YouSaid · the spoken record

Bhaskar Sunkara

lines on the record: 237
first: 2022-12-22
most recent: 2022-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I appreciate it. And yeah, thanks for keeping an open mind with these conversations and to your audience, too. It's nice to have a space where people can debate and think at length and don't have to worry about soundbite culture.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or exploitation, or whatever else. That's really why I'm a socialist. It's not about snapping your fingers and curing the world of everything in one go, but it is about, I think, putting our giving our lives some sort of meaning and purpose. And you don't have to be a socialist to do that. You could just do it at the, you know, at the micro level on your own day-to-day interactions. But I just feel like life has no good meaning without thinking of posterity in the future.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's no broad meaning of life. There's an accident. But we ourselves need to make our own meeting. And for me, a lot of it is about posterity, trying to do something worthwhile while on earth, but also leaving something behind. It could just be relationships with friends or family in the future, maybe having a family and kind of like leaving behind that sort of legacy little bits of yourself, but also them being able to learn the same way I have little bits of my parents and my grandparents in me. Then also, I think in a social sense, zooming out from just the individual and the family, leaving the world behind a little better. I would love to be a part of a movement that created a world with a little bit less suffering, a little bit less oppression.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and also we're no smarter than them. We just have more crude knowledge, in part because of them. Yeah. But, like, you know, they're just, they were just as clever as us, you know?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody should know basically what you're, or at least what decade, you know, serfdom was abolished, what decade slavery was abolished, what century Magna Carta was when the Roman Empire fell, even though that's kind of debated when the Roman Empire fell. being a person with a general knowledge and general sense of history and whatever else just makes you more eclectic and interesting and it's way better than just like especially a lot of my Indian friends you know that's not just Indians, but the hyper focus on like you got to specialize and you got to like focus on math or engineering whatever you want to do you just know your field really well but nothing else like I think there's something really too whether you're getting at school or you're just going to do it by yourself giving yourself kind of a liberal arts education”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think be intellectually curious, you know, read outside your current beliefs and understand and read authors on their own terms. So the worst thing in the world to do is to read anything, especially work of fiction, but anything, and try to deduce the authors' backgrounds or politics, whatever else. Read it on its own terms first, then you could reread it and kind of do other examinations or whatever else, and also read a lot of history. So I started off reading books like Eric Hopesbaum's four books on history going from the 1700s all the way to 1994. The last book is Age of Extremes. Sociology, economics, everything. So these big, sweeping historical books are really useful to know.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, he would be the best at Twitter. And also, he used to be a journalist before with his work for the New York Tribune. He was very clever, very snarky. He would be awesome at Twitter. I think him and Elon would have a good back and forth. But I think it would be critical in some parts. But I think the strangest part for him would be reading the historical sections and seeing the way in which his ideas, which was fundamentally ideas. Were used for evil, for hardship, in ways that did the opposite of emancipated, but in some cases, enslaved people. And I think he would have definitely not want to be associated with them. He probably would rather be associated with me than them. But even then, only begrudgingly.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think Marx would say that my vision of a socialism after capitalism. Maintains key elements of what he would the commodity form. So a lot of what Marx was concerned about was What markets do to human relationships in a negative sense? His early writings, especially focus a lot on the alienation of labor. My vision of socialism, at least in the near term, a lot is about decommodifying certain sectors. So reducing the market in certain sectors and reducing alienation, but not eliminating it. It is about eliminating exploitation and oppression. So knowing Marx and knowing how critical he was of certain other socialist strands and tendencies, and he would often write very snarky notes and letters to people like Engels being like, this guy, LaSalle, he's a total asshole, then he would send a separate note to La Salle saying, hey, can I borrow five grand? This is actually true. He did the both. I think the same month.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, which I try to kind of balance and do both. And I think a lot of socialists in the organization that I joined as a teenager, the Democratic Socialist of America and elsewhere, try to do the two, try to maintain some sort of balance between hair and our vision of the future.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much my life outcomes weren't just a product of hard work or my family sacrifices because of course I had the same family as my siblings. But the product of state institutions helping out, evening things out, public school district, public library, like all sorts of after school programs, all that was the domain of the state I really benefited from it. So in a essence, my core was the social democratic belief the state should redistribute a bit, build public institutions and be an equalizer. Now how it became a Marxist and a socialist was much more random. I was just intellectually interested in it. And eventually I kind of merged the two together where I merged together my more pragmatic and practical interest and day-to-day concerns and reforms and so on with my loftier intellectual interests in Marxism into the politics.