Okay, thanks so much. So what brought me to the book project is that I saw the rise of a radical right arising almost everywhere, often winning over people who formerly aligned with the left, often winning over workers and non elites who formerly aligned with the left. And I try to understand why that was happening. Now when I say I saw the rise, that's because I'm an American, but I've been a professor of politics for almost 40 years now, recently retired, and I'm a student of East European politics, following particularly Poland. Many of your listeners know that Poland and Hungary in the last several years have been presented correctly as countries in Eastern Europe that have adopted radical right policies. Poland right now has a liberal government, but there's a real threat, again, from radical right parties in the next election. And so, as I saw this happening in Poland, which I've been studying for a long time, I studied the old Solidarity movement of the early 1980s, and there was basically a left, kind of a left union, pushing against the left state. But then in the years that followed, the years that followed after the end of communism, I saw that the liberals were not able to keep their grip on their constituency, very similarly to what we saw with the. What we've seen with the Democratic Party in the west, and that workers are moving in that direction. So I try to understand why I saw that happening in Poland. I wrote a book published in 2005 called the Defeat of Solidarity, anticipating that the radical right was probably going to win in Poland, which it did soon after I published the book. And then, of course, with the rise of Trump, I saw this happening in the United States. So I try to understand why this was happening. And I wanted to also show many people what a real danger this was from the point of view of basic liberal democracy. That meant I wanted to grapple with that question that's been perennial, really, for the last 10, 15 years. Is this fascism? Right. That's the kind of discussion that always comes up, oh, this is dangerous. It seems to be fascism. But then others point out, no, it's not. So what does this mean? What is this about? Why is that an important question now, of course, and what is fascism? So I began with looking at the seemingly obvious similarities of this type of new politics, radical right politics, we've seen with fascism, you have some glorification of something called the nation, a rather mystical category in their use. So it's. It's. They glorify something called a nation. They exclude many residents and even many citizens from that belonging to that nation. They don't talk about having opponents, but only traitors who are blocking them. And they insist on controlling everything. If they lose, it's not fair. If they win, that's the only correct outcome. So it seemed clearly like we're dealing with something that makes sense of fascism. On the other hand, we know that fascism is widely associated with Hitler, with the unbelievable levels of violence, mass repression. And that clearly was not happening either in Poland or in Hungary or in India or Turkey or in the United States. Right. Not that kind of level. So it seemed to be different. So that gets to this idea of red pill politics, right? Because I started looking in this and saying you could totally prove in some abstract way that this is fascism and totally prove that it's not. So let's look at it from a different perspective. And over time I realized that this term red pill, a term that the manosphere kind of very anti feminist radical right has used for itself, coming from that cult film the Matrix from 1999, began to say that if we use that term as an acronym, that it defines the type of politics that both classic Fascism from 1920 to 1945 during the heyday of fascism refers to both that kind of politics. And it also refers to the kind of so called right wing populism we have today. So I use the term to refer to R E D P I L L, right wing, exclusionary, nationalist, democratic, because they say they're Democrats. And the last part is populist illiberalism. R E D P I L L and I. And it started to, it seemed that really both that what we're dealing with is red pill politics, just like classic fascism was a form of red pill politics and they can morph one into the other without a great deal of distinction. Something that I think, you know, we see happening because, you know, during Trump won, they said, oh, he seems like a fascist, but he's not doing that in Trump, too many people see clearly these kinds of policies as going off over the edge. So I think this category of red pill politics helps us understand that.
