A New Day in NYC

Summary

Compact Podcast: “A New Day in NYC”

Date: January 3, 2026
Hosts: Matthew Schmitz, Ashley Frawley, Jeff Shullenberger

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Episode Overview

In this lively episode of the Compact Podcast, Matthew Schmitz, Ashley Frawley, and Jeff Shullenberger analyze the early moves of New York City’s new mayor, Zoran Mamdani; discuss President Trump’s threats of military intervention in Iran; and debate a radical new thesis about the Frankfurt School's impact on leftist politics. Blending sharp criticism, historical context, and political theory, the hosts explore how current events in New York and the broader American scene reflect longstanding tensions between individualism and collectivism, and grapple with ideological realignments on the left and right.

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1. The Zoran Mamdani Mayoral Era: Hopes, Contradictions, and Rhetoric

Segment: [01:56]–[28:23]

The Hosts’ Initial Reactions

• Jeff Shullenberger expresses measured curiosity about the new mayor, avoiding both the fervor and the alarm:

  “I'm not either particularly caught up in the Mamdani mania, nor particularly worried we are headed for some sort of collapse into, you know, sort of Soviet style breadline dystopia...” ([02:53])

• He humorously imagines a synthesis of Soviet and Sharia dystopias—“Soviet Sharia”—underscoring the sometimes hyperbolic nature of critics’ fears.

Speech Analysis: Abundance, Affordability & The “Warmth of Collectivism”

• Speech Highlights:

  • Abundance and affordability: Mamdani cited both as goals. Many leftists criticized this, since “abundance” is associated with centrist Democrats like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson ([03:59]).
  • Olive branch: By using these “centrist” terms, Mamdani appears to be “extending an olive branch to the abundance faction” of the Democratic Party ([04:53]) while staying aligned with broader party messaging.
  • Contradictions: The speech’s central contradiction was balancing these centrist tropes with the more radical language of “collectivism.”

• The Most Criticized Line:

  • “...replacing the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism...” ([05:55])

    • Ashley Frawley: Finds the line both awkward and potentially provocative:

      “He could have said solidarity... community, cooperation... there are all these terms that he could have used that were not collectivism, which... does not have a particularly positive set of valences...” ([06:07])

    • Matthew Schmitz: Observes that “collectivism” is “a National Review term... does not appear in Jacobin.” ([07:09])
  • Contradictory Imagery:
    • Mamdani claims to oppose individualism but then appeals to “8 1/2 million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe.” ([07:16])
    • Schmitz’s Analysis:

      “There’s a pretty venerable argument that... individualism can advance collectivism and collectivism can kind of advance individualism...” ([07:16])

    • Ashley Frawley: Calls the debate between collectivism vs. individualism “very, very annoying black and white thinking”:

      “Capitalism already collectivizes. That’s the point. We are capable of being individuals to the extent that we are now because of the extraordinary collectivist bent of capitalism.” ([16:09])

Policy Prospects and “Rule by NGOs”

• Mamdani’s “city owned grocery stores” are noted with skepticism. Schmitz points out that city ownership does NOT always mean city operation: Kansas City and Chicago have tried similar initiatives, typically partnering with non-profits or co-ops ([08:38]).
• Schmitz’s Critique:

  “...it’s going to be a kind of extension of the rule by NGOs that Darrell Paul described for Compact in his article Why NGOs Run Your World.” ([08:59])

• The fate of Mamdani’s project will hinge on success with “city run grocery stores, free buses, and public safety,” especially the new “social worker” approach to mental health ([10:54]).

Historical & Social Context: From Bloomberg to Now

• Bloomberg Era:
  • Schmitz recalls the “spirited,” optimistic technocratic liberalism of Bloomberg and Cuomo, whose energy often flowed from support for contested social issues (e.g., gay rights) ([11:34]).
• Today’s Left:
  • Social liberalism has lost its energizing edge (transgender rights are “more divisive within the Democratic Party than gay rights were”).
  • Ashley argues that “the left... has displaced the revolutionary subject” to foreign causes, seen now in pro-Palestinian activism ([19:01]).
  • She warns against romanticizing “the vision of the Palestinian that is the revolutionary subject” and cautions against the cyclical tendency to seek the ideal revolutionary abroad ([19:01]).

Key Quotes & Moments

• Ashley Frawley:

  “In some ways, like being strangled is like a really tight hug. That’s probably warm, but that’s not something that we should ever aspire to.” ([18:17])

• Matthew Schmitz (on Mamdani’s individual/collective rhetoric):

  “So though he’s saying, I’m for collectivism and I’m against individualism... within Mamdani’s own rhetoric, a very strong sense that the individual is the standard by which things are measured.” ([07:16])

• On “It’s a Wonderful Life”:
  Shullenberger likens the movie’s ending to the “warmth of collectivism,” contrasting communal care with the “frigidity of individualism” ([24:54]).

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2. Trump’s Threat to Attack Iran: Foreign Policy, Post-9/11 Continuity, and the Deep State

Segment: [28:23]–[42:16]

Trump’s Foreign Policy “Interventionism”

• Schmitz introduces Trump’s declaration:

  “‘The US is locked and loaded and ready to intervene if Iran kills protesters’... are you telling me that the neocons were once again wrong when they said that Trump would be a disaster for their project?” ([28:23])

• Ashley Frawley: Expresses skepticism about the US’s shifting allegiances and humanitarian rationalizations for intervention:

  “…the admirable thing about Trump in the past had been to kind of unabashedly tell the truth about foreign intervention and its purpose…” ([29:56])

The Deep State and Military Bureaucracy

• Shullenberger analyzes how the post-9/11 “national security state” persists—regardless of presidents’ rhetoric or ideology ([34:01]):

  “He is still overseeing the American national security state that was built up in the wake of 9/11, and therefore that itself functions as a source of direction for policy...”

• Historical Context:
  • References to Dick Cheney and the shift in US foreign policy post-9/11 ([32:17]).
  • “Smart war” branding under Obama—a rebranding of the War on Terror with Silicon Valley-infused language ([39:23]).
• On Continuity Despite Political Change:

  “What’s left to the... civilian elected officials is to just kind of put their own spin on it.” ([40:43]) “...the Trumpian as well as originally left critique of the deep state... that the deep state is this kind of unaccountable monstrosity that’s been built up over the past 75 years...” ([40:01])

Key Quotes

• Jeff Shullenberger:

  “What’s notable about this is that they are bragging, they’re openly bragging about doing this as opposed to kind of trying to keep it relatively secret, which is what the previous administrations did.” ([37:34])

• On policy style:

  “In this case, it’s... Trump’s own personality, which is supposed to kind of reassure us. It’s, in a sense, the opposite of the smart war idea…” ([41:19])

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3. The Frankfurt School, Leftist Schisms, and Conspiracy Theories

Segment: [42:16]–[62:34]

Frankfurt School’s “Function” Reconsidered

• Background:
  • The right has long accused the Frankfurt School of undermining Western values ([43:16]).
  • New book by Marxist Gabriel Rockhill claims Western Marxists (the Frankfurt School) were fostered by Western powers to prevent true communism—creating a domesticated “compatible” Marxism ([44:11]).

