Politics feels louder than ever and somehow emptier too. We open the hood on liberalism—what it claims to be, how it actually behaves, and why Trump’s rise didn’t just bend norms but exposed tensions baked into the system. With Dillion from Untrodden, we trace the fault lines between liberal commitments to stability and civil discourse and the gravitational pull toward executive power, media spectacle, and anti‑politics.

Step by step, we chart the historical map: from the 18th Brumaire and Bonapartism to today’s illiberal temptations, and why figures like Orban or Berlusconi echo past crises more than they break from them. We ask whether liberalism’s best asset—pragmatic governance—can survive without a clearer core, and whether the left’s sharpest critiques can help rebuild a coherent center of gravity rather than just tear it down. We also examine identity politics’ moral heat with little policy light, the post‑pandemic sorting of temperaments over ideologies, and the unsettling ease with which tech billionaires switch lanes as incentives shift.

Rather than rehearse stale talking points, we get practical about coalitions. What can Marxists and liberals realistically build together? Where do alliance models like the united front make sense, and where do they fail? We argue for a new baseline: mutual recognition, radical honesty, and a shared willingness to protect civil society and institutional checks as nonnegotiables. From unions to city budgets, the places where people shoulder common obligations are where trust can be rebuilt and rhetoric can give way to results.

If you’re tired of vibes posing as politics and want a serious, good‑faith reckoning with liberalism’s crisis and the left’s role in solving it, this conversation is for you. Listen, share with a friend who disagrees with you, and tell us: what principle would you refuse to compromise in any coalition? Subscribe and leave a review to keep these cross‑currents alive.

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

Start with a simple question: if investment drives productivity and growth, what happens to a society that keeps choosing consumption over capacity? We trace a straight line from Marx’s core mechanics to Kalecki’s equations, then use that line to cut through fashionable theory detours—value-form shortcuts, communization fantasies, and techno-feudal hot takes. The result is a clearer picture of why profits can soar while real investment sags, why the dollar’s “miracle” masks fragility, and why printing more money can’t manufacture machine tools, skills, or energy.

We lay out four regimes that help decode the past 70 years: Fordist reinvestment that pushed productivity up, extractive reinvestment that scaled capacity through coercion, subsistence stagnation where neither investment nor exploitation rises, and neoliberalism’s defining mix—low investment, high exploitation, and asset hoarding. From there, we unpack how U.S. trade deficits and financial inflows fed capitalist consumption while weakening the incentive to build. Debt and soft budgets smoothed the ride, but they didn’t fix profitability on new capital or reverse the long slide in productivity growth. The numbers point to a coming snap-back to trend, not a new golden age.

China’s path raises the stakes. Sustained high investment, tighter discipline on capitalist consumption, and strategic upgrading are pushing the global cost curve down and forcing others to respond. That doesn’t make China post-capitalist; it does show how targeted capacity-building can escape the stagnation trap. The practical lesson isn’t romantic—it’s logistical. Real constraints matter: inputs, machine tools, power, training, and time. Risk management beats magical thinking; autarky is a myth, but resilience is a plan. We argue for redirecting surplus toward compounding productivity, treating statistics as instruments not idols, and rebuilding the industrial backbone that reduces market domination over everyday life.

If you’re tired of theories that skip the engine room, this conversation connects the dials: profits, investment, productivity, debt, trade, and class incentives. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves charts more than slogans, and tell us: what’s the first capacity you’d rebuild?

Links referenced:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/contra-capital-as-abstract-domination?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/an-economic-theory-of-maximalist?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/a-sketch-of-a-revision-to-orthodoxy?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Send us a text

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic

What if America’s “anti-intellectualism” isn’t a decline in smarts but a culture built to distrust theory? We trace that paradox from Puritan moral rigor and pragmatist “cash value” truths to the postwar professional class that speaks in a neutral tone while hiding its class origins. With Hofstadter, Lasch, and Gouldner as our guides, we unpack how speech codes, funding models, and media ecosystems shape who gets to be an “intellectual” and whose knowledge counts.

We dig into Lasch’s portraits of turn‑of‑the‑century radicals—Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Lincoln Steffens—showing how bohemia, policy reform, and romantic revolt often masked a middle‑class distance from worker life. Hofstadter helps explain why theory gets cast as elitist, how evangelical charisma and “common sense” produce a populism that can slip into conspiracy, and why so many bright people end up suspicious of abstraction. Then Gouldner reframes the post‑WWII landscape: a technical‑professional new class whose legitimacy depends on universality, even as its language quietly excludes working‑class speech and experience.

From there, we get practical. We compare elite “neutrality” to the hard realities of endowments and medical revenue, and we explore what counter‑publics look like now: labor clubs that teach Robert’s Rules and strike strategy alongside Marx, Bourdieu, and Joe Burns. We talk code‑switching without erasing origins, and we sketch ways to build worker‑centered study that doesn’t pander—spaces where rigor and relevance live together. Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” still matters here: every worker thinks and theorizes, with or without credentials.

If this resonates, help us grow the counter‑public: subscribe, share the episode with a friend who loves big ideas, and leave a review with one question you want us to tackle next.

These are the primary readings we discuss:

-The American Intellectual Elite by Charles Kadushin
- Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
- The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as Social Type by Christopher Lasch
- The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class by Alvin Gouldner
- The Missing Generation: Academics and the Communist Party from the
Depression to the Cold War by Ellen Schrecker

Send us a text

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic