From Cold War Legacies to Modern Political Challenges with Daniel Bessner

Is U.S. foreign policy under President Biden really different from Trump's approach? Join us as we welcome Daniel Bessner from the American Prestige podcast to unravel this and other pressing questions, with a bold examination of leftist perspectives on international relations. We scrutinize the position of Palestine within American leftist discourse and consider whether shifts in younger generations' opinions might eventually sway U.S. foreign policy. Student protests and divestment movements are powerful in their own right but how much can they truly influence the political machinery? 

Our exploration doesn't stop at foreign policy. We delve deep into the political climate of today, dissecting the peculiarities of the right-wing dynamics and the enduring shadow of Cold War liberalism. What do political promises from the late 2000s tell us about the current state of political engagement and identity? We discuss how social media has crafted new narratives and ask if the retreat from active political involvement signifies a broader societal disillusionment. Join us as we question whether the decline in religiosity and the popularity of socialism among youth signal a major ideological shift or just fleeting trends.

Finally, we tackle the pressing issue of AI's impact on labor, considering how white-collar jobs could face the same fate as blue-collar roles did with automation. The role of AI in reshaping the future of work is undeniable, but what are the implications for both labor and capital? We close our discussion by reflecting on the decline of humanities in universities and the shifting global power dynamics, contemplating the end of the 20th-century academic ideal and the rising influence of regional powers. Don't miss our comprehensive analysis as we navigate these complex topics with insights from our esteemed guest, Danny Bessner.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Leftist Perspectives on Foreign Policy
• 8:51 Political Analysis of Current Affairs
• 24:05 Endurance of Cold War Liberalism Debate
• 27:28 Contemporary Political Disillusionment and Ideology
• 31:16 Challenges to Leftist Ideologies
• 43:54 Global Power Shifts and Realist Debates
• 57:36 Decline of Humanities in Universities
• 1:00:53 AI Impact on Labor and Capital

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varnblog, and I'm here with Danny Besner, one of the hosts of the American Prestige podcast, with Derek Davison. And what else are you doing today, Dan?

Daniel Bessner: 1:00

I was. I think I told you off mic. I was checking footnotes so I'm emergent from the footnote minds. But it's a pleasure to see you, varn. Pleasure to be back on the pod.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12

Yeah, today we are talking about where the left and for those of you who are listening, I am putting that in quotation marks because I no longer know what the fuck that means is in regards to foreign policy and what we make of the foreign policy turn of, let's say, leftist media, because that's a lot more of a meaningful statement right now. What do you make of the foreign policy turn there, in the last year and a half of the Biden administration, of a lot of leftist commentary, particularly in regards to Palestine?

Daniel Bessner: 1:50

So maybe you could identify specifically what you're talking about. Okay, and then I could comment on it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55

That's fair. So what do you make about say, let's say, we'll pick on someone that you know, like Chapo Trap House, focusing a lot on Palestine? Are the non-commitment movement advocated by some media advocates around the Democratic Party and the run-up to the Biden election, and this focus on national politics amongst, let's say, leftist influencers and media figures?

Daniel Bessner: 2:25

I mean I think it's good. Palestine has traditionally been part of the American left's interests for a variety of contingent reasons related to the emergence of a type of third worldism in the 1960s and 1970s, decolonization, and then, of course, the fact that the United States in the past 30, 40 years has significantly funded Israel. So it makes sense. It's been a traditional left-wing focus and it remains so today. I mean the uncommitted movement obviously, you know, didn't affect the outcome of the election per se, but it demonstrated that people will I mean specifically organized ethnic communities in particular regions of the country will, you know, as a mass effectively say no to the Democratic Party, say no to the democratic party. Um, the degree to which that matters in terms of actual politics is going to remain to be seen, given, you know, how michigan develops over the next few years. Maybe the democrats don't care about it because it's just out of the democratic uh world to be decided. Maybe they do care because it is. So I that's my general take on all of that.

C. Derick Varn: 3:33

Do you see any way for people who are arguing for the campus protests to have more effect than they seem to have had?

Daniel Bessner: 3:46

Do you see, was there a way forward there or was that a misrecognition? No, not. I mean not given the state of the American state or how power works in this country. I mean not given the state of the American state or how power works in this country. But I still think it's admirable and meaningful that students protested, that they sort of noted their discontent with the Biden administration's foreign policy. But obviously that wasn't a path to changing the Biden administration's foreign policy.

Daniel Bessner: 4:11

Is anyone arguing different? Uh, maybe I haven't really heard, but that would seem to be in the realm of fantasy as opposed to reality.

C. Derick Varn: 4:16

If someone expected otherwise well, it does seem to be that some people thought that that could have had some effect by divestment, and I don't really why do they think that, like, what is the causal chain?

Daniel Bessner: 4:30

I mean nothing about the. The actual university suggests that to be the case. So I would. I would ask what would make them think that, just from an analytical stance, not a normative normatively, yes, but analytically obviously that wasn't going to happen.

C. Derick Varn: 4:41

Right, I didn't say I mean I saw the negative response by the universities as being more about demands for opening the books and even what the students were saying. But that was that was my reading. I tend to think that the Israeli donors to university endowments are actually a much smaller proportion of their income than people seem to think.

Daniel Bessner: 5:05

I don't think it's necessarily the Israeli donors. It's just like the status quo position of the United States, which probably will change over time because I think younger people do disagree, but that will be just a function of literally people dying and other people coming into maturity. I think it will change, but that to me, is the mechanism of change, as opposed to student protests or divesting or whatnot. It's just going to be like people are going to react differently because they're going to have a different historical associations with Israel and people who are over 50 and that is going to react differently because they're going to have a different historical associations with Israel than people who are over 50. And that is going to change things and I think that's a Israeli leaders don't give a shit about that, which is like pretty short-term strategic thinking, but I guess that's just reflective of the age.

C. Derick Varn: 5:44

So one of the things I wanted to ask about this do you see this is staying primarily a left-wing issue?

Daniel Bessner: 5:52

uh, do I see what specifically?

C. Derick Varn: 5:55

the palestine is israel situation is staying primarily a left-wing issue, ie you know, any support for um um, I don't think it's really.

Daniel Bessner: 6:07

I don't think it's really left. I think it's. People are interested in foreign policy. I think if you're interested in foreign policy, you are interested in the Israel-Palestine issue, like all the think tanks. All those people who are not left-wing are talking about it as well, and that seems to me to be more important. I mean, there's a significant constituency of the left that doesn't think it is important, because they're focused much more specifically on domestic. I think it's more a foreign policy issue than a left-wing one, ultimately, and so I think a lot of upcoming foreign policy professionals do not feel that warmly toward Israel, and I think that is going to eventually be reflected in US foreign policy in the next decades or so.

C. Derick Varn: 6:45

Why do you think that there's been a kind of younger consensus turn against Israel, a younger consensus turn against Israel?

Daniel Bessner: 6:51

You could see it. You could see it. I mean, like what's happening in Gaza is just undeniable, and I think that's how an effect on people is. Naturally it would. Also, israel is just a lot more, you know, on the ground powerful in the 2020s than it was in the 1960s or 1970s, when a lot of these people came of political age, and life for Palestiniansestinians is much, much degraded, uh, in those past decades.

