The Rise of Caudillo Politics in America with Calixto Lopez

We explore how American politics has increasingly embraced Bonapartist and Caudillo elements, transforming the executive branch from its original constitutional role into an imperial presidency with vast unchecked powers.

• Caesarism and Bonapartism as models for understanding the imperial presidency that has evolved since FDR and Eisenhower
• Congress's gradual abdication of its constitutional powers to the executive branch and administrative agencies
• The Southern cultural influence on American politics and its similarities to Latin American Caudillo politics
• Trump's appeal to Latino voters through recognizable strongman leadership aesthetics
• How political polarization and crisis governance have accelerated the concentration of power
• The pattern of presidents campaigning against executive overreach then embracing and expanding those same powers once elected
• Economic consequences of Caudillo-style leadership, including market instability and loss of international confidence

For those concerned about the future of American democracy, understanding these historical patterns and cross-cultural parallels is essential for recognizing and responding to the challenges we face.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:35 Introduction and Political Backgrounds
• 4:58 Understanding Caesarism and Bonapartism
• 16:16 The Administrative State and Delegated Powers
• 39:26 The Republican Party's Southern Shift
• 55:33 The Concept of Caudillo Politics
• 1:17:52 Trump's Leadership Style and Latin Appeal
• 1:54:48 Economic Consequences of Caudillo Leadership
• 2:07:15 Closing Reflections on Executive Power

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Hello and welcome to Bar and Blog. And today I'm with my longtime friend, calisto Lopez, who's been on the patron end of the show but never been on a public show before. Cal and I go way back back to when we were both conservatives, which is now two decades ago.

Speaker 2: 1:08

A little over 21 years or so at least, because we were talking all the time about the re-election campaign of W.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Right, and you were neocon adjacent and I was paleocon adjacent at the time, and that was our framework for discussion.

Speaker 2: 1:28

Although I did have paleocon influences too, like Jerry Purnell. Right, although I did have paleo-con influences too. Like Jerry Pornell, I used to read his Chaos Manor blog regularly and got ideas from it and I was a big fan of Pornell. He has a lot of paleo-con influences on him, but, yeah, I was more neocon.

Speaker 1: 1:51

And we've both been trending left now, for I think we both started this journey around 2005-2006. So I bring that up because it actually is relevant to discussions today. Back when we were both conservatives, you and I were both hesitant about trends we saw in the Bush administration that I had seen in the American politics since the Cold War. In fact I had traced it kind of back to FDR and Eisenhower, two very different figures but two very centralizing ones in a lot of way.

Speaker 1: 2:31

This is the tendency towards what I used to call as a conservative Caesarist politics, but now that I've gotten to the socialist world I consider it a subset of Caesarist politics called Bonapartism, and I could get into you know real quick what I mean by these, and then we can get into Caudilloism and what we're talking about today and why it's relevant to the American case and in fact, if possible, that there be no other branches of government that, even though it may not be absolutist in, the, say, russian 17th century or French 15th, 16th century sense, that Caesarism is still basically a singular figure who has disproportionate influence on both the executing of government but also the legislation of government and a disproportionate influence over any judicial capacity.

Speaker 1: 3:48

That may be the case. Judicial capacity, that may be the case. Then there is Bonapartism, which I, following Marx takes as the liberal, and I mean that in the small l form of that, as in the capitalist, modern form of Caesarism, which is also not quite absolutist but often pretty close. But then there is in my mind a variety of kinds of Bonapartism too. I mean just like Bonapartism is, in my categorization, a kind of subset of Caesarism. But you know, any absolute monarch could be a Caesarist monarch. Any absolutist emperor can be a Caesarist. Bonapartism does have some specific functions, like it still tends to have a legislature, even if that legislature is kind of just a formality.

Speaker 2: 4:47

Rubber stamp.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Right. It tends to pull from various social classes that are that are in weird hybrid positions, like the bourgeois, the lump and proletariat professionals, that sort of thing, entrepreneurs in our society. So you have it. It actually isn't clearly aligned to the big bourgeoisie entirely, or if it is, it's only aligned to like one subs, one set of them, not the. It's not trying to manage all of them and it it tends to be expansionist, it tends to be Imperial or neocolonial and also focused on an increasingly strong executive. But it's also a very contradictory position and I can't think of one that lasted very long. The thing about the Bonapartists is sometimes their governments and even the systems that they rose to power to survive them, although often they don't, but the power structures don't. But the power structures don't really pass down very well at all. They don't usually have successors that are successful and the diagnostic originals Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III.

Speaker 2: 6:06

They both ruled for about 15-20 years and then, après moi le deluge, as they say, it just all fell apart. As soon as they fell Right, napoleon had the 100 days attempted to try to restore his glory, but that didn't last, and Napoleon III got so humiliated at the Franco-Prussian War.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Right and then people tend to both left and right actually tend to emerge to try to copy this. So, like General Bollingay, those kinds of people will try to mimic the prior Bonapartist figures and so you've got a lot of upstart potential warlords and stuff, but usually they can't do it. I mean, that's the interesting thing about this system is it tends to exhaust itself so that there are no successors or your bodyguard kills you or whatever. It's not a very stable form of government actually, even though other forms of Caesarism are Absolute. Monarchs can survive for centuries I mean not individual ones, but a system of that can survive for a century or two, often without falling apart. It can have a kind of normal state life cycle. But Bonapartist figures and those kinds of dictators that emerge in modern society don't seem to be able to do that.

Speaker 2: 7:40

I can't think of many that successfully have they have the problem that the original Caesars had. The Roman Empire had no succession rules, there was no primogeniture. The king is dead. Long live the king automatically assumed by somebody else. Technically, people were approved by the Senate to become emperor and usually had to die by the back of the army. And you mentioned the bodyguards killing people. We can't forget that for hundreds of years the number one killer of Roman emperors was the Praetorian Guard.

Speaker 2: 8:15

But yeah, I mean the Caesarism can be stable. I mean the Roman Empire's structure slightly changed over time, but the imperial system ran from 27 BC all the way through to 1453. I mean it can be very stable, but this is the Bonapartism doesn't have the legs that original Caesarism did, or even absolute monarchism definitely did. I mean absolute monarchism can last short periods, like we can see what happened in England, where James I and Charles II tried to bring absolute monarchy to England and ended up with the Civil War and Charles lost his head and when his son came back they had a parliament-led system, even more so after the glorious revolution of 1688.

Speaker 2: 9:13

So yeah, absolute monarchy has its own flaws too, and like all monarchies, it depends on the quality of the heirs. You get a couple of idiot heirs and everything goes to hell, like we saw with Nicholas II in Russia. His father was actually very bright, but he was an absolute idiot and I think it's very hilarious to see these Eastern Orthodox adjacent people all rallying around Nicholas II. I'm like he was such a bad guy that nobody really cared that he got killed. I mean, he got himself thrown out and no other czar ever did. They did some pretty wacky stuff like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and they didn't follow like a house of cards like Nicholas did. So it's just very amusing to see these people idolize this guy, who was probably the biggest failure of all the czars in Russian history.

Speaker 1: 10:13

Yeah, well, this is one of the weird things. I talk a lot about the left's loser politics, but I think general society and the right also has a loser politics, like they tend to like literally sanctify the ruler who destroys a regime by being, you know, the decadent last straight of it, usually, and particularly in absolute. To some sense you also see this when this is not so much popular today. There's not a whole lot of like Louis XVI's hagiographers, but there have been in the past and that's important to remember. But we wanted to talk about Cadelio politics as like one of the subsets of boner partism. So like what people get mad at me about my reared, you know highly technical definition of fascism that I've just got sick of arguing for and have been like. You know, call it everything you want, but I I consider fascism to be, in its leadership structure, um, one of the forms of bonapartism like there's there's things that are unique to it, you know?

Speaker 1: 11:23

uh, similarly, I consider the american imperial presidency, from fdr forward, to have had bonapartistic tendencies, but because of the separations of our system which I don't always think are good, by the way, I'm not necessarily always for really compartmentalized, antagonistic government, but nonetheless it has been a check, albeit usually not a very successful one, on bonapartist tendencies in the presidency. And you and I have been talking about this now for 20 years. I mean, we were talking about this even before we were left wing.

Speaker 2: 12:01

There was a lot of libertarian and discussion of how the New Deal is some fascist. I mean, we see that with Goldberg too. He's a neocon when he has a book on fascism. But there was a lot of discussion how similar the New Deal was to the fascist manifesto, the. There were elements there as well, but even the person chosen to head the National Recovery Act, the NRA, was openly talking about drawing inspiration from and lessons from Mussolini. So the right wing and particularly the old right and some of the paleocons, were very strong on the fascist, caesaristic elements of the imperial presidency. And you're absolutely right the this, these tens we were seeing, do go back to fdr and they go back to eisenhower uh, maybe wilson if we really like.

Speaker 1: 13:06

If I want to really pinpoint, it's like it develops to me in that period between like teddy roosevelt, wilson, fdr is when it really solidifies, like before and after the war Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 13:17

Parts of it come from TR. Tr definitely was sort of that kind. He's very imperialistic. He tends to be more action-oriented. Very classic People talk about how fascists were involved with action. Everything was about action, not discussion. Very classic. And people talk about how fascists were involved with action. Everything was action, not discussion.

Speaker 2: 13:35

Um, and then I think goldberg is right when he talks about it kind of cements itself under wilson, the very beginnings of it.

Speaker 2: 13:44

A lot of the structures used in the new deal were just re resurrecting war, world war one era boards and control systems that were created by wilson to fight the world, the first world war, and just being applied to the national crisis of the, the great depression. But even the, even eisenhower, he saw the limits to it and he gave us a warning which we ignored. And actually some of his speeches about both the military industrial complex and his famous speech about every gun fired, every missile launched, is money taking from the mouth of babes. Basically, he, he saw the, he saw the limits of it and he tried to warn us about it. And then we just kind of went our merry way through the great society and the Nixon kind of pushed it to the limits until we got to Watergate. Things got weak a little bit. Then Reagan started bringing it back a little bit, and then W just ramped it all up in the 2000s and what we saw is this Right.

Speaker 1: 14:49

I mean I've been trying to tell people, when we talk about the current administration, that what we Trump is actually pretty clear in that you have Congress increasingly abnegating its historic responsibilities because it doesn't have even within their states. We're not talking about national popularity, because in some ways with Congress that doesn't matter that even within their states there's not enough consensus, even within an ideological camp, say conservative or liberal, whatever to actually not take a hit for making a tough decision or a sacrifice, which is why they've increasingly willingly, since World War I, slowly abnegated their historic responsibilities increasingly to either the courts or the presidency and then later on, to the administrative state under the presidency.

Speaker 2: 16:08

I mean this goes back. The roots of this go back and we discussed this in my political science courses back in college. The roots of this go back to as far as the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission for the railroads, that the Congress found that dealing with the hearings, for the fact-finding and the advice they needed to legislate intelligently on this, they had to delegate some of their authority to specialists who could handle it in a more expeditious manner and also who knew about it, because congressmen can't be expected to learn everything in just a few hearings and we just see that increasingly grow and that's become the administrative state, the administrative judges which libertarians again were constantly complaining about. I mean, I used to be a big fan of this professor, dr Kelly, out of one of the community colleges in California. He ran a site called freesiancom and it discussed philosophy Freesian School of Philosophy, it's sort of like a Germanic school and he discussed. I found it very interesting as I first found some stuff about religion, the philosophy of religion there. He also did philosophy of history. We discussed a lot of history, including the American Republic. He divided us up into three republics the First Republic until the Second Civil War. The Second Republic until the Great Depression and the Third Republic from then on, because the structural changes in the state have been great. We haven't formally changed anything. We're still operating on the same constitution, but practically speaking, the government has changed completely in each of these stages. And he discussed a whole section on the administrative state and the tyranny of administrative justices back in the late 1990s.

