Episode 156: Philosophy and Politics Free-Form Discussion (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 156 is how does studying philosophy prepare you to deal with real world political citizenship? We will be reflecting back on our various forays into political philosophy on this podcast and speaking from the heart or the nads or wherever about our experiences relevant to this question. This is Mark Linsenmayer, a political animal in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:24 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, Homo Reggae tour in Austin, Texas.

0:29 Wes: This is Wes Alwan resisting ressentiment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:36 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, barely Connected, in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:41 Mark: All right, all right, all right. We got the whole family back together. Welcome back, Seth. Mr. Paskin.

0:50 Seth: Thank you.

0:51 Mark: We proposed doing this episode right after the election as a way to try to make sense of that, but Seth vetoed that.

0:58 Wes: Seth was too depressed, distraught, but now

1:03 Mark: he emerges like a butterfly.

1:08 Seth: Yeah.

1:09 Wes: From the chrysalis of his devastation.

1:12 Dylan: He was transmogrified from his previous state.

1:16 Seth: No.

1:17 Wes: Do you know what actually happens inside those cocoons, by the way? The entire animal is liquefied.

1:23 Dylan: Yep. Returns to gel.

1:24 Wes: Yeah. It's amazing.

1:26 Seth: Well, that's not a terrible description of what happened to me in the immediate aftermath of the election. Now I. A more accurate description is when the purported hero of the series gets beaten so savagely in the initial contest with the enemy that he has to retreat to a cave or something and try to heal. And you don't know if he's gonna be able to come back stronger, find a way to overcome or to be broken forever. That's how it feels to me.

1:56 Wes: Get his ass kicked by Batman.

2:00 Mark: Does Trump have a spike bat now? Is that what's going on?

2:03 Seth: Thank God.

2:06 Mark: So there are a couple different purposes that we could use this for.

2:09 Unknown speaker: The.

2:09 Mark: Obviously we normally talk about a text and we are not talking about a text. We had just done some political episodes, the Burke and the Tocqueville that we thought we could reflect on fairly directly. We're also about to read the next two episodes are going to be Richard Rorty on politics achieving our country, 1998, and then also the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. I looked at the Episodes by Topic page and we've done quite a lot of political stuff and could just talk about the recurrent questions that have come up there and how they relate to the personal question.

We had a past episode 73, why do philosophy and what Is It? Which was our first non textual one where we had entered into that with the ambition of summing up some of what had come before and ended up just not really doing that, just making it personal and talking about our personal experiences. Getting into this, I thought something comparable might happen. That in reflecting on the distance between the questions such as what is the social contract and the choices that we have to make that go into being a citizen or just how we react to political events, that something interesting might come out of that.

Us trying to relate to those things on individual terms. Who wants to start? I mean, I have some questions, questions, sort of agenda items I could throw out, but I don't want to set the whole thing somebody else start us. What were you all thinking in? Let's kind of go around in revving up for this, in thinking about what we were going to say here.

3:36 Seth: I recognize that I'm the one who was stuck in the liberal bubble. I recognize what loop I was stuck in and how that made me blind to a lot of the things that were going on. But I also. It's not like I think what's going to happen is going to get ushered in as an age of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States and the people who have not participated in the bounty of economic prosperity that's happened over the last two decades are going to get taken care of and that I'll just have to suffer a little bit economically for the greater good.

I genuinely feel like democracy is over and I'm trying to understand what this new political system that we're going to be in, because it's going to be a one party system, it's going to be a lot like Russia or China. I'm concerned about my Jewish identity in this new world and I have a very bleak outlook. So I have been in avoidance, trying to stay away from social media and the kind of drama that every time he announces a fucking cabinet pick, having 19,000 emails in my inbox that are all screaming fear. So I'm going back to the solace of theory.

So I ordered like $140 worth of books from Verso about resistance and Marxist theory and a whole bunch of other horseshit. And I'm reading a book called the Coming of the Third Reich. Not because I think that's what's happening here, but just to ground myself intellectually in the differences between the two so that I get caught up in the Weimar Germany analogies that are being made. So that's where I'm coming from. But I did vote for the most progressive city district person who won by a 2 to 1, almost a 2 to 1 vote landslide. So we're finally standing up in the city council against unfettered development here in Austin.

5:30 Mark: So it all evens out.

5:32 Seth: Yeah, well, you know, you can be

5:34 Wes: a kind of pocket of French resistance.

5:36 Seth: That's right. Act locally, think nationally, act locally.

5:43 Dylan: For myself, I'm not quite in the place that sounds like Seth is. I feel like there's just a lot of uncertainty about. There's just a lot of chaos at the level of the national government right now. And part of it is just seeing how that plays out. But one of the challenging things for me is just trying to see how this has been talked about a lot, but trying to decide if the level at which something like facts and arguments seem to matter so little, if that's genuinely something new that's going on now or is it the same as it has been going on for a long time?

