Episode 94 – Political Sobriety with Rohan Grey

Macro N Cheese – Episode 94
Political Sobriety with Rohan Grey
November 14, 2020

 

[00:00:03.900] – Rohan Grey [intro/music]

If people were thinking that they were going to vote for Bernie Sanders once in February and then once in November and then their better world was going to happen, then they had the rug pulled out from them and now they’re feeling like they got no hope. I don’t mean to be unsympathetic to that feeling, but that wasn’t the way we were ever going to win anyway. If you actually want everyone to vote, pass a law requiring everyone to vote. Watch how many Democrats will run away from that if you propose it. It’s a significant number of the same ones talking about how important it is to save democracy.

[00:01:26.700] – 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.

[00:01:34.530] – Steve Grumbine

All right. And this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. I have Rohan Grey joining me again for part two of our interview. We’re going to talk a little bit about politics here and the framework in which a lot of these great ideas that we’ve been advancing. You’ve seen guest after guest with Rohan leading the charge with so many great bills they put forward.

But we’ve watched the political climate and we’ve watched as progressives have worked tooth and nail with various groups to create this intersectional movement, only to see the establishment collapse and retrench and block us. The concept of a fair primary seems ludicrous to even make that statement at this point, given Bernie was head and shoulders above everyone. Everybody was for Bernie. The rallies were huge. The people who were in the streets were invigorated. They were ready to go.

And then all of a sudden Super Tuesday comes and you watch one by one as the establishment actors dropped out and fell behind Biden. You had Obama step in, and you had Clyburn step in, and you had Bill Clinton step in. You had all the establishment actors retrench around the very conservative Joe Biden.

And I guess my question to you, Rohan, as we get started with this is what can progressives do? It doesn’t appear that electoral politics is something that is given to progressivism. It seems like it’s a very tough balance to be able to both be pushing for change, trying to create new ways of bringing about equality and a better planet, a better environment, a better life experience for the average person, for the public purpose. It seems like everything is stacked against us. How do we make progress in this environment?

[00:03:19.340] – Rohan Grey

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I don’t have some magic answers, OK? There are different roles for different people and there are different kinds of knowledge that it all kind of comes together in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. So I don’t think this is a matter if you just ask the right person, you’re going to get the answer that’s going to be the key to everything. But I think probably the first point, you know, when I sort of put my law professor hat on is to question the question, which is I’m not sure asking a question like “is electoral politics a failure?” is really very helpful.

I think understanding the limits and the potential of electoral politics is one thing and obviously very important. Understanding the relationship between electoral politics and other forms of activism and organizing is also very important. And that can cause you to be more or less sanguine about electoral politics as the place to devote your time to or as how you evaluate claims about electoral politics.

But I don’t think it requires you to put your thumb up or thumb down in a categorical way, because it’s a category error, in my opinion. It’s like someone saying, well, I’ve got cancer and it turns out paracetamol isn’t stopping my cancer. So is paracetamol good or bad? And we’ve got the data point that my cancer is getting worse and I’ve been taking a lot of paracetamol, so paracetamol must be bad. The problem there is you asked the wrong question or you’re trying to imply the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

So when it comes to electoral politics, at least in my opinion, it’s a part of politics. It’s a part of an institutional structure that we call the US government. Short of a violent revolution that burns the whole thing down and rebuilds it, those are the places where, when you pour the water of energy down, it trickles down through those grooves. But that doesn’t mean you have to believe the hype.

It doesn’t mean you have to believe that they do what they say they do or that they function the way they say they function, or that the world of politics is reducible to that. So I come from Australia. I don’t vote in America because I can’t vote here. I like to think I still have an ability to make a political impact in this country. And I like to think that I don’t have a naive view that reduces the kind of political impact – or the kind of political strategies I’m interested in involving myself in  – to electoralism.

But I think that’s different to then saying I’m never going to be involved in anything that has a sort of whiff of electoralism again, because, as you know – we just had a whole talk about it – I work with politicians to develop policies. Now, I’m not developing those policies because I think all the Democratic Party is immediately going to get behind those, and the Democratic Party is a good party, and if we just get enough people vote for the Democratic Party, then this policy that’s proposed by one of them will get passed.

Of course not. That’s beyond naive, in my opinion. But what it is, is recognizing that, for example, Representative Tlaib or Representative Ocasio Cortez has a massive platform, has a massive voice, has the attention and trust of a huge number of people, and has an ability to articulate important ideas and visions and to coordinate energy of other people in ways that can move other kinds of actions and politics in ways that wouldn’t have been moved otherwise.

Now, sometimes that’s positive and sometimes that’s negative, right? There are real risks of being led down the wrong garden path or beginning to trust in more sanitary form of political force. But I think the reality is that you can’t just say that you don’t like the outcomes it’s producing and therefore just sort of wipe your hands of it because it’s part of the institutional landscape. I’m a lawyer, for example.

There’s some lawyers that spend a lot of the time in litigation, there’s some lawyers that spend their entire life never going into litigation and trying to do any kind of settlement or alternative dispute resolution to avoid going to court. There’s some people that never have a dispute at all, and all they’re doing is setting policy and regulatory standards and interpreting those standards. There’s other people who sit in courtrooms and make decisions about conflicts brought by other people.

Do I think that judges are the most important way of making legal change? No. Does that mean that I can have a theory of how to make legal change that pretends judges don’t exist? No. So that to me is the sort of potentially unhelpful but reframing of your initial question, which is I think electoral politics are part of the system; I think you need to look at them soberly and realistically, not as a religion or as a form of procedural mythology where it works the way that it tells you to work. But the answer to “how much value does it have?” probably lies somewhere between everything and nothing.

[00:07:42.710] – Grumbine

Right [laughs] But that’s a fair statement. I’m speaking as somebody who’s trying to speak for other people here. I’m trying to convey the idea of the movement, people that talk to us and come through here, and our own disappointments as we had spent so much time watching twenty thousand people, twenty-seven thousand people show up to hear an old socialist named Bernie Sanders in Sacramento.

And you see him show up in New York City, in Brooklyn. It was just amazing. And then you see him suddenly lose to a guy that wasn’t even campaigning. It’s like, how did this happen? I guess what I’m trying to do here is to keep people engaged. So that they don’t hear these great ideas that you come up with or the others, or that  Stephanie come comes up with, and Rashida and AOC and others come up with and get so cynical that they literally check out.

[00:08:31.190] – Grey

Yeah, yeah.

[00:08:32.320] – Grumbine

So the question I have, I guess, is that while electoral politics is definitely part of it, one of the things I guess – especially with covid-19 and the way we’ve been reduced to telecommuting and so forth, but also with the de-industrialization of the country, the union floor doesn’t exist anymore, so the concept of organizing has changed dramatically from the days of trade unions and Marx.

