[BEST OF 2025] From Reagan to Trump: Neoliberalism, Class War, and American Decadence

Hello everybody and welcome back to RevLeftRadio. On today's episode we have my friend, Gianni, from the People's Classroom, on to talk about Reagan, the rise of neoliberalism, the last 40-plus years of what we call the neoliberal era, how it was a capitalist response to the new deal and the crises of the 70s, the political coalition that Reagan put together to advance the class interests of the capitalist class and how every president since Reagan is just a variation on Reagan, and we also draw clear parallels between Reagan and his political project and Trump and his political project. And the interesting aspect here is we see Reagan at the beginning of neoliberalism, doing a very similar thing but with differences, then Trump at the end of the neoliberal period, not that Trump himself represents a divergence or a rupture from neoliberalism, but he actually is a symptom of neoliberal decay and perhaps it's last gas. So to draw those direct lines and parallels and kind of oscillate back and forth and show the society we have today was really birthed in the neoliberal era through Reagan and that Trump himself can be seen as an interesting version of Reagan at the end of the neoliberal project. So this is a fascinating conversation, I think it's really crucial to understand this history, to understand that this is where we are and it's a very clear trajectory. But we also go back and cover the Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, the new deal, the Great Depression, World War II and show how in these periods, time and time again of American crisis, that the ruptural opportunity for a revolutionary shift is there but it is always foreclosed by reactionary elements and we talk about the weapons and the arsenal of that reaction and how those revolutionary openings are foreclosed and I think we are living at the precipice of a new moment of extreme American crises, they know that's only happened a handful of times in American history, I think we're living in the prelude to that and so this history is more important than ever to really fully understand and integrate so that your analysis of the present moment can be up to par. As always if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio you can support us at RevLeftRadio or at patreon.com/revLeftRadio from the five bucks a month you get access to bonus content, our RevLeft Situation Room, Community Zoom calls, our meditation group and much more and of course you support the show and keep it running which we deeply appreciate. Alright without further ado here's my conversation with Gianni from the People's Classroom on Ronald Reagan, Neoliberalism and the Trump era. Enjoy. Yeah, my name is Gianni Paul, I'm a long time public high school social studies teacher in New York State and for the past few months I've been running the People's Classroom which is a lecture and lesson series on history and current events from a working class perspective. We also focus on how history does not happen in a bubble, there are direct connections between the past and the present and we cover a whole host of topics so everything ranging from Palestine to LGBTQ+ history and liberation movements to the darker roots of the American Revolutionary War, the impacts of imperialism. Basically I've amassed a lot of material over my 15 year teaching career that I've really poured my heart and soul into that I think would be valuable for people to learn from. So the reason why I started the People's Classroom those because I realized how beneficial I thought it would be to bring my school lessons which again center that working class perspective to the community at large. Our social studies curriculums across the country like do a garbage job of representing the working class perspective. It's a lot of like great man history, tons of focus on the world wars and a lot of nationalist rhetoric with some of the dark aspects of the country. History can be insanely missing from the curriculum. So to me it's like basically the history channel brought to the public school system and that's not beneficial. As a result a lot of people are so confused as to what is going on in today's world and I hear this refrain all the time from my family and friends, a lot of people who are mainly well-meaning liberals but they say this sort of stuff all the time. This is not who we are. We didn't used to be like this and it really made me realize unfortunately how many people across the country were not exposed to this all important working class point of view when they were going through school. You know a lot of boomers have just been blasted with Cold War propaganda and have their brains melted and it's really tough for them to break out of it. So I want to rectify that as much as I can through my community based lessons with the people's classroom because the truth is when you actually deeply study the history of this country from the workers perspective, this is exactly who we are and always have been and the American education system purposely spreads misinformation and half-truths and it leads to people to grow up with this warped mindset as to what the country really is all about. It makes it so that a typical person is unable to grapple and reconcile with the present to act in responsible ways and I quote Malcolm X quite a bit throughout my lessons and my students end up mocking me for it because they're really just waiting for me to drop in a Malcolm X quote at some point through my lessons but I usually start each one with this quote in particular so he says you know it's so important for you and me to spend time today learning about something from the past so that we can better understand the present, analyze it and then do something about it. So that to me perfectly sums up my people's classroom and what it's really all about. Well that's beautiful I applaud you you know salute you for that. The people's classroom is a wonderful pedagogical intervention. I'm so happy to have you on today to talk about this period of American history which we'll get to in a second but you're absolutely right that a robust understanding of American history will you know completely make it perfectly clear why we are here today. And you know the liberal shock and horror at where we are today you know like the good liberals who are just can't fathom how we got here we got a vote Democrat Trump is such anathema is like when you study American history you realize the trajectory that got us here is so clear that Trump is the perfect instantiation and mascot for American empire and American capitalism and that it's it should surprise absolutely no no one with any with even a somewhat tenuous somewhat solid grasp on American history why we're here and how we got here. In today's episode we're going to be I think focusing in on an era of of American history that helps us understand this even more that is Reagan the you know 1980s the the dawn of neoliberalism and you know neoliberalism is a term that gets thrown out there a lot some people understand it fairly well other people is just kind of a vague signifier of something that is going on in our economy that they struggle to define but it is a real era in American political economy it was ushered in and given not only an ideological articulation by Reagan but also a co a political coalition that made neoliberalism viable and and eventually made it the bipartisan consensus and you know and as we'll get into in this episode Trump is by no means a diversion from neoliberalism or a break from neoliberalism he is a product of 40 plus years of neoliberalism and and maybe he is also representative of its of its last gas but we'll get there in due time I think I guess the best place to start is just starting with that word because it is ambiguous people do use it in all different sorts of ways it has become a sort of cliche catch all and and even platitude that people throw out there without really defining it so can you provide our listeners with kind of a quick definition or description of how you would describe neoliberalism like what is it yeah for sure it sounds like it's like this very complex word but it's really not when you when you break it down so neoliberalism it's taking the concepts of classical liberalism like you know that John locks and those enlightenment philosophers which was freedom for the individual and applying it to businesses and corporations so freedom for them without any sort of governmental regulation so neoliberal basically looks at anything and everything as an opportunity to make a profit so you know they would see a house on fire and think you know what we should make people swipe their debit cards through the fire hydrant before they can have the fire department actually put out the fire so neoliberalism it's been the dominant economic policy in this country for the last 40 plus years and you know many would argue that it was the Reagan presidents city in which we truly saw these policies become entrenched in our society but the fundamentals I feel like have one of my favorites is we do a little opening writing prompt that's the private company so it's amazing watching them try to come up with stuff and that's for both my younger students and my older students when I'm you know out in the community teaching but it shows the impacts of neoliberalism like the government does not care about you absolutely and I think as as we'll get into this I'm also make it clear as I've made it clear many other instances that neoliberalism was this assault on post-war Keynesianism it was the dismantling of the new deal it does speak to the fact that capital even in a system that at one point in time can can give concessions to working people is always subject to recalling those concessions at any point and so I think we also have to understand the neoliberal era as a capitalist response to the new deal era which came before it and really a concerted effort to dismantle that that even you know fairly thin version of social democracy that the US gave rise to in the wake of the in the wake of the Great Depression in World War II also of course a response to the falling rate of profit and the stack flation of the 1970s you know relatively high wages the the the slowing of productivity the rise of global competition from Europe Japan etc you know the strength of labor militancy these were all issues that needed to be resolved by and for the capitalist class and neoliberalism is what the result of that class struggle is and and we're living in the in the wake of it and we're living in the midst of it still I think no doubt like it it is here and it is hurting a lot of people definitely so how did Reagan's presidency kind of as I was saying kind how did it function as this counter revolution that dismantled the the new deal order and really brought in what we call neoliberalism like what were the historical and material conditions that made Reaganism possible and how did it reassert capitalist power after the the crises of the 1970s yeah so in my eyes like the Reagan presidency it's the beginning of this country becoming what it was always destined to be when you truly study its history you know a paradise for the rich and a capitalist hellscape for the working class so like you go back to the the founding of this country and James Madison and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution one of the most critical quotations to understand in the grand scope of history our Madison's arguments on the function of a proper government and remember and I'll give you the quote in a second but that this is the father of the U.S. Constitution saying this not me but you know his quote is the primary function of the government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority of the poor if that does not perfectly summarize all of U.S. history then you clearly are not properly studying U.S. history you know that fundamental contradiction that the history of class struggle was baked into the foundations of this country so you know look at any time period in U.S. history you'll see countless examples but you know to link it back to the Reagan era in particular I think the the final death knell of the new deal era that truly set this country on its path to hell for the working class was the issuing of the the Powell memorandum you know the Reagan presidency to me is the true culmination of the Powell memorandums initiatives from 1971 and you know I'm sure you've seen that the Chonsky documentary you know Requiem for the American Dream yeah it's it's really solid and Chonsky obviously does a great job breaking down neoliberalism and how we have ended up here but I do disagree with Chonsky that Nixon was the last new deal president like yes Nixon protected Social Security and he created Earth Day you know that's nice but he also became the process of privatizing our health care system with the dawn of the HMO and Kaiser Permanente and you know introducing us to our favorite work criminal Henry Kissinger you know the the guy who said kill anything that moves in Cambodia so you have to remember it was Nixon who was president when the Powell memo was issued and it was Nixon's policies that began the process of seeing these initiatives of that memo begin to come to fruition and you know I guess just in case if your listeners are not familiar with the Powell memo but to me it's one of the most critical things to understand to get a better grasp as to why we are in the situation we are in today you know it was it was basically the chamber of commerce getting together to figure out how they could push back against the egalitarian reforms the working class were beginning to institute in the 1960s you know you had African American groups women's groups LGBT you know plus groups immigrant groups fighting their hearts out to be treated like actual human beings and you saw some gains being made you know that the rich couldn't handle it they knew they were losing their grip on society so they hired Lewis Powell you know who was a corporate lawyer before he eventually became a Supreme Court justice put together recommendations as to how the rich could maintain their stranglehold on society and what Powell concluded was that the rich need to unite and use their wealth and influence to take over all aspects of society so you know the media the education system the government as a whole and if they