Catherine Liu The Psychology Of Liberalism

TITLE: Catherine Liu: the Psychology of Liberalism | Doomscroll CHANNEL: Joshua Citarella DATE: 2025-05-27 ---TRANSCRIPT--- You know, you and I have participated in, you know, political movements and leftist spaces. Don’t you feel like sometimes you’re in a room with like a lot of really fragile eggs who can’t deal with actual confrontation or contradiction because if they bump up against each other, they think they’re going to crack that, you know. Um, we need to discuss why left politics has no popular appeal, why it gets absorbed by liberalism, why we’re in the situation today, this new communitarianism that was sort of the structure of the internet at the bottom of the California ideology is all about this instantaneous transformation. The thing now that people are rejecting, I think, is that in actuality, democratic forms and capitalism cannot coexist, and capitalism is eating democracy alive. Welcome to Doomscroll. I’m your host, Joshua Cinderella. My returning guest is Katherine Louu, a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine. She is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. to what do you attribute this emphasis on morality specifically the word care among white collar professionals in the last few years so DWott says that when mothers give birth to children and adult human adults take care of that child they move into a special state of being where they’re vigilant and have to care for this infant to the detriment often of themselves there’s like this unthinking sacrifice and giftgiving. We all receive that kind of care or else we would not be alive. I mean, we’re born like little mole children really. We can’t move our head. We can’t we have no spinal control. Um our heads go back this way if we they’re not supported. Um which is psychically and physically damaging. And so you have the holding of an infant is about this kind of intense vigilant attentiveness that wikat says we move out of as the child as the infant becomes more independent. But this intense state of care I think is the proper idea of um using that term. We translate it, dilute it in liberal in the liberal world into caring about animals, caring about earth, caring about art, caring about um social justice. But that kind of care is so reduced and so reified in liberal discourse today. And there’s something liberating about the right and the Republicans when they’re like, “We don’t care. M we don’t care about recycling. We don’t we don’t care about fossil fuels. We care about everyone being able to um drive around um freely. There’s a kind of um immersive pleasure in the world that rejects this reduced form of vigilance. This very reduced superficial form of vigilance, very performative kind of um moralizing thing that happens within um the liberal discourse today. And I’ve been talking a lot about um virtue, right? And it’s a it’s not real virtue though that the white collar elites hoard. It’s this very reduced reified form of virtue like something about Christianity that is really amazing though when you I think I’ve like oded on um the imagery but no if you go through the churches of Europe you’ll see this Madonna and child is such an important like um duo in Christianity and part of it is about this um realization physicalization of the care thing right and I I think that we want to think that the deity and some all powerful being cares about us and it’s terrifying to think about that indifference. So we become in our everyday lives little gods. Now what the thing that I caring all the time about things this liberal ideal but I think the thing about the right and I just watched um Trump’s performance um he plays the child and the um liberals play the caring powerful but kind of punitive mother figure and he his childishness is like let’s just enjoy I’m going to be the circus barker let’s just have performativity and there’s this kind of um transgressive attitude that he has that’s very much directed at you know this owning the libs because the liberal hegemony is like this horrible mother figure who’s been oppressing us with her like don’t you care about your you don’t care about your grades that’s you know just all of these things about not arriving at care and being um sanctioned for it is uh a kind of punitive maternal super ego thing. So on the one hand you have the superficial caring and then on the other hand you have this owning that’s taking place about caring. I think we’re trapped in the thunderdome right now. There’s no exit. You mentioned this latent theme of infantilization. Is there some type of uh analogy we can draw here between the erosion of lowercase D democracy, this kind of punitive parental figure and treating individual subjects or participants in democratic society as infants? There’s this uh essay by Kant called um what is enlightenment? and people don’t read it anymore because he talks about how important it is for people to reach maturity to become citizens of a democracy. And you know, you can see like all of these um hyperlberal academics who want to decolonize everything just like freaking out about this essay like what that’s so normative like who wants to be mature? um maturity is really like oppressive and um you have to he’s gatekeeping reason like I I just hear when I read it I’m just like I just hear everyone objecting to it now and like no one’s reading it. I love this essay because I value reason. I value rationality. But you can see all these like we need to decolonize adulthood. We need to decolonize reason. we need to be like what about feelings and vibes and um all the but this started like in the 80s and 90s when I was in graduate school already like people were like um that’s so heteropatriarchal normative that because Buko actually you know my shim actually wrote a counter essay against Kant and so you have this idea that um maturity is normative maturity gives you this straight path people if you’re immature you can’t particip ipate. And so what we’ve had in this like um liberal reaction against the Enlightenment is the this um sacralization of immaturity and polymorphous perversity, which means that you are just a surface of feelings like everyone loves to love to lose for a while where you’re just a surface of feelings and vibes. And if you’re like vibing wrong with something, you’re having like a um nondi dialectical relationship with the other, whatever they say. But there’s no differentiation. Sorry. There’s I I can’t stop making fun of the but there’s no differentiation. You’re like an egg. And I really feel like a lot of these um young people today and living online, you’re literally the egg avatar. Like your skin is very fragile. They literally make memes of this. They call it the body without organs. And it’s a character of an egg. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the delusian thing. But then we have like all, you know, we have Tumblr and older forms of social media, Instagram now, Tik Tok, everything else. Um, taking that body without organs and um, forgetting about it, but using its principles to say that it’s better to be this undifferentiated egg-like or organism that has that’s just feeling or vibrating with the world. And part of the thing about Freud that I think is really important that nobody wants well everyone thinks is very normative is human beings are born in a very egg-like way. We’re not differentiated and we psychologically have to learn about our genitals. So we have to learn about um control of our bodies literally controlling our spine but also control of the sphincture, control of um all the orififices in fact and all the orififices give us so much pleasure in the beginning. You cry, you get the boob, you poop is kind of fun and then you learn like you can’t poop here. You every time you cry, you’re not getting the boob anymore. You have to execute to the world in a different way. Children learn through orality, but I feel like um the egg and the egg avatar is all about like nondiffiation, right? And celebrating like genital immaturity. Genital maturity also makes us have to confront our mortality. It makes us confront our limits and our bodily limits. when we, you know, you and I have participated in, you know, political movements and leftist spaces. Don’t you feel like sometimes you’re in a room with like a lot of really fragile eggs who can’t deal with actual confrontation or contradiction because they bump up against each other, they think they’re going to crack, right? And that’s just not a way to relate to the world. The difficulty of the world right now, the challenges that we’re facing, the