James meets... Branko Marcetic
I talk to the American-based New Zealand journalist about the American election.
The American election is next week. On Tuesday, November 5th the American public has the option of electing a flawed, bland, corporate, it seems a quite affable centrist(ish). Or they can elect a sociopathic Satsuma who screams lies about people eating dogs, doesn’t understand the concept of metaphor, and once told a black congresswoman born in America to go back to her home country.
Oh, and yeah, he also has openly said he wants to be a dictator. Just for one day though. And if the history of dictators tells us anything it’s that they always give up power willingly.
In order to try and help me, and my millions of readers, understand the insanity of this moment in American history, I spoke to the brilliant journalist Branko Marcetic. Branko is a writer for The Jacobin, host of the 1/200 podcast and author of the 2020 book Yesterday's Man: the Case Against Joe Biden.
We discussed the influence of podcasts on the election, the failure of Democrats to deliver on their promises, and a firm answer to who is going to win. Maybe. Sort of.
James: I was trying to think of a clever way to ask this question, but I'm just gonna go with what the fuck? Like…how? How the fuck is it possible that it's a 50/50 race going into the final week?
Branko: It's a good question. It's probably one that I think many people in the world are asking themselves, and probably a lot of Americans. I mean, I think it comes down to the weakness of the opposition to Trump. That's part of it. I think also people who are heavy news consumers and a lot of foreigners who read the news ardently remember the Trump years as a time of great chaos and instability. And don't get me wrong, it was that. But for a lot of people, Trump came in at the tail end of the Obama economic recovery post-recession, and people felt like it was a fairly decent economy. And then in 2020, Trump basically just blasted out—passed by the Democratic Congress—trillions of dollars into the US economy, directly into the pockets of Americans, and the President always gets credit for what the Congress does under him. There was a massive expansion of the welfare state, and a lot of people have some fairly nostalgic views about that. A lot of people paid down debts and paid off bills they couldn't pay off before. [Their] finances stabilised for that period, even though it was a very dysfunctional and chaotic period.
So I think people still have this idea of Trump being strong in the economy. And then, unfortunately, the Democrats have not managed to pass almost anything that they promised in the 2020 election. At the same time, they allowed the entire welfare state that expanded under Trump during COVID to wither away and disappear. Now you have yet another Democratic campaign that is all about how bad Trump is and how much of a danger to democracy he is and so forth, and very little is actually being told to people about what will be done to improve their financial security and their physical security. I think all those things together are why you have this race being neck and neck and it's not clear who's going to win. I have no idea what's going to happen next week; I really don't.
James: It's something that has characterised the left since its inception, not being able to communicate things properly. So I mean, with the welfare state expansion, he wouldn't have wanted to do that. That would have been the Democrats and Pelosi in Congress pushing that through. So do you think that the fact that they haven't talked about it in that way and got it across that it was them is? And some of the things like the COVID recovery problems, which I don’t think there’s any doubt he didn’t want to do that without the Dems. Do you think that's part of the problem as well?
Branko: It probably is a part of it, but it's also about what you choose to fight for. Biden’s Democrats did not choose to fight to keep that welfare state. In fact, I think they swallowed a lot of the press and the kind of neoliberal economic economists fear-mongering about government spending as a contribution to inflation post-Covid. So they very happily allowed all this stuff to go away. There was a kind of soft Medicaid expansion that happened under Trump where basically people were allowed to hang on to Medicaid, the government health insurance, even if it's meant to be government health insurance for the poor. But under COVID, they allowed it so that even if you ended up earning more and should have been kicked off under normal conditions, you were allowed to keep it. When they got rid of that provision, that meant that at this point, I think 20 million people were thrown off their health insurance. I'm sure a lot of those people got different health insurance, but that's still a very destabilising thing to happen to your life, as just one example. As well as on top of the fact that their groceries were going up and so many other costs in American life were high and getting higher. It's probably a matter of communication, but at the end of the day, it's also about what you choose to fight for and what battles you pick.
James: That was one of the interesting things about COVID. For years we were told that the state is no good; the old Ronald Reagan quote, Thatcher, “There is no society," all of that. And those two people still have such an enormous influence on our modern-day politics; it's insane. But then when COVID happened and the state did all of these things, I think it shifted a perception in people like, “Oh, so you actually can do something for me?” And now we're just trying to go back to what it was before, but I don't think people are quite having it in the way that they were pre-Covid and in the Neoliberal boom period.
Branko: Yeah, absolutely. I think I have a slightly different view of the pandemic than a lot of people. Even though it was chaotic and in many ways dysfunctional, and there's so many things that could be criticised about the pandemic response. It was actually a pretty successful example of governments around the world working together to solve a common problem that afflicted the entire globe. This wasn't just a national problem. This was something that everyone in the world experienced together. You go to somewhere in Africa, you go to the Middle East, Asia, or the Pacific; wherever you go, everyone had that experience of COVID, and for the most part, governments did many similar things to try and get through it. So I actually think it was a very successful example of international cooperation.
And you're right, it was also an example of the government working for the people. I think in the US probably, you know, for all the flaws and all the kind of herky jerkiness of the US pandemic response, I think for a lot of people it kind of finally felt like their government was actually taking care of them, which had not happened—certainly had not happened under the Trump era previously. Even under Obama, when homeowners were kind of left to wither on the vine in the wake of the foreclosure crisis.
James: Flint as well; that was a big one.1
Branko: Yeah, yeah, totally. Flint was a campaign issue eight years ago, but it's been completely forgotten. Nothing's been fixed there. It's a disgrace. Even though that state is controlled by a Democratic state legislature and Democratic governor, you have a Democrat in the White House. I would hope that people's takeaway from that [Covid period] is not that this was an exceptional period and that can never happen again, but actually that even with the amount of that the state has been under resource and depleted in the modern United States, the government is actually able to come in and do things, and it can do again in the future.
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash
James: I know some of the things that Harris wants to do—this kind of giving people $5,000 to help buy them a house, something like that—and then something to do with tax cuts of up to $6,000 for certain people. But what does she want to do? But also, what does, what does Trump want to do? He never really talks about anything that he's actually going to do apart from fucking killing people that he doesn't like, basically. So this election really is not about policy at all. To what extent any kind of election is. And this is not coming from a kind of British exceptionalism perspective; we're just as bad. This is an election that is not really about anything apart from Trump's personality, really.
Branko: It seems it has become that way. Ironically, I would say that Trump is policy-focused. It's just that the policies are terrible, and they're not going to actually do anything that they claim. Trump is very on-message. If you watch those debates, if you watch his RNC speech, if you watch so many of his public appearances, everything comes back to immigration. Now, deporting 20 million people is not going to fix the fact that the housing costs have spiralled out of control. It's not going to fix the fact that groceries and petrol are getting more expensive. It's not going to fix the completely dysfunctional healthcare system. But he claims it is and that that's his policy solution to everything.
Harris seems kind of reluctant and almost afraid to bring up her own policies. It's something that she has to be almost cajoled into by the interviews. There was a town hall where one person said, I lost my health insurance. I've been trying to get it back; what are you going to do to help me? Someone else said I lost my health insurance, and I lost my job and my house, and I've been homeless because of my disability, and I don't know how I'm going to make it back. What are you going to do to help me out? She didn't really have a response to either of those people because there's nothing in her. She had nothing really to offer any of these people aside from saying, Well, we'll strengthen Obamacare, whatever that means, and I won't let your medical debt be part of your credit score. Which, okay, that's nice, but doesn't really fix the issue. I think it's because Harris has tried to run this kind of campaign where she is trying to balance the interests of capital on the one hand and trying to kind of keep her working-class or Biden's working-class coalition together. And you cannot really do that. Those two things are at odds.
James: Yeah. There was an interesting quote someone said on a New York Times podcast last week that really applies to England as well, that the Democrats and the Labour Party wait for permission to do things from the Republicans or the Conservatives.
Branko: Yeah, right, right. This is the entire trouble, I think, with liberal politics pretty much across the Western world, is that it is constantly following the lead of conservatives. I come from New Zealand. We have the same exact thing [here]. It's the right, the neoliberal right, that sets the agenda and sets the framework of debate. And the liberal opposition is typically too timid to kind of break away from that. Biden, for a very brief window, did get away from that.
James: The infrastructure and green energy bills?
Branko: Yeah, the Build Back Better Bill. That huge bill was going to be a massive expansion of the US social safety net. Didn't end up happening, but that was going to go against the wishes of Wall Street or the Chamber of Commerce. They didn't like that particular part of his agenda. So for a brief moment, he was going to break from it. If he had actually managed to do it, it may well have shifted the course of politics. But because it didn't happen, he basically gave up on it after that first year. And since then everything has been on the terms of the right on foreign policy and on domestic policy.
Photo by Laura Seaman on Unsplash
James: You published a really good piece this week about the rally. Did you watch it live? Did you watch the whole six hours?