didn't do as he recommended he argued capitalism was on the precipice of defeat well you know the rich did listen and in the decades to follow they accomplished exactly what he directed them to do and again it's it's my argument that the Reagan presidency being the full might of the Powell memo in action and you're starting to see the you know the beginnings of class warfare ultimately during that time period yeah well said and I think you you pointed to something very important which is that this was not merely an economic response right it was a full social political response to not only the economic situation but also political and cultural movements that that exploded during the 60s and 70s right the entire society still reeling from you know the the defeat in Vietnam the the civil rights and the the women's movements had gotten so so much steam had become radicalized in a lot of ways a broader youth revolt against the entire system so this wasn't real this wasn't merely a reassertion of economic domination by the capitalist class against the New Deal Keynesianism although it was also that but it was really a a a full-on attempt to reestablish cultural political and social hegemony for the ruling class and of course the vehicle they used in their in their fight for that was reactionary politics and building a coalition of reactionary political formations from evangelical Christianity to cultural conservatives to hardcore nationalist etc as as as the political coalition where they could then advance their fundamental economic and class interests and we're seeing that I think in very interesting ways under new conditions today with Trump and we're going to continue to draw these parallels between today and and then but I think we see another attempt you know in the wake of many movements like Black Lives Matter the pro Palestine movement the Occupy movement standing rock over the last 10 to 15 years the radical de legitimate the de legitimization of the media of institutions of the political class as a whole these are all things that are trying to be recaptured once again by the Trump administration and the forces behind it in a very similar way they'll under different perhaps economic conditions as as Reagan and his coalition did now what Reagan and his coalition was responding to is the economic crises of the 1970s and and how do you dismantle the new deal and and the very idea of Keynesianism the very idea that government can play a role in the economy and today I think we're living after 40 plus years of that winning and so we're not in a state of having to roll back concessions we're in a state of having to squeeze even more profit out of a fundamentally decaying system that's already made a robust attempt at doing just that and so it's a different economic situation but I think a very similar pattern of an attempt to reestablish hegemony by the ruling class using reactionary politics as the vehicle to do that yeah it really was like it's a full frontal assault by all these different avenues that you mentioned to squeeze even more money out of us when people are in such dire straits to begin with so it's it's incredibly frustrating and alarming yeah so let's go ahead and move on because you know some people do argue and I've heard this argument and I think that there's a nuance here that's important to to note that Jimmy Carter kind of quietly initiated neoliberalism before Reagan made it hegemonic I sometimes would articulate it as you know under the Carter administration neoliberalism as a as a material movement began to kind of coalesce but that it was Reagan that gave it its ideological addressing that gave it the rhetorical and ideological power that it had and that actually built the political coalition necessary to to continue to advance it but I think there's an argument to be made that you could see it creeping in under under Jimmy Carter so do you see Carter's like deregulation and the the vulgar shock as the real starting point of the neoliberal term or was Reagan's project kind of qualitatively different than even Carter's yes this is a tough question but to me I think Carter and Reagan much like Obama and W. Bush or Biden and Trump they're just two sides of the same coin so you know you take the liberals like Jimmy Carter or Obama and Biden they provide milktose reforms you know they'll raise taxes on the rich by like 1 percent get called communist nothing fundamentally changes for the working class and then the conservatives come in and blame the left for government overreach and they further deregulate everything to say they're providing you know the working class with this vague notion of freedom and to me liberals and conservatives they complement each other it's a game you know when you really break it down they both serve capital one side you could argue is just more overt about it but make no mistake when push comes to shove they are united in destroying the working class again take you know Carter Obama etc they perfectly demonstrate the complete ineffectiveness of liberal economic reforms or you know the the reasonable measured approach in regards to economic policy when you take this middle ground reasonable approach what does it always lead to you know who benefits Reagan's presidency to me it's just simply capitalize on the failures of Carter much like Trump capitalize on Obama's failures and then again on Biden's failures the end result being the country being pushed even further to the right and you know I would argue if Carter or Obama actually instituted real left wing economic reforms are at the very least some type of FDR style Keynesian model to try to rectify the issues for the working class within the country I believe we would have very easily been able to stave off this neoliberal hell you know that we live in today and you have to remember like left wing economic policy is incredibly popular you look at any polling in regards to whether you know corporations should pay more in taxes or you know these freaks like Bezos and Zuckerberg should be taxed heavily there's almost 60 to 70% support for those policies and it's almost impossible to get 70% of the American people to agree on anything but we see no legislation or policy whatever to actually meet the needs of the people instead further neoliberal reforms get imposed on us everything gets worse a horrific economic crisis develops and it perfectly plays into the hands of the rich and you have to remember the rich love these crises because what is a crisis but an opportunity and you know I hate to quote Game of Thrones because the final season was so disappointing but you know as as little fingers said chaos is a ladder and as usual in this country when chaos strikes it becomes a ladder for the rich to further secure their status and class interest since they own the state so you know just look at the great recession and what Bush and Obama did with bailing out the banks in 2008 and 2009 crises like the great recession and the way in which the government responds to it further infuriates people the government responds by bailing out the rich instead of them turns off more people they feel like the government is evil and it plays into the neoliberal rhetoric of government being the problem when in actuality if you had a government that was in the hands of the working class like I don't know I'm just spitballing here but the dictatorship of the proletariat perhaps they could see the value and power and justice of a government that could deliver for the vast majority of its people but we simply don't have that absolutely yeah and it's so important to realize how crises is used to reconstitute and even advance the goals of the rich so the financial crisis of 2008 what happened in the wake of it but all the very trends that led to it got worse that inequality increased corruption open corruption in the political system increased you know the the banks were bailed out why regular people were foreclosed on people were pushed down the economic ladder economic and class mobility slowed down even more than it already had and in the and the situation we're living in now is on the precipice of yet another crisis is this going to explode into a world war three type of situation are we going to another war is the next great depression coming it feels like this is a very top heavy economy that is resting ultimately on an AI bubble and if and when that AI bubble does burst it's not the tech all the garcks that are getting no under Elon Musk is still going to and and and Sam Altman and all these guys are still going to be incredibly powerful and incredibly rich it's the rest of us that will that will take the cost of that will really bear the cost of that and they will use that to further entrench their domination over the economy and over society so I think that's an important point to to note as you did and the other thing is as we're drawing parallels between Reagan and Trump I think you alluded to something fascinating too which is that there's an amazing parallel between Carter and Obama right Carter is coming on the wake of Watergate at the wake of the Vietnam War and of all these crises of legitimacy for the government as such he's presented as a decent guy like a good person that is not morally corrupt but is not susceptible to financial bribery you know that wouldn't do something like Watergate and that was his fundamental appeal and there was a moment wherein Carter might have been able to use his administration to push things in a different direction but really solidified the status quo and in a very similar way Obama is coming after eight years of Bush of fucking Cheney and Halliburton and the Iraq War and the War on Terror and the Patriot Act people were absolutely fed up Obama had a super majority in Congress and he really could have taken things in a new direction but of course if he was the sort of person that was going to radically take things in a different direction he would have never been presented to us in the first place as a candidate for presidency so he ran on hope and change he talked about getting his sneakers and walking picket lines with the unions he talked about redistribution of wealth he talked about the end of the of endless war and he got in and he did the exact same stuff and what where does that lead it leads to even more reactions so after Carter we get Reagan after Obama we get Trump and that is another reason why Democrats and Liberals cannot extract themselves from copability to where we are it is not the fact that we are here where we are because of the right and because of Trump and because of just the Republican Party it is a bipartisan path that has led us here and we would have never gotten Trump if we didn't get those sort of eight years of Obama you know a real chance where people were looking for real hope and change and that and Obama could have come in and done some radical stuff with mass support and legitimacy truly out of the gate but in the wake of that when people get their hopes so high and they say this is really different this guy is an outsider he's the first black president he's promising all these things he's coming after and then to still be let down by that then what do people do they tend to turn towards reaction now it's the right wings turned to pretend that they're going to be the agents of hope and change and that's what Trump did right he sold himself as an outsider willing to take on the elite take on corruption and the endless wars and so that's why I call him the Obama of the right he promised so much of the same stuff and only to deliver more of the same and and here we are once again what comes after who fucking knows I think a crisis is going to happen in the next three and a half years that Trump is going to you know fail to to navigate in anything like a responsible or healthy way and so I think the the future is radically open because I don't think that this system is going to keep rolling on too much longer as it's currently constituted but yeah I just wanted to kind of draw those parallels between Carter and Obama and show how they are inseparable from Reagan and Trump yeah I think and again for me personally like the Obama moment was such a clarifying moment because I was so in the tank for Obama back in 2008 and it's like pathetic to look back on now but like he had such an opportunity to actually like course correct this nation and just did not you know nothing even close to what he could have accomplished with the supermajority that he had and then he has the goal to go on Mark Maren's show the other day and say like I you know I didn't have the boats or whatever to pass universal healthcare and it's just a bald face lie and I hope that you know enough people can start to wake up and realize like neither one of these parties cares about you it's just it's not going to happen and I hope the same thing eventually happens with people that are in the tank for Trump like he's not going to meet your material needs he's not going to do anything for you and people need to wake up to that yeah absolutely absolutely and you know fundamentally they do serve their donor classes they serve the economic interest of the class that they represent out of which they come and and they're not that's what we mean by they don't care about you they're literally not here to serve you their job is not to serve you at all it's to pretend to be serving you while they're serving their actual class interest in the donor classes and the big money on people that that support them and even under Trump right one of the one of the appeals and the main arguments of magick especially the first time around is like hey he's so rich he can fund himself so that means he that he's immune to corruption because he has his own money he doesn't need other people's money and then you find like Miriam Adelson donates $250 million so that he you know pursues the interests of of Israel and moves the capital to Jerusalem and supports Netanyahu and it's like of course he is still totally open to bald face corruption and to being in the pocket of money interest who give him money to do so and so yeah another way in which there was the false promise that Trump offered to the American right for sure well let's go ahead and move forward because another thing that Reagan represented that your representative in the UK and neoliberalism is defined by in part is the the disciplining of labor right it's it's the privatizing