trust that we need to have with regard to communication can’t be adjudicated by a bunch of eggs in a room worried about cracking each other. Oh well. And and you know what? Compared with these eggs, Donald Trump as like angry happy baby seems to be a relief. I’ve heard you use the phrase before the tyranny of affect. What is the tyranny of affect? A effect and effect theory has to do with a kind of rationalization of feeling. And the whole question of affect is that it’s not they they like to say the effect theory people that it’s not individual. It’s in the room. It’s collect. It’s collective. It it is infectious. But this, you know, non-individualized, non-communicated, non- irrational feeling is something that um seems to justify a certain kind of behavior, justify a certain kind of attitude towards um the other towards objectivity. And so it’s to say that we share an affect, but we don’t share an objective world that we can describe, which is like the principle of physics, right? But you and I have this feeling and we’re in the vibes world. I I do think vibes are important because I think like when you look at the austerity of certain kinds of hyperrational um people in my profession, it’s really frightening how little how disconnected they are from a effect. But a effect is important, but it’s not the end all and be all of interubjectivity. It’s good to know where my where I end and you begin, but I feel like in the affect vibe world, it’s just like let’s just vibe together. Have you ever seen like Jenzers talk or they they they’re like this. They just nod. We’re doing it right now. I’m making you do it. And there’s this like assumed consent or ascent to things that actually has no um space for skepticism, for mutual recognition, maybe from my rejection of your ideas. But our shared reality says we have to confront certain struggles in the world. We have to confront physics, gravity. We share a physical world. We share an economic world of growing inequality. We share a world where corruption and is the name of the game. But we can’t name any of these things if we’re only vibing and and if I don’t have um any boundaries with regard to my ascent and I’m afraid to contradict you or dissent from you because then we will be cut off. Our egg our egg-like connection will be broken. Then we can’t actually reach mutually beneficial conclusions. We can’t have collectivity or solidarity if all we have is vi are vibes and affect there’s I guess the similarity between a few of the things that you mentioned is that these are themes names theories within the academy that seem to masquerade as analysis but actually create a block or create this undifferentiated space. There’s a generation of young people, uh, myself included, that were introduced to maybe the secondary and tertiary sources, but never actually got that education of the primary sources, the canon. Most of what we were taught was critiquing or debunking ideas that came before. And I think that goes a long way to explain some of the illiberal beliefs that have emerged in campus politics right now. How do you explain this rise of illiberal beliefs that’s happened in the last few years? I keep going back to this idea of the counterculturalists winning you know in the institutions and they succeeded. They became professors. They were very oppositional. You know, there was a cultural break within the professor where um this younger generation that were emerging in the 70s were very sure of themselves and their rectitude because the older generation wore tweed and you know suits and they were wearing jeans and listening to rock and roll. Like there was a huge cultural break between like the great what is it the silent generation and the boomers sort of taking over academia and they had a crusading a attitude like we’re not racist we are against the Vietnam war we’re anti-imperialist they were maybe led by you know their thought leader was Edward say Raymond Williams people who were more people who were actually arudite and then you have this generation of boomer cultist studies people who are like you know what we reject the canon we come in with a political um mission and we are successful in academia and so we are teaching the new young people a kind of enlightened um set of tool enlightened field of knowledge um and we tell them that you don’t have to read the canon anymore because it’s uh hetereroatriarchal normative And we can explore our feelings about f about stars. We can explore our relationship to popular culture. There really was a cultural revolution within academia. And in that cultural revolution, there was a fervor that you know these increasingly successful um cultural studies types were wielding like like a red guard. You know, like you read Shakespeare, you’re a reactionary. I’m actually like not the biggest Shakespeare fan, but let’s say you read Marcel Puce, you you like Samuel Beckett, you must be a reactionary because I just watch TV or I love Survivor. I’ve read a book about Madonna. I wanted to read Lost. Like there was a there was an oppositionality and an antagonism that then created I think this like crusading idea that transmits to younger people like we’re in a seminar but we’re actually on a crusade to destroy power. Like I love the way that people use that like um we’re dissecting power. That really does come from Fuko. I’m sure you heard about this. And it’s like power is this a transhistorical meta thing that that’s what I was going to ask is where do they think it comes from? Where do they think power comes from? Normativity. Okay. Or where do they think power come like heteropatriarchal norms? um the state organizations like this animist against bureaucracy that Trump is exercising really has like deep roots in the libertarianism of left and right that realize itself through the past 50 years. So you have to distrust the man, you know, the hippies and don’t trust anyone over 30, distrust the man. Like we’ve created this kind of antagonism that will say everything about power except capital and we’ll say everything about um um powers exercise over us except exploitation. For the right it’s like bureaucracy and institutions waste money. for the left liberals who you know come out of the foldian school and also hate bureaucracy bureaucracy is about you know standardization alienation and um discipline you mentioned before the boomer left there’s this uh politics that emerges around the 1968 generation in which I would argue that left-wing ideas become kind of infused or woven into this kind of libertarianism what are some of the origins of that belief system because what it seems to have brought now is a kind of left politics that advocates for small business which seems to be entirely ineffective. There was a book called Small is Beautiful which was all about um this kind of like hippie formations of communes versus organizations. It also comes out of you know this um critique of organizations that actually was in business management. You know the organization man was considered you know this guy I went to work every day was a conformist. It was part of the anti-conformity of that boomer left thinking that you know there’s there oppressive organizations and then there’s this free flowing small business smallcale you know Brooklyn rooftop farming thing that can save the world right just don’t join into any just don’t join any large organizations and this okay and the other thing that I’m really fascinated by and um is part of the trauma book too is that among um second-wave feminists, the consciousness raising group ha was so critical and sort of turning like discontented housewives into feminists, right? And there was this mythical like aha moment where you’d be sharing with your girlfriends and suddenly you’re like aha that’s power you know p I’m being taught all these things and I need to liberate myself from um my domestic sphere and burn my bra and go out and experiment sexually and emotionally with other people not my husband or my children. And so this kind of um instantaneous feeling of enlightenment is better than the actual hard work of reason upon which the enlightenment is based which is you know maturity right so you had fe secondwave feminists telling women like it’s okay to regress and because you’re going to you’re going to free yourself from all these norms. The other thing that was happening in the 70s was this revival of um mind cure thought and the new age. And one of the things that people forget about the new age and um the hippies was that they really were sure that we were transitioning from the age of Pisces to the age of