C. Derick Varn: 7:16

So I mean, the situation on the ground has changed, so it's not surprising that people who only know a world of that situation are going to have a different foreign policy so do we think that per one of the theories I was floating about why Biden was so tone-deaf even to dissenting vroches within the younger elements of the policy establishment was that there was a chance that Netanyahu just wouldn't listen? If he tried to pull a Reagan in 83 or something like that, well, he'd have to listen if they did it for real, because they would just stop the weapons.

Daniel Bessner: 7:54

The problem is they wouldn't do that. The american president has the power to be like fuck you, we're not giving you any weapons and, by the way, we're not vetoing all the security council resolutions, good luck. And if they followed through on that, and then yahoo would change about five seconds, um, but no president is willing to do that, for a variety of reasons. Biden, I think, personally and ideologically. He's so old that he remembers like an age when international jury was actually an existential danger. But that is not the case any longer and I think that people coming of age are going to have just very different policies. All right, just very different policies.

C. Derick Varn: 8:32

All right, To also be specific, there's a lot of talk about Trump's quasi-saber-ridling about Panama and Greenland in not so much leftist circles but in liberal circles. How seriously should we take that?

Daniel Bessner: 8:55

I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, that the United States had tried to purchase Greenland in the 19th century at some points. So, and he said Panama too, right, and there were discussions around that as well, so maybe it's just the return to form. It's nonsense. I can't imagine. I mean I don't pay attention to this shit, but I imagine varn tell you, tell me, there must be less juice and shit like that, like people, I mean, like I feel like in 2017 that would have been, like there would have been histrionic responses to it, but at this point, people must be numb to that right for the most part, I only see it on blue sky, which I take as like the liberal form of true social.

Daniel Bessner: 9:32

So yeah, I think I'm insane. I love that, right. Um well, it's running the asylum over there, right, it's right yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 9:43

Um, it's, it's blue MAGA country, so um, so there's some true yeah.

Daniel Bessner: 9:49

Who are getting their heart rate up over Trump's claim he wants to buy Greenland?

C. Derick Varn: 9:53

That's so wild to me. God bless him. However, it does seem like in general, those talking points don't go out of it, not even to general Democrats and much less to the broader population in the same way. Yeah, because who could?

Daniel Bessner: 10:10

possibly give a shit about that. I'm amazed that anyone still is able to. I'm impressed that anyone is still able to, but that's obviously so stupid, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 10:24

So we're in a particular moment where there seems to be some interesting things that I haven't heard a lot of people talking about, One of which is Putin's response to Trump's talk on nuclear armament, which why don't you think we've heard more about that? Is that really not that big a deal? Is it just international posturing? What do we make of that?

Daniel Bessner: 11:01

I think, just because it's in the general realm of once the United States decided to fund Ukraine I mean going back a decade at this point support Ukraine, it was playing with the nuclear power. So I think it's, you know, it's kind of in the realm of that and it doesn't indicate a serious escalation, so I don't think, you know, it's gotten that much play. For that reason basically, for that reason basically.

Daniel Bessner: 11:39

It's more just the what we might call the shadow dance of nuclear powers kind of quasi-escalating. Yeah, I think that yeah, it's not a genuine enough escalation, I guess, to get much play. I mean it's kind of like a boring moment in international politics, a little bit Like there's not really that much going on. We're kind of on rails in Israel and Ukraine. I mean it is important and it does matter to people, but it just seems like this is kind of an inertial moment that there's not going to be many changes. I mean, Biden's foreign policy was pretty much Trump's foreign policy and I imagine Trump's foreign policy is going to be relatively similar. I don't think there's going to be a huge onshoring of manufacturing jobs. I think it's going to be mostly more of the same. At least that's how I read this moment.

C. Derick Varn: 12:29

I don't even know how we would unsure massive manufacturing jobs when you're also trying to limit immigration no, it doesn't make sense.

Daniel Bessner: 12:35

I mean, like the, it always doesn't make sense and I think, like everyone is kind of, everyone is kind of in a moment that's very past looking and very status quo, and because it just in a genuine way does feel like the future has been foreclosed. Um, you know, I don't know, uh, if things would have felt different with Kamala At least she was significantly younger but the fact that you have these octogenarian I know Trump is 78, 79. Is he 80? Yet? It's just like. It just seems like ugh. What are we even going to fight about?

C. Derick Varn: 13:03

He is older than when Biden was elected to the same position, but yeah, it's. It does seem very uh, very status quo and it also seems like what. What's going to define at least the next two years is that being in power means fra? Uh factions in the right are actually going to have to fight with each other more, because now they actually have stakes, right yeah, but like, what are they really fighting over?

Daniel Bessner: 13:35

I mean there's not going to be. I mean, the national conservatives are such honestly fools the fact that they would fall for any of this bullshit. I mean, what is what do they expect? It's just going to be more giving money to the uh elite plutocratic class today. Did they expect a form of national socialism, because they weren't going to get it? Uh, so what is even fighting this whole h1b thing? It's like, yeah, it took trump two seconds to align with capital you know, over, over, over anything else.

Daniel Bessner: 14:08

So yeah, I mean it's kind of like funny that they had any other illusions, but I guess people need to look forward to a future.

C. Derick Varn: 14:17

I find it quite interesting that Biden was even not Biden Bannon was even resuscitated, because I mean his faction clearly lost in the first Trump administration and somehow they showed back up. And they've already lost now.

Daniel Bessner: 14:35

I think that's the case Basically, you know. So I don't think there's a future for national conservatism in a real way. It'll be fun to see JD Vance kind of you know, just do whatever it takes to stay in power. You know he claims to be like a national conservative right, something like that, but uh, I don't think it's really gonna work out for him on that front yeah, jd vance and people like arun mcintyre, who might quote nick land and and peredo's elite school now, but we're just standard neoconservatives.

C. Derick Varn: 15:08

As little as three years ago, or you know, five years ago is uh, it's hard for me to take them as super principled people. No, there's the right, isn't?

Daniel Bessner: 15:19

even like scary. You know, like this is what was always so funny to me about the fascism debate. They're just like also doofuses, um, I mean not to say that they don't have abhorrent ideas, but they're not like wielding political power in an incredibly scary or dangerous way. Biden was also awful on deportations and the whole immigration deportation regime has been terrible under Democratic and Republican presidents, and so like I don't know what people, I guess people had to feel like they had meaningful lives. As I argued in the New Republic.

C. Derick Varn: 15:50

It gave a drama to something that's not that dramatic, um, but yeah, so this is where we are I have been playing with the idea that part of this drama is about like justifications for, for the status quo, when competence can't really be appealed to by anybody. So I mean it does feel like since the Bush administration which I know in a lot of people's mind has almost been erased from history We've been justifying everything based off of some crisis or another. But now it's just like everything is a crisis justification.

Daniel Bessner: 16:28

Yeah, that is. That is as I argue in this Cold War liberalism piece that I was checking the footnotes up today. I think that's constitutive of modern liberal politics. So, um, it's not a surprise that it's happened, uh, and I think it will continue to happen. Uh, it's unfortunate, uh, if predictable. Yeah, it's just a grim moment for politics and, like I said, kind of a boring one a little bit.