In this modern era, we are kind of left as individuals. I think that’s the neoliberal position by design. But as individuals, how do we create a collective society that has the ability and strength and power to move the needle? Do we have to accept incrementalism? Is this either burn it down or vote ourselves to victory? How does that take place, given the realities of the modern society?

[00:09:21.250] – Grey

Yeah, that’s a great question. So the first thing is, I think your initial question is, well, Bernie was leading and then he wasn’t. I think this is an area where I guess you can call it realism – I used the words sober analysis before – but some way of looking at the situation where you’re trying to understand enough of the factors at play that you’re not constantly being surprised. And of course, the world is unpredictable and there’s always going to be things that you can’t predict but to have some degree of confidence about your ability to predict the future.

So as a lawyer, one of the famous statements of legal realism in the 20th century was Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, who said, if you look at the law from the perspective of a bad man, someone who doesn’t care about the morality of law, there’s still value to the law, in the sense that you still want to know what is your likelihood of getting arrested or getting fined or something is. Right? So if somebody says, “hey, I’ve got this contract, I want to interpret it this way, can I interpret it that way?”

There’s one question of, sort of, does that make you a good guy? If you try, you know, what does that say about your immortal soul and all these kinds of things? And then there’s another question of, well, what are the odds that you’re going to prevail if you get a particular judge on a particular day? You make this argument given broader… where we are as a society, where the law is at, etc.

And that secondary analysis, you could be a complete sociopath and still be very good at it because what you’re doing is able to hook together a set of analyses that can actually help you make pragmatically useful decisions in this world. So if you look at something like the Bernie campaign, for example, I think it was always relatively frail. It was frail in the sense that it depended on a fragmented field. It depended on everybody who wasn’t Bernie or everyone who wasn’t Bernie and some Warren-ites, everyone else in the party being fragmented enough that he came through.

And that was a kind of Trumpian strategy, right? There were 16 other Republicans. By the time they started consolidating, he had blown out this lead. Once it became clear that they were willing to fall in line – and I think Pete’s and Amy’s staged withdrawals were extremely important in this respect – and then secondly, once it was clear that President Obama had tipped his hand behind the scenes and made these phone calls, that a large amount of the party went along with that.

And so, in one sense, was it so close to being won? Well, maybe it was so close in the sense that those parties looked like they were about to shoot themselves in the dick and then they didn’t. Right? But it wasn’t close in the sense that at any point in time there was a majority of the primary voters in the party who said that they preferred Bernie to not Bernie. And so what happened was one of the eventualities that could have solved things came to pass and certain Hail Mary options to avoid that didn’t come to pass.

Now, it’s one thing to hope, and it’s one thing to want something to be true, and it’s one thing to acknowledge that even a longshot has a shot. And it’s another thing to think that we had a ninety-five percent chance of winning and it was stolen. And I think the latter is a problem of the lens that you’re using, the way that you’re evaluating your risk and your capacity. And I think at least for me, as someone who tries to be a committed leftist revolutionary, whatever, the odds are always extremely small.

The odds are extremely small right up until the point that you win. And they continue to be very small the next day for the next thing you try to win. And I don’t think that the history of progress is the history of always inevitably having a good shot. It’s the history of very, very difficult things, somehow managing to eke through as much as it is. And in terms of, I guess, the broader angst that you were mentioning about trying to channel here, I’ve had students who say, you know, I believed very strongly in rights when I came to law school. And now these readings have made me question this.

Maybe that was sort of naive. I’m not religious; that’s the closest thing to religion I have is a belief in democracy and the rule of law and rights. And I understand the feeling of, well, either God exists or he doesn’t. And if he doesn’t, then I’m living a lie. Right? And it’s sort of binary. I grew up in a non-religious family. I went to a religious high school, a high Anglican school. And I was very much one of these angry atheists for a long time.

And eventually I came to a realization that these institutions have a history and have a culture. When somebody says “God,” they’re talking about every positive experience they had with their family and their church growing up, the love and the emotion that the word was imbued, with everybody that ever taught them words, you know?

And it became clear to me that this was as much of a problem of communication as anything else, because people used the words like God and religion and church to mean different things than I did. And I was trying to wage war with something that was not what they’re thinking about. And so I guess to me, if you think that voting is the expression of democracy and then you find out that it isn’t, that can be very confronting.

But I think there’s a way to come to peace with the fact that I don’t believe that there’s some sort of person up there who had a burning bush or anything like that, but I can still understand that religion has a social value beyond the kind of Christopher Hitchens/Sam Harris world of just scorn and hate and saying it’s all negative. And I can appreciate that even people who consider themselves secular have a belief system that they’re motivated by, whether that’s democracy and the rule of law or humanism or something else.

So when it comes to what you think about electoralism and political parties and voting and all that stuff, I think there’s a belief, naive belief, and then there’s disillusion of naive belief. And then there’s a more perhaps culturally nuanced appreciation of its role as a cultural and political institution that is a little bit more tempered and not about those kinds of absolutes.

And when you think about it that way, then your identity as a citizen, your identity as a voter, your identity as a member of a particular town, your identity as someone who has a voice in the American political process, even if that voice is just shouting on your social media or talking to your friends wherever you hang out, all of those layers of society, it’s not that you have to accept it wholesale as the savior or not, they’re all layers where you can have an influence, where something could happen.

And sometimes the spark is an electoral spark. Sometimes the spark is a grassroots street movement spark. Sometimes it’s some event, sometimes it’s something like an Edward Snowden that can spark serious political change. But I think the trick is to have enough of an ecumenical wide view of all of those different layers of society that you can see how they intersect with each other. You can see where they have potential, but also where they have limits.

And most importantly, hopefully, you can develop a nose where you can say, OK, this opportunity is coming down the line, and that’s one that has a potential to do something. Today we’re out in the streets, tomorrow we’re talking about a political candidate, the next day we’re in the labor unions, the next day we’re on social media, the next day we’re writing a fiction novel that’s going to spark a new social imagination. All of those are legitimate and valid. The only question is in what context and to what extent?

[00:16:14.090] – Grumbine

With that in mind… Obviously, Bernie Sanders stuck with it. He went through part one. I’m not sure, you know, I think he had like 12 people at his first rally. And then you saw people slowly but surely getting behind him. I’d never seen this in my life. I’m 51 years old. And then you saw some people fall away that felt like Bernie should have taken it to the House and fought from the floor of the DNC, and there was a lot of fire and energy and people very angry.

And I guess what you’re saying basically is that when you look at the sum of the Democratic Party, it didn’t match up to a win for Bernie Sanders, even under the best circumstances. The Hail Mary was a possibility, but in reality, when you look at all the centrists and the establishment people that are friendly to Obama and others, the chances of Bernie Sanders actually winning were really very marginal at best. Is that basically what I’m hearing you say?

