Hey everybody, KMO here with episode number 15 of The KMO Show.
Today is Wednesday, June 14th, 2023.
And my guest is Chris Cutrone.
He teaches a variety of subjects, or a cluster of subjects you might say, at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago.
He's got a new book out from Sublation Media, which we will be talking about, and as many
a leftist author guest of mine over the years, he comes to this program via the vector of
Douglas Lain, formerly of Zero Books, now of Sublation Media.
So here's my conversation with Chris Catrone.
You're listening to The KMO Show.
Let's go.
You're listening to The KMO Show.
I'm KMO and I'm speaking with Chris Catrone.
Chris, it's good to talk to you.
Hi.
Nice to be here.
You know, I graduated high school in 1986.
Makes me a Gen Xer.
And when I was in high school, I wanted to be a cartoonist.
And one of the schools that I applied to was the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
And I came away from my profile review grumpy because they didn't give me the automatic
pass.
They told me, go ahead and apply, you know, and send in your portfolio.
But they weren't terribly encouraging.
Yeah.
Well, it didn't matter.
My father was definitely not encouraging about art school.
But I mentioned that school because I believe you teach there.
I do.
Yeah, that's right.
And I've been teaching there for almost 20 years.
Wow.
You teach art history?
I do.
Yeah.
And really critical theory and philosophy, I suppose.
I do teach philosophy there because it's the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism.
So I'm definitely in the theory of those three categories.
I'm in the theory category, although I also teach art history as well, like proper art
history.
All right.
Well, maybe we can we can broach that topic a bit later.
But for now, I imagine that you have.
Well, now I suppose your students are mostly Zoomers.
But yeah, but you've been teaching in that position for quite some time.
So you've seen a lot of millennials.
I don't have much contact with millennials.
My audience tends to be Gen X and Boomer.
I hear from some younger people, but not that many.
Although this past winter, just for need of income, I went to the Lake Tahoe area and
I worked as a snowmaker at a ski resort.
And a lot of the people that I was working with were half my age.
So it was it was a unique opportunity for me anyway to talk to young men.
It's mostly men working that job.
It's a pretty, pretty physical, demanding job.
Yeah.
And most of them I would describe as right wing, even though we were in California.
And the ones who were lefty were really superficial in their leftiness.
They were they hated Elon Musk.
They hated the people they were supposed to hate, but they didn't really have.
And they would they would threaten termination if you misgendered somebody, even if they
weren't there.
But other than that, they didn't really have much to say about politics, whereas the guys
on the right were really invested.
They were really following their online people, student crowd and then people like that.
So that was that was an interesting view.
So I mentioned all this because your book is it's a new book from Sublation Media.
I believe the title is The Death of the Millennial Left.
That's right.
All right.
Is there a longer title?
Interventions 2006 to 2022.
All right.
So what is a doctor, you know, like applying like emergency techniques to a person on the
brink of death for the last 16 years?
That's a long intervention.
Yeah.
Well, it's multiple interventions.
OK.
Yeah.
On a variety of topics.
And so, yeah, so I've seen the millennial generation more through their leftism and
also through their, you know, sincere and genuine attempt to really be leftists and
to be serious about it.
And so, you know, I've been personally acquainted with all the major thinkers on the millennial
left and movers and shakers like people like Baskar Sankara.
I know that it's not familiar to me.
He is the founder editor of Jacobin magazine, which is the really the journal of the Democratic
Socialists of America, the DSA.
And so they've gone through, you know, as I kind of put it in the book, many agonies
over the years from the antiwar movement to Occupy Wall Street to, you know, through the
Great Recession.
And then finally, you know, Me Too and Black Lives Matter.
And then finally, the Sanders candidacy and the Trump presidency.
So kind of end the election of the squad in 2018 as the sort of climax moment for them.
And now we're kind of in the in the anti climax, we might say the post period the last five
years.
And, you know, already five years doesn't feel like it's been that long, but it has
been a covid.
Somebody mentioned just in passing the other day that Jeffrey Epstein hung himself supposedly
four years ago.
And that shocked me.
Yeah, it's been that long.
Yeah.
Shocking.
It's because the covid era is like a big hole in our lives.
Yeah.
It's really terrible.
So I feel like I've seen them through it all because, you know, I helped establish an organization
that was sort of dedicated to engaging all the various different tendencies on the left,
all the various different ideological aspects of the left, the platypus affiliated society.
And those are my students who were millennials.
They started that and I kind of mentored them through it.
And so, yeah, I've been in this position to really have, you know, a ringside seat or
a bird's eye view on the last generation of leftism.
And also, you know, in the Trump era, I have also become more acquainted with the millennial
right wing.
But I'm just not as familiar with it.
Well, because I think that trying to take Trump seriously has meant also dealing with
the discourse around Trump and people on the right who have tried to make sense of Trump.
And there have been some personal connections.
