Ep 14: Fear and Loathing in the Suburbs

0:00:34

Welcome to left on red where a gay millennial and Gen X mom do socialism. We've got left wing views on news you can use. I'm Scott. I'm Susan. And we have so many left wing views on so much news you can use today.

0:00:51

The first thing we wanna talk about, which are two separate pieces of news, but I feel like related news stories are incidents in the United States this last week where two completely innocent people were shot, one killed, one almost by homeowners during a, like, perceived infraction on their property. The first happened, I believe, in Tennessee -- Mhmm. -- where a young black teenager rang the doorbell of the wrong house and the White homeowner came out with a gun and shot him and he almost bled to death in the street. But he's currently in critical condition, I think, in hospital. Yes. He's not doing well, but he's alive, which we're grateful for. And the other incident happened actually in New York, upstate New York where a twenty year old white woman pulled into the wrong driveway. Of someone else's house, and the homeowner simply came out and shot and unfortunately killed her in this instance. Yeah. And this is both devastating news, but also kind of unspectacular. Right? Like, when you hear about it, you're like, oh, yeah, people being crazy. It's not the first time you hear about it. You know, since we're sort of aware of this kind of interpersonal violence, I think we're very used to hearing this in the news. We're very used to hearing this in the news in a number of different ways. I think some of them that are unique to the United States, which is gun violence. We just have absolutely the highest rates of interpersonal gun violence in the world. And that's because we have the highest rates of gun ownership. But also, unique to the United States a little bit less, but still somewhat. So we have a really, really, really scared and angry population that are isolated from others.

0:02:37

Both of these instances were much older homeowners Both of them took place in relatively suburban areas. And you can probably infer a lot of things about them that these people probably feel scared of the world at large. They probably feel that bad things are happening in the world because of people that are not like them, younger people, non white people that shouldn't belong or shouldn't live in the neighborhoods in which they live and are probably very isolated either from family or friends that they view strangers as a threat and not just as other people. Yeah. And we've talked about this before. You and I have actually argued whether suburbs are good or bad. But I do think that, you know They think suburbs are bad, by the way. They can be pleasant to live in but generally environmentally, socially, they're not good things. Right.

0:03:32

And this is not an attempt to say that if you live in some of your bad person -- Absolutely. -- right. Because we all make the best choices we can in a universe of not great choices. But rather that, like, aging we have a couple of things that happen to hear, like, so we're an increasingly aging society. Right? People are living longer and longer.

0:03:51

But I was reading something like business insider. People make enough money that they don't qualify for things like Medicaid or the government pays for your long term care as you age. But they don't have enough money to, like, cover their needs. Right? So they're sort of like this gap where you're not wealthy, but you're not, like, sort of, low income enough to get your needs covered. And they probably wanna live independently, but they might be alienated from family like in the United States more than other countries like in Europe for example, we tend to live far away from extended family, from our immediate family as we get older.

0:04:25

And then, yeah, like the world seems scary. Too many people, especially if you watch the news. Like, I'm not an expert on media, but I know that local news loves to show crime and scary things because it actually draws in viewership. I don't know about you. I don't really drive. I don't leave New York that often. But, like, I've been in situations where we're, like, driving the country. My family and I, and we pulled into the wrong house to try to figure out where we were because there's like no internet. And people have been so kind. Right? And I've been very lucky not to get shocked. But nowadays, I remember I I've been in places where I've walked, like, Autumn's property, and people have been, like, be careful. Someone might do something to us, and I've always been, like, whatever. But now I'm seeing that that's a totally reasonable fear to have.

0:05:09

I'm reminded of a friend of mine who lived to South Africa. And she told me how people in South Africa had like guard dogs. They had huge fences around their property because nobody trusted anybody. And why is that? Because there was so much inequality and racism in their society. Sorry. This is not to pick on South Africa, but any country with a lot of inequality I think given apartheid, you can pick on South Africa. Alright. Fine. Here to pick on South Africa. And, like, I was just like, oh, yeah. Good thing that doesn't happen here in the States because know, we don't have so much inequality and, you know, we don't have that much distrust.