Branko: No, no. Good Lord. I actually can't believe that anyone would honestly sit there for the entire six hours. I mean, it's also about an hour to get into the stadium itself. I saw Trump at the RNC deliver a—whatever it was—one-and-a-half-hour speech. I was bored to tears being at the actual convention, so I have no real desire to be subjected to that again.
[The rally] was an interesting event because it does speak to the clear confidence they have that they're going to win. Perhaps overconfidence. And I think it also reflects the very dark vision that they present of American society as it exists and also what they want, the direction they want to go in. People would say that the vision Trump presented in 2016 was pretty dark and grim too, which it was to an extent, but it was a different kind of darkness. It was this country's in crisis, and we need to pull it out. You know, the ordinary workers have been left behind and, you know, screwed over for decades. This is a very different vision. This is we are beset on all sides by innumerable enemies, immigrants, the radical left, and criminals. They are killing, stealing, and raping at will, and we must purge society of these terrible elements. Look at the fear-mongering that was aimed at Haitian immigrants in that Ohio town and compare it to Trump coming down the escalator and saying, Mexico is sending their rapists, and they're criminals, and some are good people. That looks quite tame and reasonable by comparison.
James: Can we conceive of what it's going to be like if he wins? Like, what are these four years going to be?
Branko: It's very hard to know. I think that it's obvious that some very bad things are going to happen. I mean, they're very serious about doing this mass deportation plan that's going to really upset a lot of communities. I think a lot of Americans who hear about mass deportation don't really understand what they mean. I think people like me and yourself, maybe people who pay attention to the news a great deal and consume this stuff in our spare time, understand that what he's talking about is deporting millions of people and breaking up families. The average person probably thinks, you know, deporting some of the worst criminals and that kind of thing. I think that's going to happen.
I think they are very serious about launching a third red scare that is orientated around pro-Palestinian protests or criticism of Israel. I think they've been very open about that. They want to do what Orban was able to do in Hungary. Trump and people at the Heritage Foundation, the people behind Project 2025, have been very open about the fact they see the left as a threat and they want to purge the federal bureaucracy of people like that.
I think the bigger question is not so much what it will look like, but whether will they be successful at that. Trump, if he wins, will be inheriting a very divided country. It does not seem like he is going to win any sort of landslide victory. And even if he does win by a fairly convincing margin, even [like] the one that Biden won on, it's still a large percentage of the country that dislikes Trump no matter what he does. And on top of that, you've got the fact that a lot of the things that he wants to do could well prove deeply unpopular. The people around him intend to do a lot of bad things. I'm not convinced that they are particularly strategically minded or very disciplined. And I suspect that they may make a lot of mistakes and fail to deal with a lot of crises, just as Biden came in and failed to deal with a lot of crises.
James: I've often thought that he actually doesn't want to be President, I imagine he finds the actual day-to-day of being President, whatever they have to do, quite tedious. I've always just thought he wanted to be the most famous person in the world.
Branko: Right.
James: Which he is.
Branko: I don't really know what is going on in his mind, but I'm sure the day-to-day of legislating is probably not his favourite thing. But that's why he has a lot of people around him and he'll be able to do some of the more symbolic, fun things of being President, while the people who are really serious about doing things like trying to destroy the left in this country, they're going to have kind of free reign to do what they want.
Photo by Heather Mount on Unsplash
James: So immigration has been kind of the main kind of story of the election, along with the economy, inflation, and foreign policy-ish type things. But really, it feels like gun control has really slipped from the kind of conversation, which is kind of not surprising, but I think quite striking. I know that Biden passed certain things. I know that Harris's platform is universal background checks and a couple of other things as well that I can't remember off the top of my head. Whether that will go through or not is a different question because they've been talking about universal background checks since the 90s practically, and they haven't done it. So why do you think that is?
Branko: Gun control is one of these things that's not really a winning issue to run on because it's so culturally polarising. If you want to make a pitch that will cut across geographic and class lines, you're really going to hit the economic stuff, because that's the stuff that the majority of people identify with and that makes a difference to people's lives. With the gun stuff, unfortunately, you're going to get a lot of people pissed off who live in rural areas. Even if people don't want to be walking around with big assault rifles and stuff and don't think that that's a great thing, it just gets coded as “they're coming for your guns.” It's very tragic because I think literally there's not a day that goes by where there is not some sort of mass shooting in the US.
