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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Andrew Hartman, who is a professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of several books, including A War for the Soul of A History of the Culture wars and the forthcoming Karl Marx in America, which will be out only a couple of weeks after this episode airs. Andrew was also kind enough to give me access to an early copy of the book, and it is genuinely pretty incredible. So welcome to the show and also probably to a list of historians being watched.
- [01:12]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Thanks so much, Claire. I'm excited to be here.
- [01:14]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I have a fun fact for you that I've been saving until right now. I actually have already been in a room with you, but you almost certainly don't remember me when I was a lowly PhD student student. I was a regular and eventually a presenter at the University of Edinburgh. American History Workshop for the people at home. It's basically like a place where historians can submit pieces of writing that they're working on, like chapters of books or dissertations or whatever, and they get feedback from other writers and, like, experts on American history. It's really cool and fun. But I actually saw you talk there, like, five years ago on something related to this book, which is kind of funny. And now here we are getting to talk about it on my podcast. And it's a thing that's in the world now.
- [02:00]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
That's amazing. Yeah, that was. That would have been over six years ago, 2019, because at the time I was. I had a Fulbright at the British Library and was kind of touring around talking about the early, early chapters I had written on this book. And I remember a very robust discussion. Like, I really. You all put me through my paces, if I remember correctly.
- [02:21]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, it's an intense experience. Like, I did a dissertation chapter and I came out of it, like, shaken, first of all. But secondly, like, with really useful, helpful edits to the dissertation chapter that wildly changed the direction I had taken it in. And that were really helpful. So, yeah, it's always funny when you encounter someone else who has been through that. This also highlights the secret to this podcast, which is really just me using it as an excuse to talk to historians whose work I admire or who I think are cool people. So the secrets out, which is this is just a networking exercise with the added bonus of getting to learn something and be mean while we do it.
- [03:07]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Well, as long as something fun comes.
- [03:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Out of it, yeah, that's all that matters. All right, let's get into what we're really all here for. Um, who are we going to be talking about today?
- [03:18]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
So when you asked me to come on the podcast and talk shit about people in the past, I thought the people from my book, like, there's some obvious choices. I have a whole chapter on right wingers or conservatives who used Marx essentially to libel liberalism in the middle of the 20th century, and a host of other right wing vigilantes who were intent upon destroying Marxism in its cradle in American history. But that to me seemed too obvious. So I thought, let's talk about Cold War liberals or mid century liberalism, because they are the basis of chapter five of my forthcoming book, Karl Marx in America. And they created, I say, I argue, invented an American political tradition in the 1940s and 1950s in conversation with Marx. They invented this American political tradition by arguing that Marx was wrong about almost everything. And here's why. American liberalism is right. And in doing so, I think they not only from a normative perspective, completely misinterpreted Marx and Marxism, but also, I think sort of spoke to the hubris of the moment, that moment in American history. American liberalism was riding high. They didn't think that they had anything to worry about on the left or the right, at least in a domestic context. And I think narrowed the possibilities of, of a political vision, especially by punching down to the left. And so their whole sort of process of exercising Marx from any type of American political tradition, I think was a way to curb the influence of the left, curb the influence of organized labor, and also to curb the influence of any semblance of an idea in American, in American politics at the time that the US should not be, I guess, confronting the Soviet Union and waging war across the, across the planet in the name of capitalism.
- [05:26]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So instead of saying, I'm going to go the easy route and talk about what's wrong with Cold War conservatives, which is pretty like when you're looking at things like McCarthyism and whatever, like that's pretty well trod in terms of being a path for, for a place that you can. Can sort of negatively discuss people. And instead we're like, I'm gonna talk shit about the people that to some extent are still like, not necessarily venerated, but are still seen as, as being fairly politically innocuous or still have some sort of positive legacy. And you're like, we need to talk about this. We need to fix this a little bit.
- [05:59]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, exactly. So these are people like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The famous Harvard historian who also was an aide de camp to President Kennedy. I kind of consider him the House historian of the Kennedys. These are people like Walter Wwisee, Walter Stowe, who was a social scientist who kind of theorized about development while a professor at mit, who ended up within the Johnson administration and being hugely influential in Vietnam War policy. These are people like the amazing writer and critic Edmund Wilson, whose writing I still enjoy reading, but who wrote this book to the Finland Station that I think though brilliant and though I still recommend people read, it had a negative impact in terms of how people interpreted Marx in relationship to this, as I call it, the invention of the American political tradition. The list goes on. Even Hannah Arendt is in this chapter. And I think all of these people, it depends on whom you ask, of course, but in a sort of mainstream American liberal tradition, the people who venerate that tradition would look to these people as some of their heroes or at least as part of the canon. And I feel like they had pretty nefarious effects going forward.
