Lot of these books have been published about socialism in response to what has changed over the last five years and they all have a little bit of a different take on it and emphasize different points so my obvious question is, why the United States and socialism and why did you write this book . Guest i noticed that there have been a flurry of books on socialism and that is a surprise because socialism has come into the american mainstream for the first time in our countrys history and there have been socialist candidates in the past, eugene debs, Norman Thomas but they were never in the mainstream and but now in fact at a time when many of us thought socialism had collapsed at the end of the 20th century, suddenly in the 21st century it is back and back with a vengeance. I am not surprised that there are books that try to take stock of this. The unifying theme throughout these books and i think by and large it will be history, its the idea that socialism has never worked before and certainly not for lack of been tried and the majority of the world it was tried and largest countries in the world, russia, china, india all swung to the socialist direction and so the issue is socialism did not work before so it will not work now and the verdict of history argument but the problem with that argument is the socialist left, first of all, a lot of people dont know the history so it doesnt really get them and the second part of it is even those who do say listen, were trying a new form of socialism number one and it is not authoritarian socialism but democratic socialism number two. Our model is not lennon or mao but it is scandinavia and we like the way people live in norway and sweden and those arent horrible countries to live in so why not the scandinavian model . It works right there and you can see it. And three, we have new types of socialism that our socialism isnt just about class grievances but includes racial grievances and gender grievances and transgender agree vances so in other words, the left is putting forward this kind of new socialism, if you will, and interesting that this time it actually can and will work. Host lets start there then and demonstrate what it is that we are talking about when you read a book about socialism what socialism that you are talking about and the classic sense and meant something to marxist and lennon it was very economic concept because some form of collective ownership of the means of production and abolishing private property and that form of socialism is a very common today at least in large scale so what do you mean when you say socialism in this context . Guest the new socialism is not, i would call a classic socialism. Socialism has evolved over the last century and a half and originally this was socialism for marks meant these voluntary communities about people who would come together on their own share all their possessions and usually free love component of the state was not involved. Marx came along and proposed his socialism which essentially was the revolt of the proletariat and the working class that would presumably overthrow the capitalist class and take over and take over the means of production and ultimately take over the whole community and that prediction has never come true even marxist day to this day anywhere in the world and there never has been that kind of a work revolt ever and in the early late 20th century socialism meant for many countries nationalization so i grew up in india and the Indian Government took over the banks and took over the airlines and controlled ultimately the farming industry so socialism in practice meant state ownership of massive Major Industries and critical industries. The left today is not interested in any of this. The new socialism is an economic component and it has all these ideas like the Green New Deal, medicare for everybody, free college and you can see these ideas are now the mainstream mechanic party ideas but it is a cultural component and i write somewhere in this book where i say the typical socialist today is not a union guy demanding higher wages but it is an eco feminist who marches in black lives matter or anti for rally and throws blocks at her opponent so that is not a character that marx could have foreseen and it reflects the fact that we are dealing with an interesting hybrid of cultural and Economic Issues with a lot of socialist today care more about abortion than the minimum wage and care more about the transgender bathroom than they care about the universal basic income. There is a cultural component that overtakes the economic component. Yes, but lets start on the economic component and get to these cultural components. I thought it amusing in the book that you define the types of socialist, i believe, hardcore socialist, because i socialist and socialist like so what do you mean by those . What falls into those categori categories . Guest a good way to think about this is to compare biden against, for example the Ernie Sanders paid bErnie Sanders is an expose that socialist. He sounds like an oldtime socialist. Theres a comic element to it. Heat honeymoons and the soviet union, praises bread lines and says they are a good thing but this is a bit too much. This is not socialism you can get sold in the United States. The demonstrates have opted socialism light or perhaps more accurately creeping socialism and that is biden. Biden, for example, opposed free college but now he is for it. Why . Because the poll in the Democratic Party is toward the left and so a good way to think about socialism now is not so much as a defined thing but to think of the free market on one end of the spectrum and socialism on the other end and asked this question, which democrat is pulling in the free market direction which democrat is pulling in the socialist direction and a simple answer is they are all pulling in the socialist direction without exception. Its just a matter of whether they are pulling hard or pulling crossly so