On the end of Krystal and Saagar on "Rising"

I started watching Rising with Krystal Ball and some Republican in August 2019. I say it like that because initially, she was the draw for my commie ass. But I'm now watching my last bit of Rising with premier contemporary Republican theorist Saagar Enjeti and his Bernie-voting friend Krystal.

This show has fulfilled its deepest purpose, at least as far as I'm concerned. Seeing a Republican who wasn't a stereotype of heartless ignorance changed my thinking. It got me to connect the dots between our ideologies. The heartlessness in the Republican coalition is just caused by the propaganda fed to the workers; it's false consciousness and not their fault. The ignorance is deliberately kept and maintained by the rich through that same false consciousness, or as the GOP now calls it, "fake news."

Meanwhile, I came to see the Dems not as my halfhearted allies who just needed to be radicalized more, but as wealthy decadent bloats paying just enough guillotine insurance to forestall the loss of their enterprises. In the Democrat-Republican split in American politics, I came to realize it mirrored exactly the split in socialist politics between reformers (the Bernie camp) and revolutionaries (all hail the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism; also hello).

The way that our politics goes, our late capitalist period must be refreshed from a different party each era; revolutions either save the political system by changing the economic system, or save the economic system by changing the political system. In the Revolutionary War, the proto-Democratic Party changed our political relations to Britain to save the colonial economic system that made them bourgeois. But when the Civil War came, Democratic answers weren't working; we needed to invent the Republican Party to save the country with the populist right; instead of handouts we got 160 acres of the means of production, and were freed of the burden of having to compete with slave labor.

But when the New Deal came, the best land had been given out, the country was as full of farmers as it could've been at the time, and Lincoln's answers had stopped working. The capitalist system was beginning to break down, so FDR saved the economic system by changing American politics. We would have handouts, and we would have global imperialism to pay for it.

Well, the New Deal's played out. Global imperialism's doing great, but the rich have drastically ratcheted back the guillotine insurance. Democrats can't save us, so it's time for the Republicans to again. It struck me as crazy when I first realized this, as it strikes many of my comrades crazy still. But the GOP must become our vanguard party. It must be made enlightened and righteous. We must help them make bourgeois government so small we can strangle it in a bathtub. We must make the rich take personal responsibility for their crimes. We must arm the working class, and stand watch against arrogant attempts to insult their culture. We must end the empire, and return to the founders' dream of nonintervention.

The GOP's base is kept ignorant and hateful on purpose by the Democrat media because the last time the GOP base was enlightened and righteous, they freed all the Democrats' slaves.

So the task of every real communist, indeed every person of goodwill regardless of ideology, is to enlighten and mobilize the GOP's voters. We cannot do this from outside the party, but must do it from within. This is the fundamental insight of the strain of communist ideology I've founded, Marxism-Lincolnism.

I would have never formulated it without the influence of this show, and in particular without the influence of one Saagar Enjeti, introduced to me by one Krystal Ball. So thank you, both of you, and I will avidly follow your future projects as I've followed Rising. I'll also stick around here long enough to see if your Trevor Noahs are any good, but they've got massive shoes to fill.

(Postscript: their Trevor Noahs are hit or miss. Ryan Grim, Emily Jashinsky, and Rachel Bovard are the best post-Krystal and Saagar Rising commentators; the rest are mostly forgettable capitalists. Krystal and Saagar's new show is called Breaking Points, and if you aren't watching it yet, it's free on Youtube or you can subscribe. But they're like the number three podcast in America already, so they're doing well.)