public goods it's the deregulation of capital and that requires the disciplining of unit of labor which requires the weakening and a full-on attack on unions which is the mechanism by which labor organizes itself to fight for its class and so Reagan's firing of the Pat Co workers as one example did symbolize this wider war on organized labor and union rates today really are a reflection of this multi-decade attack on unions as such so looking back how decisive was that moment in breaking the power of unions and reshaping American political consciousness around individualism and competition right because there needs to be an ideological sort of a fig leaf an ideological Trojan horse in which these policies are advanced and that ideological Trojan horse was freedom in individualism in small government etc so what are your thoughts on Reagan's war on workers and what that moment in particular symbolize yeah I think it was massive and should be a critical moment for labor unions to look back and deeply reflect on and self critique um you know people forget that Pat Co endorsed Reagan in 1980 less than a year before the strike and their eventual dismantling so there is a deep and profound lesson for unions to learn from this is simply cannot play nice with capital it is fundamentally at odds with what your goals are and we'll always sell you out when push comes to shove and unfortunately the failure of the Pat Co strike was the beginning of the end for unions in this country you know I have a great graph that's from an economic policy institute study that I show in my classes and which you see how since like the late 70s and then the 80s union membership falls off a cliff and on the inverse of that the wealth of the 10% starts to exponentially grow so you know now we're at less than 10% union membership and meanwhile the top 10% controls over 50% of all the wealth inside of the nation you know so it's it's insane and it brings us to where unions are today and the general ineffectiveness of them you know they they try to play nice and outside of a few examples like you know the the West Virginia teacher strike or the Minnesota teacher strikes when it comes down to it they always seem to end up backing capital I mean look at how many labor unions endorse Democrats you know how's that working out for them they think they have a seat at the table and can influence things and they just end up being absorbed into the system and completely nullified I you know unions I feel like have completely lost their revolutionary potential especially when you look back on the history of the union movement and the militancy we used to see like you know you go back to the battle of Blair mountain for instance or the haymarket square strikes there was coal miners like directly fighting us troops now it's the leader of the union getting photo ops with the governor or with the president you know it's really disgusting uh when you start to think about it and uh you know I got a call out my own union which is nice it which is New York State United teachers it's the you know the teachers union are our state but they're a prime example they do some decent work around the state but it's all like very peripheral it's a cookie cutter stuff so like we just got cell phones banned in our schools across New York state which is nice but actually fighting and confronting capital to address our material needs is it's non-existent they'll never go after the root causes of serious issues plaguing our profession you know like like the teacher shortage or the the low pay the oversized classrooms the crumbling infrastructure of our classrooms uh or I don't know the fact that I have a better chance of getting killed in my classroom than I do in a prison you know instead we get to go to Yankee Stadium for nice at day which by the way I'm a huge sports fan I don't know if you've seen Yankee Stadium lately but it's essentially an America first rally uh at this point but you know I we get to see our nice at president pose for photos with Kathy Hokel who's cutting funding for all of our schools and leaving us in dire straits and uh you know one of the other things I want to mention I don't know if you want to get two into the weeds with this but I don't know if you're familiar with um the Taylor law in New York state but it's really enraging when you dig into its history and it's a great example of what I'm talking about here but back in 1967 uh New York state public sector unions agreed to this law uh in which they would make striking illegal with significant financial penalties and jail time for union leadership and in return what unions got was that it would like force the employer to go into binding arbitration when there was a contract dispute so that's it that's all the agreement was so unions got binding arbitration to have the most powerful tool in a union's toolbox taken out of play so to me that's where you can kind of bring in Lenin's quote about trade union consciousness consciousness from what is to be done I think that's incredibly relevant and to me it kind of just shows that unionism is is not enough the patco strike failure the way unions operate today I believe unions need to regain their militancy and ditch the democratic party and either join or form you know an actual workers party and that to me are the all important historical lessons to take away from uh from the patco strike couldn't not agree more and just to be clear the the patco is the professional air traffic controllers organization so I didn't define that I should have to find that in the question so that was the air traffic controllers that went on strike in 81 and and and Reagan crushed them and so that is what we're we're discussing here and I totally agree with the limitations of trade unions and how they have been sort of ushered into the system as a whole a part of the class collaborationist project they that will carve out a relatively comfortable position for you within this decay rotten exploitative system um and that you know and a lot of unions that are are big and powerful and are allowed to continue they'll have agreements where they're not allowed to strike or that they that they that they agree with the contractors or whatever that they won't go on strike well when the union that I'm in has an agreement with an organization that represents the contractors that that we have a third party um sort of judge panel that we can bring disputes to and that they solve so that the workers don't go on strike um and so these are these are all ways in which um unions have been de-radicalized and have been absorbed into the broader project of Americanism and that's why during the Palestine strikes we saw you know dock workers around the world or or various trade unions in places like Italy um you know use their leverage at choke points in the economy to try and you know push a pro-Palestinian politic to try to stop arm shipments to Israel as they're conducting their genocide and you just didn't see anything like that here in the imperial core um and the the concept of the the labor aristocracy um I think does speak to that the bureaucracy if some of these big unions and they're just total absorption into the system itself um is really you know it's really notable and it is something that needs to be corrected I think labor unions are still essential there's so many pros uh to them as well as their cons they do provide they're one of the last ways that a working person can provide a decent life for themselves and their families and have the long-term benefits that that are the foundation of long-term stability for one in their families and they they do have a certain level of class consciousness within them that is important and they do often especially in the trade unions they conceive of themselves not as a vanguard in the lending sense but as like a vanguard in the broader colloquial sense for the whole working class and so they are thinking in those terms they do understand that you know they define they help raise the floor as it were for working people in general their their political action is centered on trying to get workers a better deal in general but it is myopic it's not revolutionary and um they've tied themselves in many instances to a democratic party that is just thoroughly corrupt a complete arm of the ruling class has a terrible branding issue in the sense of like most Americans it has like the one in the the highest unfavorable unfavorable rating in uh in in decades for the democratic party as a whole and so the unions have really tied themselves to this sinking ship that is the democratic party and they need to reclaim their independence and the radicalism that could come that could come from it but I do want to also mention though of I don't know it's not funny at all but it's an amusing parallel you know Reagan comes in he breaks the air traffic controller strike and if we're drawing the parallel to Trump Trump comes in there is no air traffic controller union that is going on strike that needs to be busted but what do we see in the first several months of Trump's presidency multiple playing crashes so it's like this it's this fascinating repetition of history where Reagan dismantles the union and then you know on the on the far end of neoliberalism which he helped us her in you get the emergence of Trump who oversees you know an unprecedented amount of playing crashes as an inauguration to his four years um as president so that's like uh oh interesting coincidence of history that we see that repetition in that way and it really speaks to the fact that we're on the tail end of the neoliberal project and so where Reagan dismantles the air traffic controllers union Trump oversees planes falling out of this guy you know it history really is something when you study it it is it is so let's go into the ideology of Reaganism and neoliberalism how did Reagan manage to sell austerity union busting deregulation as really moral virtues right freedom patriotism personal responsibility rather than as class warfare from above because obviously they never advanced their class project as a class project right they advanced it as a social or cultural movement or whatever and um how has Trump been able to kind of do the same but perhaps with a different sort of message though a message that certainly resonates uh with the message of Reaganism yeah I think this is such an essential question so this to me is the real trick of the Reagan presidency and it carries right through the two Trump administrations and I think you got to go back to Reagan's classic quote of government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem I think that sentiment really resonated with people because when you had a government before Reagan that did like nothing to fundamentally address their needs and you're seeing you know record inflation oil shortages and increasing military budget with domestic issues being pushed to the back burner that sentiment of government being the problem is much easier to sell to the American people because yes technically technically they're not wrong a government in the hands of the rich is certainly a problem the issue is Reagan was such a slick PR salesman because of his acting background he's able to mass that his government would somehow be even worse for the working class you know Reagan was the absolute perfect pitchman for the capitalist class and to usher in these these neoliberal forms um like to me the Reagan presidency is also like the WWEification of politics in the presidency yeah you know Reagan was portrayed as some type of superhero celebrity I don't know if you've ever seen the Reagan's raiders comic book but go look that up if you want to see some truly unhinged stuff of how you know Reagan was framed but you know resonated with people and it also kind of connects to like I don't know if you've ever seen the movie idiocracy in President Kamacho that's that's basically the Reagan presidency and the Trump presidency today and then you know on top of that Reagan much like Trump they framed themselves as outsiders you know neither were traditional politicians who had been in it their whole lives Reagan was the actor you know Trump's a businessman and a lot of people like that they think they aren't part of the corrupt system and because of their different perspectives they'll change things it's this you know vague notion of change but they're offering something now you know obviously they could not be more wrong but I completely understand how people can arrive at a conclusion like that now for the like the critical question of like how did they turn so many people into like bootlickers how did they turn a significant segment of the population to vote against their own material interests I think that is such a difficult but important question to try to tackle and it's it's probably a combination of a lot of factors so I think a few things to highlight is you know I believe the dismantling of our public education system and making higher education a luxury for the elite you know that certainly didn't help I also think bringing in social issues and making that the main focus for a certain segment of the population to get upset about has historically been effective I'm sure you know the classic quote of they got you fighting a culture war when you should be fighting a class war and then lastly I would say like there's also a complete deemphasis of class analysis in our country like everyone knows something is wrong but some can just never quite put their finger on it and to me that's that complete lack of class analysis everything is framed as left versus right instead of you know rich versus poor and that can lead people people rudderless but I'd really love to hear your thoughts as well on that trick of how they convince people to vote against their own class interest yeah I mean there's so many different fronts to to address this on I mean definitely with the small government pitch that Reagan came in with you know you have to also imagine that at the tail end of the watergate at the tail end of Vietnam at the tail end of an economic period of stagflation um wherein people across the political spectrum had genuine reasons to increasingly distrust the government I mean even look at the 60s many of those hippies right turned into yuppies under Reagan as they aged into an economic cohort that was more resonant with the the Reagan messaging but they're the same people