The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. After 45 solid years of Reaganite bipartisan rampaging in the direction of deregulation and “market-based solutions”, the Trump presidency can only be seen as a sort of psychopathy. To every action there is a reaction, and I believe the United States has been moving one direction for 45 years, first steadily, then psychotically. We’ve got 45 more months of Trump, but I think it’s already time to start thinking about what comes after. Not just after Trump, but after his complete discrediting of the past 45 years of political orthodoxy in the United States. I hope you enjoy my first effort at that.
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Video Transcript after the jump…
So you guys know the United States is a socialist country right?
We’ve had public education since the mid-1800s, old age pensions since the 1930s, and socialized medicine for the old and poor since the 1960s. The Wikipedia definition of socialism requires collective ownership of the means of production, well guess who owns all the roads and most of the airports? Regulation, centralized planning and price controls for US big business are just about as old our first big business, the railroads. Rules to protect the working man took a little longer, we are the country of slavery of course, but by 1903 we had a labor department, and by the 1930s fighting socialists in labor unions had established the 40 hour five day workweek that most of us see as a basic right today.
Now you can claim that these things are somehow not socialism, but you’d be in strong disagreement with the people running the United States right now. In the eyes of folks like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, a government that provides anything other than bombs appears to be evil socialism. But it’s not just them. Socialism in the broadest sense, government collecting taxes to do useful things, has become a bad word for most people in the United States, and that’s a mental illness that’s beginning to do real damage to this country.
Pro business and pro market fundamentalism is hacking away at the foundations of US society. As I pointed out in a video a year or so back, to the extent that the United States or Western civilization or whatever has a special sauce, it is big, effectively run government that takes on more duties as society requires it to. For most of its existence, the folks in charge of the United States have understood that what we needed was a mix, a balance between good government and the animal spirits of capitalism. Since the Reagan era, we seem to have been losing that sense.
The normal, healthy pendulum swings of US politics between more pro-business and more pro-government politics seem to have stopped happening as we fall further and further into a mindless pro-business fundamentalism. This may have had something to do with the end of the Soviet Union.
Ironically, defeating Communism in the 1990s seems to have made us more afraid of Socialism, and seems to have dramatically expanded our definition of what communism is or could be. When we actually needed to fight communism, our rich elites were willing to sacrifice on a few things to make a stronger country. Now that we’ve won, things like taxes, regulations, and basic civil rights are now being called socialist, so as to better facilitate the oligarch’s looting of the country.
I’ve decided not to spend a ton of time defining the difference between communism and socialism in this video. The more I read about the history of these terms, the more confusing it gets. I believe that the history is more important than the definitions anyway. The true believers will tell you that Communism has never truly arrived. According to their own ideologies, the countries that we call Communist were merely socialist countries that hadn’t yet reached the magic end state of true heavenly Communism. This, like a lot of Communist thought, is pretty darn silly. Nothing ever ends. As long as there are humans, our systems will change. For geopolitical and historical purposes, I think it’s fair to say that Communism is a more extreme version of socialism, and leave it at that.
A number of countries have claimed to be Communist, and most of them have failed. The way I see it, socialism is a relevant part of the governing tool box. Communism is when you decide, like the pro-business fundamentalists currently running the world, that only one part of the socialist capitalist balance is necessary.
The most famous and successful quote Communist unquote country is of course China, which has absolutely not neglected the capitalist part of the equation. It’s arguably getting better results than the United Stares right now, because it’s just becoming a better balanced system as we get more and more into pro-business fundamentalism.
One reason the pro-business fundamentalists are winning in the US is the way that the history of Socialism and Communism has been weaponized. This grim history is a great way to delegitimize the common sense idea that hey, we’re richer than we’ve ever been, we should do a better job of making everybody happy, and government is probably the right way to do that.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”
That’s probably my favorite quote from Karl Marx, the most influential philosopher of socialism. Karl Marx is also one of the most annoying things about Socialism. He was a brilliant guy, who was both lucky and unlucky in some really historically significant ways. There were tons of socialist thinkers running around Europe in the middle of the 1800s. But only one of them was subsidized by a factory owner. Marx lived at the bottom end of lower middle class respectability, imposing great suffering on his family, but thanks to his Capitalist writing partner Friedrich Engels, he was able to spend his whole life writing, and attaching the albatross of his bizarre ideas to the common sense heart of the socialist instinct.