[00:17:13.160] – Grey

Well, I think maybe how you would look at probability might affect how you think about the answer to that. Because in one sense, it was always a longshot. But even having the opportunity to roll a dice – like a 20-sided dice where one of the sides is the win – even the opportunity to roll that could be a lot better than the alternative. Right? And so I think it’s not that there wasn’t a path to him winning, it’s that it didn’t happen.

And we can try to understand why that’s the case so that we can avoid those kinds of things in the future. I think anyone that says they knew that it could never happen and anyone that believed it was a fool, and I think anyone that said it was definitely going to happen except for this one thing is probably also a fool. And I think that the reality is that we don’t have to ask the question of, like, would it be better if Bernie Sanders got hit by a bus, because the fact is he didn’t.

So it’s not a relevant question to worry about worlds in which things would have been entirely different. He ran when he ran. There was this unexpected wave. Now we have to deal with that world. Now we have to deal with the fact that that wave exists. What is the way to be most useful in what? Now, in my opinion, I think that having different strategies is totally valid. I think that it’s totally valid for some people to feel like he betrayed them, I think it’s probably valid for some people to feel like he didn’t betray them.

And there’s some people who feel like it doesn’t matter whether he betrayed them or not, because he still represents a resource to be used to push the needle in the direction we want it to go. And the really relevant question then comes down to what do you do next? And if people have different strategies in that, more power to different strategies. But I don’t think it has to come down to the “ultimatumist” referendum. I think he has had a lot of positive impacts. I think he made a number of mistakes. I think he did things I wouldn’t have done. I have no idea whether I would have done the things I think I would have done if I’d been in his position.

[00:18:59.390] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:18:59.930] – Grey

Frankly, I’m not in his position and I have no idea what he knows. I have no idea what the 40 years experience he’s had might change how I think. I know what I think, and I can try and push that and make sure that my world view is as comprehensive as it can be, and useful, but if you want to be in the position to make the decisions you think Bernie Sanders should have been, then do that. And I’m not saying “go run” as a glib response. I’m saying if you want to have the kind of influence where your micro-judgments matter, then you have to think about what kind of influence you want.

One is to run for office. Another is to become a celebrity. Another is to become an important member of an organization that does important work. Another is to identify a particular community or jurisdiction or whatever it is that you want to have an impact in and work out the way to make the most impact there. But I don’t think we have to say an absolute referendum on Bernie Sanders or not. It isn’t a very helpful question unless the question is, do I shoot him tomorrow? You know, which if you’re asking that question, maybe you’ve got bigger problems to worry about.

[00:20:05.210] – Grumbine

[laughs] I would never ask such a question.

[00:20:06.980] – Grey

No, no, I’m just saying that’s the kind of point where that becomes a relevant question. Otherwise, it’s like, well, what are you doing? What are you doing with your time? That’s more relevant.

[00:20:14.030] – Grumbine

Right. So Bernie Sanders was famous for saying never lose your sense of outrage. And outrage is what has fueled a lot of this movement. Just at the sheer inequality of it all, the numbers don’t lie. Since the 80s, the income inequality in this country has shot through the roof. People have no health care. It’s horrible. And you see the material conditions of the average working American and not just working Americans, but human beings that inhabit this country and around the world are marginally worse than they were before in so many ways.

We have a lot of advancements, but the regular people are not really able to enjoy the fruits of those advancements as life has gotten harder in many ways. So with that outrage and with that fear, if you will, of daily living, the conditions by which the average person lives, they don’t feel heard. And they’ve been stretched through the neoliberal paradigm to not have the kind of free time that maybe they would have liked to have had to coach the kids ball club or be involved in community things such as politics, even possibly. What would you say to the average person in that respect that is suffering, that looked to Bernie Sanders and saw those programs and saw the Green New Deal and thought about climate change, and saw the Medicare for All and thought, wow, maybe I can get taken care of.

And then when they started dreaming a better dream and they feel like the rug got pulled out from them. Is this the beginning of something or was that the end of something and now we have to regroup? Is there a movement still there that is going to outlive Bernie Sanders? In what way does that manifest itself?

[00:21:49.810] – Grey

Yeah, again, I mean, I don’t want to be difficult, but I don’t think it has to be either a beginning or an end. There was stuff before, there’ll be stuff afterwards. History doesn’t close chapters like that. I mean, there have been people fighting for racial justice, in terms of slavery and colonialism in America, for four hundred years. There have been people fighting for gender justice and things that… They never went away from the 60s and 70s. It’s just that the circumstances shifted.

Their institutional and political power shifted. And there have been people fighting for environmentalism and things as well for a very long time. So in my opinion, you can trace 2008 to be a pretty pivotal moment because there was such a large structural break in a large economic trajectory or a large economic kind of supercycle. But that didn’t create whole movements. It gave new shape to them and put energy behind things that might have already been there. 

So Occupy Wall Street had a lot of roots in early anti-global trade, WTO protests in the late 90s. Occupy Wall Street, a lot of the people involved there were involved in Black Lives Matter or they became involved in the Green New Deal activism and then became involved in the Brand New Congress and all that kind of stuff that partially was happening before Bernie was supercharged after him. And today, there’s still a left movement. There are people running for Congress, there are people organizing different organizations. There are protests.

There has been a resurgence of union activity related to things like teachers’ unions in various states. So I don’t think that there was a moment where there was no left, and then Bernie, and now the left died with Bernie. There were leftist politics. There were major historical events and there were major social movements that have coalesced in different ways, even #MeToo, as well. It wasn’t like that’s the first time those issues have been talked about, but now they’ve been given a new energy, and now we’re in a world where Black Lives Matter, Me Too, climate change, all of these things come together.

And then you have COVID. I think these are very destabilizing forces and the destabilizing can be a boon and a detriment. I mean, we had a global crisis in the late 20s and then we had this World War Two and everything that came with it after that, before we had the post-war tranquil consensus period or however you want to think of that. So I think you’ve got to take a step back and not be looking for that one solution. And my heart bleeds for people who – particularly the people who are worked to the bone so much they don’t have any time to think of anything else.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why labor struggles have always been so central to leftist politics, is because the ability to get out of the grind is the first step to actually having any attention. If that means organizing a union in your workplace, if that means changing workplaces to be one where there’s a union, if that means engaging in mass protests around those issues so that you have more time, maybe those are the starting points, because without that additional mental space, how are you going to think about anything else?

But if people were thinking that they were going to vote for Bernie Sanders once in February and then once in November, and then their better world was going to happen, and then they had the rug pulled out from them and now they’re feeling like they got no hope, then, I don’t mean to be unsympathetic to that feeling, but that wasn’t the way we were ever going to win anyway. It was always going to require more than that.

