Why we can't just blame capitalism for everything

We’re sharing an episode of The Gray Area from our friends at Vox. The Gray Area is a philosophical take on culture, politics, and your daily life. In the episode we’re sharing with you today, host Sean Illing speaks with New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz about the viability of capitalism, and the “reform versus revolution” debate on the left. It’s a nuanced, thoughtful conversation that we think you’ll really enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:27Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to another episode of the Prop G Pod. That's right, Prop G is in Greece for a week. So in place of our regularly scheduled programming, we're sharing an episode of The Gray Area, a podcast hosted by Sean Illing, a journalist at Vox Media and co-author of The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion. Oh my God, this guy likes himself. This episode we're sharing today explores how the left is in dispute over the viability of capitalism. Oh my God, we're on the left. Let's stare at our navel. Sean and his guest, Eric Levitz, a features writer for New York Magazine, discuss why the party is divided on the issue and what can be done about it.

• 2:09Scott Galloway?

  This, this is literally like a newspaper stand in fucking Wokeistan. So with that, here's The Gray Area. Why we just can't blame capitalism for everything.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Some of the most heated political debates are the ones that happen within parties or camps. If you've heard the phrase "the narcissism of small differences," you know exactly what I mean. There are lots of internal arguments on the American left at the moment. But if you zoom out enough, one of the fundamental disputes is over the viability of the current system. If you think American democracy is rotten to the core, or if you think capitalism is unsalvageable, then you probably don't see any meaningful reforms on the horizon. But if you think we're more or less stuck with the institutions we've got, then you're

• 3:06Speaker 02

  probably looking for ways to improve them as much as possible. Because, well, the alternatives are worse. You can call this the reform versus revolution divide. And while I'm sympathetic to arguments on both sides, I'm ultimately a reformist. But what are the stakes of this debate? And what's the best way to navigate it?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  I'm Sean Ealing, and this is The Gray Area. Today's guest is Eric Levitz. He's a features writer at New York Magazine, and for my money, one of our best political columnists. Recently, he wrote a piece titled "Blaming Capitalism Is Not An Alternative To Solving Problems." He makes a pretty convincing case for reformism, and it's rooted in a simple assumption: capitalism isn't going anywhere, and neither are the constraints of our constitutional system.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  So that means the American left needs a political strategy that accepts these basic political realities. His argument interweaves policy and philosophy, and I wanted to have him on the show to understand where he's coming from and why he thinks there won't be a revolution anytime soon.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  The piece is extremely skeptical of revolution in general and a mode of rhetoric that kind of gestures towards the notion that reform is not worthwhile because capitalism is inherently hostile to reformist objectives. And that's rooted in part on just kind of what I see as just a clear-eyed assessment of what our baseline reality actually is, which is that we live in a liberal democracy that has been well-established and well-entrenched, that we haven't really seen a successful revolution, certainly not a left-wing one in a liberal democracy in a century of history or whatever.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  And in particular, in the United States, we have a situation where we are living in the nation with the most powerful military probably in the history of the world. That military, its rank and file is generally, you know, there are definitely exceptions, but the Marines are not a socialist vanguard. And the police, you know, America's civilian security forces are also, you know, probably even more hostile to the left than the troops. They're a pretty right-wing constituency. They've become even more right-wing in the past decade in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for reform. And then we have the private citizenry, the most armed citizens in our country, also skew heavily right-wing.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  And so the idea that if you're a leftist in the United States, the idea that you're going to be able to affect change outside of the legitimate channels of the state, but rather by challenging the monopoly on violence, it just seems like that terrain is not a favorable one for the left. In addition to the fact that there isn't revolutionary sentiment just among regular people, whether they own guns or not, in the United States, you know, some 73% of US voters identify as either moderates or conservatives in Gallup's polling. There's some ambiguity about what people mean when they identify with various political labels, but it seems safe to say that the people who are identifying as moderate are