David Ost (9:25)
Yeah, sure. So you mentioned that point about, you know, Mein Kampf. Everyone has heard of that book and we're usually told that to read the book is to hear of the horror that would unfold foretold. And yet if you start reading that book, the first couple of chapters, it unfortunately or crazily sounds not so crazy. He presents himself as a young man who's lost out on a lot of things. Both his parents died by the time, I believe he was around 18 or so comes to the big city, meaning Vienna. He's often out of work. He famously does not get into art school and is, you know, just looking for odd jobs. And he talks about the exploitation and the misery facing the working class. And he's talking about things as if he's just one of the people as well. Because one of the key things I wanted to stress is that fascism is this kind of populist movement. I use this phrase there, a kind of provocative phrase saying that really we need to understand fascism as the left wing of the radical right. What exactly does that mean? Most people think that fascism is usually understood as the farthest right of the radical right. But the point is that what fascism did when it emerged in the 1920s, it was the first time that a right wing movement said, we care about the regular people too, and we're right wingers, not left wingers. That is, without going into much history, the original political right was at the time of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke represents that, and that represents the old aristocratic right. And they're angry at the left, the French revolutionaries, for bringing the masses into politics. They don't belong there. They have no expertise. Keep them away, then you get the next kind of right. When the bourgeoisie, when capitalists became dominant, and they of course, wanted the masses to be workers in their factories, but they didn't want them to have the right to vote because they thought they'd be overturned. And so throughout the 19th century, throughout the age of industrialism until the early 20th century, if you want regular people to participate in politics and think that they are legitimate people too, by definition, you're on the left. And then the fascists emerge and they can say, we are these scum of the earth ourselves. We hate the elites, the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy. And the aristocracy. They don't defend people like us. And also, we're right wingers. We don't even like the elites because they won't beat up the leftists like real men do. Right? You know, so they present themselves right. There's these tough guys who are going to bring order. And while there was excessive, truly a great deal of violence in both Italy and Germany in allowing the fascists to come to power in Italy. Hitler originally saw Mussolini as his idol because Mussolini with the fascist movement, Fascism was an Italian word and name of an Italian party, that what they did was go around and. And literally beat up workers on the street, beat up socialists on the street, go to socialist headquarters or to trade union headquarters, ransack them a great deal of violence. Once they got into power, though, they also wanted to help workers to give them a bit of a better chance versus capitalists. They didn't want the left to do it, but the fascists also wanted to check the capitalists, and the fascists wanted to control power themselves. Hitler did the same kind of thing. Hitler was terrified of the working class because he understood, he saw that after World War I, it was workers movements that brought about the end of the old German Empire. He was afraid of workers and always spoke highly of them and defended regular workers against the left, against the social Democratic parties. Right. But, you know, he called himself a socialist. The idea of national Socialism was just meant that we're going to check capitalism somewhat, but we're doing so in the interests of our nation and of course, against the Jews, who we conceived of as the enemy. But in Hitler, but in Nazi Germany too, they put a great deal of attention on getting workers back to work and making sure we don't want them to protest against us. So we'll try to nurture them, to give them various benefits, social benefits and things like this. So again, very violent, but also populist and trying to win over those who used to join with the left and had some success in doing so.
David Ost (15:59)
Exactly. You put that very well. Right. So absolutely they did try to do some things that leftists would consider good. And even during that time, as I show in the book, I don't think we'll go into it now, that you had some socialists, some socialist theorists who in the 1930s got persuaded by the fascists, they didn't like their politics, but they said, at last someone is doing something right, especially as the Depression came about. And to make this comparison that you alluded to about the present day, everyone knows that, you know, you had the so called golden years of capitalism after World War II, 1945 to around 1975. And things are getting better and workers are feeling included. And those who always used to have to worry about a job or whether they have enough to eat are now buying homes and able to enter, you know, start calling themselves the middle class instead of the working class. But since the mid-1970s, since the era of globalization, the first oil crisis, as we're speaking right now, we're dealing with another that may be even more serious. But that was the time that managed capitalism, that social democratic capitalism that emerged after World War II, was breaking up and breaking down. And so workers are feeling naturally that they don't have the same protection as they used to have before. The left has always tried to do something about it, but it hasn't very well been able to do so again. One key reason is that business circles in the 19 Ford after World War II business circles had an interest in social democracy themselves, in getting workers to be more trained, to be more healthy so they could avoid strikes, avoid the class conflicts of the interwar years, whereas business today shops around the world or looks for new technology to avoid workers altogether. So workers we know are feeling lost, are feeling left out. And that's where this red pill, right, has been able to re emerge with a kind of populist program will do specific things for you. I told you that I've studied Poland for a long time. When this radical right party called Law and Justice first came to power in 2015, actually was the second time it came to power. But in any case, when Kentucky in 2015, it actually did some things that won over many left wingers, provided a very generous child benefit package, that is to parents for all children under 18, giving a substantial subsidy, did some things with cracking down on abuse of labor contracts, and they won over some people that way. Most of these right wing parties have been able to win over workers doing that. Of course, we see the difference in the United States with Trump, who has always talked about defending workers, has not done it at all. And that's in fact the key reason that right now, as we speak in March, what is it, March 22nd or 23rd, 2026, not just because of the war in Iran. We know that his popularity is declining, has steadily declined because he's not even implementing any of those populist policies.