[00:24:55.130] – Grumbine

Absolutely.

[00:24:56.260] – Grey

The Civil War took hundreds of thousands of people, World War II took millions of people, the number of laborers who had their heads bashed in for striking before we got a weekend. It never happens that easy.

[00:25:08.320] – Grumbine

I absolutely agree. I guess speaking for the voiceless here and the people that are not refined and maybe have not had a great political analysis and really are not surrounded by people who are thinking about these things in a more sober fashion. You see waves, right? Things happen in waves, you get energy, they start building up, but throughout history you see wave after wave after wave of energy, the waves pull back just like the ocean.

They pull back, retrench, then they build back up again. I guess the question is – with the Squad, with some of the work you’re doing, the people that you work with, clearly there are some very smart people that are engaged and tied in that have great ideas and so forth. We’ve got a country that really wasn’t exposed to these kinds of ideas at the voter level or at the group level beyond the elite circles. This was their first time maybe believing in a long time because media has been very consolidated. There’s only a few places where you get news and the news tells it from a certain vantage point.

You look at The Washington Post, it’s owned by Bezos. So chances are that The Washington Post is probably not going to say things that are terribly against Bezos. People that are consuming that media, they look at their material conditions and they look at what’s being said in the media and they’re like they don’t really line up all the time.

I guess my question is, is that with reality sometimes, not always as it seems, as presented by the press, the not-so-free press, how would you talk to someone who is looking to you, has looked to Stephanie, has looked to Rashida Tlaib and AOC and others, and saw AOC standing on a desk in Pelosi’s office one minute and the next minute calling her Mama Bear. How would you tell them, given the realities of their own existence – they’re looking for a champ, looking for hero – stop looking for a hero and be your own hero? What would your answer to them be?

[00:27:12.690] – Grey

Yeah, or change your definition of what you think a hero is. If you think a hero as a politician is someone that doesn’t think politically, then maybe you’ve got the wrong idea. If you want someone to be the person that’s always going to pick the fight, then you’re not looking for a hero as a politician. You’re looking for someone who’s only there to pick the fight, which is fine. There’s a valid role for that person.

But if you thought that AOC was that person, you weren’t paying attention. I mean, there are people who still think that she’s their champion because they think that she’s a once in a generation political talent and she’s managed to massively push ideas that would have been unthinkable to push in a way that has brought along, quote/unquote, “normies” in an incredibly successful way. And if you don’t value that, you might not agree that that’s a reason to think of her as a hero.

If you think that she should have been fighting Pelosi, regardless of whether you actually know that that was going to achieve any positive impact, just because you think that if you’re on the good side, you have to fight Pelosi, then maybe it was a mistake to have that person as your champion. I mean, I have champions. There are people I respect a lot, but I also think that they’re human beings, they’re not gods, they’re not superheroes where you have to like every feature of them.

They’re human beings who are champions because there are things that they do that they are extremely good or extremely unique or extremely impactful. But then there might be things they do that are really shitty. I think, for example, Thurgood Marshall was a positive force. I can say a number of things where I had problems with him. I can say Martin Luther King was a positive force; I have a number of problems with things he did. I can think of these vaunted saints who people love to put up on a pedestal.

I mean, God forbid FDR, right? Nobody would think he’s a bloody saint. So the question of what makes a hero really depends on the context you’re talking about. There are people who do work I consider heroic because it’s thankless and it gets stuff done and they take the time to not to waste everyone else’s time. And there are people who are heroes because they find a way to be authentic in ways where others struggle in certain places.

You know, there’s a whole range of ways to be heroic that isn’t just always taking the position I would have taken on something. But if you think of politics as a game of picking champions and then being disappointed when they don’t live up to your expectations, then yeah, I would suggest maybe that’s the wrong starting point. The starting point is, what are you doing with your time? I don’t have to spend a lot of time supporting or not supporting Bernie Sanders.

What does that mean in my life? Not much. I don’t vote. I can’t vote in this country. It doesn’t affect me even on one day every four years. But it’s not that I didn’t have any engagement with the Bernie Sanders world. It’s just that that question was not a question that actually changed how I acted in any particular moment. So what are you doing? I mean, not you personally, but if you’re the person feeling those things, what are you doing in your daily life? What does it actually matter? What did it change your point of view? Was it just that you thought it wasn’t worth giving money to her anymore?

Fine. OK, if you want to give money to someone else you think is more worthwhile, give money to someone else. Doesn’t matter if someone else disagrees with you, let them disagree. Was it that you were about to volunteer on her campaign and now you’re not going to? Was it you were going to go phone bank? These are all very, very specific questions. I like to think work that all of us are doing in some ways are all part of the same broader pro-Green New Deal, pro-progressive, blah, blah, blah. I haven’t phone banked a day in my life for one of those people. So what?

[00:30:44.000] – Intermission

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[00:31:33.070] – Grumbine

It brings me to another question – and I really appreciate your answers by the way – when I look at electoral politics, one thing that I see for sure is the ability to budge the Overton Window to change the world and the variables that people can choose from by championing ideas and putting ideas out there that maybe have some energy behind them or maybe are new ideas that people have never thought of before.

And so this is a great opportunity to educate and to expand the way we think of the world and to get really important ideas out there. So I see the electoral process as a great soapbox, if you will, for us to get these really important ideas out there. I’m curious, what are your thoughts on the Overton Window and the role of electoral politics in terms of the campaigning and so forth in expanding the Overton Window?

[00:32:27.950] – Grey

Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is that we – when I say we, I mean, my colleagues and I – try to take a realist or institutional or material understanding of those ideas, even as we also try to acknowledge the impact of ideas on those material forces. So I think people – my colleagues at the Superstructure podcast and stuff – would push back on materialist analyses that treat ideas as superstructure because they are fundamental to how we imagine the world and how we imagine the world determines how it works.

On the other hand, ideas don’t emerge in a vacuum. They emerge in real-life institutions. You know, I’ve taught in daycare centers and K-12 schools and now universities. I’ve worked on education policy. My father worked on telecommunications regulation. Now I work in places that put me in touch with professional media and the world of journalists. And these are real things in the same way as the law is a real thing. Right? The law isn’t just this idea – you just say “the law” and then say whatever it is. It’s human beings who are part of professional legal networks.

It’s courts and legislatures. It’s people protesting and civic disobedience. It’s real flesh and blood action. So the impact of ideas to me is as much about the material structure and the production of those ideas as it is about the ideas in some Philosophy 101 disembodied “that.” That means understanding, for example, if you care about economic issues like I do, understanding the history of political economy and how it’s taught, and the role of higher education and elite academia and how those ideas get filtered through the media to people, and how they then get refracted back through popular culture and media.