• 6:52Speaker 03

  not saying that they support a revolution, but they want that violent revolution to stop at the limits of Bernie Sanders' political imagination rather than Vladimir Lenin's. I think they're saying something considerably more conservative than that.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  What you're saying here is like, look, you know, capitalism, for better or worse, is... Is what we got. There's no achievable alternative over the horizon. And that means we're probably just gonna have to chart a way forward within this basic economic paradigm. And the basic point you're making here, I think, is obvious enough, right? Yeah, America is not trembling on the precipice of a communist revolution. And acknowledging that alone doesn't get us very far. But the more specific point, and you just made it here, right, is about the ideological makeup of the American public, right? So as you just cited, 73% of the American voters identify as moderate or conservative.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Now, what does that actually signal to you? Because quite a bit turns on what we think terms like moderate or centrist or even conservative and liberal mean.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this is something that, you know, I interrogated a lot, I think, in the early years of my career as a political writer. People who identify as moderates do not support uniformly middle-of-the-road positions. There have been various papers on this. In some Democratic primary polling last year, you would often see Bernie Sanders in like second with self-identified moderates. Often moderates are people who are cross-pressured. You'll see people who identify as moderate who support single-payer healthcare, but also believe that gay people shouldn't be allowed to teach in public schools. I mean, that's not typical. Those are both extreme positions. But there is just a lot of heterodoxy among the lay public.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  You know, if you're not somebody who's hyper-engaged in politics, such that you're getting really consistent signaling from a party that you identify with, what you're supposed to believe on every single issue, the fact that there really isn't a really tight underlying logic to... Supporting, believing that a fetus is a person from the standpoint of moral law and that social security should be cut, like, there's no inherent relationship between these ideas. And if you're not sort of coached into the idea that there's an underlying logic by a political movement, you're gonna latch on to different ones.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  And so there are individual, really far-left ideas that can pull very well, including with people who identify with these other, you know, moderate or conservative labels.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's so tricky. I mean, you know, you use the word heterodox, and that's charitable. I mean, incoherent would be a less charitable word for it. On the culture war stuff, I do think it's a little simpler. I mean, the country is, I think, pretty moderate on that front. But on the economic stuff, like you're saying, whether it's taxes, or healthcare, or social security, that kind of thing, it's so much murkier. And there's much less evidence for centrism, whatever that means exactly, on economic policy views, you know? And I don't know what to do exactly with that ambivalence. I mean, it is a moderate country in some, like, fundamental way, for sure. But depending on what you're looking at, it's also deeply inconsistent.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Again, I don't know how much room for potential there is in that gray area.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think that there's two different things, you're right. There's heterodoxy, which I don't think is always incoherent. I think it's an American who favors restricted immigration and kind of has conservative views on sexual morality, but supports generous welfare provision to the elderly and to the poor. That's like a really identifiable type of voter that we see in Europe and in other countries. And it's, in some ways, potentially unusual that the US has polarized in a way in which the people who are kind of psychologically oriented towards stability and order and security

• 11:10Speaker 03

  are on the same coalition with... The free market libertarians, right? But then there is this other issue of incoherence or ambivalence, which we see in things like you can poll people about their view on whether or not the government should be spending more to help the poor. And you'll get a super majority of Americans saying, yes, we should be doing more to help the poor. And then you can poll them on should the government be spending more on welfare? And you get a super majority saying, no, we should be cutting welfare. So you see these effects of just slight wording changes on a bunch of issues that seem to tap into kind of just ambivalent sentiments that the public has.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've found myself arguing a lot over the years, and a lot of people don't like this. And maybe I'm just wrong here. But I often think that the vast majority of the public is ideologically plastic, which isn't to say they don't have strong views at any moment about any given topic. It's that there's no solid foundation, really, for those beliefs. They are often products of our media environment and whatever salient currently. And therefore, the public can flop with political winds. And maybe that does leave some hope for maybe not radical movement, but extraordinary movement extraordinarily quickly