Speaker 2: 18:07

Back in the late 1990s and I've seen that with other paleo-conservatives and libertarians paleo-libertarians like the Murray and Rothbard people talked about the administrative state and the administrative judges and how this is an unconstitutional, illogical delegation of authority because Congress is already an agent. They can't delegate their agency to somebody else is their general theory and that's why we see this still reflected today with a lot of stuff going against the administrative state the attempt to force everything to go through the courts. Now that decision recently, a couple years back, and then now with the uh collapse of uh. I think it's a chevron doctrine trying to make the courts decide things or force congress to make detailed laws. But congress is not set up to make the kind of detailed regulations. It would take forever to get anything done with all the hearings it would have to do and the votes and the log rolling, congress would never get anything done. They want that because they want the paralysis to be able to operate freely. They think that this is a way to get back to laissez-faire capitalism by paralyzing the state.

Speaker 2: 19:15

But that doesn't mean there's not a legitimate concern about the fact that these judges are sort of unaccountable administrative judges who are making regulations with the force of law without technically having it approved by the people's representatives, and that is somewhat dangerous. They're right about that. But then again modern society wouldn't function trying to run everything out of Congress designed for 18th century world which was non-industrial, isolated by weeks from foreign lands. So everything ran slowly and you could take time to deliberate and nothing was very complicated, it didn't require very complicated laws. As soon as things became regulatory in the late 19th century with the railroads, you start seeing that change. It's sort of necessary but dangerous in itself because then it gives the state executive power, gives the possibility for more authoritarian elements of the government to push its way through. I mean, when I studied constitutional law we discussed how the four horsemen of the court had blocked all the early New Deal stuff until FDR threatened to pack the court and then they all suddenly capitulated and started giving cases that allowed the New Deal to function, but they needed to do that because of the crisis.

Speaker 2: 20:40

I understand that Trump is using all these delegated powers from Congress right now. Congress has the power of the purse and can set tariffs, but for national security reasons, in case we need to act fast, we'll give the power to give the race tariffs to the president in emergency situations, and we see the same thing with the illegal alien, the Enemy Aliens Act, again in a case of war, an emergency, and then all you needed was the president to declare it's an emergency to be able to use all these sweeping powers that were suddenly granted to him by the Congress, which properly belong to Congress. And Congress is now too weak and scared to stand up to it and get the powers back because they don't want to use it. Using the power will make people more popular. You'll make decisions people aren't going to like, they're not going to vote for you, and these guys have become capably obsessed with holding on to power in their positions until they literally die in office. They want to hoard this power and they don't want to leave anything that cruises them, so they take very milquetoast positions in most cases, although I am very impressed by Bernie's recent Fight the Oligarchy tour, where he's even going to places like Salt Lake City with tens of thousands of people showing up for him, even in Idaho and Wyoming. And we're seeing people acting up in these town halls where some people are actually having some spine in congress, but there's too few of them, frankly, to get anything done to slow anything down.

Speaker 2: 22:23

And part of the problem is the founders never foresaw parties for some reason. They thought everybody would be public spirited and work for the good of the country and not for the good of the party. And what we're seeing now is the Republicans are like this is good for the party, we get power and so we're not going to care about the good of the country, we're going to go for the party. And the system was designed wasn't designed to handle partisanship Other than the idea that there would be many parties fighting it out, so they all kind of cancel each other out. Many parties fighting it out, so they all kind of canceled each other out.

Speaker 2: 22:52

But with our system it's systematically designed unintentionally it produces a two party system. The first pass the post system for voting, like we have here. At most we'll give you three parties that they have in England Tories, labor and liberals, or in Canada with the new Democrats, the liberals and the conservatives, but here in America it's always just been pretty much the Republicans, democrats. Third parties have been co-opted. Things that they wanted have become part of the platform of one of the major parties to get the support that was being lost to that third party. We see some of the programs and policies and policies proposals of the socialist party under Debs and the successor, norman Thomas, taken over by the Democrats and the new deal. We see some of these paleo con elements in terms of the libertarian party being co-opted now by the Republicans to use it as a fight against the administrative deep state. And that's just the way it works. In its first pass, the post system.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Right. It works there, even in parliamentary systems that are first-past-the-post, because even though those auxiliary parties can get seats, they rarely ever unseat one of the two major parties. It does happen and it's increasingly happening in continental Europe one of the two major parties? It does happen and it's increasingly happening in continental Europe. But since the Liberal Party divided into the Liberal Democrats and Labour in the beginning of the 20th century, the British system has been remarkably stable and we've done pretty much the same thing. For us, the last major party change was, you know, for us the last major party change was the civil war and we really haven't had major party shifts since then in the sense of new parties, but we have had the, the coalitions and the makeup that these parties have flipped. People will talk about it like oh, it's, oh, it was in the sixties. I'm like no, it's actually flipped a couple of times Because while there is like a vague truth that the Democrats are a coalitional party of people who are largely professionals and are small property holders and the poor that's kind of always been their base and the Republicans have a core of like a big capitalist, we're finally actually in the 20th century and it's taken since the 70s for this to happen.

Speaker 1: 25:19

Seeing even that basic, you know that core class demographic of these two groups really start to shift. Under reagan it seemed like the the base of the republicans was small business and the Sunbelt Industries and a little bit in the military-related industries. And then under Bush, actually you started seeing the big capitalists start dividing back out and playing both sides more, I think, after 2004. And I find all this quite interesting, but one of the things I wanted to get to, because I think we talked about this FDR form of administrative state with like vaguely Keynesian, modern monetary policies as I say vaguely, because the new deal really doesn't follow Keynesian or modern monetary policies and no.

Speaker 2: 26:25

FDR ran in a balanced budget in 1936. Right, and some people the Keynesians will point out, that's what probably caused the 1937 recession. Right, a lot people the Keynesians will point out, that's what probably caused the 1937 recession Right. Which did a lot of the work.

Speaker 1: 26:36

The other thing is, even though a lot of people in the trade union movement are pro kind of broad tariffs even right now, the New Deal was actually a tariff deleveraging period, so we did do reciprocal tariffs, with the pressure to reciprocate being downward during the 30s, and that was a big beginning of the relief in 1933-34. So I just think that's a but. That is actually the moment where the executive branch started getting the ability to start influencing tariff policy. So I think these are important things to understand and I think you and I would both agree. We can't, as much as it would be nice to agree with those early paleocons and libertarians who mostly seem to be quiet these days. Their ideological descendants are nowhere near as principled.

Speaker 2: 27:33

Absolutely not. Matter of fact, the whole LP has been a disgrace for the last two lecture cycles. They're practically fascist now. I remember I started seeing libertarians making jokes about Pinochet helicopter trips. I knew it was over for the LP.

Speaker 1: 27:49

Yeah, and also open anti-Semitism amongst leaders which even in their neo-Confederate-friendly days and their neo-Conservative-friendly days there's been periods of that in the LP too weirdly the Objectivists were neo-Conservative-friendly and the Paleo-Libertarians were always kind of soft on neo-Confederates.

Speaker 2: 28:10

But even in those days, yeah, when I was a a libertarian in college, I was a randy, an objectivist more and I was more, more neocon oriented. So I became more of a neocon and the neoconfederates even then pissed me off. I had initially subscribed to the ludovar mises institute back in college but I canceled my subscription after like three issues when they started openly praising the Confederacy because that was just way too much. Backing slavery and other regressive things was just cuckoo. And even the I got in top water with my fellow libertarians, who almost all were white males, and as a Latino I was like I don't think that the civil rights act is such a horrible imposition on liberty and also it deals with justice whatever happened to justice and so it became sort of a odd ball out because libertarians have been pushing to repeal the civil rights act. For and we're seeing it now with the DEI rollback it's pretty explicit. That's basically the Ludomis' Neo-Confederate wing getting their the rocks off.

Speaker 1: 29:26

Right. Well, we saw this explicitly, Like it starts with DEI, but it's it's not really the D, and like look, I have my my criticisms of critical race theory, and I thought liberals who said it was just anti-racism were basically lying or they didn't know what it was, which is actually more likely to case.

Speaker 1: 29:45

Oh yeah, that's right, but that more likely to case. Um but that, uh, um, that I knew pretty quickly that that was going to be branded as finally a way to get a wedge in on the civil rights stuff by rebranding it as dei, because dei did seem like a civic overreach um, in a way that civil rights stuff more or less has not been seen by the American public as a civic overreach. You know, I mean Goldwater's decision to stand against the Civil Rights Amendment and the Civil Rights Act is part of why the southern black population now the northern black population has been democratic since FDR. But the southern black electorate until the late 60s was pretty solidly republican because of the Democrats party history with the Dixie Crats and the New.

Speaker 1: 30:44

Confederates, so the aggregate black vote even as early as the 19,. The second FDR administration went to the Democrats, but we have to remember that that was during Jim Crow, so we don't know what the Southern black vote really was and when that is ended. The Southern black vote was was, and when that is ended, the southern black vote was was republican for a brief moment, and it definitely was also in the 19th century, but then immediately shifted over because of the gold warder position, um uh, over the civil rights act.

Speaker 2: 31:24

Now well, when I was a member of the Republican Party, a mechanism in Virginia, one of my colleagues, actually the one who recruited me into it, dr Brown. Ted Brown was an African American man and we discussed a lot of the history and his family had been Republican since Reconstruction. There were people who never shifted, even with Goldwater, which is kind of surprising. But Goldwater definitely marks the shift because blacks voted Republican and the North they shifted with the rest of the labor and the working class because of the New Deal. But the southern side was hostile to the New Deal. The Dixiecrats were kind of the conservative coalition that helped slow down things and eventually stopped the Fair Deal by Truman, which was the next step for the New Deal. But you know, truman tried a little bit with disagreeing in the military to get some more black votes, probably reflecting the black votes in the North more than anything else, because the South was safely Democrat. These guys were yellow dog Democrats. They would vote for a little yellow dog over any Republican because of the Civil War and Reconstruction and Goldwater is a turning point where these guys start shifting over to the Republicans, a violation that they roll on the yellow dog Democrats. They still voted Democrat on the local level.

Speaker 2: 32:49

I can still remember the last governor, the last Democrat governor of Florida, dawson Childs. He was still in office when I was getting out of college. Then he became Jeb Bush. He ruled for a while, but it's Rootwater is really the big inflection point for that, where the latest shift, and just like the South, was a reliably Democrat space and Goldwater is the first time he started carrying Southern states for Republicans. There was a few states in the South where he carried. Now the South is reliably Republican. It's exactly the exact flip of the two. The South is revival Republican. It's exactly the exact flip of the two. And unfortunately we're seeing a lot of Dixie crat concerns, including the racial elements, coming to the fore, as these took hold and cemented, while the Northern Republicans have practically evaporated.

Speaker 1: 33:44

Right and I also looked through that. I mean in 2000, when Zell Miller stepped down from office, we got Cerny-Purdue and it actually reflected in the fact that the legislature, the state level, literally finally shifted their party allegiance, which had happened at the national level going back to probably the end of the Johnson administration, definitely during Nixon.

Speaker 2: 34:16

Definitely. Although we still had the bull-weevil Southern Democrats under Reagan Right, they were still conservative Democrats, who all became Republicans later.

Speaker 1: 34:27

It was like a writing on the wall, who all became Republicans later. It was like a running on the wall, not just under Wigand, I mean they were still kind of around during the first Clinton campaign. I think people forget that Clinton run a lot of the South.

