The State Needs to Keep US All in a Frenzy of Fear and Division

The state needs division.  It needs people to make enemies.

yeah and i think i think murray would
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would say that that’s actually the
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sort of the purpose of politics
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yeah i mean like as we know politics as
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we know them yes um
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which involves the state and the state
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the state needs to keep us all in a
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frenzy of
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a fear yes and um
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and there has to be some way to divide
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people because naturally in a market
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we all get a lot right which right like
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i hope people don’t forget like in 2019
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you could walk down the streets of any
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commercial district and any city in the
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world and have
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friends all around you and
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and really enjoy your life and and meet
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strangers
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that are from a different place you’re
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so fascinated like where you’re from
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kind of thing you know
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that that was the the marketplace it was
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the agora you know under which we we
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encountered people not like ourselves
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but we found value in them and dignity
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and we realized
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something very important which is that
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their existence helps me and my
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existence helps abstain
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we had a cooperative relationship but
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politics doesn’t like that right
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politics like something else
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uh politics likes division and friends
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and enemies
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and it likes hatred
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and it likes killing and likes blood
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who likes death
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um anything to keep the regime alive
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the regime has to live
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and and how
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it lives is through division
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and death
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and and um
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and i think this is why murray hated the
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state ultimately
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i’m going to turn this stuff i’m so
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sorry
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um that’s why he hated the state because
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it divided people from each other you
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know like we’re naturally as benjamin
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constance used to say we have a natural
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interest in getting along with each
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other
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but the state
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doesn’t want that
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you know the state doesn’t want us to
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get along the state wants us to to hate
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and we turn against our neighbors and
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then we
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return to
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uh uh state managers to help us um a lot
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of my my influences here are really
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um
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due to this book i read called the um
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it was by carl schmidt it’s written in
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like 1931
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um
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called uh something of politics the
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essence of politics or something like
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that and he hated liberalism in the old
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classical sense and he said look life
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without politics is boring and dreadful
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all you do all you do
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is you know have barbara backyard
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barbecues and and baseball and and
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surfing
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and um one day flows into the next and
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you get along with others and you said
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look nobody wants to live that kind of
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life nobody wants to live like that you
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really want
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you want big things to happen to you
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something dramatic you want upheavals
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the only way we can um really achieve
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that is through through politics through
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hatred through bloodshed and i don’t
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mean just like symbolic enemies
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i want
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blood to flow in the streets he said
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that’s
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that’s where you find meaning that’s how
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you find meaning in life that’s how you
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know your life matters it says kashmir
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now he was a huge of course nazi uh
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eventually
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he was put on the nurburgring trials and
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they they uh eventually exonerated him
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on grounds that he was just crazy
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intellectuals so therefore didn’t kill
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anybody but he killed a lot of people
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actually with these views
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um
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but that’s what he said it’s like
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our lives have to mean something
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and and and
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bourgeois capitalism does not give us
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meaning it just gives us
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abundance and peace and abundance and
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peace is boring
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so politics gives us something gives us
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turmoil because it’s difficult because
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the struggle gives us heroes
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uh gives us enemies um
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but he has this other weird comment in
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there he’s like
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so who is the enemy
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and his answer is it doesn’t
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matter
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the enemy is whomever the state
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decides is the enemy
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the the point of enemy-ness is that it
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exists
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it’s not the who is the what
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so
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um so so there are there are people out
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there who believe this you know
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and so long as states exist there will
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be somebody who’s a
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um
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a convert to schmitty in view
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now if you read machiavelli it’s the
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same
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uh very similar sort of thing so i think
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we’re being manipulated
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by forces very much outside of our
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control um shouldn’t be but they are
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um we we have the potential as humanity
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all to get along
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through which we find meaning we should
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we should find meaning for ourselves
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like you have to do this i have to do
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this we have to find
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find out what makes our lives meaningful
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meaningful but meaning cannot come
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through violence it can’t come through
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destruction it can’t come through
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bloodshed
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um
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we tried that
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in the 20th century and
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and we found it uh ghastly and and awful
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um i’ve finished my soliloquy with the
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Jeffrey A. Tucker joins me for a conversation about his beautiful written work titled “The Purges Have Begun,” covering the preciousness of human freedom and the fortitude necessary to protect it in this “post-modern” world.