I haven’t read Marx’s magnum opus, Das Kapital, and I am pretty sure I never will. But I have been reading summaries for like 40 years now so I think what follows is a fairly adequate summary. And even if I had done the homework, nobody would be happy anyway. This topic guarantees a flame war.
At the base level you’ve got a really powerful insight. It seems obvious to me, and most other intellectual types, that economics determines everything. Most politics, society and culture is just superstructure on top of economic relations. I don’t know that Marx came up with that idea, but he’s certainly its most famous promoter. In this sense, the approach of every US politician of the past century, most journalists and historians, and certainly this YouTube channel is deeply Marxist.
At the next level you’ve got Marx’s theory of historical development. I’m pretty sure the magic words Dialectical Materialism come in here somewhere, but for Marx and Engels, everything is about class struggle, and the battle between classes creating a new synthesis, which develops new classes that fight each other. This theory is pretty goofy, and a lot of later research makes it look pretty wrong. But as itself Marx’s theory of history is harmlessly interesting like a lot of 19th century philosophy. The problem is what they did with it.
The real problems come when we get to the Marxist analysis of their present day. Marx and Engels weren’t free of history either. They came out of a German philosophical tradition that was deeply traumatized by Napoleon, and batshit crazy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a famously difficult guy to read. I suspect that difficulty may be why he’s taken at all seriously today. Hegel turned history into a religion. He believed he knew exactly where we had come from and exactly where things were headed, and invented a range of part philosophical/ part spiritual explanations to justify his beliefs. It’s a bizarre soup of stuff, and it couldn’t have come out of any context other than the Post-Napoleonic, Christianity questioning but still kind of faithful Germany of the early 1800s. BTW I’m very grateful to Edmund Wilson’s book To the Finland Station, that really fleshed out the relationship between Hegelianism and Marxism in a way that was new to me, and made this video possible. Hegelianism is attractive on some levels, but it’s mostly nonsense. Marx and Engles grew up in this tradition, and they rebelled against it. But, crucially, they didn’t rebel against the idea of perfect knowledge of the past leading to perfect knowledge of the future, they just came up with different versions of the past and future, holding on to the historian’s status as prophet.
The Marxist analysis of the present centered the clash between the bourgeoisie capitalists and the industrial proletariat. This made sense for the Western Europe of their times, but really for nobody else. It didn’t make sense for Russia, where their cherished revolution finally happened and it didn’t make sense for anybody in Europe in the 20th century, once governments started acting to improve the conditions of the working class.
Overheat
Marx and Engels never quite wised up to the fact that governments could do that. They were convinced that class struggle between the specific classes that they studied in their youth was inevitable, everybody was eventually going to work in a factory, and that bloody revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat were guaranteed to happen. Basically they invented a new religion, with a new version of judgement day, and a new conception of heaven on Earth.
The environment of mid 19th century capitalism was incredibly foul. Marx and Engels didn’t even focus much on the slavery that still existed and fueled the factories they were studying in the 1840s. Industrial workers in Manchester weren’t slaves, but they sometimes worked seven days a week, 12 or more hours a day, alongside children, in dirty and unsafe conditions. Add to that, the extreme political stress of the time, with old aristocracies competing with new nationalisms. You can see why Marx and Engels infused socialist thought with such apocalyptic biblical overtones. It’s less clear why we are still stuck with so much of this ideological furniture today.
Because Engels went back to his family firm to run factories, Marx got to be a professional revolutionary, spending his life elaborating and centering his dark, bloody 1840s vision at the heart of the ideology of European and world revolution. The common sense socialist idea that wow we are super rich now, maybe government should help people out got forever tied to Marx’s weird German traumatized end is nigh bullshit.
This connection of socialist common sense to bonkers commie religion got even more solidified over the course of the 20th century, through its connection to an even deeper trauma than early industrialization. Socialism became the main actor against the US and European effort to perpetuate European empire over the rest of the world. The United States rebelled against an empire at its founding, and saw itself as a revolutionary power across the 1800s, but we fully abandoned that after world war II. There were exceptions, wildly successful exceptions like Eisenhower’s role in the Suez Crisis, but by and large we spent the 1940s through the 1980s propping up every nasty legacy of European empire we could find, from Vietnam to South Africa.