- [07:20]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And the people sort of like the higher level people that probably the general public might be a little bit more familiar with are people who are. That they might be part of their administration. So like jfk, lbj, Harry Truman, hst, if we're going with the, we're going with the acronyms. But then there's also sort of like the early progenitor or who's sort of fashioned as the early progenitor, which is fdr. So these are people that like, even now, when we look back at them, they might have slightly tainted political legacies, but they're still ultimately seen as like major figures of celebration for modern liberals.
- [07:54]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, that's right. Especially fdr. And just disclaimer. When my students ask me who is your favorite president? And they often ask me, and because I teach in Illinois, they expect me to say Lincoln. And I tell them fdr. Just a disclaimer. I still believe that of all the presidents that we've had, fdr, I guess would be my favorite. And yet in this particular chapter he plays a role in. Not that this was necessarily intentional on his part, but he plays an important role in helping to exercise or rid American political and intellectual culture of any favorable interpretation of Marx. And I don't blame him for that, like I said. But the building up of the New Deal, the way in which it happened really was a way not only to, I would argue, and many historians have argued, although this is up for debate, that the New Deal saved capitalism, or at least saved the American system from something different, potentially more nefarious, like fascism, or many would say communism, socialism. But in doing so helped convince a host of intellectuals from left to right, but especially liberals, that Marx was unnecessary to helping us understand an American political present and future, and that as such, socialism was not a part of any American political tradition going forward.
- [09:23]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I think part of what's also really interesting in this is very often when we talk about Cold War liberals, we're also looking at people who now are constantly being called Marxists, like major labor union leaders and like people who are working within the context of like unions, what we see as like socialist organizing. But they are like now seen as these like extreme far leftist groups very often when in actuality like they were participating in this sort of Cold War liberalism. And so it's important for, for listeners to kind of see the landscape like that, this, this extends far past, just like some, some guys on the sort of middle left, but that it extends into this whole enormous political ideology that organizes America in, in the Cold War. If you're not a Cold War conservative, you're probably a Cold War liberal.
- [10:12]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
That's exactly right. So like the, the sort of like basic premise of my book is, wow, everyone since the Civil War in America who's anyone has read Marx and had things to say about Marx in relation to American history, American politics, American labor, American society, and the liberals whom we're talking about today, as I already mentioned, they read Marx in a particular way in order to prove that America, an Americanism, American liberal tradition, that that was far superior to Marxism and that we should fully embrace it going forward, because that is the path to freedom, not just for us, but for the whole world. Conservatives, on the other hand, which is in the chapter six of this book, they read Marx in the same period not to prove him wrong the way liberals did, because for them that was a foregone conclusion. Like they didn't need to convince the readers Marx was wrong, but rather they read Marx in order to prove to their readers or to argue that liberalism was Marxism. That The New Deal was a Marxist project, that organized labor was a symptom of Marxism. And so, and we still see this to this day when, for example, President Trump and his various, and his, the various people he surrounds himself with call particular programs, they dislike Marx as Marxism. We're seeing the same thing happening. And this, there's a long, long history of this.
- [11:43]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. I mean, even with things like Kamala Harris, like anything she said was like, Marxist, which if anyone is on the left, like any further than her, is a wild thing to say about the, the proposition she was making, which were very clearly concessions to the right, not Marxist like at all.
- [12:04]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
And there's like, there's such a long history of this. So like, for example, in the years after World War I, this is what history, a period historians refer to as the first Red Scare, although I would argue it's like the third or fourth Red scare. But so for example, during the red summer of 1919, this is when there were a number of race riots, especially in Chicago. And a conservative, conservative, like police state would sort of send people to Chicago to figure out what was happening. And the argument was, well, this is the product of Bolshevism or Marxism. Like, the only reason that these black people are rising up against police and racism in the city of Chicago or anywhere else is because they've been antagonized by Marxists or Marxists are amongst them. So like now when we hear something like dei, which I don't, I haven't met a Marxist who really likes DEI, but when we hear like DEI or Critical Race Theory or the 1619 Project being described as Marxist or inspired by Western Marxism or the, or something like that, then there's a long history there. This is like a common project by.
- [13:20]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Conservatives and the sort of liberals that we're talking about in the mid century period as well as kind of now are in part responsible for making Marx. This sort of like Marx is the specter that haunts America. And is this thing that you can tag anything you dislike with, regardless of its relationship to Marxism or to Marx's ideas or anything at all. One of the things I wanted to mention before we really get hardcore into the hating. So some of the examples of things that grow out of like FDR's New Deal style liberalism are, are things like, to sort of give some context for people in terms of like what mid century liberals achieved or were aiming to achieve are things like Social Security and things like, like the WPA is obviously a little bit earlier than, than mid century, but these things that are like the government ensuring freedom from want, for example, or FDR's four freedoms through social programming, government interference. But the belief is that they can be achieved without full socialism or without resorting to communism. Programs, like I said, expanded Social Security, federal minimum wage increases, foreign aid programs, all of these are, are sort of fundamental to liberalism, but they're presented as being a prevention of communism or an attempt to subvert communism, which is just very weird and funny to think about.
