Jamie Merchant on the Many, Many Current Crises

Jamie Merchant, the author of Endgame, joins us to talk about the current chaos. Start with the spectacle and you miss the structure. We step past the daily outrage to map Trumpism as a regime built by a new insurgent fraction of capital—tech oligarchs, private equity, and venture investors—who are eager to smash norms, rewrite rules, and route public money through tariffs, defense contracts, and boutique industrial policy. Their rise squeezes out the old asset-management establishment, pushes it toward the Democrats, and locks the opposition into a politics of “normality” that cannot mobilize the base or contest power.

We trace the media’s role in this shift: a long slide from public-service reporting to algorithmic engagement that rewards emotional spikes and partisan framing. Biden’s term tried to stabilize the system with CHIPS, infrastructure, and managed globalization, but even light-touch AI regulation, the SVB collapse, and worker pushback inside tech drove Valley elites rightward. Meanwhile, the stock market’s euphoria masks a real economy straining under a profitability crisis. AI’s massive data-center build may juice capex and energy demand, but unless it raises productivity broadly, we’re sitting on a bubble that deepens monopoly dynamics without delivering shared growth.

Zooming out, we argue we’re living through a new state-capitalist era with less capacity: the government takes bigger stakes, centralizes power in the executive, and leans on tariffs as revenue, even as planning expertise and administrative muscle erode. The postwar managerial state—Keynesian levers, technocratic confidence, public legitimacy—is gone. That’s why policy-first left populism keeps hitting a wall. Without a living, rooted class subject, electoral surges can’t endure. We sketch a different route: rebuild working-class civil society—mutual aid, cultural institutions, education, and cross-sector networks that bridge immigrants, service workers, industrial remnants, and professionals. Strategy begins where the regime is weakest: in the social substrate it can’t manage or monetize.

Hear candid takes on the investor realignment behind Trumpism, the AI bubble loop, why Democrats are structurally stuck, and how to make organizing matter when the state can’t—or won’t—govern for the whole. If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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

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