Rockhill & The Online Neo–Third Worldist Left

• Rockhill’s Thesis:

  • The Frankfurt School, rather than undermining capitalism, corralled the left into non-threatening, essentially bourgeois forms of activism ([44:47]).
  • The real revolutionary subjects, he says, are in the Global South; the Western left is a lost cause duped by consumerism.

• Ashley Frawley:
  Cites Neal Davenport’s “Dialectic of Anti Enlightenment” (2010), describing how the Frankfurt School’s blame of “mass politics” for fascism led to suspicion toward working-class movements—a suspicion that lingers today ([52:02]).

• Schullenberger:
  Notes a convergence and mutual suspicion between the “multipolarist” right and certain anti-hegemonic, pro-China “Third Worldists” in online circles ([45:43]).

  “I do think it has a kind of echo of the groyper wars that have been happening on the right...” ([50:00])

  • These “angry, mobilized” factions lack institutional power but wield significant online influence.

The Problem of Revolutionary Subjects & Working-Class Alienation

• Ashley Frawley:
  Argues that both the left and elites now avoid mobilizing the domestic working class, preferring to outsource “revolutionary potential” abroad—often at the expense of domestic social stability, as seen in immigration debates ([58:19]):

  “Our good progressive politicians prefer to fight... even the Islamic contingents that they import than their own working class... Anything is preferable to that because [the working class] had a real and for them terrifying ability to destabilize the capitalist order...”

• Rockhill’s and the “Tankie” Left’s Pessimism:
  See Western masses as “hopelessly duped by consumerism and... inherently racist” ([57:13]).

Anti-Modernity and Political Reaction

• The episode closes with a reflection on anti-modernity as a unifying undercurrent in left- and right-wing reactionary politics:

  “I think various forms of anti modernity are again maybe what would unite the kind of duganite multipolarists with the sort of third worldists on the left...” ([61:57]) “...a kind of slow shrinking away from the promises of modernity...” ([62:12])

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Most Notable Quotes & Moments

• Ashley Frawley on Collectivism vs. Individualism:

  “Capitalism already collectivizes. That’s the point. We are capable of being individuals to the extent that we are now because of the extraordinary collectivist bent of capitalism.” ([16:09])

• Matthew Schmitz on Political Rhetoric:

  “Collectivism is a National Review term... it does not appear in Jacobin.” ([07:09])

• Jeff Shullenberger on “It’s a Wonderful Life”:

  “You could describe the atmosphere of the final scene of that film as invoking the warmth of collectivism...” ([24:54])

• Ashley Frawley on Outsourcing Revolution:

  “…there’s this hunt for the perfect revolutionary subject somewhere else. And they found this... in the vision of the Palestinian... not the. Whatever real Palestinians are, don’t really matter.” ([19:01])

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Important Timestamps

• 01:56 — Start of substantive discussion; Mamdani’s mayoral transition
• 03:59 — Mamdani’s “abundance”/“affordability” rhetoric
• 05:55 — The “warmth of collectivism” line
• 07:16 — Contradictions in Mamdani’s individual/collective imagery
• 16:09 — Ashley Frawley's systemic critique of left-right clichés
• 24:54 — “It’s a Wonderful Life” as collectivist parable
• 28:23 — Shift to Trump and Iran policy
• 34:01 — Enduring structures of post-9/11 US foreign policy
• 40:01 — The deep state and continuity across administrations
• 42:16 — Segment: Frankfurt School, leftist fracture, and Rockhill’s book
• 44:11 — Rockhill’s thesis: Western Marxism as controlled opposition
• 50:00 — Online “tankie”/multipolarist/third-worldist phenomenon
• 52:02 — Critique of Frankfurt School’s legacy on left politics
• 57:13 — Western masses as seen by the new “tankie” left
• 61:57 — Anti-modernity as cross-ideological impulse

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Tone & Style

• The hosts blend academic debate and sharp polemic with cultural references (e.g., “Soviet Sharia,” “It’s a Wonderful Life”).
• Frequent sardonic humor—especially when critiquing both left and right ideological clichés.
• High level of theoretical and historical references, but interspersed with colloquial language.

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Summary

This episode offers a robust and wide-ranging discussion connecting local New York politics to global ideological struggles, warning of simplistic binaries (individualism vs. collectivism), and tracing patterns of realignment and reaction on both sides of the political spectrum. Whether analyzing Mamdani’s inaugural rhetoric, America’s persistent military posture, or the left’s theoretical squabbles, the Compact hosts dissect not just the facts but the deeper currents shaping political debate in 2026.

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Transcript

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[Matthew Schmitz]

Welcome to the Compact podcast. Today we'll discuss the first moves of New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani, Trump's threat to attack Iran, and a new theory for how the Frankfurt school destroyed the future. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So, Jeff, you're one of the New Yorkers on the podcast. How are you feeling in the light of a new dawn? As Mamdani takes over the city,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

I'm

[Ashley Frawley]

interested to see how it will go. I'm not either particularly caught up in

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the Mamdani mania, nor particularly worried we are headed for some sort of collapse into, you know, sort of Soviet style breadline dystopia, I think it'll be. Or, or for that matter, Sharia, I guess sort of Soviet Sharia would be like the, the, the synthesis. Here you sort of have, have bread

[Ashley Frawley]

lines or like the lines for getting

[Jeff Schulenberger]

your stuff from Halal butchers are really long or something like that. I assume there are some parts of the Soviet bloc where maybe it looks kind of like this Central Asia or something.

[Ashley Frawley]

But, yeah, I don't know. I did notice.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

I will say I didn't really tune into the oath taking event, but I caught sort of snippets of it and read, you know, sort of skimmed the transcript of the speech and caught snippets of some of the other speeches.

[Ashley Frawley]

Two things that stood out to me in the speech. One, it was interesting to see him

[Jeff Schulenberger]

cite both abundance and affordability as, as goals.

[Ashley Frawley]

So that, you know, many people remarked on this. I saw people on the left kind

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of sniping at him for using the a word, AKA abundance, which has become associated with a centrist, a centrist faction of the Democratic Party, notably the pundits Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson,

[Ashley Frawley]

who published

[Jeff Schulenberger]

a book at the beginning of this year under that title.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I read a couple months ago

[Jeff Schulenberger]

a piece in New York magazine that was about the war for the future of the Democratic Party. And on one side you had the abundance faction, and then on the other side you had the Mamdani AOC et cetera, sort of Democratic socialist faction.

[Ashley Frawley]

And, you know, it seemed that Mamdani

[Jeff Schulenberger]

was, was, you know, extending an olive branch to the abundance faction by citing abundance in his speech and also citing it alongside affordability, which has become sort of the. The standard Democratic Party line against Trump, which now Trump is sort of arguing is a. A hoax, I believe is the term he's used for it.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so clearly he's trying to present

[Jeff Schulenberger]

himself as in sync with the broader party coalition rather than as at odds with it.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so you saw some people on

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the left getting mad about that aspect of his speech, that he was using these sort of. These sort of soft centrist terms as opposed to, you know, more forceful ones.