David Ost (20:43)
That's absolutely true because that's why I go into this discussion about the 1930s, because as I just told your listeners a moment ago, the fascists were doing these things. Many people say, why didn't the socialists do those things? And the irony is that in the 1920s and 30s, the socialists felt that capitalism could not be reformed in any way. They said capitalism is going to lead to crisis. Like Karl Marx said, it will build its own grave and it will be destroyed. And they said we can't fix capitalism in any way. That gave an opening to the fascists then who said we will check capitalism without destroying it? As they did not destroy it, of course, but they subordinated it to their will. After 1945, Social Democratic parties, to which I include the Democratic Party as well, which really became, for all intents and purposes, a kind of social democratic party, it started doing those same kinds of things, providing the social welfare, not just legalizing, but giving power to unions and moving in this direction of greater social justice and social safety nets. But after this period of globalization, Starting in the 1970s, the left didn't have much to offer. And the Democrats in the 1980s, 1990s, starting particularly with Bill Clinton or what was called the third way, the third way left that they basically gave up all, all ideas about reforming capitalism, about forcing business to provide the resources to allow the state to benefit workers and benefit people who are losing their jobs from this transformation. It didn't propose any of these things. In fact, what happened instead is in the United States, as as many of your young listeners have experience and your older listeners will know, is that credit became easy for everyone, right? Like we're not going to fix things. But hey, credit, anyone could get credit cards. I turned 70 years old not long ago. I remember when I was a teenager, there was absolutely no chance for me to get a credit card. Who was I? You know, and of course in recent years, all my students had credit cards, regardless of what kind of potential earnings they had. You know, so they, the yes, the democrats, like in Poland, the liberals who came to power after the end of communism, often considered themselves on the left, but they also wouldn't try to reform capitalism at all. Right. And those are the conditions that have historically allowed and today allows the right to win.
David Ost (25:10)
Okay. But not being heard, that is. Bannon understands that fascist legacy better than others. He himself is a great admirer of some of the classic fascist theorists and he understands too, Right, that you have to deliver on some of that. Why that's not happening is kind of unclear because he's talked a lot about that. We know that there's these amazing new powers of the technocrats, of the computer giants, of the information giants who don't want any of that to happen, or focused on new technologies, of course, now on AI and it's all about business emerging that way. I know that Naomi Klein is forthcoming with a, a book that she calls End Times Fascism, focusing on the rights of alliance with those billionaires, multibillionaires in the technocratic class who just see workers as, yeah, they don't believe that they need to address workers problems in any kind of way. So, you know, in some ways it's ironic that paradoxical that on the one hand, some people on the liberal left want and call for some of these policies to emerge. I think it is not impossible that we will see a turn before the midterm elections. Cuz Trump, on the one hand is trying to prevent the midterm elections. He probably won't succeed 100%, but I do expect that in the summer he's going to make a lot of these populist gestures, probably the biggest one of which will be sending a cash check of a few thousand dollars with his signature to all voters and saying, vote for me and I'll give you more. That kind of thing. I don't think it'll be enough to convince people, but it will be something that will convince some. And let me say something about the minorities turning to the right, because one thing to understand is that most of the red pill politics, support from the working class in whatever country it is, comes from those I use. I create a new term called dominant essence workers, meaning those workers who belong to that category that the red pill right says is the essential group of the nation. So in the United States, that means white workers, right? In Poland, it means Catholics. In India it means Hindus and not Muslims. It means different things, but usually it's those workers who get tempted by red pill politics. Often those workers are on the left and support a kind of class politics against the elites and the capitalists who exploit them. But the problem always, historically has been that fighting against capitalism is hard. You're usually going to lose, right? It takes a lot of effort to do that. And what red pill politics offers is it takes a section of that working class and says, yes, I understand you've been exploited. Here are some treats for you, some benefits for you. And so it wins over them. Minority workers are almost in all these places, the big part of the working class that does not vote for these parties. You're right, of course, that we've seen some turn in recent years. Trump in 2024 got more support from blacks and from Latinos than in the past. But that's also because again, the Democrats have not been offering much that can appeal to them. And the red pill right is often openly racist, but it takes breaks in its racism to also say, well, we, we will support you too, if you agree with us, if you accept us. And for many minorities, again, most minorities everywhere still oppose red pill politics because this red pill politics is so, is so racist really everywhere. But many of them say, hey, racism is an eternal of our society. If someone's going to offer something that might be better for us, then that's something we'll go to. So we see some of that turn in that direction.
