Episode 92 – Propaganda and the Vortex of Centrism with Esha Krishnaswamy

Macro N Cheese – Episode 92
Propaganda and the Vortex of Centrism with Esha Krishnaswamy

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[00:00:02.580] – Esha Krishnaswamy [intro/music]
If everyone goes and starts making connections with their neighbors to say, Hey, let’s have some beer and let’s actually know our neighbor’s name because they don’t want you to know your neighbor’s name, they want you to be alienated and think you’re all alone. And then you start hearing problems and you realize, Oh, he has problems paying for his health care premiums. So do I. Maybe it’s just not me. It’s everyone.

[00:00:22.980] – Esha Krishnaswamy [intro/music]
Do you know what the difference between a dictator and a democracy is? And I say this as a joke, but it’s more or less serious. A dictator is someone who won’t let U.S. oil companies drill oil in their country. A democracy is somebody who will.

[00:01:26.670] – 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.

[00:01:34.560] – Grumbine
All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today, I have Esha Krishnaswamy and I am so, so grateful to have her join me. I was looking into someone that I could pick up on to have a great conversation with to help me understand centrism. Centrism drives me crazy. It literally drives me crazy. It feels like milquetoast. It feels like one of those zweiback cookies that your children chew on for teething. And it really doesn’t have any flavor. It doesn’t really have anything.

And when we were talking offline, as I was preparing for the show, I realized that Esha is the perfect person to talk to this about because she has a historical perspective, which you’ll understand why in a moment. And she also has a great take in the modern sense of the word as to the here and now, what’s happening today.

So Esha is the co-host of “Historic.ly” podcast. You can check her out at historicly.substack.com. She also writes for Fair at fair.org. She is also very involved in MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory, and has presented her work at the MMT Conference in New York and the Moscow Academic Economic Conference. Pretty good stuff right there. And with that, let me welcome my guest. Esha, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:57.760] – Krishnaswamy
Thank you, Steve. It’s been a long time. I think the last time I saw you was at Stony Brook at the MMT conference.

[00:03:06.430] – Grumbine
Yes, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The conditions of our meeting then versus our conditions of meeting now are one of two different flavors of hope. I mean, I think we were all brimming with possibilities at Stony Brook. We thought we had this huge intersectional movement going on. We had Stephanie, who was leading the charge for Bernie Sanders. A great robust package.

And all of a sudden out of the blue, even after Bernie won all these primaries, suddenly he’s taken out of the mix! Where’d he go? And there’s Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and the rest of the establishment back-slapping each other that they quote, unquote hashtag “Stop Sanders” and you’re like, well, what did we lose to? What just happened

[00:03:52.600] – Krishnaswamy
Empire striking back.

[00:03:55.360] – Grumbine
The Empire Strikes Back. Indeed. Do me a favor, frame this for me, because the term centrism is thrown out a lot. We always talk about centrist this, centrist that, and establishment this and establishment that. There’s a historical context to centrism and it shows up all around the world in many different governments, in many different political circles and throughout the history of time. Talk to me about the essence of centrism.

[00:04:23.110] – Krishnaswamy
My favorite quote about centrism comes from this German socialist called August Bebel. He says that it is always the same old eternal struggle – on the one hand, you have the right, on the other hand you have the left, and in the middle we have the swamp. And so it’s the swamp in between.

[00:04:51.310] – Grumbine
So the swamp in between. And didn’t Trump say he was going to clean out the swamp? He was going to drain the swamp. [laughter]

[00:04:57.480] – Krishnaswamy
So he made it bigger and more swampy.

[00:05:00.880] – Grumbine
He filled it up with more swampy swampers [laughter] So with that in mind, one of the things you raised was the origins of centrism. I think that’s a good place to start.

[00:05:16.890] – Krishnaswamy
I would say I don’t know if it started with the socialist movement, but I remember reading something from E. Belfort Bax on liberalism versus socialism way back in 1890. And he talks about how under feudalism – I guess, feudalism – not everyone was a slave or a serf, some were guild member artisans, and they’d make their own craft and sell it. So liberalism is the advocacy of that group of craft makers.

So, for example, John Locke, one of the premier liberal philosophers or philosophers of liberalism, had a theory of government, which is: God gives you rights, and because God gives you rights, you have a right to property. He says that property happens when you mix your labor with a natural element. But then when you ask about inheritance, he’s like, that’s just stored labor.

And when you ask about income inequality, he’s like, well, he thinks your great-great-great-grandfather, can store his labor and give you like ten million dollars today where you do no labor. So it just shows you the logical disconnect in that. So in the 1500s or 1400s or 16, 1700s when there is the aristocracy, and then there was the level of guild makers, that was progressive to advocate for the guild makers because you wanted to weaken the aristocracy.

But a majority of the countries have gotten rid of our royals. And so now the people who are on the top don’t want any more change. And that is where you get liberalism, I guess.

[00:07:21.180] – Grumbine
OK, so in that context, in the United States today, as it stands, we have what would be called a conservative party, and we have what you would call a liberal party, conservatism and liberalism. How would you define centrism in that context?

[00:07:43.870] – Krishnaswamy
Well, the centrism is obviously what’s in between, as we mentioned, it’s not well defined because it’s the swamp in between. So now what we need to think about is each party’s role separately and then you triangulate. So with the Republican Party, if we’re using analogies, let’s say Tsarist Russia analogy, they would be the czar and his family and his cabinet. Right.

Their function is to be basically the czar. They also don’t mind having, like, a single czar, like a president. And it’s all about the czar, and the thing about the czar is that he’s not always stable. He’s had centuries of inbreeding, so he’s not always consistent. He can be embarrassing and he’s not always profitable. But if you’re in the inner league, you can do whatever you want.