[Ashley Frawley]

But then on the other hand, you saw people criticizing. And they'd say the phrase that has been most cited and criticized even by people on the left, I would say, is this thing about the warmth replacing

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism, which, yeah, I did

[Ashley Frawley]

think was kind of.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

It was bizarre, to be honest, that

[Ashley Frawley]

he would go there. I saw people on the left saying,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

you know, he could have said solidarity. He could have said, I don't know, community cooperation. Like there are all these terms that he could have used that we're not

[Ashley Frawley]

collectivism, which generally doesn't have a particularly positive set of valences in the, in the, you know, even within the Democratic coalition. So there was a kind of contradiction

[Jeff Schulenberger]

there where the speech somehow both was.

[Ashley Frawley]

Was designed to appeal to the broad

[Jeff Schulenberger]

center of opinion in the Democratic Party,

[Ashley Frawley]

while at the same time, you know, using terms like collectivism that even people

[Jeff Schulenberger]

on the left don't seem to think are very useful.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so I saw a few kind

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of left commentators saying, you know, this guy needs to get a new speechwriter. So that was.

[Matthew Schmitz]

He wrote it himself.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Oh, he wrote himself, I believe, because

[Matthew Schmitz]

he said something about, you know, when I was writing this speech.

[Ashley Frawley]

Okay.

[Matthew Schmitz]

And I. I took that as him saying, look, guys, I. This is my personal touch on it, but I think professional help would be called for. And collectivism is a National Review term.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Yeah, right.

[Matthew Schmitz]

That's. That's a word that appears in that magazine, and it does not appear in Jacobin.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Yeah.

[Matthew Schmitz]

So it's a. It's a curious choice. And just in terms of that one statement, I'd say maybe note that there is a certain critique of kind of, you know, liberal and modern societies that argues that there's a kind of dynamic that's kind of, in a way symbiotic between individualism and collectivism. Right. That when more local forms of community break down, or the family or religious institutions, associations, things like this, and people are individualized, that's when they need to look to this broader kind of national level collective for support, because they no longer have those other forms of support. So in Mamdani's mind, there's an absolute opposition between individualism and collectivism. But I would say certainly when those specific terms are used, there's a pretty venerable argument that the two things actually go together. And I'll just note that in, you know, Mamdani's speech, there are certain hints of the way those things can go together. He says, we will tell a new story of our city. It will not be a tale of one city governed only by the 1%, nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor. It will be a tale of 8 1/2 million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe. So though he's saying, I'm for collectivism and I'm against individualism, he says, this is a New York. We will have eight and a half million New Yorks. Each person will have his own New York. So there is, within Mamdani's own rhetoric, a very strong sense that the individual is the standard by which things are measured. And so I think that Mamdani's speech is open to that. Line of critique that individuals, certain kind of individualism can advance collectivism and collectivism can kind of advance individualism because it often is uncomfortable with alternate forms of community or solidarity. In terms of Mamdani's project, I'm going to put my marker down and say I'm very skeptical of where things will go. He may have some lasting achievements. I think if you look at the last real attempt at progressive governance in New York under Bill de Blasio, he had his universal Pre K initiative, which is in place, I think has popular support and isn't going to go away soon or easily. So de Blasio had that real achievement. And Mamdani may have some similar achievements, but I'm skeptical of them. And I think that things will fail to work out for him in a way that a lot of critics haven't yet. Kind of it'll work out in a way that's a bit surprising. So a lot of critics of Mamdani's call him a socialist right. And he claims a label for himself. And so there's this notion that it's going to be a kind of overextension of government that will lead to disaster. We don't yet know how. His probably his most famous initiative, the city run, or I think I should say city owned. That's his term. City owned grocery stores will work, but I think it's important to realize that he talks about them as city owned grocery stores. And there's an important distinction between something that is city owned and city run. So Kansas City has a city owned grocery store. That city owned grocery store has seen a huge fall off in customers. It's become a money sinkhole that the city is constantly pouring money into. But what I want to note here is that it is run by a nonprofit. Similarly, Chicago, which is exploring its own city owned grocery stores, commissioned a feasibility study and this study from the consultants. So the consultants have been paid. And what they recommended to Mayor Brandon Johnson was that the city not attempt to operate the supermarket itself, but it rather partner with a for profit operator, a nonprofit operator or a co op. So I think that there is a notion that Mamdani is just going to kind of extend the reach of the government into everything. But there's a more complex process that's likely to occur and that is the city partnering with nonprofits, giving them leases, giving them money, and then they're supposed to deliver these services. So it's going to be a kind of extension of the rule by NGOs that Darrell Paul described for compaq in his article why NGOs run your world. You know, we've seen some other moves from Mamdani. You know, he's revoked some of Eric Adams's executive orders. He's revoked a more expansive definition of anti Semitism that Adams broadens. You'll continue to see contestation on those lines, but I think really Mamdani's project is going to rise or fail on the success of some of his signature initiatives. The city run grocery stores, free buses, and then public safety. And he's talked a lot about this new kind of expanded attempt to handle mental health problems through basically social workers rather than policing. And I'm pretty skeptical about how well that will work. But I think when you look at Mamdani's speech, the important thing to realize is that he is trying to offer, you know, a positive vision that's exciting. And one reason he won is that the kind of, you know, kind of the. The long trail of Bloombergism in New York just exhausted itself of a more kind of technocratic liberalism. And when Bloomberg was in office, that kind of technocratic Democratic Party did have its own spiritedness and its own ambition. There really was an optimism about using market mechanisms or kind of this smart technocratic city planning and how it could improve our lives and one of our charter schools and Teach for America and bike lanes. And these were seen as things that would really improve the city. So there was a certain excitement. I think I'll also note that one of the things that gave that Bloomberg era liberalism and energy was its social liberalism. So Bloomberg was very like really any Democratic politician, but it had a certain character there. Bloomberg embraced gay rights, which back then had more salience than they do today because they were still contested. Right. Gay marriage was not a constitutional right recognized by the Supreme Court. So. And there were a lot of Republicans who were actively opposing gay rights. And so it had a certain energy. N. Cuomo, when he was governor of New York, said, you know, if you are a bigot, if you kind of deny the right to marry, or if you deny a woman's right to choose, you have no place as a New Yorker. So those kind of Democrats who kind of appear very centrist now, they had a certain kind of cultural energy that they derived from these socially liberal causes. And I think partly through the success of those causes, that energy dissipated. And so the kind of, the more technocratic wing of the Democratic Party was deprived of one of the ways in which it really claimed a sort of left wing or liberatory potential. And transgenderism hasn't sufficiently replaced the energy that gay rights once provided the party, because it's much more divisive within the Democratic Party than gay rights were.

