How the Dems became the party of the Professional Managerial Class

28:18You had to have a certain kind of training. You had to take the Hippocratic Oath. With lawyers, you had to take the bar so that you could really fight for your clients. And for professors, you had to have a certain kind of training and your profession would protect you from the distortions of donors and rich people. and you were supposedly working on knowledge for knowledge's sake. And a whole bunch of professions like psychologists and social workers also emerge at this point. Today, they make up this kind of white-colored salary class makes up about 25 % of the American workforce. You have to have a credential in order to do your job.

28:58Now, some people say like, well, Captain, what do you say about nurses or teachers? They have credentials, but they're not necessarily elite workers. And, you know, the thing about the PMC is that the management thing is really important. Like you can be a professional without necessarily managing other people. And that managerial ethos is something that's increasingly technocratic, that is increasingly serving the purposes of the boss. And it's a specialization that is very recent, you know, within the MBA and the business school world. It used to be that the managers of the family firm, like in family owned capital firms, were like clerks.

29:41They just served the rich guy. The rich guy had a bunch of clerks underneath him. Now, with the complexity of the economy, this managerial power, managerial activities, takes on its own specializations. And what management does and what managerialism does is it wants to maximize profits for the capitalist and minimize labor costs. So this class really began to dominate. Barbara Ehrnreich saw this class began to dominate the left liberal political spaces after the 1960s. When you have in the Democratic Party a break between its old union working class base and this set of liberal elites who were very disillusioned with, quote unquote, ordinary people because they imagined them to be supporting the Vietnam War.

30:31And they were not hip to rock and roll and they were not hip to Eastern religion and they were not hip to cosmopolitan ways of being like yoga and all this other stuff. Today, like the division in this left liberal space has become like caricature. It's a fucking Grand Canyon. And the working class is delaminating from the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party is completely dominated by people who make over$100 ,000 a year or more. And the Republicans, for the first time in this election, are garnering the majority of people who make$50 ,000 to$100 ,000 a year. In 77, Barbara Erich said this class was dominating left liberal politics now, and it really looks down on the working class.

31:14And we're really going to have to reckon with this. She and her husband, John Erich, much more optimistic that the PMC would say, no, we have such good lives. We have, you know, work, purposeful, meaningful work. We want that for all workers. Well, they were really optimistic because they're boomers. And they were thinking that this class would want to share its wealth. This class now has presided over a period of escalating inequality. And we are gatekeepers to the professions so that young people like yourselves are finding that gate more and more narrow. Like you can't even get through it. This class has been so good at policing its own privileges and accumulating wealth that the entry into the upper middle class and the professional elites has narrowed to like the eye of a needle.

32:04That was what I was writing about in virtue orders. And traditional Marxists would get all mad at me like, you can't invent a new class. There's no new class. And I'm like, OK, guys, like, let's try to argue about who is right. and you guys can say I don't have a good reading of Marx. I'm like, Marxism is a kind of practical tool to understand reality. And this is the best tool with which to understand the social situation now in America. If you want to be like little smarty pants in your classrooms, go ahead. I don't give a fuck. I'm trying to use reality. No, I think it's a pretty common knowledge.

32:42I mean, if you haven't studied sociology, it's something that I think a lot of people feel but don't understand is like a concept or know how to articulate it. And such a missing puzzle piece from really understanding. Well, you know why? How things are this way. Our education has been geared towards anti-materialist, anti-class analysis, even in the left world. Any identity is great except for class identity. And Marx says very clearly, history is made by class struggle and class contradiction. How does the election that just happened or maybe the Democrats approach within the election emblematize kind of the logic of the professional managerial class right now?

33:22Well, I've been trying to write about this and understand this for a long time now, but the professional managerial class wants to supplant the working class as the engine of historical change. So it imagines itself as the most progressive class and imagines itself as the most enlightened class. Even when it's saying things like we need to decolonize the curriculum, we need to destroy Western traditions, it is totally a part of the Western Enlightenment tradition. They really believe themselves to be the most enlightened people on the planet. And they're going to teach us how to recycle, how to cook, how to sleep, sleep with our partners, how to have children, how to dress, how to consume, how to be good to the environment.