Speaker 2: 34:38

Sam Nunn too.

Speaker 1: 34:41

But you know these are for the younglings listening to my show.

Speaker 1: 34:47

This is ancient memories.

Speaker 1: 34:48

But I wanted to scale this out because on one hand, I do think that my general thesis that the 20th century made the American state go through fluxes of flirting with our integrating Bonapartist elements, but when the Soviet Union fell and we started also entering back into an unstable economy as the gains from neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s started burning out in the late 90s and aughts, what we started seeing was a return to the unchecked bonapartist tendencies in the government.

Speaker 1: 35:28

And while Democrats would run against that in name, when they actually came into office they refused to give up any of that power and actually sort of again those old libertarians who, like I said, are kind of fossils now they don't really exist anymore in the libertarian world. But they were right that once you give that executive power, even if people run against it, what they're actually going to do is just use that power. That's true for Trump too. Marco Rubio and stuff declaring it as anathema for Obama, even beginning to look that direction in 2012,. Say, the Tea Party and the use of the IRS against political action Right. We now see Trump blatantly threatening, with no pushback from people who have traditionally stood against it.

Speaker 2: 36:28

It's the ring Literally Tolkien's ring of the Lord of the Rings is the power. Once you have it, you don't want to give it up, and so you want to wield that power for your ends. So you'll run against it to get power, because people are scared of the power. But once you have it in your hands, you use it, and that's the basic threat that the ring imposed in Tolkien and that's pretty much the same with political power, the administrative imperial presidency.

Speaker 2: 37:02

I mean, back in college we took a class in Congress and there was a book that was written by the free press. I think it is some right-wing group. I was surprised they actually assigned this class. It was called the Imperial Congress. This was when you had the Congressional Post Office scandal and things like that.

Speaker 2: 37:22

They were trying to make it sound like Congress was taking all this power from the executive and it was all panicky, panicky in the book. Now our professor would give us both sides of things and he himself was probably liberal, probably didn't think too much of it, but it was an interesting topic to bring up, so he assigned us the book. I didn't find it very convincing even then, because Congress just keeps delegating stuff to the executive. Congress just keeps delegating stuff to the executive. It's the imperial presidency all the way. Congress has never really exerted any power or tried to reclaim any of its power that it had which could defang the administrative state and return some of these questions of economics and policy to more public control. I mean, people like to talk about the president being the only one elected by all the people in the United States, but it's still indirect.

Speaker 2: 38:15

It's still indirect. It's not true. It was never meant to be that way. He's elected by the Electoral College and we just barely have it related to by making a rule that whoever wins the Electoral College majority gets the entire votes of that state. I mean, one way to kind of stop this problem we've been having with the electoral college is literally just do what those two states I think it's Nebraska and Maine that they assign, you know, the two senator ones, to the winner, and then they divide up the Senate district, the congressional district votes by whoever wins those districts. And that would immediately show how California, even though it's blue and all hell, does have a lot of conservatives in the districts all over the rural and northern part of the state.

Speaker 1: 39:03

Orange County, Modesto Valley, the north of the state, and Humboldt County. Those places are redder and more conservative than like Utah.

Speaker 2: 39:12

Orange County. That was always Reagan's hotspot.

Speaker 1: 39:16

Right.

Speaker 2: 39:18

And then New York even has upstate, which is very conservative. I went to college in upstate New York and I can remember outside the city of Geneva where I went to college, which had a lot of Italians, a lot of people in working class and it was a rust belt town. The rural people were extraordinarily conservative and I remember in 2004, I gave a talk on proto-Indo-European religion at a conference hosted by the ADF Druid organization and upstate New York, I remember seeing all the Trump signs everywhere as you were driving up to that area which was a little stalker. It was New York big blue state. It was pretty much New York City and a couple of the suburbs that are blue, and Rochester City, buffalo and things like that, but everything else is like a real estate. The countryside is all rural and Republican.

Speaker 1: 40:11

So I guess this brings me, though, to if we're saying that there's been a Bonapartist tendency in the American political mind from Wilson forward, and that I actually do basically believe Michael Sandel's framework for understanding the Republic. So he wrote this in the first version of the democracy discontent, and he updated it in a version of democracy discontent that came out in 2022. Zendel you said Sandel S-A-N-D-E-L. Michael Sandel, the Harvard communitarian philosopher.

Speaker 2: 40:49

Oh yeah, communitarianism yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:53

He actually says you have the early American Republic, which lasts until about the Civil War, then you have the National Republic, which lasts until the First World War, and he basically considers that there's still classical republicanism where you're supposed to represent the districts of the representatives represent where they're from effectively, and while there are parties and there are coalitions based on parties, still, ultimately it's more about where you're at than what you believe and, interestingly, the old earmarks and pork, pork barrel politics kept that alive because people were still thinking about what's good for their district and that's why you see massive stuff all over the south and the manufacturing parts of the shuttle were all over the place because the congressmen were all trying to bring pork back to the districts and it's kept you thinking about the locality.

Speaker 2: 41:58

Once that's gone it becomes more ideological, right, it's totally new.

Speaker 1: 42:05

So I mean, and then Sundell talks about, like this administrative regime of competence that emerges after the World War, partly because even the local areas are too diverse to have a singular representative, and so you start having this focus on a technocratic administrative competency state and around the wars, and he says that he started saying that was in crisis as early as early as the eighties that's when the first version of democracy discontent was written and then he updated in 2022, where he implied that we now live in a Republic that is justified by perpetual crisis, that that is the only justification, whether it's oh yeah, we're constant crisis now.

Speaker 2: 42:48

I definitely agree with that. I mean we're in constant crisis now. I definitely agree with that. I mean we see the. It goes from 9-11 to the, to the 2008 recession, to the long recession, to Trumpville, to COVID. It's just constantly emergency after emergency and we see more emergency powers taking over in the government. I mean, people foresaw that Patriot Act would be misused back when it first came out. I was opposed to the Patriot Act because I saw the risks and I saw that strong libertarian bent and I'm just watching the Patriot Act being applied now to all these immigrants and soon to the American public in ways that were never officially considered when it was brought up. But people saw it coming and warned about it. And with this constant rule by emergency and that's how they motivate their voters Everything's always an emergency. You look at the Democrat fundraising emails. This is the most important election of our lifetime. The Republicans have been doing the same thing, using their wedge of issues like abortion for ages as well.

Speaker 1: 44:02

It's all emergency. Sandell is absolutely right. I think we you know, because you have three republics, but I actually do think there's a pretty big difference between 1860 to 1910 and then 1910 to the 1970s, right Like so. I might even say we've had four.

Speaker 2: 44:25

Probably. I mean I think that the 1910s of TR and then his run as a progressive party, that's when you start seeing a lot of this anti-machine politics which was again part of the old classical republican serving your local interests. The machines were basically that of the corrupt version. I was kind of seeing in return of that now at the corruption trump is sort of running a political machine on the national level. But that was when you start seeing the anti-corruption moves, the moves towards meritocratic selection of leaders and you see that with the local governments, with like the rise of the commission based government and the city manager government and that's sort of reflected in the federal level by the executive branch administrative organs and that really all dates back to progressivism.

Speaker 1: 45:23

Right Now. One thing I want to say before we get into the Cadelio part, which is the part that I think is going to be new to people. I think some of what we've said today. People have studied political science and the one thing that you and I would both indicate is economics actually does tie into this early 20th century capitalist development, which in Marxist terms was called monopoly capital, to Fordism, arkansianism, arkansian social democracy in Europe, to neoliberalism, which people see as a return to the 19th century. But you and I both know it's not. It's actually this public private partnership deal, um, that uses a lot of the rhetoric of returning to the 19th century, but that's not what it actually does. In fact, if you're a classical economist, um, or a neoclassical economist, and you're being at all consistent, you have to say that like oh no, everything neoliberals do is full of moral hazard, like crazy, because you got public funds going to private markets. That makes no sense.

Speaker 2: 46:35

Well, you see, libertarians back when they were more consistent bringing this up as well. Right, the free trade of NAFTA and all that aren't really free trade in the traditional sense of laissez-faire, and the same thing goes with a lot of the privatizations. I mean, all these things were privatized in very corrupt ways to people, friends and connections, and it's just very fascinating to watch how that develops after the 80s. And definitely some of these old school libertarians nailed it on the head too. I mean I'll give them credit for seeing things that a lot of the traditional American pundit class and even the left don't always see. I've seen leftists talk about how neoliberalism is not really free markets either, when people like, I think, mike Hudson talking about it.

Speaker 1: 47:30

Mike Hudson, philip Mirowski, but in general, if you're not in like heterodox economic circles, you haven't heard this, absolutely not. Nope, like Democrats, don't talk this way. They make it seem like neoliberalism is just like 19th century free tradeism, which it never has been.

Speaker 1: 47:50

David Harvey, I come down on him pretty hard a lot. He does actually realize it's not exactly the same, but then he kind of still ignores that. So on the far left you still have people who are, at least I wouldn't say wrong but inconsistent on it. But it's really important. But it's really important. And the reason why I think it's really important is I also think in 2007, neoliberalism sort of hit this weird cul-de-sac that we haven't ever recovered from and we basically during the Obama and even most of the first Trump administration, handled it through a kind of neoclassical, modern monetary hybrid with lots of quantitative easing, making a lot of like flushing the market with money for a lot of what we now see as like zombie unicorn firms and stuff like that that just don't really produce much, never really produce profit. They tend to suck up rents.

Speaker 1: 48:48

I almost want to text there so and I also wanted to bring up that we've been talking about the United States, but you and I both think that this is a worldwide phenomenon, but it manifests in different places in different ways. So it manifests on the European right all the time, but also European center liberals have been heading in this direction. Macron is constantly giving himself new powers. The French Republic already gave the Gaullist executive a ton of power, even compared to the United States.

Speaker 2: 49:21

A huge amount and that's really the Fourth Republic after the war. I mean, the Third Republic had a very strong executive, but the post-war Fourth republic with charles de gaulle, much more dirigiste. He had a lot more authority, a lot more power, and macron has been you're right, he's been pushing more power to himself and people in france have been noticing that and complaining about it. So he had the yellow jackets a couple years ago trying to fight back against that and it's just not failing. And then we had this election last summer where he called an election. People voted for one thing and then he ended up doing the other thing. They'd lost anyway. Alliance. It just blew my mind. They lost. Why are you making a agreement with the right wing instead of the left? Because they can't deal with the left. It's like American Democrats Anything to the left is scary and to be blocked.

Speaker 2: 50:13

I see it all the time in social media as well, all these centrist Democrats complaining about things I just saw somebody today complaining about. I know today was a lot of protests and I was hoping to go to some of the protests. I missed the last set but because of our schedule I didn't go. But today there was a huge protest about trans rights in England because of the recent Supreme Court decision, and some American was like this is why we lost the election. Basically, you've got to shut up about all this stuff, anything that's you know. They attacked Bernie for being too leftist in economics. They attack trans people for being too leftist on social issues. They just want to keep going right, they keep going right and they've sort of become the old Republican Party, the old Nelson Rockefeller Republicans. If you look at what Nelson Rockefellerckefeller republicans used to stand for a lot of the education, a lot of the public works, parks, uh, competency, raising taxes as needed it's the modern democratic party basically.

Speaker 1: 51:20

Ever since reagan kind of pushed them out, they sort of became democrats, conservative right I mean, yeah, I mean I I trade it to like the, the gary hart campaign for senate in 78. The first atari democrats then became the, uh, the dlc at um, the democratic leadership convention. And we still see it in like james carbell threatening to sue david hogg for trying to have leftist primary establishment democrats. And you know Dave's carbo looks like Skeletor on the news he does. He hasn't really helped them win an election since.