Be sure to check out NYDIG, one of the most important companies in Bitcoin: https://nydig.com/

GUEST
Jeffrey’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker
Jeffrey’s Written Work: https://jeffreytucker.me/
“The Purges Have Begun”: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-p…

PODCAST
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Transcript:

OUTLINE
00:00:00 “What is Money?” Intro
00:00:08 The Purges Have Begun
00:07:07 March 2020: The Inflection Point
00:11:46 Taxation as Societal Bifurcation
00:15:39 “A Life Without Politics is Boring”
00:22:58 We Don’t Study History to Learn Lessons
00:27:54 NYDIG
00:29:03 Bitcoin Never Blinked
00:33:32 A Beautiful Anarchy
00:36:43 Radical Deprivation in 2022?
00:40:00 The “Regime” Cannot Compete
00:45:30 What Happens When the State Becomes Irrelevant?
00:51:25 Failure of The State

Mr. Jones and Me: Younger Baby Boomers Swing Left

Were you more into punk than the Beatles? Were you less likely to protest the war than streak? You might be a Generation Joneser.

I think it was the 50th anniversary of Woodstock last summer that finally pushed me over the edge.

All summer long we’d been reliving the ’60s. Again. There were the boomers, reminiscing about Howdy Doody, Vietnam, the Summer of Love.

Watching all of this, I thought, well, damn. I don’t have anything in common with these people at all. Which is awkward, because I too am a baby boomer.

Or so I thought. Because then a friend of mine — born, like me, in 1958 — told me that we’re not boomers. We’re Generation Jones.

It was a term I’d never heard before, although a quick internet search revealed that yes, Generation Jones is an actual thing. It refers to the second half of the baby boom, to a group of people born roughly from 1954 to 1965.

We might be grouped with the baby boomers, but our formative experiences were profoundly different. If the zeitgeist of the boomers was optimism and revolution, the vibe of Gen Jones was cynicism and disappointment. Our formative years came in the wake of the 1973 oil shock, Watergate, the malaise of the Carter years and the Reagan recession of 1982. Above all, we resented the older boomers themselves — who we were convinced had things so much easier, and in whose shadow we’d been forced to spend our entire lives.

The fact that most people have never even heard of Generation Jones is the most Generation Jones thing about Generation Jones.

But if you identify more with punk, funk or disco than, say, Elvis, Buddy Holly or the Beatles, you’re a Joneser.

Is “Leave It to Beaver” kind of a hazy memory, while “The Brady Bunch” is crystal clear? You’re a Joneser.

Were you too young for the draft (which ended in 1973) but too old to have to register for it (starting in 1979)? Was there a time when you cared more about CB radio than Twitter? Did you wear Earth Shoes? Were you less likely to protest the war than to streak? Hello, Mr. Jones.

“Older boomers may have wanted to change the world,” Richard Pérez-Peña wrote in these pages in 2014; “most of my peers just wanted to change the channel.”

The term was coined in 1999 by Jonathan Pontell, a cultural critic, who likes the double meaning of “Jones”: not only the anonymity of it, but also the sense of yearning. And in an interview last week, Mr. Pontell told me he thinks that Generation Jones may play a crucial role in the 2020 election.

Unlike older boomers, members of this generation are reliably conservative, perhaps because the traumas of the 1970s led us to distrust government. But Mr. Pontell thinks that Jonesers are now tipping to the left, for two reasons. First, Mr. Trump’s fumbling response to the Covid-19 crisis has hurt him with Jonesers, who are part of the demographic most at risk from the disease. And then there is Mr. Trump’s cruel mocking of Joe Biden’s senior moments. “There are lots of seniors out there that also have senior moments,” Mr. Pontell says. “They don’t really like the president mocking those one bit.”

Donald Trump (who is, it should be noted, an older boomer) has been a fraud on so many levels, but if there’s anything authentic about him, it’s his air of grievance. It may have been this, Mr. Pontell says, that made Jonesers vote for him in 2016. Hillary Clinton, to them, was the epitome of older baby boomer entitlement, and if Mr. Trump stood for anything, it was for the very things Gen Jones most identifies with: jealousy, resentment, self-pity.

There’s a word in Ireland, “begrudgery.” Padraig O’Morain, writing in The Irish Times, says: “Behind a lot of this begrudgery lies the unexamined and unspoken assumption that there is only so much happiness to go around. And guess what? The others have too much and I have too little.”

I turned to the feminist author Susan Faludi — a fellow Generation Joneser, born in 1959 — for more insight. “I recognize the yearning/resenting description of that cohort,” she told me. “Personally, I’ve always been in the yearning category — a modern-day Miniver Cheevy, ‘born too late’ to be in the thick of the ’60s social justice movements, which I shamelessly romanticized. As a girl, I had, God help me, a suede fringe vest and a hippie doll that came with a sign that said ‘You Turn Me On!’”