And I just feel like more at the butt end of that than most of the time or if something has really changed in political discourse to make it less fundamentally political, which is what I hear Seth's big fear is in fact, what he thinks is actually happening is that when I hear Seth saying it feels like democracy has ended, I feel like it really means that politics has ended in the sense of rough and tumble, yes. But basically people are arguing about something like the same sort of thing and that a new era of a different kind of authoritarianism, that it might be sort of soft but sort of one party very hard to get change made and system has been ushered in.

It's not clear to me if that has happened yet, at least in the presidential part. It's just so chaotic that I don't know that anybody knows what's really going on between the opportunism and between the simple lunacy and non facts. You know, I don't know exactly what to do about it, but again, I don't know how new it it is. That's sort of where I'm at just trying to figure that out.

7:35 Mark: Well, is it in the way that the government is operating or the way in which it is communicating that you feel like has this new element? I mean, to me it seems like it's in the communication. Whereas no, I don't understand how the supposed inner workings are going and appointing these people that have no knowledge of the departments that they are supposed to lead and stuff. But that seems like a related but definitely separate issue from just the blatant lying and all that kind of stuff that is making us think that this is a post fact political discourse.

8:09 Dylan: I think they're related because I think that basically not believing in facts, that there's a big gap between persuading so you know what to say in order to persuade. But what you actually act on in terms of facts are significantly different, which I feel like that's been routinely demonstrated by Trump. And I think that's related to, you know, there's no such thing as unnecessary expert or qualifications for things. It wouldn't enter into the conversation that you were good at something in order to be put in charge of it. And I mean, it's always true that in any political, you know, political appointees are often, you know, made to friends and to people who have done things for you in the campaign.

But in my little bit of experience watching that happen, both just seeing it on a national level and then also on a state government having been involved in it a little bit, there's at least the veneer of, well, this is the kind of thing that you'd be good at doing. And there's some exceptions to that where it might be just that they're good at doing it in a way that I'm not really appreciative of.

9:18 Wes: Well, yeah, so Trump thinks of being good at doing something as different than we do. So it's.

9:25 Dylan: Well, wait just a second on that. I want to ask. I'm not sure that that's true because I think what I'm wondering is, does he actually think that people should be appointed in doing things because they're good at it? It's like Trump isn't good at being president. He's not qualified to be president. That's not even why he ran. He doesn't believe in that kind of goodness. Right.

9:43 Wes: I mean, he has to have some rationale in his head, right? To him, it's a matter of being a good businessman and a good deal maker. And he thinks he's putting in billionaires because he sees them as successful and he see typical bureaucrats as jokes. And by the way, I'm not defending him or this idea. I'm just trying to, trying to explain the mindset of the other side. And that's part of a larger backlash against the concept of meritocracy, where all the A students who've been the first to, who've gone to all the good schools and are the first to raise their hands in class and have sort of been the ultimate conformists, which is what Hillary Clinton had going for her in order to rise to power.

There's One part of society that resents all of that, that meritocracy. And they want to believe that anyone could actually be a cabinet person if they had a business which took off and not just someone who went to Harvard and collected all their credentials. So that's what all that appeals to. It's anti meritocratic on one hand. On the other, it's a redefinition of what the right merits are.

10:55 Dylan: I actually resonate with a fair bit of that. The idea that there's something wrong with our Supreme Court if you have to have gone to one of two or three schools for law school in order to be a member of the Supreme Court, and that in business, to rise to a certain level, you have to have gone to certain schools. It's a plain fact of the matter. And I resonate with that. But that isn't meritocracy. It's a kind of funny aristocracy where you get in the right pipeline and then it's because you have a degree from a certain place that it gets you in there.

And so being from a Midwest state college that was a land grant institution whose modus operandi for most of its existence was to educate people and then send them back to the farm to make their part of the public good, that all makes sense to me. What I don't get is where the veneer of knowing what you're doing is coming from. Maybe it is what you just said, Wes. Maybe it's the idea that, well, what we really need is a deal maker. And we need a deal maker. Somebody's going to fight for us because they'll get us the right kind of deal. To me, that's just a deep misunderstanding of what it means to be a political leader and what we would want to have for a president or a government official.

12:14 Mark: Well, and someone who's accomplished things in the real world, supposedly that's the appeal of the business leader, is that they were able to go out and have measurable results. However you want to argue. Obviously, a lot of people were saying during the campaign, and a case can be made that Trump was not a particularly successful businessman. But just forgetting about the specifics, the idea, you know, why would you appoint a business executive to be Secretary of State? That seems to be one of the examples of somebody that has no real qualifications. Well, he's done international business. He's familiar with some of the players, like their. There's some case that could be made.