But the Democratic Party, believe it or not, in czarist Russia, they had a very similar party called the Constitutional Democrats, or the Kadets. And what’s really funny is when you read about the Kadets. So here Lenin from 1906 explains the different kind of parties, we’ll put the link in the description box below. Let me read this and you’ll see that each party has a role.
“The Octobrists are a real class organization of landlords and big capitalists, the counter-revolutionary character of this section of the bourgeois is perfectly obvious. It stands on the side of the autocracy, although still haggling within it over the division of power, the Heydens, et cetera, sometimes even merge with the Kadets in opposition to the old authorities.
But this does not make even the most credulous people, who are taken in by all sorts of opposition, forget the real nature of the party. The Kadets, Constitutional Democrats, are the chief party of the second type. This party is not exclusively connected with any particular class in bourgeois society, but it is thoroughly bourgeois nonetheless.
Its ideal is a well-ordered bourgeois society purged of feudal survival and protected from the encroachments of the proletariat by institutions such as the upper chamber, a standing army, a non-elected bureaucracy, draconian press laws. The Kadets are a semi-landlord party. They want to ransom themselves from the revolution. They long for a deal with the old authorities.
They are afraid of independent revolutionary activity by the people. The more this party develops its public political activities, the more marked it becomes in its inconsistency and instability. That’s why the voices of short-sighted people, who are dazzled by momentary successes in favor of supporting the Kadets, will never find wide support among the working class.”

Interesting. Doesn’t that sound exactly like the Democrats to you?

[00:11:15.580] – Grumbine
Absolutely, and I guess that brings me to the question. It seems like – and I’m going to be crass in the way that I say this – it seems like the Democrats pretend as though they are a left political party while simultaneously blocking any movement to the left.

[00:11:35.580] – Krishnaswamy
Exactly. Their entire function is to convince you that there’s nothing more than the Democratic Party, and “we are the way.” But it’s like tomorrow never comes. They’ll say, I’ll do it tomorrow. They just want you, the peasant, to be happy with whatever crumbs they throw at you. And once in a while, they may throw a crumb or two. And so you’ll see this.

Yesterday I did myself the horror of looking through the Obama presidency to see when the judgeships were open and in his first year, when they had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a majority in the House, they had not even filled five of the hundred and six seats when they could have just packed the whole court till sundown. Because they are not fighters.

As Lenin said, “They longed for a deal with the old authorities here.” They just like having the deal with the czars and the business people, they are afraid of you, the people, and so they’re kind of stuck. So between being afraid of actual people power and I guess they feel stuck and powerless, maybe, I don’t know. And their entire grift is to convince you that if they had the power, they’d totally do it, but they actually don’t have the power – which is always a lie.

[00:13:12.490] – Grumbine
Yeah, every time we hear about, I don’t know how to explain it, every time we see the pitched battles and the staged protests, the catered sit-ins, you get this fake impression that they’re actually fighting for you.

And yet simultaneously, they seem to always come up on the losing end. I don’t know how it’s possible to be that inept, to always lose, to always never be able to push the ball over the finish line. Is it all a function of triangulation, is it all a function of a false war? What exactly is that?

[00:13:50.210] – Krishnaswamy
I would say that if we’re doing sports analogy, you have to kind of look at their team uniform really carefully to see which team they’re playing for. And if we’re doing war analogies, I would say they are the first step in which power can see.

So they are what people in power want you to think is an opposition. And the way they’re selected is such that they will always capitulate because what they’re really afraid of is the people, the revolution, those dirty peasants who are not educated and whatever.

And so, yes. If we’re doing sports analogies, let’s do soccer, because most people understand soccer. The Republicans are there to win the World Cup, the Democrats are there to qualify for the World Cup. We knew they’d not be that bad, but they’re not going to be sending their best team. So the first thing is that they spend a lot of time with their donors who are rich, and so they have to please their donors by being not too left, but woke enough that it won’t embarrass them.

So that means that they’re spending all this time like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. I love private insurance. I love war. Yes. I’d never be for peace.” So that’s what they’re saying in front of the donors, but things have gotten so bad that they’ve actually lost touch of what the voters believe. So they are always under the assumption that everyone’s like their donors, the far reactionary that they’re installing. And that’s why they, I don’t know, impute all these weird things to the white working class when you’re like actually most white working class did not vote for Trump.

Trump voters are far richer than the working class. And then they’re like, “uh… uh.” So, yeah, whenever you show them the statistics, it’s like “look at the income” and then they’re like, they’re not white people. Like, no, no, no. They separated the income level here, white working-class men… I’ve had this before. I can show you the charts like it was funny because this person was finding five excuses before she realized it’s not the white working… It’s you and your friends out there.

So they’ll never find support in the wide support among the working classes, we can tell. And what they do is they pre-compromise. So in Lenin’s time, the peasants and the workers wanted no czar. We want all power to the soviets, soviets were little worker councils, so that’s what their demands were. The czar’s demand is, “OK, peasants, you need to still be slaves and work on land and be serfs. I want to be czar.”

And the Kadet party compromise position was after lots and lots and lots of protests by the peasants and the serfs and all that, the czar finally had to capitulate a little bit. And so he said, “OK, let’s set up a constitutional monarchy where we have a parliament like a Duma. But I get to decide who votes and I get to decide how much their votes count, and I get to dissolve the Duma whenever I want to if I get upset.”

The Kadets were like, “yes!” and they were pretending that this farce, obviously, like, constitutional monarchy is BS, we all know that. If you have a monarchy, you’re not democratic, you’re not anything. And so the Kadets were there working with the czar on the Duma. And so instead of saying, “Let’s end this feudal handled, they were like, OK, we should transfer some property to the serf-peasants, but we can also compensate the feudal landlords.” And the peasants are like, “No, we worked on this land for thousands of years. This place is ours.”

And so this actually happened in 1906 and that was their compromise. And so they’ll always try to convince you of… That’s where it’s half the battle, well not even battle. It’s an entire psychological operation where things don’t at all work for you. For example, Barack Obama, it’s in the book Inside National Health Care by John McDonough, page 34, if you guys doubt me. On October 2nd of 2008, these insurance lobbyists and John McDonough and some people from the Barack Obama staff – remember, what month this election again, Steve?

[00:18:56.430] – Grumbine
That would be November.