- [14:49]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, I mean, and there were members of FDR's vaunted brain trust who actually sold particular programs in exactly that way. This is an American response to a crisis. This is not communism. This is not Marxism. In fact, this will ward off Marxism or communism. And so, you know, this will be a historical narrative or trajectory that probably a lot of your listeners will be familiar with. But if you think about, like, liberal liberalism in its 19th century context, it to some degree, depending on whom you were reading, who called themselves a liberal, you were thinking about like, I guess, like, sort of like civil liberties, but also free markets and how those two were sort of intertwined. But by the time you get to the early 20th century, a growing number of liberal intellectuals in the US and elsewhere, but particularly in the US had recognized that, I guess what we now refer to as free market capitalism, what they might have referred to as free enterprise capitalism, had its limitations when it came to human flourishing, when it came to, like, presenting or creating a context in which everybody or even the majority of people could experience freedom. And so the progress, the rise of the progressive movement, the progressive presidencies of Roosevelt and Wilson to some degree, taft was about 10, somewhat taming the sort of like, wilder ends of capitalism in the name of capitalism, in the name of, I guess what eventually we'd consider liberalism. By the time you get to the Great Depression, you had a growing number of intellectuals and politicians, and FDR fits this category, who had gone even more in the degree of thinking that there had to be a social democratic aspect to society if capitalism was going to survive, if market economies were going to survive, and in fact, if democracy was going to survive. And so FDR was something of the politician side of someone like John Dewey, who considered sort of thinking about the economy in individualistic terms as an unnamed form of insanity. Those are the words of John Dewey. So FDR was fully sort of of this social democratic project that reshaped American society and economy through the New Deal, and that reshaped to an even more, an even more radical degree, the Northern European, Western European economies, especially in Scandinavia in terms of offering social democracy as a way to sort of encase or shield capitalism from its worst excesses and to shield the people, especially the working class, from the worst excesses of capitalism. And I guess as someone on the left, that's why I consider FDR the greatest president, because he actually sort of waged class warfare against the more intransitant capitalists amongst him, even though he came from that same bourgeois stock. And he did. He did so in order to save capitalism. So he saved capitalism from capitalism and in the process, I guess, provided avenues or mechanisms to give more dignity to more people, especially the working class. And so the key element of the New Deal that really, I think, transformed things was, I guess, the federal government, for the first time in American history, became a neutral arbiter between capital and label with the Wagner act of 1935. But what's so ironic about that? And history is full of these ironies, right? That's one of the great things about studying history. It's never as straightforward or simple or superficial as it might seem on the surface. And that is the great irony about that, is by essentially putting the federal government in favor of collective bargaining for workers at a moment in which there had never been such working class militants across American history, FDR embraced and brought a huge portion of this militant working class into the fold, into the New Deal fold, into the Democratic Party fold, and to a degree tamed them and made revolutionary possibilities much less. And that is something that New Deal liberals to an extent latched onto and said Marx was wrong because he had argued that capitalism was going to consistently immiserate the working class life and conditions were going to get worse and worse for the working class. America proved them wrong. FDR and the New Deal proved them wrong. And thus we can just discard Marx entirely.
- [19:16]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi there, it's Claire. The episode you're currently listening to is free for everybody, but the next one won't be. Because we're trying to make this show independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you are a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means that everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pair of socks, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive bonus content early access to merch and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked or follow the link in the episode description to sign. It seems like this is the perfect moment to move to the what's your big beef with these people? Thing. One of the things that I wrote down here, it seems to me, key to some of your arguments in the book and what we're sort of working towards talking about here is you wrote that Cold War liberalism quote embraced a libertarian vision that paved the way for neoliberalism, which I think is a pretty. Is a pretty good way to transition into the idea that there's a problem here. Like there is a real lasting problem as a result of their legacy. So what's your big beef?
- [20:42]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
That is one of my beefs. Although I think in the book, maybe I don't come out and say that explicitly, but that is the argument in a recent book by Sam Moyne that I reviewed in Modern Intellectual History.
- [20:53]
Dr. Claire Aubin
That's what it is. I read that too.
- [20:56]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah. Yeah. It is consistent with how anti interpret Cold War liberalism in this book. So my big beef, just as a.
- [21:05]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Side note, this is why we need to, when we make footnotes, we have to write where we got things from. Because I wrote this down as a quote for the wrong book. Okay, continue.
- [21:12]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
That's fine. Think we can play things a little bit more loose on a podcast than in a, like, scholarly article. So my big beef, I guess, you know, here, here's an interesting way to approach it. One of the things that we're trained to do as historians is to be empathetic to our subjects, which to me doesn't mean we have to like them. We don't have.
