This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: We have a great guest today, Astra Taylor, one of the smartest people I know. She’s done documentary filmmaking, she’s written a ton of books, she’s an organizer with the Debt Collective, and she’s a person who’s just studied and is very thoughtful about a lot of different subjects. So Astra, thanks for joining me. Welcome.
Astra Taylor: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Bacon: So we’re going to start with the topic of the year, millennium, decade. I want to talk about AI for a bit, because you wrote a piece I’m interested in. The title’s in The Guardian: “The fight against data centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” But let me start with a basic premise here, which is: are data centers inherently bad, and is AI inherently bad? So talk about those things first.
Taylor: Oh, those are some big questions. Are data centers inherently bad? No. And data centers aren’t new. They’re new in the news, right? But data centers, 20 years ago, before we were talking about AI—data centers are where we store our data, and we were storing our data for old-fashioned social media usage or other streaming services.
So data centers have been around for a long time, and there was a big boom, a data center build-out during COVID actually, when internet usage exploded and there was a lot of access to low-interest capital that facilitated the build-out.
And one way of thinking about data centers is they’re the backbone of the internet, right? It’s where the cloud comes to earth. But they’re obviously much more prominent now, and they’re just being built at a different scale—hyperscale, to use the term.
Bacon: Let me come back to that, though. Data centers themselves have existed a long time. That’s what I wanted to get at.
Taylor: Yeah. So they’re not inherently evil.
Bacon: It’s new in the news, but it’s not new. We’ve had data centers. That’s what I was trying to draw out a little bit.
And I guess I do want to ask—a lot of people, I’ll say on the left, are very AI-skeptical. And I wonder—I think we can talk about the economics of it and the growth of it, but is AI inherently bad itself? It’s a very broad question, but I’m just curious what you think.
Taylor: I think AI in this economic model, in this political economic paradigm, is veering towards inherently bad. You cannot separate the technology from the economics, and this is a point I’ve been making since my first book, which is called The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which came out in 2014. That was essentially a political economy of the internet, of the old-fashioned pre-AI internet.
And my argument there was that you cannot separate technology from the underlying business model of these firms. And that just seems to me like one of those basic eternal insights we should not lose sight of. And so in a sense, this is the same movie but just on steroids, right? The AI boom is happening in a period of much more intense wealth concentration.
So the “inherent” question—people like to say technology is neutral. I think that’s a bit wrong. Yes, you can use machine learning to assist a robust scientific infrastructure, or you can use machine learning to enhance a drone that is engaged in a genocide.
Bacon: That’s what I’m getting at. Could there be a world where AI is used nicely?
Taylor: Technology is flexible, yeah. But we would need very different societal conditions and be operating under a different government with a lot more constraints. And I just want to say on the “neutral” point: yeah, sure, you can use a knife to kill someone or to make a sandwich, but that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. It’s a tool that cuts things.
And I think the AI that is being designed right now is being designed for specific purposes. OpenAI—the definition they have of AGI, artificial general intelligence, that they’re looking towards is a tool that can do economically valuable labor. In other words, they’re trying to build a human worker replacement engine. And so neutrality—I don’t think this technology is neutral, but I also don’t think it is inherently good or bad. It’s embedded in societal conditions.
Bacon: So we’ve talked about data centers and now AI. Now we’re talking about AI data centers. How did this happen? You’re in North Carolina, but I think it’s nationwide. I feel like in the last 18 months, you’ve had AI data center protests, bans, really almost every part of the country—rural, suburban. Really not urban, because data centers are mostly in more spread-out areas, but how did this happen?
Taylor: Yeah. And it’s actually becoming more urban. There are protests in the streets of Vancouver right now over a big data center. Seattle just issued a moratorium, which is interesting because Seattle is a big tech hub.
So absolutely this movement is growing, and I think there are different reasons for it. One is people don’t like this infrastructure. It has all sorts of negative consequences. These are absolutely massive build-outs. They often have real consequences for people in the vicinity—from incredible noise that keeps people up at night, that makes people want to move, but by that point it has destroyed their property values.
They’re often run on what should be temporary power sources—gas turbines, methane turbines that have very immediate consequences for the air people are breathing. Sometimes it smells bad, or even if you can’t sense it, there is extra pollution. Depending on the locality, there can be strains on the water supply. They often raise utility bills.
And then people don’t really like what it’s about, right? There used to be a compact, which was, OK, we’re going to do industrial development, but you’re going to get some jobs. Maybe you’ll get a few hundred jobs. You may get a few thousand jobs.
