Episode 233 – Managed Democracy and Inverted Totalitarianism in the USA with 1Dime

Macro N Cheese – Episode 233
Managed Democracy and Inverted Totalitarianism in the USA with 1Dime
July 15, 2023

[00:00:00] 1Dime [Intro/Music]: I consider the United States, in a sense, a totalitarian society. It’s able to just have a hegemony of capitalism that is totalizing. And it might not seem that way, because of the fact that we’re able to record this conversation, we have free speech. Yeah, it’s one thing to allow people to critique, it’s another thing to allow them to actually participate in political power.

There’s been many attempts, hundreds of attempts to change the constitution, which have all failed. And the last time we got a radical change in our constitution, a very radical change, it was actually the Civil War.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: Alright, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese and I am bringing back my good friend Tony, aka 1Dime, from 1Dime Radio. You can find him on YouTube and his podcast is really pretty awesome. He writes some great stuff, puts out some fantastic video content. On his main channel 1Dime does video essays as I said, mini-documentaries that involve the political economy, history, geopolitics and leftist theory. And various sociopolitical topics.

1Dime is also known most for his videos involving MMT and Marxian thought. Such as The Problem With Taxing the Rich, and Why Billionaires Prefer Democrats. His most recent video series was on the history of post-Soviet Russia and the Putin regime. Each video serves as both an educational analysis of a different topic and a unique artistic experiment. One that I happen to love. With that, Tony aka 1Dime, I’m just gonna call you Tony for this unless you’d prefer 1Dime, your choice, 1Dime or Tony.

[00:02:48] 1Dime: Tony is fine, but we’ll go with 1Dime just so people remember the channel.

[00:02:52] Grumbine: Okay, we’ll go with 1Dime. So with that in mind, the reason I brought 1Dime onto the show today is because I have grown quite frustrated with this almost childlike zeal to lionize the electoral process, and in particular corporate Democrats, and Democrats, and just vote for another progressive. Largely because there’s been zero evidence that they hear us and that the system is there to serve us.

And quite frankly, I think that it fails the smell test because I don’t believe we have a democracy in this country. I believe a lot of this is show and this is meant to keep us believing. The evidence is there for my belief. I can show more evidence that it’s a fraud, than most can show that it’s real.

And so 1Dime is a political scientist as well. He is going through grad school for Poli Sci, and is very deep into the philosophical wells that bring out a lot of really cool thoughts. So I figured, who better to talk to than my buddy? How you doing?

[00:04:04] 1Dime: Yeah I’m very happy to be back on, I definitely enjoy this podcast a lot. I think it’s good at bridging the gap between the more academic stuff and not dumbing things down at all, but also being quite approachable. And it’s just an entertaining podcast. I know people who are not very, quote unquote “advanced”, in terms of theory and history, but who listen to this podcast and have learned a ton.

And what I like most, I would say, is that it’s an MMT podcast that goes beyond MMT. Especially recently with regard to learning about revolutionary history and geopolitics. And I would say I come from a perspective that, as we discussed on the last podcast with you on MMT and Marxism, I support both. MMT, I subscribe to it, I’ve made multiple videos on it, which you could probably check out in the description, that’s how I got acquainted with Steve. But also, I’ve always thought that there’s a big void when it comes to MMT-ers particularly, and how they view politics. In the last podcast I talked about how the void is class-based.

There’s not a strong theory of class and power in Modern Monetary Theory. That’s its nature, it’s not a really political theory. It only talks particularly about monetary operations. And because of that, one can’t really have that by itself. But today I don’t want to just talk about class and all that, cuz that’s evident.

I think there’s something that even Marxists also missed, and that’s the question of democracy. Because I think why a lot of people who are more on the radical left are skeptical of MMT, because a lot of MMT-ers tend to just be Democrats. Or at best, Democratic Socialists. And I would call myself a democratic socialist, ideologically, but that means something very different to me than what I see is embodied today.

Because you alluded to this, about United States and democracy, because democratic socialism today really just means trying to achieve socialism through the supposed democratic institutions of the United States, or whatever given country. Now the issue is the United States is very different from a lot of countries.

And a whole bunch of theories I subscribe to, as to why I actually think the United States is a unique form of totalitarian state, and I don’t say that hyperbolically. It actually was a subject of a very long paper I’ve written, which maybe my audience will get to see soon, we’ll see. But with regard to that, I think that’s what we need to be talking about is, if we wanna talk about how to achieve what we want through the electoral process, we need to analyze that process itself.

A lot of people are very keenly aware that there’s a quote unquote “matrix”, that works for a few, and against the many. But it’s another question, as to understanding what that matrix is, how it works, because we can’t really combat it if we are believing the ideology that the “matrix”, aka the neoliberal capitalist order, sells to us. Which I think unfortunately, a lot of MMT-ers do, with the way they fetishize the electoral process and don’t consider the unique aspects, especially of the United States, which I think we’ll be talking about today.

[00:07:31] Grumbine: I find myself struggling to articulate a positive vision for all these great potential MMT proposals, when there’s no means and no mechanism by which to enact them, the idea that we can just simply vote our way there. Stephanie Kelton is famous for saying, we just need enough votes and then we can pass these great pieces of legislation.