There's a historian of the Socialist Party of America, Jack Ross, who has a personal
acquaintance with the editor of American Affairs Journal, which is like a kind of a Trumpian,
like more intellectual, more serious kind of Trumpian journal, Trumpian Hegelians.
Right.
Yeah.
These things exist.
And one member of Platypus, a young person, more of a Zoomer age person, has also gone
on a kind of sojourn through the right, like through the Claremont Institute.
You know, he did an internship there.
And, you know, he ended up quitting Platypus, but then he ended up because he got really
sick of the left, but then he ended up getting sick of the right too.
That's easy to do.
Yes, right.
And so I have more of, you know, kind of an awareness of the left, also from my own personal
history going back, you know, decades now to high school and activism back in the 90s.
And but yeah, I just haven't familiarized myself with the right as much.
I've become somewhat acquainted with it.
I've also published in Compact Magazine, which is this meeting place of left and right intellectuals.
So I've had to familiarize myself to some extent with the millennial right as well as
the millennial left.
And I kind of feel like 2023, everybody, the millennial right and the millennial left are
a little bit, they're all in the same kind of depressed state or something, or same kind
of impasse kind of state, you know, same kind of holding pattern in the Biden era.
So the Biden era, it's strange to look back on the Trump years with nostalgia.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Yeah.
Let me, I'm wearing a shirt that I almost never wear because it's starting to get a
hole in it and I never want to, I don't want it to wear out, but I'll show you where I
was in 2020.
Ah, Yang Gang.
Yeah.
Yang Gang.
And in 2016, I was Bernie.
But of course, I didn't have the opportunity to vote for either of those two in the general
elections, so in 2016, I voted for Gary Johnson and in 2020, I voted for Howie Hawkins.
So libertarian and then green.
Basically just every election cycle.
I mean, I might vote strategically in the primaries, but when it comes to the general,
it's just, hey, outside the Overton window, I am not interested in the duopoly.
Or as you describe it, I wrote down a phrase from one of your essays, I really like this,
and I'm just, I'm starting in mid-sentence.
Those who are part of an elaborate political machine for maintaining the status quo, who
are evidently resentful that he doesn't need to play by the rules, he being Donald Trump.
Yeah.
But, and I think you were describing Elizabeth Warren there.
There were three essays that were sort of the assigned reading for this conversation
and I did read them and I did enjoy them.
And they were written, I think, like two years apart or?
Yeah, 2016 to 2018.
Yep.
Yeah.
So what are those three essays?
Oh, actually, maybe up to 2020.
So it's Why Not Trump from 2016, from a few months before the election.
It's Why I Wish Hillary Had Won, and that was before the midterm elections in 2018.
And finally, Why Not Trump Again, which was late 2019, early 2020.
So it was before COVID.
It was just as the election cycle was really heating up before the primaries in 2020.
And yeah, I mean, I had to do this thing in 2016 where I had to sort of take Trump seriously.
I'm originally from New York.
And so it was a little bit of a stretch for me to be able to take Trump seriously because
I kind of felt like I knew who Trump was as a figure, as a public figure growing up in
New York.
And then I didn't really have an awareness of him as the reality TV star.
I didn't really have an interest in watching The Apprentice.
But I had this sense that he was like a kind of conservative Democrat, kind of loudmouthed,
demagogue type guy, like an Ed Koch type figure.
And I had an intuitive sense of where he was coming from.
But I was shocked to see that he had any kind of political viability.
But I kind of did see it as it manifested.
Bernie too, I have to say.
Bernie was a funny figure for me from my youth, also from the 80s, as mayor and then senator,
but mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
And when I was a leftist, I was kind of a hardcore leftist in Western Massachusetts
at Hampshire College.
And so he was like the socialist up the road in Vermont that we would joke about.
We could be like, oh, yeah, we could be a socialist like Bernie Sanders.
Right?
Because we were like hardcore Trotskyists.
I was a member of the Spartacus Youth Club and we're very serious, like revolutionary
Marxists.
And so Bernie was the opposite of that.
It was a kind of a sentimental kind of harmless figure.
And so having both Bernie and Trump emerge as viable candidates in some respect, I don't
think that Bernie could have ever gotten the nomination in the Democratic Party.
Or lived to take the oath.
Right.
I mean, they were starting to get nasty about him already.
And then certainly they did their skullduggery.
And I even lived through some weird, I would say, election tampering in my own precinct
in Chicago during the Democratic primaries because I tried to vote for Bernie in the
Democratic primaries and they mysteriously did not have our ballots.
And they said, well, you can still vote.
But it's they said we can't guarantee that your vote will be counted.
And it's definitely a precinct.
That's what you voted for.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And it's definitely a precinct that would have voted for Bernie.
Right against Hillary.
Not that he would have defeated Hillary, but they, of course, wanted him to lose by as
much as possible to Hillary in the primary.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, and of course, Chicago is notorious for this kind of stuff.
I always like to joke that in 2000, you know, with the hanging chads in Florida.
Oh, yeah.