34:04But it's all niche consumption habit that they are flaunting because they have to justify how good their lives are, how much wealth and privilege they've accumulated at the expense of the working class. The majority of this country has been going through all the devastation of deindustrialization. And deindustrialization as a policy was put into place by members of the professional managerial class. They moved jobs overseas so that Apple could make more money on its iPhone because the iPhones are being made in China. Labor costs are cheap. Remember when I said the managerialism is about cutting labor costs?

34:45Well, you could just say globalization is about a massive cutting of labor costs. Who presided over deindustrialization? This class, which is engineers, a class of foremen, and a class of managers as well. But in order to justify how good their lives are compared with everyone else's lives, they have to promote themselves as being more enlightened. They're not racist. They're not sexist. They're not transphobic. They're not ableist. It's like anything but like this idea of like class. Because, you know, in a way, once you confront a working class who wants agency and more power over their lives and a greater share of the surplus value produced by capital, you have a defiant group of people.

35:33And the PNC really loves to think of people who are less powerful than itself as like people who we need to help. It's helping and philanthropy. Branches are all about objectifying and subjugating the helpless and the vulnerable. So it self-styles as the most enlightened class. It self-styles as the most therapeutic class. And it disguises its domination with all of these ideological constructs. I mean, Barbara Ehrenreich put it really well. She said, this class wants to reproduce the ideology that maintains the status quo. So in a way, the Democratic Party is the perfect avatar of that. You know, they don't want things to change because things are really good the way they are for then.

36:19Totally. And I think we kind of saw this a little bit. You know, I watched all the different, was switching between all the different cable news channels. I really should stop watching as much cable news as I have been. You were so brave. I know, Emily, I can't either. But like, you sort of saw this in real time as the news anchors and commentators were processing this news and trying to come up with an explanation for what happened. And there were a few people who, you know, reminded the others like, oh, you know, it was pocketbook issues that or people perceiving that, you know, Trump had more to offer.

36:54And I'm not going to say that he had more to offer, but that, you know, he made that case. He offered catharsis in some way there. Yeah. He recognized the emotions that people, you know, how people were feeling and at least spoke to that. Even if he provided a diagnosis or a solution that was, you know, completely awful. But anyway, so they're processing it in real time. And it seemed for the most part they could not, you know, it's hard to process for them this kind of defeat. And it felt like the ultimate rebuke. And their mind starts going in all sort of directions. I heard Rachel Maddow, for example, she was like, I don't understand.

37:28U.S. economy is better than every other country in the world. The GDP is great. Unemployment numbers look great. They did have inflation, but they brought prices down, or at least they brought inflation down. What more could the people want? I couldn't even watch for her. Yeah. That was when I turned it off and was like, I'm not watching anymore. Yeah, I turned on Jon Stewart because he was actually a little bit better. The numbers are good. Why does your head feel bad? I just got a vice on it. Like, why are you? You know what they love? You know what Lidge loves? They love the word gaslighting.

38:03They fucking gaslit all of America by giving us the statistics about how good things are. It's like, yes, are you hurting? The job numbers are really good. It's in your head. There were literally New York Times headlines that were like, if you think the economy bad, it's not the economy, it's you. And that is gaslighting. And I think people are not going to not respond to that. I also saw a lot of people, you know, saying really egregious things where they were walking back their stances on identity politics and saying, oh, Kamala should have deemphasized. She should have de-emphasized it further.

38:35She already walked back a lot of her stuff to begin with in response to the attacks from Republicans, like in protecting trans rights. But they were saying, oh, maybe identity politics has gone too far, which is also completely insane. But anything but to avoid kind of like what we're talking about, it seems. Yeah, I mean, we are so propagandized and propaganda really works. I mean, there's a reason why we spend so much money on advertising and marketing as an economy, right? So when I started reading the New York Times, like just in the week, I was trying to avoid it before and I was going on vibes and for media.