Speaker 2: 51:55

Bill Clinton.

Speaker 1: 51:56

Yeah, and yet he still gets to come on and guide them and I'm like, okay, whatever.

Speaker 2: 52:02

American politics today is all a bunch of failed sons failing upward. That's basically everything. There's no consequences for failure and they just get rewarded for it right, um, I'm definitely in agreement with you there.

Speaker 1: 52:15

So the reason why we want to talk about like american politics, though, is, well, I think this is a worldwide phenomenon. I think the america I think, even though you know trump is everyone always focuses on trump's relationship to Putin and Russia. The patterns that we see in Trump was not just that he was a bonapartist, I mean, I think that Biden, in some ways, was a bonapartist, including the way his fan base treated him by projecting all kinds of nonsense upon him that he never did.

Speaker 2: 52:43

Absolutely. The whole dark Brandon stuff was hilarious. I mean, it was funny, I enjoyed the joke, but yeah, the guy was about as milquetoast as you could get. It was opposite for the dark Brandon as you could actually have in reality. But yeah, it's definitely a worldwide phenomenon. We see it, the rising of the right wing. We have the collapse of the center towards a little more authoritarian, a little more right wing. We see it in France. We see it in France, we see it in Germany. Definitely in Russia, the ADF gets more and more powerful.

Speaker 2: 53:13

Like the Christian Democrats just sound a lot more like the ADF did a few years ago, just like the Tories are more and more like the Progressive Party I think they call it now which used to be the old UKIP, and even the Tories are basically I mean the Labour's basically Tories. The Keir Starmer is basically running the old Tory government's policies, continuing them, cutting services, cutting this, cracking down on protests. And we see it in Hungary with Orbanban and the fact that american I was horrified about five years ago, they started having americans kiss up to orban, because I'm like this is the absolute opposite of what american conservatives supposed to believe now it's basically urbanism you and I both know.

Speaker 1: 54:04

Though, when you look at latin america and finally we can get to what we're talking about today and the American relationship to Cadeo politics both left and right, but mostly right it shouldn't really surprise me that they kiss up to Obama, because we kiss up to all kinds of people we shouldn't kiss up to, I mean Pinochet being an obvious one.

Speaker 2: 54:30

Pinochet, the entire El Salvador and Guatemala governments back in the 80s. I mean Kirkpatrick's whole thing about authoritarian versus totalitarian is a justification for backing all these authoritarian dictators. And how long would that be applied? Wait till we apply that here. You see it now, where people say anything left is automatically totalitarian oh my god, authoritarian craziness. And it's like there's a whole bunch of libertarian Marxist, libertarian socialist, anarchist philosophy out there which is utterly alien to and opposed to what the Americans think of communism and the left. But, and the left, but, yeah, the left. I'm a person. My roots are from Mexico and from the Cubans. We did double LZF sound, but Cadillac politics still plays a role, even in today. We see with Ortega, we saw it with Castro. It has no political orientation, it's usable by both sides, it's part of the culture, really.

Speaker 1: 55:37

So what is carismo and how is it a form of bonapartism?

Speaker 2: 55:43

Well, let's see. The Spanish official dictionary definition is caudillo one who, as head or chief and superior, guides and commands people. Caudillaje the adjective is domination, mando or government of a caudillo, he who does not just try to get along con vivir, but to dominate. So, just as we talked about Bonapartism as sort of the executive domination, caudillaje. Politics is traditionally a centralizing power, even when the official ideology of the caudillo was loose federalism. Like we saw with Rosas inina in the 19th century, they tend to accumulate power to themselves and hoard it and then dole it out as favors to people to get things back from them.

Speaker 2: 56:38

But it's definitely the leader, it's leaderismo and el jefe is exactly El Jefe and it's deeply rooted in Latin American culture. There's a writer who was an American aid official and businessman, who's traveled Latin America as a kid, teenager, young adult by car all the way down the Panamanian, the Pan American highway, all the way down to Argentina, a bit like Che Guevara did with his motorcycle diaries. And he worked with Latin America, all these different countries, especially Guatemala, for different USAID functions and he observed Latin American society and observed a element that it's a very Renaissance-based society. It's post-feudal like the North, but he describes it as a Catholic two-morality system. And this guy's name is Glenn Caudill Dealy, glenn Caudill Dealy, and the Caudill is funny because it's spelled like Caudill without the O. But he wrote two books the Public man in the 70s and in the 90s, the Latin Americans, and my professor Millington in political science in college who taught all the Latin American classes.

Speaker 2: 58:01

Interesting fellow. I think he might have been with the CIA because he was talking to me about how he knew Strassner. He was talking to me about how he knew Strassner, he was talking in class about how he knew Strassner personally and he was friends with and with Allende just days before the coup. So very interesting context this professor had. But Mr Dealey says it's basically a renaissance to morality culture, where there's a public society and the public realm which is based around Machiavellian Pacific Republicism, where it's all about making ascending social status. He cites Balthazar, gracian and these other courtier writers of the Renaissance who still have influence in Latin American writing and thinking. And so it's all about gaining power and domination yourself and gaining virtue, as Machiavelli would say, by actions of flamboyance and trying to make a flamboyant impression and attract followers by your flamboyance, although it quickly becomes drawing admiration to compelling admiration. So we see this pattern.

Speaker 2: 59:19

Now the word cardillo is literally the word for chief, as it's said in the dictionary definition. It means leader. Leaderism is what cardillaje really means Leaderism, jefeism, as you put it, el jefe, the chief, and it developed in Latin America after independence from Spain. It showed up all over the place, in almost every country, and so if you look up, say, cadeaje on Wikipedia, there'll be pictures of Caudillos from Ecuador, argentina we studied Rosas and Bolivar. Simon Bolivar had many characteristics of a Caudillo particularly.

Speaker 1: 59:55

Oh yeah, Marx hated Bolivar for that reason actually, he wrote a scathing dictionary entry on him. But go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:00:01

Oh, yes, and you can see it in the Constitution he wrote for Bolivia. Bolivia didn't keep it very long, but it had a lifetime president. Supposedly it was modeled on the British system where the president takes the monarch and then he picks his secretary of state to be his vice president, who then succeeds him. And he even in his writings talked about how in America the secretary of state sort of became the president. You see that with Madison, you see it with John Quincy Adams, and so for the early part of the 19th century that was often the pattern and that he would pick his own successor. He didn't elect the president, he kind of co-opted his fathers, a tricameral legislature with a Senate, a House and a group called the Chamber of Censors, who were sort of like, did a lot of the work that the Supreme Court does for defending constitutionalism, and also acted like the House Ethics Committee, basically doing the functions of the censors from Rome. But the fact that he designed a very centralized presidency and government system is a sign of the Cadiaga elements of it, where you can power and hold it and you use the power to get followers and then you use your power and your followers to build influence, to do things for people, to get them bound to you, to increase your size of your group.

Speaker 2: 1:01:26

He's dearly writes about how Latin Americans tend to be surrounded. The goal is to be a surrounded person with an entourage around you which is very much like the Renaissance courtiers trying to be the entourage of a prince. And so that's the public side, which is very ruthless, almost very much involved with showing off your virtue, showing off your manliness, showing off your grandeur, your dignity, presenting a very interesting public face. And then the private world of the home is where you're the perfectly good Catholic who goes to church every Sunday and says confession, and the women it's a realm of the women and it's considered more feminine. So if you're more home-oriented, it's not as manly, and you see that a lot in Latin American culture to this day. And so, people, there's a distinction between the public and the private. In the public sphere, this guy could have five mistresses, and the more mistresses he has, the more masculine he is, the more followers he gets, the more respect he gets. And then in the private world, he's the perfectly dutiful father, though Looks perfectly. You don't make the two mix. The two realms do not mix, and my professor, m Dealy said, this kind of goes back to Hannah Arendt who wrote about a more Renaissance period type of modernism where it's no longer the feudal world but it's not the one morality, as he puts it, of Protestant Europe, of England and Germany and so on, where you're expected to have the same public life as your private life, the whole. And you see, this Latin, this Latin thing.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

President Mitterrand, when he died he had his wife and his mistress and the kids with both of them show up at his funeral. Very typical two-world society where you only saw Mitterrand's wife usually, but he had his mistresses and everybody knew about it and that didn't really stop. And this is a socialist, mind you, but you know so. In the public you're very masculine, you're. In the public, you're very masculine, you're very you, you don't like, you don't take any attempts. They talked about how, traditionally speaking, if you're speaking, holding forth ex cathedra and you have authority, people don't publicly criticize or challenge your position. They may tell you later in private that they disagree with what you said, but in public, public, no, it doesn't matter. And that he observed people making.

Speaker 2: 1:03:51

He taught a class once about Simon Bolivar talking about Bolivar, and he asked the people in the classroom what they knew about Bolivar and one of the students stands up and gives this 25-minute extemporaneous speech about the importance of Bolivarism and his influence and how we've got to return to the print the values of Bolivar and do a Bolivarian revolution it's almost like Chavez before Chavez and restore the dignity and virility of the Republic Again this virility thing. He quoted examples where the presidential campaign I think 1990, between Oscar Arias and Costa Rica and his opponent Arias, had just finished making the peace deal in Nicaragua between the Contras and the Sandinistas. But his opponent was like this peace deal threatens the national virility and power of Costa Rica. We cannot let him win again to further basically emasculate Costa Rica. We cannot let him win again to further basically emasculate Costa Rica. And he gives examples of other hyper-masculinized and it's this kind of public-private. You see it, I mentioned to you before we came online.

Speaker 2: 1:05:02

I think that Trump expresses a lot of this and I'll discuss it in more detail, but I think he learned it from the time of the mafia in New York. The mafia is very of this and I'll discuss it in more detail, but I think he learned it from the time in the mafia in New York. The mafia is very much this, even in myth, like in the Godfather or the Sopranos. At home Tony Soprano is a great husband, takes care of his family, very religious, gives money to the church. Then in public, in the public sphere, he is the masculine guy with his goombas, his. In the public sphere, he is the masculine guy with his goombas, his mistresses. He beats people up, kills people and so on, expresses his power and dominance. He's all power play. He has a pattern of power plays with different people. We see it in the Godfather.

Speaker 2: 1:05:37

This is part of that Latin Catholic two-morality world and he dearly discusses the mafia in Italian society having the same kind of patterns. These are patterns you see throughout this kind of world. He gives examples from French Canada, quebecois, to Latin America, to Spain, to Italy and to some degree France. I guess the Huguenot would keep France a little more one, morality a little bit. So Latin American society is built around this.

Speaker 2: 1:06:07

He shows examples of how people express themselves. People are always trying to improve their position and it's all about social relations. This more Renaissance Catholic thing is about building power through social relationships, for example, and things that allow you to express your virtuosity. So people will study humanities, political science, philosophy, where you can extemporate but you can't really be disproven. But the technical studies that we do here in America a lot the science, the STEM world, business, management isn't really studied much except by people who are in the lower or lower middle class, who know they're never going to become ascendiente so they can at least become rich by being a skilled businessman or whatever. But everybody else, they try to present a certain dignity in public, to present a certain image that makes you worthy of being followed. I mean, even I express that in that I put on a shirt and tie today because I had to look okay to be seen by thousands of people on YouTube. I had to show up in a t-shirt as opposed to me who's a dirty angler-brained motherfucker who would?

Speaker 2: 1:07:20

show up in a t-shirt.

