Cenk Uygur

Communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship. It creates a power vacuum. When you say, “Hey, there’s no structure of power here. We’re all equal. It’s a flat line,” one guy usually gets up, because that’s human nature, and goes, “I don’t think so. I think if you’re going to leave a power vacuum, I’m going to take that power vacuum.”

Corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition and wants the free markets. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don’t have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing. You don’t have real news. When you’re in the online world, it’s chaotic. And don’t get me wrong, it’s got plenty of downsides, but within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge. Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier, but there is a percentage chance that he’s such a wild card that he overturns the whole system, and that is why the establishment is a little scared of him.

The following is a conversation with Cenk Uygur, a progressive political commentator and host of The Young Turks. As I’ve said before, I will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right of the political spectrum, always in good faith, with empathy, rigor, and backbone. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate, ineloquent things, and I frequently change my mind as I’m learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But just know that I’m aware when I fall short and I will keep trying to do better. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Cenk Uygur.

You wrote a book.

Yeah.

A manifesto that outlines the progressive vision for America. So the big question, what are some defining ideas of progressivism?

Yes. So in order to do that, Lex, we got to talk about where we are in the political spectrum. And in fact, there’s two different spectrums now. People often think of left, right, and that’s true, that exists, but layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment. So I’m center-left on the left, right spectrum, but I’m all the way on that populist end of the second spectrum. So where does progressivism lie within that? Well, I would argue that it’s exactly in those places. It’s populist and it’s on the left, but it is not far left. So far left is a different animal, and we could talk about that in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a progressive, so expand the circle of liberty and justice for all, and equality of opportunity. Now people will say, well, that seems pretty broad and all American, but is it? Think about it.

So expand the circle of liberty. Everybody’s in favor of that, right? No, absolutely not. Certainly the King of England was not in favor of expanding the circle of liberty, and the Founding Fathers said, “We’re going to expand it.” And they expanded it to propertied white men. And then progressives have been … they’re progressives because they expanded the circle of liberty. They, then from then on, as we were perfecting the union, progressives always say, “Expand it further. Include women, include people without property, include all races.” And at every turn, conservatives fight against it. So that doesn’t mean if you’re a conservative today, you don’t want to include women or minorities, et cetera. But today you would say, for example, “Well, I don’t want to expand the circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants.” And maybe you’re right about that, and we could have that discussion in terms of a specific philosophy.

And I don’t believe that undocumented immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines. But I do believe in expanding liberty overall. And the contours of that are what’s interesting. And then you see justice for all. Everybody’s for justice. No. Right now, marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot of parts of the country. Now, a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree that it should be legal. But for my entire lifetime, black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people and the entire country has been fine with it. So is that justice? No. Black people smoke marijuana at the same rate. Black people get arrested about four times the rate. That is an injustice that an enormous percentage of the country was comfortable with. Well, progressives aren’t comfortable with it. We want justice for all.

So equality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say, at least some portions of them will say, equality of results. So progressives just want a fair chance, so free college education, but afterwards you don’t get to have exact same results as either the wealthiest person or we’re not all going to be equal. We don’t have equal talent, skills, abilities, et cetera.

There’s a lot of questions I can ask there. So on the circle of liberty, yes, so expanding the number of people whose freedoms are protected. But what about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the freedoms of an individual. It seems like progressives are more willing to expand the size of government where government can do all kinds of regulation, all kinds of controls in the individual.

So Lex, what we’re probably going to talk about a lot today is balance. And so a lot of people think, “Oh, I am on the right, I’m on left.” And that comes with a certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct. The left is always correct. So there’s two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if you’re an independent thinker? It’s literally, by definition, not possible. If you say, “I lent my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago or 800 years ago, and I’m not going to change it,” you’re saying, “I don’t think for myself I bought into a culture.” And by the way, there’s a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into: religion, politics, sometimes racial, et cetera. So that’s why you need, actually, balance. The second reason you need balance, other than independent thought, is because the answer is almost never black and white.

And that gets into a really interesting nuance because mainstream media, in my opinion, is the matrix, and its job is to delude you into thinking corporate rule is great for you and we should never change it and the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. What mainstream media calls moderate, is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology. So for example, they’ll say, Joe Manchin is a moderate. None of his positions are moderate other than potentially gun control in West Virginia. He’s not for gun control. The people of West Virginia are not for gun control, generally speaking. And he uses that, and they usually have these shiny objects where they’re like, “You see this? I’m a moderate because of guns,” or, “I’m a moderate because I’m a Democrat from West Virginia.”