[Ashley Frawley]

I think you probably already sort of dealt with this fairly well. But, yeah, the line that everyone had pulled out of Mamdani's speech about collectivism, I swear it was placed there in Trump style just to get supporters excited and make rivals as angry as possible. And, you know, but you know, what came after that, just before that in the speech and just after really spoke to the fact that there is a kind of a relationship between the individual and the collective that Mamdani appears to appreciate slightly appreciate to a certain extent, and an appeal to universalism, which of course will warm my heart. But the I think it's worth reiterating because I found the discussion about it online to be so annoying, is that I think the left and right both get this wrong. There's a sense that socialism is collectivism and capitalism is individualism. And it's this very, very annoying black and white thinking that needs to be dispelled. It's not. That is. That's not how it works. It's not like we. We get one or the other. Capitalism already collectivizes. That's the point. We are capable of being individuals to the extent that we are now because of the extraordinary collectivist bent of capitalism. The example that I always use is that I'm freer immensely as a woman now because I don't have to pound millet eight hours a day. You know, that is done for me. And the. Whatever food just appears on a supermarket shelf like magic, and then I'm free to think and create and be an individual. And that is something that capitalism does. And socialism and communism are an extension of that, of that individualizing impulse of capitalism as it collectivizes. That is the point. There's a dialectic between the collective and the individual, that as you collectivize more and more production, you free the individual. And capitalism is already doing that. And socialism is the freeing of capitalism from its destructive tendencies. So I feel like that needs to be reiterated because I see people, you know, collectivism, the warmth of collectivism just scared me so much because I just thought, well, yeah, in some ways, like being strangled is like a really tight hug. That's probably warm, but that's not something that we should ever aspire to. And the other thing that I kind

[Matthew Schmitz]

of have been thinking about, Nordic socialism, hardest hit by his figure of speech, you know, associating warmth with collectivism and coldness with individualism and people who believe that the Nordics have pointed the way forward for socialists are devastated by this ill chosen metaphor.

[Ashley Frawley]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The other thing that I've been thinking about over the past couple of days is the way that sort of part of the thrust behind Mamdani is this pro Palestine vote or this pro Palestine kind of contingent. And I've been more and more concerned really over the last decade with the degree to which the left is seeing the main bulwark against capitalism. Well, okay, this is nothing new. And I started that out completely wrong because obviously the left has for many, many decades displaced the revolutionary subject to some other place abroad. Oh, our working class is totally bought off and will never is not revolutionary. They think they're all little temporarily embarrassed millionaires or billionaires. We have to look elsewhere. And so there's always this hunt for the perfect revolutionary subject somewhere else. And they found this, what they think is the ideal revolutionary subject in the Palestinian, in the vision of the Palestinian, not the. Whatever real Palestinians are, don't really matter. But there's this for them, there's this vision of the Palestinian that is the revolutionary subject that isn't afraid to use violence, blah, blah, blah. And this is just wonderful. And I would very much caution against that. And I would remind people to think about the fact. How many times has. Have Muslim Arabs been used. And this is going to get me in trouble probably, but whatever been used against socialist and revolutionary causes, how many times have they been explicitly empowered to destroy socialism? You can think about Moroccans in Spain, mercenaries that were. Yes, okay. People fought because they were desperate. This is what some people say, you know, and they were promised, you know, food and land and so on, but some fought out of jihad and against communism. Okay, The CIA explicitly funded what would later become the Taliban against the ussr. Everybody who thinks that Islam is this like proto communist movement is sorely mistaken. And I'm really annoyed by. American socialists are putting all of their eggs in that basket. And this ties into the general point that I want and I see Jeff looking uncomfortable. So yes, go ahead and correct me.

No, no, no, I wasn't uncomfortable at all. I was glad you brought up the regulares, the Moroccan mercenaries in Spain. It's one of my favorite, one of my favorite little things to troll the right with that. You know, Franco only won by importing large numbers of African Muslims into Spain. And in fact you can, you can find propaganda from the republican side of, of, you know, these like these posters about, you know, black babies being born in Spanish villages.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

The Implication being that these, these mercenaries were raping Spanish women.

[Ashley Frawley]

So you can find that from the Republican side. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's a great, it's a great little, little vignette. But yeah, so I, I almost. I kind of want to save the, the main points I want to make

[Jeff Schulenberger]

about what Ashley just brought up to a later segment because it's highly relevant to that.

[Matthew Schmitz]

By all means, we can return to that.

[Ashley Frawley]

Yeah, so that, but, yeah, troll both the left and right with that because it is, you know, it's a, it's a contradiction to everything that they want, you know, the, the Muslim to stand for in our, in our conflicts. But the other thing that I wanted to say that ties in with what I was. The point that I was making about, about the dialectic is again, you can see this kind of playing out. I'm going to be like excessively Hegelian here and try not to do this, but is that there's this. You can see this same kind of freedom versus authoritarianism dialectic playing out in society in the same way that we're working at this individual collectivist dialectic. And I. And you can see it in our kind of uncertainty around religion where, like, Christianity is very difficult to govern. Like, the emphasis on individual conscience and so on can make it very difficult to govern. Freedom in general is difficult to govern. And, but authoritarianism obviously makes it easier to confirm, but is extraordinarily stifling. And we're kind of oscillating between these two poles and what we are not able to do and what we are not able to come up with is. And within that authoritarianism is excessive collectivism. But what we're not able to do and what we are still working out as a society is the kind of central task that history has given us, which is how to be free together. And I think you can see this kind of working out in our, in our political conflicts, in our, in whose side we want to take, where it's like, people want to reject excessive individualism and go hardcore for authoritarianism. People want to reject collectivism, go hardcore for individualism. And we are just trying to kind of work this out or reject Christianity and go hardcore for Islam and be like, oh, this is the radical subject. Look how collectivist they are. Look at them. A bulwark against capitalism or whatever it might be. And I think we should not lose sight of the task that we have to figure out how to be free together. And we haven't figured that out yet. So that's my Big world historical take on Mandani.

I was just going to add one

[Jeff Schulenberger]

little thing, which is that the.

[Ashley Frawley]

The phrase the warmth of collectivism evoked for me a moment that it probably

[Jeff Schulenberger]

didn't evoke for that many people, because I. Or maybe it did, I don't know. But I recently rewatched It's a Wonderful Life, the most classic Christmas movie which I hadn't seen for decades.

[Ashley Frawley]

And you could describe the atmosphere of the final scene of that film as

[Jeff Schulenberger]

invoking the warmth of collectivism in which this entire community comes together to essentially,

[Ashley Frawley]

I mean, in this highly sort of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

economically communitarian way, which invokes kind of ideas of the gift economy, a kind of pre capitalist mode of production, because

[Ashley Frawley]

essentially the protagonist has lost this money,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

it's going to make his loan business go under.

[Ashley Frawley]

But because he's done so much for

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the community, the entire community comes and chips in and thereby, you know, ensures that he is not. That he is not lost.

[Ashley Frawley]

And this is poised against the frigidity

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of individualism in the figure of Mr. Potter, the sort of monopolist banker who, you know, who. Who increasingly has come to dominate the town.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so in any case, it's. It's interesting that at least there's a

[Jeff Schulenberger]

version of this idea which perhaps, far from being.

[Ashley Frawley]

And, you know, we could debate whether

[Jeff Schulenberger]

collectivism is the best term for that,

[Ashley Frawley]

but certainly there is a collective pooling

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of resources that occurs in this scene. That's the whole point of it.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so it's. It's interesting to me that, you know,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

that the sort of National Review epithet of collectivism would be used to summon up these foreign images of, you know, the Soviet Union and China and so on.

[Ashley Frawley]

But all we have to do is

[Jeff Schulenberger]

turn to this iconic American cultural product

[Ashley Frawley]

and we find a scene that could be.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Could be described that way. And is.

[Ashley Frawley]

Is. Has become sort of the paradigm of.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Of the vision of. Of the Christmas spirit in American culture.