- [21:37]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Definitely not.
- [21:37]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, we don't have to be sympathetic, but we definitely have to do our best to understand the context from which they and their ideas and their actions emerged. Because that'll better help us make sense of it, better help us understand why they did the things that they did, even if we disagree with the things that they did. And so in a context in which the United States was fighting a war against fascism and eventually conquered fascism and thus opening up to the world full recognition of the atrocities of the Nazis in that context. And at the same moment, with the emergence of Stalinist Soviet Union, the Stalinist Soviet Union as being like the next in the eyes of most Americans, especially Cold War liberals, in their eyes, being the next sort of like foe potential enemy, and increasingly knowing that the Soviets were brutal not only to people that they had conquered, for example, like the swaths of Eastern Europe that they occupied during the Nazi Soviet Pact, but also the way in which they dealt with their conquered foes at the end of World War II and also even more importantly, the way in which they dealt with internal dissidents within their own country. In that context, like there's these. There's great drama in history, especially in this moment. I think it's understandable why so many liberal intellectuals, or even erstwhile or even formerly leftist intellectuals, some Marxist intellectuals, changed their mind about Marx and developed a theory of Marx that was what I would argue, very rigid. So it makes perfect sense. So I don't want to be like, misunderstood as saying they should have, could have done things differently. And yet I would argue they. I wish they would have, could have, should have done things differently. And that is that many of them, I think, knew better. So many of the people I talk about in this chapter, such as Sidney Hook or Reinhold Niebuhr, these are some of the most influential intellectuals, period in the mid, in mid century 20th century. These are people who are still held in very high esteem. So like when Barack Obama was running for President in 2007 and 8 and being introduced to the nation, he told people that Reinhold Niebuhr was the most influential intellectual on his worldview. Right. These are people who still matter. In the 1930s, someone like Niebuhr and also someone like Sidney Hook had written a great deal about Marx. In fact, Sidney Hook, who was a philosopher at NYU at the time, wrote this great book, towards an Understanding of Karl Marx in 1933, which was very favorable to Marx. I would argue it's one of the greatest books about Marx ever written by an American intellectual. And he meshed Marxism with pragmatism because Hooke had been a student of John Dewey's at Columbia. And it's really brilliant. It's till still to this day, I would argue people should read that book as a sort of window onto understanding not just Marxism, but the sort of possibilities of Marxism and the way in which Marxism fits well in a democratic setting, a sort of American pragmatist setting. Sidney Hook then wrote a book in the 1950s that was like the most rigid denunciation of Marxism and basically blamed the Soviet Union on Marx. And in the process. So like, that's one part of it. So he knew better and yet did. So anyways, maybe he had changed his mind and we should grant him a little bit of like leeway. There in changing his mind. Perfectly possible. But what's interesting about this like couple, that knowledge, this sort of U turn he made with the fact that in the 1960s when these young student radicals started reading Marx and were really interested in sort of American versions of Marx, they approached Sidney Hook, who by then is like one of the leading neoconservatives in the country, which is why eventually he would win the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan. They approached Sidney hook in the 1960s and said, we would love to issue a new edition of your 1933 book towards an Understanding of Karl Marx because it's just really hard for people to get their hands on it. There are a bunch of old copy, old musty copies and academic libraries, but we want to be able to like pass this around amongst all our activists, friends and comrades. And Sidney Hook said no. He refused for his, he refused his earlier self to be, for a new edition of that book to be republished. To me that's an indication that like there's a degree of not only censorship but even self censorship taking place by many of these liberal intellectuals that meshed with the sort of hubris of their triumphalism, I guess is a way to think about it that distorted Marx and made it so that Marx in particular, but so a socialist sort of political tradition more generally, was made nearly impossible as a thing to ponder in this context. And to me that what was so damaging about that is that there's a whole generation of Americans who just either didn't learn about Marx or socialism or if they did so through this very narrow distorted lens as presented by the liberals. And I guess like then when liberalism starts to falter, it makes it much less possible that there are these alternative traditions for people to fall back on. And, and so like that's my both generous but also critical reading of them, but also just as a sort of like snide way of reading them, which I couldn't help but do. And that is when, when they would talk about how America proved Marx wrong because of the welfare state and how working class Americans were doing so well, I just kept repeating in the back of my head, just wait, just wait, just wait. In other words, like, Marx was never wrong in the grand scheme of things. It's just that America, thanks to the New Deal and FDR had and also the influence of radical labor movements, had sort of momentarily solved some of the worst crises of capitalism. Momentarily in an American context, definitely not in a global context.