We had the same butterfly ballots in Chicago.
And just the city of Chicago threw out three times as many ballots as the entire state
of Florida did.
Wow.
Yeah.
You got to win elections by a wide margin because there is.
Thank you.
Yeah.
There is.
Totally.
So let me direct us back to your trio of essays because I'm sure we can get off onto some
other fun topics.
But I want to make sure that this is covered.
What I was saying was I had to sort of screw myself into this role, especially as a teacher
and as someone who is mentoring some millennial and then zoomer leftists, that I had to sort
of get them to see Trump for what he really was and not for what the Democrats were going
to say and what the left would generally say about him.
He's a fascist and this and that.
And so it was very important for me to sort of like discipline myself to the task and
then try to make a public intervention through these kinds of short pieces where I had to
sort of it's a difficult thing like how to not say what's needed to be said.
Don't say too much.
You know, be careful about what you say, what you don't say, not just in terms of like PC,
but just intellectually.
Like, what could I claim and what could I not claim?
You know, what could I call attention to?
What did I have to treat with a light touch?
And also rhetorically, strategically thinking about like how to defuse like the hot button
stuff that people were very anxious and even hysterical about.
You know, how to sort of address things without conceding to the talking points, if you will.
You know?
How to defuse the sort of reflexive catastrophism of the left and mainstream Democrats.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So I think you originally wrote that first essay at the request of your students.
Is that right?
That's right.
They did.
Yeah.
I had written during Occupy Wall Street, I had written some short pieces in the midst
of that that they had used as flyers.
And so it had to be short like that.
It had to fit on like a page, like one sheet, maybe double-sided, but still one sheet.
It needed to be reproducible in that way.
And they wanted to do that at the beginning of the academic, you know, school year in
September of 2016 because they, you know, platypus had already existed for 10 years
at that point.
And we had campus chapters around the country and around the world that, you know, where
the student organizations, you know, are active.
And so they knew that people are going to be like, well, what about Trump?
And therefore they wanted me to produce something, you know, succinct and to the point.
And I did.
And that's what generated that piece.
I had written about like Obama, the Obama election in 2008.
I had written about the anti-war movement, you know, the sort of Great Recession and
anti-war movement moment, like circa 2008.
And so I had had some experience writing in a kind of current events kind of way.
But Trump's different, of course.
You know, like dealing with like what's really going on in mainstream politics, but from
a leftist perspective and, you know, sort of not just doing a ritual denunciation, but
trying to like, you know, really think about it, try to open the space for thinking about
it.
It's hard.
And I did spend some months thinking about how I was going to go about that short piece
on Trump.
Yeah.
So what about the second one?
You wrote about how you wish that Hillary had won.
Why?
Right.
Well, two years in, right, or a year into the Trump administration, really, like, let's
say a year and a few months into the Trump administration.
So I had been vilified on the left by why not Trump piece?
No.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And I was invited to speak at the Left Forum in New York City by one of the organizations
that had really taken me to task for what I had written.
And that's the Marxist Humanist Initiative.
So they had organized a panel, basically a debate on Trump and Trumpism.
And I was their sort of whipping boy for that.
And so I wrote one why I wish Hillary had won in response to being invited to speak
on their panel and wrote it as my opening remarks to engage them in dialogue and to
sort of kind of call their bluff because they claim to not be for Hillary, right, but to
still be anti-Trump.
And so I had to sort of call their bluff and be like, well, you know, OK, I'm actually
willing to say I wish Hillary had won in a way that they were not willing to be so straightforward
about it.
Yeah.
So it was sort of a double edged sword there.
Absolutely.
That's right.
Exactly.
And so it's because I just had to kind of concede or admit without conceding some points
and really midway through the Trump administration.
OK, has the world ended yet?
You know, we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We're still waiting for the world to end.
And I guess now it's going to end in 2024, right?
Whereas it was supposed to end in 2017 or 2018.
And then it did end in 2020 with the covid catastrophe and and etc.
But it's yeah.
So why I wish Hillary had won just as a kind of like, look, I'm in the same bubble as you
all the Democrats, the libtards, the whatever.
Like I'm definitely in that world.
I'm in Chicago.
I'm in, you know, higher education.
I'm in a lefty school.
And you know, just like I know, I know, I know, you know, like I understand, right?
Where are you coming from, comrades?
But really, you really wanted Hillary and not Trump, huh?
So yeah, it is.
I was meant to be, yeah, it was meant to be a little bit of a barbed, of course, thing.
I don't know.
Maybe these things are too rhetorically complex.
I guess when people are really like on edge.
If you don't mind my simplifying your last answer, I think for the benefit of the audience,
I took you to be saying in that second essay, I wish Hillary had won because then it would
be much more stark and obvious to the neoliberal agenda and how the Democrats don't give a
shit about the material conditions of the working class.
That's right.
No, that's right.
That's exactly right.
Exactly.
No, I know.
I know.