C. Derick Varn: 16:51

At least, from my macro perspective, it doesn't seem like much is going to change so you, you don't foresee trump uh getting a resolution in the ukraine russia war very quickly he might do that, but that that was anyone who wasn't a true believer like blinken and biden, would have made a similar choice.

Daniel Bessner: 17:09

It just happened to be that you have these like strange guys who who are true believers in a project that no one really believes in and are themselves willing to totally deny it. Vis-a-vis Israel and Gaza, I think a sort of next issue Democrat would also not have done what Biden and Blinken did vis-a-vis Ukraine is provided a blank check, I don't think Obama would have necessarily done, done that, for example. Um, I actually think he probably wouldn't have done it, particularly in the second term. Uh, so that's not so like revolutionary to me, as opposed to. Actually, it was strange that there was the support for it, that there was. Uh, that's how I read that one.

C. Derick Varn: 17:51

Yeah, I have found the Biden administration to be, if not Clinton-esque, maybe even Scoop Jackson-esque in their orientations.

Daniel Bessner: 18:06

Like old school.

C. Derick Varn: 18:07

you know, like Biden is so old, it's kind of a weird thing to still be um, yeah, I guess I got my hopes up a little bit about his capitulations on afghanistan, which obama was not willing to do, but clearly the old school mentality um has dominated this administration and blinken was also always against Afghanistan, if I remember correctly, I think in like 2010,.

Daniel Bessner: 18:37

He was also against the surge, so it was Blinken, so that was kind of an outlier in the Biden world for whatever reason. But I mean, yeah, he was a pretty shitty president.

C. Derick Varn: 18:49

He's going to go down as, like I think, a pretty bad one, like an all time bad one.

Daniel Bessner: 18:53

Yeah, very little he did was good. I mean, he seemed to be mentally infirm, so that's not a surprise, but yeah, pretty bad.

C. Derick Varn: 18:59

Like, uh, worse than Carter. Even speaking of Carter, since he died a couple of days before we are having this conversation, this will come out a from now. Maybe we can assess Carter's legacy a little bit. Carter took good stances on Israel early. I remember his apartheid book being super controversial in the aughts, but as an actual president his foreign policy was pretty bad.

Daniel Bessner: 19:28

Yeah, I think the general take on Carter is not a great president, a pretty good post-president, in that he didn't just try to enrich himself like other post-presidents, um, but uh, yeah, you know, famously initiates the neoliberal turn. Obviously there was something in the air. Probably a lot of people in that office would have done similarly. I don don't think that was necessarily unique to Jimmy Carter. The response to the Iranian revolution was bad. The human rights thing fell away pretty quickly, increasing turn to a type of neoliberal, globalization-focused economic policy policy. Um so, and zbigniew brzezinski being kind of aggressive with the russians and the ending of detente, setting the stage for the second cold war of early reagan. So yeah, I think that's probably how he'll pretty much be assessed. Yeah, you know he was one of the small group of men in charge of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

C. Derick Varn: 20:30

So there's yeah, it's kind of hard not to be a little sketchy when you're the head of the Imperial Corps at a time of height, yeah yeah.

Daniel Bessner: 20:43

I think that's correct.

C. Derick Varn: 20:47

It does seem like we are in. I also find foreign policy now to be both boring and also kind of bleak, for example in israel, palestine, um I don't see I don't see a lot of ways that gets resolved.

Daniel Bessner: 21:06

Um, I mean I mean, it's being resolved right now, just in a terrible way.

C. Derick Varn: 21:13

Yeah, let's rephrase that and resolved in a way that I would feel good about.

Daniel Bessner: 21:17

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 21:22

And I think there was a lot of During 2022 and beginning of 2020, I mean in 2023, there's a lot of leftists who entertain things like that. Hamas could win this, and I remember just.

Daniel Bessner: 21:37

I mean who entertained it in a real way. I can't imagine.

C. Derick Varn: 21:42

Yes, but not, I wouldn't say, people who actually know better. But yeah, I mean that's, that's that's absurd.

Daniel Bessner: 21:49

Right, that's just absurd. I mean, no honest analyst could possibly think that. Who was arguing that?

C. Derick Varn: 21:55

Some of the people around say Marxist Unity Group and the left of the DSA.

Daniel Bessner: 22:00

Okay, I mean, that's just whatever one's normative position. That was never in the offing. I don't think from my opinion.

C. Derick Varn: 22:09

I don't think. In my opinion, what they seem to think was that it would trigger a larger regional war, that aggression in Lebanon would have happened earlier and that Iran would have taken direct intervention and no world did I see that.

Daniel Bessner: 22:25

Okay, so it's fantasy land. It's like people who say China's going to lead the communist revolution. It's just like no. Why would you think that? There's zero evidence suggesting that to be the case.

C. Derick Varn: 22:34

So I don't know, it's not like they've reestablished a common turn or anything Right? I was going to ask you why do you think we live in a time I mean because this comes up in your Cold War liberalism article a little bit but we live in a time of, frankly, more and more people taking political fantasies to kinds of strange conclusions. Why is that becoming more and more common?

Daniel Bessner: 23:11

Maybe it's not more common.

C. Derick Varn: 23:12

Maybe it's always been bad.

Daniel Bessner: 23:14

I think that you see it more because of the internet it'd be hard to measure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. In fact, um, um, people did retreat more into fantasy because, again, the future just appears closed off. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case. Um, but uh, it's unfortunate, but I just don't think we're headed down the path that we would otherwise like to be headed down. Nothing analytically suggests that to me.

C. Derick Varn: 23:51

Um, so nothing analytically suggests that to me.

Daniel Bessner: 24:06

Lately you've been talking a lot about people not recognizing the dangers of Cold War liberalism and the fact that it seems to still actually dominate a lot of political thinking. Why do you think it's dominant? I actually don't think it's dominant. I think that it was dominant during the World at War on Terror. This is just more of an academic project. I think that Cold War liberalism is a liberalism that believes in shit, and I think that we're actually at a different moment. We're at a quote unquote realist moment.

Daniel Bessner: 24:24

I'm publishing a book with Zero. We're used to work on imperialist realism. So I finished that sort of essay of criticism and I actually don't think Cold War liberalism is particularly influential right now. I think there's this sort of malaise feeling, this sort of foreclosure of the future when it comes to US foreign relations and the imperial hegemon feeling, more so than there is a Cold War dominant view, which makes sense because the boomers are dying and getting old. So the Cold War just looms less and less as a force in American life, even though it loomed pretty large during the war on terror, because those boomers were the ones making the decisions. So I actually don't think it's that influential anymore.

C. Derick Varn: 25:01

Okay.

Daniel Bessner: 25:02

Personally.

C. Derick Varn: 25:04

I tend to see it as it endures.

Daniel Bessner: 25:07

There's the rhetoric of it. Like Ann Applebaum is a Cold War liberal, but I don't think Ann Applebaum is particularly influential. Tim Snyder is a Cold War liberal and he sells a lot of books, but I don't think he's really shaping US foreign policy. He just kind of comes off like silly when he refers to Putin as Hitler and takes these wacky stances vis-a-vis Trump. I don't think most historians think especially highly of him.