It means understanding the relationship between legal structures and economic structures and how legal ideas either are or are not driving economic narratives. It means understanding human psychology and social psychology. And when you start from that point of view, then a politician is somebody who has in one hand a soapbox and in the other a set of keys to certain institutional rooms and levers. And in another they have a certain set of credentials and social capital.

And all of those can be useful or not, depending on the context, depending on the problem you’re trying to solve. Again, I don’t have to be categorical and say, “oh yeah, politicians, that’s how we’re going to get these ideas passed,” or “oh they’re useless – we should never worry about all that stuff.” Because neither of those are true. There are times when I will take my argument directly to the public. There are times when I will work with people who can do it other ways.

You know, there are times when politicians could be extremely useful and there are times when they may be the very last domino that falls into place. There just isn’t one answer to those kinds of things. And I think part of this is going back to your earlier question about having heroes. Part of this is the art of politics. Knowing when your judgment is saying “this is useful and this isn’t,” and being OK with that, that’s your judgment. You want to spend your time doing this over that, go for it.

Maybe you want to fix the pipes in your building because that’s the immediate problem you need to solve that will then help you deal with the problem with your city council about that thing that will make those people’s lives better, and next time you come to them with a different problem, you’ll have a different kind of social credibility with them. That’s not at odds with the Green New Deal. That’s just a different way to make your impact. And potholes still have to be filled up. That’s the real world where that happens. How you make an impact there is really, again, I think, more of an art form than sort of “one size fits all.”

[00:35:56.590] – Grumbine

Sure. And when you guys write these ideas and you think through the macroeconomic realities and possibilities and so forth, and you’re putting together what looks to be a rather shocking – shocking being different than what we have today – proposal that is radical by some measure. And when you put that together, what is your expectation when you put it out to the world? Is it just to kind of get the conversation going? Is there any expectation that these things will take hold? What do you think is that starting point? What are you expecting from it?

[00:36:30.920] – Grey

Yeah, I mean, the first thing is that, again, situating these ideas in a real world is that, like, I am a person with a certain position, my organization has a certain position, the people putting these out have certain positions, and this bill fits into all of those dynamics. But when we get to the actual bill itself, I mean, on one hand, you can’t have social change towards something that people don’t actually even have a word for yet. Right?

The ideas are actually important part of shaping a conversation and then that conversation becomes part of the overall action, even if it isn’t driving it all the time or even if the overall action isn’t reducible to a conversation. There’s an internal political economy of different policies. There’s all these different kind of competing visions coming out right now and to think about why we think certain visions are better than others, and to try to make sure that those visions sort of take up the oxygen and get the first-mover advantage and all those kinds of things, are a part of the consideration.

Part of it is that a lot of these ideas may not have had an articulation of these problems and – not one to my horn or anything – but I think some of us are in positions to articulate ideas in ways that are genuinely different from the ways that others have articulated them, or solve problems with solutions that others haven’t put the dots together in that way. And when you put them together that way, people go, “oh yeah, OK, that works.”

It’s not that they were sort of inherently waiting for it, it’s not that were inherently opposed to it, it’s that by just turning up and doing the work, some will go “OK.” If you’re the person that’s always turning up to your community meeting saying, “Yeah, I’ve already fixed the pothole,” then that has an effect on how people perceive you, and the next time you say, “Oh, I think I thought this idea of fixing the pipes as well,” they’ll go, “Oh yeah, OK, you’re the guy who fixes the potholes. You fixed the pothole pretty well. This looks like a similar problem. OK.”

So you know, someone like Congresswoman Tlaib, for example, comes from a background of direct services work, particularly with people with housing issues, and as I said before, always concerned about real people and how it affects real people. And so for her to be able to propose these big ideas that are often exclusively the domain of a certain kind of person or a person with a certain kind of background and to have them be high quality, it’s a form of taking power.

Now, it’s not the same as taking to the streets. It’s not the same as winning an election. It’s not the same as passing a law. But it is a transfer of a certain layer of power in society. And as long as you understand a bill like this as doing those things, and maybe doing a lot of other things, but being circumspect about how you think it works. I mean, I don’t think that we’re going to get two hundred Democrats tomorrow to sign on board this bill. I do think that that may not be the most important question right now.

[00:39:09.790] – Grumbine

Sure. One of the things that came to mind is that as we’re seeing people in the streets for Black Lives Matter, as we’ve watched so many unarmed African-Americans get gunned down in the streets, and you see the police and they’re militarized and they’ve got lots of powers and lots of ability to avoid prosecution based on the way the laws are written and then interpreted. How did this come to be?

And you point backwards to the history in this country of us abusing minorities in general. But then you look back at the crime bill that Biden was instrumental in, that he was very proud of and even recently had resisted saying anything negative about. But you’ve got a guy here who literally was part and parcel with mass incarceration in the United States. People like Michelle Alexander very eloquently play it out in “The New Jim Crow” and so forth.

And yet here he is being brought in to serve as the guy that will fix that problem, presumably. Right? I’m just curious, how would you put that into a discussion? Obviously, people see that and they go, why in the world are we going to bring a guy that’s spent 47 years doing this kind of thing, but now all of a sudden he’s the Democratic nominee and we’re being told to save democracy, we’ve got to vote for the guy that wrote the Patriot Act. How do we frame that? It’s a challenge. I can’t even put words… I don’t know how to bridge that together.

[00:40:39.280] – Grey

I mean, the first question is, why take seriously those people that tell you you have to save democracy this way? I mean, they’re probably the same people that didn’t vote for Bernie in the first place. So fuck ’em. I think the first thing is… This is almost like in the same way as we spend a lot of time in the MMT world, saying when people talk about the impact this is going to have on the deficit and then the standard center-left response is, “Well no it won’t,” you know, like, “oh, look at the ways that it saves money” or whatever else.

And you’re saying you’ve already bought into their narrative. Well, if somebody tells you you need to vote to save democracy and you’re like, “no, I don’t, how dare you tell me that, do you know how bad he is?” You’re already wasting oxygen. You’re giving them your life. Don’t give it. It’s not worth just move on and do another thing. If you think that that’s someone you need to persuade, then don’t do it on their terms.

In the same way as we MMTers say don’t try to persuade someone about the budget by using the same assumptions as their rhetoric in the first place. Well, here, if somebody tells you you need to vote for Biden, alright don’t. Just don’t start from that assumption. If you want to engage with them, do it on different terms that you’ve decided are the most useful. But I think anyone who looks at Biden’s record and thought he was going to be the saving grace for racial justice has got to be deluding themselves.