• 12:34Speaker 02

  in one direction or the other. Do you buy that? Or do you think there's more ideological solidity there?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  I have a couple of thoughts on that. I think that one is that there is a lot of malleability on certain issues. And then there are some sort of pretty consistent fundamentals that we see in public opinion that I think aren't unchangeable, but they're tied to structural facts of our social reality. So I would say that the public's aversion to Social Security and Medicare cuts is one. And that's rooted both in This real sense of entitlement that develops from seeing on your paycheck for your whole life that a substantial sum is deducted each time. And so you feel, okay, well, I am entitled when I'm old to that benefit.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  And then it's also tied to this real transformation in social life over the past century or whatever, where you cannot rely on your children necessarily being able to support you in your older years, like you did earlier in in history. Potentially, they could move to a different part of the country, et cetera. We have a new social order that's premised on what what gives us security in older years is this program. So people are not going to move on that. And then I think the kind of sticky thing in US opinion that is a real problem for the left is the American aversion to taxes. Now, tax increases on the wealthy are very popular.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  And given the trajectory of those rates and the trajectory of the income distribution to the wealthy, there's a lot of space for the left to operate in without having to get people on board with the idea that they should sacrifice, middle class people should sacrifice a portion of their private consumption power in order to give the government more capacity to provide them with services. I think eventually the left is going to want to try to win that argument. And the problem there is that there is reduced trust in government in the state that is rooted in an ideological project of the conservative movement, but also in genuine atrophying of state capacity

• 14:49Speaker 03

  and legitimate failures of the government that have alienated people from it. And so that, I think, is the actual, like, big structural challenge for the left that I don't think is just the media tricking people. It's that we we don't have a population that really strongly trusts the government to do a great job at big ambitious stuff that it sets out for itself. And where the rubber hits the road there is when you ask people to actually give up part of their paychecks in order to to fund something.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I definitely agree with you on that front. And I think that's a that's a pretty incontestable claim, right? So let's just take that for granted. That is a sort of basic political fact.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Of course, that leads to then a question, certainly within the left, about, okay, well, in light of that, as a matter of strategy, what's the best way forward? What's the best way to reduce as much sovereign as possible? How can we get the best world possible, given all of these constraints? And your piece sort of orbits around this distinction between the revolutionary left and the reformist left, which are two, obviously, different ways of going about producing political change. So can you just define those two camps for us, so we can kind of get into it a little bit?

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Sure. And I think that there are plenty of distinctions within the reformist left, which are potentially worth talking about, because I do think that the revolutionary left is... I was addressing that here, but it is a relative fringe in terms of, I think, a higher percentage of the arguments on the left are between camps who are both generally participating in electoral politics. But the reformist and revolutionary left, you know, revolutionary left basically takes the position that we live in a fundamentally fraudulent democracy, that under capitalism, the supposedly democratic political system is fundamentally a form of aristocracy that

• 16:46Speaker 03

  kind of has a mechanism for inculcating a false consciousness among the population to convince them that they are actually governing. But fundamentally, the bourgeoisie, the upper-middle-class to rich are the only ones with genuine influence over what the political parties do.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  And just really quick, just so people know, false consciousness, or this is basically just the idea that people are sort of duped into accepting or affirming a political order that is fundamentally against their own interest. Is that a good... Okay. I just want to clarify that.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And in any case, even to the extent that the democratic process is amenable to reform, that the underlying logic of the capitalist system... We'll ensure that whatever gains are made get rolled back or subverted or undermined because the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, the imperative of supplying profits to people who have the wealth to claim ownership of those profits is antithetical to these more egalitarian goals.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  And so fundamentally, the left's task is to organize disaffected segments of the working class and prepare for a major crisis that is going to come because of the inherent instability of capitalism, potentially contest power through, you know, maybe you can't do it through violence, but if you can shut down all major roadways, just have people, you know, make it so that this society just cannot function as is, enforce a break with the entire paradigm. It would be better to ask a revolutionary leftist to characterize this viewpoint, but that's my understanding of it.

• 18:38Scott Galloway?