- [28:11]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi everybody, it's Claire here with a quick mid roll shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you might be interested in. So this week I want to talk to you about Pale Blue Pod. If you, like me, are overwhelmed by the universe, but also kind of want to understand and possibly befriend it. Pale Blue Pod is for you. Astrophysicist Dr. Moya McTeer, who may or may not be on an upcoming TGS episode about an astronomer who sucked, sits down with a new guest each week to demystify space one topic at a time. They do it with open eyes, open arms and open mouths from laughing and jaw dropping. Obviously, I can personally attest to the fact that by the end of every episode, the cosmos will feel somewhat less scary and a lot more fun. New episodes of Pale Blue Pod come out every Monday, wherever you get your podcast. So go give it a listen. And I think what's also interesting in this unwillingness to look, to really critically examine our own history sometimes by these groups is when you think about things like Social Security, for example, and you use this as an example in your book, and I know that for sure it's in the book you talk about how a lot of these things actually come out of more radical ideas that are then translated by FDR into Social Security. Like there's a very radical Doctor who, who pushes hard for something like old age retirement or old age, like insurance, essentially. And then now we look at things like Social Security as sort of a liberal triumph rather than something that very directly comes out of radical activism in order to sort of happen in the first place.
- [29:49]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, and that's, I think that's another reason why we can say that the Cold War liberals sucked because they imagine that all the good things that happened as a result of the New Deal were because of like, smart liberal political leaders like FDR and the Brain Trust or wise intellectuals like them who were sort of advising the most important people in the culture, which, as you, as you mentioned, ignores like Robert Townsend and the sort of push for Social Security which comes from below. This is what the historian Alan Brinkley refers to as the voices of protest. This ignores the influence of Huey Long in terms of how the federal government should work to redistribute wealth. But it especially, most especially, ignores the large militant labor movement that emerged in the early 1930s that kind of reached its apex in 1934 when there were strikes all over the country. This is kind of the year of the strike. Mike Davis, one of my favorite historians, refers to 1934 as the High water mark of class struggle in American history. For Example there was the general strike in San Francisco that emerged out of, out of the dock workers. It's this sort of militancy by the labor movement that pushes FDR and the federal government to pass the Wagner Act. Not only because they thought it was right, I do believe FDR thought it was right, but also because they knew that this, that labor militancy was a problem for the whole society, but especially for them and as Democratic leaders. And how are they going to tame it? How are they going to sort of keep their coalition together if they don't tame the labor militancy? Bring them into the fold and this will help do it. I think any like major reform in American history is happening because movements and people, voices of protest are pushing from below and because the people passing the reforms are worried about the stability of the system. They're worried about what the like larger consequences if they don't stabilize the system. And sometimes reform is the best system of stabilization.
- [32:10]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Just for listeners who might not know this, the Wagner act, also known as the NLRA National Labor Relations act, is a law signed in 1935 by FDR that protects workers rights to form unions, bargain with their employers. Things that like now we see as sort of not fundamental because there are still people who very much want them to not be rights that we have, but that we see as being sort of fundamental to some workspaces and some workplaces, particularly like blue collar jobs and like teachers unions and places that we just now see as being just a normal aspect of, of American life. These come out of radical labor activism. But it seems like this sort of liberal viewpoint that comes out of the mid century period prevents us from being able to actually acknowledge those and the contributions that they've made to American society so far. That even someone could write a book on Marx in America and how we think about Marx and then later just totally divorce themselves from that thinking. It's this sort of internal revisionist history that happens. And yeah, I think that sucks.
- [33:22]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah. And not only that, but the Democratic Liberal government in 1947 when Truman was president essentially did not do much to get in the way of conservatives, both, both Southern Democratic conservatives and sort of Midwestern Republican conservatives in Congress who formed a coalition to, to constrict the power of organized labor and the Taft Hartley act of 1947, which greatly reduced the ability of labor unions to organize effectively in the name of anti communism. So in the name of a sort of like Cold war liberal project, so you can look at like the sort of intellectual side of things which I focus on in the book. And that is this constricting vision of Marx, that Marx was a determinist, Marx hated democracy, Marx was like a German idealist who did not, could not think in pluralistic terms. All of the sort of cold war liberal criticisms of Marx play out politically as well in terms of how the Americans not only approached communism, the Soviet Union, but also organized labor. And, and to me, that's the real damage done by these cold war liberals who, again, I think, suck.
- [34:43]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I mean, I think part of what really comes across in the book and also in talking to you right now is that the idea of liberalism or cold war liberalism as an antidote to Marxism or to prevent Marxism creates this very bizarre understanding of the left on the left, which is you can be left, but not that left. Marxism is an enemy of liberalism, rather than what you call an occasional sparring partner or a sort of foil to liberalism. And then you get the left without the left, or worse, the left against the left. And it really, like looking at it now at this current sort of political moment, is really interesting to think about because you're seeing that same thing happening right now where the left is just eating itself over and over and over again, instead of presenting any real meaningful opposition to what's happening on the opposite side of the political spectrum. And it was happening 50, 60 years ago, 70 years ago, that this thing where the left was unable to sort of create any cohesive, meaningful relationship with itself and instead sought to antagonize itself, which is just like infuriating when you think about it. Like how long this, how long this tradition has been continuing and where it really comes from or where it really.