39:12I was like, Trump's going to win. He's going to win. He's winning the selection. I had money on it, you know, with a friend, like a private bet. And then over the weekend, you know, I fell into the trap again. I was like, well, I should read some mainstream media. I should read some mainstream liberal media and I can't just avoid it. And so then after about 72 hours of this, I was like, oh, my God, she's going to win. And you can just tell how one is really influenced by this information ecology. And our task is huge. I mean, you guys are both in the media and I'm in academics, which is, you know, perfect PMC, culture industry industries.

39:50But how do we do counterpropaganda? You know, we're all susceptible to it. And I talked about how all of us grew up in a kind of Cold War, anti-Marxist, anti-materialist world. So a lot of our logic is actually just like our default positions are anti-materialist, anti-class analysis. I just want to circle back to the gaslighting thing for a second because I almost feel like that's like giving them too much credit. Like, because I think gaslighting, I mean, that's something that like the right has like really mastered, right? And it implies like almost a certain kind of like nefarious intention.

40:23And I think the reality is like more mundane and kind of worse, which is, again, to reiterate the the problem with the PMC is just this this obliviousness to not understand. Like, I think there was like so much earnestness in being like, I don't what you're referring to with Maddow. Like, I don't understand. Like, the numbers all say it's good. Like, I don't think she was even saying that in like a gaslighting way. I think she just like genuinely believed it and couldn't couldn't see what was beneath the PMC that was like driving all this. I couldn't couldn't wrap her head around like that didn't resonate with your lived experience.

41:02Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that that's actually like, well, I don't want to say worse, but it's you know what I mean? Because the sort of conservative or the sadistic gaslighting is actually about controlling people and being aware that someone is hurting, but telling them they're not hurting. And there is such an intense level of economic segregation in the world right now. Like I grew up in a rural New York City, a much more in suburban New York, a much more economically. I mean, I said racially integrated, economically integrated set of neighborhoods and social spaces. And all of our social and public spaces are so deeply policed and segregated right now.

41:45When I look at the way that my son grew up and the way that I grew up, the playground is a place where a lot of people, you know, kids sorted out their conflicts with each other. The way that he grew up was like the playground is a place where there was so much disciplinary stuff that was going on, partially because of safe spaces, partially because of, you know, the design of urban and suburban and ex-urban spaces. It's designed to segregate the classes. And so we talk about racial integration. And that has declined in America since I was growing up, too. So we're segregated on every single account.

42:25We're only talking to people who agree with us. And we don't have there's very little inter-class contact, just informal inter-class contact. So I'm not like I don't forgive Rachel Maddow for being so obtuse. But, you know, in her daily life, who who is she in touch with? If she's grown up in a PMC household and she's living in wealthy New York City, whatever, her points of contact are probably a cleaning lady or, you know, I don't know, like the doormat of her building. I'm serious. Like, where are those informal relations, those public third spaces that created like a fabric of non-formalized contact, casual contact between people of different classes?

43:13They're gone. No, totally. Now we have the Museum of Ice Cream, who's like our public spaces, if that's still around. But if you're a working class person, you're not going to that museum. You're getting a Mr. Softy. Totally. And it's, you know, when you're saying everything's more segregated than ever, it's like information above all is now kind of the pinnacle of that. So, you know, it's like we're the old, you know, the sort of cherry on that terrible shit Sunday is like segregation of information all just resonate, you know, resting within our own ideological echo chambers. It's like, yeah, you have certain level of the PMC, a certain, you know, slices of a generation that like are only watching MSNBC.

43:55And that's like a very specific kind of discourse. Same thing, you know, with Fox News, obviously, to say nothing of other kinds of media, right, that are not legacy traditional mainstream media.