who 20 years prior were pushing this individualism as well as had huge reasons to distrust the government from an ostensibly left wing position right if you're if you're attacking racism in the system in the 60s you're attacking the Vietnam War all these things as a young person wanting real change but you know by 1980s you've now shifted into a different period of your life maybe you own a house or something and Reagan is coming in with an individualistic and a small government message one that also happens to perhaps align with your class interest well it's it's quite obvious why somebody would bite on that but you know Trump is an interesting inversion of this because Trump actually beat out the Republicans still arguing explicitly for a small government libertarian ideological framework right Trump is saying no I'm going to use the government as a weapon like I'm going to use a state against my enemies that is an interesting deviation from small government Reagan libertarian rhetoric which said the exact opposite and and a bunch a huge faction or multiple factions of the Trump coalition explicitly want him to utilize and weaponize the state apparatus in the interest of his political project and you know project 2025 or whatever is a is a reflection of that it is a it is taking seriously the idea of pushing as far as you can executive dominance in the government so that you can use the state as a big stick to carry out your political project of course on behalf of the oligarchic class on behalf of trying to reestablish American imperial hegemony on behalf of the ruling class but now instead of using the rhetoric of small government which Reagan had to do trying to dismantle can Keynesianism in the New Deal the the new reactionary right is is saying we totally accept using big government as a big stick so that's an interesting inversion on the tail land of of neoliberalism as opposed to its inauguration yeah I think I guess what it boils on to just to take away from what you just said like people don't really care I think ultimate with the end of the day between like big government or small government they're so desperate for somebody to just try to do something that they're willing to back whoever's going to actually take action because of the you know dire straits that people are in today but I think that that probably plays a role as well yeah without a doubt for sure um so let's go ahead and this next question and you know that this is a meme now like every president is Reagan you know cool cool Reagan dumb Reagan whatever from Clinton to Obama Bush to Trump and Biden right these are all sort of reflections of the basic premises of neoliberalism and they and every president since Reagan is largely operated within that framework that he established right market fundamentalism financialization endless war spending and hostility to organize labor um sometimes that shifts a little bit right Obama and Biden were ostensibly a little bit more open to the idea but not in any serious way not in any serious policy direction I think they're during Biden's term I think there was um to some small degree a realization that there has to be a pivot back towards if not organized labor than at least industrial policy or something and there were some small hesitant steps in that direction but it was in the package of this broader Biden failure and um and Trump has completely rolled back the clock on any positive uh forward steps that Biden might have tried to make during his four years but would you say that neoliberalism became the defining era of American capitalism much like the new deal order before it and if so I was hoping that you can kind of explain the bipartisan durability of this consensus even as its social and economic foundations have collapsed right both political parties in their own ways are trying to rhetorically talk in perhaps directions that that that that symbolize deviations from neoliberalism but they're actually in this neoliberal realist position where they can't break out of the ideological confines of neoliberalism and so they they continue to perpetuate it so what are your thoughts on that bipartisan consensus and its durability for so long yes I would absolutely agree that neoliberalism has become the defining era of American capitalism I think there are important reasons behind it I think it's because the the left has been systematically destroyed in this country you know groups like the the black panthers or anyone that actually had the guts to confront capital is is long gone uh you know one of the most enlightening things I ever heard and I wish I remember who said it to actually properly give them credit but the question was asked like why isn't there a new Malcolm X or someone in that mold and their sponsor was well the US government made sure that that person is either dead or in prison and you know as a result all you have left are the current center right Democrats who do nothing but somehow get painted as if they're you know some type of left wing radicals and it all leads to the overton window moving further and further to the right you know there are no fundamental economic differences between the two parties one just tries to wield progressive language to mask their true intentions and now you know there's so much money in politics it's absolutely nuts you know the citizens united the amount of dark money flowing into campaign coffers not to mention you know the insanity of a pack you know obviously as well so you also have to have a ton of money to even get started in politics in the first place so you know of course the government is going to represent the wants and needs of the wealthy I mean I think I saw a study that said one person one percent of the American people are millionaires but you know over 50 percent of the members of congress are millionaires uh you know so the amount of money it takes to go to college the amount of student loan debt there is it's next to impossible to break through in American politics so the average person who would have been a great working class-centered politician does not have a prayer of getting into our current system and it's designed to be that way so you know again it's it's a rigged game so what's the George Carlin quote you know it's a big club and you ain't in it I wish more people would would realize that so that to me is what lends to the durability of neoliberalism it's tough for a regular person to actually get themselves involved in this system in any meaningful way absolutely well said and I want to kind of re re-address a point that has kind of been looming in the background of this conversation so far and I think we talked about it a little bit up front which is that at every time in fact we did because you you quoted James Monroe who talked about you know the opulence of the minority protected from the the the barbarism of the majority or whatever the poor um we have to understand not only and I always make this argument the American revolution was the most conservative revolution imaginable yes thank you yeah to even call the revolution is only called so because of its formal political shift away from constitutional monarchism and towards an explicit republic so in that narrow sense of the of the official and formal political forms being being turned into you know this new thing called a republic and really giving in that sense you can call it a revolution in a political form but when we talk of revolution from a Marxist perspective we're talking about it with a class analysis as its foundation and in this sense this was in the economic sense this was a separatist movement this was not a revolution and very quickly the founding fathers made that clear theoretically in their writings as you pointed out their class positions were all as the aristocracy of the United States and early on the colonial bourgeoisie that overthrew monarchy was hell bent on preserving property and obviously initially slavery right and in the early days after the American revolution you had these rebellions from below shays rebellion whiskey rebellions um you know of course slave revolts the entire time that represented this bottom up energy that the new quote unquote republic you know quickly turned its guns on that that the putting down of something like shays rebellion was not just um a historical event but really signified an ideological project we are not interested in you know this democracy from below stuff we are not interested in a redistribution of wealth and power we're doing this republic thing but we're still keeping the class hierarchy firmly attached so the revolutionary period was a tumultuous rupture from what came before and as such it was an opportunity for a left word movement that was that was shuttered immediately so this is a this is a inaugural to the United States right this this prevention of these ruptural moments from being turned and towards revolution and and instead turned towards a maintenance of the status quo and if you look at the French Revolution which was also a break from monarchy and was also the establishment of a formal political republic that was a much more left wing revolution in every sense because it was about bread and let them eat cake it was a bottom up uprising to redistribute economic power um not just a shift in political form and that left wing inaugural revolution for France um despite all of the things you can criticize about France including its colonial adventures since then yes he is still represented in the the bottom up militancy that we see in French protests and the you know left wing politics with regards to like health care and stuff that we see in in in the French society that we do not see in the American society so I just wanted to make that point and then what what happens next what's the next major crisis that was actually present in the revolution but was forced all for a coalition purposes the question of slavery right it was a it was a a contradiction from the very founding of the country that we're building this country on these ideas of equality and Jefferson's writing about you know the inalienable rights of all man but while he's owning slaves this contradiction had to burst right there was you could wrinkle over it for a time but it had to burst and of course in 1860s it did just that and after the Civil War what did we have another ruptural moment that opened the opportunity to the possibilities of a multiracial real democracy right but it was reconstruction and the failure of reconstruction was destroyed by the planter industrial alliance and what did we get instead of a multiracial democracy we got Jim Crow corporate monopoly the robber baron era right the guilty days so another ruptural moment in American history where it went hard right instead of pursuing a revolutionary direction now the next break was the Great Depression in World War two that was a break with the old order that was a that was a chance to reestablish a whole new way of doing things and for the first time in American history we can reasonably say with caveats that that was not a revolutionary turn in fact it was a protection against a revolution but for the first time it was a leftward economic shift represented by the new deal but in order to get the new deal which organized the working class into a new political order it had to fence it off by race by gender and by you know an attack on anti-communism we just did an episode of with Aaron Leonard on his new book Menace of Our Time talking about 20th century anti-communism and we spent some time on FDR as an anti-communist figure who explicitly saw himself as saving capitalism from the Bolshevik threat externally and from a Bolshevik style revolution inwardly because you had the Communist Party you had these militant labor organizations that were looking over and seeing the Bolshevik revolution as a possible road map for what they can do here and by offering the new deal it was this concession on behalf of the working of the ruling class towards the working class to satiate those things but it had to be racist you know it had to reaffirm gender inequality and it came with a large dose of anti-communism and it was a rare moment where after World War II the real competition economically for the United States was centered in Europe and that was that was in ruins right because the war was fought on that continent and so you had this brief moment where America had geopolitical hegemony and an economic hegemony where it was able to make those concessions and but it also came with entering into the Cold War and all those contradictions so even that slight left to let center left pivot that we saw in the ruptural moment after the Great Depression and World War II was only made possible by a very specific and unique set of global political and economic conditions that allowed those concessions to be made that are by the way no longer present so when we talk about a new new deal you had you you completely lose track of the fact that there were very specific conditions that existed at that point that allowed those concessions to be made that no longer exist now and I think we're entering this next huge ruptural phase with an even weaker left with an even weaker organized labor front that we have seen in the past and so this history is absolutely crucial to understand but I'm wondering your thoughts on any of that yes I'm so glad you mentioned the the American Revolution and then the Civil War time period because those are actually my next two presentations that I'm giving to my to my students actually out in the community and for like you have to understand what the country was founded on like why the revolution actually happened you know it was led by the upper class it was led by the bourgeoisie they did not want to lose their slaves and you know one of the most clarifying books that I've read in the past couple years was the counter revolution of 1776 by Dr. Gerald Horn and when he gets into like the fundamentals of why this revolution took place inside of this country it goes back to the the James Somerset slavery case and the you know landowners and the people that owned enslaved people over here were terrified that they were going to lose their property so that's what really caused them to make a break with England because they felt like England was on the precipice of abolishing slavery and they couldn't handle it so they got certain segment of the population worked