It's, no, it's a problem because I feel like what's haunted them, the Democrats, for the
last, you know, seven or eight years now is they used to call it the Obama coalition of
voters, right?
And I also feel like from my personal experience, I knew firsthand, you know, my family, my
family, rather conservative people from Long Island, just working class people, but conservative
in a kind of a normal way.
You know, they voted for Obama twice and then they voted for Trump.
And you know, and I think they were more neutral in 2020 about it.
I think they did vote for Trump again.
But I also think that they were like, you know, Biden wouldn't be the worst thing in
the world.
Right.
And so they are the Reagan Democrats.
They are the bellwether, you know, swing vote.
They are the working class.
They are this thing that the Democrats worry about.
Can they win the white working class?
Can they win the working class?
And you know, they're very ambivalent about that, whether they even want to.
Right.
I think they'd rather the working class not vote.
Yeah, I'd rather, I think that they think they'd rather just compete among the middle
class.
Well, let me share the second of two of your quotes that I wrote down.
The recent Brexit vote shows that when people are given the opportunity to reject the status
quo, the status quo response has been that they should not have been given the opportunity.
That's right.
Yeah.
Don't let them vote.
Don't give them a hoax.
Don't present them with the option.
Right.
Because I mean, with Brexit, especially so Brexit, you know, kind of foreshadowed Trump.
In 2016.
And it was really a move by David Cameron, the way I understand it, to kind of really
disarm the Brexit faction in the Conservative Party and the Tories and sort of give them
what they were asking for the referendum, but assume that the referendum would be voted
down, that Brexit would not pass.
And then there was a shock when it did pass.
Right.
And you know, so Boris Johnson, you know, represented the sort of Brexit impulse that
David Cameron did not agree with.
And I feel like David Cameron was like, OK, let's put it to a vote.
And he thought he'd defeat it that way.
And then it backfired.
Right.
And you know, I mean, you know, Hillary did something similar with Trump, which is that
the Hillary campaign really preferred Trump as an opponent.
I believe they paid to run some of his ads in certain districts.
They did.
Yeah, they did.
I mean, they played both sides.
You know, they also did things like they paid for people to start fights at Trump rallies.
They did do that.
Bobby Moog did do that.
That came out in the emails in the in the Julian Assange leaked emails.
And you know, but I think that they thought this is how we soundly defeat the Republicans
by making Trump the candidate.
And they're kind of doing that now again, too.
With the the indictment about the documents?
I think so.
I think I thought that was a tempest in a teapot and just a pretense for for skullduggery
until I saw the photographs of the documents.
I mean, it wasn't a few.
It was boxes and boxes and boxes stashed in all these different rooms and in very insecure
conditions.
And apparently, you know, Trump was rather cavalier about just sharing them with people
very casually.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, he was himself.
He was himself.
Yeah, expected.
And and, you know, and the Democrats do lawfare.
They do.
Meaning, why would you mean?
Go ahead.
They're, you know, no doubt.
Right.
If you scrutinize someone closely enough, you can find that they committed an illegal
act.
Right.
It's the you know, the Republicans always say this.
That's the Stalinist playbook.
You know, show me the man.
I'll show you the crime.
Right.
And and he is kind of, you know, foolish enough.
But you know, as far as the the casual nature of the storage, evidently, you know, evidently,
it's a little shocking.
But evidently, like presidents, when they leave office, this stuff that they have right,
their kind of documented legacy is literally in their personal possession, meaning they
literally have to handle it personally, like they have to finance it personally, like storage.
Right.
And so, you know, evidently, Obama put it in a used car dealership his stuff in the
suburbs of Chicago.
It's all very it's in.
So the shocking part is that it's literally their personal responsibility.
And so, of course, Trump's just going to stuff it in the unused rooms in Mar-a-Lago.
Right.
Another aspect of this is just the, you know, the habit of stamping top secret on everything.
Oh, very, very secretive.
Yeah, over classification.
So that, you know, I don't know if you've paid close enough attention because the rhetoric,
the public discourse around this, but I've been trying to follow it.
So there are a couple of interesting things about this indictment.
One is that they're actually not accusing him of like they're sidestepping the classification
issue and they're turning it into a national security issue instead.
In other words, they're not saying that he's guilty of mishandling classified documents.
They're saying he mishandled documents that pertain to national security.
And that means that even if he said that he even if if it were to be shown that he had
declassified anything, it wouldn't change anything.
That's the first move.
The second interesting part about it is that evidently among the documents that he's being
indicted for mishandling are documents that prove that the Russia collusion hoax was indeed
a hoax.
So he took things he wasn't supposed to take because he he wanted the evidence that he
was innocent of what he had been accused of with Russia.
And those are the very same documents that they are saying is also a national security
risk for him to possess.
So they're kind of getting him made up a story about him, then he has documents that prove
that it was a made up story.
And him having those documents is indeed part of what they're charging him with.
It's a threat to national security because it might be it might allow him to establish
his innocence at some point in the future.
Exactly.