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm the youngest of five. I was only one of my family born in the United States. So it was very obvious to me that my life outcomes were very different than life outcomes of my siblings. So my three oldest siblings, you know, didn't go to college after high school. Some of them got their degrees much later on as adults. But I was from a pretty young age had access to a great public school district and was put on the track that you're going to go to college. This is kind of the outcome. And like I said, even my grandmother was illiterate. My mom didn't have a lot of educational opportunities early in her life. She actually graduated from college the same year I did. So she later got her kind of degrees and whatever else. But to me, it was obvious that”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If anyone rewinds the tape, they go to when we first started talking about early socialism, when I was talking about the German Social Democratic Workers Movement or all these different early parties, I think at various points, I use the word worker and socialist movement interchangeably because, in fact, at the time it was pretty interchangeable. Socialism was the ideology that had the appeal of the working class movement. You couldn't really separate between the two. Now, obviously, socialism's like a fringe ideological current among a very small minority of the working class, which is fine, but we need to get to the point, I think, ideally where when people talk about unions and people protesting and social movements and socialism, they all kind of are one and the same as part of the same broad, broad movement.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain systems like social democracy, but also what happened in Russia, China, and kind of more historical overview. Then the book kind of ends in the present. It ends with looking at the Bernie Sanders campaign, why it resonated, looking at some of the problems facing the US, the UK, other advanced economies, and why I think the socialist message is still relevant. Because for the longest time, I'm 33. I became a socialist as like a teenager. And for the longest time, it seemed like I was just a member of a historical society, you know, keeping alive an idea that nobody was interested in anymore. And now, you know, it's heartening to see more young people interested in the idea, but we actually need to, I think, have a clearer sense of what we stand for and how we make our movement. Like it used to be more rooted in the working class.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot of it's a look at socialism's past, present, and future, basically. So a lot of it is historical. The opening chapter uses a pasta sauce factory as a way to explain certain Marxist concepts, but also a theory of change, like how we get from, let's say, pure capitalism to more regulated, unionized and social democratic systems, and then beyond social democracy into my vision of socialism. That's kind of the first little bit. It's like a visionary kind of like look at the future of socialism. But then I try to explain why some of the past socialist movements have gone wrong. Because I think we can't take for granted, I think a lot of people want to live in a different or better society. But they look at past examples and they're skeptical. And I think there's good reason for skepticism. So I try to explain both the successes of”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where me and you can go around the corner and get a beer and we're not people of two different races getting a bear. We're just two guys in America getting a bear. We're trying to get have the type of society in which there's less of that sort of communal or racialized identity. And that was a whole point of a whole generation of anti-racist struggle. But now we seem to be kind of reifying it in the media and in culture and in politics. And that's one issue where I've been kind of banging the drum on this to the point that it's annoying in certain parts of the left. I don't think there's maybe extreme opposition among socialists, but it's more like why do you keep focusing on”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentally, just I'm a universalist, and I believe that people, no matter where their backgrounds are and so on, kind of want the same things for themselves and for their families. And I feel like a lot of the left or some of the left, not even the far left, more like the center left, has adopted kind of a stance saying, oh, we need to talk about white privileged or white Karens or white guys or old white guys doing this or whatever else. And to me, it's not only Ron and a moral sense, but it's counterproductive. Because the last thing I want is a young white teenager who feels unrepresented politically and wants to be a part of maybe even the left to feel like, oh, I should think more about my identity. No, the whole point of anti-racist politics is we want to live in a world.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, definitely. Of course. I myself am looser on the self-censorship than other people, but that's only because I've gotten this far just shooting from the hip or whatever. And occasionally, you know, you'll come to a rash judgment, right? You'll speak too soon or complain about something too soon and you'll have to kind of either apologize or kind of reconsider whatever else. But on a host of issues, I have used that maybe not all of the left has, but I know that the core of my politics is a politics against oppression, against exploitation, against all the things that we talked about. And if you know that's at the core of your politics, then you can maybe say, you know what, I don't think the left should respond to the real racist in the still rat in the world by adopting an excessively racialized rhetoric, if that makes sense.