up about some of the taxes and those sorts of things but the real like fundamental issue was they did not want to lose their property they did not want to lose their enslaved people and that's what led you know to the revolution ultimately and when you understand that that's what our country was founded on then I feel like everything else starts to actually make sense and you can connect the dots on these issues that we're seeing today but they've always been there and that's why again studying history is so important you have to understand the context and what this country was born out of otherwise you're rudderless you're not going to be able to grapple with the present in any meaningful way absolutely and what is American reaction depend on it depends and every time you have an American reactionary movement it has these qualities hardcore anti intellectualism right a suspicion of theory of abstraction of collective reasoning a racial hierarchy a reassertion of racial hierarchy in the face of crises right we saw that after every period of American history and we're seeing that now what is the Trump presidency what is this attack on immigration what is this white identity in politics if not a reassertion of racial hierarchy especially after 10 to 15 years of a renewed bursting fourth of you know identity movements that were concerned about you know black lives and these things so it's a reaction to that there's always a religious reactionary moralist component to American reaction we saw that with Reagan and his you know turning evangelical Christianity into a political force we see that today with the backing of Trump by the evangelical you know hardcore Christian nationalist right we've seen that throughout history and also and importantly the hyper individualism that has actually rooted in settler colonialism where freedom is seen as property those two things are indistinguishable so the settler colonial foundations of the United States is at the same time in ideological pillar of all reactionary movements up to this very second that we're living through um and if you look over at Israel you see the exact same contradiction that because it is a settler colonial entity it's it can only ever really be fascist because you know the the ideological superstructure of the material base of settler colonialism has to be fascism and we've seen that time and time and time again and so you see the United States you see Israel you see any other settler colonial entity in history and you see a very similar way in which reaction manifests and articulates itself particularly in moments of crisis so that's why we're dialecticians we understand that you know this is not something in the past we don't go back and just look at manifest destiny as if it's an object on a museum shelf that we can ponder at it is a living breathing process undergirding American reaction to this very day and in a true revolutionary rupture from you know the the the reactionary American apparatus as it currently exists requires a revolutionary rupture from the settler colonial foundation itself and if you try to do a revolution that tries to keep intact the settler colonial pillars of the of the country that doesn't try to solve that contradiction you're going to kind of create the opening for the reassertion of hardcore reaction every single time so that's something to think about yeah because I mean like you said like this is what we were always destined to be that you know it's baked into the system this is the path that we were put on and again you know history doesn't happen in a bubble and you have to understand those connections between the past and the present on or to really be able to act appropriately with what we're seeing today amen so let's go ahead and talk about we've kind of retouched on this but this is important anti-communism right because both Reagan and Trump rely heavily on anti-communism Trump's talking right now about you know cracking down on antifa and the radical Marxist left you know that's a huge part of his rhetorical posture and hasn't been really since the beginning but is being ramped up now Reagan through the Cold War rhetoric cast social democracy itself as a step toward totalitarianism right stuff like universal health care as a government take over of our freedoms and that's why we can't have it which is you know really bolstered through the Cold War ideology which as you mentioned earlier and among other things has been beaten into the heads of boomers and Trump again is reviving the same language to justify his current crackdown on descent can you walk us through kind of Reagan's history of anti-communism and and how did the weaponization of anti-communism serve to legitimize neoliberalism at home and maybe another question you can address sorry for throwing so much at you but as uh what role did the end of the Cold War the collapse of the Soviet Union play in producing the triumphalism of the 1990s which allowed neoliberal ideology to not only go unchallenged but to become the bipartisan consensus yeah I think this is such an important topic to understand the demonization of communism around the world was critical to the continued domination of neoliberalism at home you know right up through today so for the Reagan administration there are sadly countless examples of US interventionism and the dismantling of communist projects you know abroad but especially in Latin America you look at Grenada or you know Nicaragua there's first two countries you know that that come to mind but uh in Grenada you know you had Marie Spishup leading the the PRG creating absolutely remarkable reforms inside his country after their successful communist revolution you know fighting for workers rights women's rights free health care mass literacy campaigns fighting against apartheid you know the list just goes on and on what the Reagan administration did to this man and this movement is so vile you know I can't even put it into words but you know regardless in the big picture the whole point behind this is when you can demonize communism abroad it makes it so a certain segment of the population will instantly turn against any semblance of communism here at home it's a it's a way to break solidarity and you see this like unfortunately pops up all the time it's all too ingrained of that mindset of American exceptionalism it rears its ugly head with the American people quite often and to make things worse than I'm sure you'll agree you have this incredibly frustrating strain of western communists or socialist leftists who will instantly start spewing CIA talking points whenever a communist nation abroad is mentioned and you know one of the first presentations I gave from my people's classroom was on immigrant rights so we covered you know obviously the history and all the deep connections to today with ice and all the horrific things that we're seeing and I was going through the historical context to uh saco and vanzetti and the first red scare so I mentioned you know how the Soviet Union made these incredible gains for the working class and how it scared the hell out of the powers that be here in the US you know that's a major reason why saco and vanzetti were targeted and after the presentation was over you know I did a little Q&A and these guys had an issue with me highlighting the positives of the Soviet Union for like 20 seconds out of the nearly two-hour presentation that I gave and you know I remember their quotes it was like you know well capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we have and communism is good in theory but you know it doesn't work in practice and it's just like open a goddamn book study actual history like my god um but it was clarifying for me to see how anti-communist rhetoric is ingrained into the American psyche and Reagan you know greatly helped to exacerbate that with his foreign policy and then you know yes to answer the the second part of your question the collapse of the Soviet Union you know that to me is one of the most tragic events of more modern history without that counterweight without multi polarality US neoliberalism and capitalism was able to entrench itself abroad for multiple decades and obviously here at home as well however you know I I do feel like there's a little bit of cause for hope as a result because of some of the gains that we're seeing out of China because I mean you could just like show an American the Chinese will wait tablet and what that looks like and they might like start quoting Mal just a little bit of a counterweight to the things that we're seeing because of how awesome those things look yeah oh yeah it's it's it's so interesting to think about those dynamics and and I would even make the argument that the new deal FDR concessions of course with all the other conditions I already mentioned being being you know necessary for its formation if you took out the threat of global communism if you took out the Bolshevik revolution from the international sphere not only would the communist movements here in the US be robbed of a dearth of theory that allowed them to make progress in that time but the capitalist class I think would have been under less international pressure to give those concessions without you know the big fear they made this explicit was a Bolshevik style revolution in the United States and if that Bolshevik revolution wasn't successful over in Russia in the first place they would have never had that sort of hanging over their head as a possibility at home and yeah the communist international movement as it manifested here in the US would also be weakened in you know severe ways so perhaps we wouldn't even have got the new deal or perhaps it would have been much less robust than it was if the Bolshevik revolution hadn't succeeded in the first place and that right there is an example of dialectical understanding of these two seemingly completely disparate political events the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the new deal here in the United States what is their what is their actual connection you know those two things seem totally separate from one another no they are actually deeply deeply intertwined in these fascinating ways and so I think that speaks to the power of a dialectical form of analysis but I also wanted to point out that you know that you said you gave this two-hour lecture and they were harping on this 20 seconds where you said something nice but and what came out of there what came out of their mouths is this these platitudes right and and I think this communism looks good on paper but it doesn't work in practice these things that you hear all the time it is so clear that they are not the product of independent thought they are the the parenting or the regurgitation of propaganda it's actually fascinating to see somebody who you know has not spent a millisecond studying this history reading a single page of a single book about communist theory or history or anything like that confidently spewing out these completely anodine baseless shallow platitudes as if they are the product of their own independent thinking and in this way this is how we see ideology and how it actually manifests in real life it is the ideological apparatus and its muscle memory being worked and we we talk we use these words like you know NPC or stuff like that and when when you see somebody look you in the eyes and just vomit out these sort of platitudes you can kind of see that they are at least in one in in one way ideologically completely captured and then they are just they have been like sort of like brainwashed to when you poke them with this certain stick they regurgitate this certain thing it's like a Pavlovian response yeah to to any critique or anything that would threaten that ideological assumption and it's quite scary to actually see in real time how it just flows out from the faces of people who otherwise not only haven't thought about those issues or study them into importantly but also would benefit and are being screwed by the system they're defending and they don't realize how when they spew those platitudes they're they're actually participating in the ideological maintenance of a system that is destroying them in their future and that's that's also the sadness of it all right absolutely and just it made that a mouth quote popping my head of no investigation no right to speak yeah absolutely yeah I think like that just like you said people just go into like robot mode and they just hear the word communism and it's just this scree of like I said CIA talking points just coming out of them and they don't even realize it like the lights just go out yeah and it's just so frustrating for me as a teacher because like can you please just use your critical thinking skills or just try to take a deeper dive into this stuff without just spitting back things that you've heard like in the capitalist press or wherever and it's so difficult to break through that so that's why I was so tough for me with that that presentation like you know that was the thing that they took away from what I talked about for two hours was I said like a nice thing about the Soviet Union it just shows how deeply ingrained those minds that's our and it's very frustrating and yeah and my thing is like I don't even care if you disagree there are people out there that understand the history and that there's not communist they just don't agree with the communist premises and but they will articulate it in a way that's not you know pladitudinous it's not empty it's not shallow they'll they'll have their critiques we can argue I would I would I like that I enjoy like spending time with somebody who is an ideological opponent of mine actually has studied and gives a serious critical analysis of a thing and then comes to me with with a disagreement that's fine like we're not saying that anybody by virtue of disagreeing with us our brainwashed that's not what we're saying no we're saying that many people who spew this stuff our brainwashed in that ideological way but you know if they did the study if they read the books if they studied history if they really became curious about this stuff that doesn't guarantee they'll end up agreeing with us that's what political struggle is for right we don't all agree and we'll never all agree and we have to fight on the political social and cultural terrains for for control and for power that's this unfortunately that's the game we're playing