[Ashley Frawley]

So, and. And it's worth noting that that film

[Jeff Schulenberger]

was, you know, despite its current iconic

[Ashley Frawley]

status, you know, it did come under

[Jeff Schulenberger]

suspicion during the Red Scare because of this basic message.

[Ashley Frawley]

I don't think the message is. Is communist.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

In a sense, it's a kind of communitarian populist vision which you could trace back to various sorts of currents within American politics that go back quite a long way.

[Ashley Frawley]

But the other thing I'd add here

[Jeff Schulenberger]

is that it's interesting that, you know,

[Ashley Frawley]

you have plenty of critics of the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

frigidity of individualism on the right today, on the. The Post liberal right. In fact, one of the main sort of things that the post liberal right has hammered away at for the past decade is individualism as, as an overriding value and its, its deficiencies.

[Ashley Frawley]

So it is interesting that, you know,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

although this term for, for most people immediately evoked these kind of foreign images of, you know, whatever, Soviet bread lines and so on, the, the actual resonances of it within American politics and history could be somewhat more complex.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I'm, I'm still of the opinion

[Jeff Schulenberger]

that it was a very bad line. It was very poorly chosen word and

[Ashley Frawley]

didn't, didn't do Mamdani any favors.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

But nevertheless, I think it is interesting that, that you can find, you know,

[Ashley Frawley]

or there are threads you can draw

[Jeff Schulenberger]

out of it that go in different directions than, you know, most of his, his critics would, would assume.

[Matthew Schmitz]

For more on Mamdani, I highly recommend Greg Conti's Peace for Compact Mamdani and the Future of the Left. I think the definitive statement on why Mamdani is the most important figure on the American left today and his success or failure in New York matters nationally. So it looks like we're maybe getting ready to bomb Iran, maybe do more than bomb. President Trump says that the United States is locked and loaded and ready to intervene if Iran kills protesters. I remember 2015 and 2016 when neoconservatives warned that Trump's rise in the Republican Party would signal an abdication of moral leadership by the United States, a dereliction of our duty to stand up for freedom and democracy abroad. Now Trump is saying we're ready to intervene if Iran brutally suppresses a democratic uprising. So are you telling me that the neocons were once again wrong when they said that Trump would be a disaster for their project? I think they might have missed on that one, too.

[Ashley Frawley]

Well, this is not my strong area, but it's rising on the agenda. So I don't know, like the old leftist in me is suspicious always where I'm like, oh, the US Historically funded some not so great, not so liberal regimes. Not funded, sorry. Allegedly sort of backed these, these regimes. And yeah, so now they're kind of that now they're backing the liberal Democratic side. They don't. I don't know. That doesn't, doesn't strike me as something that the, the US Is doing but then used to doing around the world historically. But then it's Trump, Trump. We've got Trump involved in all of this. I don't know. I've seen some discussion online about like this. Oh, it's another Example of like white man's burden, where the US Is going to try to intervene to free the poor, like non Western person. But I mean, in this case, I mean, is it not us, is it not our burden to seek freedom and to push against authoritarianism around the world? That seems excessively kind of Pollyannish of me, but I don't know. I mean, there's obviously deeper kind of economic drives behind this. There's a broader kind of agenda around Iran and war with Iran that may be getting a kind of democratic wash at the moment, which would be more usual and more in turn in tune with previous administrations. And given the way that the United States is approaching South America, that would also seem to fit giving this sort of same kind of glorious wash to what is essentially a base kind of conflict, a conflict over base resources. But you know, the admirable thing about Trump in the past had been to kind of unabashedly tell the truth about foreign intervention and its purpose. So I'm kind of, I don't know, I'm, I'm, everything seems to be so contradictory and up, up in the air with the Trump administration, very, very difficult to interpret. And I'm not very good on Iran, I will admit. So I don't know, Jeff, rescue me here because I'm not, I'm not sure what to make of this.

So I would point people back to

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Nathan Penkovsky's obituary of Dick Cheney, Cheney's last laugh in, in compact where he

[Ashley Frawley]

discussed the, the problems with how Cheney

[Jeff Schulenberger]

and his sort of neocon faction have

[Ashley Frawley]

been, have been remembered and the way

[Jeff Schulenberger]

that, that may, you know, sort of set a trap for people on the right who have, who have claimed to, or in some cases seriously attempt to, attempt to carve out a new foreign policy path.

[Ashley Frawley]

So, you know, I think Nathan's larger point is really that if you follow Cheney's career, he, it's not that he,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

that he always espoused some sort of idealistic vision of universal regime change where America goes around and brings about democratic government in all these hostile lands that

[Ashley Frawley]

in fact, in many ways if you

[Jeff Schulenberger]

look at various phases of his career, he seems like a kind of restrainer, a sort of more skeptical, a more

[Ashley Frawley]

skeptical kind of critic of, of overly

[Jeff Schulenberger]

ambitious foreign policy and military interventions abroad.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so then the question is, how did he end up, you know, despite

[Jeff Schulenberger]

his, his, his prior skepticism of such

[Ashley Frawley]

things, how did he end up being

[Jeff Schulenberger]

one of the architects of the, the Bush administration so called freedom agenda?

[Ashley Frawley]

And the, you know, the answer is

[Jeff Schulenberger]

that as, as, as he accounts for

[Ashley Frawley]

it is that 911 intervened and changed everything. And so at the same time, you know, I think part of what's interesting

[Jeff Schulenberger]

about this moment is that we are still operating within the post 911 paradigm.

[Ashley Frawley]

So it's not so much that Trump is, has, you know, confronted his own

[Jeff Schulenberger]

sort of 911 events and that's caused him to, to shift.

[Ashley Frawley]

It's that he is still overseeing the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

American national security state that was built up in the wake of 9 11,

[Ashley Frawley]

and therefore that itself functions as

[Jeff Schulenberger]

a source of direction for policy. That it's not a kind of neutral apparatus that can be turned in any direction. It's something that, you know, gravitates towards certain kinds of things.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I've been thinking about this, you know, before this Iran sort of saber rattling.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

I've been thinking about this in terms of the, the bombings of these boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, supposedly as part of a war against narco terrorism.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I happen to have been reading

[Jeff Schulenberger]

this book, the Fort Bragg Cartel, which

[Ashley Frawley]

basically documents the, the history of the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

sort of Special Forces units that were developed, you know, really first in the 1970s and 1980s in and involved in various kinds of, of, of sort of, you know, dirty war type activities in Central America and the Middle east.

[Ashley Frawley]

And you know, really have, have functioned

[Jeff Schulenberger]

as a kind of a kind of black box within the military where various

[Ashley Frawley]

things that we don't necessarily want to

[Jeff Schulenberger]

talk about publicly are sort of carried out with, with a great deal of secrecy.

[Ashley Frawley]

And that the, the point of the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Fort Bragg Cartel is that this, the secrecy has generated this incredible culture of, of lack of accountability. And you know, one result of this is that you had incredible levels of not just corruption, but kind of personal depravity working in this realm, who, you

[Ashley Frawley]

know, became heavy users of various drugs

[Jeff Schulenberger]

as well as involved in drug trafficking, particularly out of Afghanistan.

[Ashley Frawley]

And you know, at the same time, these are the people who were going. I mean, and the thing about these, these boat bombings, you know, they're sort

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of extrajudicial killings of alleged quote, unquote, narco terrorists.