C. Derick Varn: 25:32

So it exists and endures, but more is farce than tragedy. Interestingly, I think the resistance mode of the first Trump administration seemed to have given it a kind of false second or third or fourth life. I don't even know what that was, yeah but it was not real.

Daniel Bessner: 25:49

They couldn't even stop Trump Right.

C. Derick Varn: 25:52

So discursively it might have been important, but it wasn't like reflective of anything in real history well, I think this leads to an important point, which is like don't don't confuse discourse with actual policy positions.

Daniel Bessner: 26:06

No, it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's right. That's why chomsky is wrong. I have a piece coming out about that that will have been out, uh, by the time people listen to this. I have that, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 26:18

Why do you think? In what ways do you think Chomsky is wrong? As a person who's published a lot of stuff against Chomsky recently.

Daniel Bessner: 26:24

But go ahead. I just think his emphasis on information politics is not, the connection between information and politics is not correct fundamentally. So that's a lot of his writing, that's a lot of his contribution. Like he's, he is corrected so far as it goes that and this is important, particularly when he was writing that the U? S empire is like bad, and he's written a lot about that. But in terms of his analytical points, the point about change through mass politics is wrong. The point about information politics is wrong. And he's also wrong, I think, on the empirical claim that most people believe in what he terms in this latest book, the Myth of American Idealism. I don't think most people believe that anymore. They might've believed it in the 60s and 70s, but I don't think it. So I just think he's like represents uh, what was correct in his moments is no longer correct yeah, I mean, given his age, his moment was, you know, 40 years ago 50 years ago.

C. Derick Varn: 27:26

yeah, quite a long time ago. Um I this does lead me to this kind of impasse where I wonder if the kind of boring drudgery of of real politics is why so many people seem to be glomming on to political projections. Political projections. I don't know if the it's hard to know if that wasn't true in the past, because we just didn't know what the average, we didn't have micro histories in the average person the way social media allows us to have now. So I just have no idea what people actually thought.

Daniel Bessner: 28:06

in some ways, yeah, I mean, but again, I wouldn't be surprised, in a moment where there seems not that much political change is happening, that people retreat into these types of fantasy type areas.

C. Derick Varn: 28:19

I think particularly after. We can't accuse the Democrats lately of promising political change, but from 2008 to 2016, and then Trump as well, have been promising something like an anti-status quo politics. That has never really been.

Daniel Bessner: 28:35

Yeah, then this is the quo, then this is the question, the mutual room question. Right, maybe that's where we're in, so it doesn't fucking matter that much. You know, uh, and I probably implicitly, a lot of people are drawing that conclusion, if not intellectually than emotionally. Right, why would you do this to yourself? I mean, I think you see it against it, like not only the turn against from quote unquote woke, but like people are angry at it now and like I think that that reflects sort of an anger at the feeling that nothing has changed. So you see, like basically elite liberal institutions, just like kicking out the DEI officers and things like that, and I think that just reflects a total turn away from politics in general.

C. Derick Varn: 29:21

Do you think we're in a depolitical moment in the way, like a lot of people thought, the late 70s and early 80s were Well?

Daniel Bessner: 29:28

I think it's an important part of people's identities, but I mean, it does seem like there's probably going to be less mass interest in it would be my guess than there has been.

C. Derick Varn: 29:40

What reason do you I mean, I have my theories on this, but what reason do you think politics as an ideal set, not politics as something that you actually fucking do, is so much a part of people's identities right now?

Daniel Bessner: 29:57

uh, because they're alienated and intellectualized and they associate with ideology because they lack organic connections to people in their community, probably something like that. And then, like you, have various capitalist incentives that, uh, make it, you know, remunerative, to stoke people's anxieties and fears, and that's also going to encourage association with the politics, because it seems like that's the only way to change it.

C. Derick Varn: 30:28

So probably something like that would be my guess well, to me, one of the weirdest things that I still hear, even in mainstream uh discourse and I want to say that it's primarily discourse, I don't see a lot of evidence that people actually care on a policy level is concerned about quote-unquote christian nationalism, and when I look at, like, the rates of religiosity amongst young people, I I just I don't know what they're scared of, but maybe you know in terms of what that people are becoming less religious well, no, in terms of like, there's a massive christian nationalist movement that will have support amongst the young, because I just don't see like, oh no, if you see more people going to church, like this week or whatever, um, you're the.

C. Derick Varn: 31:17

The decline in religiosity between generations is fairly huge yeah, I don't think that's a real worry again.

Daniel Bessner: 31:24

That's like the fascism shit. The same people who worry about christian nationalists, the same people are worried about fascism. You know it's a stoking fears of an organic 20th century enemy that doesn't really exist and your life is still meaningless, no matter how many blog posts you write yeah, I mean in some ways it reminds it's stuff that we've seen before.

Daniel Bessner: 31:44

I remember in the bush administration talk about dominionist and me going george w bush is not a dominionist, that's yeah, yeah, it's sort of like secular liberal societies anxieties about like religion and belief coming to the fore. So yeah, it's predictable um, I do have.

C. Derick Varn: 32:07

I mean, one of the questions I I have thought a lot about is like the quote unquote socialist left. Uh, given that you know I'm a weirdo sectarian and I know that, but I also know my opinions are, like, not broadly shared amongst the american public and I have no delusions about that. I have thought a lot about this so-called popularity of socialism amongst millennials, um, which has always struck me as an overstated thing, and also the Pew polls don't indicate that it actually lasted very long. But there's been some talk about, you know, gen Z having a lot of weird, incoherent politics that people are now interested in, and I guess my question about this is like, well, there might be people who get quote radicalized by movements online or whatever, but so far I don't see how that's affected anything in American political life.

Daniel Bessner: 33:09

There's no party, so there's no ideological discipline. So it's not a surprise that people have ideologies that are all over the place. There's no institutional structure to enforce or even teach ideology. So, yeah, people are going to have weird ideologies because there's no institution. It's obvious.

C. Derick Varn: 33:28

And you don't think there's any way to have a party in the United States anytime, real soon. That's not one of the major two, correct?

Daniel Bessner: 33:35

I mean no, there's nothing in history that suggests there is.

C. Derick Varn: 33:43

Yeah, it's kind of hopeless. Yeah, I mean, it's One of the things that I've really thought about. This is just people talking honestly about the structure of the Constitution and then their proposals for fixing that. It's like abolish the Senate. But then I'm always like don't you have to control I don't know like 40 States to even talk about doing that.

Daniel Bessner: 34:04

Yeah, that's literally saying like have God come down and tell you to be good. It is in the realm of pure fantasy. Abolish the Senate, it's meaningless. It's a meaningless thing to say With no connection to power or change or anything. And then the left says organize, which is also meaningless given the deterioration of social relations. So yeah, there we are. Here we are.

C. Derick Varn: 34:42

When the left says organize, I've always been confused about that.