David Ost (32:08)
Yeah, look, in contemporary United States, the violence is really being upped very, very much. I mean, I started writing this book some years ago and, and I have much of the pros talking to people that, oh, it's not so violent right now, but it can easily become so. Again, that's, I think, the advantage of calling it red pill politics, which can be institutionalized either as fascism with all that violence and concentration and death camps, or as right wing populism with much less of that, but that it can go either way without many people being aware of it. Since I even finished the book, I mean, I wrote the last words And I think October 2025, and it's in these last five, six months or so that that internal violence has been upped. And in the United States. I agree entirely. And I say at one point in the book that these detention centers are in fact the kinds of concentration camps. It's a historically correct word. They're not now death camps. But, you know, with the kinds of policies we saw, whether it was in the first term about stripping families, taking children away from their parents, or as we've seen more recently, I think it was still in this month, still of March 2026, that you had the Trump administration propose terrorism and secure terrorism convictions against protesters of ICE ice, who of course, are masked police who do not identify themselves. Trump is using them increasingly as a personal police. Again, very similar. Similar to how the black shirts in Italy or The Brown Shirts, I.e. stormtroopers in Germany, were used as this personal police. Right. So he's trying to criminalizing all that kind of opposition. We saw how the two people, Renee Goode and Alex Pretty, were characterized or right away as terrorists, that if it does come to shooting people in the United States, it could come to that on demonstrations where they're going to double down on their charges, so. Absolutely right. That's why, you know, this category of red pill politics, I think, helps us understand that it can very easily get to the point where the connections to classic fascism are clear. Again, we see the policies of Trump trying to prevent this November 2026 midterm elections from being fair. Right. He wants he and his people to count all the votes, and we know where that would lead to. Right. And so it can become every bit as repressive as that. We're in a very dangerous time. And that's why we still do have a left in opposition. And all of the red pill cases today, there still exists some opposition liberal and liberal left parties who are trying to do something. And as I say at the end of the book, right, what's necessary is for them to be both more openly and explicitly economically populist. And we're going to have to break, if necessary, and it will be necessary to break with placating the super rich and the big corporations. We're going to have to be economically populist, and we're going to have to be tough as well. Right. Tough in our rhetoric, just like red pill is tough in its rhetoric. Many of us would wish, I too would wish that we didn't have to be in an era where it's like, again, this very fierce politics and tough against your opponents. But obviously, we all, most of us, most people would prefer to live in an environment where people get along in some sense. But we see red pill parties breaking with that convention, being openly harassing, violent, racist, rejectionist. Again, that point of theirs, they don't have opponents or critics. There are only traitors who oppose them. And that's something that the liberal left needs to understand to take into account that we have to fight back against that. And if we do, there is certainly very much a chance that they can be stopped. Right. But they're not just crazy people that's a danger to say, oh, they're crazy and soon they'll finish and we'll go back to normal. No, we know that there are these economic reasons why red pill politics is getting support. So we have to tackle that as well. And there are ways to do that and we can do that and I hope we will.