James: “A minor mass shooting.”2
Branko: Right. The amount of just horrific incidents that have happened over the last few years; there's the Sandy Hook school shooting, of course, but then you also think about the Ulvade -
James: I think if you asked the average person, do you know what Sandy Hook is? Even if they're not really interested in this kind of thing, they'll say, Yeah, when those kids got killed. But if you were to say Uvalde to them, they'd be like, What is that, like a new deodorant brand or something? Even though it's the same amount of kids that got killed, it's just gone, isn't it?
Branko: It's just kind of become normalised. A lot of things, including a lot of things around Trump, have become normalised that people used to be appalled by. There isn't a type of messaging that could be effective on gun control, unfortunately. It's not really a good issue to run on, at least in the foreground of your campaign.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
James: One of the things that's come up, I would say, in the last month of the campaign is the use of podcasts as a means of getting messages across. I mean, obviously, Trump was on Rogan last week. I don't know what the views are today, but I bet it's up to 15 to 20 million. It was 11 million after two or three days. They're complaining that it’s being shadow-banned by the algorithm. Even though that's not true. Well, people say that it didn't go very well. I mean, he just comes across more like what he is: a complete fucking idiot. He talks about how he only found out in his 70s that trees take water from the ground and, you know, stuff like that. But before he was on Theo Von. He was on Flagrant. I imagine he must have been on Kill Tony at some point.
Branko: I think they were going to get him on there, and instead what happened was Tony went on at his rally.
James: And Kamala's been on a few different ones as well. They're obviously doing them for a reason, but do you think they are important in getting messages across and getting people to vote, which is ultimately why you do anything like this?
Branko: I think it's a really smart strategy. Both campaigns have realised that basically anyone who is watching CNN or Fox or MSNBC or reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, these people are locked into a candidate already; most of the viewership of these shows are hardcore partisans, number one. And number two, they're very politically engaged, which is why they're watching the news. They've long made up their minds [on who to vote for]. So the question is, how do you get the slice of the electorate that is not politically engaged? That doesn't really care about politics; they aren't paying attention to the election and isn't watching the news at all because they don't care. And the way to do that is to link yourself to these cultural products that people consume. Trump's done it with Nelk, and you're right, Joe Rogan, Flagrant, and, you know, the UFC. He was on The Undertaker's podcast -
James: Was he?!
Branko: Yeah, yeah.
James: Oh, I missed that.
Branko: Well, you know, Kane, Glenn Jacobs
James: Yeah, he was a Mayor wasn’t he.
Branko: Yeah, he's a Republican mayor. Wrestlers have conservative beliefs; at least the old school of them do. So the Undertaker, I think, is a genuine Trump fan. So he's bringing the message to people where they're not going to consume politics; they're going to listen for entertainment, and then they see this politician on there, and he's able to get the message to them. Also for Trump, it's key that he is able to come across as just a normal-seeming person, that he's able to dispel the image of himself as this kind of dark extremist. And for Harris, it's the same thing. You know, Harris, she went on Call Her Daddy.
James: Yeah, that was what I was thinking of.
Branko: And then now Shannon Sharp's podcast, it's a very similar strategy. It's we’re going to turn out or reach the slice of the electorate that is not going to listen to us or hear us otherwise. Rogan himself, when he was talking about why he hadn't had Trump on, kind of explained pretty well what the usefulness of this is to politicians, which is that they can be very successfully humanised when they go on these shows.
James: I really like Theo Von, and it was weird because he had Bernie Sanders and Trump on in the same week.
Branko: Yeah.
James: I don't know how well the Rogan interview has gone for him. Obviously, in terms of sheer numbers, it’s really good for him, but he does really ramble on that one. But on Theo Von, Theo was talking about his addiction issues, and then Trump was talking about his brother and why he's never drunk and stuff like that. And that's really good for him because he comes across like a normal person. It's actually interesting because people like me will say he can't talk properly. And then his supporters say, Well, he goes on these podcasts and he talks for an hour, two hours. But I guess what we mean is that when he's under any kind of pressure, he can't form coherent sentences.
Branko: The other advantage of these shows is that these people are not official journalists; they are entertainers. None of these people are going to ask them very tough questions and scrutinise them very much. On Rogan, there were some challenging questions in the interview, from what I've seen, but for the most part, they're not going to really hold their feet to the fire. So you can basically just say whatever you want unchallenged. J.D. Vance is apparently going to go on there in the next week.
James: He was on Theo Von last week as well.
Branko: Oh, there you go. And guess who isn't: Kamala Harris.
James: Rogan tweeted saying that they want her to go on but she doesn't want to go to Texas. He'll have to come to her. I don't think he's ever done a podcast that isn't in that really, so why would he do it for her?