Well, because it is it is a threat to national security to show that the US government lies
the way it does because it does.
Right.
And that is a threat.
Right.
At the same time, I think most of the public is so cynical about that, that I like I remember
when Snowden released his documents via Glenn Greenwald, and it seemed really damning about
all of this unauthorized surveillance of American citizens going on.
And I think the universal response was, yeah, whatever.
We know that already.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it is a funny I mean, obviously, it's fun a certain way, meaning that you can
be sure that the Democrat aligned media is going to handle it a certain way.
And but also the Republicans are not going to make too much of an issue of it.
In other words, I think that in the Obama era, you know, because you see people like
Tucker Carlson, who will say I was wrong about what I went along with in the era of the war
on terror.
So in the George W. Bush era and in the Obama era, the Republicans basically gave a pass
to the national security state.
And they only wised up to it in the Trump era and only marginally only marginally.
Right.
So only a little bit and only at the margins that the mainstream established Republican
Party still does not want to really expose the state.
They don't.
Right.
They want to say, oh, well, the state is not being even handed or something.
You know, in other words, like they're basically saying, well, if the state violates people's
rights evenly, then it's fine.
That's basically their their approach.
The problem is that it's an uneven application of the denial of people's rights.
It's amazing.
I mean, the way that I've talked about it with my students and with my friends, that
the Trump era and again, turning it into like a teachable moment, it shows how things work.
It does.
And so it casts a lurid light on the way things work.
It's a distorting, like Chioscuro kind of lighting.
But it is an illumination of something.
It does show something.
And of course, it's not like we weren't able to see it before, but now it's sort of something
that you can't ignore.
Because again, in the war on terror era, there was some exposure of it.
But it's been you know, that could still be turned into, oh, well, that's foreign people.
That's other countries.
That's this and that.
You know, it's Guantanamo Bay.
Whereas, you know, again, the idea that this would be turned against the American population.
Do you know about this Jason Siegel article in Tablet about the Russia collusion hoax?
It's an interesting article that he published recently.
So evidently, so he's a millennial journalist, a liberal, you know, a Democrat, essentially.
But he was an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
And so evidently, the scales fell from his eyes when he realized that the US was using
the same techniques on the American population that they used in the war on terror in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
The same kind of information warfare and psychological warfare.
He's like, oh, they're doing the same thing here that they did there.
And that shocked him.
And of course, that really shouldn't shock anybody.
But I guess it is shocking.
Right.
And again, that's like the Tucker Carlson thing.
Well, I was fine with the war on terror until I realized that they brought it home.
Right.
Which is impossible not to do.
Yeah.
I mean, didn't they bring it home from the very beginning?
Right.
I mean, you know, so but again, like I'm an old style Marxist, meaning that I am skeptical
and critical of the state per se.
That's the capitalist state per se, but the state per se.
I mean, that's like a very, very old fashioned kind of Marxist perspective.
Sounds anarchist.
It does.
Because of course, you know, Marxism and anarchism come from the same 19th century
socialist movement.
And they did agree on most things.
In fact, in the 20th century, you get a sense that they didn't agree, and that's because
of what happened in the Soviet Union and Stalinism and etc.
But you know, up to that point, yeah, they, you know, and I think that that got lost.
Pardon me just a moment.
I think we're about to be interrupted.
So we're talking about anarchism and general skepticism of the state.
And I don't remember exactly what you were saying when I interrupted.
Oh, right.
So in the 20th century, I think that what happened on the left, unfortunately, is that
it became statist and it became identified with the state.
And of course, in American politics, it really has to do with like, I don't know, the FDR
New Deal moment and the turn, you know, the realignment of the political parties that
the Democrats were like the more conservative party until FDR.
And then they became the more progressive party, starting with FDR.
And I think that then, you know, the 1930s is also the era of like Stalinism and the
alliance of the Soviet Union with the United States.
And so a lot of our language in popular political discourse, not just on the left, comes from
that era.
And a lot of 20th century conservatism is also born in that era in the 1930s in response
to this phenomenon.
And so you get this notion that, you know, the Republicans as conservative and really
as conservative liberals, like kind of their upholding of like the Constitution.
And they say it's not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic.
And it's not the rule of people, it's the rule of law.
Is this sort of attempt to sort of uphold a kind of, you know, civil libertarian perspective
against the state, the statism of like the New Deal and progressive policies.
And, you know, it goes, it runs through the 1960s, you know, in the Black Lives Matter
era, but also in the period around, you know, 2015, you know, the 50th anniversary of, you
know, 2014, 2015 and the Obama years towards the end, the 50th anniversary of the Civil
Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
You know, the Selma movie, this kind of thing.
What recirculated was an old Cambridge debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley
Jr.
You know, William F. Buckley, who's the conservative neocon.
And basically, William F. Buckley is like, you know, you can't legislate against racist
attitudes.
And James Baldwin is saying, yeah, but you got to try.