44:17so obviously trump won by a landslide and notably not because he won over a ton of new people i think it was something like 400 000 more votes than he had before but because something like 11 or 12 million fewer people came out to vote for Kamala than they did for Biden. Do you think this will be the moment of I mean, I can't I maybe I was wishful thinking, but like I couldn't help but think, could this be the moment of reckoning that finally prompts the PMC class to do some soul searching? I, you know, I've been doing like a day by day temperature taking of this thing. Other than work, this is all I can do.

45:01I'm like a really bad wife. I'm a really bad friend because I'm just like obsessed with this question. And 20, you know, every 24 hours I have a new assessment of it. I was hopeful in the beginning that there would be this really this new assessment. But I think a lot of it is also just like PMC hand wringing and going back to the, oh, America's so misogynist. Americans are so racist kind of thing. And it just makes me want to tear all my hair out when I hear this. There's no reckoning. But, you know, it's early days yet. Like we can see how things are going. But I also think that people like me who are being called like the dirtbag left, the scumbag left, we're less censored now.

45:42Like, you know, we're so shocked by the way that we were catarized as Bernie bros and like spoilers for HRC. There's a lot of anger about that under Biden as well. You know, like you are hold, you know, holdovers from the old left and stuff like that. That has gone. That has weakened. I'm just much less censored than I was because you know what? I was right. EMC is a reactionary force. And if there is a kind of reckoning that will take place, this, how many more slaps on the face can they take before they have to reevaluate? I don't think they have to that much because they still hold all the power livers in a lot of powerful industries.

46:22and they're still backed by a lot of hedge fund guys and everything else. But I'm hopeful. I keep a hopeful eye out for this kind of reckoning. But I really do think that what I had been saying a couple of years ago, was that the popular revolution, if it's not led by the left, will be led by the right. And this is the first intimation of this. The other problem is America is ungovernable at this point. Capital has so much power. Workers have so little power. The environment is being devastated. And we'll have four years of like some really fucked up thing. We're waging wars, sending all this money abroad.

47:02We're hollowing out American existence. And we'll have another change ever again. And that kind of political impasse demobilizes young people. It disillusions working class people. I remember knocking on doors for Bruni in 2020 when like the last time we had some hope was. And I remember being in this working class neighborhood and this young woman, you know, opens her door and I'm like, oh, we're here for Bruni Sander. And she goes, will you vote for him? And she's like, you know what? I don't vote. Doesn't matter. They don't care about me. And I've said this before on other podcasts, but I was like, I couldn't convince her.

47:38I was like, you're right. I'm the worst door knocker in the world. Because I was just like, wow. Yeah, you're right. So how can we mobilize people to vote more for a kind of positive thing rather than a rejection, which I think this election was? It was both demobilizing young people or anyone with any utopian aspirations and giving the occasion for a lot of people to reject PMC values. If we have to reimagine a new politics where people are voting for a positive, powerful left wing change, it's hard to imagine right now. But anything that blocks it, I will denounce. I kind of wonder, I don't want to get too far off track, but I kind of wonder if it was actually the spring and, you know, the student protests around Gaza and sort of like the even, you know, the PMC establishment's response to that that could have represented a kind of breaking point.

48:37at least as far as like the left or the young people being like okay we're on board with you know this sanctimony I guess or like we're gonna play along where like it was really a moment where it felt like the democratic establishment was going against its own self-professed values and then even using cancel culture tactics you know against the left in a very very bad faith way that like the students understood it was the ultimate gaslighting you know calling the students anti-Semitic and stuff like that. Yeah. And the masks were, the masks fell from people's face. They were authoritarians. And I've been trying to identify this question, you know, in the post-war period, liberalism, post-Second World War period, liberalism was opposed to authoritarianism.