[00:18:57.670] – Krishnaswamy
OK, so this was October of 2008, just so you guys remember this. They all met in a room and then he put a list of all the different health care systems and then they asked, who wants single-payer? Obviously, no one in this group – well, because this group is full of insurance lobbyists, pharma people. And then they’re like, OK, in that case, we’ll do something like Romneycare. And then they all were like, clapping. And that was it. And that was when single-payer was killed. One month before the supermajority election.

[00:19:30.340] – Grumbine
Wow. Oh, my God, that is like a gut punch.

[00:19:35.230] – Krishnaswamy
Yeah, so there were these nurses in 2009, I believe, who basically got dragged out of the Senate and arrested. It was just terrible.

[00:19:45.790] – Grumbine
That is so deeply depressing. Yes, I’m sitting here thinking to myself, “hope and change.” You think of the whole entire movement away from W as the economy is collapsing, as the world around you is knowing nothing but war, as we’re still getting the red scare, all the alerts, and you got guys in the airports, we’ve still got all this fear porn for terrorism.

In comes Obama and everybody’s thinking it’s going to change everything, and one month before he wins the nomination, campaigning as the lefty-ist of left and turns out nothing could have been further from the truth. This is horrible.

[00:20:34.510] – Krishnaswamy
Yes, he admitted that in a different time, he probably would have been a Reagan Republican.

[00:20:42.950] – Grumbine
Wow. Well, to be fair, there were a lot of Reagan Democrats during the Reagan era, this dynamic in the U.S. has been on display since Bacon’s Rebellion. Whenever you see the working class try to unite in any kind of struggle, they throw a wedge issue in there. And you watch as the quote unquote, “white supremacist/landowner group” consolidates power back and forth and it jumps back and forth.

You see the radical Republicans, who were the ones that helped free the slaves, ain’t the radical Republicans today trying to free anybody. And the flip side is the Democrats are still playing that role. They don’t have the Dixiecrats in there right now but as you see from the Democratic convention, they’ve begun bringing the Dixiecrats back over. Enter [Governor] John Kasich.

Every one of these people has started slipping back over. You’ve got a lot of the war ensemble voting for Biden. This is not to say by any stretch of the imagination that Trump is good, this is just to show the weird plurality as the landowners and the ownership class in this nation consolidates power once again. It’s amazing.

[00:22:00.140] – Krishnaswamy
Exactly, and if we’re using Russia analogies again, think of Trump as the czar. Everyone agrees he’s bad, he’s horrible, he’s terrible. Like there’s not a single person who would disagree with that. So it’s like you’re talking about everyone else but the czar.

So that’s kind of how I tell people. That way we don’t get people saying you’re whitewashing Trump. And it’s like, not quite. It’s just that his nature is not hidden because he’s so brazen and open about the barbarity, you just need to talk about him less, I guess.

[00:22:34.100] – Grumbine
I think what’s troubling – you play out the Medicare for All. Huge, huge support, popular support throughout the nation.

[00:22:41.470] – Krishnaswamy
Sixty nine percent and among normal people [laughter] it’s the average person. Of course, this is different. “Average person” is not average voter, and average voter is not average party member. But 69 percent of all Americans love Medicare for All.

[00:23:01.660] – Grumbine
Yep. I’m sure there are studies out there – and I don’t know what they are and I want to know – but I’m sure there are studies to show where populism lies and where the people want relief and where they want action. And then the actual lack of democracy on the other side of this.

[00:23:18.400] – Krishnaswamy
Oh, there was a Princeton study from about 10 maybe years ago. It could be longer. And they found that the Senate is actually negatively correlated with the will of the people. So negatively correlated means if the people want something more, the more the Senate becomes against it.

And if you’re rich, you get what you want one hundred percent of the time, and if you’re poor, you get it maybe zero to five percent, and that’s usually by accident. So they have determined that, statistically speaking, America is an oligarchy.

[00:23:57.940] – Grumbine
Oh it makes me enraged. So I’m not here to tell somebody how to vote, that’s in no way what I’m here to talk about. So let’s be clear. So if anybody hears this as one way or the other, my intention is not to influence your vote. Vote however you’re going to vote. But my intention is to simply shine a light on the day after the election is done.

The real work is never stopped. And you’re going to have this election that’s like a sedative. And in reality, nothing has changed. In fact, Joe Biden was kind enough to tell Wall Street nothing will fundamentally change when he gets in office. And I guess that’s kind of the point of centrism, if what I’m hearing you say is correct, is nothing will fundamentally change.

[00:24:43.490] – Krishnaswamy
Yeah, but they’re like a swamp. They’re flowy, liquidy… they can dazzle you because they’re not easy to grasp or figure out. But what it always boils down to is that if you’re in power, you’re not going to give people the tools to destroy you, will you? And so what it is, is that they are trying to convince you that their electoral system, whatever it is, it is possible for you to win using their system.

And the only reason you’re not winning is because you are not racing hard enough. But you are. The problem is that their starting line is at one hundred feet and yours is at twenty-six miles. You’re running a marathon and they’re running a sprint.

[00:25:36.900] – Grumbine
Right.

[00:25:37.410] – Krishnaswamy
And so electoralism… One of the features of centrism is like putting a lot of propaganda out there to make the only way of citizen participation be that election and to make you think that there’s nothing other than the election and make you forget all about what really gave us rights.

Weekends, we did not vote for a weekend, but workers striked until they got a weekend.
Direct action. The sick leave, workers strike. In fact, even the civil rights amendment is based on a lot of strikes amongst workers. So if you look at it, all these… There have been so many democratic changes to the nature of the system, but zero percent of them have been through electoralism.

[00:26:37.140] – Grumbine
Right. You bring up a great point because, you think about this, the EPA. The EPA came into existence when?

[00:26:43.900] – Krishnaswamy
Richard Nixon.

[00:26:43.900] – Grumbine
Under Richard Nixon. And let’s be fair, Richard Nixon was not what we’ll call the environmental president. And he did it under duress. And quite frankly, it was kind of like a, “Hey, get away from me. Here, have this thing.”