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The self confidence to just keep doing it. And obviously, if you're totally obscure and crazy and way off the mark, you're never going to build that audience. But I think a lot of publications have tried to, same thing I guess goes with YouTube shows, whatever else. They try to adapt to what everyone else is doing right away when they don't achieve success. Whereas for me, the early issues that Jackman got very little resonance and took a while for it to build into something. But a lot of it was just the confidence to just keep going and keep publishing what I would want to read and just hope that I'm not so much of a weirdo, that I'm the only one”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hardest part is obviously the things just like any enterprise, right? The things beyond your control, like you could put out something that you think is great or interesting, but then you need the feedback of people actually subscribing to it. And you occasionally encounter periods where you feel like you're doing your best work, but you're not getting the audience response. And I think you just need the kind of.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I started Jackman when I was between my sophomore and junior year of college. Basically, I was already a socialist. I was involved in the Democratic Socialist America. I was in the youth section, the Young Democratic Socialist. I was editing their kind of youth online magazine called The Activist back then. And to be honest, I had my ideology. I had my views. I had a group of people around me that we would debate together and occasionally write for this other publication, The Activist and so on. And yeah, just a product of creative ignorance in the sense that I knew I had the capacity to maybe pull off an issue or two. I just had no idea how long I would keep doing it, you know, and I'd just eventually consume my life slowly, but surely like I had different plans for my future kind of, you know, but I ended up just being a magazine publisher. I literally didn't know what a magazine publisher”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to mail you a bunch of copies. No, it's perfect bound. It's long issues. Jackman's publisher, Rimikov4v has recently did a redesign of the publication. So it looks really good. It's up there in the design award competition range”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're a socialist publication. We try to be interesting. So we try to have articles that kind of have debates and contestation and whatever else, but we're definitely, we're all socialists.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Chinese people have why I would imagine that even in a democratic election the Communist Party might have majority support is because they fare the unknown, they fare collapse. That was one of the big lessons of the Soviet collapse. You want China to divide into five, six states? Do you want economic turmoil? Do you want mass immediate privatization? Do you want whatever welfare state you have destroyed and so on? I think people are right to have those fears. But there's a different route towards democratization that maintains stability, right? There's different routes that you could have democracy. Not every country had to go down the route of Yugoslavia and the USSR and so on.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't need that trade off. We could have a form of imagine if Russia went to a system closer to social democracy that maintained the stability that people wanted, the welfare state that people wanted, but restructured the economy in not a shock way, but in a way that made sense and that ordinary people felt ownership of instead of just oligarchs who are former Communist Party bureaucracy just dividing up the country for themselves. I think the same thing in China. Like, first of all, certainly from the West, the US government and people in the US should have, you know, have no say over what should happen in China, right? The Chinese Communist Party has more authentic authority than any of us do in the country. But, you know, I think that the fears of stability that a lot of”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they admire is the stability and the strong leadership. So there's a lot of people who miss the Soviet Union, right? The reason why they miss it is that it was a system they knew. It provided the basics of their livelihood. Then afterwards, like look at Russia in the 90s, people were in chaos, and the Communist Party was had a huge amount of support democratically. Anti-democratic measures had to be taken ironically against the Communist Party to keep it from regaining more of a foothold in Russia. But”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State. There's been workplace protests, there have been all sorts of local anti-corruption protests and things like that. But the government decides what's permitted and what's not at what particular moment. And I think the long run, even if it can survive, there's a better way to do things, which is quite simply a democracy.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Democratic part becomes before the socialist part. So I would say there needs to be multi party elections in China and state censorship and control over the press, in other words, needs to be done with. As far as our immediate economic policy, I think the idea of maintaining strong state control of certain commanding heights of the economy while liberalizing other spheres has done quite well in China's case, lifting people out of poverty. But again, there's something really lost in society, even if it's getting wealthier, if you're great, you know, if ordinary people don't have the ability to participate in dissent freely. And the Chinese authorities have allowed some, you know, it's not North Korea. It's not a totally totalitarian.