49:24What we had this year was a full-on display of liberal authoritarianism, which, you know, was a contradiction in terms. I mean, I don't even know what to call it at this point, but I really do think it's worth studying more or worth talking about more because we were witness to the most flagrant display of the use of force to put down dissent. And we still are, and we've lived with it for quite a while now, in academia at least. I mean, in classrooms, people being shouted down for any kind of dissent. People taking positions that, you know, silences everyone else. And now what do we get? We get, you know, actual potential policies coming from the Trump administration to censor speech along certain lines in academia.

50:14Oh, yeah. Which again, like the irony of like, I think one read of like what went down with the protests is that there was a lot of fear in the Democratic Party of pushing, you know, more folks who were pro-Israel, pushing people to the right if they took a clearer stance on what was going on or like undermining what was going on within their own party and their Biden's choices, you know, and the irony is like in an attempt to, I think, try to avoid isolating or pushing away more of their own voter base. They did that just with a different group of people within it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it was even that calculated in that particular way, I think we're worried about their donor base, really.

51:00And you know what? People say, like, the Democrats, they don't care about losing. They love losing, blah, blah, blah. The interests of capital were served very well. Everyone with a 401k, or maybe your parents, maybe people who won stocks, they did really well this week. They did super well this week. Yes. And I think we have to be sort of going back to what we were talking about before. We have to be careful. Like Wall Street is ecstatic. We have to be careful not to equate Trump's success in branding himself as the candidate of the working class with actual economic populism. No. Yeah. And I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about, quickly, just kind of clear up the difference between the economic future Trump wants to usher in and actual economic populism as the left understands it.

51:48And also sort of like, what is the left's answer to Trump taking on this mantle, to J.D. Vance being the biggest mainstream politician at this point, besides Bernie, who's interested in even talking about class? What is the Democrats' answer to that? You know what I'm going to say, Emily? I don't care. I'm not giving any more Democratic Party parties. I'm just not. Where do you see it going? I guess. And you can also answer it for the left as well. But, you know, where do you see it going? I mean, there's going to be more attacks on unions. I was just hearing from Justin Guastella, who works for the Teamsters, and he said that the union leadership had endorsed Kamala, but the rank and file were totally unenthusiastic about her.

52:31And so there's a split even within the unions with regards to like their leadership and then the anti-authoritarianism of the rank and file. And I think the left has to take back anti-authoritarianism. It has to overturn every shibboleth and talk about like actual working class conditions, working class life, and be absolutely relentless about bread and butter issues, which no PMC person likes to talk about because it's not glamorous, it's stupid and all, talk relentlessly about the cost of living, the cost of childcare, the cost of education, the cost of housing, and relentlessly pound and take a powerful anti-capitalist position without lecturing everyone about the finer points of Marxist commodities theory.

53:20That's right. Stop being so fucking nerdy. because it was lived material experience that people are having. Everyone who goes to work and has a bad boss knows about domination and oppression. Marx actually said the class struggle is in the working day. The worker wants to work a shorter day. The capitalist wants you to work a longer day. He wants you to be more productive, wants to pay you less. Like, just use that as a freaking battering ram and try to tell people because the PMC doesn't know that it's a worker. It feels like she is an artist, a creator, someone who has a calling. Well, there are bosses.

54:00And oppression happens in the eight-hour work day. And just keep pounding away at material issues. And do it without thinking that you have to lead people into, like, abstruse conversations about Bramshi versus Lukács. Shut the fuck up. Talk about people's problems. Be with the people. Learn from them. Let them lead you. Stop trying to lead people with their niche ideas and culture. I don't even know if this is possible right now. I feel like the younger people have come through, like, humanities and social sciences, and they don't have any training for this. But maybe, maybe, like, increasingly, people will feel like they have nothing left to lose, and we'll try and we'll give up the PMC homilies.

54:46We have to reject the PMC from the left, because they rejected the PMC from the right. Right. And to not also not like shrink, you know, when the right tries to then like weaponize talking about this stuff and like immediately being like, it's socialism, it's communism, like all that. Like, I don't think folks, to your point, have been equipped with how to double down on talking about these things without being like, oh, no, what do we do? We have to avoid this now because otherwise they're going to think, you know, they're going to call us commies. But the thing is that, you know, after 2011, after the financial crisis, socialism was for a moment more popular than capitalism among young people.