Daniel Bessner: 34:43

That word to me seems like almost almost empty at this point when I ask people what they mean by it, because I'm like well, how well in theory like organize your industrial union, but they're like the social relations of that sort of organization and building a power base based on the working class don't exist due to the deterioration of the american economy into basically an economy of freelancers with no protection. So like it doesn't, the question isn't organized. The question first should be like how would one organize in a dislocated and and alienated economy? And we don't know that.

C. Derick Varn: 35:17

Right, I mean it is interesting because that was like when Marx was writing, that was the case of a lot of the proletariat. But that's not the high point of the workers' movement. The high point of the workers' movement is during industrialization, where it's easy to organize people because there's lots of people in one place.

Daniel Bessner: 35:31

Yeah, and also like, in actual fact, that it was helped in this country at least by, like, defense production, so it was always connected also to the empire, particularly after world war ii. Um, so there's a lot of contradictions there as well. Um, but yeah, I mean it's uh, this is the situation in which we find ourselves um and I?

C. Derick Varn: 35:55

what do you think about a lot of the attempts to bring quote fordism back, since it does look like neoliberalism whatever the fuck that means to people, and I have my definition of it, but it's not what a lot of people mean by. It seems to be on its uh stagnation period. Do you see any hope in that?

Daniel Bessner: 36:16

no, why. Why would the? Why would there be a reshoring of a manufacturing economy? Right now, I think it's about eight or nine percent of the american workforce works in manufacturing. So we've also lost a lot of the institutional knowledge to, for example, like build a factory and make it work. That doesn't just exist in the world. You actually have people who know how to do that. We don't really know how to do that any longer. And also I just think, with a lot of technological change, that a lot of this stuff is going to be automated out of existence, as it already was, plus given actually existing capitals, and people are going to do arbitrage and pay lower labor costs. So if there's no political transformation, why would we see the type of reshoring of American manufacturing? But not only that.

Daniel Bessner: 36:53

Even if there was a political transformation, would we really want to reshore manufacturing labor? Wouldn't the idea be to move past it, to basically do the Marxist dream as a critic in the morning blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean it's. It's not like these. These jobs are good goods in and of themselves. You would want to have different types of human emancipation. So I don't understand the fetishization of a manufacturing work. It just seems again like very 20th century in the moments. Is not that one?

C. Derick Varn: 37:19

yeah, it seems to me mostly to be nostalgia from people who don't know manufacturing work. I mean, yes, um, yeah, uh, when I talk about it a lot, I'm just always like, yeah, it's eight to 13 of the population has even had any job related to it. And, um, the organic composition, usually like a technical term, just you don't need the same amount of people to do the work, and that theoretically is a good thing, like you know, um now, and in practice I get that it's kind of a problem under current conditions. But uh, that's not just true in the United States, though, and I think this is often missed by, like third-worldists and whatnot. It's true everywhere. I mean the urbanization of, say, latin America, southeast Asia, that doesn't have a corresponding industrialization, does seem to throw a lot of classical Marxist tactics and strategy just totally for a loop, and not just here, and I think that's often ignored.

Daniel Bessner: 38:24

Yeah, as one would expect, because history is dynamically changing. So the problem is, it's just the power of whoever we want to identify as the workers or the Marxists just pales in comparison to the actual power of the capitalist state or the capitalist order or the imperial state, however you want to frame it. Whatever it is, we don't have the power. So Bernie Sanders was kind of like an end run about that. It was kind of a Hail Mary pass to at least get the boots off the neck of people. But that failed.

C. Derick Varn: 38:55

So yeah, it's tough to know where to go, and so you think that the financialization of various industries will probably continue unabated why wouldn't it, you know? Yeah, I mean. One of the reasons why I think you're right is actually I am somewhat of a classical Marxist and when I point out that, like actual commodity production isn't super profitable right now, no, it's all fake.

Daniel Bessner: 39:23

I mean, the falling rate of profit thing is real. Like obviously capital is not going to be able to get the return in the 21st century than capital is able to get, for example, building the American West. You know, like that that is just not going to pay. I mean, it's already been done, that frontier has been closed, so you just get the fucking fake capital with these gigantic market capitalizations of five monopolistic companies. It's not a healthy capitalism, which is why it does lead to things like climate change and self-implosion and self-destruction. Um, and that may be where we're going. I don't think capitalism is healthy. It's obviously a kind of cancerous rot, uh, but there's nothing else to cure it.

C. Derick Varn: 40:01

So here we are right and uh, do you? A lot of people are putting their faith that other countries will be able to break out of this cycle, but do you?

Daniel Bessner: 40:13

see, there's nothing that suggests that. No one would suggest that what's the evidence?

C. Derick Varn: 40:17

well, a lot of projections on the china, but I don't see any of that panning out particularly unemployed. Uh magic, I don't know.

Daniel Bessner: 40:27

Yeah I mean like it's not real, like I I mean, do you think? I mean also china's is going to have to confront the fact that so much of its legitimacy is based on consumption and consumption is, you know, just in opposition to the earth, and so that's going to also be like a huge tension that's not going to be able to be resolved, which is true of all actual societies, that the political legitimacy now rests on consumption, which is a big fucking problem, because the thing you need to reduce to actually address climate is the thing that is impossible to reduce because no one in power can do it.

C. Derick Varn: 40:59

So it's in a pretty bad situation yeah, particularly if you have to derive a profit because, as I've, yes, in capitalism yes right, yeah, because like, yeah, you can produce stuff that lasts for a long time, but we don't do that no, because you're you need to constantly get more money and increase profits.

C. Derick Varn: 41:18

Growth of quarter to quarter it's yeah, it's pretty sick so I mean, it's just I think maybe there's some hope in the ecological society, claims of uh, of china, and then, you know, projections on, yeah, china could do that, though maybe they could do like evs and stuff.

Daniel Bessner: 41:38

You know, it does seem like they're making genuine pushes in that direction, but it's all still under the capitalist framework, ultimately, in a capitalist world dominated by the united states. So even if china were to surpass the united states, it would have to be like really drastic transformations in technology, and to me that just seems like the other side of the coin of libertarians who say, yeah, technology will solve it, don't worry about climate. It seems similarly in the realm of fantasy.

C. Derick Varn: 42:05

It's also interesting to me that very few people on the left talk about youth unemployment in China and also a coming demographic crisis, which will fix the youth unemployment eventually.

Daniel Bessner: 42:15

But yeah, that'll have a cost. Yeah, absolutely. I just uh, it doesn't seem to me that there's really enough evidence to suggest that like something real is um, in the offing. A genuine transfer transformation is in the offing with china. Not yet things could change, but I don't see.

C. Derick Varn: 42:32

I've never asked you about this, but I I've wondered about what you've made of the idea that bricks is, uh, not, not a socialist order, cause I mean that would be ridiculous and people would think that, but as an alternative capitalist order is viable or not.

Daniel Bessner: 42:47

I mean, I do think that in terms of alternative order now, but do you think that it could assert authority that pushes the United States a little bit off their backs, and that's a good thing? I think American relative power is in decline, even though the United States is overwhelmingly powerful. We have to have those two thoughts in our head at the same time, and so I don't think that the BRICS is going to engender a new global order, but it could, on the margins, and maybe over time less on the margins, force the united states out of particular regions. For example, I don't think the us is going to be in east asia in 20 years in the way that it's been since world war ii, probably be in latin america pretty significantly and it seems like in the middle east also, but probably not in east asia, and that's a genuine change do we see france getting pushed more out of africa?