While prepping this video, I actually came up with a new definition of Communism that explains a lot more 20th century history than I am comfortable with.
Socialism + US Aggression = Communism.
It takes a lot of violence and oppression to make Karl Marx’s apocalyptic 1840’s science fiction appealing as a counter-argument. Most of the world grew out of hardcore Marxism shortly after winning their independence. Communism only survives in places that the United States invaded directly, like Korea, Vietnam and Laos, and continues to attempt to destroy by economic means like Cuba and China. The fact that Venezuela experienced a failed US backed coup in 2002, directly before embarking on this century’s dumbest socialist experiment fits my theory disturbingly well.
After world war I, world-wide socialism went through a split. There was the revolutionary socialist vision pushed by the Soviet Union, that appealed to poorer countries fighting for their freedom. And there was the social democratic version that has been pretty successful in every country across Asia, Europe and the Americas that has tried it. This is a function of economics and political history. The tools of socialism tend to be successful for every developed country that tries them. They are a lot less useful for poorer and less developed ones that try them. It’s not just the fact that these countries are poorer. The basic idea of looking out for your fellow man becomes more sinister looking when it’s tied directly to revolution and getting back at your oppressors.
This potted history of Communism and Socialism will be unsatisfying to all of the experts, those on the left who love these intellectual traditions, and those on the right who hate them. And I couldn’t care less. My point is that these historical discussions are simply not relevant to today’s politics the way that Elon Musk and the rest of the oligarchs want them to be.
Socialism has a common sense idea at its heart:
We’re super rich now, we should be able to use government to make everybody happier. Elon Musk and a century’s worth of rich folks before him have worked really hard to associate this simple idea with Stalin, Mao and piles of corpses.
We should always be aware of the historical, economic and imperial forces that gave us Stalin and Mao. But the common sense ideas at the heart of socialism have a lot more to do with the 40 hour work week, and the fact that the US government paid to help my Mom survive Cancer than they do with geopolitics or history.
So did the US government pay too much to help my Mom survive cancer? Probably. But is Elon Musk doing anything to improve governmental efficiency around healthcare provision? Absolutely not.
Battery
Elon Musk’s department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is an absurdity. Musk himself seems to have stepped back from the headlines, in an effort to save his faltering car business, but his DOGE kids are still hard at work eviscerating government agencies. The idea that a bunch of computer programmers who know nothing about how government agencies function, are going to be able to bring about positive change because they know some advanced spreadsheet magic is bonkers. They are likely to cost the government vastly more in lawsuits, both from fired employees and folks who lose statutorily required services, than they are going to gain from cutting these employees. They certainly haven’t saved any money yet…
https://bsky.app/profile/jacobtlevy.bsky.social/post/3lmjtjzy3rc2e
DOGE is a jacked-up, super-charged variety of bonkers, But it’s not a new kind of bonkers. This logic has been at the heart of both parties’ approach to government for 45 years. It started with Jimmy Carter, who probably sensibly realized that the US’s socialism capitalism balance was a little out of whack in the 1970s, and tried to bring back a little more capitalism. Pushing back against government may have been the right thing to do in the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, Ronald Reagan made attacking government our state religion.
“Scariest words in the English language”
Our state religion of hating government was elevated to new heights by Bill Clinton, who did a much more comprehensive and careful version of what DOGE is doing, firing government workers in droves, and letting market forces and private companies take over government work.
I haven’t done as much research on this as I want to yet, but my sense is that the Clinton era DOGE wasn’t very successful either. In the 1980s, everybody was angry at these unaccountable government bureaucrats making six figures who could never be fired. Clinton fired a lot of those six figure bureaucrats but they ended up being replaced by seven figure contractors, who were completely unaccountable. In the end, Clinton’s government efficiency push ended up making government services worse, and more expensive.
What Clinton’s government efficiency push did do was make a lot of government contractors very rich. And that seems to be the most likely result with Doge as well. There’s one very glaring example we’ve seen already. And that’s the way that DOGE has treated Medicare Advantage, one of the biggest and most expensive frauds in US history.