Speaker 1: 1:07:24

Or my most famous faux pas, that I actually did feel bad about showing up in shorts and a collared shirt to a formal government event in Egypt, because the Mexican consulate invited me and said to come in formally, and I did not realize that that was still formal by an American definition.

Speaker 2: 1:07:45

Yeah, I mean, it's just a formal. Truly formal is supposed to be white tie, right Informal is tuxedo, really informal is business suit. That's how the traditional hierarchy goes. So you've heard of sense and you don't extemporaneously expound on things. You accumulate people and it's basically a system of reciprocity and prestation. I scratch your back, you scratch mine, I do this for you and in the future I'll expect a favor from you Again. It goes back to the example, for example, is the godfather Don Corleone is asking what are you going to do for me if I do this for you? And Latin American society is very big on dignity, dignidad. It goes back to Roman culture. I mean a lot of this Renaissance stuff is basically pre-modern classical society and culture expressing itself after the Renaissance and kind of pushing the otherworldliness of the Middle Ages away.

Speaker 2: 1:08:55

And so you start seeing it with the Renaissance in Italy. You see it with Machiavelli. Who did Machiavelli turn to for advice and examples? Livy and the Romans. He talks a lot about virtue. He goes well beyond the prince. The prince is sort of like a small side project of Machiavelli's. The discourses and the art of war are much more important. So it's all about making and even in the prince he talks about making a big show and also not hurting, not doing small damages to your opponent, because that'll trigger, uh, retaliation in the future. You got to crush them completely or be nice to them, right, um, so it's which I do think is actually good advice in life.

Speaker 1: 1:09:44

like, if, like, give people the opportunity to save face, but if you you've got to go to war, actually go to war, because halfway doing it is going to lead to mad reciprocity. By the way, I think we're living through that right now on a societal level.

Speaker 2: 1:10:07

But we're seeing it with Trump doing that exact thing. If you cross him, he will come after you with executive orders until you give in to him, and then you do a favor for him and he'll do a favor for you by rescinding the executive order. That's an example there.

Speaker 1: 1:10:23

He's not very good at it, he's definitely a tyrant Because he actually, like with Columbia University, he actually doesn't keep his end of the promise almost immediately, which means that people after the first one won't make the deal again. And I think that's what like say. For example, he restored, you know, the funding to Columbia and even put some weird conservative institute that he had one of his cronies pay for on Columbia. I bet you you wouldn't be getting nearly as vociferous pushback from the other Ivy Leaguers because the boards of trustees wouldn't be on their side. But I agree with you. That's how it operates.

Speaker 1: 1:11:06

I have some very abstract theories for why this is. I want to come back to it again because we're talking about this in a cultural way, but I want to come back to it as a kind of material way. Why would this make a lot of sense for this kind of old cultural form to survive so long in Latin America versus other places? Right, we don't have in the United States. We haven't tried to keep up pre-Magna Carta views of the executive or even, like I mean there are some things that culturally we hold on to like British common law.

Speaker 2: 1:11:44

The British are definitely supposed to be one Protestant, one morality peoples, and even for a historical model of who we're supposed to be modeling ourselves on, based on the Renaissance I'm talking more like Francis Bacon, the New Atlantis, john Dee, who first coined the idea of the British Empire, shakespeare, that kind of period and that kind of life. But even then you start seeing the one morality elements in British society at that time. You have the Puritans go back pretty much to the same period later, into the period in the 16th, 17th century, whereas in Spain you still had this going forward in the 17th century. And, delia, as I said, you know, an example of taking things that cannot be fully proved is how Marxism was very popular among Latin American intellectuals and that they studied the humanities and philosophy a lot. But now, suddenly, to gain influence, but also in a way that's still unprovable, they started taking the dogmas of the Chicago School of Economics. He's referring, of course, to the Chicago Boys and Chile. He's referring, of course, to the Chicago Boys and Chile, but he wondered how long the Chicago school would maintain its dominance. Because it's so one morality, efficiency-minded, where, rather than making a show and developing your resources to develop people and spend your resources to help your people, americans, it's all accumulating.

Speaker 2: 1:13:11

There was a game I even bought a copy of it recently that he had he bought in Latin America. It's called Junta en America and Latin America was called Golpe, which means coup, and it's basically monopoly. But you're el presidente of a banana republic and you have to have people accumulate and people represent other oligarch families around you and you're all trying to accumulate. Instead of properties, you accumulate power, bases and like the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Central Bank and so on. And he said every time he had the people play it, the American kids got wiped by every Latin American, every Latin American students, because we learn more about this and to give and take social aspect of it. And it was very true. When we played the game, he divided us up into teams and there was a me and a Puerto Rican girl and two white people and he said the white people are going to play it like Monopoly. They're going to grab their properties and hold it to their hands and not really make any deals with them, but the Latins will I'll do this for you If you give me this thing here to me and we'll work together. And we ended up preserving our power and stopping the counter coup. We wiped the floor. It was like the master of monopoly getting a monopoly real quick. So it's a lot of reciprocity and give, back and forth, give and take, and it's part of the culture.

Speaker 2: 1:14:37

I mean I've learned it too. I'm not a very sociable person. I don't have a huge friend group. I'm not a very good ascendiente in that sense. I'm not really good at networking. I do accumulate followership. I mean I've commented to some people before that I apparently have enough charisma and leadership networking. Um, I do accumulate followership. I mean I've commented to some people before that apparently I have charisma and leader. Leader is leader, osgo, leadership that I get constantly.

Speaker 2: 1:14:57

Made the spokesperson for groups at work. I became the chairman of the young republicans in virginia. I know how to play it without unconsciously playing it to get these positions and learning how to make give and takes on this I would help. I'm sad to say. I used to help Winston Sears, the current Lieutenant governor of Virginia, who's showing her butt running against for the third district, a congressional district, in 19 2004. I was chairman of the volunteer coordinator and I still. I still have these just as I dress up volunteer coordinator. I still have these. Just as I dress up.

Speaker 2: 1:15:37

There's cultural elements, that kind of sink in, without you realizing it, in the society. I generally would seem to be a poor person because I don't develop this huge social network of people. Usually that will become my followership, who can do things for me and I do things for them, although every time I've gotten a real stable job it's been through networks and contacts Exactly the sort of you do things for me, I do things for you thing. It's like the current job I have. I got because my dad met the guy at the Dites of Columbus and he mentioned to my dad that it was an opening. So Cal put your thing in. The guy was the director of the division in Miami and I got the job and I've been held down for five years, thank God. And Doge hasn't come after our department yet.

Speaker 1: 1:16:27

No, it hasn't department yet no, I would. I find this interesting because I have a couple of abstract theories and also I agree with you about some of the cultural stuff and I do think one thing that Marxists have been historically very bad at is dealing with the fact that some of these old cultural, prior cultural forms actually do survive and run very well. So whereas Marxists have basically assumed Protestant rationalization a la Weber forever everywhere, that's actually been a very bad assumption in a lot of places and part of why they have been outflanked and misunderstood their enemies and I know I am unpopular, kind of a believer in the Protestant work ethic by Weber, I kind of hate Weber in a lot of other ways. But I actually do think there is a substantive difference between Protestant Europe and Catholic Europe on the way that they operate political economy and the way they encourage cooperation or not.

Speaker 2: 1:17:34

And even bringing up Weber. I mean Weber is talking about the need for rationalization. So bureaucratization, the modern material, instrumental bureaucracy. But Latin American cultures, as Dr Adeli points out, are notorious for having huge, bloated bureaucracies. But they don't operate on these instrumental, rational goals. They're used as ways to build up fiefdoms and power and either block people so you have to come to you to get things done because you can block them or you help them and also to show your importance Again, the followership. You let people sit in your waiting room and you have a huge waiting room full of people to show how important you are by having all the people waiting to see you. And he talked about there was a discussion how Uruguay it was political. Usaid was talking about Uruguay.

Speaker 2: 1:18:29

The bureaucracies run and selected by, instead of civil service examinations like in China or the United States or Britain. It's kinship, membership of clubs, membership of political parties and friendships. Who decide who get what job and where? Who decide who get what job and where? And he gave an example of Batista's Cuba where the Navy was run by two admirals who are brothers. The rest of the Navy was controlled by a brother-in-law in the army who's buried to one of the sisters of these people and then his nephew ran the armored division of Cuba. It's all about who you know, not very instrumental, rational. They find ways. They're very big on recording everything very carefully, dragging things out, having proper stamps, because it's a way of showing your power and your authority by having these elements and it also is a sign of your office and it's weird to me because it reflects on me. I am in D&D terms. I am in many ways a lawful neutral. I want to regulate everything, make everything organized and rationalized and almost bureaucratic, like a mandarin in some ways. In my personal opinion, that's one of the reasons why I was attracted to technocracy. But and I always argued with I've argued with my friends on varying grounds, for the need for some levels of bureaucratization because it's a sign of civilization. As soon as civilization developed, we started having bureaucracies. It's sort of needed to help things flow and operate, keep track of things, record things. But the Vibrarian model doesn't really work in these cultures because it's very Protestant.

Speaker 2: 1:20:34

Again, and your point about things persisting I was actually thinking about this in the chart today, how the big problem is the elements of the older stages. I was thinking about the things to talk about today. I was thinking about the thing, about things to talk about today. I was thinking about the German ideology, the different stages of development, like there are elements of the feudal system still retained in capitalism.

Speaker 2: 1:21:04

You have the House of Lords in England, you have landlords in all of these countries, which is still based on a more feudal model where you had the fief fee, simple, I mean literally the term for ownership in America is still based on feudalism of land ownership. And so you have these things come along and it reminded me of how, in the critique of the, gotham Marx wrote when the society comes out of the revolution, it's still going to have the birthmarks and fingerprints of capitalism on it and it's going to take a while for society to evolve away from that. And we're seeing these changes and persistences staying in our society today. Older forms of modes of production we're seeing that now with people trying to push the physical economy, the physical manufacturing, still, because it's still part of our society. We haven't fully financialized, we have totally abstract capital and you probably can't totally abstract capital, either to be completely fair, but these things will persist.

Speaker 2: 1:22:07

And I was thinking about how to describe my philosophy and I was like, oh, I'm sort of like a first international. I kind of follow both anarchist ideas I read a lot of Kropotkin in particular but I'm also in agreement with Marx that you can't just instantly have a revolution. Everything is going to become free. You're going to have elements and stages that are going to have to be evolved out of and changed and reshaped, so it's not going to be an instant automatic thing like the anarchists want. But the anarchists have a point, because otherwise you get too rigid, as we saw in a lot of the actual resistance socialist states, and so Dow was thinking how these things could persist.

Speaker 2: 1:22:50

And so even Latin America today, the older Renaissance format of the encomienda, the hacienda, still are there, even with certain elements of modernization and capitalization and rationalization. But it even infects Latin society, like the speeches and the grandiosity and the showmanship. We saw that with Fidel, with his famous long speeches and things like that, and they talked about Che Guevara right, about how manly and courageous Fidel was in the fighting and he took the fight to the people, and how leftists and latin american often think about things in a way, of how to use your ascended power to help the masses. It's not so. It still has a certain hierarchical element to it and you still see that with uh, and I think the reason why you get these strong men expressing this caudillo element, with ortega now trying to become more authoritarian again. You see it with Maduro, even though he's an incompetent buffoon.

Speaker 2: 1:23:58

But all these things here come up and it reminds me of things. How do you put it? Things happen twice. Once first is tragedy, second time is farce, and in some ways that was Napoleon and then Napoleon III. Trump is sort of the third coming of Bonapartism, but as burlesque, it's even worse than farce because he's such an incompetent buffoon. So that was an interesting point there, but I think I lost my train of thought for a second. I'm sorry. No, no, that's all right.