But wait, let’s look at your positions. You’re against paid family leave, that polls at 84%. So you’re a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced back into work the day after they have birth. You’re against a higher minimum wage, you’re for every corporate position, and they all poll at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate, and this applies to almost every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat. They’re all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a balance in order to get to the right answer.

So that’s an interesting distinction here. So you’re actually, as far as I understand, pro-capitalism, which is an interesting place to be. That’s the thing that probably makes you center-left and then still populist. You’re full of beautiful contradictions, let’s say this, which will be great to untangle. But what’s the difference between corporatism and capitalism? Is there a difference?

Yeah, so I really believe in capitalism. I don’t think that there’s really a second choice. Where it gets super interesting is the distinction between capitalism and socialism, because that’s not at all as clear as people think it is. And people often say socialism and communism as synonyms when they’re not synonyms. And so I view it as there’s basically four distinct areas. It’s obviously a spectrum. Everything is a spectrum. On one end, you have communism on the left and on the other end you have corporatism on the right. And I would argue that capitalism is in the middle. And so communism, we know, state owns all property. You’re not allowed to have private property. So I will piss off a lot of people in this show. So I’m asking for their patience. Please hear me out and because, don’t worry, I’m going to piss off the other side too.

So communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship because it is not built for human nature. We’re never going to act like that. It’s not in our DNA. You could try to wish it into existence than they have, and it never works. And it’s because once you have almost no rules in terms of, “Oh, we’re all equal,” even though communism eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules, it creates a power vacuum. When you say, “Hey, there’s no structure of power here. We’re all equal. It’s a flat line,” one guy usually gets up because that’s human nature, and goes, “I don’t think so. I think if you’re going to leave a power vacuum, I’m going to take that power vacuum.”

That’s actually a really interesting way to put it, because when everyone is equal, nobody is in power, and human nature is such that there’s everybody [inaudible 00:10:33] that there’s a will to power. So when you create a power vacuum, somebody’s going to fill it. So the alternative is to have people in power, but there’s a balance of power, and then there’s a democratic system that elects the people in power and keeps churning and rotating who’s involved.

That is exactly it, Lex. You got it exactly right, in my opinion. Okay, so that’s why communism never works and can never work. So it’s an idea of we’re all going to work as hard as we possibly can and take only what we need. Where? When has that ever happened in the history of humanity? We’re just not built that way. So we can get into that debate with my friends on the left, et cetera. Now, corporatism is just as extreme and just as dangerous, and that is basically what we have in America now. What we have in America now, and this is another giant trick that the Matrix played on everybody, that they did a shell game, and all of a sudden extreme corporatists like Manchin, and almost every Republican in the Senate, are moderates. Oh my God, Mitch McConnell, all of a sudden, is a moderate and et cetera, as long as you’re not a populist, populists are never moderate.

But if you love corporations and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations, you’re magically called a moderate when you actually, according to the polling, have super extreme positions that the American people hate. And by the way, that’s part of the reason for the rise of Trump. We can come back to that. But the second shell game is taking out capitalism, putting in corporatism, but still calling it capitalism. Okay, so what is corporatism? It is when corporations slowly take over the system and create monopoly and oligopoly power. So that snuffs out equality of opportunity. So how do they do that? When people say the system is rigged, they oftentimes can’t explain it that well. And then mainstream media goes, “Oh, you sound conspiratorial. It was rigged, yeah. I wonder how.” Yeah, super easy to explain it.

Here’s one of dozens of examples: carried interest loophole. So that is for hedge funds, private equity, the top people on Wall Street, that’s part of their income. They get 2 and 20, right? So 2% is a flat fee no matter what happens to the fund. And 20% of the profits of the fund goes back to the people who invested it. It’s not their money, it’s not their investment. What they’re getting is actually just income, and should be taxed at the highest rate. But it’s because of this loophole, it’s taxed at a much lower rate, at around 20%. So do you know at what income level you go above 20% if you’re a regular Joe? It’s at $84,000 a year. So these billionaires are getting the same tax rate as people making $84,000 a year. It’s unbelievably unfair. And that’s corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules. I’m going to pay less taxes. You are going to pay more taxes.

So again, I can give you dozens of those examples. So in mergers so that they get to oligopoly power, that’s how you rig a system. Lowering the corporate tax rates, making sure that there is no real minimum wage, making sure there’s no universal healthcare. We all become indentured servants of corporations. They take away power from the average guy, give it to the most powerful people in the world. But the most important distinction, Lex, is that corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition and wants the free markets.