And William F. Buckley was like, that's just going to produce a worse situation even for
Black people.
That's going to make them, you know, dependent on the state and etc.
And of course, he was right, you know, like Buckley was right in that debate.
It was assumed at the time that, of course, he was not right, you know, but, you know,
he was thinking.
He's so annoying.
If you're on the left at all.
Totally.
He's so annoying.
And he's so not in the mold of what you would think a conservative would be.
I mean, he's very highly educated.
He sounds like he's putting on this sort of fake British accent.
Yeah, right.
Very effective.
Efeat.
Efeat would be, you know, the phrase that like the alt-right throws at the left now.
But Buckley was definitely effete.
And I remember a panel debate just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
There was a debate, I think it was on PBS.
And on one side...
In our generation, Buckley is like a crazy figure, isn't he?
But go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
And the topic being debated was, is the Cold War starting to come to an end?
And Buckley was firmly on the no side.
And within a couple of years, the Berlin Wall was down.
So that was quite the watershed moment.
So he was, you know, spectacularly wrong about that.
But you know, smart people are spectacularly wrong about all kinds of stuff.
Absolutely.
But yeah, that's just me reminiscing about William F. Buckley.
I can go back now because, you know, when I was young, I was pretty lefty.
And I'm just not anymore.
And I can go back and listen to Buckley now and not be irritated.
And just kind of shake my head.
It's like, wow, that's quite a voice on the right.
I don't...
Like, I wasn't even in a position to appreciate what he was playing.
Right.
Even what he was saying.
Right, exactly.
No, I was in the same kind of, you know, predisposition, which is to say, you know, just to see a
nefarious motive behind it.
And there's actually a movie that's like it revisits the Gore Vidal William F. Buckley
debates around 1968.
It's called like Best Enemies or something.
And it's like a wonderful thing because again, it's kind of like, you know, Vidal and Buckley.
And it's about like Vietnam and Richard Nixon and also Reagan was a candidate in the primaries
in 1968 already.
You know, he was angling to be president.
And I think that Buckley might have supported Reagan against Nixon at that point.
And it's a fascinating window into a kind of formative moment, you know, during the
new left, but also the birth of the new right that gave us, you know, the Reagan era that
was formative for our generation.
And again, like just thinking, well, in fact, these things that people on the left might
have considered to be settled historically are not.
And that's, you know, it's raised by Trump and in a very peculiar way because there isn't
like quite the same intellectual apparatus around Trump that there was around Reagan,
you know, like William F. Buckley.
You know, there isn't like an ideologically coherent like new right the way there had
been in response to the new left.
And so but it's just it is interesting.
So anyway, getting back to the statism point or like a Reagan, you know, the government
is the main threat to like freedom, you know, most terrifying words in the English language.
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Yeah.
I'm an Adorno scholar, right?
So I'm a scholar of Theodore Adorno, who's like a Frankfurt School critical theorist,
a Marxist.
And there's an essay that I teach by him that's talking about like, he says, actually, this
is a line, you know, the social worker might be a greater threat to the abused woman than
her husband does.
Rhetorically powerful.
I'm not sure it's true, but right.
But what we've lived through since that time, so he was writing that in the 60s, is we've
lived through a kind of state of education of life.
Right that that we've naturalized and that we take for granted.
In other words, we think, OK, yes, like domestic violence, you should have a police intervention,
right?
To prevent what used to go on in the private sphere in the past.
But then actually, when you scrutinize it a little bit more closely, you know, it is
part of like a criminalization of the working class.
It is about bringing the working class under state control, state surveillance.
And the fact that the police are because the police are quite cynical about these things.
In other words, when they show up for an incident of domestic violence, they often arrest both
people because often both people have thrown blows.
And then, you know, so a woman who is has an abusive partner and has children, she is,
you know, through victim advocacy, she's subject to a kind of police scrutiny that might end
up with her losing her children.
Right.
And so, you know, and again, just recalling that the old style socialism and Marxism and,
of course, anarchism as well would have would have objected to the working class coming
under the tutelage of the state in the way that we've naturalized now.
So I'm going to speak in a very meta way just about the structure of the interview and such.
You've been talking about the past, and I want to switch into some speculations about
the future.
But before we do that, I want to make sure that your new book and Sublation Media have
been given their due.
Is there anything else you want to say on those topics?
Yeah, I mean, I probably should say something about that.
So just in terms of like this book that I'm just publishing now, that, you know, again,
reviewing the last 16 years or so, but through the issues that have come up for the millennial
left in their formative experience, really, these are the abiding issues on the left.
So things like capitalism as an economic system and as an economic crisis, like the Great
Recession kind of moment.
Also, you know, the question of Black Lives Matter and the enduring, you know, legacy
of a history of racism in the United States, the question of US military interventions,
the question of US imperialism, and then, of course, Trump as a kind of culminating
moment.
But really, you know, that's the closest thing we've had to an anti-war president in my lifetime.
Yes.
And I do write about that.