12:48 Wes: He speaks Russian, right? Or they all speak Russian. That's a requirement, I think. I'm Just kidding.

12:52 Dylan: I mean, the guy from Exxon is arguably actually qualified in some way running a company that. There's all kinds of things I don't agree with about his appointment, but he's run a company that has a capital worth more than most countries in this

13:09 Seth: world, and it's in the business of something that's a critical strategic resource.

13:15 Dylan: Yeah, that's different than somebody like Ben Carson, who's actually a surgeon, but gets appointed to and accepts, in fact, wants to run HUD because he doesn't want to be surgeon general.

13:27 Wes: What about, say, an Athenian idea of governance, or even the idea of governance that goes back to the origins of this country where you could be a country lawyer, a country this or that, and then you say, hey, I'm going to be president for four years, and then we're going to take turns. We're all citizens, we all take a role in governance. And it's not about being a specialized, professionalized, expert bureaucrat. It's really just about being a citizen. And in a sense, no one is qualified. Right. These positions are too big for that. You need a whole staff of experts underneath you.

And you really need to be someone who's looking at the big picture and good at making decisions and good at having gut instincts about which advisors to trust the most and which to trust less and things like that. Ineffable sorts of leadership qualities. Again, I'm not endorsing this argument, but this would be the kind of argument someone would.

14:26 Dylan: Sure, I can go a long way in that direction as well. Maybe it's the contrast of that idea with the fact that the way in which you would make these judgments seems to have little to do with things that we would call facts of the matter. So that you would be able to agree on a judgment about what kind of leader they were doing or how well they were doing. But rather, you just make up what the facts are. And it does feel like that level of making up what the world is like is at a different kind of level right now, at least in our president elect, if not in other aspects of people he surrounds himself with.

15:04 Mark: I've seen a few analyses of talking about this as being a post fact period, and I think that's liberals having a hermeneutic take on what's going on. I can't believe that the people that support Trump explicitly are we're in a post fact world or there's no such thing as a fact. Sure. It's just that they're either ignorant or would they say that Trump is telling the truth. In other words, he can talk off script and in a certain way is a no bullshit kind of guy. Even when he's talking about, like, the bullshitty strategies that he had in recent rallies, he's been talking about what he said before and how that worked, that he's sort of giving his audience a look behind the scenes, that he's in a certain way, an open book.

So that they think is refreshing. Why is this considered honesty? Why is this considered Genu? Interesting cultural question, but it's not an embrace of something explicitly postmodern attitude towards truth.

16:05 Wes: A lot of this actually is. Also, it's about values, not facts. Even some things that are seemingly on the surface about facts are actually about values. Our relationship to facts is fraught and complex. And the things that we tend to say we're certain about, we're willing to lend them that amount of certainty because we think there's some urgent question of value at stake, whether that's moral or whether that's just a matter of survival, say, with global warming or something like that. So most people, for instance, on some question of physics, they would never stake out a position. The public would never say if there was some controversy within physics, they would never profess a level of certitude about that. But for global warming, that becomes political.

16:49 Mark: Except whether the Earth is the center of the. The universe or not. We have to look back in history for such a controversy in physics.

16:57 Wes: Yeah, except it's less obvious to people because there's not pictures of climate change, so to speak, and the fact that there's computer modeling involved and all sorts of other things, and the fact that people see studies come out one year fat is bad for you, the next year it's good. It's all sorts of things people can use to say, well, actually, I don't have to accept scientific consensus, whereas you and I would agree that, you know, we're stuck with scientific consensus. We have to leave it up to the experts. We're not experts ourselves. And it's a joke to go on YouTube and see some skeptical video and then think we've seen something that actually calls into doubt climate change.

That's silly. But the fact that we have to rely on experts and that we don't really directly know, that's a kind of epistemological. And that's, by the way, a universal epistemological predicament that people can exploit. And they can use that to convince themselves that a variety of positions, but basically they can use sort of the value Part of things as a sort of hammer in that case. Because if they're willing to allow themselves as much doubt on what you call relativism, they would just justify as a kind of skepticism. And you could say, well, that's not an option in this case.

It's that the world is at stake in some sense, there's that level of urgency. And then they would question the level of urgency, in which case it becomes a much more complex. We might think of them as relativists or post fact. They would think of themselves as skeptics who have good reason to be skeptics because the scientific establishment is dominated by Democrats, just like universities are, just like the culture in general is Hollywood, all the rest of it. They see that as a one party system.

18:37 Dylan: There are a couple of different categories of the rhetoric that has felt new or disturbing, I guess I'm willing to attribute to Trump and it may not be again, I'm not certain that how new it is, but it does feel like it's new on the scale that he brought it in and legitimacy that it's had. One part of it is the ferocity and frequency, of just hyperbolic lies. Not things like being a climate denier, but things like saying, well, Obama founded ISIS or any number of other even crazier things that are just patently not true and sort of demonstrably not true in that the most naive form of Is that actually true? No, no, that's not actually true. So that's one category.

