Saagar Enjeti: evaluation

Transcript context

…Anti-cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti-establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions? Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who runs our institutions. That’s said, anti-establishment is really not the right word because there are a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment, right? They are against that, but they’re not anti-cultural leftism. And that’s the key distinction between MAGA and left populism. Left populism basically does agree. They agree with basic conceits, like racism is one of the biggest problem facing America. They’re like, “One of the ways that we would fix that is through class-oriented economic programs in order to address that. But we believe in… I don’t know, reparations as a concept. It’s just more about how we arrive there.” Whereas in MAGA, we would say, “No, we actually don’t think that at all. We think we’ve evolved past that and we think that the best way to fix it is actually similar policy prescription, but the mindset matters a lot.” So the real distinction, MAGA and left populism really is on culture. Trans, in particular, orientation about… Actually, immigration may be the biggest one. Because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years. There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who’s one of the hardcore immigration guys, and they agree with each other. And Lou is like, “Bernie’s one of the only guys out there.” Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left, and it’s changing attitudes on mass immigration. There’s some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave where he started… I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian concept, right? Because Bernie is basically of a European welfare state tradition. European welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of immigration. Because we have high taxes and high services, we have a limited pool of people who can experience and take those services. He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude. Bernie also… I will say, look, he’s a courageous man and a courageous politician. As late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate because he said that that pro-life candidate was pro-worker. And he’s like, “At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy.” He took a ton of shit for it, and I don’t think he’s done it since. So the sad part that’s really happened is that a lot of left populist agenda and other has become subsumed in the hysteria around cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. And ultimately, that cultural leftism was the thing that really united the two wings of that party. And that’s really why MAGA is very opposed to that. They’re really not the same, but the left populist can still be anti-establishment. That’s the key. It’s interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. So you think that’s what happened?…

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