Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t think it’s true. I think the New Left of the 1960s, which incidentally was a very brief period — it scattered, splintered, but it left a major imprint. What I’ve just described was largely an effect of the New Left of the ’60s. It civilized the society in many ways. Things were just taken for granted in the ’60s. You couldn’t possibly even say no. Well, that’s the effect of the activism of mostly young people, what was called the New Left. It’s not a movement, but it’s all over the place. It’s changed the way we see and think of things, almost everybody. It’s libertarian, socialism, anarchism. Of course, they’re not going to be popular. We have a class-based society, rigid class-based society. The business classes, the ultra-rich are dedicated to class war. They’re basically vulgar Marxists, fight values inverted, constantly fighting a harsh class war. They control the resources, control the institutions, control the economy. So yes, ideas that they don’t like, you don’t hear. Nothing novel about that. Go back to George Orwell. In one of his essays, he wrote about how in England . . . It was set in free England. Unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force just because of the class nature of the society and the subordination of intellectuals to power. Incidentally, his essay was suppressed, just to make it a little more dramatic. Found later in his unpublished essays. If I think of some of the New Left critics of say, the Cold War, the revisionists — you have Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism, Sidney Lens, D. F. Fleming. I’m sure you knew many or all of these people. To me, they sound, if anything, more like the Trumpian right than, say, the Democratic Party. There’s been this odd inversion where foreign policy ideas, fears of a deep state manipulating the system — those have shifted to the Trumpists. What do you make of that? How do you feel? The revisionists didn’t talk about a deep state. They talked about the existing public institutions; the corporate sector, which has an overwhelming role in determining state policy; the military-industrial system, which is a large part of the economy. You read people like the main writers at the time — Gabriel Kolko, others — they were talking about how this determines the nature of policy. The new right has some of that rhetoric, but it’s a joke. The right wing of the Republican Party are just servile worshipers of the very rich in the corporate sector. Just take a look at their legislative programs. During the Trump years, there was one major legislation — what Joseph Stiglitz called the Donor Relief Act of 2017 — a tax cut that was a gift to the super-rich in the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else. Take a look at their programs right now. Main programs are, first of all, guarantee that it’s a red line. You cannot touch the huge Trump tax cut. Now, what you have to do is defund the Internal Revenue Service. Why? Because they go after tax cheats, who are the wealthy and the privileged. Can’t do that. We have to protect them, save them. Meanwhile, what Trump managed to do pretty effectively, as a good demagogue, is stand up with a banner in one hand that tells working people, “I love you,” while with the other hand, you stab them in the back. That’s basically the policy. When you look at foreign policy — Tucker Carlson and the rest, who say, “We don’t want to waste money in Europe,” but there’s a bottom line to that. “We want to save our resources for a war against China.” It’s insane. You’re right about the Democrats. Their foreign policy group is in the hands of, basically, old neoconservatives. That’s true, the group around Biden, but the GOP is even more dangerous.…

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