- [36:01]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Takes hold, yeah, that's a really good way to frame it. So, like if you think about an executive order issued by Truman in 1947, which essentially was the stated intention of it, was to rid the federal government of communists. They didn't really find many communists in the federal government. They did rid the federal government of people who had been reading the wrong books and magazines or people with the wrong sexual orientation. It's. It's an example of both, like Truman and these cold war liberals doing something they believed in, they truly hated communism, doing something also to please, ironically, some labor leaders who wanted to rid their unions of communists who just were giving them too much trouble because they were so militant, they were never satisfied, but also thinking that by doing so they could placate the right and maybe the right wouldn't. Especially the sort of emerging anti communist right that takes form under the leadership of Joseph McCarthy by 1950, thinking they could placate them and they wouldn't come after them. But no matter how far to the right the Democrats or the Cold War liberals went, they still were considered the enemy by conservatives. They still were considered Marxist by conservatives. And so a lot of lessons not learned because this is happening still to this day. Like the day we're speaking last night was Trump's, I guess, State of the Union, if you want to call it that. And the official response by the Democrats was the problem with Trump is he's not more right like Reagan. We need to be more like Reagan. To me, this is like such a Cold War liberal playbook thing to do.
- [37:42]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. There's also, if I saw this right, they were like wearing pink. Like that was their big protest is that they were pink to this, which by the way, does nothing is nothing, means nothing at all.
- [37:55]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
I mean, if they truly identified as commie pinkos, I might be impressed, but I don't think that's what's going on.
- [38:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, no, I mean, and it, it's, it's a way of what I, what I find frustrating reading this, thinking about it and you know, like, I'm on the left, I don't know if I'm necessarily that like as wildly far left as some of the sort of more rabid Twitter people. But like, I'm definitely lefter than a liberal. But it's, it's interesting because it ends up with groups basically, like making themselves teethless. Like, essentially like. One of the things that I kept thinking when I was read this stuff is that when you're talking about Roosevelt saving capitalism, and the quote that I wrote down here is the American political tradition was a mid century invention made possible by the fact that Roosevelt saved capitalism, is that in not wanting to end capitalism or even threaten capitalism in any meaningful way or sort of being willing to concede capitalism as a source of difficulty in their lives, but not one that can or should be replaced. You end up with left ish politics without teeth and without imagination and without any sort of real meaningful long term political imagination. Nothing gets better, like at all, because you're not imagining a better world.
- [39:15]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, so the Marx wrote a lot, said a lot about a lot of different things. But the sort of basic kernel that to me remains true to this day, that lots of leftist socialists, and especially labor militant organizers or unionists have, have focused on is Marx's theory of labor and its relation to value in a capitalist society. And that is that the more the worker is exploited, the more profits that can be made by the person or the capitalist or the system exploiting the worker. This to me remains true. And thus the appropriate action if you want to improve the condition of the worker and thus give the the working class, which happens to be most people more freedom, more opportunities to flourish as human beings, is to is to figure out a way to give them more power vis a vis the capitalists. And if so, if you truly wanted an opposition party to the Republican Party, if you truly wanted a party that represented working class people, which Democrats say they want, although I think their actions, the actions of the leadership betray their words, if you truly wanted that, you would do whatever it takes to empower working class people. And Marx has like a basic answer about how to do that, and that is working class people need power at the workplace so that they can work fewer hours for more money and thus enjoy the fruits of society and potentially democracy in ways that the bourgeoisie already does. And one of the fruits of of enjoying that would be to have more political power and thus to sort of empower a party to oppose the party of the capitalists. But the problem is the Democratic Party is just, I guess, capitalist party light and has been for a long time and this and maybe always has been. But there are sort of like ebbs and flows to this. And I think Cold War liberalism sort of set it on this path in ways that I think we can, many of us now can look back on and say that was the wrong path.
- [41:29]
Dr. Claire Aubin
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- [45:59]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
It's maddening. Yeah. So liberalism, it seems to me, especially as represented by the Democratic Party, has embraced a sort of elite cultural liberalism that the majority hates, that they sort of code as Hollywood. Most people like Hollywood in terms of the cultural products that give us, but not in terms of like, I guess, other things that seemingly Hollywood gives us, but coded as that, coded as unfortunately, university professors, but really like a sort of professional, high end professional class of people and at the same time has ditched, I guess, the economic policies or the sort of working class meat and potatoes kind of stuff that made the Democratic Party the majority party or like a, the, the top party in American political system for a good 40 years in the middle of the 20th century. This process begins, I think, during the early Cold War, but really takes shape by the time we get to this 1970s and 80s. And then it's all about concession to. Now we're at the point where the Democratic Party wants to champion that it has better billionaires than the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party ever since really the Clinton years, has embraced the sort of technocrats of Silicon Valley, thinking that they were natural Democrats. And yet some of the most influential among them have looked around and said, ah, we kind of now prefer Trump and the Republican Party, which to me seems like the right decision on their part. If what they're interested in is deregulation and crony capitalism, they're getting it. So the Democratic Party just has made one misstep after another. And again, I guess I see the sort of seeds of this in Cold War liberalism, which is why I chose them as my topic for this aptly named podcast.