Aquarius. The what? What? Okay. The age of Pisces. Okay. The age of Pisces was like a really oppressive age was the age of Christ. and um disciplinarity and some time in the 60s you know end of the 20th century you look pained I’m sorry to be telling you this keep going but it’s it’s you got to know these things Joshua but we were changing from the age of Pisces to the age of Aquarius and in the age of Aquarius is the age of um electricity of connectivity and eventually like even the internet and so educated in Marxism where is these long painful boring equations that just rationally prove the extraction of surplus value. This sounds [ __ ] insane. What are we talking? We’re talking about like constellations like Uhhuh. astrology. Yeah. Okay. And um you know how the the calendar goes like Pisces Aquarius. I don’t know actually. I’ve never cared to learn this stuff. I’m sorry. December December January is Pisces and then we move to um I don’t know where we are we now. Aquarius is like February and Aquarius is about like loving and communication and um we’re going to reach this alternative enlightenment. It’s an alternative to reason to genital maturity it to even you know um normative forms of interubjectivity because we’re just going to all connect and the inter well I I shouldn’t say the inter this new communitarianism that was sort of the structure of the internet at the bottom of the California ideology is all about this instantaneous transformation like no effort necessary for the revolution is just going to happen. And you know I’m sure that the boomer cultural studies props would be like we don’t believe in astrology but this was like I think their thinking and when I look at um the world that they’ve given us you know there are um all these departments that have in anthropology especially that have decolonizing the curriculum in them like our voluntary we are so enlightened that we’re going to go through the entire mass of human history and also human um endeavor and just decolonize things one by one so that when we click a little button they’ll be enlightened like they were this is colonial thought we click a button now it’s decolonized it’s voluntarist it’s um immediate and it’s um gestural and performative in a way that makes us feel better about reading Boa France Boas or Margaret me and they had you terrible prejudices and biases. They didn’t take antibbias training and we’re going to, you know, um take the bias out of their work. So, there’s a kind of um instantity that I’m talking about that’s very similar to the culture of the internet. Like all of these things, all of these things have intellectual precedents. Like why we want why do we want um instantity so badly? This it was this imagination that was already cultivated and created in the 60s and then the 70s where you have this coming to you one day you you know it’s like the red pill black belt thing too like all you have to do is take a pill really you don’t have to like think anything through and you never have to change your point of view after you’ve taken the pill. We’ve mentioned the enlightenment a few times. Some of the ideologies that I see rising coming into prominence in the last few years include theocracy literally monarchy. People make arguments for things that are analogous to the cast system. Yeah. And uh on the other hand, you have a left that rejects the enlightenment. Yeah. Because it’s somehow responsible for racism, colonialism, the you tragedies of of history. Has all of this baggage that comes along with it. Right. How should the left understand its relationship to the enlightenment? For better or worse, the idea that all human beings are created equal, that reason and scientific method replicable through experimentation and documented through a kind of mathematical empirical observation of the world that other people can follow with regard to my logic. this kind of anti-mystical grounding, anti- religious, anti-propagandistic, anti- authoritarian idea of a subject who could engage with others in the world through reason, not mysticism, not subjugation. That idea for better or worse was hatched in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. There are material reasons for this. The bourgeoisi created enough leisure that some there was enough people who were able to engage in philosophical thinking outside of the toutelage of the monarchs and the church. They were able to hide, you know, beginning with Galileo, they were persecuted by the church. And then by the 17th century in France, Deart was able to sort of um give a deist cast to what he was really pioneering which was the scientific method. And this moment you know precipitates the violent overthrow of feudalism in France and also the violent overthrow of the British Empire in the United States. This idea that all human beings are created equal and that systems of oppression and belief are meant to enslave people in a state of what Kant called permanent toutelage. that we should all be freeing ourselves from the state of toutelage in order to be able to um enjoy and participate in human progress and endeavor which means the emancipation of the majority of human beings from both want um oppression and um exploitation that begins for better or worse as a form of thought in Europe. Europe you we can we can stamp our feet and say well you know there are other forms of enlightenment there you know what the [ __ ] happened but the scientific method that gave us electricity that gave us the the buildings the possibility of building buildings this high urbanization along with this ravages project modernity was born in the 17th century in Europe Mhm. And there are many reasons we could think about this that you could say that Protestantism and a certain form of you know Jesuitical Catholicism was already um on a secularizing trajectory. Yes. Right. So the whole the the thing now that people are rejecting I think is that in actuality democratic forms and capitalism cannot coexist and capitalism is eating democracy alive. So a lot of young people like my son who’s only grown up with the dysfunctional democracy. I think I saw the end of it. He’ll say like it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Democracy doesn’t work. This is this is not working. And they feel attracted to a kind of authoritarianism because the authoritarianism seems more obvious and naked exercise of power. Whereas, you know, if you have people preaching to you about um let’s use our reason together and there’s just all this [ __ ] irrationality going on, especially in the left liberal spheres, then you just think, well, maybe we need to go back to strong top tobottom um forms of rule because democracy is just hypocrisy to younger. It’s it’s fallen down. There’s a there’s nostalgia for authoritarianism. I can understand that. The other thing is pragmatically speaking, left organizations should be more structured and authoritarian because we’re not going to be just like aggregated little eggs trying to take down the system that we live in because it doesn’t prov organization actually provides um stability, transmissibility of knowledge. I feel like every time there’s a new um organizational fervor on the left, we keep repeating the same mistakes which were already described in that Joe Freeman article called the tyranny of structurelessness. If you haven’t read it, you should really read it. And it’s about how the women’s movement ate itself up in the 1970s where um we you’re work one day you’re working for women’s liberation and the next day you’re being canceled by a group of women who think that you’re you’re too male identified or you know you’re not um you don’t you’re not a m a loyal enough member of the sisterhood. And every single left organization that I’ve um seen comes to this point at some point where it becomes a purity politics and I think it is the um end you know the end point of a kind of crypto religiosity. You know what puts that down is highly highly structured organizations extreme, you know, extremely centralized exercise of power and then you say it’s a dictatorship. We listen to your complaints but there’s no like um voting involved. Um, so, so I think young people are legitimately questioning how democracy can function in a country where capitalism just eats um, democracy alive right now. The fact that Elon Musk has $500 billion at his disposal means that he has a weapon. It’s like he has a nuclear weapon and then the rest the rest the 330 million rest of us have like sticks. And this is the thing about caring is that at some point we have to get rid of the get out of the humid sentimental ideas