Daniel Bessner: 43:36

um, I don't know enough about it, but sure france is relatively weakening.

C. Derick Varn: 43:40

So yeah, I'll say yes I mean, it does seem like when people talk about decline, there was a lot of people who did not see europe as declining far quicker than the united states in relative power but it is although.

Daniel Bessner: 43:55

And I don't know why they didn't see it Like yeah, it seems obvious a little bit. Yeah, like the whole all the juice moved from Europe to the U S a long time ago. So yeah, I thought that was I. I didn't know how quick, but it did happen pretty quickly.

C. Derick Varn: 44:13

It took one energy shock around a war that you know. I mean it's a significant war and I want to claim it's insignificant. But you would think the entire European infrastructure would not be so dependent on Russian gas. But I was wrong about that.

C. Derick Varn: 44:32

Yeah, they are, and it is important, important and it demonstrated the importance of, of particular regions of the world to the international economy, and that's still true um, you know, one of the things that I have been thinking a lot about is there was a lot of misprojection in circles like the gray zone, about what was going to happen in Syria. Now, I'm not, you know, I'm not one of these people who celebrates, you know, a former al-Qaeda aligned government in in syria. But I also don't understand why people were pretending that somehow this would lead to new chaos, as if there wasn't chaos in syria already.

Daniel Bessner: 45:22

Um, yeah, this seems like I. It's funny, I mean, it just doesn't come across my transom. This seems like pretty, pretty small left-wing groups.

C. Derick Varn: 45:31

Right, it sounds it sounds like I don't know. I mean, I don't know how One. I don't always know if I would classify gray zone as consistently left-wing, but like are they small?

Daniel Bessner: 45:41

Not even talking about the gray zone. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's just such a disconnect from policy so it really just takes place so in the realm of discourse that you know, you kind of kind of doing Dungeons and Dragons campaigns at some point, which actually makes it less interesting from my own and not to talk about anyone else, to write about foreign policy, because it does seem like there's so little room for change and that there has been so little change and so long um, do we?

C. Derick Varn: 46:20

one thing I have wondered is are we going to see changes in the pivot to asia at all?

Daniel Bessner: 46:22

I mean, they're going to try to do it, but china's just too powerful, so I think it's a failed project. There's no way they're going to be able to successfully maintain the type of hegemony that they apparently want to maintain. It's just a matter of time, uh, so I'm sure there'll be a lot of money filtered into that, and a lot of people are trying to claim that things will be different, but I just think that they're fundamentally wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 46:41

Yeah, well, I think that's. What's interesting to me is that's an area where, you know, a lot of people perceive that that was a change under Trump, but that's really a longstanding change.

Daniel Bessner: 46:55

It goes back to obama, yeah yeah, if not, and really earlier people yeah I was reading samuel huntington and like realizing, oh, this was this.

C. Derick Varn: 47:02

Some people wanted this all the way back in like the early 80s.

Daniel Bessner: 47:05

It's yeah, of course. Yeah, people have been arguing that china is coming around the corner, as it were um, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 47:15

I mean to me it's like well, it's already china's already a major power. We already live in a quote-unquote multipolar world. Not that the people throw that around, I necessarily agree with what they mean by it, but I think it is a fact that we have uh, the us is, you know, uh is the most powerful amongst increasingly regional powers, and I think US policymakers seem to know that. But what do you make about that? Are they still trying to be expansionist? I can't tell. No, the United States. Are we traging? Are we wallowing ourselves off finally for imperial power? No, no, no. Well, first of all, we've never walled ourselves off finally for imperial power. No, no, no.

Daniel Bessner: 47:56

Well, first of all, we've never walled ourselves off. We've always dominated the Western Hemisphere. So even the quote-unquote walling off is just dominating the entirety of Latin America and parts of the Pacific. Oh, absolutely. But yeah, as you know. But no, I just think that there's going to be a relative retreat over time from East Asia because China's too powerful.

C. Derick Varn: 48:10

Like, it's that simple.

Daniel Bessner: 48:12

Uh China's too powerful in Eastern Europe, isn't important enough. So there's probably going to be a retreat from Eastern Europe, a retreat from uh East Asia and probably also over time, the Middle East. That's what the United States, I think, really wants there, and I, you know the fact that the Israelis are quote unquote solving uh the issue of Palestine is going to be, it's going to be an American policymaker's perceived interest, because Israel is just going to normalize with the big Arab states and that'll be that. Then the US can retreat from the Middle East and it has a permanent bastion there.

C. Derick Varn: 48:46

So I could see. All those are things that I could definitely see happening around. Uh, I mean, one of the things about syria was that it was seen as a loss for the axis of resistance, which even people like um rashid khalidi said was just basically an iranian interest project. Uh, what does this mean for iran if america starts to pull out of the region? Is it going to?

Daniel Bessner: 49:10

I mean, iran seems pretty weak, uh, all told, uh, and I mean, I'm not sure how strong saudi is, but it does seem stronger than iran, uh, and the us is backing it. I mean, I think, just basically, hezbollah and iran and hamas have just been proven to be pretty weak, uh, since october 7th, um, insane in lebanon, generally speaking, uh. So I think that is just the accurate situation on the ground there is that Israel and the US and the US allies are more powerful.

C. Derick Varn: 49:43

Right, I mean, and do we see, like, the conflict of interest between, like say, saudi Arabia and Turkey and Qatar more dominating the issue? Because I do think there's a kind of misunderstanding that I think comes out of, ironically, the Bush years, where people realize there's a difference Shuny and Shia to see the Sunni world as unified in a way that it isn't. No, of course not, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Bessner: 50:12

Yeah, and this is all like post Ottoman decline Well, not Ottoman in the case of Iran, but generally speaking, like the formation of a new order a century after, like an order that ruled it for five centuries came apart. So things are still kind of shaking out, I think, in this moment of the nation-state and post-colonial not resistance post-colonial national movements, and so I think it's still shaking out in effect.

C. Derick Varn: 50:42

Do you think we're still seeing national consolidation in the Middle?

Daniel Bessner: 50:44

East. Tough to know. I mean, like, obviously the nation-state was like really in a position in the Middle East. Tough to know. I mean, obviously the nation state was really in a position in the Middle East. It was in a position basically everywhere outside of Western and Central Europe, but it was really in a position in the Middle East. We'll see what actually happens over time. It's difficult to know.

C. Derick Varn: 51:07

So foreign policy is boring and kind of bleak and bloody. Um, all right, um, I guess. One question if we're in a realist moment and I think we are uh, where are the divisions between realists right now? I mean mean, because you know, I used to sometimes think, okay, this may be too discourse driven, but I would read, like Peter Zion versus John Mearsheimer, for like what liberal or democratic aligned realist thought versus what more paleo conservative-esque realists think, like Mearsheimer. But are there divisions between realist? Are they relatively unified right now?