And I look at something like that and I say to myself, I don’t want to get swept up in electoral politics. It’s clear that movements are what moves any chance of any kind of relief for the people. At least that’s my perspective. But centrism, just to put it in perspective, you see the quote, unquote “pussy hat march.”

[00:27:22.070] – Krishnaswamy
That was in 2016?

[00:27:25.740] – Grumbine
Yes. You see them co-opt the concept of progressivism and fighting back and so forth. And what you get with these things is literally where movements die. They get co-opted, they get simmered down, they get placated, and then they get pushed aside.

And then the anger eventually builds back up and then they find a wedge issue, they slice it in half, they water it down, they co-opt it, and then they push it aside. At least this has been my view. Does this sound like the way centrism works or am I missing a key element there?

No, you just have to remember who they are functioned… Each society has people to do a different function. So you have the people who are brainwashing you and then they’re not going to be the same people as like the Blackshirts who come and beat you up.

So it’s that you just have to recognize the difference between the person who speaks nicely and brainwashes you versus the Blackshirt with the big stick. But they’re working in tandem because they’re both serving the same function of holding up the hierarchy the way it is.

[00:28:42.870] – Grumbine
Interesting. What makes us keep falling into this?

[00:28:47.270] – Krishnaswamy
Well, I think this is particularly an American problem. I have no idea how it happened or why it happened, but when I read newspapers from the 1930s to like – the 1920s and 30s, 50s, and 60s – you see, like people are aware of this thing called class and that you realize that there is a group of society that will try to rule over the other group of society.

But then something happened in the 70s and 80s that I can’t explain. It just gets erased. All those newspapers got shut down, killed, whatever. And you are seen as instead of a class, as an individual. And whatever happens, it’s just your fault because you’re a weak character as opposed to “we set up the societal structure, which is inherently disadvantageous to you.” You see what I mean?

[00:29:49.160] – Grumbine
That’s neoliberalism, is it not? Neoliberalism, in a nutshell, is all about the individual. And if you don’t succeed it’s your own damn fault. Everything is your fault. If you don’t have good health care it’s because you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t try hard enough, you didn’t behave right. You didn’t do what you’re supposed to do. You’re one of those people over there. You’re in the out crowd.

[00:30:12.980] – Krishnaswamy
Exactly. But it’s not. Because they don’t want you to go outside and look at the floor plan to see that they’re on the first floor while you have to run up a hundred thousand stairs. [laughter] But that’s what you need to do. You need to go out and look at the floor plan and how it’s set up.

There was this one statistic from – I forgot which survey it was from – but they did a survey of Ivy Leagues, not percentage-wise, but in absolute numbers like one, two, three, four. They had more kids from the point one percent attend Ivy Leagues than the bottom 20 percent.

[00:30:52.410] – Grumbine
Wow, the people are… They’re the booge, the bougie.

[00:30:57.750] – Krishnaswamy
They’re the Rockefellers and the Bushes and whoever else.

[00:31:01.650] – Grumbine
Old money. Yeah, OK, yes, I was wondering why Ellen goes dancing with Bush, right? And Michelle Obama’s hugging up with Bush.

[00:31:13.440] – Krishnaswamy
Oh, yeah, this may be slightly inappropriate but I always think that Bush has a little bit of a crush on Michelle Obama, because if you look at him, he lights up and he gets, like, really giddy, like at his father’s funeral when he started like swinging her hands and dancing with her. [laughter] It was awkward. But I just think that.

[00:31:35.590] – Grumbine
It wouldn’t shock me.

[00:31:48.560] – Intermission
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[00:32:37.680] – Grumbine
But there’s definitely a club and that club exceeds any right or left politicians. They’re at the club and they are the moneyed class and they are the rulers of the world and they don’t want to see us change that positional authority. They don’t want us to have an equal stake in the game. There’s completely two separate economies, two separate worlds.

And there’s probably more than that, to be fair, but they are definitely in an elite world that doesn’t get impacted or affected by the laws or programs of the land. That is for the little people. And they live above and beyond anything the government provides. It’s quite amazing, actually.

And especially as someone that understands MMT and understands where money comes from, you understand that we the people, that’s our money, that’s public money. And they have co-opted that and they have taken that from us. They have gotten a giant vacuum cleaner out and siphoned GDP right into their back pocket.

[00:33:46.550] – Krishnaswamy
Giant sucking sound.

[00:33:48.350] – Grumbine
Yes, we beg for porridge while they sit there and eat caviar and filet mignon and we are hoping something drops down from the table so we can fill our bellies. That’s quite scary.

[00:34:01.970] – Krishnaswamy
Yeah, but I think in America there’s another layer where the propaganda is laid on so thick. To me, oftentimes it feels like an old movie, The Matrix – talking to somebody who’s in the Matrix when you’ve been disconnected from the Matrix. But that’s propaganda. It’s easy to understand and study. For example, if you are Jeff Bezos, who do you think is more evil, Bernie Sanders or Trump?

[00:34:36.320] – Grumbine
Definitely Bernie Sanders.

[00:34:38.540] – Krishnaswamy
Exactly. So Washington Post is going to be writing a lot of defamatory things. They had this time where they had 16 hit pieces on Bernie in 16 hours. [laughs]

[00:34:50.960] – Grumbine
Unreal. Yeah. Yeah, terrible.

[00:34:52.880] – Krishnaswamy
So you have to understand that these media companies are owned by five club members, and they’re not going to be seeing the world the same way you are. So you can’t rely on them for the truth, you can rely on them for a lot of information, but not the truth.

You can rely on figuring out what is worrying Jeff Bezos. You can rely on them to figure out what the next disaster may be because they probably caused it. But you can’t use them to figure out the truth because that is not their function. Their function is to give you the world view of the elite and hope that you think there is no other world view.

[00:35:43.150] – Grumbine
The TINA approach: “there is no alternative.”

[00:35:48.160] – Krishnaswamy
Aha. There’s lots of alternatives.

[00:35:49.780] – Grumbine
Yes, yes there are. Lay some of them out for me, talk to me about that. Let’s talk about some alternatives.

