Meeting the Moment with Anat Shenker-Osorio, Michael Podhorzer and Naomi Klein

Had such a great time joining Anat and Michael on Substack live yesterday. We dove right into the midterms of it all–with Angie Nixon’s win, the nail-biter of a Pennsylvania special election, and the California race. Then we went much deeper: what it actually means when money is in charge, and not just who wins elections. Anat made an important point that the U.S. left has sometimes over-indexed on electoral politics while missing where the real power resides.

Which brought us to extreme wealth and why that seems to derange the people who have it—how it makes billionaires believe they deserve everything they’ve got, and also makes them terrified someone’s going to take it away. (That’s why they build bunkers, and through tantrums over marginal one-time taxes…) It connects to something I’ve thought about for a long time: democratic socialism governing well—filling potholes, actually delivering for people—has always scared power more than any authoritarian alternative. It’s not an accident that it’s making people like Marco Rubio boiling mad right now. Here’s a short clip where we talk about that.

We also got into what I think might be the worst offer capitalism has ever made us — AI — and how people are already laughing at it rather than buying it. And Michael introduced me to what he calls no exit: that elections alone don’t constrain capital, only collective action does, the kind we see in unions and churches, one where we can’t just walk away from each other.

I loved this because, as you know, I make the case that billionaires are looking for an exit. That “can’t just walk away from each other” idea became the heart of the end of our conversation. We talked about Minnesota’s organizing, what Adam Stewart calls “neighborism,” digging your neighbor’s car out of the snow, deciding for yourself what kind of people you are instead of letting someone else define you. And about Anat’s focus groups, where the women who could see a pattern in what’s happening to their bodily autonomy were the ones ready to fight, while the ones who saw each attack as isolated bad luck weren’t. Whether people see themselves as a collective with shared interests, or just individuals each having a hard time, is kind of the whole point.

We ended the conversation with something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The idea of hereness. When billionaires are thinking of a way out, we’re the people who are staying. We’re staying, we’re committed to each other, and we need to be in it together, because there’s no shortage of needing our neighbors in the disasters ahead–whether it’s fire, flood, or the next economic crash.

Thank you Tom Huntington, Cat McGinn, Michelle C. Funk, An Mcgreevy, Bill Huber, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anat Shenker-Osorio and Michael Podhorzer!

Reminder that my new book with Astra Taylor, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, comes out September 15th, and the tour dates are up too, so look for us in your city.

Join me for my next live video in the app.