19:28 Wes: But this depends on the extent to which you extend to someone the benefit of metaphor. Right. So for Trump, Obama founded ISIS just means, and this is false, by the way, but he created the conditions in the Middle east that allowed ISIS to arise when really of course, in that sense GW Bush founded isis, if we're going to use that metaphor. Now, is that a reckless kind of metaphor to use? Yes, but I think trying to fact check that and say that's a fact or that's not a fact, I think we're better off saying, well, that metaphor is extreme and it's not a matter of that being true or false, but it's just a misleading kind of metaphor.

20:06 Dylan: So the guy who writes Dilbert has this point of view about Trump's hyperbole is that if it's not actually calculated, it's just part of his deal making to be utterly extreme in the most outrageous way and then backpedal from it. And he would point to something like the fact that the 2000 mile wall that was 150ft high that Mexico is going to pay for, has turned into a 50 yard fence that's 3ft tall that maybe we'll take a loan on or something, whatever it is. Right.

20:40 Wes: Or that will get them with tariffs or something, and they'll pay for it in that sense.

20:45 Dylan: Okay, there's more to talk about that and whether that is the way you're talking about it, and that sort of benefit of the doubt means it feels more like a corruption of our political discourse. And maybe what I'm saying is lying is just a deeply intolerable way of running political discourse. But the other piece, and I wonder if it goes hand in hand with it, is the, I want to say, authoritarian aspect of it, of the us versus them, the demonization of certain groups, marginalized or minority groups, and holding them at fault for things that they're not at fault for, and inciting violence in a whole variety of ways, or at least condoning it. And this goes from encouraging supporters to beat people up, either implicitly or explicitly, to creating the environment for a kind of deep intolerance that is explicitly violent. And that feels new.

21:50 Wes: Yeah, but you could say the same thing about calling someone a fascist. And there was more violence against Trump supporters than there were against those protesters, which is just a fact.

22:02 Seth: But we live in a post fact world now, Wes.

22:07 Wes: So this is where I think, even though Trump scares me, I don't in these cases, Like, I think some of this is more a result of looking at things through partisan lens. And as you know, I'm in the habit of trying to look at it through the lens of the other side. And also I sort of like, you know, and I get accused of false equivalence for this, but I see a lot of the same flaws on both sides, the sort of distortions of the truth and the there's so many of

22:36 Dylan: them that are just deeply not equivalent, really.

22:38 Mark: So I was already before, you know, the election actually happened, that I was going to write a blog post or something saying the one thing, the one historical advance out of this, you know, when I was sure that Trump was going to be beaten, was to show that the masses are educated enough that you just can't tell lies that can be debunked by simply googling it in this information rich society. It just should not be possible to do that. And of course, that was part of my bubble that. And so the big theme here that I'm trying to deal with, which I think we were dealing with very explicitly in the Burke and TOCQUEVILLE episodes is, is elitism.

And the fact that we, as anybody listening to this, anybody that reads enough, that cares about philosophy is a member of an elite. Whether or not you're rich, just the fact that you think about stuff in an at all serious way makes you feel probably, you know, maybe you have some sympathy with when you read Plato and Aristotle and them not being completely down with democracy. And you figure, well, yeah, of course, democracy is in general great because people know their own needs better than they know anybody else's needs. And so it's best to have everybody advocating for themselves.

And maybe you think that the human nature is basically good or something. And so people are not going to, at least on the whole, in the long run, truth will win out and are not going to. Anything really horrible done against minorities is done by a minority that maybe happens to be in charge at that moment. Right. It's not like every single person in Nazi Germany was a genocidal maniac in the way that the leadership was, et cetera. And now that this has happened, and it's happened because according to West's analysis, according to these analyses that you read, because we on the left were also elitist.

24:29 Wes: Not just elitist, but there's a lot of vilification of the sort of the working class white person became a kind of scapegoat. I've been talking about this for a long time, right? And identity politics. I thought it was very, very dangerous. I thought it could lead to precisely this kind of reaction because this kind of reaction, and nationalism in general falls within the domain of identity politics. This just becomes a kind of cycle of revenge. And that's why I think if we're talking about improving public discourse, we have to eradicate that.

We have to get rid of that way of talking where we are basically trying to humiliate the other side. And this is why I sent you guys this article by Pankaj Mishra, who's a really great essayist and novelist from India. But he has what I think is like the best thing I've read about all this called welcome to the Age of Anger, published in the Guardian. Yes. And this is a left leaning by far. You know, this is a Bernie Sanders style analysis for anyone who wants to sort of know the general political bent that it comes from. But it's also very insightful and nuanced.

And he talks a lot about De Tocqueville, but especially he also talks about Freud and Weber and Nietzsche because he thinks that a lot of people try to understand this election through the lens of, well, why didn't they vote for their self interest? And why don't people care about facts? Why aren't they enlightened, rational actors and all of that stuff? So we constantly underestimate the importance of human irrationality, some of it, which is just not going to go away. And so especially, for instance, the concepts of status, thinking back at our Nussbaum episode and the relevance of that to anger, humiliation, there's sort of status within the culture, what they see when they look in the cultural mirror.

So, for instance, yes, Trump supporters on average had a pretty good income, but that doesn't change the fact that a plumber is lower on the cultural totem pole than a doctor. So they see something much different when they sort of look in the cultural mirror at themselves than a doctor does or even some other professional who makes exactly the same amount of money as they do. And that leads rise to ressentiment, to envy and things like that. And that's made worse, as de Tocqueville points out, by the equality of economic conditions. Equality of economic conditions doesn't make things better, it makes things worse, because then people become even more sensitive to slights and humiliation and all the rest of it.

They want to be seen as equal, not just economically, but in social, political status.

27:05 Dylan: One of the things I liked about that article, and it's related to what you're this ressentiment, is the way in which it goes hand in hand with an absence of the notion of public good. And I guess that's the part that I find so disheartening, is there is a veneer of trying to get a good deal for the downtrodden in Trump's rhetoric. But it isn't a rhetoric of the public good, a rhetoric of what we ought to value for our neighbors that's good for all of us. It's how do we make sure that everybody gets what they want for themselves? And the urge to privatization, the urge to making sure that I'm going to get whatever I can get, rather than we ought to be working together to have a great community. And, you know, yeah, we make compromises for that, but it's for ourselves and for the good of our children and the good of our community.

28:07 Wes: But I think a nationalism is kind of about that. It's about the whole idea of honor and dignity and status. Those things are at work. But it's a need for some sort of meaning. You know, when community breaks down, make America great again, that sort of like callback to traditional values into sort of a fantasy of a time when the public good did seem more monolithic. It did seem more like a single thing that everyone had in common that pluralism has sort of damaged. You know, we could think back to our Sandel episode as well. It's, I think, part of what motivates this sort of phenomenon, this nationalism, is a thirst for the communal as opposed to the hyper individualistic, neoliberal capitalist society.

28:57 Dylan: But it's a funny thirst for the communal, right? In at least the alt right version of nationalism. It's a thirst for the communal that is grounded in the exclusionary. It's the communal by building fences rather than building tents, right?

29:11 Wes: As Mishra talks about German nationalism, for instance, as a revolt against French rationalism and cosmopolitanism and universalism, and also because of the humiliation from World War I. But what do they kind of retreat to? Well, they want to retreat to something more concrete and more specific and less abstract. You know, the German culture or the German fatherland, things like that, because it's more visceral, it can form the basis of an identity which gives you a more visceral attachment to community. And as you guys know, I've argued, as appealing as those sorts of things are, whether it's German identity or any sort of identity, I think it's always very, very dangerous politically to indulge that sort of yearning.

And it's not even doable, really. I mean, it's a complete fantasy that we could ever go back to some sort of non pluralistic national identity. The solution is to recognize that yearning and find out what's going to replace it. That's not so dangerous and doesn't have such an explosive potential for violence.

30:14 Mark: Well, look, the expression of actual white supremacist rhetoric is marginal even within that group. And I certainly wouldn't characterize the typical Trump voter as having any part in that. What's voiced explicitly by Trump and by many people supporting him is the desire to see social justice as a matter of colorblindness. In other words, it's a rejection of the identity politics of the left in favor of what is supposed to be just objective goodness. And so this is just a historical social disagreement that if you read articles in Salon and they say, well, as soon as you go back to colorblindness, then, well, what you actually get is surreptitious racism and de facto exclusion and all that, you know, so just like we covered in our bell hooks episode, that these patterns, these attitudes are so historically embedded, so deep, that unless you are taking positive affirmative action to counter them, then you inevitably let racism persist.

31:26 Wes: And I think that that fuels the problem. I remember this sort of becoming a preoccupation right after Obama was elected. This idea that, well, immediately the left became paranoid that everyone would think we're in a post racial society and that we have no more racial problems. And the sort of axe grinding began about the fact that we're not in a colorblind society. But even it starts to sound like, well, that's not even an aspiration, Mark. You just made the argument for that. But in some ways it has to be at least an aspiration. The idea that doing away at a political level, sort of abandoning one's identity, which is sort of the Rawlsian equivalent, right, of going into the original position, making that abandonment for the sake of the public good, the idea that you can't do that because your identity, then society inevitably will be hostile to your identity.