0:05:41

But increasingly, our society is reflecting the the high distrust, the social anatomy, I think, is what's called, of a far less developed country, like a far more fractionous country. This is one of the many symptoms of the disease of capitalism. Of inequality of pitting people against each other of an individualist culture where we are competing and moving away from collective society where we should love and appreciate each other, where we view our roles in society in the world as part of a collective where we view ourselves as equal members as someone who might be accidentally pulling into our driveway. You know, it's funny you mentioned being treated with kindness and hospitality, which is really nice and it's ironic because I do think that's a reputation the south has of like southern hospitality. But increasingly as conditions in this south get worse and worse for the people that live there, we're losing that in that region and in all rural regions in the United States as inequality increases, as conditions for people living alone, moving far apart from each other get worse, we're becoming a lot less hospitable and a lot more hostile.

0:06:51

I have had guns like showed at me. You know what I mean? Like, when they, like, reveal it in your, like, holster or, like I believe the word is brandished. Yes. Brandish. Thank you. I've had then Brandon sent me a few times. One of the times that I remember that fits into this example was We were going camping on this property in Pennsylvania.

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Was it was it Tentr? Yes. Yes. The very poorly named app that has nothing to do with gay sex, called Tentr.

0:07:20

And we accidentally, I think, pulled up to, like, the wrong property, and this is, like, obviously, certainly rural area because these are, like, camping areas. And we pulled up, and I was like, this is the right address. I don't know. So we had this car kind of sitting outside the house for a couple of minutes. And this guy came out of the house like kinda slowly and he had this gun and he showed up and was like, what are you guys doing here? And I'm like, I'm so sorry. I'm looking for this address. And then he looked at me for a few seconds and he thought about it. And he goes, are you from the camping thing? And I'm like, yeah, we got it online. And I guess he knew that his neighbor was renting his space out for campers, and he, like, calmed down immediately and took his hand away from his waistband. And it's crazy. You know, I didn't really think about it until just now we're talking about the story, but this man was like ready to like shoot at me or thought that for whatever reason because a car he did not recognize was in front of his house for a little bit that it was some sort of threat to him, to his life, to his property.

0:08:16

And how unfortunate that we live in this society, where we view strangers and other people as potential threats that I think plays into a lot of what you are saying, where we feel insecure about our lives, where we feel threatened, especially in a racially divided society where we feel like our race is under siege by another race or we might feel really negatively about another group of people that we suddenly take this, like, under siege mentality ready to attack, ready to defend, ready to be violent mentality that just makes the world a much, much worse place. I'm trying to understand, like, what goes through the minds of these folks who shoot people. And one of the things I think about I don't know. Remember what the exact towns were that these shootings took place, but I imagine these towns are kinda like a lot of towns in the US where there were jobs there was maybe manufacturing. There was certain amount of prosperity. And since the nineteen seventies with deindustrialization, which maybe somebody you might have seen my tweet that my My son had to read an article about deindustrialization in Detroit as part of his state test prep.

0:09:25

That's good. Yeah. But, like, he doesn't know what automation and assembly lines are because I've never taught him what those are, and he didn't learn them in social studies anyway. But, like, I think a lot of places are places where, like, if you're like an old person, you're like, what happened to my town. Like we used to be places where people lived and now it's just place of leftovers. America has all these small towns that are kind of like places of leftovers. And so I'm not saying it's okay to shoot pictures, who show up at your in your property? Absolutely not. But you know, people are like, attach the places that they live. They wanna grow old there. They have ideas the way the world's gonna work. And instead, like, IBM shuts down, your property values die, your kids move away, never visit because that town's depressing, and somebody shows up, and they've scared you. Like, that is the world view I imagine that these folks have and are political leaders at the Pappen. Right? This is just something that they thought was that's the price of modernity. Yeah.