These data centers—sometimes they’re billion-dollar build-outs, and there are 30 jobs, 100 jobs. And in fact, there’s a company now that’s offering robot security dogs to replace the human security workers that were guarding these places.
So the jobs that are permanent tend to be low-wage security jobs or janitorial jobs. The higher-paid work is temporary—it’s in construction or building the actual computers. So it’s a bum deal.
People are also finding out that they are being built with incredible tax incentives that often don’t benefit the community. And so there are all sorts of reasons that people are questioning this.
And then I think there is the bigger context of: but hold on, what does this portend for our collective future? Do we want to live in an AI world? And then amazingly, something as amorphous as AI or the cloud—you go, Oh, it’s actually in my backyard. They’re trying to build it here, and people are realizing that they can fight back.
I’m on some Signal chats with people from 45 states fighting back against these developments and definitely seeing themselves as part of a bigger push. And so I wrote the piece in The Guardian with Saul Levin, who is a longtime environmental organizer—he’s from Michigan, and he’s been on the data center beat for a long time. And we were actually replying to those folks who were like, Oh, is that really the best way to fight AI? It’s kind of whack-a-mole.
And our point is: we’re on incredibly complicated political terrain. It’s actually amazing that there is a space where people can gather, find each other, and push back. And when people do gather, they’re finding out, Oh, actually, we might not have voted the same way. We might not have a lot in common in terms of culture war issues. But hold on, we actually all object to this. And it’s creating these new solidarities. So I think the physical space that these data centers offer is actually providing an incredible opportunity for organizers.
Bacon: So I want to ask, how did this get politicized? And the reason I want to ask this is because it appears the Democrats have decided they oppose them now, but that’s—they followed the consensus.
Taylor: Not all Democrats.
Bacon: Some of them are, yeah. But what I’m getting at is: it seems to me that AI data center proliferation was fine with most elites in media, business, politics, both parties. And yet a groundswell of people started opposing it. So I’m curious—it’s unusual in our culture today. You often find political movements are kind of top-down. Sometimes they’re bottom-up, but usually they’re led by—Black Lives Matter, there were at least active civil rights groups that existed for a long time.
So in some ways, I’m curious: how did these people figure out, Oh, this is something we can oppose? Because a lot of these cities, actually, the city council was trying to hide the tax credits from them. It was not very transparent. A lot of places where the media’s not very strong. So how did people get informed on this?
Taylor: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I do want to just linger on your point about the lack of transparency, because I think that’s a huge element that is pissing people off.
Bacon: Oh, that also causes that. Yes.
Taylor: All of these deals are under the cover of these NDAs, where often much of the city council doesn’t even know what’s going on.
Bacon: The government in the city has decided either to cover it up, or they don’t know themselves. The mayor or whoever has done it without them knowing.
Taylor: Yeah. So I did some reporting in Memphis, where Elon Musk has built his Colossus supercomputer, and then neighboring—there’s actually now three of them in Tennessee and Mississippi, all in this area—and just absolute secrecy. And that’s part of what created this incredible outrage. And then as people dug, they realized they’re secret for a reason, because it’s these temporary polluting turbines and because he’s not keeping his other promises.
So I think that’s a big part of it. I think there are a lot of reasons. On the progressive side, one is that on Inauguration Day, there was the phalanx of tech executives and the sense that tech had gone MAGA. And so suddenly people were like, “Hold on, what side are you on?” And now you want to totally merge with the U.S. government and build this AI dystopian future.
That doesn’t really explain what has happened on the right. But on the right, big tech has been their enemy, right? For years, Silicon Valley was this techno-democratic formation, and they were—in the views of the right—censoring the truth, whether it was about COVID or about election conspiracies. There was a lot of animosity to big tech.
And then you have these AI executives saying, In the future, we’re going to be eliminating half the jobs, or maybe all of them. And by the way, we’re building a transhumanist digital God. And people were like, We don’t want to be replaced. We hate that. So they just haven’t built up a lot of public goodwill on either side.
And even though the populism of the right is fake, there’s an anti-billionaire kind of vibe. And these guys are like, We don’t even want to be billionaires. We want to be trillionaires. We are talking in the moment when Elon Musk on paper is a trillionaire. We have entered a new phase of oligarchy, a new phase of plutocratic power. Today is a tragic day. And the vast majority of people who have two brain cells are not for this. So I think it’s just the perfect—
Bacon: Because also, in this case, it went local to national as opposed to the opposite. Usually so much of our culture is national to local, and in this case, I think it bubbled up. The New York Times did not invent the data center rollback. In some ways, it was covered in a local paper first.