I don't think that's right. And I think it's a dangerous, as I've said many times before and wrote it up in my Sandel essay as well, I think it's a dangerous idea and it leads to precisely this sort of situation where people say, all right, well, you have your identity, we have ours. It's a zero sum game, then we're going to fight. It can't be portrayed to be a zero sum game. Or this kind of conflict, I think is inevitable.

32:42 Mark: My biggest objection to that, the social justice position, is just because you discover that something is a worthwhile goal socially to pursue doesn't mean that it should eclipse everything else, that it should become the only goal and that you should have the attitude that you're either with us or against us. Every once in a while somebody will say something about Israel or something and like, hey, unless you are invested in what's going on in Israel, then you're anti Semitic. Whereas as a non Jewish person who reads less in the area of foreign affairs than in other political areas.

Not that I'm choosing to be entirely ignorant, but I am not in a position where I need that to become my struggle. The Israel, Palestine conflict. And, and just as another example of. So, you know, last year around now on this podcast, we answered the question of why we haven't covered more women and minority figures and kind of gave this answer of like, well, we're trying to reflect the history of who actually was influential on who. Putting aside, of course, all the Eastern philosophy that we haven't done. You know, that's not the tradition we came From.

And of course, then in the years since then, we did a lot more in that area. We did bell hooks and we did other women philosophers and looked into critical theory and things like that. So I wasn't actually on that discussion trying to take this position of, no, we will never do this, and you social justice warriors are all full of crap. But like, that is the reaction. As if I had said that. As if we had said that, that we got immediately from some people emailing us or on Twitter this very much. If you're not with us, you're against us. If you are not actively devoting, if this is not a chief part of your agenda, then you are part of the problem.

And I just don't like that approach too well.

34:34 Wes: It's not just that undermines the idea that one's intellectual pursuits ought to be in the service of social justice, which I don't think is another thing I don't think is a good idea. One's intellectual pursuits are not a form of social activism. Their pursuit of the truth and the idea that the true is subordinate to the good is the Orwellian idea that two plus two equals five if it needs to. So the fact of patriarchy means there's fewer female philosophers to choose from historically, and that's unfortunate, but that's the fact that we have to live with and there's not really much we can do about it.

I mean, we could just stick to contemporary philosophers or 20th century. We could try and jerry rigged that or use some sort of gender criterion. But my philosophical interests aren't really defined by that. I wouldn't want to limit myself in that way. I'm not that generous, I'm not that altruistic, that for the sake of social justice, which I would forfeit my genuine curiosity, study, say, the ideas of Hegel, regardless of what his gender was.

35:39 Mark: Yeah, I don't want to start this whole controversy up again, but the idea is just bringing this in as a comparison of if this is what the attitude has been in service of a completely legitimate. Like, we were pretty complimentary toward bell hooks, as crazy as some of the particular media analyses she gets into. And I recognize that we're not just expressing our intellectual interests here. We're engaging in a teaching enterprise that we are part of the media culture, you know, and if we were monolithic, if we really just didn't do any of the figures and refused to ever do any of the figures that we have in fact done, I can accept that there's a critique of that that can be made. And again, I'm just pulling myself back into actually discussing this topic, which I don't want to do.

36:27 Wes: Yeah, lead us back to what your larger point was.

36:30 Mark: First of all, I don't like these narratives of what happened with the election that inevitably make some sort of gestalt generalization. Like, you know, I find them entertaining, but I'm very skeptical about them just because there's so many individuals involved and they all have their different reasons. And it's almost easier to point to a specific exchange like, oh, these articles in these publications that are responding to each other and talking about that as a symptom of an intellectual trend rather than to say this is what happened sociologically.

However, playing that game that we've been playing a little bit here. Yes, I can see why. It's not even necessarily that people are explicitly racist, but in the rejection of political correctness, it's that they have not added that, you know, and maybe this is a matter of ignorance, but they have not been enlightened to adding social justice as a prime mover in their lives. Right. As Dylan said, that's part of caring for the public space. And they're more looking at things from a social contract perspective of what do I get out of government versus what do I put into it?

I pay taxes, are they getting me a job, are they taking care of me? What am I actually getting out of this? And it's entirely understandable that people would have that self centered given the economic structure of our society. They're not college students whose basic needs are taken care of or people that are immediately feeling the effect of this. So why would they take this up?

38:01 Wes: We assume that the reasons are ideological. So for instance, there was some guy who has this election model that's been really accurate for a long time who predicted the outcome of this election based on certain economic indicators, who's coming into power, who's going out. And so you might think you could have predicted this election on purely non ideological bases. And I think a lot of what you heard from Trump voters was just that, well, we want to change and you know, I don't have a good enough job, things are stagnant. This whole it's the economy stupid concept that Bill Clinton was so good at exploiting, and then just the idea of a change election where basically whoever's in power becomes sort of the scapegoat for anything that's bad with people's lives and then they just want something different.