[00:35:56.910] – Krishnaswamy
OK, well, how about instead of some alternatives, I could lay out some previous historical events?

[00:36:03.240] – Grumbine
Absolutely. Let’s go for it.

[00:36:05.490] – Krishnaswamy
OK, so let’s go back to 1999 in Venezuela. Venezuela used to be owned by this one or two families who are always pro-US and were like, “Hey US oil companies, come and suck our gas and just make us rich and happy and we’ll be good.” But then the people were starving. And if you think things are bad in Venezuela now, oh my God, if you look at Venezuela under capitalism, it was like hell on earth.

People couldn’t go to school. Half the children had to work, like, drop out of like sixth or seventh grade. And so Hugo Chavez was… I guess he did a coup and then he got arrested and then people went out into the streets, protested so much that in 1995, all of the presidential candidates had to put in their platform that they were going to pardon Hugo Chavez, otherwise, like, they couldn’t even think about winning.

And then they pardoned Hugo Chavez. And then he ran the next election and he made a series of videos which I highly recommend. He talks about neoliberalism, globalism, colonialism. It’s really good. But he would actually just talk to the people – just with his loudspeakers sometimes if he didn’t get on radio or whatever – every morning. And he talked to them about all these issues, like what is socialism, why it’s better for you, what we can do.

And so in 1999, he ended up winning the election by an overwhelming majority. Like, it’s about as Democratic as you can get. So Venezuela and Bolivia in 2005, are two examples of where the people have been able to get to power electorally. And I would say so that is one option, but even with that, it could not have happened if it weren’t for … like two to three years beforehand, in Bolivia too, they privatized the water.

And so all these people in Cochabamba were coming out and protesting, protesting, protesting to stop Bechtel from stealing the water. And Evo Morales emerged as a leader of that. So in both those situations, it happened electorally, but it happened because there were natural leaders that emerged out of a working-class movement.

[00:38:36.840] – Grumbine
So let me ask you a question. Given the historical position with Venezuela today and you see the coup, and you see that the US, including Biden and Trump, both are supporting the puppet that they’ve tried to put into Venezuela. Is this more of the same? Is this just more of the same?

[00:38:57.990] – Krishnaswamy
Yeah, basically. Well, not entirely. OK, I don’t want to… OK, disclaimer: this has nothing to do with who you should vote for. I don’t have a recommendation. You guys decide who’s the best and I trust you, OK. So, now. Yes and no. It is more of the same in that yes, Biden… well, even a progressive senator like Chris Murphy tweeted out two months ago, we kind of did a coup in Venezuela.

So they have the same world view, which is the US should be like queen bee. And every other country in the world is like a worker bee who works for the queen. And that’s just not the world view that, would you agree – I hope there are Star Trek fans here who get this analogy – it’s like agreeing to be assimilated by a drone. No one’s going to do that willingly.

[00:39:58.640] – Grumbine
No. Agreed [laughs] Great reference.

[00:40:01.880] – Krishnaswamy
Boring. Yeah. And so it’s always going to be a conflict because people fight back. So, yes, Biden would… OK under the Obama administration they tried at least three coups in Venezuela, all of which failed. I think the difference is that Trump does it in a way that you’re hearing about it, maybe? I’m trying to figure out what happened, why we know about this one. Besides all the comedy.

And so, in the foreign policy realm, it does not make an ounce of difference. Like you might as well just get over that part, like, I guess. But in some domestic realms, it may make a difference. But since both of them have that fundamental “America first, America is the greatest” outlook, to them…

OK, do you know what the difference between a dictator and a democracy is? And I say this as a joke, but it’s more or less serious. A dictator is someone who won’t let US oil companies drill oil in their country and a democracy is somebody who will. [laughter]

[00:41:09.140] – Grumbine
That’s actually great. That’s like a knee slapper. But that’s exactly what they consider. That’s their definition.

[00:41:15.470] – Krishnaswamy
That’s their definition. Exactly. So then when they say Maduro is a dictator, you need to go look at the previous elections and you’ll see that the Carter Center praised it. It’s run better than our elections and he won overwhelmingly. And if you’re wondering why he won overwhelmingly, look at the alternative, Juan Guaidó, and then you’ll understand why he won overwhelmingly.

And in America, they do it two ways: if they don’t like a country and the leader is winning overwhelmingly, it’s because people are too afraid to vote and everyone’s voting “yes” because they’re too afraid. But if they don’t like the leader and he’s barely winning, it’s because he’s cheating. And then it becomes opposite when they like that leader, regardless of what he does.

So what you should do is the first statistics that I look at whenever they say, oh, this guy’s a dictator, I google life expectancy in this country and childhood literacy, because one, for me, I love kids. So I hear that kids are going to school and not working in sweatshops. So I’m going to be looking at childhood literacy because if kids are going to school, then childhood literacy is going up. And if kids are working in sweatshops, childhood literacy is going down.

And when you see it, like with Venezuela, it shot up a lot within two years. So you know that Hugo Chavez was doing something that caused a lot of parents to make their kids go to school and learn how to read. But it also means that in Venezuela, if you’re going to start a new company, it’s not easy because you’re going to be policed. It’s hard work. It’s a lot of bureaucracy.

So if you’re Jeff Bezos, Hugo Chavez is an annoying dictator who won’t let you do what you want. But if you’re that poor fisherman, he’s a great president because he’s letting you send your grandchildren to school for the first time in four generations.

[00:43:10.490] – Grumbine
Wow. That’s a great way of putting it. Oh, my goodness.

[00:43:14.210] – Krishnaswamy
But the problem is that the way they always make you try to put it is freedom versus dictator. It’s never that simple. Usually it’s something like, do I want to send my kids to school or make them work in a sweatshop?

Do I want clean water or do I want water that’s not clean? Usually that’s the choice that other countries have. And many people in America don’t get it because America has exploited so many countries that you, the American voter, does not have to think about that.