Taylor: Yeah. And I think part of this is, people—my utility bill is being raised, and I don’t like the noise from this thing, I can see this ugly thing. But I think there’s also part of it that’s like, These billionaires from Silicon Valley want to replace us, and we don’t like that.
And I think it’s both at the same time, and that is powerful. But I don’t think the Democrats have polarized against this or taken this opportunity to the degree that they can or should, given how it’s shaping up to be such a huge issue.
Bacon: So “the fight against AI centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” We use this word “democracy” all the time, and usually it’s a predictable Democrat saying Trump is bad. But you have written about democracy before the Trump era and really thought about it deeply. So what do you mean when you say this is a fight about democracy? Because you mean something more than just “Trump bad.”
Taylor: Yeah. Trump is bad. Bad man.
Bacon: Yeah, I know.
Astra Taylor: Really bad man. For me, it comes back to political economy. You cannot have democracy under conditions of incredibly concentrated wealth or oligarchy. One of my favorite definitions of democracy comes from Aristotle, who said democracy is rule of the poor, because the poor outnumber the rich. If democracy is the rule of the majority of people, then it should not be the rule of the super rich. And we are—again, this is a pivotal day in terms of the history of oligarchy.
Bacon: And what happened today? Is that what you’re referring to?
Taylor: Yesterday, the SpaceX IPO. We are—I was just reading this Guardian piece, and it said that for somebody who’s a trillionaire, $100 million is the equivalent of $19.27 for the median American. And I was like, “Can that be right?” That is so mind-boggling.
But I think democracy means that people have a say in the conditions that affect their lives, and it also means they’re not ruled by the super wealthy. And so the AI fight is absolutely connected to both of those things. Because nobody—we weren’t asked whether we want this AI revolution. It is being forced on people. It’s being forced on people at their jobs. It’s being forced on people in their search results.
The government is essentially backstopping—the way that Trump has fully merged with Silicon Valley, he is putting an incredible amount of government force behind this industry and bet his presidency on it in a sense, because it’s been floating the stock market. So that’s absolutely a democratic issue.
And I think this question of—again, what direction is this tech going? Are we building tech that serves humans’ needs? Are we building tech that aims to replace a lot of human jobs and human relationships, to further concentrate wealth? Are we building AI as a further wealth-siphoning straw, or something that could help people?
I’ve been thinking about what it would take to have the best iteration of this technology, and fundamentally, I think it requires a robust welfare state, it requires labor protections, it requires environmental protections. And those are things that are not on the table with this administration. So in a sense, this AI revolution is happening in kind of the worst of all possible worlds.
But I do think that this gets to very fundamental issues about who has power in our society. And the last thing I’ll say on that is: to me, democracy is not just the political sphere. It is something broader than that. And to go back to the labor issue—the fact that AI is being sold as something that can do economically valuable labor, the dream of a billion-dollar company with only one employee—
Bacon: The nightmare, in my view, but the dream to them.
Taylor: Yeah. But Sam Altman has said that he has a chat with his executive buddies betting on when that will happen, when they’ll finally have this employee-less company. And this tool is being developed to degrade labor, but also to further erode what power American workers have.
And these are companies that are backing lawsuits against unions and would love to get rid of the NLRB and all of that. That just seems deeply undemocratic to me. And I’m very happy that people from all walks of life are rising up against this.
Bacon: You said the Democrats are not seizing this issue—Democrats in the parties. So let’s talk about that, because I guess one of my favorite writers, Tressie McMillan Cottom, has a column in the Times today, and the headline is “This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats”—talking about AI data centers and AI more broadly. Is the answer to this question very simply that the rich like data centers and AI and the Democratic Party is captured by the rich? Is there anything more to say than that?
Taylor: I think there’s a lot of that. And I haven’t read Tressie’s piece, but I fully endorse it in advance because I know that she’s right on about this.
I think that’s a huge part of it. The reason billionaires and trillionaires are a threat is in part because there are no rules, or very minimal rules, on how much they can spend on elections and how much they can spend to buy off politicians.
And we know that there’s a lot of dark money flooding into races at every level right now. That’s part of it—a lot of Democrats are looking to either tap into those resources or actually to just not trigger a huge spend, because they’re fighting really dirty.
Bacon: Crypto companies killed off, defeated Sherrod Brown’s functioning. It is a real thing, yeah.