about caring for helpless things and helpless people even and think about how to build organizations with lasting power that can confront the obscene accumulation of wealth that’s taking place today. I don’t think it’s going to be easy. I think that if you if you organized a protest now that really was powerful um I’m going to sound too conspiratory but the powers that will be they’ll come in the ground put that down either through infiltration through physical threats so it um there hasn’t been a threatening um figure like that since Bernie and they put him down they put down that movement really quickly the other thing about the enlightenment is that once you have an articulated reason um reasoned and rational analysis of political economy, of the unconscious, of mental health, of childhood, of eroticism, of exploitation. It’s very hard to silence it once it’s been written, once it’s been communicated. If you want to regress to irrationality, you have to fight really hard to repress the truth that is out there. M and so you know Freud wrote the voice of reason is quiet but it will not be silenced and if you see and I feel like all the irrationality of liberalism is being punished by Trump. You you can’t be that stupid and irrational and try to fool people as much as they did without some kind of um karmic revenge because there is a I think reason that we all share. This is the enlightenment speaking. We all have a capacity to reason. We all share it. You can suppress it. You can, you know, become a holy roller. You can join a cult. You can um join Curtis Yarvin in his nostalgia for monarchy. But we all have a sense of um logic. It’s innate in human beings. And it will at some point explode. it will at some point react against irrationality either violently, effectively or ineffectively if it’s not organized. But this was also the um such an important point for Marx for Freud for Kant for the thinkers of the enlightenment which is that um human beings are born equal not because who of who they are but because of their shared capacity for reason. Right? Even the caveman who built, you know, who hunted or who built something, who retained domesticated animals, who um found organiza tribal organizations that allowed for his clan to survive or her clan to survive. They had to use reason at some point to become we we as a species had to use our minds at some point to become the top predators of the earth because we are physically very weak, but we are mentally very strong. and God and tyrants and capitalism would like to take that away from us but we they can’t really because the um the secret has been broken. This kind of irrationality that has become I think prominent and mainstream on the left. I find this to be in contradiction with overcoming the market form of organization in society that if one was to go about let’s say economic planning or even highspeed rail something like this that would be a very deliberate rational approach and having lost that um I think we’ve kind of lost trace of this lineage this is why I wanted to talk a little bit about the enlightenment today because Marx is scaffolded on top of the shoulders and the insights of Adam Smith and Adam Smith before him there is this school of thought called the enlightenment. Where did the American left go wrong? Is this something that happened in the ’90s? Is it something that happened in uh 1968, 1917? Did it happen in the 1700s? Like where do we start to scope this problem? When did we start to wor when did the left start to worship irrationality? I think that’s a good question. And I think that the um secularizing drive of both Freud and Marx to depose all gods and potentates and um irrationality that um got stopped I think with the new left who began to worship irrationality as a form of oppositionality. And when we say the new left, what period are we referring to? The SDS, you know, the students for a democratic society um becoming like more new age like 68 to 72, right? But the other thing that’s interesting about this moment is that it actually um comes at a moment when there’s massive redistribution of wealth from the top down and there’s a kind of middle class comfort that Americans haven’t enjoyed before. And it’s at this moment of like actual um social democratic triumph that both capital needs to improve its increase its rate of profit and de-industrialization of the United States begins and the outsourcing of heavy manufacturing to East Asia begins and um wealth starts to be redistributed back up through the 70s. But there’s this kind of um optimism I would say that and um hubris that the new left had because it sort of just it sort of assumed that there would be a stable middle workingass alliance and that was broken completely by Reagan. Um which also leads to you know the confirmation of the left theory that social democracy itself is not stable. Yes. Right. like social security is a social democratic institution that the rightwing right now wants to eat alive privatize, right? So it’s a social democratic thing. And so if you really think about it then um it was always unstable because they were mad the right was mad when it was made when it was established and they were and they’ve been like salivating over this large sum of money that we pay into so that we don’t have to die in poor houses. And they’re think they’re thinking like how this is just sitting there. This they you know Elon Musk called it a Ponzi scheme which is either deliberate obfiscation or just like sheer stupidity. I think it was a policy paper from the Kato Institute or something like that repeating. Yeah. Yeah. This I I mean I Yes. Social democracy is unsustainable in the long term. Right. So there’s this kind of uh problem of historical development where there’s large profit margins at the beginning. You can redistribute this wealth into universal basic policies, social democratic infrastructure and then after a certain point of development necessarily austerity has to cut in and capital fights back against labor. And this is historically the problem of social democracy that it kind of works for a limited period of time. That crisis of social democracy can kind of break in two directions. either it can move towards neoliberal austerity as it did in you know 1972 to 1980 or it can move towards economic planning where you no longer need to use this price mechanism to organize society’s resources and so as we are encountering another period in which there may be certain forms of social democracy that happen in the advanced world like a I’ve heard it referred to as a green national security Keynesianism this kind of resurgence of not quite new deal politics, but things that more so resemble the New Deal liberalism that we were akin to before, you know, um the neoliberal period that again these opportunities to introduce forms of economic planning uh become possible, right? Good luck telling that to anybody who was raised on the canon of 1968 though there’s this sensorious trend that’s kind of emerged in the last few years. Where do you attribute that to? Is that something that came out of the boomer generation or on the liberal on the on the liberal left? Yeah, particularly among elite educated professionals among the the college campus left. Is that something that happened in the ‘9s? Is it the ’60s or where does that start? I don’t know where it started, but to me it’s very crypto religious. It’s all about excommunication. Um there’s a doctrine and the more powerful they became within liberal institutions, the more doctrinal error was not tolerated. So there there are doctrines that um have to do with like visibility, recognizability, centering marginalized voices even though you know we don’t have um or land acknowledgements or this mystical idea of identity giving you um some kind of moral um superiority over other people that um they really underwrote and I feel like they’re um the doctrinal deviations from identity politics if or wokeness if you like maybe even to re through recourse to a historical um high liberalism not to mention Marxism that is just not tolerated. Right. Right. This kind of intolerance is part and parcel of I what I was going to say is is their power. It’s like they’ve consolidated so much power and they don’t want to give up any of that power. Even though skepticism was always, I think, a, you know, kind of prime principle of um, liberalism, like I’m not going to take what you say at face value. I’m going to be skeptical. We’ll argue about it. I trust that you I trust that you won’t lie to me. And I trust that you won’t hate me if I disagree with you. But