0:10:21

This is like the this like combination of fear and terror and misery that's causing these sorts of violent outbursts as you're talking about it, it kinda makes me think, this is like the inverse. A lot of times when we as leftist talk about public safety and crime, We are often pointing out correctly that the number one way to reduce violent incidents in any community is not to increase police, not to increase incarceration, but to increase opportunity, support investment in that area, uplifting with resources. And it's kind of like the inverse is happening here too. That all of these people that are becoming increasingly reactionary, violent, fearful aren't becoming that way because their lives are just so good and perfect and they're so happy and, you know, they're just like freaks internally, but because they're descending into this world of like fear and terror, whether they're, you know, falling into this, like, racial disease where they believe in racism and they're hateful towards other people or whether they're just living in a suburb that is becoming more and more, like, an exherb than then, you know, abandoned, and then they're feeling hateful towards the world or hateful towards their life, and then they become violent. So in the same way that we talk about needing to invest in communities and support people throughout their lives, that we prevent them from resorting to violence. And usually we're talking about like young men ages of like sixteen to twenty five. So we I think need to talk about all communities in the United States of older people who might have lots of guns and who might be really scared and angry and feeling like very isolated. And those people too need to be socially integrated you know, be given resources and support and love. It's kind of crazy for us to talk about these people that committed these heinous acts recently. One out of, like, clearly racist hate, the other out of just hate alone. But I bet if we lived in a society, where they felt valued and integrated and loved, and there were people around them that made them feel like part of a collective, they would not have been so violent. They may not have even had guns at all. Alright.

0:12:30

On that, cheerful note, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately and not to just talk about the New York State budget. Is how I started organizing, and I imagine also you did to Scott organizing after Trump got elected. Well, I was talking about it. I only started organizing after AOC got elected action. Well, so but also that's all sort of related because AOC thought about running because -- Yes. -- Trump got elected. It's all like what that mean with the increasingly larger Domino's, you know. Mhmm.

0:13:00

Anyway, so I remember at the time one of the things that we did us, sort of, people on the left, was that we really used Trump's, like, naked lack of decorum sort of un presidential qualities to really paint his policies as being unacceptable. And some of you may know, some of you may not know that I kinda cut my teeth in New York State organizing, by organizing with part of this anti independent Democratic conference in the senate, which was a group of Democrats that basically caucus and gave leadership of the Republicans to sorry, the leadership of the New York State senate to the Republicans even though there's no way that the Republicans should have had hour. In New York State, it was just like a political bargain. And we we can talk about that more, I guess, another time. But so one of the things that we did, and this is something that the WFP did, was created this they, like, did a bunch of market research and they found that the most effective way to turn democratic primary voters against IVC incumbents was to call them Trump Democrats. Mhmm. The other thing that we did too was that we found that, for example, I did like this anti betty divorce confirmation protests, some like it was in the rain with my babies because they were little then.

0:14:20

Betsy DeVos was a big charter school supporter. So I was like, yes. Trump being elected means that charter schools are a Republican thing. Democrats won't push them anymore. And I was thinking about people like Ramam Manuel, who and other Democrats who had pushed charter schools, right, in, like, large urban areas. So I really thought that Republicans and Trump sort of really taking this mental neolibertism would mean that Democrats would would shy away from that. But as it turns out, I was wrong. So wrong. Yeah.

0:14:50

Democrats seem to be back on their bullshit, not that they ever really left, but now that they're in power in many places, they are reminding us that they want the same things. That Democrats and Republicans are simply two parts of the capitalist system. Both of them support every single neo liberal reform. When we talk about neo liberalism last episode, it's not like one party is pushing it and the other isn't. Both parties have agreed on this pact of let's support the market, let's support businesses, let's support corporations. But even as Democrats are doing these sorts of things, we come to this what you mentioned earlier where they did market research and they found out that calling Democrats, Trump Democrats was really effective.