If he does anything good for racial justice, it will be because other people forced him, and that was something that became either politically expedient for him or because the costs of not doing it were too high. And so the question to me isn’t, does Biden, in his heart of hearts, care about black people? OK, can we get some change if we push him on that? Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe that’s still not a reason to vote for him. It’s entirely up to individuals about where they fall.

I don’t have any strong views about, oh, if you don’t vote for the Democrats, you’re letting Trump win. I think that’s ridiculous. I come from a country where we have compulsory voting, and if you actually cared about making sure everyone’s vote was heard, you can say all this stuff about forcing people to vote or… I haven’t even heard a single Democrat propose compulsory voting. Certainly not high on anyone’s agenda. So I find it basically crying wolf when the largest bloc of people in the country are always nonvoters, never people who vote for third parties. It’s just a convenient form of scapegoating.

If you actually want everyone to vote pass a law requiring everyone to vote. Watch how many Democrats will run away from that if you propose it.  It’s a significant number of the same ones talking about how important it is to save democracy. But when it comes to Biden, I think you don’t have to think he’s the savior to think that voting for him could be better than nothing or that it may be better for left politics to push within a democratic regime.

And it’s not, I think, even inconsistent or hypocritical or inherently sexist to say that’s a different calculus in 2020 than it was in 2016 – not just because you’re an idiot if you thought that Clinton was a shoo-in and therefore your vote didn’t count. But because in some respects that was a moment where there was a real referendum on whether the world was sort of OK or not, whether we could kind of extend and pretend what we’ve been doing for the last eight years. And Clinton ran on, you know, that America is already great.

If Clinton was elected, we would be at brunch right now. I mean, that type of narrative is one that is saying everything’s fine, nothing to see here, move along. Whatever else you say about Biden, I think he’s coming in at a time when it requires a historic response. The left is institutionally stronger than it has been in decades, certainly much stronger than it was at the beginning of 2016, as an independent force both within the party and outside the party.

And Biden is coming in as a not particularly popular leader. He’s not the person everybody loves to love, like Obama. He’s not the person who spent 20 years with her husband consolidating the party’s machinery behind them like it was with Clinton. This is someone who has spent most of their entire political life assiduously sticking to the center wherever the party happens to be at that point in time. And his role is being a guy that people like personally so that he can make deals.

I mean, that’s the kind of personality where having a strong left faction within the party could actually make some change, which is very different from a Clinton that had a whole machine ready to go and was willing to crush everybody who was outside that machine while also claiming that her views were the furthest left. I mean, I was reading just today and… I think it was Matt Iglesias or someone.

I don’t have respect for his point of view in general, but one of the things that somebody mentioned in the thread I was reading was that Clinton’s campaign was built in part on suggesting that anybody that supported Bernie Sanders was sexist or racist, and that in fact it was the Clinton view that was the more progressive because progressivism not tied to pragmatism is not progressive at all and so, in fact, actually being more reactionary and moderate and all these things was the more progressive view because that was just what politically realistic people thought.

Biden didn’t campaign like that. Biden lied, certainly, about how much we could afford and all that kind of stuff. He leaned very heavily into the red-baiting, calling Bernie a socialist and all that bullshit. But he explicitly said, “I’m not as leftwing as that guy.” And I think that’s a good thing. It wasn’t “I’m more leftwing than him and he’s a sexist and a racist.” It’s “the party isn’t as leftwing as Bernie.” Well, that actually opens up a huge amount of political space to define what the left is.

And then Biden just becomes whatever is in between that and the right-wingers in the party. So I think Biden in some respects is a weak candidate, and there is strength for us in that weakness. And there’s a difference between saying “vote for this guy because that’s what we need for democracy and because he’s better than the other guy,” and saying “we think the left has a better chance of making an influence in the next four years under a Biden presidency than under a Trump presidency.”

I think the latter is an entirely coherent position, whether you agree with it or not. Up to you. It doesn’t actually matter, even if I have to agree with that, because that’s not a question that shapes the next thing I’m going to do tomorrow. It isn’t the question I have to ask before I do everything. I can be hemming and hawing about that question and still keep doing all the work that actually I can make a difference on tomorrow. And I think most people that’s probably true of too.

[00:46:14.630] – Grumbine

OK, I agree with that 100 percent. Let’s move on to Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris didn’t get a single delegate the entire primary. She said she was a real candidate. She took a bunch of shots at the left and then all of a sudden dropped out. But then after having that historic moment where she’s like, “I’m that girl” and called Biden a racist, now all of a sudden she’s his vice-presidential candidate.

And I guess my question to you is in looking at Harris as a person who had been an Attorney General and has some tough things to answer for. I’m curious – a lot of people believe that she’s been groomed to be the heir apparent. And with the Democrats having a rather liberal view of what a free and fair primary is, the fear is that she’s just a shoo-in for the next round. My question to you is, what do you think about Harris and how does she play into the future of left politics?

[00:47:09.800] – Grey

I don’t think she’s a leftist at all. And again, I think the question doesn’t have to be, do you think she’s good or bad? I mean, she just is a fixture of things. And now the question is, how do you manage that or get the most juice out of it? I mean, I think probably my view is – my understanding at least – is a lot of the Harris staff, a lot of the support behind the scenes was the remnant from the Clinton machine.

And I can certainly see her choice as V.P. with Biden to be another olive branch between certain wings of the elite side of the party or the establishment side of the party in the same way as Obama giving secretary of state to Clinton. This is the Clinton wing making sure that they’re represented. And in some respects, I don’t think the Obama wing had much of a remnant.

Biden is, in some sense, the sort of last dregs. He ran a kind of skeletal campaign this time. And I don’t think anybody really was claiming that he had the best people of all the different campaigns. He didn’t have the most energy and stuff. He just kind of kept his head down and became the residual – and the person carrying on the inertia – of the Obama presidency, which is still extraordinarily successful, unfortunately.

I think with Harris, you know, on one hand she ticks all the boxes. She’s very articulate. She’s got a good resumé, all those kinds of things. She’s got the right diversity characteristics for somebody that is supposed to be kind of the next generation of the party. On the other hand, I find her to be always coming up short in selling that to people. Outside of her very committed base, it doesn’t seem to me to be a lot of people buying that as the next generation of identity politics within neoliberalism.

And I think it’s highly possible that Biden steps down before the end of his first term and hands it over to Harris, and leftists should be very well aware of that possibility and plan accordingly how they approach their strategy. But I don’t think, again, like I’m not sure whether that actually affects most people’s decision of whether or not to go out tomorrow and spend the three hours you’ve got organizing for Green New Deal or whatever else it is. I think a lot of those kinds of political questions are probably more important.