Speaker 1: 1:24:42

One of the things I find that's interesting and maybe this will explain to me like in my systems complexity theory. Those are two separate theories that I combine together, but I want people to know that that's not necessarily together.

Speaker 2: 1:24:59

You've actually influenced me a lot in studying both the subjects. Actually, as I follow your developments in intellectual online, I've been reading more about it, although I got into more actually. But I'm trying to learn about Bogdanov and his technology Because of my interest in the technocratic elements and prefigurations in Bogdanov's writings. But you were saying I'm sorry if you interrupted.

Speaker 1: 1:25:21

No, no, no, absolutely One of the things I think that maybe led this Cordelianism. I do think it's cultural, but I think the reason why that culture could survive in Latin America is that for reasons that are also cultural but tie into political economy, because, to use Marx's language, they affect relations of production or they affect the way people actually do the economy, not just in this abstract mode sense, but in my relation to someone else. What am I doing Is that the settler colonial forms in the Protestant world and North America tended to be exclusionary and either tried to physically wipe out other groups or, when it didn't do that groups, or when it didn't do that, uh, it did the um.

Speaker 1: 1:26:16

Uh, marginalize and push them to the side, a bit like marginalize, push them to the side and then reincorporate them after you've broken their sense of identity. So like uh, kill the indian, save the man, to use the horribly offensive late 19th century, early 20th century phrase. So when we went out of the outright exterminationist, we became assimilationist. But like utterly assimilationist, you're going to adopt our religion and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2: 1:26:43

Whereas like.

Speaker 1: 1:26:45

Right, whereas Catholic settler colonialism still settler colonial, still European guys. Let's not forget that Encouraged intermarriage came up with an incredibly complex and elaborate caste system that had 17 or 18 steps, as opposed to a semi-binary system in the Protestant world White, not white, and had incredibly complex relations with, because also that settler colonialism from New Spain, like Spanish feudalism or manorialism or whatever you want to call it, barely existed before it started in New Spain because of the Reconquista, which took a while and was also super complicated and way more complicated than people realized.

Speaker 2: 1:27:36

Yeah, the knights in Spain were often professional soldiers funded by the cities. There wasn't a lot of this fiefdom where you're supported by a fief and your villains give you this backing and the wealth to have the arms and armor. They were more almost like professional soldiers. But also in Latin America, the encomienda system and the hacienda system incorporated the Indians into it, didn't completely assimilate their culture as long as their culture I mean the people in Peru and Ecuador, the Quechua people have a lot of traditional beliefs and practices, in clothing, for example. It incorporated them in a way, and the fact that large landowning still remains a part of the political economy of Latin America to a large degree, I think is one reason why this persists, because that gives you the wealth to be influential and make favors for people and it gives you a client population of your hacendados. Your hacendado has all the peons on your land who can then become your voters. It's very much like the clientele system in Rome, and the size of your clientel ship was how powerful and influential you are in the Roman Republic, same way as these Caudillos, who often were regional rural landowners with large encomiendas and land haciendas with large population of workers.

Speaker 2: 1:29:08

Because America, the settler, central colonialism, the small individual homestead for one family on it working the land and latin america was.

Speaker 2: 1:29:19

The spanish conquistador got assigned this village and this became his hacienda with his indians, usually under the actually under the local indian chief, the cacique, as sort of like the headman for the group, and they became your clientele and that sort of influenced, I think, latin American politics and culture. And that keeps us alive because it still allows you to have a clientel-ship, a followership, inherently built in. In addition to the family, the extended family, which is another important part of it, where everybody in the family just thinks for each other. Americans and Northern Europeans don't have that tight-knit extended family where your best friends are all your cousins. The closest, I think, is the South. I've seen very similar social relationships when I had dated a Southerner. They had their cousins and they owned the land and in many ways the honor society of the South, with its pugilistic dueling culture and the fighting and often the corruption, resembles very strongly Gaudillo society in Latin America because they also were based on.

Speaker 1: 1:30:27

Yeah, I was going to say that. Yeah, the Anglican, yeah, the Anglican South, which I think we forget because of the evangelical associations themselves today. That really began post-Civil War. The planter class was largely Episcopalian and COE maybe Methodist, but they were some Baptist too. But they were, they were some Baptist too, but they were mostly actually of this. What we might actually see is this older European form that was Protestant, yes, but but still more high church and whatnot. You definitely see it comparing the religious beliefs of Jamestown to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Speaker 2: 1:31:16

Oh, yeah, definitely. And Anglo-Catholicism, as they say in England.

Speaker 1: 1:31:23

Sort of high church Anglicanism, yeah, and that was popular in the South until the Civil War and the plantation system which is also the Haciendas did have, you know, a lot of the Haciendas and a lot of the French style manors and stuff had chattel slavery. So I don't want to say that Latin America didn't it? Sure as hell did. But it had less of it than the Southeast.

Speaker 2: 1:31:57

More of the French side. San Domingue or San Domingue, the French form of San Domingue, the original name for Haiti, was a slave society where the slaves were worked to death literally. They had to constantly import new ones. Slavery existed in other parts of the Latin American society. That's why we had a lot of blacks in like. Cuba for example, but it's not as big in Mexico. Ecuador has some blacks on the coast in an area that was more suited for large-scale agriculture, whereas the highlands weren't.

Speaker 1: 1:32:34

The Spanish were less given to the slave trade, except for some indigenous peoples than the Portuguese or the English. That's just a historic the. Portuguese got into the African slave trade before the English even did. It makes sense.

Speaker 2: 1:32:49

The Spanish also took a more protective view of the Indians. They constantly passed laws about it. Go ahead. Yeah, they constantly, even as early as Columbus. You see Isabella trying to protect the natives of the Tainos.

Speaker 1: 1:33:11

It's interesting for me to, yeah, as far as isabella was concerned, they were fine exploiting them, but they wanted they wanted to exploit good catholics, not wipe them out like um uh, I, I uh, not not to make the isabella sound like a great person, because I think she's a villain in her history, but nonetheless, you're right about that. My point is, though, in some ways, civilizationally speaking, protestant American society and you see this in Canada too was simpler and thus less given towards reactions to the complexity of their society by investing into unitary figures and I bring this up because Joseph Tainter talks about this tendency that when things get too complicated you tend to try to simplify it by investing in some kind of personalist sovereign who can come in and save all the problems.

Speaker 1: 1:34:12

And this isn't just in cardinism. You see this in all kinds of Bonapartist and the Caesarist politics.

Speaker 2: 1:34:18

We mentioned earlier how the Congress ceded power to the almost personalist executive, because problems became too complex for the decentralized, fractionalized, slowly operating Congress to handle. So they simplified it by giving it to the executive branch and gave it credit to the Ministry of State. Definitely, tainter is correct about that.

Speaker 1: 1:34:46

Right, and what that actually does, though, according to Tainter, is it's anti-competitive, it is anti-bureaucratic, although you still seem to have all this personalist patronage bureaucracy which, again, we had in the United States in the early 19th century.

Speaker 1: 1:35:07

In what we would call the first American republic. We had that before and we almost had it again in the 1920s. Um, and you could argue that we've kind of had it in the american system since george w bush. Um, I think like the neoliberalism in a way allows a spoil system and a patronage system that ties all these um large corporations into the state and makes them politically vulnerable, which we see now in ways that they don't like. They think that they're telling the government what to do.

Speaker 1: 1:35:41

Even I as a dirty socialist, had in the past tended to assume that it was actually the corporations who were really in charge. And no, apparently they're actually kind of not. Unless they all act in unity together, like with the bond market, that's when they actually show like that's their hard check. But they only have hard checks, they don't have soft ones. And Tainter says that this won't actually lead to a simpler society, it'll actually exacerbate the conflict and you have an increasingly incompetent administrative class because they're both protected, they don't have sufficient competition and how they get their position is personal, not any relationship to merit. So even the and Taitor doesn't believe that meritocracy is real. I want to be clear on that. But like the even pretense of meritocracy as a check to competence goes away. There's just nothing there and I think we see this.

Speaker 1: 1:36:48

The difference between Trump administration one and Trump administration two is Trump is doing more of this cadillo stuff and and rewarding loyalty over competence in almost every instance, so that he doesn't have to do a pushback, which I ultimately think might be the only thing that saves us from him, although I'm not sure it's going to save the Republic in any way, form or fashion.

Speaker 2: 1:37:12

I think his loyal but incompetent foons like Hesketh are probably going to, are helping trigger a lot of resistance to him personally and they're running. I mean just reading about stuff that Hesketh is doing at the DoD, for example, just wrecking the place. They're going to damage the administrative state. So even after he's gone it's going to be a problem. Recovering and rebuilding after this is going to take a very long time, but it might kill off Trump because his incompetence his only competence and the incompetence of his people. Like a lot of people are pissed off at the Hesketh thing with the signal gate and a lot of conservatives who are traditional conservatives would be upset about that because it puts soldiers at risk and that kind of incompetence. They expect the competence and they're not really getting it and I think that's one reason why there's some pushback, even from some old traditional conservatives now.

Speaker 1: 1:38:13

Well, I mean, maga is interesting in that you have this concentration problem when it comes to power, like this. Last time it came to power legitimately, popularly elected. I know some people are passing around, you know Elon Musk stole the election machine conspiracy theories but I'm not willing to go down the Greg Palast argument from 2004 again. It wasn't helpful then, it's not helpful now and I don't think it's true Because the win was so narrow. Anyway, I mean, it was a true popular vote win, but it was a narrow popular vote win. He never won a majority. He still didn't win a majority. He still had 49.6%.

Speaker 2: 1:38:51

I mean it was a true popular vote win, but it was a narrow popular vote win. Plurality though he never won a majority, he still didn't win a majority. He still had 49.6%. It's a plurality win and maybe it would have been an actual majority win if the smaller segments who voted for the third parties had voted for one of the major parties, particularly all the libertarians voting for conservatives and Republicans might have pushed it over. But it's a very small win. I mean, if they wanted to stuff the ballot box, so to speak, as a traditional Scalia would, it would be a much more convincing win as far as number of votes. We see that all the time, even with the recent vote with Maduro, where he created a especially large majority even though I was supposed to differently.

Speaker 2: 1:39:36

We saw it also with Morales in Bolivia. You don't see that here, so I don't think that there was any of that kind of shenanigans.

Speaker 1: 1:39:51

Yeah, my point is, though he's already hemorrhaged most of that support, which but that actually in a weird way puts puts uh, republican congress people even more dependent on him, and the reason why that is is people the moderates just leave the party, they become independents or they join the Democrats, and so you have a concentration effect which will eventually, like, if it gets super bad, you get down to like less than 32% support in general, then that concentration effect will start to reverse. But right now, that's what you see, and I think that puts everybody in a kind of strange position. But you know, I want to talk more about examples of Caudillos, and you mentioned Morales and Maduro. I will also say Caudilloism, as we said, does not have one political value. It doesn't. There's Caudillos that leftists like. There's Caudillos that rightists like. There's Caudillos that confound everybody, like Peron. Like Peron, it's just like do we consider him a leftist or a rightist? He was kind of close to the fascists, but then he had cut.

Speaker 2: 1:41:17

Very close.

