Ryan Grim Interview About Strategy Differences

I was not expecting to see Ryan Grim being interviewed by Franc Analysis. I’m glad it happened because it really made me think.

Grim works for the billionaire-funded Intercept, an organization co-founded but now reviled by Glenn Greenwald, and also sometimes co-hosts The Hill as the ‘leftist’ half of the left/right pairing of talking heads. He was on Jimmy Dore once and they had a rather brutal falling-out.

Franc is far younger, far poorer, and far more radicalized, famous mostly for not being afraid to shove a mic in the face of politicians at rallies and so on and saw away. He did a very good job under these circumstances, going after Grim with questions he’s probably never been asked before.

The best part of the interview is the last ten minutes, where they inconclusively debate “electoralism vs. direct action”. Franc thinks voting and sending money to pols is pointless and over with. Grim sees it as the last best hope.

A lot of the best leftists see Grim as a shill for established power, either deluded by his own prestige and success, or maybe even a plant for some nefarious three letter agency. It’s easy to believe, but if it’s true, he’s an incredibly smooth one, as when he says here flat out that ‘billionaires shouldn’t exist’, even though one signs his checks.

His best answer to Franco about why people should keep investing in the lesser of two evils was to point to the iffy promise of the “3.5 billion (human) infrastructure” bill. He’s right. Personally I have a lot on the line with that bill, and my fingers are hard-crossed that the Dems push it through.

But for a best answer, it still sucks. So yes, I get health care finally. All that means is that a sliver of the pork in the bill falls to me for a change. It’s still just pork.

It does nothing to change the facts of Empire or imperialism. It does nothing to bring a federal jobs guarantee, or even throw a bone in the direction of a living wage. It does nothing to slow down the twisted logic of capitalism, and it would do too little too late to affect the climate catastrophe that looms over us all.

Both parties to the duopoly that rules our lives are useless for solving anything that fundamental or real. Franc and the more enlightened members of his generation are absolutely correct in asserting that fact.

I’m very dubious and fatalistic about the idea that ‘direct action’ will solve anything either, but some form of it is the only real option left. It’s that bad option, or nothing.

Let’s hope it can be done non-violently. Let’s hope that the smarter people continue to reject Grim’s ambivalent prescriptions, and to embrace Franc’s. Let’s hope that hope still exists at all, for any reason, on any front, and that we’re not pitched into a neo-feudal lockdown at the same time we’re burning and drowning and taking down every last vestige of charismatic mega-fauna with us.

I’m a belletrist and I pray for the tigers, even though god isn’t listening.