the democrats have decided lets go to with creeping socialism and is more marketable than bernies socialism and that is why they picked biden over bernie. Host i think youre right to talk about this as being on a spectrum because even in defining the narrow version of socialism or nationalizing the means of production there are varying degrees of that in the present and the soviet union during the time of war communism or mao during [inaudible] and then they partially liberalized but are still overwhelmingly socialist so countries like us that are more on the capitalist end of the spectrum may be running so let these Office Policies run [inaudible] one of them is singlepayer healthcare or some version of nationalized healthcare that socialist would like. That fits into the traditional definition of socialism a little bit better. Guest yeah, it does. Of course, there are welfare states in europe that have National Control of healthcare part of this is you cant debate these things without being honest about them and knowing what you are talking about. When i listen to people like Elizabeth Warren talk about medicare for all your singlepayer healthcare to begin producing a kind of rhetoric that has to be unpacked. They say things like we want to take healthcare away from the Greedy Pharmaceutical Companies and turn it over to the people. That we want the people to be in control of their healthcare and the weight their healthcare is administered but then i asked the obvious question, well, what role would do or will the people have in any of this . Lets look at other government institutions. Post office but what control do you or i have been running the post office . None. What control do you or i have in running the dmv . Nonverbal control does the ordinary british guy have over the British NationalHealth Service . None. The people here its a little bit of a ruse on the people will not be running anything good Elizabeth Warren is so right away realize that socialism offers something to the socialist class that is proposing it and it is not just the pharmaceutical companies or the third player in the politicians who they themselves have a great deal of power to gain and power that is ultimately convertible into money and that is very important important component socialism in america gets very rich and if people are able to parlay their position ultimately into vast amounts of cash and this is happened to the bidens and the clintons and the obamas, al gore so how these people go from zero to a hundred Million Dollars in the government salary, they do it ultimately by cashing in on their public position. That is the first point i want to make is that the people are not in charge in fact. The real question is who will run healthcare and Healthcare Industry including the Insurance Industry or the Political Class that makes it more of the actual choice facing us. Host i think youre absolutely on point here and this is true of socialist revolution everywhere done in the name of the people but end up benefiting the nomenclature or some pigs are more equal than others. One thing they will draw as part of this Economic Policy that they do say is treating everybody more equally, universal basic income. We will guarantee minimal income to allamerican so they can be free from the oppression of want. How do you respond to that proposals on that . Guest i think this is where we have seen a little bit of a preview of, nasty preview i would say, of socialism on the coronavirus where we have had some swarm, in miniature of universal basic income and for the left this is almost a recipe and i almost want to say to the markham people hey, youve been sitting on your couch for months so how would you like to keep doing it or why you want to put on an outfit and shave and go to work and punch a time clock and listen to your employer or raven rants . What if we give you a thousand, 2000 a month and essentially make you a permanent slug. I have to admit there is a little bit in human nature that says wow, thats fantastic because who wants to get up or off the couch . It appeals to all of us. Ultimately i think it points to the type of socialism by the way the democrats are selling. Family got a ration card for example so under coronavirus we got a temporary case of what socialism would feel like on a permanent basis and we shouldnt also get the attack on civil liberties. Thats a key part of what socialists do. Its not just economic confrontation. Its also no religious liberty, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of speech, no guns. Its funny, when you pay people not to work you dont get production and weve seen some of that these recent months. Another one to bring up and this obviously doesnt fit with traditional marxists either is free college. I dont see College Students as the oppressed class but free college or forgiveness of student debt as part of this package. I was watching 60minutes and i see this fellow , his name is joel lapinski, hes studying to be a doctor and he goes man, i would be such a better doctor if i didnt have to worry about paying for medical school. It would be so great if this education was free. I could put all my attention into being an outstanding doctor and heresleslie stall nodding and im waiting for her to ask the key question which is joel, if you want other guys to pay for your education , once youbecome a doctor are youwilling to work for free . The answer is obviously not. He wants the pool in the backyard, he wants to have the big house and so on so heres my point. He wants the privileges of and perks of being a doctor but he wants a foreman to pay for his education area the shamelessness of this i think is a little shocking and i dont think again mark would have any sympathy for this guy. He would consider him part of the bourgeoisie and a part of the class that would be thrown on its back when the workingclass became angry enough to read the problem with the workingclass today is there less likely to