So I think the third of the essays that you that you read, Why Not Trump Again?
I think that it's there that I say Trump was the peace president that Obama was supposed
to be.
Yeah.
He had one point where I think to appease the Pentagon, they launched some missiles
at an airfield in Syria.
But they got the body.
They did kill a considerable number of Russian military advisors.
Democrats couldn't criticize him for that right now in the current environment.
You know, what he did was he did a kind of yeah, he did a punitive strike in response
to I think a Syrian chemical weapons attack and he attacked the airfield that it had been
mounted from.
And so it was a measured response.
You know, the one that I also recall is like the drone strike of Soleimani.
Yeah, right.
And then Baghdad, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard military advisor for the Shia militias
in Iraq.
And evidently, this is what I read about anyway, who knows?
It's all very apocryphal.
You know, what happens is the president is given a menu of options by the national security
team.
You know, you can do this, that or the other thing.
So it was in response to attacks that have been made on US military bases by the Shia
militias in Iraq.
And evidently, he chose the one that was supposed to be the option that was so crazy that, of
course, you don't choose that one.
And yeah, on purpose.
Yes, I imagine.
As if to say, I recognize the game you're playing.
If you're going to play this game, I'll pick the crazy option.
So go ahead, choose wisely.
You know, Barack Obama supposedly would be presented with a set of baseball guards with
potential drone strike victims on it, and he would choose the baseball card of his choice.
But he was the drone assassination president, which to me, the idea that you can just because
there's not a human pilot in the aircraft, the people that you kill are still dead.
It's the same.
Yeah, it is.
And it's not an autonomous weapon.
There's a human pilot controlling it in a trailer in Nevada.
It's not it's not a movie that depicts this.
I think it's called Good Kill.
Oh, yeah.
Or something, something kill.
I think I think it's good kill.
That's the pathos of the drone pilot.
There's a very low budget sci fi film called Sleep Dealer, and it is about a drone pilot
who defends the American, you know, the US Mexican border against illegal crossings by
Mexicans.
But he himself is a Mexican American.
Right.
Yes, yes, but but he is the like gold star drone pilot with the most kills of Mexicans
who in the story are basically just trying to get to a body of water because they need
right.
Right.
So they it's right.
So it's like a setup.
No, it's terrible.
I mean, you know, so and you know, so I've had debates with people on the left about
this and they're like, well, you know, the drone strikes increased under Trump than under
Obama.
They do make that claim.
And that's probably true.
However, there was a general attempt to draw down the wars and to draw down the war on
terror more generally.
And you know, certainly there were opportunities to escalate, you know, with like the Civil
War in Yemen.
I mean, there were there are these opportunities to escalate these things.
And he did not.
And you know, again, that's hard for the left to swallow because I think that they see the
national security state as essentially Republican in character.
You know, they have a very out of date notion that like the police and the FBI and the CIA
certainly, but also the Pentagon and maybe even the State Department are Republican.
Right.
But that's that's who they recruit from.
They recruit these sort of, you know, macho white guy conservatives who are Republicans
and that the Democrats are some kind of check on the national security state.
That seems to have been thrown out the window.
But in the Trump era, I think that it was jarring for them to recognize that actually
the deep state might be saffed by Democrats now.
And you know, I think that again, they have this idea, a very old idea.
I don't know.
You know, in the 80s, certainly when there was a renaissance, like far right in the Reagan
era, you know, there was like the new KKK and there were like neo Nazis and whatnot.
And so part of the discourse on the left would have been that the state colludes with them.
In other words, the state cracks down hard on the left, but kind of winks and nods at
the right.
And according to many leftists online, that is still the case.
I don't think so.
I don't think so either.
I don't think so.
Right.
And so it's one of these funny things where I feel like, okay, the left is really stuck
in the past.
And maybe that's why I've been, you know, talking about the past in the way that I have,
because I feel like really the tragedy for me of the millennial left has been that it
was an opportunity in the new millennium to rethink a lot of received wisdom on the left
and they shied away from it.
They made some steps in that direction, but they ultimately shied away from it and adopted
very much our generation's posture of like defending the welfare state against the privatization,
neoliberal libertarian onslaught of like a Reaganite Republican party.
And they really couldn't recognize that Trump ran against that Reaganite party, ran against
the neocons, the neoliberals, and even in a certain way, he sought to disarm the Christian
evangelicals, to sort of throw a sock to them without really conceding to them.
Right.
And instead, it's like, oh no, he's like the ultra neoliberal and the ultra neocon and
the ultra Christian evangelical demagogue.
And you know, and they had to invent these ideas of like Christian nationalism and white
nationalism and white supremacy.
And there might be some of that going on ideologically, but I don't think that that's why people voted
for Trump.
I really don't.
I mean, maybe because my family is Italian American from Long Island, maybe that's not
like a real world to me.
I don't have like a felt sense of that.
I'm sure there is some of that, but I feel like that doesn't really explain it.