Daniel Bessner: 51:48

and if there are divisions, well, murchheimer wants the us to dominate china, which seems to me, um, uh, totally impossible. Um, so I think, like that's not realist at all. So I guess that's a big division on the degree to which not only the united states normatively should, but empirically can confront China, which, as you imagine, I think is ridiculous. Obviously, the United States is not going to be able to remain dominant in East Asia. It's fucking China. It's gigantic and mega powerful. What are you talking about? It seems so obvious. But Mersheimer is under the delusion that the United States is going to be able to remain regionally hegemonic in East Asia, which just seems absurd to me.

C. Derick Varn: 52:33

Yeah, I think it's kind of crazy too, and particularly also if I mean India's economy is doing well these days. I mean, it's still nowhere near relatively as powerful as china, but like um, there's just, that's an area where there's not just one, but like several major powers it's ridiculous.

Daniel Bessner: 52:58

It's ridiculous, so that's probably the biggest division. But then I would say mersheimer is just like an american hegemonist, at least in part. Um, so it's again. It's not especially a surprise, but I guess that's a division. Uh, I think, like some people get annoyed with, like my position at least, because it seems hopeless, but to me, like it's just, you know, there's no reason in painting what I consider to be a false picture. But that's not so much disagreement as just like wanting to emphasize a different area, I guess. So, um, yeah.

Daniel Bessner: 53:32

I, I guess I'm not sure there's that many divisions between quote unquote realists. Uh, in, in my, uh, in my opinion. I don't know if you see anything that I haven't.

C. Derick Varn: 53:45

I don't know. I mean, this is your area of specialty. I do kind of think there's a difference in age, and one of the things I was thinking about Mersheimer is just that he's older.

Daniel Bessner: 53:54

Yes, he is.

C. Derick Varn: 53:58

And Zion is pretty blunt about, like the way he wants to handle China, which is not dominance. He he seems to be blowing smoke over people's asses that the demographic, demographic crisis is just going to fix the problem for the United States. And as long as we leave them alone and kind of pull back from the region and then focus on Russia, I guess then two, also after 1949, but really after world war ii, it's not going to be able to maintain dominance.

Daniel Bessner: 54:31

Crazy, totally, totally fantasy land, uh. So yeah, I just I almost like don't even pay attention to these debates because they're so obvious. Like you think, in fucking 15 years the us is going to be dominant in east asia, like obviously not. So what are we even talking about? Right, I wrote about this in harper's a few years ago and my position hasn't changed. The us is in regional decline there, obviously, and it will continue to be in regional decline there, obviously you know, I do think we have to admit, in terms of world power, uh, the united states.

C. Derick Varn: 55:04

It has declined, but a lot of people seem to think that a relative decline is somehow an absolute decline in.

Daniel Bessner: 55:12

The united states is no longer a player the united states is still the major player in international affairs. Uh, it's just uh, not the only major player, uh, even though it's still primus inter paris in an augustinian sense, uh, in terms of augustus, but it's not what it was in 45 or 89, um. So you have to hold those thoughts in one's head at the same time why do you think it's so hard for people to do that?

C. Derick Varn: 55:42

because I, I will say, a lot of people, not just leftist, seem to think, think that the U? S is in some sort of absolute decline. And I just I'm like are you looking at the same stats that I'm looking at?

Daniel Bessner: 55:55

But yeah, you know, yeah, I mean, I, I think, I think that that that it is not as powerful as it once was, but it's still extremely powerful, extremely powerful, right? And so, yeah, I don't think the empire is going away anytime soon, even if it's not going to remain dominant in East Asia.

C. Derick Varn: 56:19

My basic take on it Do you think that's because people confuse the relative incompetence of cultural and political elites for the incompetence of, I think, people lack meaning I think people lack meaning and I think that there is a genuine crisis of meaning in an alienated capitalist society.

Daniel Bessner: 56:37

Like marx was correct, obviously, when social bonds are weakened, when you're alienated, even in experience of like a mass culture or mass politics as existed in the 20th century were more and more alienated over time. Um, and so that is going to just necessarily lead to people placing faith in more fantastical elements not connected to reality, or fantastical stories not connected to reality. I think that's basically the long and short of it. Um, most people also aren't trained to be like hardcore analysts. I I mean, especially when you're talking about younger people particularly. Things have been closed off to them, like family and advancing in a career and other ways of finding meaning that it did exist previously in history, and so they get interested in more and more abstract things like political ideology, and I think a lot of it emerges from that well, this is going to lead me to ask you one of the few domestic questions I was going to ask you about, which is, uh, um, the decline of the university, which I think is both.

C. Derick Varn: 57:37

I know people who try to get me to um, to talk about like, oh, why don't you tell people to go into the trades all the time?

Daniel Bessner: 57:44

and I'm like, because I know this is this is so funny, like, like I, these worlds that you are bumping up against. Why don't you get people to go into the trades? So you want, like, basically a society of artisans. I guess I would unite this everyone's in art, like doing woodwork in their shack that they built. It's just just not how the economy has functioned for literally hundreds of years well, this is a funny thing, because I get it.

C. Derick Varn: 58:12

I've started to get it from leftists, but I've got it from right-wingers here in utah, like, which is a fantasy nostalgia, right, that's just a classic, like men working with their hands, type shit the.

C. Derick Varn: 58:24

The funny thing about that to me is that on one hand, I do think like, yes, american universities are in decline, um, and I wanted to ask you about that because there seems to be denial that, for example, one of the reasons the humanities is in decline is that they've lost their mission, and part of the reason why they've lost their mission is they've kind of been, I don't know. I kind of view like universities, the way I view the certain that the southern baptist convention is to the gop. The universities are the universities, humanities departments are to the democratic party, um, which is now kind of like a, a declining subsidiary to it. But I wanted your take on that, um.

Daniel Bessner: 59:06

Well, I mean historically the humanities were in the 19th century connected to nationalism, same the 20th century connected to like nationalist ideals of liberal and progressive development. After world war ii became connected to the american imperial project, uh, and then became more critical of it. It's kind of where after the 60s rights movements they kind of retreated into the academy and over time I think that turns out disconnecting the humanities from larger, small c conservative cultural projects is not good for the long-term benefit of the humanities. Also, we're an increasingly secularized, um stem focused, pragmatic, focused society, even though obviously american pragmatism is american pragmatism's core feature of American culture. But that has now been transmuted into the purpose of an education is to get you a job.

Daniel Bessner: 59:54

Also, this is of course affected by capitalism and universities under capitalism tends obviously, as we've seen in empirical historical reality, to become geared towards not a literal trade in the artisanal sense, the idea that a degree is basically an audition for a job and the humanities were never going to thrive in that environment. So I think that all of those concomitant factors have come together to basically lead to the decline of the humanities and the effective end of the middle-class dream of the 20th century university was that, even if you know a son of a machine worker, a son of a plumber, or daughter of a housewife or daughter of a you know a, a house aide, um was able to become a phd in history and lead a good, solid life and art life of arts and letters, unlike, uh, any other time in history, and I think that's true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:39

And that's kind of coming to an end, so this is actually already over yeah, I mean, I saw, um, I was watching a debate around the decline of men going into universities and there was like, oh, it's male flight, equivalent to white flight. I'm like, well, white flight's a complicated phenomenon. That's partly about economic pricing. But um, not to say that isn't real, it absolutely is. But it I, when I was looking at the the, the male flight argument, I'm like, well, what's the? What's the economic benefit from not going to to college?