And I harken back to when the Biden administration took over. There was Sarah Nelson, Derek Hamilton, Stephanie Kelton, on the Bernie Sanders, ‘let’s unite together’ team, and none of the things that we had championed with Bernie Sanders made it into the Biden administration. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t have some ideas that they tried to sprinkle through, but it felt very performative.

Not from the people doing it. I believe the people trying to do it did it in good faith, I just believe that the system itself is built on appearing to be a legitimate democracy, and yet nothing we’ve ever asked for, even when it polls at 80%, have I ever seen come to be. The only thing I’m seeing right now at all is a legalization effort, which I believe is largely because there’s a way to profit from it now, and they’ll control access to who can sell marijuana.

So I believe that to the extent that it enhances capitalism, or it enhances the capital order, then they’ll do it. But aside from that, I see absolutely no evidence of a democracy that serves the people. What are your thoughts?

[00:09:16] 1Dime: Yeah, so there’s a lot right there. So the idea that the United States is not a real democracy is, of course, not new at all, in terms of democracy being for the people. The founding fathers explicitly designed the system very much against that. James Madison feared the people, talked about the system of checks and balances is actually a safeguard against the tyranny of the majority. That’s in the Federalist Papers.

This is the framing of the US Constitution as we know it. And some things have obviously changed since then, but the large structures overall are pretty much the same, the way decisions get made, and the electoral process. Aside from universal suffrage, a lot of things have remained pretty much intact, and that is not particularly new.

Now, there’s a few different things I think that we should understand as to why the United States is a particular form of liberal democracy. I would say, so much that it’s not really liberal democracy, compared to a lot of countries. Because all Marxist theorists already know that capitalism and democracy are kind of oxymorons, because if you have wealth discrepancies, the rich will inevitably have disproportionate access to influencing the laws and the political process of that system, that’s well established.

But the United States is unique insofar as, it doesn’t have to compromise with its population by actually giving the people from the dominated classes, power. So that’s what I think is very unique. Let’s just consider a fact here. The United States, despite being on paper the most liberal country in the world: it has the most robust civil liberties, it has the most widespread access to gun ownership. And despite that, it has never seen a single radical change to disrupt the hegemonic order without the consent of people who run that order. That’s key, ‘without the consent.’

So people will obviously point to major changes like the Civil Rights Act, the New Deal. But the difference between those changes and let’s say radical changes in many European countries, like France and Germany and Spain, Portugal, there’s many examples. Of course there’s Nordic countries too. But in the United States, the major changes came from the top down. The Civil Rights Act wasn’t implemented by the black activists, it was implemented by an actual racist president, Lyndon B. Johnson. So you still got the change in response to the radical forces from below, but in none of the cases were those radical forces actually holding political power.

Same with the New Deal. It was implemented by a person who, in today’s terms, I believe would be a billionaire, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an extremely wealthy individual. It wasn’t implemented by a socialist party or even a social Democrat party coming to office through elections. It was implemented by the Democrats, who have no history, in the Democratic Party, of being a labor party. Even though they had a very controversial coalition with organized labor that was heavily depoliticized, the Democrats were not a labor party, they were not a social democratic party ever, on their foundation. There’s been efforts with the Bernie Sanders campaign obviously to change that, which haven’t really worked.

But America is unique, insofar as the dominated classes have only won concessions through radical resistances, but without holding power. So a difference between Germany, even when Germany was less democratic on paper than the United States, the social Democratic party shared power in parliament with Bismark, and even after that, and of course as the Weimar Republic, you have a huge change of power. You had a Democratic Socialist president in Sweden, Olof Palme, I forget how to pronounce his name, but he was elected to office and he had met a fatal end, but he was elected to office. You had Allende elected to office through a coalition of radical parties, and some less radical, in Chile.

You have these possibilities in different countries. In America, you don’t. Now, there’s many factors behind this. There’s all sorts of factors as to what is actually just dulled class consciousness in general. And there’s a really great intellectual, Mike Davis, who has written plenty about this. But it’s also due to the inherent structure of the system itself, which despite being very liberal in what it allows its citizens to do in the private sphere, aka civil society, it is extremely limiting in what it actually allows people to participate.

What do we mean by ‘political power’? You can say there are radicals who have held political power, like Jesse Jackson, the Rainbow Coalition, you have AOC and the squad. But I think of ‘political power’ as to mean anything for the dominated classes, it’s the ability of a social class to actualize its interests.

And what I mean by that is, the various factions of the capitalist class, what actually constitutes their power. It’s not so much holding office, per se, it’s the fact that they can realize their interests. And the government does that for them, whether or not they hold direct political power or not. So the United States is interesting because it’s been able to pacify its dominated classes, without actually conceding power to those classes.

And that’s why I consider it to be a very unique system. It hasn’t had to have this parliamentary system, where you have communists and socialist parties actually share power in parliament. And that’s the trick, when you compromise with radicals, it may actually pacify that system. That’s been the role, historically, of social democracy in pacifying communism.

The risk of that though, is by giving people more concessions, you actually increase their ability to mobilize. You actually empower them. That’s why there’s always been a tension in capitalism, between the more dictatorial fascistic forces and more liberals who wanna concede. But in America, it has the best of both worlds for the ruling class. Because it’s able to embody dictatorial power in crushing radical forces like the Black Panthers, and using its first airstrikes ever actually on a workers strike, interesting fact. While at the same time it’s able to concede, but without giving power to those classes. So that’s why I consider the United States, in a sense, a totalitarian society.