It's not some atavistic, you know, like white nation rearing its head, you know, the way
the Democrats would have us believe.
And you know, we'll just see next year.
You know, I imagine that if Trump runs again, if he does in fact, you know, run in the election,
which I think he will, he will get even more Latino and black votes than he did in 2020,
where he evidently got more black votes than any Republican had gotten since 1960.
You know, I went to the Politicon gathering in 2019 in Los Angeles and I had never taken
an Uber before and I took an Uber from the place where I was staying to to a bus terminal
where I from there and go to the airport.
And my very first Uber driver was a young Mexican man who was very enthusiastic about
Trump.
Yeah.
He said, yeah, I don't like to build the wall thing, but everything else right on.
You know, so what is my first.
It's real here in Chicago.
That's also the case.
And you do encounter them.
You know, the Uber drivers are essentially the proverbial taxi cab driver, right?
The cab driver.
And they are there.
There is a kind of certain like conservatism that you encounter with such people for sure.
But it's it's it's there.
It really is there.
I mean, the way that I like to joke about New York City is when people were still reading
paper newspapers, like not that long ago on New York City subways, you know, all the working
class people of color are reading the New York Post.
Yeah.
Supposedly this this right wing rag.
Right.
Yeah.
I lived in New York City from 2012 through 2016.
And yeah, I'm very familiar.
I was there during the Bloomberg years and very familiar with the different, you know,
New York media.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Very.
You know, we're waiting for with that.
He caught dead reading the New York Times.
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
So, you know, this is just a reality.
And you know, what do we make of it?
I mean, you know, one shouldn't like read too much into it.
And it is this kind of like, you know, projection object, you know, the working class and their
political sensibilities.
My sense is that, you know, it isn't it isn't what people might think either in a negative
or in a positive sense.
It will confound expectations.
And so won't fit.
It won't fit a kind of a hysteric paranoid narrative.
And it won't fit a kind of sentimental, you know, narrative on the left either.
Right.
Well.
If one is devoted to a paranoid narrative, facts will not stand in the way.
Well, there's that.
Now I know.
Well, this is the other thing that I've come to recognize, because, you know, I made my
sincere good faith effort to just open some little bit of space for thinking.
And I've just had to come to the sad conclusion that people see what they want to see, hear
what they want to hear, stand what they want to understand, believe what they want to believe.
And it's it's very difficult to get people to challenge their preferred, including their
preferred like negative view of things.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Oh, I can go on and on about that.
Hey, we have reached what is definitely the end of a one hour podcast segment.
You have another 20 minutes to hang out and talk about other issues.
Sure.
All right.
That was Chris Catrone and the additional 20 minutes that I asked for turned into 45.
And it won't be a great surprise to regular listeners that I wanted to talk about artificial
intelligence and in particular, the reaction of aspiring young artists to the diffusion
models, which generate very detailed images from text descriptions or prompts.
And it probably also won't be surprising to you to learn that when the topic turns to
artificial intelligence, I do most of the talking and Chris doesn't have a whole lot
to say on that topic, but he does return to the topics that he's more familiar and comfortable
with.
So if you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, well, you'll probably enjoy the content of
the next episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast, which if memory serves, will be episode number
459.
All right, well, normally here at the end of the podcast, I ramble on for a bit.
And the thing that's on my mind right now is the death of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the
Unabomber.
He extorted the New York Times and the Washington Post into running his manifesto in... what
year was that?
Was it 95, 96?
I think it was in 95 and then he got caught in 96.
I was in grad school at the time and I remember reading it and not being terribly impressed
and I'm pretty sure I didn't even get to the end of it.
And it wasn't until Wired magazine ran that famous, infamous, we'll just say well-known
editorial by Bill Joy called Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, in which he quotes the Unabomber
Manifesto extensively.
And at that time I went back and I did read the manifesto from beginning to end carefully
and it made quite the impression on me.
And that's largely what's been on my mind.
One thing that Ted Kaczynski argued, both in the manifesto and then in later writings
like in the book Anti-Tech Revolution, Why and How, which I have on the desk in front
of me, he argues that technological civilization is a self-propagating system and that over
time it will need fewer and fewer people.
And the people that are no longer necessary for the continued functioning of the self-propagating
system will be eliminated.
And that the people who are still useful to the system won't make much of a fuss.
First they came for the communists and I didn't object because I'm not a communist.
You know the litany, right?
Anyway, these are topics that I have been ruminating on in my YouTube videos.
And directing you just by voice to my YouTube channel is difficult because even if you type
in the exact name of my channel, YouTube won't show you my stuff.
But if you go to my Patreon, which is very easy to direct you to, patreon.com slash KMO,
I have links to various YouTube videos there, any one of which will get you to my YouTube
channel.
Alright, well that does bring us to the end of this episode of the KMO Show.
Thank you very much for listening.
I will talk to you again quite soon, particularly if you're a CWROM Vault subscriber.
But until you next hear my voice, please, stay well.