And I remember we started Young Turks back in 2002, so we’ve been around for 22 years, longest running daily show on the internet ever. And so we were pre Iraq war and the Iraq war starts, and Dick Cheney starts handing out no-bid contracts. I’m like, what part of capitalism is a no-bid contract? You can’t negotiate drug prices. That’s the most anti-free market thing I have ever heard. It’s almost like communism for corporations. They get everything and you get nothing. So it’s preposterous, it’s awful, and it kills the free markets, and it’s killing this country, and it is the main ideology and religion of the establishment.

Are all companies built the same here? So when you say corporatism, it seems like just looking here at the list by industry lobbyists, it seems like there are certain industries that are worse offenders than others, like pharmaceuticals, like insurance, oil and gas. So it seems to me it feels wrong to just throw all companies into the same bucket of they’re all guilty.

No, they’re not all guilty. So let’s make a bunch of distinctions here. So first of all, first of all, are they “guilty?” No. They’re doing something that is logical and natural. So if you’re a company, do you want to pay higher taxes or lower taxes? Of course you want to pay lower taxes. Do you want to have higher employee costs or lower employee costs? Of course you want lower employee costs. But the government needs to understand that and protect us from that power that they are going to exercise to get to those results. And if you think free markets is there is no government, you read it wrong. Go back and reread Adam Smith. He says, you must protect against monopoly power. If you do not protect against monopoly power, you’ll have no free markets. And he’s absolutely right. So second distinction is between small business and big business. That’s why Republicans will always be like, “Oh, we’re doing this for small business. That’s why we got the biggest oil companies in the world, 30 billion in subsidies.” What happened to small business? So I run a small business. And so if people were to say like, “Hey, maybe there should be exemptions for some of the regulations if your company has less than five employees, 10 employees, 50 employees, et cetera,” there’s some logic in that. Because businesses have different stages of growth and they have different interests and different needs in those stages of growth. And we want to facilitate small business growth because that’s great for the economy, that’s great for markets freedom, et cetera. But the bigger corporations, even there, there’s a third distinction. It isn’t that there are certain industries that are worse, there’s just that there are industries that are better at lobbying.

So anyone who right now, number one donor in Washington, a lot of people make a mistake. They think it’s APAC or they think it’s the oil companies or the banks. No, it’s big pharma. And who has the most power in this country? Big pharma. So we can’t even negotiate the drug prices. I mean, look, guys, think about it this way. That’s like saying, “Okay, here’s a bottle of water.” And normally in the free market that would cost about a dollar. For Medicare, the drug companies come in and go, “No, I’m not charging a dollar for that water. I’m charging a hundred dollars. And the government has to say, “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Of course, sir, we’ll pay $100.” That’s why it’s compared to communism, because I can’t imagine anything more diametrically opposed to the free market than you, the consumer have to pay whatever the hell a corporation charges. That’s insanity. Let alone the patents, let alone the fact that the American people pay for the research and then they make billions of dollars off of it and we get nothing but robbed by them.

So it’s about lobby power. Oil companies have huge lobby power. Defense contractors have huge lobby power. It’s not that they’re more evil, it’s just that they have figured out the game better and they have basically taken the influence they need to capture the market, capture the government, and snuff out all competition, or a lot of competition.

Well, figured out the game better. So I think a lot of companies are good at winning the right way by building better products, by making people happier with the work they’re doing and the winning at the game of capitalism. And then there’s other companies that win at the game of lobbying, and I just want to draw that distinction because I think it’s a small subset of companies that are playing the game of lobbying. It’s like big pharma.

So Lex, first of all, you have to set rules for what makes sense, not, “Oh, I don’t like this industry,” or “I don’t like this company,” or, “Hey, this company is not doing that much lobbying at this point. They will later when they realize what’s going on.” So for example, in my opinion, APAC has totally bought almost all of Congress. And so now other countries are going to wake up and go, “Wait, you could just buy the American government?” So APAC is going to spend about $100 million dollars in this cycle, and then they’re getting 26 billion back. So every country in the world is soon going to realize, oh, take American citizens that live there, get them a tremendous amount of money and just buy the U.S. government. But for corporations, they’ve already realized that on a massive scale.

So for example, in the two industries you gave: automotive. So in New Jersey, about a decade or ago or so, one of the most powerful lobbies is car dealerships. So at the national level, you’ve got pharma and you’ve got defense contractors, et cetera. At the local level guys who have huge power, number one is utilities. Number two is real estate. And then car dealerships are hilariously among the top because it’s local businesses that are financing the politicians at the local level. So they passed a law saying that you have to sell through dealerships. But Tesla doesn’t sell through dealerships, and it was intended to bully, intimidate, and push out Tesla, out of the market. They then did that in a number of different states throughout the country.