[Ashley Frawley]

I mean, this term narco terrorism goes back quite a ways and was, was actually brought up in the context of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the Afghanistan war where bizarrely, it was

[Ashley Frawley]

claimed that the Taliban was exporting opium,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

when in fact it was really the US Allied factions within Afghanistan that were dominating the global opium trade after the US Occupied Afghanistan.

[Ashley Frawley]

So the point of all of this

[Jeff Schulenberger]

is that we had these forces that were going around just basically committing extrajudicial killings, committing murder with impunity. Under orders from the government.

[Ashley Frawley]

This has been going on for decades. And, you know, to go to Ashley's

[Jeff Schulenberger]

point about, you know, what was supposed to be good about Trump was that he was kind of honest about what was really going on here.

[Ashley Frawley]

I mean, you could look at these boat bombings as an example of that, because the point is there have been

[Jeff Schulenberger]

US Forces deployed to go around assassinating suspected or alleged terrorists for decades.

[Ashley Frawley]

What's notable about this is that they

[Jeff Schulenberger]

are bragging, they're openly bragging about doing

[Ashley Frawley]

this as opposed to kind of trying

[Jeff Schulenberger]

to keep it relatively secret, which is. Which is what the previous administrations did.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so, you know, there's kind of this brazenness, I wouldn't call it honesty,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

because the whole rationale for it is completely. Is just sort of blatantly made up and largely nonsensical.

[Ashley Frawley]

But, you know, the, you know, coming

[Jeff Schulenberger]

back to the point about Iran here, it's just that it really seems like

[Ashley Frawley]

this administration has, has come into possession

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of this whole, you know, vast apparatus. And because the administration is internally conflicted, you know, between factions that, you know, have very different visions of foreign policy and of the US Role in the

[Ashley Frawley]

world, it makes sense that it will,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

in various ways default to a sort

[Ashley Frawley]

of, you know, repetition of the same kinds of things that have been done, and it will just kind of put

[Jeff Schulenberger]

its own spin on, on those.

[Ashley Frawley]

So, you know, a prior example of this would be the, the escalation of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

these kind of targeted assassinations under Obama

[Ashley Frawley]

was justified under the rubric of a smart war. And so you can think about how

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Obama, you know, said he didn't. He didn't oppose war, he just opposed dumb wars.

[Ashley Frawley]

And this was, you know, one of his campaign lines. And then, you know, once he was

[Jeff Schulenberger]

in power, he was kind of trying to align himself with Silicon Valley, which of course, was talking about, you know, smart devices and smart governance and all these kinds of smart cities and all these new applications of this term smart to imply, you know, sort of high tech.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so Obama framed the continuation of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Bush's war on terror as smart war.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so he gave his own kind of spin, his own kind of aesthetic,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

his own kind of aesthetic branding to it.

[Ashley Frawley]

But, you know, but essentially it was, it was a continuation of the same

[Jeff Schulenberger]

project with, with the different set of, of inflections to it.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so I think we can really

[Jeff Schulenberger]

see this as the same thing.

[Ashley Frawley]

It's the, the, the whole apparatus. And, and it's interesting, right? I mean, this is sort of the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Trumpian as well as originally left critique of the deep state. Right.

[Ashley Frawley]

That, that the deep state is this

[Jeff Schulenberger]

kind of unaccountable monstrosity that's been built up over the past 75 years and

[Ashley Frawley]

that just kind of does its own

[Jeff Schulenberger]

thing and that civilian elected officials don't really have much power to control.

[Ashley Frawley]

I mean, this is the critique.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Like, this is the basic idea of the deep state.

[Ashley Frawley]

You know, the, the irony of the current moment is that you have. I think I mentioned this in a

[Jeff Schulenberger]

previous podcast, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, saying, you know, I don't know, we must fight the deep state or something, which is sort of absurd.

[Ashley Frawley]

But, but the point is that you, you sort of, you end up with

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the same apparatus basically being deployed to do the same things just because that's the path of least resistance.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so what's left to the, again, civilian elected officials is to just kind

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of put their own spin on it.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so I'd say, you know, basically what you have is the spin being

[Jeff Schulenberger]

put on it is a lot of. Of bluster, a lot of, you know, just kind of blatant inconsistency and reflections of the kind of mercurial nature of, of Trump himself.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so this is supposed to, this overlay in the same way that Obama's

[Jeff Schulenberger]

smart war overlay was supposed to kind of provide a new legitimation and rationale for the continuation of these policies.

[Ashley Frawley]

I think in this case, it's essentially

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Trump's own personality, which is supposed to kind of reassure us.

[Ashley Frawley]

It's, in a sense, the opposite of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the smart war idea, where it's like trust, the, the sophistication of the technology to do this.

[Ashley Frawley]

In this case, it's, we'll trust that

[Jeff Schulenberger]

we have this, you know, this kind of mercurial guy who just kind of does his own thing, and he's in charge now. So whatever he does, that must not be the deep state. It must be, you know, it must be some kind of reflection of, of the, the, the deeper commitments of this, this character.

[Ashley Frawley]

But, you know, it really is just the same thing.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

It's, It's a continuation of and, and,

[Ashley Frawley]

and continuation of the same things that

[Jeff Schulenberger]

this whole apparatus has been built to do and has continued to do in different forms and to different degrees, and

[Ashley Frawley]

it just has a different, in this

[Jeff Schulenberger]

case, much more chaotic and confusing sort of ideological overlay to provide legitimation.

[Matthew Schmitz]

Yeah, they're not avoiding dumb wars. They're avoiding cringe wars. So, Jeff, as other Americans have spent their time watching college football, getting drunk, recovering from hangovers over The New Year's holiday. You have spent your time just obsessed with going mad, reading the new book explaining how the Frankfurt School is not, as right wingers have long said, an attempt to undermine capitalism, the capitalistic west, but is instead a what? So if it's on the left wing plot to undermine the west, what is the Frankfurt School? And can you tell us a little bit why this group of German thinkers commands so much anxious attention?

[Ashley Frawley]

It's a good question. I mean we'd have to. I don't want to get too deeply

[Jeff Schulenberger]

into the standard right wing Frankfurt School

[Ashley Frawley]

theory, but suffice to say it functions as a kind of typical conspiracy theory. You posit some sort of foreign infiltrator,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of course, helpful if they happen to be Jewish, who has, you know, been

[Ashley Frawley]

brought in and you know, is sort of planted within the seats of power and you know, from the, from that

[Jeff Schulenberger]

position sort of undermines and degrades a society and civilization from within.

[Ashley Frawley]

So that's roughly the Frankfurt School conspiracy

[Jeff Schulenberger]

theory promulgated by various, you know, varyingly mainstream or fringe right wing pundits over the years.

[Ashley Frawley]

And what's, what's interesting now is that you have a Marxist professor by the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

name of Gabriel Rockhill who has published

[Ashley Frawley]

is a, this is going to be a remarkably, a three volume work called

[Jeff Schulenberger]

who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism

[Ashley Frawley]

that promises to show, contrary to what

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the right wing account claims, that the real function of these Western Marxists, AKA Frankfurt School intellectuals, was to undermine the struggle for communism and that the real role that they played was to forge

[Ashley Frawley]

a kind of what he calls a

[Jeff Schulenberger]

compatible Marxism that could exist comfortably under the rubric of Western capitalism and that would cut off, as he sees it, any ties between the Western left and that of, you know, what's now called the Global south, as well as, you know, actually existing socialism as it was called in the 20th century, that is the Soviet Union and its, its satellites.

