Saturday Night Live had this skit years ago where they presented a Fugitivesque TV show called The Last Liberal. With all the talk on Fox News and conservative talk radio about the rise of Socialism in Obamerica, Bill Moyers decided to go out and find The Last Socialist to get the other side of the story. It turns out the subject of the host's recent Bill Moyers Journal interview is an old pal of the Weekly to boot!
Moyers jokes that when it came to locating a socialist, his show “consulted the Endangered Species Act and actually found
one, way out to the People's Republic of Southern California.” That one would be meat cutter and long-haul driver-turned-writer, historian, urban theorist, social commentator and MacArthur “genius” Mike Davis, who teaches creative writing at UC Riverside and is still listed on UC Irvine's history faculty page. Davis, of course, penned City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and his latest, In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire.
You can read the whole interview transcript here or watch some of it here.
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At one point, Moyers asks about “this chorus of voices, the Wall Street
Journal editorial page, conservative talk radio, Fox News, Lou Dobbs,
CNBC's Cramer and Kudlow, all blaming Obama for the bad economy. Are
those attacks sticking out where you live in California?”
DAVIS: Well, I mean you know, what could be more
absurd than the, you know, the people who brought this country to its
knees now being the chorus of dissenters, now representing themselves
as the populous? The fact that they're the ones who have erected the
antenna, the lightning rod for popular anger is worrisome because if
these bailouts and stimulus fail, if the country sinks deeper into what
could be a very long period of stagnation if popular anger is
monopolized by the demagogues on the Right, I think you could see a
real resurgence of the Republican Party or at least of its most
anti-immigrant economic nationalist wing.
This is something maybe not very visible on the national screen. But
when you live near the boarder like I do in Southern California, the
southern cities, areas of the Midwest, this has really invigorated what
you once would have refereed to as the John Birch Society wing of the
Republican Party. The vacuum left by the fall of the Soviet Union has
been filled by, you know, good old-fashioned Nativism immigrant
bashing.
No group is so vulnerable right now as the immigrants whose labor has
sustained the California economy for the last generation, legal or
un-legal. They have the fewest entitlements. They have the least safety
net. And their jobs are the ones that are being impacted most directly
because they work in construction services or industries that are
highly sensitive to the business cycle. Some have gone back to Mexico.
Mexican statistics show that. But it doesn't make sense for most people
to go back. The border economy has really collapsed. The tourist
economy along the border is dead. The maquiladoras, the border assembly
plants are laying off. So having made huge investments to get to the
United States, doesn't make a lot of sense to go back to a country
where there are even fewer jobs and fewer hopes. How are people
surviving? Well, in some cases, they cram five into a room. They're
standing in front of Home Depots hoping they won't get picked up by the
police or the immigration service. And, of course, this exists in a
situation where it's very likely that our southern border and that
Mexico are going to become very, very destabilized, further
destabilized than they are. And this provides lots of ammunition to
construct the whole, like, Versailles myth of the economic crisis. You
know, to blame immigrants, to blame liberal, to blame the imaginary
socialism of bank rescue plans that are fully endorsed by The Economist or the Financial Times.
When Moyers says no one in America is raising the specter of real Socialism–the
abolition of private markets and the wage systems, the nationalizing of all
the major industries, the supplanting
of capitalism, dogs and cats, living together–Davis corrects the host.
“I am.”
Found him.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.