[00:43:45.890] – Grumbine
It’s funny because… I guess we should touch on the whole Russiagate, the Russia propaganda that the media put forward when Hillary Clinton didn’t win. Before she even got beat, so to speak, the whole Russian narrative – I think they spent 40,000 dollars on Facebook memes, and suddenly totally turned the United States on its head.

And I guess my question to you is it’s still sticking around today, if they really thought Russia had destroyed our democracy like that, you would think our war-mongering nation would have already gone to war. But that’s not what happened. This was largely a propaganda stream. You see the treatment of Julian Assange.

You see the treatment of anyone that exposes the inner secrets of these people. And quite frankly, it just screams deflection and schadenfreude. There’s nothing about it that even feels remotely real. Yet you had tons and tons of people calling regular people Macedonian trolls and Russian bots and Putin puppets, all in the name of covering up for a really poor candidate with a really poor platform and a really poor campaign, that she just felt entitled to the presidency.

And when it didn’t happen, the world melted down around them and you saw the outrage come in the form of this Russiagate. I’m curious, what are your thoughts on that?

[00:45:10.850] – Krishnaswamy
Well, I think I have two thoughts on that. The first thought is that before Russiagate, the main villains were, quote/unquote “terrorists.” And I guess more and more the American people started seeing through that. They were like, how’s that little man in the village in Afghanistan my enemy? He’s not.

And so I think the military-industrial complex needed a new, more formidable enemy in terms of Russia and now it’s China. That’s my theory. But I don’t have proof for my theory. But we do have Hillary Clinton and Robby Mook planning this like a few days before the leaks that say what they said.

And yes, it is entirely to stop introspection and any mistakes, like they don’t want you to analyze what went wrong because eventually you’ll know what went wrong. THEY went wrong and they were against the will of the people. And so Russiagate has been there to serve as both an explanation for their screw up and also as fodder.

And it’s also coming back. I remember one of the earliest iterations of Russiagate where they said, “Oh, Russia pushed Black Lives Matter.” And it’s like, “OK, it’s good that Russia is pushing it.” So their entire implication is that if Russia does something, it’s bad. And it’s like so far, according to the news, some people in Russia support Black Lives Matter, which seems reasonable. And a lot of them oppose fracking.

And they were trying to frame it as some sort of bad thing. And also, they do another thing where it’s the biggest country in the world. It’s like 11 time zones. So it’s not like Putin can control every inch of everything that happens, but they always blame Putin on everything in that country.

So you don’t see the nuances or even anything resembling something reasonable in regards to Russia. And I’m getting scared that they’re also adding China to the mix these days and that’s frightening.

[00:47:25.970] – Grumbine
Yeah, I mean, you go back, think about the Panama Papers, it exposed this huge network of oligarchs around the world and money movers and rich people in general and basically all the havens they created and all the really bad actors. And now you’ve got once again, there’s always something to obfuscate from what’s clearly right in front of your face.

To warp the mirror so you see something like it’s a funhouse. And I wonder, with the dangerous games that we’re playing… Remember when Hillary Clinton was clapping and laughing about the death of Muammar al-Gaddafi?

[00:48:08.540] – Krishnaswamy
Oh, God, that was horrific. Scary.

[00:48:10.280] – Grumbine
And I can hear her in my head cackling. “We came. We saw. He died.”

[00:48:16.440] – Krishnaswamy
The most frightening moments, like, I still get chills when I do that because it was so frightening.

[00:48:22.040] – Grumbine
But that was just passed over. Oh, you’re a misogynist because you don’t like a strong woman. What are we talking about here? We’re talking about the left hates war. The left doesn’t want to be an imperialist nation. We want to be a good neighbor in the world community.

[00:48:40.580] – Krishnaswamy
And we don’t want to bring slavery back to Africa, which is now, what the case is, that they’re trading slaves in Libya.

[00:48:48.940] – Grumbine
Let me ask you, given the fact that we have no media that would be considered mainstream today, that actually reaches into the chairs of every household in America, that every person sits down after their long day, their hour-long drive back and forth to the office, and they plop in a chair and they turn on the boob tube, the propaganda machine, and this stuff is pumped into them.

It feels like it doesn’t matter how many movements we stir up. There’s nothing as persistent, as well-funded, and well-connected as the media propaganda wing in this nation. It feels like no matter what we do, there’s always going to be a new Russiagate. There’s always going to be a new Iraq. There’s always going to be another atomic bomb in Iran. There’s always going to be something there.

And it hearkens back to 1984. We’re at war with East Asia, no, we’re at war with Eurasia. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston? No, it’s the number the party tells us how many fingers am holding. How do we get to truth? I know truth can be somewhat subjective and dependent on the eyes of the person reviewing it, but really how do we get to that?

[00:50:06.500] – Krishnaswamy
With each other is what I’d say. You can’t trust the boob tube, but you’ll probably trust your neighbor. And if everyone who’s listening to this show goes and starts making connections with their neighbors – just say, hey, let’s have some beer and let’s actually know our neighbors names because they don’t want you to know your neighbor’s name, they want you to be alienated and think you’re all alone.

And then you start sharing problems and you’ll realize, oh, he has problems paying his health care premiums. So do I. Maybe it’s just not me. It’s everyone. And so for people who are tuning into this show, you’re already a lot more politically conscious than your neighbors. So you can’t be stuck in yourself. We need you to go out and talk to your neighbors and bring them a little in. And if every one of us does that, eventually we’ll be able to have a movement.

And so when I was canvassing for Bernie Sanders, I knocked door-to-door in South Carolina and I spoke to so many people who had so little and I made a lot of connections. And now it’s hard with the COVID to do that, but once… I guess now we have to figure out a way to do it digitally. And also we have to figure out how to, once it’s back, we need to just keep on doing that kind of like one-on-one outreach, because that’s what we have – each other.

[00:51:33.110] – Grumbine
It’s great that you say that. One of the things that we always hear from people is the left has to organize, we’re always being told to organize, and then we’re being told that we’ve been outorganized by the right. And I look around and I’m like, how did they outorganize us? How did they outorganize us?