[Ashley Frawley]

As far as I understand today, Rock

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Hill is, you know, essentially a pro China in his politics. And so he thinks the left should really align itself with, with China.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so he's part of a larger, I think you could sort of argue

[Jeff Schulenberger]

there's a sort of parallel here with Grupo, with like gruppers on the right.

[Ashley Frawley]

I'd say that the kind of lower

[Jeff Schulenberger]

brow realms of the left have this general sense that the real allies are these sort of these rising Global south or Brics nations.

[Ashley Frawley]

And interestingly I wrote something about this, that there was a schism at Arctos

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Press, the major right wing publisher in

[Ashley Frawley]

Europe because the, the editor was fired essentially for being too, you know, too

[Jeff Schulenberger]

pro China, too pro Iran, too pro sort of Global South.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so you do have these factions

[Jeff Schulenberger]

within the right that, these sort of multipolarist factions.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so there is a kind of way that this faction, which I'd say, which I'd align kind of with the gripers, you know, Nick Fuentes himself will

[Jeff Schulenberger]

say positive things about Stalin.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I'd say there's kind of a, there's a particular kind of horseshoe convergence where then you have figures like Jackson Hinkle and these other people in the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

so called American Communist Party who also

[Ashley Frawley]

define themselves as MAGA Communists who also

[Jeff Schulenberger]

have this kind of Third Worldist or kind of Global south orientation.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so it's interesting to me because

[Jeff Schulenberger]

I've been noting these schisms within the

[Ashley Frawley]

right recently that also on the left

[Jeff Schulenberger]

you have, I'd say a large contingent

[Ashley Frawley]

which I, I'd say has a kind

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of set of parallels to the groipers

[Ashley Frawley]

because it, it tends not to be

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the most kind of prestigious realms of the left.

[Ashley Frawley]

And it tends to be supported by

[Jeff Schulenberger]

a kind of mob of very angry anonymous posters, you know, most of whom have, I don't know, like Mao avatars or you know, various other kinds of symbols of, of kind of Third World communism.

[Ashley Frawley]

And you know, that, that then they have certain figures like Rock Hill who

[Jeff Schulenberger]

are slightly more sort of intellectually, academically respectable who will put out these, these arguments.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so essentially Rock Hill's argument is that the, the real function of Western

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Marxism was, you know, it was supported by the CIA and other, you know, the Rockefeller foundation and other powerful kind of pro capitalist entities to seed this form of kind of capitalism compatible Marxism in the West.

[Ashley Frawley]

And presumably the effect of this was

[Jeff Schulenberger]

to kind of forestall the emergence of a left that would be aligned with various kinds of Third World national liberation causes and so on.

[Ashley Frawley]

So you know, Ashley brought this up

[Jeff Schulenberger]

in relation to the sort of, the

[Ashley Frawley]

way that the Palestinian struggle has become so central.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

We could also point to Matthew's piece

[Ashley Frawley]

about

[Jeff Schulenberger]

the way that Palestine replaced Black Lives Matter.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so that the left's kind of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

center of gravity has at least the kind of popular left center of gravity has kind of moved towards these alliances with various kinds of Third World or Global south type causes.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so I mean the strange thing

[Jeff Schulenberger]

about Rock Hill and this, this book to me is that it's, it's, it very much echoes, you know, not, not.

[Ashley Frawley]

See, I'm, I'm unclear like whether or

[Jeff Schulenberger]

to what extent if at all he's

[Ashley Frawley]

conscious of this, but it very much

[Jeff Schulenberger]

echoes this long standing villainization of the Frankfurt School on the right.

[Ashley Frawley]

But it does so in order to

[Jeff Schulenberger]

advance this again, sort of neo third worldist politics of alignment with, you know, what are seen as these anti imperialist forces globally.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so it, it, you know, basically

[Jeff Schulenberger]

attacks anyone on the left who is not, you know, essentially pro, sort of China, you know, in, in favor of like the increasing power of China, let's say.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I again, I think what's interesting

[Jeff Schulenberger]

about this is, is over the past week, you know, at least in Internet spaces, this has been really heavily discussed and of great interest on the left.

[Ashley Frawley]

And I do think it's, it has a kind of echo of the groiper

[Jeff Schulenberger]

wars that have been happening on the right where you have this very angry, very mobilized kind of set of online militants who don't necessarily have a particularly strong foothold in any institutions, but, but also, you know, basically have an ability to kind of mobilize large numbers of anonymous accounts online and also I would guess are able to kind of draw on various kinds of bots and, and

[Ashley Frawley]

sort of accounts controlled by like foreign

[Jeff Schulenberger]

intelligence operations of some sort.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so I think something similar is, is happening on the left and the way that you've seen people galvanized to defend this because I mean, I'd say this Rock Hill book is largely being

[Jeff Schulenberger]

kind of ridiculed by respectable academic leftists, Marxists, et cetera, but there is this uprising of very angry, again, mostly kind of anonymous, although not entirely, I mean, but, but you know, heavily kind of anonymous accounts defending this.

[Ashley Frawley]

And this echoed something that happened a few weeks ago, which was that the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

NYU professor and sort of notable Marxist writer Vivek Chiber wrote a piece kind of questioning the, or did an interview questioning the idea that capitalism depended on colonialism.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so this might seem like kind of an obscure point, but it made the sort of, again, sort of neo

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Third world faction of the online left very, very angry that he would argue that capitalism was not ultimately rooted in colonial plunder.

[Ashley Frawley]

And so I do think that there is this kind of interesting fracture. Even though this, this may seem kind

[Jeff Schulenberger]

of bizarre and obscure, there is this kind of interesting fracture line which, you

[Ashley Frawley]

know, probably has some implications for the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

left's viability going forward.

[Ashley Frawley]