It’s totalitarian insofar as it’s able to accomplish the goal that a totalitarian society wants to accomplish, which is a totalizing preclusion of radical alternatives to the status quo. That’s what I mean by that. So it’s able to preclude all alternatives. It’s able to just have a hegemony of capitalism that is totalizing, and it might not seem that way because the fact that we’re able to record this conversation, we have free speech. Yeah. It’s one thing to allow people to critique, it’s another thing to allow them to actually participate in political power.

Russia, which has a democratic system on paper, no one would have a problem saying that Russia is not democratic. It’s essentially kind of a totalitarian society in a certain sense. A lot of people would say, yeah of course, as if the Communist party can win the election against Putin, yeah, right. Yet, and Americans will say things like, we can just vote socialism in. This democratic myth is far more pervasive, and I think the myth itself is one of the most entrenched sources of ideological control, because it affects the left wingers. If the left wingers believe that they’re using the very ideology of their adversary to combat their adversary, which is inevitably not gonna work, because they’re playing a game that is essentially in many ways rigged by that adversary.

And it’s not a matter of just opting out completely, it’s not a matter of not voting. It’s not so simple. But I think it’s worth acknowledging the total lack of democracy in the United States in order to actually, first of all, demand the democracy that is required for Democratic Socialism.

[00:17:34] Grumbine: Very powerful. As you’re talking, I’m thinking of you’re running through a maze and each time you come out, you end up at exactly the same spot. I feel like this is, ‘we gotta door knock, phone bank, donate’, we got all this energy, we saw all these people enthused, and something happens. Obama comes and says, ‘Bernie, sit down’, or Joe Biden, who’s been asleep for months on end in his basement trying to put words together, suddenly is tapped on the shoulder and says, ‘hey kid, you’re up next’, and then Bernie drops out again.

Every single time, it’s like Lucy pulling the football out from in front of you, but the idea of really working hard to get through the maze and then ending up at exactly the same spot. And people are so programmed to follow through on that rote exercise…

[00:18:31] 1Dime: Yeah.

[00:18:31] Grumbine: They can’t see any possibilities outside of it. What is it about the system, that allows so many millions of people to fall back in and wonder why nothing ever changes?

[00:18:44] 1Dime: So I think your description of it as a maze is a very appropriate analogy actually, because a system that is truly hegemonic allows for its own resistance. In fact, it actually produces its own resistance. This is the idea of controlled opposition, but it’s even better when it’s not actually controlled. It’s contained opposition, so that the people who are doing the opposition genuinely believe that they are fighting the system, and that they have a chance of subverting it, of really truly challenging it.

Because a system that is too totalizing, so this is the old school Totalitarianism, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, those systems give no illusion of democracy whatsoever. No one really believes that there’s actually a radical alternative to it. So despite that changes exist, so anyone who says something like, ‘oh, but, but you’re underestimating the fact that America has gone through many changes’, well, so has the Soviet Union, they had Kruschev, Stalin, etc., but it’s still, at the end of the day, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who has hegemony.

In Nazi Germany, you still have a totalizing hegemony. That’s not to compare fascism to communism, but I will say like the Stalin period was a totalitarian society, that’s well established in history. That doesn’t mean every communist state ever was totalitarian. Or like let’s say, North Korea today, the DPRK, there are actually other parties that exist and there are elections, but it’s totalizing in the sense that it’s the same party that has power. And nobody’s really gonna say it, ‘but they have different parties, why don’t you just try to beat Kim Jong Un in an election?’

The thing is, a real hegemony doesn’t have a totalizing control in its appearance. A real strong system is totalizing, in that it actually produces its own disorders, its own resistances, and where people voluntarily submit to it. So there’s ideological component that a lot of people genuinely believe in the American dream, they genuinely believe in capitalism, and that’s very entrenched in American history, just due to a lot of factors. Due to the fact that it’s ‘the land of opportunity’, the fact that compared to many other countries, it was very possible to make it as a wealthy farmer. Whereas in Europe, you’re usually screwed by a big landowner. It’s very deeply entrenched.

So there’s a lot of voluntary aspects to the submission, but it allows for resistance to a limited degree, so it’ll allow for resistance insofar as it doesn’t challenge political power. A good example of this is, let’s say Bernie Sanders and AOC, when AOC was first running, were smeared by their party and by the media. However, when you have a depoliticized resistance movement, like Black Lives Matter, especially after its more radical components were put down forcefully, the ruling elites have no problem actually accepting it, embracing it into its orbit.

So power is a relation. It’s not something that individual rulers hold over their people. It’s rather a relation that has degrees of domination. So if a ruler has to just eliminate the resistance, that’s usually a necessary last resort, that is only made necessary when there’s no obedience. So that’s a sign of a weak power. That’s not a sign of a strong power. The fact that East Berlin, for example, had to build a wall to keep people from leaving, suggest it had less power. Whereas the conventional way of viewing power, is that as power gets more centralized and it gets bigger, it corrupts.