Speaker 1: 1:41:20

He's a, but then there's legitimate left-wing Peronism after the OG guy is dead. So you know, what do you make of that, although that seems to be ending? So, what know, what do you make of that, although that seems to be ending? So what kinds of Cardillos in the middle of the 20th century do you think help us understand the current situation in Anglo America? Now, I think Canada is not heading this way exactly, but we definitely are way exactly, but we definitely are. And I've been talking about Trump as a Europeanization of American conservatism, which I still basically think is true, but there's a Latin valiance to this, as opposed to, like, a Nordic Protestant valiance to this. So what do you make of that?

Speaker 2: 1:42:10

Well, I do think it's a factor why he attracts so much Latin American voters. They're familiar with the style, it's comforting, it's what they're used to, and so they fall in line with the Caudillo there. And when he plays up the fear of the left, like a lot of traditional right-wing Caudillos did across Southern Cone, they fell in line with them and they also like the strongman aesthetic. I mean it makes no sense. People are trying to leave latin america to come to a more stable society, more meritocratic one, so why would they reproduce that cultural strongman thing here? But I think it's just that's what they're used to. They're they're happy with it and they feel the need. They feel threatened by the left.

Speaker 2: 1:42:56

I mean my dad, for example. He's been voting he's a Republican my whole life until he started voting for Obama. I think he's voted against Trump. We haven't talked about it, but he's scared shitless of Bernie. He's told me several times why I supported Bernie in the primaries and I like his ideas because it reminds me of what they said in Cuba before Castro came to power and so you need a strong man to fight off the evil leftists, so you need a Pinochet.

Speaker 2: 1:43:31

And even my professor brought this up, that in latin america in the 1980s there was a choice between democratic, strongly democratic colombia, which is riven by gang warfare between the different uh drug lords. You had sicarios or assassins riding around killing people off Vespas, and then you had the stability, the low crime and stability of strongman Chile, and so a lot of people were like we don't want this chaotic, democratic, crime-ridden situation. We would rather go to the strongman who keeps things quiet and safe, and I think we saw a lot of that in this election year too. Crime was a huge factor, almost exactly like it was in Latin America in the 30s and the 80s.

Speaker 2: 1:44:20

So I think they felt the need for the strong man, so I think that's one of the ways he does well among Latin Americans.

Speaker 1: 1:44:27

This is the thing I want to talk about. At crime, he's tapping them on the back Right.

Speaker 2: 1:44:29

Absolutely I want to talk about On the back Right Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:44:33

I want to talk about this, about crime, because I think the left narrative of crime is frankly shit. We basically just don't want to deal with it ever. And I say that because it's like with homelessness, increasingly our houselessness. As I want to say now and you can see me as a person who's been homeless I roll my eyes at that because I feel like that's one of these things where, like you say, you're valorizing the individual but what you're actually doing is making the condition sound less bad than it is. Um, and I don't think that's actually okay, um, uh, but nonetheless I do think.

Speaker 1: 1:45:11

For example, like I don't think carceral solutions to most petty crime work, and that is what we saw increase during the 20s. There was a brief blip in murder after COVID, but that went down. And then what you saw was property crime staying high, but not even as high as it was in the early 90s. It's still relatively low. But you had people on the Democratic Party side and even on the far left just denying that there was a crime problem altogether, which does not help them. I don't know what. I guess this is one of these things where I'm like I've not help them. I don't know what.

Speaker 1: 1:45:53

I guess this is one of these things where I'm like I've never understood this. When you tell people that, because of some statistical aggregate, that what they're experiencing in their life is not real, you're usually lying with statistics, even if your statistics are valid and some of the statistics I don't think were valid because they were like oh well, the climate is super low. I'm like it was super low in the aughts and the aunty. It has not actually been super low since COVID. It's not super high. But even I have a hard time reconciling this obsession you guys have with gun violence. Would you also saying that there's no crime? I don't see how both those things are true.

Speaker 2: 1:46:38

So happy.

Speaker 1: 1:46:40

And right and so, yeah, I think that's, I think you have that, you have you also, I do think, the frustration and the grift in the administrative state and the over-reliance on it. I think you and I both agree that yes, virginia, there does have to be an administrative state, but it was kind of ridiculous, oh yeah definitely, and I also think ironically, this is perpetuated by neoliberalism, because you need NGOs and shit to do everything, because the government won't do it and that's more costly and more complicated.

Speaker 1: 1:47:20

And that also opens up grifts and favoritism and favors. Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:47:27

I mean it opens up the chance for a little more cardio-like thing. It's like the sombrita thing that came out the. I mean it opens up the chance for a little more cardio-like thing where you it's like the sombrita thing that came out, the yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:47:50

So in the current situation, who should we be looking at and studying? We try to like. So what would America do In the current situation? Who should we be looking at and studying, Trying to figure out what may be At play here in the United States?

Speaker 2: 1:48:00

Well, I think part of it is. As I mentioned before, the South is in some ways the most Latin-like part of the country Culturally, just as the machismo is a big role down there. The dual almost the old dual culture is very similar to the Latin obsession with honor. I think one reason why I'm seeing more Cardeo politics is and also is more like the family. This family kind of ruled Lee County, north Carolina. They had a lot of influence. Everything happened because they said so. That's a very Cardeo thing. We are the leaders, everybody does, even when the Cardeo isn't formally in power, they're the power behind the throne, they give the approval.

Speaker 2: 1:48:46

And you see that in the South in some things I mean even in our popular culture, dukes of Hazzard, boss Hogg he's a typical small-town Caudillo basically. So I think the rise of the importance of the South as an electoral bloc culturally speaking makes it more susceptible to Caudillo politics because culturally speaking it's more akin to it. And so I think that's the reason why I think, particularly in the Republican Party, the Republican Party becomes more and more a southern party as it loses the north as much as it does, I think that cultural element becomes more of a factor, and I think that's one reason why we have so much increase in Caudillo elements, caudillo-like elements, in the Republican Party today and why we get figures like Trump and I don't think, how do you like elements in the Republican Party today? And why we get figures like Trump. I don't think it's necessarily going to last.

Speaker 2: 1:49:38

We saw how bad DeSantis did. He tried to do everything else like Trump, but he didn't have the personality, the charisma, and that's part of the thing the personalism. You need charisma. Trump, he's a buffoon, but he's got charisma. People like him. They listen to him. Desantis had the charisma of a wet mop. Now the big theory is he's also got a certain reptile brain intelligence.

Speaker 1: 1:49:59

I actually, when people forward the chest to him, I'm like there's no way Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:50:05

Reptile brain. I mean, I've actually made the comment before that the Republican Party today appeals to the art complex of that reptile brain theory because it's all about fear and territorialism and acquiring resources. It's a very strong art complex. It doesn't have much of the mammalian empathetic element to it and somehow he's appealing to that. I think it was Haidt who used to do the moral values test of politics.

Speaker 1: 1:50:41

Yeah, haidt, jonathan, haidt, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:50:45

You took a look at who scored what and the book has always scored more impurity hierarchy, fear, watt. And the book has always scored more in purity hierarchy fear, xenophobia. That's all. That was already a pattern you saw when the hates stuff came out back in the late aughts. It's just increasingly the dominant thing for conservatism. It's pretty obvious. It's what their appeals are. Thing for conservatism. It's pretty obvious. It's what their appeals are for. Their politics are all about resentment, purity, culture, maintaining the purity of the blood, maintaining the purity of the women. The xenophobia elements, the fear, and it's also territorialism.

Speaker 1: 1:51:33

Although that here's one thing I think I agree with you, but I think you go back to a point you made earlier.

Speaker 1: 1:51:41

One thing that you've seen amongst evangelicals that did not used to be there at all was the two-morality King David model of leadership they used to they really did used to freak out about the appearance of public impropriety at all um and uh, and there was supposed to be no division between public and private life. That is gone in the politicized evangelical worldview. It's not gone in protestant christ, I don't think, but it is gone in that and that's new. I mean, that's like a new development. I think partly because of secularization, because after 2008, like, religious belief amongst young people dropped a ton and it's under discussed even. What do you?

Speaker 2: 1:52:30

make of that? Oh, I agree, definitely it's fallen down a rabbit hole. You see it a lot Gen Z is trying to show signs of being evangelical oriented, which is a slight change to the trend.

Speaker 1: 1:52:47

Even though they're unchurched.

Speaker 2: 1:52:48

Unchurched, but they're unchurched. They have this evangelical aspiration Even though they're unchurched. Unchurched, but it's basically a little church.

Speaker 1: 1:52:53

They have this evangelical aspiration.

Speaker 2: 1:52:56

But they don't go to church. They kind of live it personally. But I do think it's also helping to do the two moralities thing because they're not having these social repercussions and reinforcement of a church and a congregation around you keeping you straight and narrow. If you're unchurched you could be, oh, I'm pious, and everything, and then still have your seedy side and they'll be really knowing it and not getting any pushback on it, whereas if you're in a congregation people are more likely to catch on to what you're doing. And I see it even now Like I've been going to church a lot more often, particularly since my stroke, to the point that the priest recognizes me pretty well, but it's like except for like one or two young couples, it's all people older than me or my age, like really old. It's like going to a geriatric ward in many ways.

Speaker 1: 1:53:55

Gen X or boomer, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:53:58

It's Gen X and boomers and not really the millennials. Do you see millennials or Gen Z? They're there with their family. Their parents will be there and they're going with their family. Almost every young person you see is there because they're there with their family, part of the family group, not on their family. Almost every young person you see is there because they're there with their family part of the family group, not on their own.

Speaker 2: 1:54:16

Occasionally you'll see a couple people come in once in a while and ask about it. But I do think that we are seeing the two moralities come in because, as Dilly said, this is very much a Puritan thing. Puritan New England would never have stood for this kind of thing. We had the red letter and things like that, the scrum letter, but I do think to a degree it's always been there sort of, at least in the Southern evangelicals, because I remember some scandals involving my ex Brooks's church and leadership being a little immoral, let's say, but also utterly pious. And I do think that distinction existed down there to this day. But it's just increasingly obvious because, again I think, because people are unchurched, they're not having the social reproduction and social reinforcement role of the congregation, they're watching them, like you did in, say, plymouth or Boston in, say 1670.

Speaker 1: 1:55:25

All these podcasts who have never even been like gone through Catcher Men and whatever it's like. It's crazy, Like go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:55:33

Yeah, like there's an example of Bob Jones University where you can't even dance with each other, but it's also a hotbed of they just changed that.

Speaker 1: 1:55:41

You can dance now as long as you're being watched by one of the higher-ups.

Speaker 2: 1:55:46

Oh really, I don't know. I don't follow Bob Jones. Women can wear pants now.

Speaker 1: 1:55:50

I only know because it was right next to where I was.

Speaker 2: 1:55:53

Oh okay, it's local to your South Carolina. It was local to.

Speaker 1: 1:55:56

Greenville, south Carolina. Yeah, only reason I knew.

Speaker 2: 1:55:58

So I do think that this is a lack of churching and about the social reproduction and social reinforcement and norms upholding of being in a congregation. Being unchurched is an increasingly common thing. I mean evangelical, low church, protestant. It's never really been super church, but you used to go to the church. Now there's a lot of people who feel this way. They just go to the bookstore or they watch a televangelist. They're practicing in their home and the only reinforcement they get is to the TV. Practicing in their home and the only reinforcement they get is to the TV. So you don't have the. It's easier to let your instincts let you do.

Speaker 2: 1:56:38

Come to public thing, although in America it's sort of reversed. The public side is super pious, it's the private side that has the mistresses. It's kind of reversed around from the Catholic side where publicly they'd run around with the Goomba or the mistress and keep the Casa Chica with your mistress in it, and then at home you're the pious man who goes to church all the time. In America it's sort of two more allies, but reversed, flipped. This is my perspective as a Latin American and that's what I saw in the South. But you're more of a Southerner than me. You're from Georgia. What do you think about?