Taylor: Yeah. Or look at this—there’s the New York congressional primary that Alex Bores is in. And this is a guy who worked at Palantir and then quit, because he had—I wouldn’t say a moral awakening, because he’d been involved in labor and other causes before—but left in protest due to some of their dealings with Trump 1.0.
And these super PACs funded by Silicon Valley are now trying to use that against him: Oh, he’s a Palantir employee. And he’s actually—in other words, they’re shameless. They are willing to absolutely punch below the belt, and they’re funding millions of dollars into this, and that’s just one race.
So I think politicians are afraid. I think, though, a lot of voters are tired of fear. They’re tired of fearful politicians. And the way to cut through the noise is to stake a clear moral position, name the proper enemies, speak to this discontent, and believe what the tech executives have been saying. Believe them when they say their agenda is to replace human workers and to replace our relationships. They want to be our bosses, and they want to be our girlfriends and our boyfriends. And believe them when they say that they’re willing to risk ending the world.
I think a lot of what they say about their superintelligent machines and stuff is sci-fi. But I believe them. I believe Dario Amodei, and I believe Elon Musk when they both say they think there’s a 20-to-25 percent chance that AI will annihilate humanity. Now, I don’t think their computers are as good, as great, as conscious as they think they are. But I do believe them when they say that’s an acceptable level of risk. That’s what I believe. And that is demented.
Bacon: I interviewed somebody who’s made the same point of just listen to what they say. That person’s name is Bernie Sanders. And Sanders has come up with this idea of a sovereign wealth fund where the government controls how these companies—I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think it’s an idea that’s out there, and I’m glad he’s pushing stuff, but I’m not sure that’s where I want to land. I’m curious what you think.
Taylor: Yeah. I’m with you. What worries me about it—and you can see this in OpenAI’s openness to some version of this—these companies are not against it. They have very inflated stock valuations at this point. They might like to have—and they’ve been seeking to merge with the federal government.
Bacon: It’s true.
Taylor: They’re like, Let’s do it. Let’s get married. I don’t love a scenario where the American people have even more exposure or investment in these firms and this technology being, quote-unquote, profitable—because the profit is, at this point, based on very socially pernicious consequences. The displacement of labor, the burning of immense amounts of fossil fuel.
I think the climate dimension of this is just incredibly critical. There was just a very reputable academic study that came out that said due to the build-out of new crypto and AI data centers, the demands of the energy sector could increase by almost 30 percent in the next four years alone.
So yeah, I don’t want the American people to have a piece of a toxic asset. That’s it.
And industrial policy, though—I think Trump has shown that industrial policy is possible. And under different conditions, in different countries or with different leaders, you can use those tools in really powerful ways. You can say renewable energy only. You can say labor protections. You can say privacy protections. You can say accurate data sets. You can say all sorts of things using the power of the state. But I think the proposal on the table is not going in that direction.
I also think, for me, one of the biggest bulwarks against this technology is investing in social services. In other words, the more excellent our healthcare is, the less we want an AI doctor. The better funded our schools are and the lower the teacher-to-student ratio, the less we’re tempted by the idea of plugging every kid into a Google-controlled iPad.
And that’s—I think in this book with Naomi Klein that we have coming out in September, that’s part of it: we need to make the real human living world irresistible and supportive and secure enough that actually part of the appeal of these virtual tools is diminished.
Right now, people are turning to AI because sometimes it’s the only option. And that is the vicious cycle that we are in, where the diminishment of public services feeds a demand for tools that further degrade those services and also further enrich the people who own them.
Bacon: You mentioned the book you’re doing with Naomi Klein. I think the title is End Times Fascism. So tell people—tell me what “end times fascism” is.
Taylor: Yeah. The subtitle is And the Fight for the Living World, so it’s not all negative.
“End times fascism”—it’s our attempt to understand what kind of fascism we are living through, what has changed. It’s based on a piece that we wrote for The Guardian that came out not this April but the April before. And essentially it’s looking at the main constituencies of this far-right alliance. Fascism historically is always a weird amalgam. In fact, that’s what the word “fascism” comes from—it’s a bundle. So it’s always contradictory. We’re looking at what is making up the reactionary right today. And the tech sector is a major prong, as well as the religious right and also this ethnonationalist front as well.
Bacon: Let’s pursue one of the premises. What is the “end times” part? I think people know what fascism is. But what’s the “end times” part?