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other things that were counterproductive. And as a democratic socialist, I certainly don't support that state, but I also hope that the US and Biden will find a way to avoid intense rivalry and competition economically spilling over into something worse.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emerging from the outside through armed conflicts and ruling over ordinary Chinese people have continued. Since Den Xiaoping, the policies have been better economically and often at times, not always, the technocratic governance has been quite good, but that doesn't mean that the party has a democratic mandate or has the should have the right to govern as they see as they see fit. Because clearly, you know, it doesn't have that mandate in swats of the country or in places like Hong Kong or elsewhere. But to me, nothing the Chinese Communist Party does has anything to do with socialism. I think even by their own definition today, it really doesn't. It's a sort of nationalist authoritarian developmental state that has done some good things to improve the living standards of the Chinese people.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industrialization didn't really work either in a way is trying to better than India or other countries that didn't have the basic education and the strong state authority and the health improvements and whatever. I think maybe, but I think that's why we need to sometimes go beyond just economic measures of success. Because if you told me tomorrow the US will grow at 3% if we maintain democracy, but it'll grow at 8, 9%. Everyone will be wealthier if we move to some sort of authoritarian government. I think you're asking the wrong question if you're going to make your decision based on growth, right? Because it has to be based on some sort of principle. But the same dynamic of from the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party ruling over people.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China benefited greatly from the Communist Party's implementation of basic education and healthcare. So in a lot of China, you had one of the conditions where women were absolutely terrible. There was still foot behind and all sorts of terrible backward practice. You had a huge vast majority of the population that was illiterate without any access to basic education, and you had no health access, especially in the countryside. So those are the three good things that China did. Improve the status of women, get everyone into primary education, and improve the lot of healthcare. Besides for that, their agricultural campaign was a failure, just like Stan's for many of the same reasons I mentioned before. The great leap forward and crash”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the same thing that I said before about Stalin and assessing the Soviet Union has to apply here, because obviously, you know, I oppose authoritarianism, and all sorts of moral condemnations I should do. But to look at what the Chinese Communist Party actually accomplished, I think we kind of need to take a step backwards from our moral opposition to the means in which they accomplish it and just look at it developmentally.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's very similar to the Soviet case and that socialism came to China. Through not a base of organized workers in a capitalist country at a certain level of development and so on, but it came through the countryside and in conditions of civil war, strife, Japanese invasion, and whatever else, and Mao built his base in the peasantry, then came down to the city to govern and try to build a base and rule over workers. So it was kind of an inversion of classic socialist.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that the fact that Bernie's speech is very clearly came out of, if not directly his own pen, but his own rhetoric over the years. And he kind of wrote it, seemed authentic. Even if he was repeating it. And then Trump has just wild improvisation. I think people found real in a certain way. And I would love for the left more generally to tap into some of that anti-establishment sentiment. But obviously doing a way that's productive, that doesn't blame immigrants or whatever else for problems, but it's kind of built on a different basis. But people are fed up for good reason with a lot of conventional politics. And we need to speak to that. Otherwise, it'll only be the right that is taking advantage of those people's anger.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earned media is what they always talk about, right? And political campaigns, the more you could get on TV. The better. Even like, I really like Vetterman. He just won his campaign. But a good part of his early campaign, he had pivoted from talking about issues to just talking about Dr. Oz living in New Jersey and kind of having the troll campaign against him, which I found amusing. But also it was effective, obviously, won. But it's a bit depressing because I would have rather a whole campaign cycle about healthcare and jobs and other issues.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, I don't have a problem with partnership. It's what kind of partnership. So I think Trump has cultivated like a lot of right populace, a relationship with his supporters. It's almost like a leader, follower relationship, and a way that doesn't actually enhance people's knowledge of politics and the issues, but actually just leads them to follow the party line. Ideally, I think socialist politics and politics on the left should be something different. Eugene Debs, the great American socialist leader of the late 19th and early 20th century, used to say, you know, I'm not your Moses. I can't promise to lead you to the Promised Land because if I can lead you there and you just follow me there, someone's just going to lead you straight out as soon as I'm gone. And I think there's something nice about that kind of anti-blind following leader follower kind of dynamic.