here so I just never want people to think that by virtue of disagreeing with us we're saying somebody's ideologically captured that's too convenient yeah I know you agree with me but yeah it's that it's that lack of critical thinking that lack of critical thought that is just so frustrating to not see from certain people that you again like you said like they should no better like those two guys like I said that that did say those those things to me like one of them prefaced it by saying like well I'm a polycye major you know just trying to give himself some credence to what he was talking about it's like well did you not are you listening to yourself and just yeah it's it's tough that's not the argument you think it is I'm a polycye major that doesn't immediately give you legitimacy yeah it's like saying trust me I know my shit I'm an economist it's like okay yeah okay yeah but the last thing I wanted to say because we're doing the parallels obviously Reagan is is known in the anti-communist part is like you know these contras and throughout central and South America the CE the CIA coups destabilization of these areas and and today we we see that being revamped with Trump right Trump as we speak is is building up a real force to basically do regime change in Venezuela the moment he got in he puts a Cuba back on the sponsors of state terrorism list increases the embargo right rolls back anything that Obama did to try and begin opening relations with Cuba and really causing crises inside of Cuba and inside of Venezuela where because of the sanctions in the embargoes you know medicine and food and stuff are hard to combine especially when you're an island nation you depend on trade in order to get things that you can't self sufficiently create on an island a literal island and so Cuba is in this weak geographical position and Trump is just tightening the screws on them and and I do think that in this era of multi polarity that this this this reattempt to dominate your sphere of influence right to to pursue the mud row doctrine vociferously in this moment of imperial decline in multi polarity is an interesting parallel because Reagan was doing it in the context of the Soviet Union still existing the Cold War and the real competition like there was an until the Soviet Union collapsed you know it wasn't clear who was going to win the Cold War ultimately and there were periods of time in American history during the Cold War where it seemed like revolution was around the corner and that the Soviet unions were pulling ahead the Soviet Union was pulling ahead vociferously you know and and and you go back and you look at radicals and revolutionaries in the US in the 60s and 70s they're feeling that too they're seeing that the US is in this state of catastrophe so it wasn't a foregone conclusion that that was how history was going to go so Reagan operating in the context of the Cold War is doing the Monroe doctrine and establishing hemispheric control and and and domination as a foundation to fight the Cold War and now in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of multi polarity Trump is trying to do the exact same thing to give him a foundation to try to prevent or arrest imperial decline so another iteration in the same ways that we've been exploring throughout this episode that I find I mean fascinating but also deeply disturbing right for sure yeah actually just covered in my class the other day based on the episode that I just listened to from from you the like the Monroe doctrine 2.0 of like what we're seeing in Venezuela I I just taught a lesson on the Monroe doctrine itself and I wanted to make those connections to today of just seeing the Monroe doctrine once again be me being put into into play of everything that we're seeing currently with the Venezuela with the boats being targeted the Nobel Peace Prize you know going to the Great Wing leader of the opposition party inside of Venezuela and it's just you know you're seeing history repeat itself in the worst possible ways yet again and I could be wrong I'm not I don't predict the future but I doesn't feel that this is a bluff it doesn't feel that this time that they're saber rattling or they're just trying to destabilize without making a real move this seems much more aggressive the Nobel Peace Prize going to Machado is this soft power setup you know Trump explicitly activating CIA proxies in Venezuela to destabilize it from within using Puerto Rico as this launch pad for military actions and and you know pray lewd to an attack on Venezuela sending I believe 10,000 troops over there flying B2 bombers in Venezuela airspace this seems like it's happening Marco fucking Rubio is the Secretary of State and you know he he's like a John Bolton for South America this is what he wants this is his constituency is is made in large part by these exiles from Venezuela and Cuba these hardcore anti communist reactionaries that want this and so everything is set up perfectly and Trump also has to kind of if he wants to do this if this is part of his imperial plan which I think it is doing it before the midterms I think is also another constraint on them that they're thinking about that they got to kind of push some of this stuff through before you know Democrats make any sort of inroads not that Democrats are going to be anti-war in Venezuela necessarily by any means but that there might be some more legal or a bureaucratic restraints put on the Trump administration as a whole that could slow them down or in other ways obstruct their ability to go full on with the things they want to do so I think there's a little bit of a time thing at play here and with the ceasefire and Gaza this might be the perfect time to to do a full-hearted attempt at regime change and all the things we've seen leading up to here has been kind of setting the table for that actual military action which I do think if I had to place money on the thing is coming definitely and like you said I think it's just it's so blatant like what they're doing like they're not trying to hide it they're not trying to mask it it's so on the nose that like you said they just they feel like they have a small little window and they're trying to just accomplish whatever they can possibly accomplish within this tight little time frame and like the bigger picture thing though that I focus on with my students is like like I said it is very blatant but like it's not complicated to understand and I wish more people like felt comfortable actually analyzing geopolitics because it's really simple like you know they want the oil inside of Venezuela that's really what it boils down to the US companies got kicked out after the Bolivarian revolution with Hugo Chavez and all the things that have happened since are very simple to understand of why the US wants to save a rattle so hard and take out you know Maduro currently inside of Venezuela so I wish more people felt confident actually pinpointing that stuff because it is not complex at all and it's very clearly you know it's easy to see through and they don't even want to negotiate with Maduro that so even if Maduro is trying to make overtures saying hey we'll open up some of our natural resources to you you can have a cut all these things that they're not cool with that they want the full overthrow they want to turn it into an argentina they want to install a Malay type figure for their own total domination of their area they're not willing to even compromise with these states they want to totally overthrow them and they explicitly say they have the right to Trump has been recorded as saying in meetings he sees Venezuela as part of the United States I mean this speaks to your point there's no attempt to ideologically and rhetorically wrinkle over these things or to present a fig leaf or anything I mean you know Trump making AI images of a Trump hotel in Gaza right yeah or or or posting on truth social the video of him bombing boats now Obama and Biden and all the rest would do those things but they would they would have the restraint not to brag about it right the boat bombings would be lines in the New York Times you know Obama would come out and say you know we had evidence this was a cartel and you know if he did those sort of things he would not like posted on his Twitter being like God another one you know or or or make these grotesque AI videos of of real estate development in Gaza after they take it over that's of course a part of the plan of the donor class like they the Zionists would love nothing more and the the western capitalists and venture capitalists and investors would love nothing more than to have that as an investment opportunity and that's been true throughout administrations but Trump just makes it so fucking belligerently obvious he takes pride in things that every other president would feel we have to soften this we have to present this in a certain way you know and he's just like we're doing it we're gonna do more of it we love it and uh and his his his cult members love it um and he just he takes no prisoners in that regard so there's just he just makes it he makes it plain like I'm going to say these things I'm going to do these things does anybody care and it it reminds me of back during his first campaign like back in 2016 when he just went out and said you know I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and I would not lose a single vote and it's kind of the same thing that you're seeing now he's banking on the fact that the American public at least enough people than the American public just don't care about these things and he's just going to power through it regardless without any sort of decorum that an Obama would have or anything along those lines absolutely correct um so let's go ahead and and move on we we're more than 40 years into the neoliberal era that began you know uh formally with Reagan four decades of deep deregulation privatization financialization union decline tax cuts for the wealthy how do you trace a direct line from these policies to today's economic landscape of stagnant wages soaring cost of living you know incredible in a quality gilded age levels of inequality mass precarity etc I mean I think a lot of us intuitively understand this but maybe you can give it a an articulation yeah I'd really like to focus on what I feel is a pivotal and all too forgotten aspect of the Reagan presidency to help answer this this critical question so that's going back to when the Reagan administration deregulated children's television um you know before the Reagan presidency there were a bunch of regulations in place for kids TV it was the the grassroots organization act action for children's TV that fought for these regulations so a few of them were you know 14 hours of programming for kids was mandated throughout the week there could be zero commercials during a children's show uh you know the hosts of children's shows could not sell products so you know you had amazing children shows on uh and obviously I'm going to date myself here with some of them but you know you had reading rainbow and mr. Rogers you know Sesame Street I don't know if anybody remembers Captain Kangaroo uh in schoolhouse rock but you know now a Leo neoliberal would view these regulations and these shows with complete disgust when a neoliberal sees a precious baby they see massive profit opportunity so the Reagan administration to get decided to go after you know these regulations so that's when Reagan hired Mark Fowler as his new FCC chair and Fowler was a corporate lawyer and he immediately decided to deregulate everything you know in TVs and his quote was uh you know let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes hmm what always happens when the government takes this hands off approach who benefits because when he says he's going to let the people decide he means he's going to let corporations decide so ACT put together you know a massive task force study it was over 60,000 pages long in which they consulted child psychologist teachers pediatricians nutritionists and they concluded deregulating children's TV would do irreparable harm so obviously corporations are going to push back against this and they raised $16 million you know just like the Powell memo would have wanted and defeated ACT and children's TV was deregulated and eventually the fairness doctrine was also done away with um and just want to give a quick shout out to my dad who still rants daily about the loss of the fairness doctrine but uh regardless you know corporations swooped in and children's TV ended up looking like you know capitalism threw up on your TV screen you had shows like GI Joe now and transformers and commercials all over the place marketing plastic crap to kids and I remember like my entire childhood became dedicated to getting the Ghostbusters replica proton pack and you know all the actual educational shows began to fall by the wayside and it had significant educational and cultural effects you know younger students reading math and science scores began to fall off a cliff in the 80s to the point you know where we're at today where we rank in like the 20s and 30s in the PISA educational scores so you know it makes complete sense why the Reagan administration would want to do this because if you look back at Reagan's history when he was the governor of California you know there's a push to provide free college tuition at all you know California state colleges and of course he's you know he defeated that and one of his advisors was quoted as saying we are in danger of producing an educated proletariat that's dynamite we need to be selective about who gets through uh the higher ed programs and I think that perfectly sums it all up when people aren't properly educated you can easily see why we are where we are today and now you have you know AI being pushed inside of society but especially inside of public schools which is incredibly frustrating for me you know of course as a teacher but one of the reason why I think this is also pivotal to understand because it's a perfect microcosm of the goals of neoliberalism it's the hollowing out of humanity and the slow turn of all of us into tiny little profit centers to exploit so you know I guess to tie it back to your question to me this example helps explain the last 40 years of why there has been no type of course correction whatsoever and you already referenced it but I have a great meme of Reagan and the subsequent presidents