  But it is what it sounds like, right? We gotta, we gotta burn this thing down and

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:41Scott Galloway?

  and start over.

• 18:53Scott Galloway?

  Is the Serenity Prayer, of all things, a useful guide for the left? That's coming up after a quick break.

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• 21:30Speaker 02

  The core point here, the core reformist point here, is that the world isn't perfect. It will always be imperfect. If you want utopia, then find a novel. And so that means the goal of political action has to be to make things better, not perfect. And that sounds simple enough, but I do think it is something that purists on both sides struggle with, for sure. And I think actually the way you put it in the piece is to say you think the left has to embrace the serenity prayer. What the hell is that? What do you mean?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  So the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr came up with this prayer, which is, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." And I think that a lot of arguments on the left, not just between reformists and revolutionaries, but among reformists, centers on disagreements about these things. What is it that we need to accept that we cannot change? What is a question of a willful denial of reality? And what is a lack of courage?

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Well, let's give a concrete example here, so that we can take something that you talk about in the piece, which is climate change. Right? So there may be a certain skeptic on the left that would balk at a green policy that might keep global warming below one and a half degrees, because that's not enough. We've got to be more aggressive. And I think what you're saying, or what a reformist would say, is that that's not necessarily wrong. But if we can keep warming below one and a half degrees, we should absolutely do it, because that's better than the alternative, and it will reduce a hell of a lot of suffering. And so it's fine to make noises about more ambitious policy goals, but if that's what

• 23:18Speaker 02

  we can get, we should take it and not undermine that, because the alternative, again, is worse. Is that fair?

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, to give, due to the skeptic, I think that right now, we are not even remotely on pace to keep emissions below 1.5 degrees, which is the agreed upon threshold. But I also think it's important to keep in mind that that threshold is in some ways somewhat arbitrary, in the sense that What we know for sure is that the more warming we have, the higher the risks and the more suffering that there's going to be. Where exactly the tipping points for these self-reinforcing feedback loops that accelerate the warming are, we really don't know. They could be before 1.5 degrees, they could be far after.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  We don't know with certainty exactly when things are going to be worse or better.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  I guess I'm a squishy reformist here, but I'm trying to, I do want to steal, man, the revolutionary case a little bit.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Someone may look at the climate dilemma and say, hey, you know, we're facing ecological collapse here, you know, incrementalist reforms won't do. This is a no bullshit emergency. Do you think that hypothetical person is wrong in insisting upon that?

• 24:38Speaker 03

  I think that the idea that this is a truly frightening situation and that the current trajectory, even if we make the most optimistic assumptions about what the Inflation Reduction Act is going to accomplish, that that trajectory implies a real, real hazard to the sustainability of global ecosystems and certain suffering that's concentrated in certain parts of the globe, low-lying islands, regions that are already arid and are going to face significant negative repercussions in terms of agriculture from further warming. That's all true, right? The question is, what can we do about that?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  It gets to that thing, you know, what do we need to accept that we cannot change? And from my perspective, if you actually just look at the way most people in this country, what their concerns are. Now, working-class people, some of the poorest people in the world, are going to be deeply, profoundly hurt by climate change. And some of the people who are most concerned about climate change right now in the world are residents of low-lying islands that are not at all wealthy, but it is a very immediate threat to them that they understand. In the context of the United States, and I think a lot of other developed countries, Concern for climate change is disproportionately concentrated among the middle class and

• 26:05Speaker 03

  upper middle class and people who have baseline material security at a certain point where this somewhat more abstract, somewhat more long-term existential threat can have political primacy for them. A lot of people in the country, you know, if we just go by polls and I think to a certain extent voting behavior, the increase in the price of gasoline, the increase in the price of groceries, the things that are making it hard for them to make their budget math work month to month are just so far ahead of concerns about the long-term