But many Jonesers feel bitterness about the 1960s, Ms. Faludi said, not nostalgia: “Researching my book ‘Stiffed,’ I met many angry baby boomer men — laid-off workers, evangelicals, militiamen — who felt they were slipping down the status ladder and blamed civil rights, antiwar, feminist and L.G.B.T. activism for their misery.”

Jonesers expected that as adults, we’d inherit the same wide-open sense of opportunity as our older brothers and sisters. But when those opportunities dried up, we became begrudgers instead — distrusting of government, nervous about change and fearful that creating opportunities for others would mean a diminishment of our own.

And so instead of changing the world, we’ve helped to create this endless mess — a result of the choices we’ve made, and in the voting booth not least.

Damn. The more I think about it, the more I think I don’t relate to Generation Jones either.

But maybe not relating is what Generation Jonesers do best.

“In a way,” Ms. Faludi asked me, “aren’t we all Generation Jonesers now, all still living in the unresolved rain shadow of the ’60s, still fighting the same issues, still shouting the same chants (‘What do we want?…’)?”

Maybe. But I’m hoping that this tumultuous, traumatic spring is finally the time Generation Jones — and the rest of the country, too — embraces the idea of transformational change. It’s been 50 years now. Couldn’t 2020, at long last, be the year we end the 1970s?

We’ll soon find out. Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?

 

An Epidemic of Hardship and Hunger

Why won’t Republicans help Americans losing their jobs?

Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on workers. The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can’t keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years away.

But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits — such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, will take place “over our dead bodies.” (Actually, over other people’s dead bodies.)

They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income.

Because most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage.

But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative.

Bear in mind that ending Obamacare would end protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions — and that insurers would probably refuse to cover anyone who had Covid-19.

Finally, the devastation caused by the coronavirus has left many in the world’s wealthiest major nation unable to put sufficient food on the table. Families with children under 12 are especially hard hit: According to one recent survey, 41 percent of these families are already unable to afford enough to eat. Food banks are overwhelmed, with lines sometimes a mile long.

But Republicans are still trying to make food stamps harder to get, and fiercely oppose proposals to temporarily make food aid more generous.

By now everyone who follows the news has a sense of how badly the Trump administration and its allies botched and continue to botch the medical side of the Covid-19 pandemic. Weeks of denial and the failure to implement remotely adequate testing allowed the virus to spread almost unchecked.

Attempts to restart the economy even though the pandemic is far from controlled will lead to many more deaths, and will probably backfire even in purely economic terms as states are forced to lock down again.

But we’re only now starting to get a sense of the Republican Party’s cruelty toward the economic victims of the coronavirus. In the face of what amounts to a vast natural disaster, you might have expected conservatives to break, at least temporarily, with their traditional opposition to helping fellow citizens in need. But no; they’re as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky.

What’s remarkable about this determination is that the usual arguments against helping the needy, which were weak even in normal times, have become completely unsustainable in the face of the pandemic. Yet those arguments, zombielike, just keep shambling on.

For example, you still hear complaints that spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits increases the deficit. Now, Republicans never really cared about budget deficits; they demonstrated their hypocrisy by cheerfully passing a huge tax cut in 2017, and saying nothing as deficits surged. But it’s just absurd to complain about the cost of food stamps even as we offer corporations hundreds of billions in loans and loan guarantees.

But what’s even worse, if you ask me, is hearing Republicans complain that food stamps and unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work. There was never serious evidence for this claim, but right now — at a time when workers can’t work, because doing their normal jobs would kill lots of people — I find it hard to understand how anyone can make this argument without gagging.

So what explains the G.O.P.’s extraordinary indifference to the plight of Americans impoverished by this national disaster?

One answer may be that much of America’s right has effectively decided that we should simply go back to business as usual and accept the resulting death toll. Those who want to take that route may view anything that reduces hardship, and therefore makes social distancing more tolerable, as an obstacle to their plans.

Also, conservatives may worry that if we help those in distress, even temporarily, many Americans might decide that a stronger social safety net is a good thing in general. If your political strategy depends on convincing people that government is always the problem, never the solution, you don’t want voters to see the government actually doing good, even in times of dire need.

Whatever the reasons, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Americans suffering from the economic consequences of Covid-19 will get far less help than they should. Having already condemned tens of thousands to unnecessary death, Trump and his allies are in the process of condemning tens of millions to unnecessary hardship.