somehow, because we can’t have universalism because of postmodern pluralism, we don’t even believe in God. So all we believe in is doctrinal purity. Yeah. You know what um leftists need to do? They need to grow up and have boundaries. And I’m I am going to be like the Jordan Peterson, the Joanie Peterson right now. Okay. Um it is not okay to be a little egg avatar. You ha we have to treat ourselves and each other like adults which means sometimes we’ll be upset by the world. We will make we will be upset by other people’s opinions, other people’s behaviors and we have to treat ourselves and the other with respect because we have to keep the idea of good social relations before we can even get to socialism. And good social relations means good boundaries. And this is why having a strong ego is actually critical to being a good political subject. Otherwise, you’re divided like an egg between the super ego and the id. Freud said the superego and the id are on one loop. The ego has to be a mediating term between them. So people grow the [ __ ] up. Speaking of uh mega communism, we’re in a situation where historic margins of working-class people have voted for Republicans. This is something that’s been growing over the last few years, but it’s impossible to ignore now, even for the mainstream media. You mentioned before this kind of left liberal doctrine. It seems to resemble something of like a priest class. Our mutual friend Angela Nagel described uh some of this increasing margin of working-class support for conservative right-wing populist parties as a kind of clerical rebellion. Does that analogy map to you? Does that make sense? It does. It does. But I I don’t know if it’s clerical rebellion or popular blasphemy. What’s the difference between the two? The clerical rebellion means like there’s one part of the church that rebelss against another part of the church. And I feel like the Republican party is not really like um it’s not devout or pious enough with liberal um liberal values. It just wants to encourage popular blasphemy like but I think it’s I think it’s important. I was like, “This is a distraction.” But right now, I think it’s part of this irrationality. Of course, trans people should have civil rights, but why can’t we call people mothers? Why? When my girlfriend was giving birth or going to birthing classes, um, prenatal education classes, they had to call mothers birthing people. This is in Brooklyn, um, three years ago. How did it get to that point where we couldn’t use the word mother anymore? Didn’t we think there would be a re popular reaction against that [ __ ] And it was totally doctrinal and um my friend said, you know, she talked to some of these doulas and these um um you know, natal education people and they were afraid of being cancelled because they have, you know, a presence online. That’s how they get their business. Um midwives and stuff like that. So they were conforming to the liberal doctrine of Brooklyn that you couldn’t actually say um early education, early childhood education for mothers or you know um I don’t know birthing classes for mothers. It had to be birthing classes for birthing people. How do we explain this historic margin of workingclass people voting for Republicans? Like how much of that culture wars, trans kids, like all of this kind of stuff. And how much of it is this kind of underlying crisis of let’s say the Democrats abandoning labor as part of their coalition? Like what proportionally makes up this historic shift? So let’s say we wanted to do the um we double down as liberals on identity politics, but we also fought for universal healthcare. We also fought for the break up of monopolies. We also fought for minimum wage. Let’s say we fought for both things with equal amounts of fervor and we actually gave people concrete benefits that made them trust or great trust their government or their political policies their and their political policies. Maybe that would have been okay. But the Dems pushed the language rituals without really having any stake in providing for workingclass and middle class people. you know, Trump actually just wrote checks at the end of COVID. Um Biden stopped that. I mean, and there were there were certain things that um you know, um people kept saying like his inflation reduction act did so much they just had a bad, you know, they just had um bad optics, bad communications. They should have told people what how they were improving their lives. Maybe they actually weren’t improving their lives. Maybe it wasn’t just a PR stunt, but they push this other like um cultural program harder than they did the economic programs. They You know what I was thinking on my way over here? I was like, look at all these executive orders that Trump was doing. What if a Democratic president actually said, “We’re going to abolish insurance companies. They don’t do anything. We’re going to have singlepayer. I’m going to do it by executive order because here’s a billion-dollar company that’s like deni, you know, the CEO of a United Healthcare would still be alive. Luigi wouldn’t have had to do what he had to do. And um we’d have just said no insurance companies like e executive order. Yeah. Yeah. And we would have gotten all this push back, but you’d have been saying I’m on the side of Americans who’ve been exploited by the insurance companies. Why? and I want mothers to be called birthing people, which I would have still object objected to, but it was like, I’m gonna do this really powerful thing and take away this middleman that’s adjudicating your health care for profit. That’s, you know, there’s so many doctors that are angry about this, so many nurses that are angry about this, so many people who suffered like this. Who would be angry at you for punishing insurance companies? But they won’t do it because all of they’re just their billionaire donors don’t want them to. So they’re just like puppets of a different kind of oligarch. I mean because I was really thinking about that like what kind of symbolic executive order could a democratic um president have made that would have galvanized people even if eventually got whittleled away and um challenged in the courts whatever. What if you just said you know what United Healthcare Blue Cross Blue Shield you guys are no good. You’re you’re bad people. Like talk like Trump. You you’re you’re you’re hurting people. You’re horrible. You’re doing cr You’re doing crimes against America. I’m getting rid of you. And then everyone be like, “Yeah, now that.” But you’re no, these guys are bad guys. The insurance companies are bad guys. You’d have at least a hundred million Americans going, “Yes, on my side.” And you’re like, “I’m on your side, people. These are bad guys.” You know, in an alternate universe, I see Luigi, me and Gony coming down the street gunning someone down. Someone’s going to get really mad at these insurance CEOs. What value do they provide? None. So, let’s just get rid of them. On this topic of executive orders, this has been recently my hobby horse to discuss with people during uh Trump 2.0. There’s a lot of criticisms on the left about this concentration of power in the executive branch. People calling Trump a dictator and so on. And I think to myself that, you know, let’s imagine some point in the future there’s a candidate that you and I like and we want them to pass sweeping policy reforms. We actually do want a very empowered executive branch that can do FDR like transformations to the US. Is there something that we’re kind of shooting ourselves in the foot with some of these critiques? fear of power, fear of actually transforming the stuffing myself because we we on the left I mean I think generally I think you and I would probably disagree with this but I hear these criticisms kind of bubbling up in the zeitgeist. Everything is so procedural, right? They’re so technocratic. He’s not following the rules. I think that for Yeah. He’s not following the rules. Yeah. The the rules that are uh written on paper, right? Is that okay? He’s he’s not he he’s uh he’s just doing stuff. So, this goes back to I think our idea to one of your questions about how democracy how democracy for younger people seems like it’s a failed experiment is that it’s become completely processionual like it’s all process based. It’s not politics. This is how um David Puff and Pentinfolks talked about the um failure of the Harris campaign too. It was all like technical. Their failures were technical, not political. Like actually sovereign an executive order and a sovereign act on the part of the president is highly political. Like he’s doing things and he’s