This is a very classically Orwellian view of power, that unfortunately a lot of, even leftists, hold. And I just think it’s completely wrong, because the way, really, power works, it’s a relation. So power might actually allow people who are, in the subjugated side of the relation, to climb in the orbit of power.

For example, AOC, she can be in Congress, as long as she’s domesticated to the Democratic Party, as long as she doesn’t threaten the overall order. And she doesn’t really have power because she is not able to actually represent the interests, and actualize the interests of her working class oppressed constituency. She’s not able to actualize that, and she’s structurally not able. It’s not her individual selling out, which some clueless political commentators try to say. It’s not due to like, individual selling out/corrupting, it’s an institutional arrangement that is designed to work in this way.

[00:23:29] Grumbine: One day AOC is standing on Nancy Pelosi’s desk with the Sunrise Movement at her feet, making all these demands, and then when the time came to doing a Green New Deal, it was done. To me, that’s a very hard sell, that’s just the nature of the beast. I’m very interested in hearing you take me through that.

[00:23:54] 1Dime: I think I can see why. That’s not so much me trying to defend the squad, as it is more saying that we shouldn’t really be putting faith in politicians, who don’t have the structural power to do the things that we expect them to do. So there needs to be power won outside the state, that actually can make this happen.

And capitalism has enormous power outside of the state. For example, we know capital flight is a real thing, and this is a discussion that is an objection to MMT. If MMT policies were implemented, you’d have capitalists withhold their resources, or even shut down parts of the economy, hold the parts of the economy hostage, in response to that, and that’s possible.

However, the state could just steamroll them. But the state isn’t held, the majority of the state anyway it’s not a monolithic block, held by those dominated classes who can demand such things. The capitalist state will only domesticate capitalism insofar as it’s good for capitalism’s long-term interests, like Roosevelt. Roosevelt did a lot of things that capitalists didn’t like, but he did it for the long-term interest. Something like the Green New Deal, I can see a lukewarm version of it being implemented for capitalism’s long-term interests. However, that’s not gonna happen through a couple of individual politicians who don’t have that structural power, and I guess it’s worth getting into what liberal democracy and the United States’s relation to it, actually is.

[00:25:24] Grumbine: Okay,

[00:25:25] 1Dime: Unless you have brought another question regarding that, we could get into that. And that’s the question of managed democracy and inverted totalitarianism, which is a spectrum we can look at, of the way democracies are.

[00:25:48] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:26:40] Grumbine: I see a lot of people that do exactly what you said, take all their heart, all their hope, all their energy, all their money, and put it towards these politicians. And they get in there, only to have no power whatsoever. Assuming this is a real thing, and they could do it if they had the power. They have no power, at least visible power.

They do have a bully pulpit, whether it be on Instagram for a million followers, or Twitter or YouTube. There is an opportunity to convey messages, and yet those opportunities are frequently bypassed and lost. And I think to the degree that this charade holds up, people are losing faith even in the charade, based on the fact that they don’t use these tools.

Take for example, that the Democrats dropped Medicare For All, stopped talking about a Green New Deal, once Joe Biden took office, and there was a lame duck Congress where the Democrats had lost the house. Did the house members start talking about Medicare for all once again, completely out of power. When they had a supermajority, it was off the table. Now that there’s absolutely no threat to power whatsoever, they bring up Medicare For All.

It’s that sort of thing that baffles rank and file people, as well as myself. Is this part of this inverted, totalitarian state that you’re talking about, this power dynamic or lack thereof, or is this something else?

[00:28:16] 1Dime: That’s exactly what it’s part of. So we can look at all existing capitalist democracies. All existing democracies that exist today is managed democracies in one way or the other. Because democracy itself, rule by the people, kind of implies an indeterminacy, meaning that there’s no finality as to its form. And in theory it would change according to people’s demands and needs, but by its nature, democracy is always contained. It’s possibilities are regulated, and set within strict bounds and limits.

Now constitutions do this at the most elementary level. You could even argue some degree of management of democracy, is to some extent necessary, unless you’re more libertarian socialist, but there’s a spectrum.

So with capitalism’s development, capitalism itself is developed alongside the type of democracy we have today, liberal democracy, even though democracy is a much more ancient notion, and was far more radical actually, prior to the onset of liberalism, but that’s a different story.

So with capitalism it’s a very unstable system, and this is why Karl Marx is so famous for thinking that capitalism, even though it’s very brutal, it’s a very progressive system in a sense that it develops a lot of wealth. However, it actually will produce its own crises. It’ll produce a working class that will get more and more fed up, who will eventually subvert that system. Now capitalists were quite aware of this, and so were the politicians who oversaw such systems. And this is where you get the birth of administration, and the field of public relations, and various fields that aim to contain both the business world and the political fields. So you start to get the rationalization of everything.

With capitalism, we know this pretty well. In capitalism, what happens when you can’t get enough people to buy your goods, cuz you have overproduction? You get advertising, to cause people to desire things that they don’t otherwise normally need, and to also control needs in such a way that they’re subservient to that system.

At the level of politics, what happens is, as you get a wealthier society, you do get a portion of the society that might be more educated, that might have more technological possibilities of disseminating radical thoughts, and radical things that can challenge the order. So you need more and more ability to contain that system.