that is hilarious but insanely accurate and you know it's a picture of each president and the title a little caption under each one so you have Reagan is classified as Reagan classic then H.W. Bush is nerd Reagan Clinton is cool Reagan W. Bush is dumb Reagan Obama is eloquent Reagan Trump is rich Reagan and Biden is senile Reagan but they keep like it's hilarious it's great but the key thing is that they may have personality differences but the policies are the same you know you study any of them for like five seconds and you'll find policies ripped right from the Reagan neoliberal playbook you go through H.W. Bush and his tax cuts Clinton and NAFTA you know W. has too many to mention but of course his tax cuts and then you could argue you know the no child off behind act as well Obama with the ACA you know that was created by the Heritage Foundation and you know Biden destroying the railroad workers strikes or Trump with the U.S. MCA you can clearly see that lineage from Reagan to Trump you know the president's name changes but the neoliberalism seems to endure no matter what and if Hillary would have won she would have been the girl boss Reagan and if Kamala would have won she would have she would have been the coconut Reagan yeah I did see one that actually said her as a cop Reagan oh nice yeah perfect even better yeah also very good but yeah so I love that you focused on one on one thing and you really flesh that out the education thing because you know we get the broad contours of the economic policies and where we're at I want to focus on another aspect and I wrote some notes to this effect kind of doing what you did but instead of public education and the education of children with public television I want to talk about the homelessness problem right because homelessness was not what it what it is today for most of American history you did not have just a miles blocks and blocks of homeless people in every major city and even small and medium-sized cities that we see today and and Reagan really really is at fault here right and there's many ways then which his administration can be it can be you know pinned on his administration so a HUD budget was slashed right so between 1978 and 1983 federal housing assistance was cut by roughly 80 percent so public housing construction stopped so that's one that's one element the elimination of section 8 and rent supports Reagan gutted the programs that directly subsidized well income tenants so you're not building public housing you're you're slashing subsidies to help low income tenants afford homing housing the deinstitutionalization so the process of closing psychiatric hospitals it did begin in the 70s but Reagan accelerated it without building community based mental health care or any other thing that could be an alternative and and in effect thousands of mentally ill people were taken out of these hospitals and just dumped onto the streets you had cuts to welfare and disability programs so Reagan's administration tightened eligibility and vilified recipients right the whole welfare queen thing it was turned into like this national idea of people sucking off the the welfare state and not contributing and things that we still live with today right that happened under Reagan and finally deregulation and gentrification the neoliberal urban policy prioritizes private development speculation and rising property values cities chased investment and tourism they did not build affordable housing for their people so the homelessness crisis and the broader housing crisis that we're all experiencing today that we see every single day when we go out into our world or when we pay our rent or when we pay our mortgage or when we look for a home these these are things that are also directly trace traceable back to neoliberalism and the Reagan administration and these are things that are now huge problems in our society which by no means are being addressed in any serious way the fascist response to homelessness is to dehumanize them to blame them for their own situation and then if they have to do anything about it at all use the police state to go and prison them and use prison as public fucking housing in this fucking country um so you again you can see a straight line from Reagan to Trump from those the neoliberal policies of Reagan to the actual social conditions that we all live in in 2025 yeah and just real quick uh you know i live near utica new york which is a classic you know rust belt city and it perfectly ties into what you just said like we had a psych center right in the heart of utica that served a lot of people and that was shut down you know decades ago and you can see the negative impacts of that you know kind of scattered across our city so it's just uh you know locally a classic example of exactly what you were talking about absolutely and yeah and a neoliberal individualist society it's like pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you're home let's go figure it out yeah your homeless it's not a social responsibility to take care of homeless people that's the individualist aspect of of neoliberalism and the socialist vision is like we are going to take care of you we are not going to allow anybody to be homeless we are going to take care of you're not going to imprison you for it we are going to hug you and love you and give you all the resources you absolutely need we will force you off the street we will put you in a home we will give you case work we will give you mental health we will get you addiction and recovery issues trauma counseling we will invest in our people we will take care of our people because they are neighbors they are human beings we care about them and the socialist orientation of society is to organize society around human well-being not around profit maximization that is the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism and we see a system is as it does well we see what what capitalism and what neoliberalism actually leads to and that's the society we living today yeah I think it's love versus hate that's really it absolutely so you know Reagan still is revered and there's this way in which you know history is memory hole I mean events from two weeks ago are memory holes I when Charlie Kirk got assassinated the right was just saying now you've really done it you know you've pissed us off there's no returning from this civil war now like you are going to regret doing this and yeah Trump is doing this antifa crackdown but what I said at the beginning of that was hey in two weeks everybody's gonna move on because that's the pace of our society and the digestion and the metabolic rate of our digesting of news and the moving on that we go through and when you go back in time you know Reagan is is now you know put up as like a really great president Obama explicitly said that Reagan is one of his political heroes and somebody he looks up to Bush is now being treated it has been for the last several years by liberals as like can we at least return to Bush where things are going on and it's just fucking insane and I would not be surprised if Trump in 10 years 15 years 20 years is treated in a similar way it depends a lot on the trajectory of society in the meantime but Reagan is still revered today among both political parties why do you think his legacy seems to endure in such a positive life yes I mean you look at it like most modern polls about like popularity of US presidents and Reagan typically ranks in the top 10 on most of those polls so you know it's one of the most infuriating things to me because when you actually study the history of Reagan it's like you know unless you are a sociopath how could anybody like this guy you know like when Reagan was governor of California he was being driven around and during past a food bank in Oakland and he is quoted as saying you know I hope they all get botulism if that doesn't tell you like everything you need to know about the guy then like I can't help you but like to get back to the question itself like I feel like his legacy indoors in a positive light for a few reasons first of all and I've kind of touched on it but I think our education education system does a horrible job of educating people on modern day issues in particular and I'll look at my own state you know of New York state for instance more of the modern issues in our civil studies curriculum and standards like the Reagan administration either aren't covered or very briefly discussed in a real surface level sort of way because there's such a focus on standardized testing at the high school level with the region's exams that we have here in New York and you know teachers are pressed to cover a ton of content and a short amount of time and that you know goes directly against everything that a sound educational philosophy should be so as a result you get a ton of students in this country who go through school without ever talking about Reagan and the rest of the neoliberals you know that follow him in any sort of meaningful way so you know these kids end up falling through the cracks and who will eventually film the gaps of that knowledge for them you know it's going to be the capitalist press or some right wing buffoon on social media and it kind of again all ties back to the power memo ultimately you know the rich control or education system and it's designed to prevent working class knowledge you know do you think a you know company like Pearson or Prentice Hall is going to have a textbook that has anything other but a positive spin on the Reagan era you know of course not so and that that's one facet of it I think the other facet of it is I think his legacy indoors because there's a significant segment of the population today who don't like feel the impacts of neoliberalism the same way my generation and subsequent generations do you know I don't want to like dump on boomers too much but you know boomers grew up in the shadow of the new deal they do not feel the heat the way that that we do you know they don't quite get it their material conditions are vastly different you know they don't understand that it's almost impossible to own a house you know I think the last study that I saw said you need to make like 115 grand a year to even have a shot at home ownership you know they don't understand there's no state in the country that you can afford rent on minimum wage you know they don't understand that it's almost impossible to have a child or multiple children you know in this atmosphere and they don't get that you got to bankrupt yourself in order to acquire a college education so you know it's all insane to me and it all ties back to the Reagan time period so that's why I think his legacy indoors without much of a challenge you know in today's landscape yeah and I think the only way in which that changes is a robust move away from the basic premises of neoliberalism right if in when society does break in a genuine left wing direction away from neoliberal era then we recast figures that in that era were heralded as heroic we recast them in a different light right and in history as we look back over history we're always kind of wrestling over it and redefining it and shifting it people's views on on historical figures and historical eras shift based on the present situation and conditions out of which they're looking back across history so I think there will be a day when that does change and I think some of the political work that you're doing that I'm doing that people on the left broadly do even something like sharing those memes around is a part of the broader process by which Reagan is ripped off of this fucking pedestal that he does not belong a top of so I know somebody in my life who lives in a deep red state in Kentucky who is poor by all measures you know disabled can barely get any sort of social safety net struggles financially immensely and because they came up at a certain time they still have this heroic vision of Reagan and they're still attached to the GOP and is a full-on maggot trumper and the mythos of Reagan is a main component of continuing to have them commit to this party that runs their state and runs their country in the direct opposite economic direction that would benefit them in any way shape or form it and trying to get past that ideological fog and talk about the actual consequences of this person that you revere as a hero who has demonstrably created social conditions that has made your personal life way worse than it has to be it's it's an impossible endeavor and it's just it is tragic to see that so they break through yeah it is because like it's like it's it's all like optics for the people that really like Reagan they don't take a deep dive into his policies I would argue you know for the most part he just you know he looked like a president he fit the mold and that's all that they focus on instead of really looking and analyzing the things that he did with his policy initiatives during his time as president that's what people should be focusing on but it's now he was just you know a slick actor and he just looked the part and that's all people care about yeah and it's tied into their sense of self this person that I'm talking about their father passed away their father was a cop in Kentucky in the 80s like oh my I can't imagine what went on then yeah but was you know made his politics a lot about Reagan and so you know his child who still lives today it's the the idea of Reagan is actually integrated into their very sense of self and their family lineage and to break from that to turn on that would be in some sense to turn against the values that their beloved father or whatever had and taught them and so it's like it's deeper than it's not rational it's emotional it's visceral it's deeper than logical irrational thought and we have to we have to reckon with that if we're going to convince anyone for sure all right well as we wrap up this conversation this has been amazing we can go longer we could talk about you know president since then we could do an episode like this on every president after Reagan and cover my series is about yeah every single lesson is one actually well for like W Bush I have to break it up over two so that's like a four-hour presentation yeah going through W but yeah that's exactly what my my most recent lecture series has been designed around and you do a great job of that and in a second we'll talk about it and I'll link to it in the show notes people can