Branko: And she only wants an hour. It makes her look like she is scared and avoiding a media appearance that could be bad for her.
James: She should do it because he's the easiest interviewer ever. He talks to Bernie Sanders, and he sounds like Castro. He talks to Ben Shapiro, and he sounds like Reagan.
Branko: (Laughs) Right, right. Harris is such a manufactured politician who is deathly afraid of just being herself. I suspect that it sadly would not be a good venue for her because over three hours you can only keep your guard up for so long. Even when she's kind of at the top of a game, she struggles to be authentic and articulate what she wants to do and who she is. She was just saying a week ago that we need to do better among young men, and this is her chance, and she is avoiding it. And at the end of the day, she needs that appearance more than Rogan needs her on the show.
James: So the big story over the weekend was the Washington Post not endorsing and USA Today and the LA Times as well. I did see a really good tweet from one of the Post’s writers saying we won a Pulitzer Prize for our reporting on January 6th. I'm not sure to what extent it actually matters in terms of people voting or not, but I think it's really meaningful. I suppose it's more symbolic that these people, these newspapers—"democracy dies in darkness”-and all that nonsense that they talk about. It does seem quite symbolic that they are backing away from actually saying something.
Branko: Everyone who reads the Washington Post does not like Trump. The vast majority of their editorial content is very, very critical of Trump. So it wouldn't have moved the needle in any way. What to me is significant about it, and what is actually quite worrying, is the fact that it was clearly motivated by this desire by Jeff Bezos, who is a government contractor, who sees that Trump may well be on the road to winning and also sees that Trump is going around already preemptively threatening his potential enemies. Not just with cancelling the government contracts, but putting them in prison, and God knows what else. And to me, that's what's worrying, because if Bezos is going to step in and kind of exercise his editorial veto in this context, because it may threaten his personal and business interests, then what? What is going to happen when Trump wins? Where else is that veto going to be exercised? How else is coverage going to be curtailed that might be critical of Trump? The next time might actually be important. It won't be about an endorsement but will be about an actual story that could really end up blowing back [to Trump]. That's what is significant to me.
A lot of billionaires and others have now, looking at Trump's chances, started to kind of retreat. In 2016, when he won, it was seen as an accident and a fluke, and he was this widely reviled figure and everything. There was a lot of social capital in putting yourself out there and saying, Oh, Trump, he's the worst. We have to stop things; he’s a threat to democracy potentially. Now that there's more capital in staying mum and playing ball. Mark Zuckerberg has said that he's going to stay out of things a little more. To me, it's an ominous sign, but not for the reason that I think a lot of people think it is.
James: Yeah, definitely. Because, you know, if they're doing it now without him actually saying something to them, how are they going to react when he actually calls up Bezos and says, Look, if you run this front page on whatever he might have done, we're going to increase your tax by 20%. That’s kind of the problem, isn't it, really?
Branko: Yeah, we'll cancel the contract that you have with us.
James: What does Amazon do for the government?
Branko: All sorts of things. The thing that's frustrating is that the U.S. government is the largest contractor in the country. It gives millions of dollars to a whole heap of [companies]. Nike is a government contractor. It can be all sorts of different things, but often to do with the military. They provide supplies and do logistics and that kind of thing. But so many companies have contracts with the federal government in the US and make so much money off of it that, in actual fact, the US government has tremendous power to kind of push corporations to do what they should without having to go through legislation. That's what's been kind of frustrating about the Biden years: I think the full scope of government power has not really been employed, and we're about to see it employed by Trump. But for a very different set of ends.
James: What's your gut saying: Harris or Trump?3
Branko: Honestly - I can't - I honestly don't know. If you put a gun to my head and say you have to pick one, I would say that Trump is probably the one. But that is under extreme duress. That's with a gun to my head. I really have no idea what is going to happen. I think both of these people are their own worst enemies in a way. They're both trying to lose. Trump with this rally where they insulted a key demographic that they need to win a state like Pennsylvania and others. And then Harris by campaigning around Michigan with Liz Cheney and talking about her endorsement from Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez and continuing to fuel this horror show that is just going on every single day in the Middle East. I've never watched an election where both candidates seem to be doing their best to lose it to the other one. It's very, very surreal.
Twitter: JamesTurrell1
Instagram: jamesoneverythingish
Mark Ruffalo’s heart might be in the right place, but he ain’t half a dipshit.
This is defined as three people including the gunman being killed. What a world we live in.
My gut says Trump as well. We are fucked as a species
.