be found at the union revolt and they are to be found at the trump rally so the left has lost the workingclass. The workingclass rather than beingcommiserated has become wildly prosperous over the last hundred 50 years. Its changed this whole game to find their constituency on this. One of the new policies being proposed by them is on the face environmentalism but really has a lot of socialist components underneath. So why is the Green New Deal a red new deal . If you look at the Green New Deal a number of its remedies have nothing to do with Climate Change and i believe many of the politicians pushing the Green New Deal neither know nor care whether the earth is getting hotter or colder area and they experience it exactly the same as when they were kids so this is ultimately a pretext and a ruse. By the need for a ruse at all . You touched on it a moment ago when you said the workingclass is not going to deliver what the socialists want. An economist about 100 years ago raised the question why has socialism not become mainstream in america and his answer is all socialist utopias have come to agree on roast beef and apple pie. In other words the working guy is living so well he wants to join the capitalist class, not to violently fling it to the ground and the leftists figure this out they know this too so they realized we need to pit. We need new ways to get to socialism without the kind of revolt which is never going to happen so now they rely on the politics of beer. Fdr learned in the new deal that fear is a great way to get things done that you couldnt do otherwise so since then, since the 70s when i first came to america from india ive been hearing this and in the 70s the world was running out of food. In the 80s it was nuclear apocalypse. In the 90s the ozone layer was apparently dissipating and the last 20 years and Climate Change. The oceans are rising, the penguins are coughing and lately coronavirus and in every case the idea is to create panic and try to get people to do in a stampede in a crowd mentality what they would not do if they thought about it and acted in a common deliberative manner. Thats been the strategyof the left hence the importance of Climate Change. You also identified this period of fear in the 1930s is kind of how america again its transition to socialism. In the presidency of fdr and the policy was putting in place there. Would you elaborate on that . Id like to highlight two elements of fdr that are not all that wellknown. One of them is that fdr favored and this seems almost comic to say today 100 percent tax rate. He thought if you made over a certain amount of money the money should take up the government should take everything and at one point he said why should any american make over 25,000 a year and obviously in his time he didnt mean 25,000 in our purchasing power but the statement itself is revealing. He wanted aceiling or limits on what americans could earn. The other thing fdr did was he introduced the politics of demonizing the rich which has been critical to the politics of the american left. Not just the socialists but the Democratic Party in general and this is worth noting because its not necessarily a characteristic of socialist countries. Look at scandinavia. In the scandinavian countries you will never see people demonizing the guy whos running no kia or demonizing the guy who runs erickson. Hes a bad guy, were going to make him pay lagging finger, bErnie Sanders indignation, all this is absent from scandinavian socialism so when the left says theyretrying to follow the scandinavian model , youre not. Youre following the fdr model and model ice would say that far closer to venezuela, the politics of dividing the society not just one way but many ways that i call scandinavian socialism unification socialism , were all in this together. He contrasted with what can be called division socialism which isabsolutely critical to the politics of the left. Look at the way they create racial divide, they literally seize upon it because its part of theirsocialist strategy. I saw found a surprising couple of years ago while i was researching i found a book called socialism sucks. And while we travel the world, we finished up by going to the big socialist conference in the United States and i went to socialism thousand 18 and talk to young people there because there was basically nobody in our age range there. Everybody was either in their 70s now, ask 1960s hippies or 35 and under mostly 35 and under area and i went there to understand what they mean by socialism, what are they talking about and just to learn and i didnt hear very much about nationalizing production, i heard it from some hardcore over there black lives matter, immigration issues, climate issues. Gender issues, pick as you go across the spectrum of different things. None of them traditional socialism, abortion was a big one they all chatted about in there. I dont remember seeing that in marks anywhere area i was a little bit surprised by that and i come to see more of that now and maybe we have some differences on this area i have 70s with some of the issues they point out but their solutions to me almost always seem wrongheaded area you identified this as i think you call it identity socialism. Would you like toelaborate on whats going on. I think this is just one of the signal contributions of my book is that i identify and try to dive knows if you will the new type of socialism, identity socialism which is a marriage of classic socialism and identity politics so they can classic socialism as essentially a strategy of marxian division between the rich and the poor. Loosely speaking area classified area or the modern american socialist left, be divide in society is but its not just that but its also a race divide, black against white. Its a gender divide, mail against female its a Sexual Orientation by, straight against gay and transgender and its also an immigration divide, legal against illegal so one may say that wh