go and actually watch those lectures and fill in all this historical knowledge and even the Reagan lecture it goes more in depth in what we were able to fully cover yeah for sure but you know as a final question before we get into that today as we've talked about we face systemic crisis declining living standards ecological collapse imperial aggression and overreach do you see any possibility for a post neoliberal order emerging from within the US or while meeting full transformation once again kind of come from the global periphery right yeah this this is such a tough question and one that I constantly go back and forth on so you know there are days when I'm incredibly heartened you know by the activism and pushback I see in this country and like truly feel chase quote of how people in America that are fighting back are doing the most important work of all because we live in the belly of the beast and then there are other days when I'm completely dejected and feel like all hope is lost in this country and it's times like that where I feel like I become like a disciple of Fanon and feel like fundamental change will have to occur outside the US but you know either way I look to like I look to the people of Palestine and others facing genocide in incredible amounts of repression if they can continue on and fight then you know what excuse do we have you know the least I can do is go out into my community community and educate you know as many people as possible a few times a month I feel like I'd be a massive hypocrite I'd be a coward you know if I didn't so you know to order and to move forward in this country though I really feel like we need to go back to the basics and like listen to Lenin and I really believe we need to form a true workers party of vanguard party and unite the various branches we have into one you know we have the the PSL and CPUSA and DSA and others but I think we need to put our differences aside and come together at this critical juncture because I just feel like without a true vanguard party I feel like there can be no legitimate pushback against neoliberal domination inside of this nation you know the democratic party to me at least is a complete dead end all the democratic politicians that people look to to being as like you know the spark that could begin the transformation of the democrats into a true opposition party have turned out to either be massive disappointments or complete frauds like I don't know John Fetterman and even like you know AOC and Bernie and even a little bit now you're already seeing with with mom Donnie are in you know being incredible disappointments you know mom Donnie's a recent about face should tell you everything you need to know about the Dems I mean how many times can you be Charlie Brown and have the football pull the way from you before you realize that the democrats are not the answer you know they're they're so-called progressives are doing nothing but sheep dogging people back into a political apparatus that threw them out the window decades ago so you know like I said earlier it's it's two sides of the same capitalist neoliberal coin so you know let's listen to Lenin let's look to the bravery and courage of others around the world who are directly confronting the U.S. Empire to inspire us to do whatever we can you know back here and what sometimes feels like the heart of darkness to try to raise class consciousness consciousness and you know fight back in some way incredibly well said and I just have two quick points as a follow-up one to your AOCs are on mondani and Bernie Sanders you know sheep dogging point the the main thing I want to say is like subjectively from within their consciousness that's not what they see themselves as doing but in order to survive in the incentive structure matrix of the democratic party in order to run campaign even when ostensibly elites in the party are kind of hesitant to endorse you or whatever to exist in that world to move up in it at all you have to play the role of a sheep dog because the only principal stands towards the democratic party is total unapologetic opposition and the moment you try to take any other stance toward it when you think you can go within it and make it better you are now operating in that spider web and you are stuck to it's you know it's sort of tethers and you have to behave and act in a certain way in order to just survive in that context whatsoever and so I don't think AOC or Zora on mondani or whatever come into this stuff thinking I'm going to pull back on these issues and I'm going to just just do enough to get the younger people back on board of the democratic party so we can reinforce our our hegemony on the left it's not like that it is just the structural logic of surviving in that context produces these results and so time and time again we're shown that our only viable position with regards to the democratic party has to be total opposition and a refusal to work with it but to treat it as the enemy that it actually is not a vehicle for our interests and then finally I oscillate like you right between like you know people are fed up you know something has to give but I oscillate also in the other direction is like Americans sometimes are just too comfortable that this neoliberal system is it it can't sustain itself so it will collapse and maybe in the wake of collapse something new can emerge but as we've seen throughout American history in the wake of collapse more times than not it's a hard pivot to the right not to the center left much less ever an American history hasn't been a pivot to the radical economic revolutionary liberatory left it's never once happened it's not saying it can't happen but that it's sometimes tempers any optimism I might have specifically locally but that is not to say that we shouldn't do everything we can because even if I'm right and that real transformation at the real vanguard of global revolution is on the periphery is on the global south where the contradictions are higher where the comfort level is not what it is here where they are literally fighting for survival that we still have to do everything we can not because we here in the imperial core are the vanguard of global revolution but because we're the rear guard that we are operating within the belly of the beast and we our job is not to sit back and let the global south take over it is to support and sustain that global struggle by consolidating our support for these global south movements fighting capitalism imperialism and colonialism and to organize and educate and do everything we can here in the belly of the beast to weaken the imperial apparatus from within and to lend support internationally to those movements that are on the front lines and the people in Palestine are on the front lines right the people in Africa fighting colonialism in the Congo in South America right now the people in Venezuela 8 million of whom said they're going to come out and fight the US if there's an invasion the people of Cuba that is where the conditions are the ripest for revolutionary action that is where the line for anti imperialism and socialism is being held and we have to deflate ourselves in the sense that we are not the the the protagonists in this global story but that doesn't mean we don't have a role to play in fact our role of organizing and agitating and educating is more important than ever so it is not a view of passivity it is not a view of putting the burden on the shoulders of the people in the global south it is a view that de emphasizes us as the protagonist and puts us in a support role for a global movement of revolution and i think that is i think a healthy way to look at it and goes a long way in deconstructing some of the egoism that naturally emerges from the west that thinks that that you know they are the center of the world and that any good thing coming is going to come as a product of their specific behavior so people can disagree with me on that but that's kind of where I am at the current moment yeah i that actually perfectly segues into a question that I wanted to ask you because after my presentations you know the number one question that I get so many people come up to me and they're like what can I do I feel powerless and you know I tell them to get involved in any way they can you know whether it's attending rallies or protests you know get out in the community and you know use whatever talents they have to do whatever they can to help out in some way you know like my role I feel like is to educate you know there's maybe something else like organizing but what would be your your answer to that question like what can people do I feel like we know what we need to do on a mass scale but like on the local level what would be your recommendations yeah I mean I mean everybody has a role to play everybody has something they can offer the movement obviously organizing getting involved in tenant organizing is a huge important materially relevant site of struggle getting into political education which first means educating yourself humbling your own ego to the subordinate activity of studying and learning about the world no investigation no right to speak you do not know as much as you think you know so there has to be a humility there there has to be a personal transformation where you are redefining your vision for your life away from careerist self-centered notions of status and wealth and and careers and towards liberation for others that is actually a spiritual and existential transformation that breaks out personally and psychologically from the ideology of capital which says you need to get the best job you can you need to get the most money you can you you you you you you have to break out of that and live for something bigger than the self live for something bigger than the the ego and its advancement and its own petty petulant desires so I think this involves a moral transformation away from the ethics of capitalism and and pre you know positioning the ethics of socialism and communism a spiritual and psychological transformation away from egoic and narcissistic individualistic self-obsession in towards living for something bigger than yourself a material and political struggle that is involved in political education community organizing tenant organizing labor organizing you know influencing the people in your life your friends your family your co-workers when and where you reasonably can and ethic yeah I said an ethical revolution so I think you have to take your whole life your whole life and put it in service of of doing everything you can to make the world a better place and that that happens at multiple levels of big and and I think that's what I would I would tell young people and also to do it in a way that doesn't need for the external world to immediately shift for you to feel valid right we don't know the outcome we don't know where this all leads um that is not any reason to not do it that you have to commit yourself to this even with the fact that you might lose being a very real possibility and to totally accept I do not control where history goes but I am an active agent of it and I can do everything I can to push this thing forward um and I think that's all of our responsibility um but but again it's not guaranteed success and so you have to do that without um any assurance that you're going to succeed but you still got to do it and what what's the alternative the alternative is to just completely accept that all your life is is working and consuming and trying to make the number in your bank account go up while everything around you burns and that and that the alternative is just to care about your tiny little self and its little machinations in a social context that is collapsing all around it that's no alternative at all so the choice actually when you look at it with clarity the choice is clear the more meaningful engaging rewarding life is the life dedicated to something bigger than yourself and the small myopic self-centered life um is is really an abandonment of your existential responsibility and a belittling of your spirit um so that's that's what I that's what I would offer to people yeah I think that's beautifully said and definitely a message that I want to pass along to the people that I'm trying to educate and you know one of the biggest things that I took away from from what you just said is just removing the ego is so huge especially in this country where it's very difficult sometimes to to push back against that all right my friend this has been a fascinating wonderful conversation I really really appreciate you the people's classroom the work you're doing the lectures you're giving I hope this is not the last time you're on rev left you have my my phone number at this point so we can do another version of this we can we can do more episodes like this you're a very effective teacher I appreciate you spending your time and and sharing your knowledge with us um but before I let you go can you just let people know where they can find the people's classroom um and anything else you want to uh to plug or point people towards yeah for sure and just first of all I want to say thank you so much for the opportunity you know rev left and red menace have been so pivotal to my political maturity and development and honestly help me become a better educator when I really think about it so it's been honestly a dream come true to spend some time with you today and I can't thank you enough um but for my uh social media if you would like to follow me on there uh for Instagram it's at the people's classroom 315 so that's my handle on Instagram and then I do have a YouTube page as well where I post the video versions of my lectures that I've been giving out in the public and that's just you know going to youtube.com and then it's slash at the people's classroom altogether uh with no spaces and uh no apostrophe or anything so that's the best way to kind of stay up to date with the things that I've uh been working on and I got a couple upcoming presentations uh the 21st I'll be going through the darker roots of the American revolution and uh the drafting of the u.s constitution and then on the 28th I'm going to give uh one of my presentations uh on palesign again then going through some of the history and connections to today's wonderful well keep up the amazing work staying contact and let's do this again sometime that sounds great thank you so much (upbeat music)