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Donald Trump is the best thing for the Democrats, just because it would create this turnout mechanism, this excitement around we have to stop Donald Trump. He's attacking DeSantis. I mean, already he's trying to sanctimonious thing. But yeah, I kind of like, yeah, Trump's kind of like the Don King of American politics, you know?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's an incumbent president. He's an incumbent president. So it's just very hard to imagine another Democrat being able to do better than him.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Bernie will primary Biden either. I mean, Biden doesn't run, then obviously it's an open field. But I just feel like...”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not buy AOC at that mark. I would buy Biden like crazy though. I'm not a gambling man, but I would totally toss a G at Biden at that amount.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know the type of kitchen table conversations are, I hate that cliche, but I just used it, but a lot of these conversations are just different in their tone and cadence. And it's not just a question of Fetterman or Tim Ryan in Ohio and the kind of just white working class voters. I mean, working class voters of any race. They're day-to-day needs and the day-to-day things they want to talk about is just at a different plane than a Met Gala cultural statement.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she could develop it. Listen, I hope I'm answering your question. I think not the way I should answer it, being someone broadcasting to people on the left and elsewhere. I hope AOC goes in that direction. I just think that she has a lot going against her just because she's already a national figure and she's in a deeper blue district. But we need a rooter politics then in working class people.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He'll write down like five things. And I, yeah, I'm only going to talk about these five things. Ask me about this. Okay, I'm talking about these five things.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, differentiate ourselves a bit more, but then also just keep her language simple. Trump was more complex than Bernie in his literal language, but he was repetitive and there was kind of a rhythm and a cadence to Trump's speech. I think AOC needs to like Bernie, reduce her rhetoric down to a couple key lines and signatures, and focus her politics not on twenty issues, but on three or four most important issues and have that message disciplined. Bernie will do an interview with you and he'll write down, hope you do interview Bernie. But”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the difference between AOC and a progressive Democrat? During 2016, it used to be pretty easy to say the difference between the Bernie Kratz and a progressive Democrat, right? Because we were establishing our own outside third force in American politics, where, you know, you could knock on the door of a lot of people who would end up voting for Trump, and they would say, oh, I have a lot of respect for Bernie or whatever. They were still going to not vote for him, but he wasn't considered part of the Democratic Party milieu. I think now with AOC, there's a much closer association of AOC in our policies with ordinary Democrats, whereas she needs to draw stronger distinctions. She does need to do it like Trump did with just, man, I forgot all of them, though I found some of them amusing in the moment. Like all his nicknames about a lion Ted Cruz and the rest, you know. But I do feel like she needs to.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Trump is much more of a firebrand anti-establishment force. That, and I mean this negatively for what it's worth because I disagree with Trump, but he was willing to set fire to the Republican establishment, right? He was able to self-fund largely his campaign. And he already was a media figure without them. AOC has been much more cautious for the Democratic Party establishment, in part because she's not trying to run a national political campaign right now for the outside, like a 5% chance they could be president. Let me set fire to everything. She's trying to help people and help her constituents through the game of getting committee appointments and, you know, getting wins in the margins. And I think that's understandable for what it's worth.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think Trump was kind of a unique personality in American history, so it's hard to compare anyone to Trump.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas I think a national political figure needs to pick their spots and also pick their moment for changing their rhetoric and adjusting to their audience. And I think she does it in certain environments, but that needs to be your national message when you're out there. You need to be speaking towards the not already converted. And I think Bernie does that. Bernie strips his politics down to the basics.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she's very far away from being able to do that. I think that. Even other politicians that are also polarizing within the squad in terms of what they say or their ideas or whatever else are very effective communicators like Ilhano Mar and others, I think AOC, I mean, that's my hope, right? My hope is that someone like AOC could the last year plus have not been extremely promising in my mind, in part because she's become or she's continued to position herself as a lightning rod cultural figure.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she has other things against her. Like, I'm obviously class focused, but there's no denying, I think, that some of the hostility to her is like sexism. It's rooted in, I think, people wanting to see her fail or whatever else. But that's only some of it. I think some of it otherwise is her struggling to relate to people who don't have a lot of her starting points as far as moral and ethical beliefs”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source