changing the political realm. He’s changing what we imagine possible through government. He’s making people angry, making some people um happy and he find he feels that he is the expression of the popular will. Yeah. Because he won so many votes. Why did no Democratic president feel that way? Democratic presidents think they’re the ex they’re the um managers of constitutional procedure. But you know what? Actually, you could think of executive power as expression of popular will. And now that um all of Trump’s executive orders are going to be challenged in courts, his followers are going to say those judges were appointed. They were not elected. like that. The courts are actually anti-democratic. But I feel like we we right now have to push the limits of what executive power is for Trump to execute the will of the oligarchs. If one day we do get a progressive leader, someone is going to have to do that to thwart the will of the oligarchs, right? But you cannot continue to be technocratic and depoliticizing and apolitical. One of the things that the Democrats are really good at doing is making people feel home hopeless and um demobilizing them politically. This is I will not include this in the public version of the podcast, but my contrarian impulse here is that if one had to imagine organizing a national economy that contained a thousand millionaires versus 10 billionaires, there are procedures, there are levers that can be used over a small group of people like Jack Maw for example. Like if we have the neo FDR that gets into office, like we just put Elon Musk in prison for like 10 years and you don’t have to worry about taxing, you know, 900 other people that are routing their capital through the Cayman Islands and using tax avoidance and whatever. It’s like it’s just concentrated in one guy. That’s a little bit of a lever there. I Oh, you’re not going to put the Well, I I’ll I’ll say that I totally agree with you. a little too maybe for the No, but I’ll agree with you on this because I think I mean I put him in jail now. I wouldn’t wait but you know once we do have neo FDR like NEO FDRA put Yeah. And you know what the other thing is um Jack was never in jail. He was just sequestered like this is because there’s no hab there’s no habit corpus in China or we don’t need to have this on but um he was just um probably like um under house arrest and um not told not to make public appearances for a while. So the the thing that I thought was really interesting about this was that what seeing what’s happening now is that instead of having Jacob bride the Chinese government, the Chinese government scared the billionaires as you said and now we have the billionaires exercising their will or one billionaire at least the others are scared but exercising his will over Trump and um um collaborating with him And in China, it it’s antagonistic. It’s like, and the government said, you know, we let you make all this money, but in the end, we’re still in charge of you. And that was And you know what’s crazy about that is that if you look at Chinese public opinion, they’re like, “Yeah, you know what? He had too much money.” Yeah. No, it’s not like, “Oh, Jack, he should be free.” You know, there was a lot of skepticism like, well, I think he didn’t pay his taxes that year. You know, there there was like public criticism of him, come to think of it, huh? I don’t think Elon Musk did either. Yeah, exactly. There’s no there wasn’t public agilation like he’s a he, you know, he’s a multi-billionaire. We really admire him. Oh, poor guy. His civil rights. There was like, oh, maybe maybe he did something. Yeah. Yeah. or at least his civil rights comes at the cost of everyone else’s life expectancy because he’s got all the resources like Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about social media for a moment. Um there’s a the kind of theory or political common sense that has emerged that people will refer to as this mass leaderless disorganized protest. Where did some of these ideas come from? Why does this seem like a plausible uh common sense idea to many of today’s left? You know the academic sources are of course anarchists like David Greyber um neop populist anti-marxists like Ernesto Llau and Shantelm who kind kind of moved away from um old left forms of protests and strikes into um talking about these kinds of um electric spontaneous organizations from popular discontent. They they had a whole argument against organization because organization would naturally become oppressive. you would have a hierarchy of demands whereas these populist uprisings they were Argentinian um could take a chain could create a chain of demands that would be non- hierarchical and I think you know I’m not that familiar with David Greyber but you know he for me he’s part of the school of also the no logo Naomi Klein types which are just like um we protest the WTO and consumerism right and that in and of itself is a kind of um opposition itionality that will attract more and more people and that will make global multinationals afraid of us. Um I think that Greyber was talking about also you know anthropological formations where people preodern organizations that could have been very effective that kind of strong institutionalization of anarchic thinking as anti- athoritarianism. I have great admiration for Greyber’s work, but I feel like very often people are afraid to say this, but like how are those forms of organizations standing up to power right now? Once again, is it’s like overlooking the rationalization that the enlightenment took with regard to organizations and corporations and financialization and the organization of modes of production. You know, in preodern forms of modes of production, you could have maybe this kind of more floating u mobile organization. But once again you can admire them without worshiping them. So in 2011 um you know occupy was everywhere. People had were had lost their homes. There were young anarchists and old grandmas who were occupying the piece of lawn in front of um city council. And I went to the I had a 10-year-old. I didn’t have a lot of time. I go and I went to Occupy UCI meetings. There was a five-hour meeting that determined that we could not call it occupy UCI because that was like occupying the occupied territories. They rebranded it as take back UCI. So I felt you know what else were the item menus for the 5-hour meeting. No this anything else in the No nothing else. This took a long time to debate but um there were many many meetings and there was an occupation. There was for a long time there was resistance against placing a list of demands um in the hands of the administration and finally after really a lot of struggle and my arguing with them and arguing against my colleagues who are part of this anarctic thing where they said if you have demands then you’re just giving power to the administration. So I was like so what do you what are we occupying? What’s the protest? What’s the end of protest? um showing power by just having you know all those tents in the center of the campus. So after you know couple of weeks of this they the students realized they needed to have list of demands and they came up with a list of um um non-prioritized demands that had to do with freezing the tuition showing more transparency in the budgeting. I can’t even prioritize the demands. Yeah, they can’t praise. But listen, but listen to the So listen, it gets worse. So, but um one of the demands was genderneutral bathrooms. So, they delivered the demands to President Drake was like chair of the faculty senate and he was at the meeting when Drake looked at the demands, laughed and said, “I’ll give them gender neutral bathrooms.” Yeah. So, tuition’s going up, but you got He literally laughed at the loose of nonpart. I mean, you could you could actually just I mean, you don’t have to build another one. You can just change the sign. So, the tuition hike will probably cover it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. Incredible. And this was at a time also when the faculty had to take take a four to 10% pay cut because the situation was so dire like it was there was so much possibility for galvanizing public opinion. The students were suffering the faculty and staff were suffering. We were all suffering. Students can classes were being cancelled. The budgets were frozen. But you know we could there was these 5-hour meetings about demands and you know somehow I still remained hopeful. What is the role of culture in political struggle? People will ask what is PMC? What is PMC? I see this a few times a week. Maybe it would be worth the