I'm more interested in exploring the ideological reasons. We always have to keep in our mind the extent to which that that sort of thing is entirely possible. And we think of a Trump vote, we think of many voters as being. I mean, a lot of people don't read a single political article on the Internet ever. First of all, half the people don't even vote. And then the half that do, many of them do not follow politics in the way that we follow politics. They're not seeing the same sorts of data, and their decisions are not as ideological. That's something that those of us who are more educated and therefore, I think, more prone to partisanship, we tend not to be able to understand that mindset.

39:24 Dylan: I'm just thinking about it as sort of the perfect storm argument for Trump's election. Right. And at some level, it didn't matter what he said. It was more about how he said it and being at the right place at the right time. And I think there's something plainly true to that effect for all kinds of aspects of politics and elections. Being in the right place at the right time and having the kind of message that happens to resonate at that moment. And I think it's probably a significant contributor in an analysis of what happened, trying to decide if Trump's election is really something genuinely different as an indicator of a trend and a change in American political discourse and norms and habits, or is it a variation of a sort that we've seen before.

We had years and years and years of McCarthyism and commie pinko hunting and people's lives destroyed from that kind of thing. And there have been eras of. In our democracy, we can pull out slavery and all kinds of other parts of our government that we voted on and made laws on. And it's not clear to me what to think of where this takes us. And the part that most makes me nervous is just the surface of casual meanness that I just feel like it's just meaner in a way that is dangerous and destructive. And I don't know if Trump is a symptom or if Trump is part of the cause or if it's a little bit of both, but that's the part.

I guess if I had to come up with a thing that makes me kind of despondent, it is just the plain spoken meanness of it. I mean it meanness in two ways. Meanness in the viciousness and the undercurrent of violence, and meanness in the sense of smallness in pettiness.

41:23 Wes: For me, it's. It's actually different. It's the more typical Despondency over the fact that right wingers are being put into positions of power and very right wing policies that I don't like. And that worries me. And the other thing that worries me is just the Trump's erraticness and what I think craziness. And I think that's a genuine.

41:46 Dylan: Yes, that's a big problem.

41:48 Wes: Criticism of, you know, the fact that he's going to tweet something at China, for instance, you know, and try and start an international crisis by Twitter before he even gets into the presidency.

41:57 Dylan: He's not trying to. He's just doing it.

41:59 Wes: He's doing it. So anyway, that more than claims about violence. I mean, the culture to me was already mean in both directions. So it's the same concern that I had when Bush won the policy. Although I don't think I foresaw with Bush the crazy element, which is what the whole Iraq war and the neocon thing was. There's an element of insanity to that. So that's the added anxiety for me. And definitely not this talk of fascism. Although I think, as the Mishra articles shows, there's something wrong about the accusations of fascism or the comparisons to Hitler, but there's also something right about it.

What's right about it is it captures the phenomenon, a kind of a nationalist phenomenon that is rebelling against a kind of enlightenment universalism. What I think is wrong about it is just that it's a little too extreme for me at this point. I don't think the conditions are the same, and I don't think Trump is Hitler. I mean, of course, anything can happen. Who knows what, you know, how bad things can actually get. I'm not the kind of person who denies it can get that bad. That's why I think the quality of our political discourse is so important, because I think violence is actually always around the corner.

Mass violence is a normal thing historically, so it's always worrisome, but I think doing that prematurely, it kind of ratchets up the tension in a way that's not useful. And I think the other part of it is just historically, situations are very dissimilar. So, yes, you have kind of a strongman character, and there's a style of politics, plus the erraticness, that's really anxiety producing, but that's what it is for me. It's not fascism per se, but I feel bad that we've kind of blocked out Seth on this and we're probably not making him feel any better.

43:37 Mark: Yes, we're about to reach what is normally the Half point of our conversation. Seth, I know you're sick. You're not obliged. I feel like we haven't even started discussing the questions that I wanted to get on in here. We've just been doing this punditry thing, which is fine, but I feel like I could definitely go for another hour here and make it a two parter with no problem. But Seth, do you have any reaction to this so far?

44:01 Seth: I didn't feel like you're blocking me out. I just, it seems like we're pretty focused on Trump and what he symbolizes. And also the discussion seems very theoretical and rightly so. I think from Wes's perspective, I think the thing that, you know, when I expressed early on that I was worried that we were on a path to one party rule and fascism, it has little to do with Trump himself, who is very much a wild card. And making the CEO of Exxon the Secretary of State is an odd, but has a certain kind of internal logic to itself. What I'm thinking of more is the fact that the Republican majority in the Senate and the House just absolutely refused to vote on or accept a nomination for the Supreme Court on the premise that they would wait until the election and if the election was favorable in their, in their view, they would permit it.