0:15:32

And we come to this interesting question, which became a a brief little mini, I wouldn't say controversy. Brief little discussion. Discussion. On Twitter with some folks in DSA this week where we started calling the governor, Kathy Hockel, basically a Republican. And I think there was interesting I disagreed with how it happened, but I thought there was interesting pushback of It's not right to call her a Republican because she is not a Republican. She is in fact the Democrat. And all of the terrible things that she's doing do in fact reflect the interests of the Democrats and the Democratic Party, which is true. I don't think there's any doubt in our minds as socialist Democrats are in fact, capitalists support neo liberalism and are a critical part of the neo liberal regime pushing things like charter schools, pushing things like you know, locking people up, reducing rolling back biller form.

0:16:27

But how do we get people to understand that? And one thing that we're pushing up against is many folks in the world, in the United States, at least who feel like they're liberals or somewhat on the left, have a basic understanding of Democrats as good and Republicans as bad, or at minimum an understanding that Trump and Republicans have become extremely toxic in a way that Democrats haven't yet. Do we benefit from calling Democrats Republicans Or do we have a duty to people to explain the ways in which they are like Republicans are actually quite Democrat of them? Yeah. And so I think that for a while the Democrats used the toxicity of Republicans under Trump as their main talking point. Right? They didn't wanna promise anything to us like Medicare for All or, you know, free college or, like, substantive student loan, rough debt, anything like that. They just wanted to say, oh, the Republicans earned power. Trump is really, really bad. So that was sort of what they sort of took advantage of that. They could be really lazy by saying, well, for us, we're not the worst. Right? And in fact, they are not the worst.

0:17:41

That is that's sort of the third way Democrat. That's the tradition that Kathy Hockel, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton, Ramamaduel, arguably Barack Obama that comes from this tradition, this like pro globalization pro, neo liberal, economic reform, Democratic wing of the party that's been dominant for a long time. And what, like, what AOC has done is say, no, the Democratic Party is not that. And what what oh, somebody like Bernie Sanders has done and said, no, Democratic Party isn't like that. And that's what young people are also doing. And so the Democrat Party is a coalition. Right? And so by arguing that the kinds of things like Kathy Hockels doing is Republican, we're saying that those kinds of behaviors are not welcome in this coalition.

0:18:29

And it's just a conversation about, like, what do we find acceptable and what's toxic? I'm gonna push back on the idea that the party is a coalition. I think it's a party where it has leadership that tell its members, elected officials, and people in power, how they can and cannot vote. And punish people by not giving them money or support people by giving them money, right, for their campaigns. But it's interesting because this is kind of like the debate we have a lot as socialists in terms of our relationship to the Democratic Party.

0:19:02

And I think what you're talking about a little bit in terms of what you're saying, Bernie and AOC are doing is something that we call realignment, which is the idea that a socialist will continue organizing and getting enough power and clout and people in the Democratic Party that we would realign it and move it further towards the left. And I think that's very popular and appealing to a lot of people because the Democratic Party is gigantic. It's extremely powerful. And has a lot of resources that we would like, but also most critically to me and the part of all of his debate that matters to me the most is There are tens of millions of Americans that identify as Democrats. So when we talk about the party, yes, we talk about the official institutions and the structures, and people like Nancy Pelosi or Hakim Jeffries and Chuck Schumer leaders that make decisions and empower people.

0:19:53

But we're also talking about, you know, Mary, and Jamal, and Jonathan, and Abdul down the street, who all see Democrats and say, Democrats are good. And I like Democrats. And who see our socialist candidates as Democrats and say, oh, there's a d next to their name? Great. So there's an enormous base of people that support what they believe are Democrats or think of Democrats as simply good, just have a positive association. And have a really negative association towards Republicans have, for many years, thought about them as, like, evil, terrible, racist, elitist, trying to do the worst things.

0:20:31

In operating in that world, I think I'm extremely sympathetic to the argument of describing the Democrats we hate the most who are most in power as Republican. Right? I think that's very powerful to those people who think highly of the Democratic Party and who think very negatively a Republican party. I think it creates a synapse in their head. Actually, some Democrats in leadership are really bad. But I'm also really sympathetic to the idea that we need to begin to get people to realize Politicians like Kathy Hockel aren't bad because they're not Democrats. They are what Democrats do. Politicians like Kathy Hockel are representative of the Democratic Party a lot more than politicians like AOCR? Right. So I guess I we were talking about two separate things. A little bit. Okay.