time now to talk a little bit about the history of that term about Barbara and John Aaron Reich. Who are they? Where does this story begin? So um Barbin John Eron Reich published an essay called the professional managerial class in 1977 in a journal which looks more like a zen. It’s online called radical America. It’s beautiful. There’s a little essay in there about hairdressing salons as workingclass women’s spaces. you know, you you get a picture of like American radicalism in, you know, in the late 70s even, which is so lively, you know, um and so deeply connected with workingclass life worlds. And they were and in this essay they said that um left liberal or political spaces, you want to call that, are increasingly dominated by credentialed white collar elites, right? and their and their vision of politics and that this kind of um organic relationship to workingclass um interests that once the Democratic Party once could represent through its um sort of big tent inclusion of union leaders and union workers has been broken by this monopolization of liberalism by credentialed elites. Recently there’s an article in Jacaben by Chris Misano saying that um most of the American workforce is per is white collar now and that we don’t is either service worker white collar um college educated or um and that the industrial blue collar working class is just dis is just disappearing in America and we should just embrace the progressive politics of this um new class. It’s called new of white collar white collar workers and these white collar workers like identity politics and we can’t think that breadandbut issues are going to be some kind of like messiah. Yeah. I mean that sounds wrong in like 12 different ways. So crazy you have to read it. It just came out like read it actually. It’s so confusing. Maybe you don’t have to read it just because it’s so confusing and contradictory, but as a kind of um apologia for Democratic Party politics, it might be useful to read it. Oh, I see. So, um so what they say is that we have downwardly mobile white collar elites, but they like identity politics, too. These people like identity politics. And so, what I um what I take from this is um new statistical readings of the changing nature of the American workforce. I mean the in a lot of the statistics that I site um we have outof wage workers 25% are professional managerial workers and their numbers you know because they look at professionals they check out the managerial qualities like that group the professional white collar and service worker they include the service worker they include nurses they’re expanding to um 40 to 60% and you know agricultural workers now make up only 3%. The um industrial working class is you know um really uh shrinking as well. So that um what misano’s argument against the rights would be well there is no blue collar industrial working class now with its values and with its breadandbut issues. We have to just massage Democratic party politics to combine some breadandbut issues but with progressive identity politics as basically like the Democratic party doesn’t have to change. They just keep going with keep going. But what um but historically speaking what I think is really interesting about the manager and the foremen in the factory under industrial capitalism and then the white collar worker the MBA in the later part of the 20th century is that um in the family firm I think Markx talks about this in the late 19th century the clerk who are the accountant like all the clerks and the people who work to manage the finances of a large family firm. Let’s like Tyson Crop in Germany, right? The people who were working to manage those resources were almost like family servants. Like I said, they they often worked, you know, very closely with the head of the family. Sometimes they even worked in the family home. That family home becomes like the office. But as um corporations become more complex, this layer of people need special training. their numbers expand. Some of them like under tailorism are taken up by the be from the best workers and promoted through the ranks and then we have specializations in college in management to um expand this notion of accounting of worker discipline and I would say today like financialization um speculation and liability. So lawyers, lawyers, accountants, managers expand within this group and you have this idea that they are mediating between lower tier wage workers and um the owners of capital, the bosses, right? So this this class is expanding in number does expand as capitalism becomes more complex and its values are the values of the capitalist but with a progressive and liberal veneer because it also has to mediate the interests of the work of the wage workers below it. But more and more um I find and the Eron Reichkes you know show see it in the 70s is that they are protecting only the interests of capital while trying to differentiate themselves from lower tier wage workers when this class was smaller and and worker unrest was more dangerous um you have someone like John Dwey you have Edward A Ross the early professor when only 5.5% of the American population went to college in 1900 They um tried to standardize and regularize and protect academic freedom from the ravages of the market and from the demands of the bosses. And this was a moment when the naent professional classes were probably the most progressive at all. But you could also say from a purely historical materials point of view that they were only mediating and stabilizing the immediate unrest and crisis of capital. M so you could say that they just stabilized capital so that there was no revolution in 1896 you know and um they prolonged its life in some way but I also think that someone like Jane Adams wasn’t formally um recognized formally educated but was a pioneer of social work she actually did improve the lives of Chicago tenement immigrants in um terms of these social science instruments that we take for advantage today like taking surveys in the tenementss. You know, elite Victorian ladies did not even want to go into these feted areas and um thought that they were just crime and disease ridden and when you go and look at the Jane Adams Museum in um Chicago today, it’s like standing all alone because everything else around it was demolished and turned into freeways. But someone like had this idea that maybe we should preserve this house. Um there are really like incredible uh maps of like where neighborhoods, languages spoken, um rates of disease, child birth, deaths and maternity death rates, and they’re all on paper. They’re all archived. And so her purpose for that was to improve social services for the Chicago um slums. But you know today all of these surveys that social science and social workers have inherited as part of the professional managerial class is about managing resources managing like austerity right for um the poor, the underprivileged etc. Like her her contact was like being in the community with them. But now we instrumentalize poverty knowledge to create more studies, more grants, more surveys in the um in the university. There’s actually a book called um poverty knowledge by Sarah Okconor and but there’s also another book called automating inequality which is about how data gathering and data veillance was first exercised on a massive scale through welfare. M so the so the professional managerial class might we we could say manages inequality today manages workers for the interest of capital private equity if you like people like have specialized interests and abilities which um allow them to do jobs that differentiate themselves from unskilled wage workers. I have to say though that I have had so many letters from lawyers, doctors, medical ethics trainers, people who are working large organizations who are part of the professional elite who have seen how um this how our stratum has totally betrayed the public good. Like people just write me from all over ever since virtueters came out and they’ll say like I can’t say this out loud. No one is going to um listen to me or thank you for writing this book. I feel less alone like within the people are like oh PMC you’re just a self-hating PMC no it’s called being self-critical like I like having professional knowledge I think expertise is important but we’re seeing how within the management of healthcare for instance healthc care is not managed for the knowledge for the well-being of patients or um to respect the expertise of doctors it’s for profit of the insurance companies in 2013 there’s an important essay by Barbara and John Aaron Reich called the death of