it's actually an important route to achieve tangible victories. And it's something that we actually an important route to achieve tangible victories. And it's something that we could continue in various forms throughout our lives. And I think that's, that's the goal of any broad left, um, movement is to achieve

some victories and then add on to the, the victories. Well, I feel badly that we have talked for over an hour and I haven't even gotten into your publishing work. Uh, so let's end there and tell me a little bit about where people can find the work that you do at The Nation and at Jacobin and, you know, the importance of that work as your final plug and telling us about what you do.

Well, I'm the president of The Nation magazine, which is kind of a ridiculous title, but basically the publisher of The Nation. You're, well, you're literally the, it's called the nation. You're the, you're the potus. You're the Pnotus. I don't know. There's something in there.

And the nation has been around since 1865. So it was founded by abolitionists in 1865. It's a longest standing, uh, you longest standing liberal left publication in this country. It's been generally on the right side of history all those years, 165 years on questions of war and peace and the like, 159 years. That was pretty bad. I'm still living in the past. In my mind, it's not 2024. But I, um, it's, it's, it's not 2024, but I'm also the, uh, founding editor of Jacob magazine, which is a quarterly magazine. I think for my money, it's the best looking publication in the entire country.

The design is incredible. Of this magazine. Like it's like, you want to cut the pages out and put them on the wall. I, I, I subscribed for one year just to get the print product and it truly is beautiful. And, um, yeah, I'm also working on a few books, but my last one was the socialist manifesto, which yeah, as I work on my second book now,

I'm not sure how I managed to write a book in the past. Like there was, this is like, you know, five, six years ago. So there were still smartphones and all these distractions, but for some reason it was a lot easier than now. Well, I look forward to the new book and thank you so much for coming on the show, Bhaskar. It's been incredible talking to you. Thanks so much, appreciate it.

Well, thank you so much to Bhaskar Sankar for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. If you want to support the show, please head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. You can join our community book club. We have a community discord.

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