[00:51:51.560] – Krishnaswamy
They get money from the Koch brothers in terms of billions of dollars that we don’t? [laughs]

[00:51:58.520] – Grumbine
You’ve got that element. But then you said it also, that they start 100 feet from the finish line and we’re doing a full marathon. And the system is rigged in so many ways. It’s just unfathomable that so many millions of people organized for Bernie Sanders. Put everything they had, money, time, heart, soul. And we’re still denied without so much as a legitimate primary election.

The judges in Florida, when the Becks took the DNC to court, they fought tooth and nail that we have no responsibility whatsoever to give you a fair primary. We’re a private corporation, we can select who we want to be the representative of our private corporation. And yet we have this duopoly system where both of these parties can hand-select whoever they want.

And as you’ve stated, they’re not there for us. They’re there for capital. They’re there for that oligarchy to provide us a narrative that makes us feel like they’re fighting for us while simultaneously protecting the oligarchy. That’s a brutal eye-opener, isn’t it?

[00:53:09.780] – Krishnaswamy
Yeah. What we need is a Labor Party that many countries have. And this is why I suggest people read theory, because if you start any party – like Steve starts the Steve Grumbine Party – he’s not immune to the forces of capitalism and eventually his party will become exactly like the Democratic Party, like I’ve seen this happen in countries where the Green Party actually get elected and boom, they’re one of the neoliberals. [laughter]

[00:53:39.980] – Grumbine
Neoliberals on bicycles, right?

[00:53:41.840] – Krishnaswamy
Exactly. So for me, I like reading Lenin a lot, mostly because he’s hilarious and he always like insults everyone. If he were born today, he would be totally the worst Twitter troll ever. But he explains in one of… My favorite piece is “What is to Be Done?”

And there you learn how to build a workers party that does not get corrupted to the will of the money because the way you fund your workers party, he funded the party with having – back then they said 50 kopecks, which is like 50 cents, maybe – he had each of the workers put in 50 cents, and the party was only getting funded by that and not all these czars and stuff like that.

So that was very, very important. Only members fund the party. Another thing is that they would always ask for the most. So instead of, oh, let’s abolish the czar, they went to “all power to the soviets” because getting rid of the czar is a half-assed measure, all power to the workers! That’s 100 percent there. And so that was another tactic.

So that’s why if you read leftist theory, the main thing is that with leftism, you’re solving a puzzle on how to get political power. And this puzzle has never been solved for the US. It has been solved in other countries, maybe four or five times in history. Of all the history of mankind, maybe four or five times. A handful. It’s a hard problem.

[00:55:16.340] – Grumbine
Yes [laughs]

[00:55:16.340] – Krishnaswamy
David usually does not beat Goliath. The reason why the stories in the Bible is because he was unusual, right?

[00:55:26.090] – Grumbine
Yeah, this is really enlightening. So the power dynamic that we have in this country is largely an illusion. The idea that we can vote our way to saving ourselves from extinction. It’s largely an illusion, is it not?

[00:55:42.950] – Krishnaswamy
I would say so. I mean, I can’t think of any important thing that’s been done via voting.

[00:55:50.910] – Grumbine
Listen, Donald Trump is a really bad guy. He’s done a lot of horrible tweets and he’s definitely rolled back some important protections and he has enabled some really bad actors to rise up from the ashes and say some really bad things and do some really bad things. The flip-side to that is, is that nothing has fundamentally changed.

This is largely just kind of ginning up a lot of energy to an electoral process that doesn’t fix the core problem that created Trump. If you believe that Trump is a creature of neoliberalism to begin with, if you believe that the reason why he has support from quote/unquote “the working class,” which you debunked in the beginning of this, is because suddenly he’s going to take on neoliberalism… That fairy tale.

[00:56:40.550] – Krishnaswamy
No. What he has support from is people who are in the middle class, who he’s saying, “I’m going to protect you from those hordes of working-class people coming into your suburban middle America white picket fence.”

[00:56:57.070] – Grumbine
He basically said, I’m going to protect you guys from all this HUD crap in your communities. Don’t you worry, we’ll keep the poors out of your neck of the woods.

[00:57:07.600] – Krishnaswamy
OK why aren’t the Democrats playing this in every…? OK, we know why. I did not even know this.

[00:57:14.330] – Grumbine
I’ll send you the tweet-off line. It’s horrible. Yes.

[00:57:17.570] – Krishnaswamy
Oh, my God. Yes. And so that’s kind of what he’s appealing to. So it’s about a turnout game at this point. People who are comfortable with their life, they will want to protect it at any cost. So it’s not like you can convince them that you’re not so bad if you’re poor because it’s just something you can’t convince them of.

So it becomes a turnout game at this point. And whoever has a better turnout operation… And if they lose, it will be entirely Joe Biden’s fault because he clearly did not have a good turnout operation, which is an essential part of a campaign.

[00:57:54.470] – Grumbine
Yes, think about this, you had Bernie Sanders with Sanders Institute, you had all these incredible things popping up, people were really beginning to believe. And then when they yanked the carpet out from under our feet watching the people fall in line because “Orangeman bad” – instead of seeing what just happened to this most vital movement. It wasn’t about Bernie, it was us, it was us saying we need help.

[00:58:22.010] – Krishnaswamy
This was not the first time this has happened either. Actually quickly let’s talk about Henry Wallace. He was like the Bernie Sanders of his day in nineteen thirty-something. Well there’s also Huey Long but Henry Wallace, FDR had picked him as vice president for the first three terms. This fiery… He was very progressive.

And one thing I do know is he would never have nuked Japan. But the Democratic Convention did something that year, 1944, I think. And they forced FDR to pick Truman. He died and we got Truman, who did horrible things like nuking Japan. And that was the first time they yanked the rug from underneath the people. Eugene Debs.

[00:59:06.920] – Grumbine
Oh, Eugene Debs for sure. Yes.

[00:59:09.860] – Krishnaswamy
Jesse Jackson in ’88. Yes. He was very left in ’88. He’s mellowed over the years, but he was like Bernie. Bernie even endorsed him.

[00:59:20.520] – Grumbine
Yes, yes, he did.