55:25Why didn't the Democratic Party, you know, use data analytics on that? Many socialist policies are very, very popular. The other thing is within academia, I mean, we could do this more, is that American policy from the New Deal onward were socialist policies. And as there's an American left tradition that actually comes from Eugene Debs, it comes to the prairie populists. There's a kind of deep American identity about anti-authoritarianism, suspicion of the powers. You know, we can stop being such little assholes about American identity and say we Americans have a robust like tradition of being pro worker and anti capitalist and anti authoritarian.

56:11Draw on that. There has to be a reinvention of left verdict from so many different areas and a negation of this bullshit that we've been from the universities themselves. Well, I was going to say, say more about like how to do that, too, because the right has now in taking the working class like under its wing, they also have, I think, sort of created a total cloud of toxicity around anything that could represent policies that work for them by, you know, making dirty words out of socialism and communism. And that's part of, you know, a larger like rhetorical discussion. But like, how do we get out like from under that?

56:49Why does J.D. Vance get to talk about class but not be called a socialist? Is it because he has like conservative social politics that he's allowed to talk about it? Yeah, exactly. Great question, Emily. Great way to put it. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Just keep pounding him. The other thing is that if we know our history, we have better weapons. Like there was an American-born resistance movement to capitalism in the late 19th century. Farmers, workers, they banded together in the People's Party. And one thing that they wanted the government to do was to curb the power of monopolies. And as an immigrant, you know, who's I'm more American than anything else now.

57:32But one of the things I really value about being American and becoming American is that we have this idea that manual labor has dignity. And most older traditional cultures, they don't believe that. Like there's a clerical elite that, you know, like scholars in China or intellectuals or, you know, degree holders in Germany where, you know, people who are artists or people who are more elevated don't do manual labor. And we have this. This is a very American tradition. This is very Marxist and materialist, at least, is that there's the dignity of work that we should value, the dignity of craft skill, the dignity of a kind of autonomy that isn't anarchy.

58:19Like we're connected to each other because of industrial capitalism. We can't go back and become little anarchists or, you know, hippies on communes. We can't disconnect us from the industrial world that we live in. But in the early part of the 20th century, American socialists, American leftists were trying to figure out, like, how do we live in an industrialized world and maintain democratic, independent thought? You're in our own history, man. And this is the thing about artists and before they're captured by art schools or, you know, musicians or things like that, is that people, and this was a part of the Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry, is that people had to produce their own leisure time.

58:58People on the farm. People were poor. People worked in factories. This is why the PMC wants to police leisure time. Like the bourgeoisie wanted to take away pubs from the English working class and also the American working class, the European working class of cities. People took away American music industry, took away rhythm and blues and monetized it from African-American creators. Like people created this kind of culture to give them solace and give them pleasure because of the punishing ways in which the working class was forced to work with their bodies. And there is something so deeply, like profoundly valuable about the American ethos, which doesn't have to do with our bullshit empire, but has to do with the fact that we do have a tradition of valuing manual labor and craft skill.

59:54In your really great chat with Joshua Citarella and his Doobest Girl podcast, and I think you kind of make this point in the book as well, you talk about this like traumatic rift between the people who make a living doing things with their hands and, you know, the PMC people who make a living, I guess, performing like mental labor or at this point, like computer work. Or even performative politics, performative identity. Yeah, and mobilizing signs, you know, to help sort of like shore up the interests of the ruling class at this point. Like when did that rift first arise? You mean the rift between intellectual manual labor?

1:00:34Yeah, like you talk about the hand and the mind. You know, you could say it started with a power loom in the 18th century when weavers suddenly were displaced by steam-driven looms. The Industrial Revolution took away craft from workers and organized. The Luddites. Yeah. The Luddites, for instance, were people who resisted the use of technology. But then the sort of devaluation of craft skill happens, you know, in a long term process that is now, you know, being dumb. There's another name for it now. It's called AI. You know, everything that can be black boxed and engineered to produce things to displace human skills is the aim of capital, because literally the capitalists would like the robot to replace the worker because the robot is supposed to be more more docile.