• 26:43Speaker 03

  implications of carbon emissions that the idea that if a bunch of leftists started blowing up gas pipelines and interfering with fossil fuel infrastructure and in the first instance, increasing people's energy costs by doing so, the idea that this will catalyze, you know, a sort of this kind of idea that anarchists had at the turn of the 20th century of the propaganda of the deed that seeing the the pipeline explode will finally get through to people that, oh, this is actually the most important thing and we'll see a change in fundamental political behavior. I just think this is delusional. I just think this is not the way that the world is.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, some of this turns on on on maybe, you know, how you think revolutions happen, you know, is it a generational project? Because if it is, we don't have that kind of time. We've got to improve policy now and that means making whatever gains we can. I mean, one thing I wonder about a lot is, you know, is how do we know where the real boundaries are? I mean, especially, it depends on what your role is. If you're an activist, say, you know, not a Democratic Congresswoman or Senator or something, but if you're an activist, right, your job is to push and push and help. Shift that Overton window in your direction as much as possible so you can create the space for more and better policy reforms. And when that backfires and when it doesn't,

• 28:10Speaker 02

  I don't know, right? But there's a role for making those maximalist demands so as to shift that window a little bit so you create more space to advance policies that you're favorable to, knowing all the while you're not going to get everything you want. But that's not, that's part of the, the strategy.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think that there are different roles for different actors. And I think that some of this is fundamentally difficult. I am often in intra-left debates reminded of the George Carlin joke about how sort of when you're driving, everyone that's driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower is an idiot. Right? And so, you know, anyone who is making ideological demands more maximal than you are is a purist and anybody who is more ready to compromise is a sellout. To a degree, these judgments are going to be subjective. But I do think that one of my squishier sentiments, I guess, is that I think a lot of people on the left are really concerned about the

• 29:07Speaker 03

  potential of power and privilege to corrupt by inducing complacency about the need for change. Right? And I think that this is related to the fact that, for the most part, the political class, you know, people who are actually able to devote their lives to either participating in or writing about politics are among the more privileged people in the country and by extension in the world. But I do think there is, by the same token, also a risk of privilege corrupting through purism, that because one is not going to be the most vulnerable to Democrats overreaching and Republicans winning the next election and

• 29:51Speaker 03

  slashing Medicaid, you know, because if you...

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Don't have that immediate vulnerability that you potentially are going to be more tempted to use politics as a venue for political self-expression or for signaling a status game within a subculture. And that in both directions, these potentials are used as kind of ad hominem smears. People will try to impugn each other's motivations rather than addressing their arguments, and that's bad. But I think just as individual actors, I think we all need to be, at least if you are a privileged person engaging in politics and in these debates, I think one needs to be open to the idea that one's thinking could be corrupted in either of these directions.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Coming up after the break. Did the pandemic prove that a reformist approach actually worked in the US?

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• 32:25Speaker 04

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• 33:08Speaker 02

  There is such a difference between theorists of politics and practitioners of politics. Everything's possible in the realm of ideas, but the practical constraints of doing actual politics in a constitutional system like ours is a whole other story. And there are just trade-offs. And I think you're right to point out that there is a role for intellectuals and critics, but there's got to be an eye toward the real-world stakes for actual people. And there is something perverse, as you say, about the reality that a lot of people pushing for ideologically maximal demands are enormously privileged people

• 33:51Speaker 02

  who have more wealth than like 90% of humanity. You also say that the middle-class Americans are wildly prosperous, certainly relative to the rest of the world, and that's how they vote. A lot of middle-class Americans vote, like people who are very comfortable and feel like they have a lot to lose. And you're not wrong about that, but I also feel like...