Speaker 1: 1:57:19

that. Yeah Well, I mean we're shed. I'm not from. I'm also not from a Protestant Southern stock, I'm from Jewish protestant southern stock. I'm from jewish and catholic southern stock. So so like, uh, you know latin culture. Actually and I've said this before, latin culture is more comfortable to me than doing a protestant culture.

Speaker 1: 1:57:40

But that is also why I think I was like I started noticing this shift in american bonapartism from this kind of uhDR like chief, the James Burnham model, the chief manager who probably is not a manager in the way that people complain about PMC. They think of managers, but it's from the military, are from business, and that was the James Burnham model of what our technocratically and its leadership base would come from. And Trump is both kind of a new barish part of that world but also a rejection of that. I mean, as I pointed out, trump is a nepo baby, absolutely, but he does not come from one of the old American families, and even Obama did Now, carter didn't and Clinton didn't either, reagan, I don't think did either, but before the 1980s and even the Bush family and, like I said, obama actually his white family does have ties to the oldest, like old money in America. You came from these old families that we didn't really acknowledge was like kind of our aristocracy. Trump isn't from that.

Speaker 2: 1:59:00

He is a billionaire, nepo baby, he's an oligarch, blah, blah, blah, but he's not one of these old family people and whereas he's also not a corporate uh mandarin either who rose up to the corporate ranks to become a big ceo of a major corporation like, say, jack welsh would have been if jack welsh ran for president. He is sort of a large-scale petit bourgeois, uh, and that he runs a basically a small business people now that's mostly selling trump licenses in his name. He's not really constructing anymore because he's been bankrupt too many times. The banks don't lend him any money, um. So, yes, this he doesn't have that same. We hate the boss, the office space, uh thing. We don't like hr, we don't like the corporate leadership. So, yeah, he's definitely not part of that.

Speaker 2: 1:59:56

Back in either 2012 or 2016, there was an article in one of the magazines I saw online and I can't find the bookmark, but there was an article discussing Trump as being, because I can't remember if it was Trump or Romney, but I think it's pretty much Trump because of the description. If I remember from the story, trump represents the self-made businessman, sort of like the car salesman Appeals more to the bourgeois, the self-made man, and of like the car salesman appeals more to the busy bourgeois, the self-made man, and he also appeals to the showman. There's two types of people. There's a different type of voters, a different type of people people look up to. There's a celebrity, the voter, the celebrity person, and sometimes you'll have people become that like JFK, the whole Camelot thing. But you have some people.

Speaker 2: 2:00:49

Trump definitely represents two factors factions whereas his opponent, I think Clinton at the time, represented the Mandarin, who were the people who worked their way up the corporate ladder, up the bureaucratic ladder, up the academic ladder, getting their degrees, getting their positions, working their way up that way. And so you had the competition between, I guess you could say, the corporatocracy and the PMC versus the self-made man, the petit bourgeois and the showman, who's definitely the celebrity showman. He combines those two and gathered that around him, just defeated the other type, who usually I expect to have more institutional power because the corporations are the big donors. As you said, we all thought the corporations ran everything. Now we're seeing that they're actually running scared and will crave in as soon as this caudillo makes his move. I mean it's kind of disgusting to me seeing how other corporations and even the universities are kind of bowling over, although now, as you said, you broke the deal.

Speaker 1: 2:01:54

I will say this Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 2:02:04

No, I'm waiting for you. You said, I will say this, and then you went quiet.

Speaker 1: 2:02:08

Oh, oh, oh, yeah. Yeah, I think there's a. Anyway, he broke the deal with Colombia, but also like the bond market's losing faith in him, like, if you read the Mirren document, that's the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accords it was based off of, like, the idea that no one was going to drop US treasuries, and that's not true anymore. Which by the way is actually something that, like that pattern, only holds in American and European economies that are more or less rationalized Caudillo economies actually do do what's happening right now.

Speaker 2: 2:02:56

Yeah, as I said, I spent 1985 in Mexico.

Speaker 1: 2:03:01

Back on him, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 2:03:03

And I watched the Spanish peso drop like a rock when I was there as a kid and the effect it had on the inflation and the bond market when I was there as a kid and the effect it had on the inflation and the bond market. And, of course, this was because of the early 1980s banking crisis and bond market crisis in Latin America, where De La Madrid was trying to uphold because they are taking all these loans for the banks and also sold a lot of bonds when they could pay the interest easily with oil revenue from the oil shock and then when the oil shock drove up, that's when they were over leveraged and they got clobbered and the imf went after them. Uh, we're seeing that here in america. We're sort of beginning the super high debt to ddp ratio. The the interest is taking up more and more of the debt.

Speaker 2: 2:03:51

Um, people are realizing that if we have an economic downturn because of these tariffs and the chaos, you can't even keep the tariffs consistent. You'll put them in one day and then take them down the next day and no capitalist is going to invest money with no certainty. They are some of the most risk-averse people on earth. In reality. They want predictability with no certainty. They are some of the most risk-averse people on Earth. In reality, they want predictability. They want consistent planability that they can plan out all the data streams and financial streams. And he's making that a hash.

Speaker 2: 2:04:25

And as people worry that this is going to cause the problems. Without a good economy, you don't get the tax revenues to pay the interest on the mortgage. On the problems. Without a good economy, you don't get the tax revenues to pay the interest on the mortgage, on the debt, you've got to borrow debt to pay the interest. It becomes a runaway situation. People are seeing that.

Speaker 2: 2:04:41

I think that's the reason why the bond market is taking a dump. Also, he's pissing off people who hold a lot of American debt. He pissed off the Japanese. He pissed off the Chinese. They can start unloading or refusing to buy, more likely, refusing to buy new debt, forcing the interest rate up at the bond market, which is, I think, what we're seeing. But if they really wanted to screw them, they could just start unloading the debt. Luckily, a lot of our debt isn't held by foreigners, unlike Latin America, where they really got held by the store hearers. But we have enough outstanding debt held abroad by the Saudis and the Chinese and the Japanese and everybody else who run huge debt deficits with the accumulated American assets, that are going to have a problem and we're seeing a kind of like economy. Really we're seeing the inflation, the stagflation, we're seeing the currency devaluation, the dollars dropping like a stone, the bond markets crashing. I mean, it's very much the instability of that you'd see in a 1980s Latin American banana republic.

Speaker 1: 2:05:51

Well, I think that's a good place to end, kyle. I think, uh, we'll try to have you on the show again. Uh, uh, sometimes I know that I enjoy these conversations and uh, you and I have a yeah, you and I have a long history of discussing um latin american politics, american politics and european politics and uh, we've changed a good bit since we started this.

Speaker 1: 2:06:15

But actually our concerns about the executive and that was a point of agreement when you and I, when we were on opposite ends of the conservative movement, was yeah, we haven't changed our distrust of the executive Like that's not, not as that at all, which is why.

Speaker 2: 2:06:34

I'm more of a liberal, even though I've become increasingly a Marxist, in my analysis I'm still a libertarian socialist. I don't trust executive branches and I don't really. I will, for irony's sake, collect Soviet memorabilia Like I collect pins from the Soviet Union, like I just got one from Wish that had a rocket thing following up on, I think, the anniversary of Sputnik. I'll gather tanky iconography is a joke, ironically speaking. But I'm still anti-executive, anti totality, even though I believe you need to administer a state. I'm anti-bureaucratic and that's the anti-bureaucratic elements of Marx and Engels and their proposals in the civil war in France of how the Paris Commune was trying to restrain the bureaucracy and their critique of in the premier as well, of over bureaucratization. The bureaucracy being sort of a separate part of society. Controlling it rather than being a servant is a big fear. There's sort of presaged burnham and and uh and orwell and I've read too much orwell 1984 and burnham.

Speaker 2: 2:07:48

I remember I first discovered burnham at my grandma's apartment in New York when I was bored looking through her book collection. She had the new Machiavellians original edition and I could tell you about my grandma for a while she was a little hotbed and she used to spook the whole family because she was defending Castro regime against my mom's mom. She's Ecuadorian, she used to be a journalist, a kind of firebrand immigration journalist way back in Ecuador, and sort of a radical. She would defend the Castro regime. She would tell me about the things Batista would do, the murders and all the other oppressions he did, and she also would defend the Soviet Union, which makes you think she might've been some sort of a trot or something like that because of Burnham. But those critiques drawing from Burnham because all Orwell was doing was restating Burnham really in the in his writings there, and also the new class theorists like Dilan from Yugoslavia.

Speaker 2: 2:08:56

But those tendencies are still there with me and I'm still strongly anti. I do need for bureaucracy, but it's got to be chained and restrained and definitely don't let the executive get too much power. That has never changed. That is the same me from that. I'm still a coloss, colossal libertarian, even though I'm more of a libertarian socialist now than an american style libertarian. But that is definitely unchanged. And you were the same way, even though you were more paleo con. I can remember you also told me the first time about um, the new Duvel Draw, because some of the friends we were hanging out with in the live journal, groups were quoting Benoit and things like that Benoist. So we've had these positions ourselves for years and one of my follies is that you've been consistent and I also blame you for my, my, my transition. You remember once I made a post to me and said I won because I made some sort of a rather leftist comments and proposals on, I think, my original Facebook you know, having like a national.

Speaker 2: 2:10:07

I remember that and you were like I won See, I got the conservative to go with me and then it's sort of of I've been listening to you and following the suggestions you've made, uh, along the way to spread my uh, my mind, but definitely, uh, I mean I'm a heterodox. Um, although I think some of my ideas. I will talk about my view on the Soviet Union and the Mensheviks, and I think it was Plekhanov who talked about the Incan form of development or Incan empire, sino-incan despotism.

Speaker 2: 2:10:47

And there was a book that I bought at Books a Million in Miami and there was a book that I bought at Books, a Million in Miami.

Speaker 2: 2:10:52

Yeah, and it was by Shlomo Aveneri. He's an Israeli scholar and he was writing about how the French terror came about because, in Marxist terms, they were trying to recreate Sparta and Republican Rome in 18th century France with a totally different mode of production, and that Marx basically said if you try to push something to a different mode of production that it actually exists in, you get the terrors. Get the terrors. And I would think that Soviet Union not being ready for a revolution in Marxist terms the mode of production was still too futile led to a lot of the terror there. Bakunin talking about the threats of the party, I think were also something they needed to take a hand on. That's why I call myself more of a first internationalist. I'm sort of neutral between the Marxists and the anarchists in my interpretations of things and to a degree I said probably a more orthodox Marxist, old-fashioned, but it's more of an interest in both.

Speaker 2: 2:12:11

The literature, just because, as I was telling you, the 18th premier is way applicable to what we have today. I was telling you how Louis de Paul had his basis with the rural peasantry and the lump imperial tariff and the lump and pearl tarot and Trump has his base with the rural peasantry as we have here in America, and the petit bourgeois who are becoming increasingly lumpinized. And really you look at the rallies, a lot of lump and pearls tarot are there. He's repeating a lot of the stuff of Louis Napoleon, which is one reason why I said it was like returning the third time as a burlesque. But Marx is a really good writer. He's very entertaining and his analysis is often very interesting. I mean, I'll have to have to come back on and discuss that more with you rather than keep going, but it's been a pleasure talking with you again, derek, and it's a long pleasure talking with you again, derek. It's a long friendship. I'm glad we're friends. Yeah, it's been a pleasure talking to you, kyle, and we'll have some time excellent.

Speaker 2: 2:13:27

Thank you very much. Have a good afternoon alright.

Speaker 1: 2:13:30

No, that's fine, you too.