1:01:28Right. And then the engineers would be the most powerful people in the world, like Elon Musk. So this traumatic break is the division of labor that is precipitated by really intensive forms of production under capital. So first industrial revolution. We're now in a post-industrial world. And in a way, you know, many people could say, oh, you're just dreaming. There are no industrial jobs left. We can't bring that back. But I think that people who have had their skills stripped away from them, this kind of labor trauma is the one thing that nobody wants to talk about. The decline of the value of craft skill.

1:02:08And for me, you know, I don't do much with my hands, but I really value the craft of writing, for instance. And in my world, I see that being devalued more and more as well. And how can we reinstall this kind of respect for the worker? And the solidarity, yeah. Yeah, with the work process itself. I'm strangely, like, stupidly optimistic still that there's a human anthropological drive to do work well without market pressure. And we have to respect that. I call out bullshit when we see it. So Kamala is brat, as we discussed, kind of fell flat, didn't really work. We lost like the left or the left side of politics as a whole, lost the meme war.

1:02:57To you, as someone who has studied this and been involved in different countercultures, what forms of cultural resistance do you think remain for the left now? Talking about like cultural or artistic production. What does, you know, like a quote unquote oppositional art look like from the left in a culture like this? I have a quick answer to that. I mean, let's stop thinking that oppositional culture leads us to a better world. The better world provides conditions for better culture. But culture does not lead us to the better world. My example would be like the great breaks in aesthetics and production that were precipitated by the Bolshevik revolution that gave us, you know, Russian constructivism and architecture, painting, drawing, aesthetics, theater was precipitated by the Bolshevik revolution.

1:03:53Bauhaus was made possible. Every principle of modernism in architecture, every utopic aspiration in color theory was precipitated by the Weimar Republic's support of the Bauhaus as a school. And the Weimar Republic was, as you know, the social democratic formation that was put down by the rise of Nazism. In the United States, you could say craftsman era had to do with a sort of American revival of craftsmanship as a response to industrialization. So the social conditions have to improve for better art to be made. The art that's being made today is shitty because we live in shitty times. So shit times produces fuck art.

1:04:40It's not like the thing where shit times produces good men. No. Shit times produces shit art. So as a professor, you're a professor of, you know, film, among other things, that you recommend start with the actual politics of it. Start with politics. But the other thing is, like, that was a very flippant answer in many ways, but I do believe it. Like, start with universal programs. Start with reviving, you know, the public dignity of the artist who's been trashed since the Reagan era. But the thing that I often find possible is that within genre film, there's a lot of potential for counterpropaganda.

1:05:20So it's not necessarily popular culture is necessarily reactionary. There is a possibility of creating counterpropaganda forms, let's say in horror. There are explorations of subjectivity and power relations that can be made possible. And also in the most conventional genre of films, you often see the most amazing possibilities of class struggle. Joss, as a blockbuster, was actually a class analysis of Martha's Vineyard. So there's a way in which we can talk about culture, we can engage with culture with greater class consciousness. It's not that it necessarily lead us to the better world, but I think we should know our history, respect traditions, and always be contentious and ready to debate things, bravely, courageously disagree with each other, and always insist that there is a better world that art indicates and that the better world will create better art.

1:06:24The really great breakthroughs, the great modernist breakthroughs, all came from the bottom in the 20th century in cultural production. I'm just thinking about rhythm and blues. You know, in the great modernist socialist experiments in Germany and the Soviet Union, they were geared towards actually improving the lives of people. Well, got to respect that. Yeah. Well, thank you. Catherine, thank you so much for your time. What a great conversation. Appreciate you. Thank you so much.

1:06:56This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominick. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.

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