a yepy dream, the rise and fall of the professional managerial class. Do you understand the PMC as uh expanding or shrinking or or where do you see their role in society? Are they growing in power now? So that that essay I have to say I disagreed with their conclusions but it was written like right on the heels of Occupy Wall Street. So there were a lot of downill mobile PMC people who were in the or college educated people who wanted to be PMC who were in the encampments and they were very optimistic about the fact that there would be a new coalition between different strata wage workers to rebel against capital. I think that as capital um um shrank um well-paying jobs, wellpaying white collar jobs, the PMC’s role as a gatekeeper into that world became more and more important. the gate the the sort of narrow door from like college degree to elite job becomes smaller and smaller and that and its gatekeeping function actually made it more powerful and I think that what they underestimated was how powerful that gatekeeping function would be. Yeah. and um how disorganized the left was and how this kind of anarco libertarianism within Occupy Wall Street would turn into uh kind of crypto religious cancel culture. Like they didn’t they didn’t really experience that. I mean Barbara Enrich passed away a few years ago. RIP she oh I’m sorry she was cancelled. you know that because she um she was cancelled online, you know, when she was in her late 70s by a bunch of young um social justice warriors because she said something about how Maria Hondo, the um declutterer, she said it’s amazing that America has one that one of its most popular social media influencers doesn’t even speak English because this was the um the height of Mariah’s like um decluttering ring social media empire. And for some reason, everyone thought that was really racist that she mentioned that Japanese woman didn’t speak English. Does she speak English? I haven’t subtitled. I think it’s all subtitled. Oh, so she just literally doesn’t speak English. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And they culturally was cultural appropriation. This is one of the most awful points like and I remember thinking like all what have any of you done for the American left? this this woman is a monument to the American left in in um American left intellectual history. And she she puts out she was on you know Erin Reich was on Twitter, you know, she was like a woman of the people and she was just commenting on popular culture and uh you know we had that kind of like racial race racialist jihad going on and even mentioning this meant that she had to have a fatwa put on her. I couldn’t I I I don’t know what she made of it, Erin Reich herself, but um it was kind of like her 1977 article come to like ironic fruition, you know, that the values of this class would be so divorced from many material issues that it would only police people on the level of language and ritual. And so that so when she she and John wrote this in 77, she was much more precient than 2013 when I think she wanted to believe she and John wanted to believe that um the revolution was coming again. They were quite 77 was you know sort of the death of 68 revolution but 2013 after Occupy Wall Street was them trying to be optimistic about organized protest. Yeah, there’s definitely a Jordan Peterson clean your room joke in here somewhere, but I’m not going to make it. But there was um something that um Maria Hunter did that was really funny where you have to take all your possessions, put them in your hand, and ask yourself, does this give me joy? And if it doesn’t, you throw it away. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. No, I do. I do know. Yeah. On this topic of the clary, the priest class, there’s another term that people will throw around recently called the Brahman left. What does the Brahman left describe? What are we trying to get at here? You know, Pikati is French and he’s really talking about this Thomas [ __ ] is the author responsible economist who says that he’s not a Marxist but wrote um incredible books about capital in the 21st century. And his his um thesis about the Brahman left is that there’s a certain kind of um leftist who has who’s not only um wealthy but has all the social and cultural capital and tries to exercise their idea of um cultural and economic politics as a dominant ideology in their countries. But what I was going to say was that his um analysis was based on the French like leftb bank leftists. The um just very quickly the analogy he’s making here to the Brahman cast. Should we define that for the audience if they’re not familiar? So uh India um is a cast country where Hinduism religiously justifies a c division of the population through ca a cast system that has a divine um sanction. And the brahinss are a an upper cast group of people who are not supposed to touch certain kinds of labor and certain kinds of people. And so at the bottom of the social hierarchy are the Dalites who were literally called the untouchables right in the catch system. And at the top of the social system are Brahmans who rule the country, get educated but who also have certain restrictions on their activities that might um constrain them. And this cast system is part of a kind of Hindu feudalism that is unmovable because it’s divine. And when you have a Brahman left, one of the things that you could say is that it’s a contradiction in terms because leftism is about dynamism. Classes can come, classes fight, one class can take another um place in kind of a hegemonic role in the society and um Marx’s whole idea of class struggle is about the um violence and dynamism of class formation. Once you have once you use those two words together, you use this notion of a fixed perpetual divinely sanctioned class of people who are different from others and superior to them. and you combine it with um uh kind of secular leftism that shouldn’t embrace a cast system at all but certainly has its lifestyle and its um geographical and educational locations is much worse in France because the um as Pikati showed like the greatest amount of well the greatest number of wealthy people in France inherit their wealth um tax records in France were very very wellkept so he showed that the accumulation ition of capital actually happens over generations. Social and um cultural and economic capital are concentrated in geographical areas in Paris in a very small number of um educational institutions and you have to go to these schools and you become the ruling elite. you don’t go to these schools, you don’t enter government, you don’t enter um any of the um socially desirable circles in this very very centralized notion. And so it’s been it’s been translated into thinking about America. um we have you know our class system is not quite as old rigid as the French one but it’s still about a class that believes that it is superior to all other people because of some kind of inherited inherent let’s say not inherited but inheritant inherent qualities. So you’re in town to talk at PS1 the art museum. We’re going to explore this issue of care and why it’s so popular among uh cultural institutions in the last few years. Where can people find your work if they want to learn more about these topics? So, um the talk that I’m giving at PS1 is based upon this book that will be published by Verso next spring called Traumatized. And it is about sort of the um psychological underpinnings of liberal ideology through a historical treatment of trauma and trauma culture in since the 1970s. Let’s say secondwave feminism, anti-war going into deconstruction, psychoanalysis in academia. It will be very exciting and controversial. I hope I also have a Substack if you want to see just more day-to-day things about what I’m doing called Cluinon Cliu anan.substack.com where I fight against infantilization and I do bits on culture and film and I write more about art there than politics. But one of the things I really want to do as part of the substack in the future when I get things um more organized is have a weekly video called um userfriendly super ego where I address the psychological problems of living under oligarchical capitalism. Well, that’ll keep you busy. Yeah, it will. It will. I think people people can lose track of how satisfying good culture writing is because the political analysis is a necessary part of it. So I’m an immense fan of your writing. I encourage people to subscribe to your Substack. Huge fan of your books and our conversations are always very meaningful. So Catherine, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you.