Or what are you choosing to read this week or what’s your media diet or whatever else? The presidential politics stuff to some degree becomes almost like parlor gossip or palace gossip. It’s interesting because it’s like the celebrities of this world and I follow it – I’m not saying you’re an idiot if you follow it or anything. But it’s not a determinative factor in most day to day activities. If you’re the kind of person who is going to have to make a very different decision about how you spend your time based on whether you think Kamala Harris is the savior of the left or not, then I think you’re probably in the vast minority of most people who are doing good work today.

[00:49:41.660] – Grumbine

Sure, absolutely. All right, so let me ask you – with Trump almost from day one, people were talking about impeaching him. I think they were talking about impeaching him before he even took office. And finally, as time went on, right at a time where I felt like the energy would have been better spent doing exactly what you said, focusing on a Green New Deal, the political will and the political capital was shifted away from a Green New Deal and Medicare for All and put towards impeaching Donald Trump, which at the end of the day, as one of those symbolic gestures that really didn’t amount to a whole lot of anything, but it did take a lot of air out of the focus.

We have an environment that’s burning up right now. We see around the world all kinds of clear evidence that if we don’t take strong, swift action instituting something like the Green New Deal, that this is all just chitter chatter as the tidal waves wash us away. I’m curious as to your view of impeachment and what these kind of symbolic wars actually mean in the grand scheme of the theater that we watch. It seems to be like a big waste of time and it really seems like it starved us of an opportunity to advance critical life-saving legislation.

[00:50:58.250] – Grey

I think on the question of symbolic acts, I believe deeply in symbolic acts, but I think the real question then just becomes which symbolic acts? I don’t have much time or energy or interest in this one. You can see my own personal track record. I think I probably spent about as little time as humanly possible focusing on that and only to know how much I could avoid thinking about it. For the record, I didn’t think it was particularly useful and it wasn’t.

And you don’t have to be a political genius to count how many votes you have in the Senate. And you don’t have to be a news junkie to see just how much attention that whole thing took up when other things were more important. As a broader political strategy, my personal view is I find the sort of politics that’s based on “let me speak to your manager,” or like “that’s not fair, where’s the teacher on the school ground?” or “if we just appeal high enough up, then the gods of fairness and justice will step in and save us,” to be pretty naive losing strategies.

And I don’t spend much time on them in my life. So when it comes to trying to get Trump pulled out on a technicality, I don’t think it’s really addressing why he came into being, how he got the power he did, and what will come next. I just don’t find any part of that strategy to have actually been grounded in a good vision of what you’re trying to achieve as much as just “He’s bad. There’s got to be some way of getting the official bad stamp on his forehead.” And this was it. You know, good luck with it.

[00:52:24.430] – Grumbine

Let’s look at RBG for a minute, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was pretty old when Obama was in there and there was plenty of opportunity for her to step down at a time where a Democratic president could have nominated another Supreme Court justice to take her spot in a reasonable amount of time. She passed away a few weeks before the election and we now have a stacked conservative court. I’m just curious, what are your thoughts on the Supreme Court and how that impacts us and maybe the role of politics in that arena?

[00:52:54.920] – Grey

Yeah, I mean, I thought that was an extraordinarily stupid and self-centered decision. I think she could have retired in the first month of Obama’s presidency and he could have tried to appoint a firebrand thirty-five year old, and we could have had the firebrand thirty-five year old progressive on the court for 40 years, which is how the Republicans are playing hardball when it comes to judicial nominations. I don’t think that the only reason that didn’t happen was because she didn’t resign.

I don’t think Obama would have done that either. And frankly, at a certain point, this is a larger problem than just one justice. Probably the person whose jurisprudence I have the least contempt for on the Supreme Court since I moved to the United States was John Paul Stevens and even him I had huge disagreements with. And so I just don’t look to those particular people to be guiding lights on anything particularly progressive. I don’t think it has been since the Warren Court or maybe a little bit afterwards.

Is anybody on the court who actually is willing to go that far?  I spend a lot of time in copyright law. Justice Ginsburg was not progressive at all in that space. I care a lot about issues of racial justice and worked with kids who come from African-American backgrounds and Justice Ginsburg barely hired a single black clerk. I don’t have to pretend that criticizing her for those kinds of actions or other kinds of conservative decisions she’s made somehow have a referendum on whether I think she was ever good on any issue.

Yeah, there are issues she was good on, there were issues she pushed on, there were things that she trailblazed on. And there’s a certain kind of personality and theory of politics that she had that I find incredibly harmful and dangerous and frankly, didn’t expect much of her, and she delivered on that. So I think at this point, packing the court and delegitimizing the procedural aspects of the court are pretty much the only way to stop the court becoming a reactionary vehicle for the next 40, 50 years. And the only question is whether we can convince enough average people and change the discourse on that, that that becomes a viable threat, if not a viable strategy for people in power before it’s too late.

[00:54:50.520] – Grumbine

What does packing the court mean?

[00:54:52.950] – Grey

It means changing the number of justices on the court, which is something that is not constitutionally prohibited. It’s something that’s happened historically. There were periods of time when there were nine justices on the court, etc. It just means adding more justices to the court and then because whoever’s in power would be the person with the power to add those justices doing so in such a way that would ideologically rebalance the court.

[00:55:11.730] – Grumbine

Understood.

[00:55:12.810] – Grey

So adding four more justices so that there were 13 and making sure they’re all thirty-five year old firebrand leftists is what should happen, you know, in my opinion. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why that’s probably not going to happen. And there’s a whole bunch of people who are going to be in the way of that. And let’s work on reducing those obstacles and pushing as hard as we can.

[00:55:32.300] – Grumbine

OK, so with that in mind, let me ask you… I love the way you put everything. I’m going to listen to this myself to try to rebalance some of my own expectations. Because I’m really digging deep. I’m really trying to be useful in this space and I want to make sure I’m not guilty of doing some of these things that are not useful. And I know there have been times where I’ve taken a less than useful approach and I’m trying really hard to consider what’s that role that I want to play.

Some of these things are questions that I’ve heard. Some of them are things that I’m thinking of as you’re speaking. But ultimately, I’m really interested in being useful. So I guess my question to you is, at this point in time, what would you say to leftists right now who are discouraged in general? What are some things you feel are areas that might be a good place to focus, some things for people to consider?

[00:56:24.440] – Grey

I think there’s only so much generality you can provide a response like this that’s going to be helpful to anybody. But I think the broadest thing I would say is you have to know two things, right? You have to know who you are and what’s the situation in the world. So you’ve got to be able to look into a mirror and really be honest about where your strengths and weaknesses lie and where your capacities and limits are. And then you’ve got to have your ear to the ground so you actually know what the hell is going on.

If you are finding yourself constantly surprised by events and there are people whose opinion and values you respect who aren’t – to listen to those people until you can work out why it is that they saw something you didn’t, is probably an important part. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that just to have a direction.

