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Which is what they should do.
Mark Blyth
Funny way of doing it. Right. So, instead of which we do, it's internal politics, and the party determined that we talk about the just transition, and we mustn't reward these carbon polluters. Well, you have to deal with the fact that if you don't actually get some of them on board, you're never going to win another election.
Rana Faroohar
I'm so glad that you made that point, Mark because I hear that, too. And I had an interesting trip about a year and a half ago around the Carolinas looking at supply chains and textiles there. And I met a number of small and midsize sort of private business owners, a number of workers, a lot of white workers in the agricultural industry there. You know, honorable people couldn't stand Trump as a person, particularly those that identify with military or veterans at all but voted for him. Why? Because they understand the hypocrisy of what the Democratic sell has been since the 90s, which is basically OK, China, if you let us give you banking services, we will send you all of our manufacturing jobs and outsource our innovation ecosystem to you. It's amazing how clear, crystal clear, someone working in a cotton gin is on that point.
And I do think that Democrats still have a long way to go at getting 'woke' to those issues as 'woke' as they are too some other issues. But I also think that there are two things that are going to work, again, not immediately, but over the long haul in making that transition; one is that COVID-19 has basically just put on steroids all of the problems of neoliberalism because we talked about this myth that capital goods and people can all travel equally across borders. Well, we know capital can jump. Well, in the digital economy, data is the new oil. It's the resource that everything is driven by. It can go across borders even more easily than capital. We are in the middle of time warping a transition into the digital economy that we kind of knew was going to take about 15, 20 years. We're now going to wake up in 2 to 5 years, all that disruption that we've all been talking about in previous podcasts and saying, well, in about ten years, X, Y, and Z will happen. That's going to happen. And here's what it's going to look like.
Sure, there's a bunch of new businesses that are going to be formed out of this. They're going to need less people, and they're going to invest less. That means we're going to get a jobless recovery. And I put recovery in quotation marks of a sort that is going to be entirely new. The math, the basic math is the U.S. is a 70 percent consumer spending economy. We have had a problem with middle-class income stagnation for 20 years. We've had a problem with working-class income stagnation for over 40 years. That's going to be put on steroids. And I think that that is going to create the kind of alliances that, interestingly, you already see forming in the Black Lives Matter movement.
One of the reasons I'll tell you that my white upper-middle-class daughter is out there marching in those protests is not just because she's concerned about racial justice, which she is, but she's concerned about her own economic future. And this is a privileged child. But she's looking out and saying, oh, my God, what kind of college debt am I going to have? Whats the labor market going to look like? What are humans going to be able to do as opposed to robots? And I think that all that just got sped up in a way that is going to push some of these transitions.
Paul Jay
Mark.
Mark Blyth
I agree, and I'll push it even farther. The digital transition is absolutely underway, and we see this in the geopolitics of the moment. We spoke about it a couple of years ago at tech conferences. We called it the splinter web. You either have a payments platform, or you don't. You either have a way of protecting your data, or you don't. And what we see now is particularly the E.U.s response. They finally woke up to the fact that they don't have any digital platforms at the scale they're massively behind. They're selling 20th-century products like diesel engines. The world would no longer want them. And what are they doing? They're doing data protection. It's a protectionist move. We are basically about to sue our big corporates. Why? Because we're disciplining them. China has already created the Great Firewall in the East and has corralled their companies. So the world splits up into these smaller areas, and it's much easier for the right rather than the left to weaponize this as a kind of nationalist and geopolitical struggle of which this is a part. There's a very 19th-century rendition of this whereby the container of hopes for civil protection always lies with the nation-state. And the weakness that neoliberalism has always had is assumed a subject and a set of interests that moves beyond the nation-state and has never really happened and is now, in a way, happening in such a way that it is creating both those alliances that you're talking about. But it's also creating a kind of very dangerous nationalist revisionism at the same time.
In the 1930s, in the midst of deep depression and the sort of unraveling of capitalism as it was in 1920, 1930, and all the things that went into the crash, there were kind of two possible ways that elites would respond. And much of the European elite and much of the American elite wanted some form of authoritarianism, fascism, suppress the resistance and rebellion amongst the workers and other parts of the population that were dispossessed by the crisis.
Paul Jay
Or you had an alternative, which was mostly in the U.S., FDR, New Deal, and such.
Biden claims he wants to be the most progressive administration since FDR. I don't see that in what he's really proposing as a policy. But that said, where are the American elites on this? The financial the tech elites?
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