- [47:57]
Dr. Claire Aubin
The repression. I think there's. It really is when you start thinking it through, and this is the case for literally all of history, at least in my experience, when you start thinking it through everything, you have like sort of a, a Sherlock mind palace thing that happens where all of a sudden you're like oh, yes, everything makes sense. If I look at this as being a precursor to what we have now. If I look at Cold War liberalism as a precursor to the kind of liberalism we. You can actually draw a very clear straight line from one thing to the next. And that doesn't mean that there is an obvious progress, like in terms of a sort of forward progress necessarily, but that you can see one thing allows for the next thing to grow. A lot makes space for this. And what's so maddening is that you have a group of people who are saying. Who are like Lucy and the football and then realizing that they are also the person yanking the football out from their own. This metaphor isn't working that well. There's Charlie Brown, there's the football, there's Lucy holding it. They're yanking their own. They're yanking the football out from under their own foot somehow. They're, they're. They should be creating these opportunities for themselves, and this starts in the Cold War period. And instead they just allow themselves to fail over and over and over again. So much so that now there is just no desire to like, reorient or, or like stand up or like do anything. Kick the football.
- [49:26]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Finally, you know, and some of it even at the time, was so obvious. So earlier on in our discussion, I mentioned WW Risto, who a really interesting figure. David Milne, the historian, I think he's at East Anglia University, has written a really good biography of Restaurant. And he's born in New York as a Jew in Brooklyn, working class, kind of early 20th century. So many figures in my book are of the same milieu, but they kind of joined the Socialist Party, even. Or even the Communist Party. In fact, Restaurant's parents were socialists, but from an early age he starts reading Marx and he thinks Marx is wrong about a whole bunch of things. And in fact announces in his journal when he's like 16 that he's going to spend his life proving Marx wrong and becomes an academic, a social scientist. He's at mit. He wins a fellowship, goes to Cambridge to spend a year writing a book. And this becomes his most famous book. He has a book called the Stages of Economic Growth. The great thing is the subtitle is a non communist manifesto, so specifically geared to disproving Marx. He becomes famous based on this book. And it's sort of like a. It's sort of a Marx light argument that society's transition from various stages, like feudalism to capitalism. But he argues liberal capitalism is the end stage. The apotheosis. This. It doesn't get any better than that. As opposed to Marx, who of course is envisioning socialism or communism as the end stage. And in any case, premised on this book and his fame as a professor at mit, his fame also as a renowned Cold War liberal. He gets tapped by the Johnson administration and he's one of the people who becomes the policy architect of the Vietnam War. And unlike some other members of that policy team, such as Robert McNamara, he never really gets disillusioned with it. He just thinks that building a sort of like Tennessee Valley on the Mekong Delta is the project. This is how the United States is going to succeed in winning the Cold War. And this is bringing freedom to people in Vietnam, people in Indochina, people across the planet. And if they can't see it, that's their own fault. But we're going to make them see it, even if it means killing 3 million people. To me, this is a sort of like blind blindness to, you know, to what's a blindness to ideology that is symptomatic of so many people, but I think is incredibly symptomatic of the Cold War liberals, which is also ironic because they were the ones who pronounced, as the title of Daniel Bell's 1960 book goes, the End of Ideology. But by ideology, they meant things they disagreed with, especially Marxism. So there's just this ideological blindness that's sort of like baked into the cake of American liberalism going back to the 1940s, that. That I feel like we're still living the after effects of that.
- [52:40]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. And you can also see how this policy, like, of what's happening in Indochina very clearly and directly translates into what we now know as sort of neoliberalism, where there's this like, it's liberalism that also involves a level of sort of like cultural imperialism, a level of enforced intervention in other parts of the world in ways that are very much about just imposing American culture and American values, values in scare quotes onto other people. That this is still a part of the sort of neoliberal project. And it is interesting seeing it that early and seeing it as being presented as a sort of like, like I said, an antidote to Marxism or as a sort of preventative measure against Marxist communist dangerous ideology, as though the ideology only exists if it's bad, rather than it just being a part of literally any political group that's just inherent to a political group is that you have some sort of ideology, some ideological orientation.