• 34:14Speaker 02

  They do actually have a lot to lose. You know, I mean, the Great Recession was sort of a reminder of how quickly the floor can drop out and how predictably capitalist excesses can unravel, really, our social order. And again, in the interest of sort of steel manning the revolutionaries here, I can see why someone might look at how swiftly we just returned to business as usual after the Great Recession and just say, you know, well, the gradualist approach, it ain't working. So we gotta push for more maximalist goals here, or we're just, we're never gonna climb out of this abyss, you know, we're just gonna boom and bust ourselves into oblivion.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I understand that sentiment, certainly. I personally think that the way that the US government responded to the COVID recession cuts against it a bit. Now, it's possible that it was just the exceptional circumstances of a pandemic, which I think it's a little bit easier for everybody to recognize that the individuals and businesses harmed by a recession that's caused by a virus that emerged from a bat or whatever, that those people are not responsible for their economic fates, that whatever, you know, sort of laissez-faire ideology that's maybe inculcated in people, people recognize that no one has a moral responsibility to formulate their business plans to be prepared for the

• 35:38Speaker 03

  potential of a virus causing shutdown orders that make it illegal for people to visit your business. And so maybe that was part of the reason why, you know, even though I think a lot of people harmed by the Great Recession were similarly morally blameless, it was a bit clearer in the pandemic context. But whatever the cause, the government came in and had such a robust response to this that poverty went down in the middle of a recession, that there were fewer kids going hungry in America in April or May 2020 than there were in February, when the unemployment rate was, you know, many, many points lower and there were millions more people at work. What we showed there is that the government has the ability to make recessions in the

• 36:23Speaker 03

  sense that we Know them in terms of the harms that come to mind when you hear that word. We can make them optional. We have the power to make it so that people are financially held over during those times. And fundamentally, in practice, what we did by doing that is we distributed the costs of adjustment more equitably across the society. That's what fundamentally, there are many, many other factors involved. But we would not have a significant inflation if we allowed the economy to go into a deep recession or depression. That would have concentrated the costs of adjusting to what COVID did to our economy,

• 37:04Speaker 03

  which it did just real damage that is unavoidable, whatever the government does. One way to pay for that damage is to have a 10% or 15% unemployment rate, have the most vulnerable workers in the country, just take it on the chin, potentially not be able to feed their kids, lose their homes. Or another way is to actually come in and give them stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits. And if that means that because we're not producing as much as we otherwise would have been, that prices go up a bit, then we can smooth, we can pay for this, everybody shipping in a little bit through inflation rather than pummeling the poor. And that's the choice that we made this time, basically.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  And I'm worried with the politics of inflation that we might not make the same choice again. But I think that there is really something to build on there and something for the left to take ownership of, that because of a lot of progressive advocacy in 2020, we didn't do what we did in 2008. We had the government come in and it sheltered people against the slings and arrows of outrageous business cycles. It took action.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  But isn't the problem that they don't seem to have benefited politically very much from that? They sent out checks to everyone and people didn't give a shit. They just, you know what I mean? Like it's

• 38:21Speaker 03

  No, that's a huge problem.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Did it work politically, right? It was a good, it was a good and just thing to do to help people who were suffering in that moment, but. There didn't seem to be much political payoff for that.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  It's possible that it helped Trump come closer than he otherwise would have. I mean, I think that that-

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, right? So if you're, if you're a part of the American left, if you're a part of the Democratic Party, what the hell are you supposed to? What's the lesson you're supposed to draw from that? You know?

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  I don't know, but it's-

• 38:52Speaker 03

  I mean, I will say this, the polls, if you look at just polls of how people feel about the economy when they're talking to surveyors, they seem to dislike inflation more than they disliked sustained unemployment after the Great Recession, right? Obama's economy in 2012, I think unemployment was still around 8%. Was, was probably, I believe, more favorably viewed than Biden's economy, where we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in history, but we have some elevated prices. At the same time, Biden and the Democrats did not do as badly in the 2022 midterms

• 39:33Speaker 03

  as they did in the 2010 midterms, when there was no inflation, but there was high unemployment. Lot of other variables. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was a huge thing. Donald Trump's bad endorsements were also. But the bottom line is that, to the extent that the Democratic Party, in terms of the motivation behind the American Rescue Plan, part of the calculus there was Obama didn't do enough to combat the recession, and Democrats paid the price in 2010. You know what? Democrats did have one of the best performances for an in-power party in a midterm over the past, you know, several decades. So even with the polls saying what they do, there's still something of a case to say