My old law professor, who was a student of Thurgood Marshall, said – you know, I think he was channeling him – all you need to know is exactly what you want, exactly how to get it. Right? And of course, those are not questions you can probably ever answer. But part of this is sort of knowing what it is that’s getting you up every morning and what it is that you care most about.

There are people that focus, for example, on racial justice, gender justice, or immigrant justice, or native justice, or whatever else, it is because they know that those are the things that are most dear to them. Those are the things that motivate them. Those are the things that they can have the most impact, not because they don’t care about those other issues, but because there are only so many hours in the day.

There are only so many different things that you can put your attention toward, and they’re better in the spaces where they’re going to keep getting up and doing that. Now, for some people, that might mean just trying to keep your life under control, trying to have the right values, instill those values in people you can influence in your personal life, donating money, voting on a certain day, and trying to stay sane.

For other people, that might mean volunteering, getting involved in a local organization, whether it’s, you know, Democratic Socialists of America, or the Sunrise Movement, or whatever else it is, Black Lives Matter organizations, or Me Too groups or whatever else. Again, the things that may be most relevant to your lived experience, or the things that you care the most about. And then I think probably the other thing is just to be humble in the sense of don’t try to reinvent the wheel simply because you either haven’t done your homework or because you don’t feel like a team player or something.

You know, politics is a team sport and there’s a role for people to take the initiative, and there is also a role for people to plug into existing systems and institutions. I’ve set up organizations, you’ve set up organizations, but we’re both also part of larger communities and hold ourselves accountable to those larger communities. I think that’s incredibly important.

But there are other institutions that I do work for because I believe that those institutions are good, and I do that work for free and support them to try to make them more successful in what they’re doing, not because it comes back around to my professional life or to my organization, but because I spread around the time that I have and do that work. And so if you’re feeling dislocated, I would try to plug in. You’re not the only person who cares about problems in the world. You’re not alone.

There are a lot of people around the world who care about a whole range of different issues. So get off the couch, get out of your house – to the extent that that metaphorically is possible under Covid – and find those communities, find your people, find the place where you feel like you’re useful and you feel like it’s making a difference. And it’s the “think global, act local.” Sometimes it’s “think local, act global,” you know, it depends on what your position is.

Sometimes it’s being a keyboard warrior. Sometimes it’s getting out and helping fix people’s cars that are busted so that people associate your organization with actually helping people. Black Panthers famously had breakfast programs, breakfast-lunch programs for kids, and each breakfast-lunch just gets eaten, right? It’s not like you sort of have a record and you get to point to it, like McDonald’s “26 billion served” or something like that, you know?

But just the act of thanklessly getting up and doing the work and then having the credibility that comes from that I think is really important. And for a lot of people, there is work to be done, but they don’t want to do that work. Well, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you’ve got to look at what you’re willing to do. If it is reducible to voting, liking a Facebook post, and getting outraged, then maybe that isn’t enough. Maybe it needs to get more practical.

[01:00:22.760] – Grumbine

Last question before we go, and this is a little bit of a deeper question – the rest of the world seems to have a lot of parliamentary systems, different coalitions and so forth. But in the U.S. we have a “first past the post” duopoly, and a lot of negativity within the duopoly towards third party efforts. There was a great push to keep third parties off the ballot this election. Ady Barkan was celebrating the fact that the Green Party was eliminated from the ballot, which just baffled me. What are your thoughts on third party politics in America? Does it have a legitimate place in the structure of the United States political . . .?

[01:01:00.380] – Grey

Yes, of course it does. There was a point in time when there wasn’t such a thing called the Republican Party. There was a point in time when there wasn’t such a thing called the Democratic Party. It’s a peculiar and bizarre world to imagine this particular snapshot as somehow being universal or eternal. It’s all historically contingent. And who knows? Ten years from now, there could be a complete collapse when something goes wrong.

I’ve seen other countries where the political parties cease to exist. In Greece, one party almost was wiped out and then had a massive resurgence. In other places, third parties have held the crucial kingmaker vote in a coalition and then the next election got zero seats. We’ve seen Macron’s party come out of nowhere to win an entire election and the presidency. So anyone that thinks that there’s no possibility of that is deluding themselves.

That doesn’t mean that the Green Party or the Libertarian Party is going to be the vehicle to do that. Or that just doing what’s been done for the last 10 elections as a third party for the 11th time is going to do it. But it does mean that this “all there are are the two parties, there will always be the two parties, everything can be reducible to that,” I think is just wrong. You mentioned Warren Mosler because he had some comments about my ideas on your last interview.

I’ve had this conversation with him about his proposal for electoral financing, where he says, you know, anyone can give anything, but 40 percent has to go to the other person. Well, I think that’s just completely bonkers because, first of all, it treats every problem as reducible down to two sides. It treats the entire political system as down to two actors. That kind of stuff immediately breaks down when you consider the possibility, first, of more than two parties or two sides of an issue, but also possibilities of what do you do with historical data and predicting future trends?

Does the party that got three percent last time get three percent of the minority share of the 60-40 split or whatever it is? You know? There’s no way of allocating those funds fairly, ex ante, by Tweedledee versus Tweedledum kind of dichotomy. So in my opinion, you can’t have a theory of politics that’s reducible to those two parties. That said, the US voting system, and the “first past the post” system, does lend itself to resolving in favor over time, usually of two parties or of splitting down the middle.

And there’d be very good ways to look at reforms that could change that. There are proportional representation systems, there are multimember systems, there are alternative vote or ranked-choice voting systems. And then there’s also things like having compulsory voting. If you had compulsory voting in this country and you went from 30, 35 percent voting turnout to 80, 90 percent turnout, that would absolutely change the political landscape overnight.

Who knows whether the parties that exist today would be the parties that have a majority in that situation? It would just be unfathomable, and the same thing would be true if there was a different campaign financing structure. So, again, I think that you can take seriously these people who try to gaslight you about that, or you can just tell them to get fucked and move on and spend your time thinking about more important issues.

If you don’t feel like you can vote for those parties, don’t vote for ’em. You don’t owe your vote to anybody. And none of these people who lecture you about voting have the moral high ground to say that it’s your fault if the election goes a different direction.

[01:03:58.880] – Grumbine

That was great. On that happy note, I’m going to let you go. Rohan, please let everyone know what places we can find you.

[01:04:07.010] – Grey

I’ve got a website rohangrey.net with my random writings, and you can find me on Twitter and things. I’m the president of the Modern Money Network, and we’re pretty visible in this community, so hopefully, you know where I am. Feel free to reach out with anything. But thanks for taking the time, Steve. As always, a pleasure.

[01:04:20.150] – Grumbine

Absolutely. All right, this is Steve Grumbine, Rohan Grey. Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.

[01:04:31.890] – 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.