“Bogan,” in Australian slang, refers to someone who is of low culture, crude, unsophisticated. But it can be a term of endearment or a badge of honor depending on the context.
I went on Bogan Intelligentsia, a podcast in Australia with a rare independent voice about world politics. In the case of that show, “bogan” is a colorful way of referring to the working class. Bogan Intelligentsia, then, implies what Antonio Gramsci would have understood as an organic intellectual of the working class.
In this episode, we get very critical about both US and Australian foreign policy (our references to pegging and ball gags might be too crude for some, but it gets the point across…and nothing is cruder than the wage theft and militarized violence we criticize).
We explore why Trump is trying to colonize Canada (I’m writing an essay about that now), and how Mark Carney is responding to American domination more intelligently than either Australia or New Zealand.
We also talk about some of the pathologies of how Washington thinks about foreign policy, and whether there’s any hope of reform or redemption from within the Democratic Party.
And in the back end of the episode, we talk about the concept of multipolarity—specifically how neocons, MAGA, and Biden liberals all think differently about multipolarity and what it means.
The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can watch on YouTube.
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