Now, the American system was managed very strictly, much more than many liberal democracies from the very get-go, through its separation of powers. I would recommend the book called We The Elites by Robert Ovets, and how the separation of powers was to prevent any situation in which, let’s say you do have a popular government, it’ll be put in check by, let’s say the undemocratically elected Supreme Court. Which, the Supreme Court, can literally prevent the constitution from changing. The Constitution was built by slave owners. There’s been a bunch of studies on this, there’s been many attempts, hundreds of attempts to change the Constitution, which have all failed.

And the last time we got a radical change in our constitution, a very radical change was actually the Civil War. Much of that progress got undone anyway, in a reconstruction period. So with capitalism, it’s a very chaotic system that requires an ever increasing management. This is why you have all of these think tanks who aim to manufacture consent, to regulate public opinion, to poll all the time, to see what people are thinking, to manipulate that. And you start to get more lobbying groups and all of this, to contain the process.

Now, the United States is managed to such an extent, and this is the argument of managed democracy, inverted totalitarianism. I forgot to mention who it comes from. It comes from a theorist named Sheldon Wolin, in his book of the same title called Democracy Incorporated. It’s quite famous for being popularized by Chris Hedges, who I don’t think really takes the book to its full conclusion, but that’s another story, but you can find talks of it on YouTube. But the idea of inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy, is that democracies are all managed to an extent. Once they’re managed to such an extent, that they preclude any radical possibilities of alternatives to the status quo, they become more and more akin to a totalitarian state, insofar as there’s a totalizing hegemony of one ideology.

There’s a reason why not all dictatorships are totalitarian. Like for example, in Franco’s Russia, there’s a great clip of Noam Chomsky talking about this. How in Franco’s Russia you could actually find anarchist bookshops and you could read like a lot of radical material, cause they didn’t care, cause they would send you to the torture chamber if you did anything, anyway. However, those systems are very unstable because while there’s no illusion of democracy, people will inevitably reach a boiling point where they’re fed up, and you have, in the case of Portugal, the Carnation Revolution which overthrew their dictatorship. There’s plenty of examples of this.

Now, a totalitarian system, in the classical sense, tries to fix this problem through just more control over civil society, tries to ban every sense of opposition. That is a failed model, as we’ve seen. There’s only a few totalitarian states that really exist today. In many respects, they’re less totalitarian, classically, than the old version. Because if you try to control everything, you don’t have an illusion of democracy, it’ll fail. So this is where you get a spectrum of inverted totalitarianism, unlike a system where there’s typically a revolutionary, almost quasi-revolutionary, change in the status quo.

Like let’s say Hitler and the Nazis overthrowing the Weimar Republic, or Mussolini having a completely new order. Inversion totalitarianism comes from liberal democracy’s inversion, it comes from liberal democracy itself. Rather than being a sudden zeitgeist political change in which one order has changed to another, it’s almost like a slow, invisible, gradual progression in which, what is already a heavily contained system that’s heavily managed, becomes more and more managed to preclude any possibilities of change.

People talk about campaign finance being the problem as to why “progressive” politicians can’t get elected. But that’s more of an effect of this rather than the cause, because let’s say, Citizens United, the court ruling in which now allows corporations to pretty much give unlimited donations to candidates. That’s just the most recent evolution of a system which precludes all possibility for radical change.

Now America was always quite contained, quite a very sophisticated managed democracy. And the New Deal, which was an attempt to compromise with the unions, and some of which were more radical and less radical than others, I think was less radical compared to that of Europe, it was able to compromise without giving the working class political power in large, significant amounts. This form of compromise still allowed people some possibilities of change, compared to the system we do now. You can take it from no one other than Hayek himself.

Hayek’s big fear with welfare capitalism was that if you gave people too many things like affordable healthcare, affordable housing, a job guarantee, or just in general gave into demands of unions, what would happen is those unions would feel empowered and demand more, and demand more, then you get socialism. That was his fear. I think his fear was far too great, when it comes to America, but he had a certain point and that’s what the neoliberals that later came around feared, in precisely what they did in their counter-revolution.

Neoliberalism, rather than being a completely unique system, it’s rather just an evolution in this managed democracy towards an inverted totalitarianism. Sheldon Wolin documents this very clearly in his book, and his student Wendy Brown, talks about this as well in her work. This is the key thing though, what did neoliberalism do? Neoliberalism saw that as people were getting wealthier in society, they had a greater ability to protest. It’s not a coincidence as to why the peak of protests was around the 1960s, and this was around the time the economy was peaking, right before you start having stagflation. And you have a lot of protests, much of them were heavily co-opted, not as radical as they could be, but there was great amounts of protests. The specter of radical change was far greater than it was in the preceding decades.

[00:36:58] Grumbine: LSD was legal. You had the Timothy Leary mind expansion going on at that time. There was a lot of things that shut down that whole era.