0:21:23

But because honestly, if the party worked that way, it was like leadership disciplining, then you know, mansion and cinema would not have been able to basically make our senate completely ineffective when we had the majority with the Democratic majority in congress. So, like, it doesn't work. Right. I mean, it doesn't work that way because it doesn't matter. Mhmm. Right? Because they don't need that that doesn't matter if the leadership disciplines them. It certainly didn't matter New York State when you had a bunch of democrats talking with Republicans. Right? So that actually isn't that active the way it is in other countries. Mhmm.

0:21:57

And I think that this is I agree with you that the affective identity component of being a Democrat is really important to voters and that I think that you know, we also saw people calling cinema and mansion Republicans as well. Right? Because we're trying to redefine, like, to be a Democrat means you have to, like, support climate change laws, even though we know that's not true. But making that argument is strategically potentially effective. And so all this is panning out, but like, you know, the democrats have to both discipline and win a coalition. And they are continuously losing more and more votes because of a lack of participation by their potential coalition because they ignore the interests of young people. We can come back to this another time, but it's, you know, it's not a question that we can answer in a ten minute segment.

0:22:50

Well, I do have one question. Long term, do you think it's more valuable to try and move Democrats further to the left? Or do you think it's more valuable to establish a separate left poll that sufficiently identifies Democrats and Republicans as right wing? I mean, I don't think that they you have to do them separately. Mhmm. So And, like, it depends on your targets as well because someone like Chuck Schumer has been more, like, open to the DSA's work, for example.

0:23:22

And then, like, there's some politicians out there who are just regular Democrats who are also looking at the handwriting on the wall and they're just, like, gonna hang out the Youngs. Right? So and, like, there's all these crappy democrats who are doing interesting things right now because they realize that this third way, knew the real bit is not working out for them, and it's not working out for regular people. Right? So whether it's Governor Minnesota passing free school lunches, in every school in Minnesota or, like, governor of Illinois, like, you know, taking very strong stance support of unions, like, whatever it is. Right? We do see, like, something happening here. We don't really know, but some stuff is something. Is it isn't not happening. Right? We know that there's -- Yeah. -- movement. And it's it's not the Democratic Party of when I was, like, in high school and college. There's something's going on.

0:24:13

I think I feel like I agree with you in terms of just like the both and approach if only because as socialists, we simply don't have the power and numbers to do anything but make the best of what we have. And I think there's a lot more to talk about in terms of Democrats, Republicans, comparing them, and all the differences. But we'll have many more episodes to discuss this and Hopefully, some guests. If you are listener, you wanna opine on this, join us on the show, our DMs are open -- Yeah. -- or something like that. Send us a coded message about relationships that is actually about this topic. Right. And we'll have to I'll break up with the Democratic Party. But we also have just a few minutes left and wanna talk about our next and final little bit of news. So speaking of Democrats and Republicans and climate change and everything that's happening nationally, you may have seen a little bit of this. It wasn't national story per se, but it was definitely featured a lot in social media.

0:25:13

In Florida, there was immense flooding, especially in Jacksonville, and other parts of the state nearby. And the flooding is uncharacteristic for this time of the year. Mhmm. And the flooding season usually happened around June to, like, September. And it was extremely devastating. A lot of people lost homes, a lot of infrastructure was severely damaged, A lot of people who were not expecting to have to deal with this right now are dealing with this. And while all of this is happening, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was somewhere else in the country talking about trans people. Right. So there's real needs that Floridians have. And Ron DeSantis instead is trying to figure out if he's running for president, if he can out Trump, Trump, if you can sort of get the never Trump Republicans to, like, join his side.