[00:59:22.350] – Krishnaswamy
This is what they did. They told the Democrats that most voters are too racist. And if you ask most voters, they weren’t racist, it’s just that they convince Democratic voters that most voters were racist. So they tilted it to Dukakis, even though these voters preferred Jesse Jackson in order to stop the lesser evil of George W. Bush.

[00:59:44.360] – Grumbine
George Herbert Walker Bush.

[00:59:45.630] – Krishnaswamy
I’m sorry, I have my…

[00:59:47.460] – Grumbine
W was later. [laughter]

[00:59:48.720] – Krishnaswamy
Oh, God, yes, I’m sorry, Daddy Bush.

[00:59:52.130] – Grumbine
New World Order. Read my lips: no new taxes. [laughs]

[00:59:57.980] – Krishnaswamy
Yeah. That Bush. Sorry.

[01:00:00.350] – Grumbine
Not “mission accomplished” Bush. “No new taxes” Bush. [laughs] the big sucking sound of Ross Perot.

[01:00:07.160] – Krishnaswamy
We should have elected Ross Perot. He was talking about NAFTA and he was totally right. He brought this big chart and said, “This is the big sucking sound of your job going to Mexico.” I don’t understand why anyone would not have voted for Ross Perot. I’m not old enough to vote back then. But when I look at the old video, he was so adorable.

[01:00:27.290] – Grumbine
He had UFOs in his mind though. He was not all together there. But in fairness, though, I was a huge Ross Perot guy for about fifteen minutes. And then he flipped around and showed his true colors. He kind of went crazy, off to the side.

[01:00:41.450] – Krishnaswamy
Ah. Okay.

[01:00:42.440] – Grumbine
You look back at history and what you’re talking about here from Wallace, you had Eugene V. Debs, you’ve had many other…

[01:00:52.250] – Krishnaswamy
Oh, there was another guy in 1968 that they screwed over. Or was it in nineteen seventy two? Who was the guy in 1972? They still talk about him losing as a reason why…

[01:01:04.080] – Grumbine
He ran against Nixon, right?

[01:01:06.570] – Krishnaswamy
Mm hmm.

[01:01:07.560] – Grumbine
In 72.

[01:01:09.550] – Krishnaswamy
George McGovern.

[01:01:10.590] – Grumbine
George McGovern. That’s right. We had Hillary Clinton, the Goldwater girl, and yes. Poor George McGovern got crushed in a landslide.

[01:01:19.800] – Krishnaswamy
But that’s because the Democrats sabotaged him. I forgot how, but there were a million different ways.

[01:01:26.850] – Grumbine
It’s interesting, though, to see that every time this happens, we get beat. And each time we’re suckled back into the fold because we’re made to believe that there’s no alternative. And we’re made to believe that we’ve got to vote for the lesser evil because if we don’t vote for the lesser evil, the bigger evil is going to eat us all up for dinner. And it happens and the ratchet effect keeps going.

The Republicans pull further right. The Democrats take over their old territory and pretend like they’re Republicans, and then the Republicans become more radical and then the Democrats move to the right. And it happens every election cycle. I mean, Bill Clinton and the Third Way were absolutely horrific; from rewriting the welfare laws to repealing Glass-Steagall and doing all sorts of stuff that really set the stage for the mortgage crisis.

They were really instrumental in the liar’s loans and setting up everything that went into the housing collapse. The Clinton era really had a heavy hand play in pushing us over the finish line to really blowing this thing up. People oftentimes forget they benefited largely from the dotcom era that came in just at that right time and while simultaneously destroying more wealth.

I mean, the hockey stick of wealth inequality at that point in time was ridiculous. It was almost a line going straight up and down. It wasn’t even angled anymore. The wealth gap grew so tremendously under Clinton that I can’t believe we don’t talk about this more. It’s terrifying that our saviors are frequently the ones that destroy us.

[01:03:03.660] – Krishnaswamy
Well, yeah, and that’s the main thing, is that they have convinced most people that there’s no way of participation outside of electoralism and… We shouldn’t even be talking about elections that much. In fact, we should be talking about like let’s make sure that everyone in our town is unionized and think of unions as a training school.

And now they’ve made it harder to organize unions by making everyone work from home. And so you don’t get to see your colleagues to unionize with them. And so we have to think about direct action more and we have to think bigger. Everyone should write down what their ultimate plan is and then figure out how to get there. And it’s not through successive elections.

I don’t know how to get there, but there is a way, if we’re all creative enough, but it won’t be through like the elections because they’ll bear down. So the problem is having people think that there’s nothing other than an election to participate.

[01:04:07.040] – Grumbine
Right. Esha, I just want to thank you so much for the time that you spent with me today. Let me ask you, if you had to put a bow on this, what would be your message to our listeners in regards to not only electoral politics, but centrism as a whole?

[01:04:23.510] – Krishnaswamy
You’re not going to convince centrists of anything, so don’t waste your time arguing with them. They’ll always flow properly depending on wherever there’s a gap. So you are much better off with convincing people who are not politically awake, who are so busy, the person who has two jobs and works 13 hours a day, those are the people you can reach. And so just like, you know, you can’t argue with your racist uncle, you can’t argue with the centrist, you can’t reason them. You just have to convince people around them.

[01:05:01.500] – Grumbine
All right, but with that, I want to thank you so much for joining us. How can we find you? I know we talked about your podcast, your substack earlier. How can we find your work?

[01:05:09.660] – Krishnaswamy
Well, you can find me on Twitter at @eshaLegal. And that’s actually about it.

[01:05:18.810] – Grumbine
Well, I love your podcast as well. And that’s at the substack. Is that where you host it?

[01:05:23.640] – Krishnaswamy
Yep. And the podcast account is @historic_ly.

[01:05:31.020] – Grumbine
Very good. So with that, I want to thank you all. This is Steve Grumbine and Esha. Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here. Have a good day, everyone.

[01:05:39.270] – Krishnaswamy
Have a good day, Steve. Bye.

[01:05:47.900] – End credits
Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. 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.