Zombie Economic Nationalism, Antifascist Protest, and Arundhati Roy

I had to wakeup at 4am to do an interview on a live radio talk show with a call-in segment—A Public Affair. The show has wonderful NPR-like conversations but with a critical consciousness.

I tend to avoid these zero-dark-thirty invitations for the obvious reason that I don’t like doing media in the middle of the night, and am rarely bringing my A-game when I’m too tired to see straight.

Still, I thought this one was worthwhile because I feel a real desperate urgency, not just in myself, but in what I see and hear from everyday Americans who sense that the Trump regime is destroying everything they love. There is a tendency for people who think of themselves as “not very political” to respond to tyranny with emotional venom, with a personal revulsion. But fascism doesn’t care about your feelings. It’s vital to respond to fascism based on an account of why everything is happening; without that, you sink into depression or gun play, both of which benefit the fascists.

So I mustered at 4am to explain what I can explain.

The conversation ended up being deliciously wide-ranging, and I was surprisingly dialed in the entire hour:

• Why the oligarchs who back Trump want an economic recession;

• What tariffs are good for, and how Trump’s tariffs impact both global trade and domestic labor;

• What separates Biden’s economic nationalism from Trump’s “zombie economic nationalism,” and why both are bad but Trump’s is much worse;

• The value of the #TakeDownTesla movement;

• What Arundhati Roy teaches us about civil disobedience;

• Why the general strike is civil society’s ultimate weapon against fascism;

• Calling bullshit on politicians who invoke the “national interest” when their actions do not benefit “the nation”; and

• Why the trillion-dollar military budget is not possible without inflating the China threat.