[00:37:08] 1Dime: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:09] Grumbine: Stifled the brain power of a country. I wanna inject something though before you get off of this. I was talking to Michael Hudson, and you guys can catch it in this most recent Macro N Cheese podcast, one of the things that he brought up that was very intriguing, that the difference between Europe and the United States is that Europe actually had grown up through feudalism,

[00:37:32] 1Dime: Yes,

[00:37:33] Grumbine: whereas the United States never experienced that, it walked right in the door with this system. They had nothing to base it on. So when you see France rising up and you say, why can’t we be like that? Well, France has a different framework, they had a different history, they understood. And so the rank and file people have heard those stories their whole lives, and in the US it’s totally different. We’re still celebrating a bourgeois revolution that had nothing to do with freeing the people. We just celebrated the 4th of July here the other day, in celebration of freedom from England, when reality was, it just meant the rich people that come to the US, weren’t paying tithes to the crown. It wasn’t much of a revolution at all, yet we celebrate that freedom for the rich people. I’m curious what your thoughts are.

[00:38:24] 1Dime: I’m very glad you brought that up, cuz when I mentioned the historical factors as to why this American system is the way it is, that was one of the things I was alluding to. Mike Davis illustrates this very clearly in his book, Prisoners of the American Dream.

So the American system is very unique, because unlike Europe, in Europe, the democratic revolutions involve the coalition between the working class, the peasantry, and the more radical sides of the bourgeoisie. Because a lot of the sides of the bourgeoisie, actually sided with feudalism, and the big landowners, the aristocrats. So democratic revolution in European countries, such as France and Germany especially, took on a much more proletarian character. And because of that, there was much more of a proletarian history of a working class organization.

And it was also this feeling that the Democratic revolution wasn’t finished. It was this gradual process brought forth by these fugitive radical working class forces. And because there was these vestiges of feudalism, there’s also a reason to not believe in a lot of the mythology of capitalism, as much anyway.

For example, you still had these big landowners, these vestiges of feudalism who own so much of the land, you couldn’t really make it as a farmer in France, like you could in America. In America, if you were white and a man, you could make a decent living for yourself, if you had the right circumstances. It was a much more realistic illusion to believe, compared to Europe, where if you were a peasant, all your work was going to profit that landlord. So there was much less illusions, so the Democratic Revolution, there was always a sense it was never finished.

Now the Democratic Revolution in America was brought forth by the bourgeois class themselves, and they were able to dominate that revolution ideologically and politically. Ideologically, in the sense that they were able to frame their opposition to British liberalism. This is worth keeping in mind, liberalism as an ideology, came across before this association with democracy. Liberalism, originally with the Magna Carta and the British glorious revolution, was not democratic. It was feudal lords and aristocrats rebelling against the crown.

And in America, you had a similar thing, with the slave owners in the colonies rebelling against the British crown, due to high taxes and various factors. However, once they had this revolution, they were left with a system that was removed of its feudal vestiges. So you had a system which had to be framed in a Democratic way, because how do you deal with this new population and all these contradictions. They had to frame it in a democratic way while containing it, and that’s where you get the creation of the US Constitution.

And I mentioned the illusions, but the big thing is, is that democracy was literally created in the system, by the bourgeoisie themselves. They were able to set the terms of what we even think is democracy. And there was less opposition to the bourgeoisie, because of the factors I mentioned regarding land, the vestiges of feudalism. But because they weren’t divided with the feudal classes, they didn’t have to make these alliances with the working classes as much. It was actually the opposite.

In America, the dominated classes were much more divided by slaves, white men, and by farmers and working class people. Cuz farmers almost represented a different class of their own, cuz they could do quite well in America. Farmers weren’t these peasants by any means, they were quite well off, comparatively speaking.

So, in America you get this idea of liberal democracy for the first time getting put into action. It’s not the first liberalism, but it’s the first liberal democracy, really. And you get this idea of a separation of a civil society too in capitalism from politics.

Most of the domination that occurs in society occurs in the private sphere, in the workplace. In capitalism, it’s not feudal lords exploiting you with their political power, it’s your capitalist boss, it’s the compulsions of the market. So then it was very easy to create a conception of democracy that was not democratic, because most of the oppression that occurs is in the private sphere, and they’re able to create a system which favors those people on the top of the system, without it being super explicit.

So the illusion of the system is built into it. That’s what I would say is the biggest factor, when it comes to why in America its system from its very start, it was birthed by and for the bourgeoisie with less compromises, compared to, in European countries like France and Germany. So the illusion is built in.

[00:43:07] Grumbine: I have to make a correction. I was giving Michael Hudson credit for it, and he said a lot of cool things, but I owe it to Friedrich Engels. Who in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, where he broke down the differences between France, where they had come from feudalism. Where the US started off from scratch.

[00:43:28] 1Dime: Well, Marx and Engels interestingly were actually, I think, far too enthusiastic about American democracy. That’s the irony. They didn’t have a lot of research on America, cuz at the time they didn’t have as much information as we do now. And because there was these feudal vestiges America looked quite progressive, and they had this, I think, quite flawed progressive view of history that viewed things as if it was necessarily more liberal, it was necessarily better. So the point after the Civil War, Marx believed America actually had possibilities for socialism, and he’s famous for praising Abraham Lincoln. And it’s one thing to say that, however, what all this misses is that because the Democratic revolution occurred so early in America, and through really its terms being set entirely by the hegemonic capitalist property owning class. That idea of democracy was built by and for them, without compromises to those dominated classes, who could eventually use such democracy in theory, to actualize their interests.