• 40:18Speaker 03

  that, that Democrats benefited from balancing the scales in favor of full employment rather than low inflation.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Perhaps, you know, I continue to believe Americans are ideologically incoherent, which isn't always a bad thing necessarily. Too much ideological coherence can be a very, very terrible thing. But in part because of that, I mean, I just, I think politics really is a kind of high stakes game of competing stories, and whoever tells the best story-

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Most convincingly usually wins and you know, is there a story about communist revolution that can win in America? No, no, I don't think so. There are limits. Is there a story about democratic socialism that can win? I think so. And maybe part of that story involves making some of these radical critiques of capitalism, not in order to overturn it, but in order to maybe define the terms of the debate a little bit and push for as much reform as possible. My job isn't to figure out what's what's most politically prudent on that front. But I mean, I do, I don't know, I'm just curious what you think, Eric. I mean, I, I do wonder about the political viability of the left moving forward than

• 41:31Speaker 02

  whether we can win. You know, not necessarily the argument, because I actually don't think most of democratic politics is really about arguments at all. I just don't think that's what the game actually is. But it is a game of persuading people however you can to come to your side or accept policies or politicians that will help us use the machinery of government to reduce suffering. I keep saying that, but that's, that's really the bottom line here. I mean, do you have much hope in the left's ability to win politically moving forward, given all these complications?

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the short answer I would say is, is yes, especially in the long term, because of the trends that we're seeing in terms of the political ideologies of the rising generations, the millennials and zoomers so far, anyway, are, are two of the, the most left wing generations that the United States has ever produced.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  I mean, it's always been the case that as people get older, they tend to get more conservative, but there's evidence that that's, it may not be as true.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that there's both aging effects and socialization effects. So it's true that potentially having children, becoming a homeowner, these can have conservative influences on, on people's politics, but a significant portion of their outlooks are determined, you know, like a lot of other things, like, you know, maybe the, the music that you're going to listen to the most in that really malleable period when you're a teenager and early adult, when a lot of sort of your personality is set and the formative experiences of that particular era have a big influence as well as the politics of your parents. You know, I think that Potentially, Zoomer's parents were a bit more liberal, certainly on social issues,

• 43:13Speaker 03

  than their parents were. And so that's going to also affect things for millennials, the coming of age during the George W. Bush presidency, when the wheels really fell off the country in a variety of different ways, I think really affected our ideological orientation.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  How old are you? I mean, I'm an older millennial.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, I'm thirty-five.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  So, so there's the generational thing that gives me some, some hope, to the point that you were sort of speaking to at the beginning of your question, like, I do think that Americans, people in general, have a lot of different moral intuitions and forms of social identification and social resentment, some of which are contradictory. But I think that there are definitely ways to tap into what are already widely held values when advocating for a left-wing agenda. And my, you know, reformism leads me to think

• 44:14Speaker 03

  that the left should do a little bit more of explaining how allowing the government to play a greater role in insulating people's lives from the arbitrary whims and inequities of the market, how that can reinforce and support the values that Americans already hold, rather than trying to really persuade people to forfeit their fundamental values. Like, I think there's a role for radical thought and critique in terms of seeding ideas that are going to maybe germinate far down the line. But I do think there is also kind

• 44:57Speaker 03

  of, in speaking to the kind of the subcultural corruption idea, really perverse incentives in, you know, left-wing subcultures and potentially in academia, to make one's ideas actually sound even more radical than they actually are in substance, you know, to describe a plan for race-neutral redistribution that will disproportionately benefit African-Americans as reparations, even though they aren't really reparations, or, you know, to...