0:26:04

And it really just shows how if we don't do something about climate change, like both moving away from carbon and making our our, like, homes, our cities, our communities, disaster, resilient, then it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or democrat, red, state, blue state, then it's bad, bad things are ahead. Yeah. And it's not like Rhonda Santos being governor of Florida right now is what caused these floods. Right? Florida has had Democrat and Republican leadership over decades. United States has alternated.

0:26:38

This is not an isolated issue. This is the result of decades and decades of fossil fuel pollution of letting companies do whatever they want, listening to them when they said, oh, climate change isn't real. Don't worry. And then a complete and utter lack of investment and support from the federal government, state government, city governments for people who might be in the path of climate disasters. What we're seeing in Jacksonville, I think, is a really, really sorted example of what lies ahead for everywhere in this country. Even if you don't live on the coast, there is an increased incidence of disasters, of extreme weather, of crop failures, any number of natural consequences to you and your loved ones and your community as a result of climate change. And right now, no part of capitalism or the American government seems interested let alone equipped to deal with any of these consequences. Right.

0:27:36

Even if someone like Biden would claim that he takes climate change more seriously than a DeSantis, he too is authorizing the building of more pipelines. Kathy Hockel is trying to reclassify, like, various fossil fuels, so they don't count towards moving ourselves to like, carbon neutral by twenty thirty, twenty forty. Right? Well, you can't wait. Climate can't wait. You know, our communities can't wait. Our children can't inherit, like, a barren Mad Max, dystopian future as hilarious as I kinda seen to the movie in her mind. Right? That's actually we'll lives in actual people's futures. Yeah. And it's just like you just said, like Biden improving this pipeline, Kathy Hockel trying to do this random bullshit over methane It just seems like no one who's in real power in our government or in an economy and society is taking any of this seriously.

0:28:27

It seems like to all of them, the amount of money that they might make or the amount of businesses that have different interests are more important than taking the steps we need, doing this like massive intentional, collective, social, society scale work. Towards counteracting climate change, towards being more resilient. Seems like no one cares about that. Seems like businesses came here. Okay. But there are people who care.

0:28:53

And while we it may be difficult to watch those in power, act like the reality is not gonna catch up to all of us, There's one way to fight this, and there's one way to fight this pair, which is to Join the Democratic socialist of America, the DSA, You heard Susan say even if it seems like the people in power don't wanna do it, well, you know what you can do, you can become the people in power. In New York and other chapters across the country, members of the Democratic Social of America have worked on legislative campaigns and electoral campaigns and become really politically active and done a lot of organizing to mobilize communities, gotten folks riled up and supporting labor actions, gotten folks in unions, and then gotten those unions to become more fighting unions. And all of these things are shifting the tide so that more and more people in power are working class people like us. Yeah. We can't do it by ourselves. My if I sit in my room and freak out and spiral about my children's future, that doesn't actually help my children at all.

0:30:01

But in building, you know, our our collective power and stopping fracked gas power plant here in Astoria, Queens, whether it's fighting for build public renewables. Which we're going to win? Right. Which I, you know, and many others that we're friends with have been arrested over because people don't seem to take seriously, we are fighting and we're changing the conversation. Absolutely. And you can be a part of this too. You are already You're What about you? You are already in this fight. You are a working class person You are already experiencing the consequences of climate change wherever you are. You are experiencing the consequences of living under capitalism. And so instead of being alone, instead of being atomized, instead of living in fear, like those people we talked about at the beginning of this episode, you can live with others and be collective and do work together and become powerful. I live in hope and work with each other, and we can build the world we deserve. And we will, if you join today.

0:31:04

Check out DSA. Google joined DSA. There's a link in the podcast description, we hope to see you soon. I'm Susan. I'm Scott. Solidarity forever. Left on red is recorded live at left on red studios International in beautiful historic Astoria Queens, the most filmed neighborhood in all of New York City. It's hosted by Susan Kang and Scott Karolidis, It's produced with original music by Noah Teachey, and Julianna Mirra manages our comms. Thanks for listening, solidarity forever.