Otherwise, they could just, I guess, continue indefinitely. And the Republican governor of North Carolina was just recently voted out and demanding a recount. And when he lost and conceded the recount, they convened a special session. They blocked out reporters, they move protesters out of the building and they essentially cut the powers of the incoming administration. And with the gerrymandered districts that they have, there's really no return. I mean, North Carolina has effectively become a third world state. And I don't mean state in the sense of the United States.

I mean, there's a false democracy there because there's no way, given the way that the districts and given this sharp divide between the rural and the urban and the districts, there's no way for people who have an opposing viewpoint or who think this is wrong to express their political opinion anymore. And so in my mind, what's happened is it's not a question of are people being mean or am I concerned with the policies that are going to be implemented? Of course I am. You know, I will say it here. It seems clear to me that the policy of the Republican Party is anti woman.

Don't tell me it's pro life or pro unborn babies or whatever. They just seem to genuinely despise people and want to implement policies to hurt them. And it doesn't have a fiscal rationalization that makes any sense. Maybe they just have inculcated this irrationality that we're talking about more aggressively and sooner than the Democratic Party has. But the policy scares me. But it's the fact that they've just basically subverted democracy. You know, they've been skirting and playing sort of within the rules slightly and now they're just basically flaunting them.

And that's where I think I won't be surprised to see Wisconsin be the next one to do it. And that's what has me concerned, is we had a two party system that has been broken for a long time and one party embraced the quote unquote post factor. Right? They have a machine that defines what the discourse is going to be on any given day. They define what constitutes truth and fact. And they were able to successfully drive their agenda precisely because they understood this. You know what, that the author, Wes, whose name I can't remember, that article that you sent was excellent, you know, that recognized and embraced the fact that human beings were not rational, or at least there's some component of what it means to be a human being that was being neglected by the system of global capital.

Now, ironically, they are also the ones who benefit the most from global capital. So there's an inherent contradiction there that's going to come to terms, I don't know how, when they have nobody else to blame. Okay, so they've been blaming Democrats. When Trump comes in and he puts all these billionaires in place and they don't withdraw from all these trade treatments and they don't bring manufacturing back to the United States and they just continue to enrich and create income inequality, then the question's going to be who are they going to blame?

It's not going to be the Democrats because the Democrats aren't in power anymore. There's literally no Democratic power left to oppose them. So who are they going to turn their attention to?

48:11 Wes: Well, generally these things cycle back and forth. I mean, one party gets thrown out of power, it's hard to be the incumbent party and win. The other thing is if you explain things in terms of their rational self interest, but what they want is jobs and industry to come back. And I think on some level that's true. There are some Trump voters who think that way or they think they think that way. But on another level, if Mishra is right, it's something much more irrational. It's not really tied to their economic interests. It's tied to their sense of dignity, which even the whole jobs thing is kind of tied to that because it's about making a living wage and not needing government assistance and having a job that's not culturally looked down on.

And so there is some tie in there. But I think generally it's about feeling humiliated and dishonored and all those sorts of visceral, kind of narcissistic, injury level things which actually account for a lot more of human behavior than we usually allow for, unless we're reading Freud and Nietzsche and those people. So.

49:14 Seth: Right. And so what's the best way for Americans to not feel humiliated? It's going. We're going to go to war. That's how he's going to do it. I think it's inevitable because once he says he can flex the might, we've been too wimpy. We haven't been strong in negotiation. There's got to be somebody out there we can beat up.

49:32 Wes: Well, he did run on kind of an isolationist policy. I mean, yeah, I think it's entirely possible. I just don't. I'm not as certain as you because he ran as a complete isolationist. But, you know, anything can happen.

49:44 Mark: But, yeah, we're going to make Mexico pay for the wall.

49:46 Seth: Militarily, he ran on an isolationist platform, but he also ran on the wall, ran on a bunch of other topics. And, you know, I just recently listened to a very intriguing podcast on Econ Talk, a guy who's just written a book where he basically goes through the history of US Presidents and talks about what their motivations were. And their motivation seems to have been, according to him, at least this is his perception and seems to be fairly well researched, that they want to get reelected. And the best way to get reelected. Forget about the economy. It's not the economy, stupid. It's start a war. If we're fighting, the president always gets reelected.

50:26 Wes: Yeah, I don't disagree with all that. I just, I found the other Republicans far more scary. If you watch those debates, the level of jingoism, you know, Iran, when they talk, is evil. Russia even is evil for Trump. No, they're just really smart. They kick our ass. They have good people. We don't. We're stupid.

50:45 Seth: This is exactly my point, though. Trump doesn't scare me as much as the Republicans.

50:49 Wes: Right, okay, okay, do.

50:51 Seth: I'm saying he's going to keep himself in office and he's going to deflect blame onto probably the Republicans as well as the Democrats. But the best way to stay in power for everybody involved Is to start a war or to fight somehow. And that's the best way to get Americans feeling good about themselves.