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Bad Faith

Episode 348 Promo - "Who's Left" (w/ Benjamin Studebaker)

Bad Faith

Bad Faith

Chapo, Bernie, Left, Leftism, Socialism, Socialist, Berniesanders, Comedy, Democrat, News, Politics

4.52.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut Benjamin Studebaker joins Bad Faith to explain why he thinks the solutions offered by the U.S. pundit class are selling little more than false hope and podcast subscriptions (with exceptions). What about our system makes the Democracy crisis "chronic," why should we not be concerned about threats to democracy from Donald Trump, and what's the solution not being offered by the fallen elites that comprise the media class?

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Produced by Armand Aviram.
Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Coming out of 2016, I think gradually the Bernie movement McGovernized, it became more focused around the concerns of college educated Americans.

0:09.4

In the book I make a class distinction between the working class, people who work for a living

0:14.4

and don't go to college, the professional class, people who work for a living and do go to

0:18.4

college, and the oligarchs and employers who own businesses and derive money from rents or from investment. and go to college and people who do. That this split is in terms of what issues you tend to prioritize.

0:36.0

I think it is also a function of the drying up of opportunities

0:40.3

for people who do go to college.

0:41.8

It's become the case that many people who do go to college. It's become the case that many people who do go to college

0:45.0

no longer get the kinds of prestige jobs or roles

0:48.0

that pay well that they expected when they went,

0:51.5

that there's been an explosion, of course, of student debt.

0:55.1

So what we're finding is that lots of professionals are coming out of college, loaded up

0:59.6

with debt, with no choice but to take whatever jobs the market makes available.

1:03.3

These jobs are often not much better than traditional working class jobs,

1:07.1

especially if you think about those as what they used to mean in the 70s,

1:10.3

a steel mill job.

1:11.5

They're not better than those jobs, adjusted for inflation or in terms of living standards or access to health care or housing. They're not better. In some cases, they're worse.

1:20.0

An effect of this is that the, what I call the fallen professionals, the professionals who don't end up in the kinds of jobs that they hope that they would end up with, are bearing a lot of resentment and frustration. I think that's understandable and very sympathetic. I think that there is an invitation to them to direct that against the traditional workers who don't go to college, to look down on them in the way that a house slave would look down on a field slave.

1:46.4

To say, well, at least I've been to college and I've got the markers of education.

1:51.8

I know what words to use. I know how to talk, and these people, they're not educated,

1:55.6

they don't have those markers, they're not as good as me. They may think they're as good as I am because they make the same

2:00.1

money or they live in the same kind of house, but they're not actually as good as I am.

2:04.9

And this comes into our organizing and into our politics where if we have traditional workers

...

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