That just doesn’t exist in the same way. Granted though, with capitalism, it produces its own resistance. You get some of the most militant labor movements ever in America, you do get resistance, it’s not a country with docile people. It has civil liberties in which people are able to mobilize, which conveniently are always taken away whenever those resistances manifest into alternate political ideology. IE I’m talking about Woodrow Wilson and the Red Scare, basically banning free speech to deport communists; in McCarthyism, countless examples.

Civil liberties are always super fragile when it comes to the majority of the population. So the thing is though you have this effort that I allude to later, the compromise, the postwar compromise, which occurred in all sorts of countries. In Europe too. Where the ruling classes had a compromise with the dominant classes, vis-a-vis the state. Except in America with The New Deal, in contrast to social democracy in the likes of, let’s say, Finland, Denmark, Norway.

Finland was before World War II, it was actually by the white government, who was very reactionary in response to the Finnish revolution, that’s another thing. But you get an election of a lot of radical parties. Even in Britain, it’s not a socialist party, but you do get a Labour party, under a Clement Atley elected.

And the contrast, the Democrats, not a labor party. They have a compromise with labor, but one in which labor doesn’t actually hold political power through representation. And some of the few radical figures that were in the Democratic Party, such as Henry Wallace, who was the first vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had some socialist not communist sympathies. He was conveniently purged in a rigged campaign to choose a vice president against Harry Truman, in the Democratic National Convention. You can find an episode on this on Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States.

So the thing is though, this still gave some level of empowerment to the working classes. They got a larger size of the economic pie. The fact that there were unions, even though they were domesticated and depoliticized, and couldn’t really manifest into something other than the hegemonic ideology. This is what McCarthyism did, this is what all sort of legislations did, to domesticate labor while still allowing it. The fact that there even was labor unions, people had more wealth and more free time to actually organize, and it culminates right in the 1960s.

So you get this neoliberal hyper-reactionary effort under, really kind of starts partially, socially speaking, with Nixon. Which is more of a reaction against black power, but then against organized labor as a whole. Obviously we know this culminates with Reagan and Thatcherism in England. And this is the real death blow to the demos, that I would say solidifies inverted totalitarianism. Cuz now, not only do you not have challenges to the hegemonic ideology, but it’s even very difficult in theory, to challenge the hegemonic ideology, due to the precarity of the working class.

People simply don’t have time, they don’t have the ability to even really be citizens. And without a citizen, how do you organize politically? So it’s a lot more than just neoliberal ideas, where they genuinely believe in cutting government spending. It’s not like they’re stupid. This is an anti-democratic effort to quash any slight remnants of the possibilities of resistance that exists.

And you could say that there’s still ongoing efforts, always, to do this. Whether it be the Koch brothers still trying to modify the US Constitution in ways that further solidify their hegemony. Or whether it be the police repressions against the protests that do exist, or the more friendly powers, the co-option of progressive elements into the government.

There’s many aspects of resistance. Like I said earlier in the pod, a system that is strong allows its own resistance, which are made totally compatible with the system. It’s easy to subsume large components of, let’s say the LGBTQ community, and feminism, and even Black Lives Matter into the system, while maybe precluding the more radical, if they even still exist, components. And that’s the ongoing effort of identity politics, as always a way to divide and conquer these systems.

Fundamentally, a capitalist state’s role is to organize the dominant classes, who are never always divided, there’s the different factions who don’t always agree. We’re seeing a literal fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, as we speak, it’s a spectacle, there are divides.

The state organizes the dominant classes while disorganizing the dominated classes, and to the degree in which it completely eliminates or precludes, through soft power and/or hard power, usually through soft power, those resistance forces that could pose alternatives to the hegemonic ideology. It is an inverted totalitarian system.

And that’s why America is uniquely undemocratic compared to the likes of France, which at the very least has a democratic socialist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in theory, can get power. If he gets elected, there’s a lot he can do with his power. Jeremy Corbyn, the processes of managed democracy that managed the elections heavily through outside manipulation, were able to easily defeat him. However, if Corbyn, in theory, achieved power, if he had the support behind him, he could implement a lot of policies.

Now in America, even if Bernie Sanders was magically elected through the Democratic Party, which is not a labor party to begin with, so that’s already a difficult question. Even if he was elected through the Democratic party, you have all of these hegemonic forces that he would be against. The Supreme Court, Congress and the Senate. Which the Senate, by the way, was designed to be a quasi-democratic aristocracy, and that’s in the words of Madison himself.

So in the United States, people shouldn’t be asking: why is Joe Manchin voting against Biden’s Build Back Better, it’s Joe Manchin’s fault? They should be asking: how does a senator have the ability to stop an entire agenda that a lot of people support from being implemented? It’s at the point where the American system is almost so hegemonic, so approaching this inverted totalitarianism, that it’s almost undermining the system’s own ability to adapt to the economic system in which it oversees, capitalism. Because arguably, the capitalist system needs some level of adaptation to keep it going. Maybe it actually needs the Green New Deal to have a better capitalism.

