Appearance on Background Briefing with Ian Masters

Earlier this week, I got notes from several people saying, “I just heard you on the radio!” One was even from a friend I hadn’t heard from in like 20 years, from my military days. Anyway, I hadn’t expected that—I went on Background Briefing with Ian Masters, which is apparently syndicated on public radio in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

You can listen to the 26-minute interview above or wherever you get podcasts. Some of the highlights:

Going back to the Reagan era, the way we related to our friends was very bullying…we were roughest with our allies. A version of that is happening now. It’s only surprising insofar as we’ve never acknowledged there’s a part of us that has been a bully this whole time.

If you value American power, Trump is a nightmare because he’s accelerating the decline of American power. If you valuable peaceable relations with the world, Trump is a nightmare because he’s accelerating mutual reciprocal hostility with the world. And if you value not having World War III happen, this broligarch defense-industrial cartel is also a nightmare—they’re the ones benefiting most from the Trump presidency.

The Democratic Party has become the defender of a system that most people recognize as not working—that’s extremely unpopular.

…of course we end up in this situation where the average worker is like, ‘I don’t even recognize you guys [the Democratic Party]. You guys are obsessed with what pronouns I use but you don’t care if I have a home to live in.’

union density is at a 100-year low right now…Trump is going to war against the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor…this is a bad environment in which to try and build working-class power and the Democratic Party, for all its problems, was a more favorable terrain for the struggles of labor…capturing the working class with an anti-MAGA, populist politics is the only hope.