Daniel Bessner: 1:01:15

I guess you don't get saddled with debt, um, but if you look at no, you basically need to go to college to become a middle class person you know, so you still need to do it.

Daniel Bessner: 1:01:26

It's just the uh sort of benefit of it is less than it's been because more people are doing it. Uh, so, yeah, I mean there's also a gigantic problem white collar work. I think ai is going to wipe out a lot of white collar work. Uh, the the automation that that hit the blue collar workers starting in the 40s is now coming for quote-unquote creative intellectual work. Turns out that a lot of that is going to be rote and craft. Um, so there's going to be a genuine uh crisis of that as well.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:54

Uh, so that's also coming for all the marxists that think china's the vanguard of the revolution well, it was, I was, uh ai is interesting to me because it's it's both less good at some of that than you think, but it's very good at a lot of rote stuff and I think people underestimate the rote it's going to be extremely good at rote stuff and a lot of this is David Graeber's bullshit jobs thing.

Daniel Bessner: 1:02:19

Right, it was Graeber right. And so like it's going to be able to replace those jobs and basically capital needs to reduce labor costs and there is no blue-collar workforce so they're going to have to go to the white-collar workforce. So ideally, again, ai should be a good thing, as long as it didn't destroy the environment. You don't want to do those drudgery bullshit jobs. You want to be free to compose in the morning and criticize in the afternoon and do mad blah, blah, blah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:46

Build your woodworking facility, uh, but again, this is capitalism, so basically it's just going to be you know more of the same, I think yeah, yeah, that's my bleaker view too is, even though it's not going to replace a lot of like high creativity stuff there's a whole it can't do that yeah, I mean it can't do that.

Daniel Bessner: 1:03:05

It's what it's going to reduce is basically the capitalist class. This is coming for essentially be learned on the capital side. So I think this one is primarily. It's kind of ironic that the left is anti it because it's coming from the capitalists. The left base has already been destroyed. It's coming from the capital side of the equation. It's eating itself. Right, it's eating the capital side, as one might have expected already.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:48

Yeah, I guess it's eating itself. Right, it's eating the capitalist side, as as one might have expected.

Daniel Bessner: 1:03:51

Already, I guess, yeah, I guess it's coming for coders too, but it's yeah, it's coming for low level coders, uh, and I think like so, people learning to code, like obama told them, it's not going to be great for them which I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:00

part of my thing is we were talking about it in terms of music and someone's like well, I like a lot, a lot of generic music, and I was like well, music has been been made generic by capital for a while, partly because of the, the way that it served up the people through streaming services and et cetera, et cetera. And there's still interesting music out there. It's not, I don't want to say like there's not, but for the most part, like I can like. If, if you like country pop, I know exactly what that's going to be and then I probably can do that right.

Daniel Bessner: 1:04:34

So, like um, I think I, I mean yeah, I mean the. I mean again, the problem isn't in the ai, the problem is in deciding whether the air exists automation is a good thing.

Daniel Bessner: 1:04:44

Ai is a good thing in theory is a good thing in theory. The problem is that under capitalism, it is geared towards reducing labor and making money. I think it's going to be hard for the left to get too upset about the capitalist jobs that AI gets rid of. It's going to get rid of middle management, which is is that a productive class? Uh, I don't know. I'm not shedding too many tears yeah, I was talking to someone.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:12

They're like are you afraid it's going to take teachers jobs, and I'm like they're going to try, but just like when they try to work with the massive online classes it's not going to work, like no, it's not going to work.

Daniel Bessner: 1:05:22

It's going to be able to get rid of rote craft stuff, that stuff that could like genuinely be learned, um, so, uh, yeah, I mean that's happening and it's gonna happen. It's also there's a first real investment. Like capital was flailing around with nfts, it was flailing around with crypto. Ai is actually gonna redound to some benefit again. Not the benefit, the sort of return of settling the american west, but a genuine return due to reduction of work uh, yeah, with the caveat is they need to make its energy costs go way down, and they haven't yet.

Daniel Bessner: 1:05:57

But um, yeah, they're going to really need to do that actually, like that's actually pretty important, I think.

Daniel Bessner: 1:06:04

I also think a lot of people are already using ai like I think, a lot of like. I think it's Like, I think, a lot of like I think it's it's being, it's being amalgamated as a tool into places. So, for example, I wouldn't be surprised if we started talking about fact-checking. Ai is probably a pretty good fact-checker. You know. That's something you could probably be pretty good at with training over time, and I wouldn't be surprised if all magazines from left to right start using AI to do things like fact checking, as opposed to having no fact checker, so you can see where it's going to start affecting things.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:35

It's a pretty good copy editor too, as much as I hate to admit it. Yeah.

Daniel Bessner: 1:06:39

I mean, this is the rote sort of stuff that a human brain misses that a larger language model is not going to miss because it's not a human brain Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:53

The large language model is not going to miss, because it's not a human brain, right, it's never going to produce Romeo and Juliet, but it could tell you what year Romeo and Juliet was published. Yeah, I do think that means that the humanities don't don't bridge. Well, although I have taken some hope that actually like OK, well, maybe the humanities will get the fuck out of the academy a little bit, because I mean, basically that's just for rich people unfortunately.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:13

Yeah, are rich people, are people that can con rich people into giving them money yeah, which is such a like just begging people to give you money? No gracias uh, yeah, I mean I'm a podcaster.

Daniel Bessner: 1:07:25

I can't say much about that, but um I, I also beg people for money, don't get me wrong, but it is what it is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:33

I could make all my living from it. I'll tell you that that would be really hard and really degrading, but I guess that's where a lot of the response to you comes from, is that people feel like you're hopeless, and I've had Benjamin Studebaker on a lot to talk about domestic stuff that people feel are similarly hopeless, I guess, for me.

Daniel Bessner: 1:07:59

I don't know, things might be hopeless.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:02

Yeah, for me, sometimes, when someone's like, well, don't you have a solution, and I'm like, well, maybe there isn't one right now, right, I mean, there clearly isn't one, I think that's pretty obvious. I think, right, yeah, well, um, on that note, uh, well, it's a pleasure everyone subscribe to american prestige.

Daniel Bessner: 1:08:24

that's the only thing that will ensure social progress is if you pay me and Varn to podcast and bring these hot takes directly to your dome as you do laundry the dishes or drive or walk. If you're in a walkable area, you might be walking right now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:42

Could you?

Daniel Bessner: 1:08:42

do some.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:43

ASMR. Where's American Prestige at these days? Supporting cast We've moved around, we've bounced around, but we left.

Daniel Bessner: 1:08:47

Substack. And Where's Americans Prestige at these days Supporting cast? We've moved around. We've bounced around, but we left Substack and we're at supporting cast now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:53

Supporting cast. Okay, so go find it on supporting cast. Support our cast, right. Thank you so much.

Daniel Bessner: 1:09:02

Bye.