Jacobin Show: Why Americans Hate the Government w/ Matt Bruenig
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2021
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every Wednesday at 6 PM ET, Jen Pan, Ariella Thornhill, and Paul Prescod host a new episode of The Jacobin Show, offering socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the audio version of the broadcast on February 24, 2021.
Matt Bruenig, founder and president of People's Policy Project, joins the show to talk about building a functioning welfare state, the Family Fun Pack, and what's wrong with how we think about the racial wealth gap today.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.0 | Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the jack up in show. I'm Jen Pan and I'm here today with |
| 0:40.8 | Ariela Thornhill. Ariela. It's good. It's good to see you again. Yeah. We miss had weeks |
| 0:47.0 | off. We both had weeks off. Luckily, we are actually kind of coincidentally reuniting |
| 0:53.0 | to sort of pick up where we left off with Jennifer Silva. So, you know, tonight's theme |
| 0:58.8 | is why Americans hate the government. And I just want to quickly mention that we will |
| 1:02.8 | have Matt Brunig, who is the founder and president of the People's Policy Project coming |
| 1:07.6 | on in about 30 minutes to talk to us about building an actually functioning welfare state. |
| 1:13.4 | But maybe we won't hate. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess that's kind of the |
| 1:18.6 | question that I wanted to kick off with. So, there's this conception, I think, that Americans |
| 1:26.0 | are uniquely libertarian or uniquely freedom loving. And that's why we don't have a strong |
| 1:30.9 | welfare state, right? Because Americans just hate the government too much. And there's |
| 1:35.1 | kind of a correlate, which is that Americans are too racist for a welfare state. But that's |
| 1:39.7 | another can of worms. And I don't know if we'll have time to open that one. Yeah. But on |
| 1:46.3 | the subject of Americans hating the government and being too libertarian, and that's why we |
| 1:51.2 | don't have a welfare state, I actually think that mixes up cause and effect. I think, you |
| 1:55.8 | know, I think part of the reason why Americans hate the government and Americans do hate the |
| 1:59.8 | government. There's very low public trust in the government in the US. Politicians and |
| 2:04.6 | Congress people are like some of the most hated figures in American life. So, there's |
| 2:09.2 | definitely a real animosity toward the government. But I actually think that it doesn't originate |
| 2:15.2 | with the population. It starts from the fact that the government wants to dismantle itself, |
| 2:20.5 | right? So, if you think back to the 1980s, Reagan in, you know, his 1981 inauguration speech, |
| 2:26.5 | he has the very famous line where he says something like, government is not the solution. |
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