That's. So I'm going to have to read this book. It's on my list. But yeah, I was. That was a very unexpected kind of take on it because from the outside it appears to be exactly correct. I mean it's a like the, the Frankfurt School is from my, you know, and this was always a problem with me in sublation, is that it seems very obviously to me to be mostly, but not entirely wrong turn for the left that has colored its trajectory since then. And while I haven't read Rock, I would like to read this book. I'm going to have to, but I would, I would kind of point readers toward somewhat pointlessly now because it's no longer available online. But if you can dig it up, there's an excellent essay by Neil Davenport called Dialectic of Anti Enlightenment which was published back in 2010, which I've always really, really liked because it does an excellent job, in my opinion, of pointing out the errors of the Frankfurt School's famous story about the rise of fascism, among other things, and the degree to which this has colored our understanding of the horrors of the 20th century and therefore the trajectory of the left. So this idea that Nazism is the endpoint of, you know, famously the end point of enlightenment rationality, instrumental reason, I mean, there's obviously a kernel of truth in that, but it, there's this, this tendency to kind of blame fascism on mass politics and democracy. So it's like, you know, naturally kind of predisposes those who take this. It's, you know, it's just totally taken for granted. I would say across the political spectrum that, that mass politics is dangerous and that utterly neutralizes any kind of serious movement because a serious movement is going to be mass, a mass movement. And it's, oh no, all those working class people getting a little uppity, that must mean fascism. And that's, that's kind of like the legacy of, of the Frankfurt School's blaming of the Holocaust on this kind of this, this dehistoricized great man kind. And I'm not saying that this is obviously a horror, horrible simplification of the Frankfurt School, but this sort of echoes, the reverberation of it is that we have this kind of idea of Holocaust remembrance as this moralized stop the hate kind of innate human evil that lurks within all of us that takes only a great man to bring out. And you know, that famous, you know, film that everybody in film school likes to reference, Metropolis, where like just a robot begins to dance and all people go wild. That's all that it really takes. And instead it's that Davenport points out, as many people have since, that actually the greatest support for fascism was amongst the middle classes and not in the American sense, but the European sense, the sort of professional Classes and the vast majority, majority of working class people, in fact, communist movements and socialist movements had grown during that time or parties had grown during that time anyway, so. But that's just one example of this sort of the way that Frankfurt, the Frankfurt School's understanding of history has colored the left's understanding of history. The other thing is like the blaming of culture which then becomes a way of blaming the working class. So the working class is, you know, duped by culture and therefore they will never be revolutionary. And so we have this kind of search for the untouched subject somewhere else who isn't duped by, you know, consumerism and so on in the culture industries and this kind of thing. So I don't. Even if the CIA wasn't directly funding it, they ought to have because it was highly effective.

Although I think Rockhill would, would agree

[Jeff Schulenberger]

with the second point that you just brought up. In other words, he, he does think that the Western masses are duped by consumerism and are inherently, you know, he,

[Ashley Frawley]

I think he basically, he and his

[Jeff Schulenberger]

faction basically buy this kind of Nakai settler's theory of, you know, that, that like the white Western masses are, are

[Ashley Frawley]

fundamentally evil and you know, therefore you.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

I don't think he does think you can really have democracy in the West. I guess he, I, I think a lot of these people think that you just have to have, you know, some kind of actual great replacement or something where like, like the white Western masses are overwhelmed and maybe genocided by the, the revolutionary forces of the Global South. Which by the way, if people watch John Carpenter's Escape from la, this, the scenario is, is, you know, how, how things are going to end that you have these, these kind of Global south revolutionaries who are like, oh, we're going to like do an actual, I mean, their plan is essentially like what's described in the.

[Matthew Schmitz]

Yeah, Camp of the saints.

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Right, right.

[Matthew Schmitz]

Camp of the saints.

[Ashley Frawley]

Anyway, the point is, I don't know what they actually think, but I mean, certainly they, they agree with this like

[Jeff Schulenberger]

Rock Hill and his sort of neo tanky crowd of pro China people.

[Ashley Frawley]

Like, I mean, they agree with the

[Jeff Schulenberger]

idea that the Western masses are hopelessly duped by consumerism and are also just inherently racist and therefore can't be given any kind of power. And therefore, you know, the only path for politics is to support these supposedly virtuous people in other parts of the world who are going to really bring the revolution and destroy imperialism and presumably just kind of neutralize or somehow absorb or maybe genocide the, the evil whites of the, the West.

[Ashley Frawley]

So, so it's interesting how like you're,

[Jeff Schulenberger]

you know, like your critique of the

[Ashley Frawley]

Frankfurt School sort of half coincides with theirs, but then on the other hand

[Jeff Schulenberger]

is actually

[Ashley Frawley]

maybe pointing to a place

[Jeff Schulenberger]

where they, they agree with like the crudest version of the Frankfurt School idea. And obviously like Marcuse kind of goes in this direction.

[Ashley Frawley]

I mean, the irony is in a

[Jeff Schulenberger]

way that Marcuse himself kind of goes in the same direction that they end up going in with his, his sort of endorsement of the New left.

[Ashley Frawley]

Yeah, that's why I said it was surprising to hear that summary, because on the surface of it it seemed exactly right. And it's funny, your characterization is so ironic about the sort of like, great replacement implicit in this because you know, for somebody who's like, actually Western Marxism is exactly what our overlords want. Well, I feel like, you know, importing tons and tons of people from the third world is also exactly what our progressive elites want too. And you know, if you go to the magazine today or yesterday, we have a piece by Lisa McKenzie on Cologne, ten years on, and she, you know, her book, she did this research like must be 10, 15 years ago. But her book that she mentions in the piece talks about how they were long before nice middle class people noticed there was an issue working class women were having. And working class communities were having to integrate tons and tons and tons of people with vastly different cultural and moral ideas than theirs. And, and, and the sexual harassment that came with it. And, and we know now obviously that it was much worse than just sexual harassment. But her interviewees, the people that she talked to were like terrified of sounding racist. They're like, it's not that we're racist. Like, I don't want my 15 year old daughter having crude sexual come ons when she pops over to the corner store. So yeah, so this is, this has been going on for a long time and it kind of ties in with what I was saying before. Like a part of me thinks that, you know, the CIA funded the Mujahideen because they preferred to fight them than the USSR and the, our, our good progressive politicians prefer to fight. People from the third world prefer to fight even the Islamic contingents that they import than their own working class. It strikes me as a powerful parallel actually of the CIA funding what would eventually become the Taliban. It's like, oh, what a terrible mistake. Now they have to fight the Taliban. Well no, they prefer the Taliban over the ussr and it's the same thing here. They want to destroy their own working class and they would even prefer to fight internal terrorism in the name of Islamism over working class solidarity and the forces of the working class that had been so powerful in the 19th century. Anything is preferable to that because that had a real and for them terrifying ability to destabilize the capitalist order in a way that I think implicitly they don't think Islam can anyways. But yeah, so they're putting their eggs in the wrong basket. As I said again before this, this sort of like third world there's because ironically the people in power this feel the same way. But I do wonder if you know, part of this, what directs a lot of people to just think like this isn't western Marxism necessarily, but an implicit and deep running Heideggerianism. Do you, is it, tell me, do you see, having read this, do you see this kind of. Is it, is it Heidegger, this kind of like anti modernity that flows through a lot of these movements that is actually the impulse that is leading them in this direction.

Obviously this seems like a difficult path to go down because but I do think there's and this is maybe something

[Jeff Schulenberger]

we've been talking about doing on blame theory for a long time.

[Ashley Frawley]

But yeah, I think this kind of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

various forms of anti modernity are again

[Ashley Frawley]

maybe what would unite the kind of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

duganite multipolarists with the sort of third worldists on the left.

[Ashley Frawley]

And you know, it ultimately just adds

[Jeff Schulenberger]

up to a highly regressive politics which

[Ashley Frawley]

I think you could argue is a

[Jeff Schulenberger]

kind of validation of the status quo of a kind of a kind of slow shrinking away from the promises of modernity where that, that becomes a, you know, it's a sort of,

[Ashley Frawley]

it's a sort of

[Jeff Schulenberger]

making virtue of necessity type situation.

[Matthew Schmitz]

With that, thanks to Ashley, to Jeff and to our producer Stephen adebata. For more compactmag.com subscribe.

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