The irony is, the American system is so undemocratic, that perhaps it could undermine itself through that very hegemony, in which it exerts over its dominated classes. So I guess that’s the thing I will conclude on there is, this is not to push for any kind of accelerationism or anything like that, but that is to say, it is a hegemonic system with a totalizing control in its preclusion of alternatives. However, it’s not a system in which it’s unshakable, it could undermine itself. Often throughout history, the most hegemonic empires have been undermined, not through one great revolution, but through a variety of forces that made their way through the system, undoing and undermining itself. IE the Roman Empire.

[00:52:08] Grumbine: Wow. Given that you made the quite explicit statement that you’re not advancing accelerationism, and yet what you’ve also said is, it’s an incredibly hegemonic, undemocratic process. In other words, not only do we really have very little, if any, ability to influence and have agency in the system, even the people that are elected in this theater, don’t have power either, because of the structure of the framework. The actual models, the system itself, precludes them from having any real power.

So in the absence of revolution, how does anything happen, or is this just, ‘live with it.’? It feels very Boolean, it doesn’t feel like there’s a million options. You’re either going to fight and resist and do something, which feels futile as well, when you look at the military and all the other gods of industry, or you just sleepwalk through this.

It feels very either/or, I don’t feel like there is a soft middle in there. Help me out.

[00:53:26] 1Dime: I think this goes back down to the classic idea of dual power, which is, you do need to establish power within the state, but outside of the state too. So outside of the state is what we might call, more like, revolutionary actions. That is not to say aimless protests, right? Build organizations that are able to reach out to working class people, and it means media institutions, that means labor unions that are not depoliticized. Unionization is always a good thing, it’s important. It should not be plagued by a trade union consciousness, as Lenin called it.

[00:54:02] Grumbine: Class struggle unionism.

[00:54:04] 1Dime: Right, exactly. When it comes to the state though, I don’t think it’s simply, we should just be participating with the false hopes of changing things through electing certain representatives. I see the sole purpose of electoralism is to popularize ideas. What I hoped with the Bernie Sanders campaign, and I think he did accomplish this to a certain degree, especially in the first time he ran, is that he popularized the idea of Democratic Socialism. Think about all the people now in America, even in Canada, this had a ripple effect in the Western world, a lot of people are now less close-minded to what was before a very taboo idea, and that is socialism.

So there’s some level of that too. But when it comes to electoralism, if we want to have any kind of democratic socialism, socialism through the Democratic institutions, well we need to demand a democratic revolution. There’s many things people can mean by that. One of those things is a democratic revolution, first. It’s one thing to say, oh be gone with the system entirely, revolution. I’m sympathetic to the Marxists who call for that. However, I think without envisioning what comes after that, I’m quite skeptical. I think in terms of what we can demand now.

There’s a lot of demands just off the bat that can constitute a democratic revolution in the United States, that I think are necessary if you even wanna think about an electoral road to socialism. A set of demands that includes abolishing the Supreme Court, first of all. Nothing can get done without abolishing the Supreme Court. Even if you had Medicare For All, it would likely get struck down by the Supreme Court, on the grounds of infringing private property rights of those private companies. I would say also, another big thing would be to abolish the Senate. Now, that’s a controversial one because the Senate has very undemocratic roots as well. It’s not the only undemocratic institution the United States has, so that would be a key thing too. Also replacing the electoral college with, at the very least, a mixed member proportional representation system, like you do have in Germany, for example.

Now these are not the ideal forms of democracy. I’m not a liberal in this sense, but with those systems, they actually allow, in theory, for a democratic road to socialism. America doesn’t even have that possibility in theory right now, which is why I think we can’t even think about something like democratic socialism, without at least having those base conditions.

That’s what I would say should be priorities I think, for now.

[00:56:38] Grumbine: Fair enough. Mr. 1Dime, tell us where we can find more of your work. Give everybody a rundown of where we can find your stuff.

[00:56:46] 1Dime: Yeah, so I run the YouTube channel, which is a video essay and a mini-documentary channel called 1Dime, it’s spelled one d i m e. You could probably find it in the description of this podcast, in which I do video essays on a variety of topics, that you already mentioned.

I would say, pertaining to this podcast, the one I would recommend is one called Why Billionaires Prefer Democrats. That’s one of my older ones, but it’s basically on a class theory of the capital estate. I titled it Why Billionaires Prefer Democrats, because it would get the clicks of liberals and conservatives. Because obviously billionaires don’t really prefer Democrats, even though some do, but they usually just support both parties.

So I’d recommend that video. I also run 1Dime Radio podcast, if you’re more of a podcast listener. And the episode I’d recommend with regard to that, might be The Dark History of Liberalism, that kind of pertains to this conversation as well. But I have a lot of stuff, which I think, if you like Macro N Cheese, you definitely like content I do. So you could find that all in the description.

[00:57:49] Grumbine: Fantastic. Tony, 1Dime, I appreciate you as a friend. I appreciate you taking your time with me and being flexible. I know you weren’t feeling great, so thank you for joining me on this show. I hope to have you back again real soon.

[00:58:05] 1Dime: Yeah, for sure. I’m very happy to be on here, and also a fan of this pod as well, as I would consider you a good friend in this space as well. So, happy to be here and I hope the audience enjoyed.

[00:58:17] Grumbine: Absolutely. Alright, I’m Steve the host, this is my guest Tony 1Dime. This is the podcast Macro N Cheese. We are outta here.

[00:58:32] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy. Descriptive Writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.