Medicare is a government program that provides socialized medicine to old people in the United States. It works well. But the pro-business fundamentalists believed that injecting the private sector into the program would make things better. My understanding is that Medicare Advantage was born as a Reagan era loophole, but it was really supercharged by Obamacare, a supposedly progressive package of laws that was cooked up by the hard right Heritage Foundation. You know the Project 2025 guys.
So over the past decade the private insurance industry has taken over half of our socialized medicine system. And they have done exactly the opposite of what was promised. They have become more expensive than government Medicare, and they are more likely to deny services. Worse services, for more money, sounds like a good thing for DOGE to target, right?
The whole Medicare Advantage program is a disgusting fraud and an example of absurd pro-business fundamentalism. But there’s a specific practice called upcoding, that has already been extensively reported on, that costs at least 10 billion a year, that is exactly the sort of thing that DOGE’s spreadsheet kids might be good for tracking down.
But that’s not the kind of fraud Elon Musk is looking for. Rich people making money off government is the goal, not the problem DOGE wants to solve. His approach to Medicare is to fire the few government workers that are left. To make services worse, to force more people on to the privatized plans that make his Mar-a-lago friends rich.
When it comes to government, Elon Musk is not a very smart man. His public relations stink. Nobody’s looking for an Argentina style madman running around with a chainsaw through our entitlements system. But he isn’t wrong to be surprised that his efforts aren’t more popular. Over the past 50 years, hating government really has become our state religion. Most of the opponents of his DOGE efforts have been careful to point out that they really love government efficiency and market based solutions.
The big effort to oppose Trump pushed by the Democratic elite is called Abundance, which is just more deregulation and anti-government hate. The Abundance agenda is basically libertarianism for Democrats. The balance has swung all the way towards hyper capitalism, not just in our elites, but also in the way that most people talk about government and the economy, all across the nation. But there is a kind of hope to be found, even in these grim days of Trump-Musk ascendancy.
As we all know, there is nothing that super charges leftism like Donald Trump. Last time around, our corporate masters were able to funnel those instincts into a useless panic about Russia and a lot of woke bullshit. Neither of those diversion strategies are likely to work this time around.
The failures of the Ukraine & Gaza genocide loving first Biden administration were so immense that Trump actually managed to win the popular vote. In 2017 he hadn’t expected to be president before he was elected, in 2025, he and a completely subservient Republican party have spent 4 solid years planning how to execute his plans with no obstructions.
And as was obvious to most people who read already, and is now even beginning to dawn on the rich idiots who funded his reelection, a President Trump who gets to do whatever he wants is very likely to bring us even worse disasters than the Covid catastrophe he inflicted on us back in 2020.
It’s becoming clearer what a big favor the hashtag resistance did for Trump back in his first term. The Russian Hoax, the teams of journalists and lawyers, and the “adults in the room” really did manage to obstruct his agenda the last time around. If they hadn’t, it’s unlikely he’d have completed his first term. If Trump had been able to do more of the things he wanted to do the last time around, he’d be remembered now only as a punchline.
The unleashed Trump of 2025 has already kind of crashed the world economy. I have become convinced that there is a place for tariffs in the management of US empire. The time is long past due to reorganize the US-China trade relationship. But a revolutionary change to the world’s trading system needs to be done carefully, consistently, and in a targeted way.
Trump clip. With the board.
What about any of that seemed careful, consistent or targeted? Trump’s administration is a little over three months old and we’ve already seen a 20% drop in stocks, and a bond market that looks as sickly as it did at the onset of a global pandemic.
He’s also been using the Department of Homeland Security as a private gestapo stuffing college students into vans, as he cuts what’s left of our federal government’s essential services. At the end of his first four years, Trump had a credible case that he had been obstructed from doing his job. And even then he turned Congress a lot more progressive.This time around he’s been allowed to let his freak flag fly, and it’s already catastrophic just three months in. Can you imagine how angry this country is going to be 45 months from now?
So get more comfortable with the socialist nature of the United States. Start reading up. Because one response to the Trump apocalypse is going to be a hard pendulum swing to the left. It’s going to be like 2008 on steroids, without a bank-friendly Obama to defuse the tension. We should do it better this time around, and actually try to solve some of our country’s problems, instead of just adding to them.