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Frame an argument for the importance of the state playing a greater role in supporting children and child rearing, that it shouldn't be all left to the family unit as family abolition, that we're going to abolish the family. You know, I think there's sometimes these rhetorical modes that kind of work in terms of like stimulating people to to sit up and pay attention, but that are not, at least if you're going to be participating directly in the project of majoritarian politics, you know, are really not helpful.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  There's a lot of pessimism, growing pessimism on the left for very good reasons about the viability of our constitutional system.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yep, which I share to an extent.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have two parties, and one of them has just totally abandoned liberal democracy altogether. So you're not, you're not a crazy person if you look at this situation and go, yeah, may not be a lot of hope for reform in that system. And I get it, but I still think, I don't know what the alternative is, or maybe I do, and I think it's, and I'm horrified by it, you know. And I guess a lot of this comes down to how much faith, you know, you have in persuasion. You know, I, I am sensitive to some of the arguments I hear from people on the right who complain that a lot of the intra-left discourse quietly assumes that the problem is that conservatives just don't understand the arguments the left is making, and if they did, they'd be liberals, you know, that's kind of the false consciousness thing.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  But that is a mistake, you know, there are real unbridgeable differences in the country, and some of the stuff the left wants is just a nonstarter today and tomorrow and then, you know, for the foreseeable future. But again, I still think people are more plastic than we often assume, and no one knows for certain what's politically possible and what isn't. In the end, I think I definitely agree with you that. Whatever stories the left wants to tell, or whatever arguments the left wants to make, we've got to avoid the impulse for purity and never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if that's all we can get.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that I agree with your sentiment, and I would also affirm the point you've made a couple of times, that I'm not saying that everybody needs to calibrate all of their public pronouncements as though they were, you know, Joe Biden, or doing messaging for the Democratic Party, that there is absolutely a role for iconoclastic intellectual work that asks those who are interested in this adversarial take on the existing order to think about this stuff critically. I think that there is a tendency for people sometimes to want to stray, you know, in one way or the other, outside of their lane, you know,

• 48:17Speaker 03

  either people discouraging people who are clearly operating in a theoretical vein, you know, criticizing them on the basis of the impracticality of their ideas, or, you know, people, theoreticians, who are criticizing Democratic political actors for not comporting themselves as though they had tenure. So, yeah, I think that different people have different roles, but I do fundamentally believe that the tendency to seek to discredit ordinary political engagement and everything that is fundamentally normie and uncool, that's

• 48:58Speaker 03

  kind of inherent in majoritarian politics, that it's not productive, because I do think that fundamentally, there are real stakes, and we really can make a difference in people's lives. I mean, just in the last, you know, in my adult lifetime, you know, tens of millions of Americans have gained access to Medicaid as a result of Democratic politics. As I just said, you know, during the last recession, we had a lower increase in the poverty rate than we've had during any comparable recession as a result of ordinary politics.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's fucking awesome. You know, and the reality of doing liberal democratic politics in a constitutional system is extremely uncool and extremely boring and plodding and hard. And if you're someone on the left making some of these maximalist arguments, that's right on, go for it. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to abstain from voting if Biden makes some concession on some point in order to get something done for the sake of some greater good. Because that is just what politics is, right? You can't, it involves trade-offs. You have to be pragmatic because you can't get everything you want. And so that's where the maximalist, I think, or the purist approach really just falls

• 50:17Speaker 02

  apart upon contact with the reality of trying to get stuff done in a system like ours.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I just want to be clear that, you know, because polemicists, you know, from the center or whatever often do this, like, I am not at all saying that everybody who questions whether, you know, every concession that Biden or Democrats in general have made to the right was actually politically necessary or desirable, that they're all purists, that you're a purist if you're not just toeing the party line. I'm not saying that, yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Eric Levitz, this was a ton of fun, man. I really appreciate you coming on to the show. People should go read your piece and follow your work. Again, thanks for coming in, man.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Brandon McFarlane engineered this episode. Alex Overington wrote our theme music, and A.M. Hall is the boss. As always, let us know what you think. Drop us a line at [email protected]. And if you appreciated this episode, please share it with your friends or your parents or your family or whoever on all the socials. That stuff really helps, truly. New episodes drop on Mondays and Thursdays. Listen and subscribe.

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