- [53:44]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, one of the other, to my mind, great things about Marxism, putting all my cards on the table is it's, it's sort of anti nationalism. It is not an ideology that if you read Marx, seriously would lead anybody to become a nationalist. But American liberalism, and this again is rooted in Cold war liberalism, is extremely nationalist, like I would argue every bit as nationalist as American conservatism, even if it takes on a different sort of rhetorical tone. And we see this to this very day. Liberals cannot understand a world in which the United States is not seen as the leader of the world. They think that all, all order will crumble if we as Americans are not leading everybody. And to me that's a really dangerous and just stupid ideology.
- [54:37]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, they're interestingly so. This would have come out two days ago when we're recording this. So two months ago or whatever when it comes out, or a month ago when the episode comes out. But there was recently like a Democratic Party retreat where all of these like bullet points for the plan for the future of the party came out of it. And one of the things they said was we just need to be more patriotic. That needs to be part of our going forward plan is we need to be, we need to really lean into American nationalism, into American patriotism. They also said we need to stop focusing on small dollar working class donors, which is, sorry, crazy to hear that being like a plan when obviously the opposite should be the plan. Obviously that is why there was a failure very recently. But there the. I just thought it was so funny that they were like, how could we solve this problem? More eagles, more flags, more you know, two time world War champion kind of energy. They really like feel that that is how we solve this problem. And it shows such a strong sort of disconnection from what people actually want and will actually be helpful ultimately.
- [55:49]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Totally agree. It's such a pandering of the most condescending type. I mean, so the people creating this agenda clearly have come to the, they clearly do not understand most American people. And so they see Republicans winning elections and they're like, well, you know, they're all like hyper patriotic and nationalist and their rhetoric make America great again. We have to offer Americans some version of that. We have to prove we're, we're better at it than the Republican Party. And I, I'm sorry, but that is not, it's not why Republicans win. But it's also never going to be believable to the people who are prone to vote Republican that the Democratic Party is like a better nationalist party.
- [56:30]
Dr. Claire Aubin
No.
- [56:31]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
So it's just such a losing strategy and it's just so dumb and that these are the sort of quote unquote best and brightest that the Democratic Party can offer. It's, I've just, it's a sad. I would laugh and I do laugh often at these people, but we need more than ever a strong, legitimate, smart opposition party to the people in power and we just don't have it. So we should all get out our copies of Das Kapital and start thinking seriously about what we can do.
- [57:06]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I mean, you heard it here, folks. I think. Yeah, it's, it's, it is interesting how like truly directly you can draw a line from one thing to the next here. Like how what a thing that starts out maybe as a useful ideological orientation can then be very swiftly. We're talking like in less than the space of a century, be turned against itself and be rendered totally ineffectual and kind of fuck everything up for everybody, like. And yeah, I mean, it's not funny in the sense that this is causing real meaningful harm to people, but it's funny in the sense that it's like, how could you possibly look at what has happened in recent election and this episode is, is more sort of presentist than any of our others, but how could you look at what happened in the previous election and not learn literally anything from it, or at least none of the lessons you should have learned from it? And it's because there's a group of people 70 years ago who make that possible. A group of people 70 years ago who say, what if we appease the sort of right wing imagination by squashing or quashing any imagination of our own, any desire for a better, brighter, more equitable, sustainable world? What if we just make everyone else happy by pretending that that imagination doesn't exist and then you essentially breed it out of your party over years and years and years and then you get to a place here where there's no imagination left.
- [58:41]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Yeah, I think that's correct. That is the argument of Sam Moyn in his recent book, and I just, I endorse it. Liberalism in the middle of the 20th century handcuffed itself and has been suffering the consequences ever since. I guess we, you could say we've all suffered the consequences ever since. And you know, so much of history, this is also something we're taught in grad school. That's true. Is so much of history is contingent and random, but in this case, I think the sort of like order of causation is pretty clear cut. At least it is to me and it seems like it has been to you as well.
- [59:18]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that means I can officially make the pronouncement that you have convinced me. And I think they suck. And I think that's a good place to let people go and think about this afterwards. I want to thank you so much for coming on. Professor Hartman can be found on Twitter artmanandrew. His blue sky is Andrew Hartman. You can pre order yourself a copy of Karl Marx in America at the link in our episode description thank you so much.
- [59:48]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Thank you so much Claire. It's really been a joy and a.
- [59:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Pleasure and I expect everyone who listens to this to be a communist by the end of the episode.
- [59:56]
Dr. Andrew Hartman
Then we can declare it a success.
- [60:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So get in the comments, tell me what you think, tell me if I have, if we've successfully convinced you, and if not, then keep it to yourself. Just read the book thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Collective, this episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Dr. Andrew Hartman, and produced and edited by Tom Amani. All of our theme music was written and produced by my favorite dog sitter Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get two extra ad free episodes per month, as well as access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe@patreon.com thisguysucked See you next week.