Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism | Lex Fridman Podcast #441

Communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always devolves into dictatorship. It creates a power vacuum. When you say, "Hey, there's no structure of power here," right, "We're all equal, it's a flat line," one guy usually gets up, because that's human nature, and goes, "Uh, I don't think so. I think if you're gonna leave a power vacuum, I'm gonna take that power vacuum." Corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power, whereas capitalism loves competition and wants the free markets. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope, because you don't have the right information. You have propaganda. You have marketing. You don't have real news. When you're in the online world, it's chaotic. And don't get me wrong, it's got plenty of downsides, right? But within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge. Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier, but there is a percentage chance that he's such a wild card that he overturns the whole system, and that is why the establishment is a little scared of him.

The following is a conversation with Cenk Uygur, a progressive political commentator and host of The Young Turks. As I've said before, I will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right of the political spectrum, always in good faith, with empathy, rigor, and backbone. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate, ineloquent things, and I frequently change my mind as I'm learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But just know that I'm aware when I fall short and I will keep trying to do better. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Cenk Uygur. You wrote a book-

Yeah.

... a manifesto that outlines the progressive vision for America. So, the big question, what are some defining ideas of progressivism?

Yeah. So in order to do that, Lex, we gotta, uh, talk about where we are in the political spectrum. And, uh, in fact, there's two different, uh, spectrums now. People often think of left-right, uh, and that's true. That exists. But layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment. So I'm center-left on the left-right spectrum, um, but I'm all the way on the populist end of, of the second spectrum.

Mm-hmm.

So where does progressivism lie within that? Well, uh, I would argue that it's exactly in those places. It's populist, uh, and it's on the left, but it is not far left. So far left is a different animal, uh, and we could talk about that i- in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a progressive, so expand the circle of liberty and, uh, justice for all and equality of opportunity. Now, people will say, "Well, that seems pretty broad and all American," but is it? Think about it. So expand the circle of liberty. Uh, everybody's in favor of that, right? No, absolutely not. So, uh, certainly the king of England was not in favor of expanding the circle of liberty, and the Founding Fathers said, "We're gonna expand it." And they expanded it to propertied white men, and then progressives have been inc- They are progressives because they expanded the circle of liberty. They then, from then on, as we were perfecting the union, progressives always say expand it further, include women, include people without property, include all races, and at every turn, conservatives fight against it. So that doesn't mean if you're a conservative today, you don't wanna include women or, uh, minorities, et cetera. But, but today, you would say, for example, "Well, I don't wanna expand the circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants." And maybe you're right about that and we could have that d- discussion in terms of a specific philosophy. And I don't believe that undocumented immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines, but I do believe in expanding liberty overall, and the contours of that are what's interesting. And then you say justice for all, everybody's for just- No. Right now, marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot of parts of the, uh, country. Now a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree that it should be legal, but for my entire lifetime, uh, Black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people, and the entire country has been fine with it. So does that justice? No. They smoke... White people, Black people smoke marijuana at the same rate. Black people get arrested about four times the rate. That is an injustice that an enormous percentage of the country was comfortable with, while progressives aren't comfortable with it. We want justice for all. So the equality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say, s- at least some portions of them will say equality of results, right? So progressives just want a fair chance, so free college education, but afterwards, you don't get to have exact same results as the, either the wealthiest person or we're not all going to be equal. We don't have equal talents, skills, abilities, et cetera.