Taylor: The “end times” part is that this is an alliance that is flirting with the end of the world. They’re so comfortable in the sense that we will make it. So on the tech side—we all know this. This is just part of being alive today: you’re like, Oh, there’s another bunker. There was a recent piece about Peter Thiel going to Argentina, and part of it is he loves Milei and his libertarian policies, and also, if there’s a nuclear war, maybe it’ll be OK there.
Or we have people leading the charge into these wars in the Middle East thinking that they’re going to hasten Armageddon, because they’re in these biblical narratives.
So this sense that—and the thing is, we are operating in a moment of unprecedented global crises. The climate crisis, as much as we’re not talking about it these days, is very real. The threat of artificial intelligence—my idea of what the threat is might not perfectly align with what Musk is saying or Altman or Amodei, but I think there are very real dangers here.
The dangers are real, and we have world-destroying tools that our species has not had before. So we’re trying to think about what that means for our politics and how the hell we get out of this.
Bacon: You and I met in, I think, 2022 or 2023. You were working at the Debt Collective, and the thing you all were working on then was getting the Biden administration to cancel—you always said “don’t say forgive”—
Taylor: Don’t say “forgive.”
Bacon: And I think it’s an important distinction. Cancel student debt. So I want to ask you about—we’re about to start this Democratic primary, and this sort of why Biden lost and why Biden wasn’t popular. I think the narrative the Democratic Party has concluded is that he was a little too left on economics and a little too focused on the college grads and not focused on the working class.
And the embodiment of bad ideas was canceling student debt. I think you’re going to hear probably 15 candidates say a version of that, even the quote-unquote progressive ones. So respond to the sort of—Biden was—the student debt policy was emblematic of Biden’s bad instincts. How do you respond?
Taylor: Yeah. Certainly an idea, and it’s being pushed by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, mostly.
Zooming out—I helped found a group called the Debt Collective, which is the first union of debtors. We have been organizing people—student borrowers, also medical debtors, people with back rent debt—to fight, inspired by the example of the labor union. Essentially, people who lack wealth need to have power in numbers. We need to have solidarity in order to push for political change.
So yeah, we never talk about forgiveness because we don’t think that people need to be forgiven for going into medical debt or going into student debt. Or often going into credit card debt. If you live in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, I don’t really think it’s your fault if you end up having to borrow to make ends meet.
And in fact, I think it was yesterday, there was news that the Trump administration is now thinking about further eroding the Affordable Care Act but also offering people loans to cover their medical emergencies. Debt’s not always a choice.
What we are saying at the Debt Collective is, again, a clear and moral position: guess what? People should have the right to be educated. We live in an incredibly complicated society. We at some point decided that public education K through 12 should exist and that people should be able to go to school and get that level of education. We live in a more complicated world. Let’s add four years.
This is how higher education in the United States actually began, if you go back and you look at the GI Bill and the building of these incredible public institutions of learning and research. These were public goods that became privatized over time and became financed by tuition, which means financed by debt. That is actually a new development. And so our proposition is: let’s cancel student loans and let’s make college free as a public good.
And that feels to me all the more urgent right now in this moment of AI. I think it’s actually very connected to the AI discussion. When we’re talking about, Oh my God, what is knowledge? What is truth? How do we discern fact from fiction? I think that the fight for public education is actually incredibly urgent.
And the right knows this. Why is the right laser-focused on attacking education, attacking academic research, attacking funding for science? Because they know that it is a threat to their oligarchic and racist and misogynist ambitions. And in fact, the Heritage Foundation released a report recently that said, You know what? Too many women are going to college because they get subsidized student loans and there’s federal investment. And when they do that, they just don’t have enough of the right kind of white babies that we want them to have. So this should be a Democratic Party issue. And instead they’re like—
Bacon: When you said “this,” you mean free college, higher education, defending colleges.
Taylor: Also just defending it as a public good, not, Oh, you’ll get job training. Maybe we’ll fix the economy with some education. No. Education is something that matters for a democratic society and that people should be able to access.
And the thing is, Biden should have listened to us, because we laid out a way to cancel student debt quickly and efficiently. If I had been in charge, I would have also canceled all the debt owed to veterans from military hospitals and created an alliance, presented it as solidaristic. Instead, there was a lot of misinformation about the demographics—who is a student debtor. It was always this idea as though, Oh, they all went to Harvard or something.
No—if you go to Harvard, you actually don’t graduate with student debt, because there’s this huge endowment that is owned by this tiny little university. Most people with student debt went to for-profit colleges, to vocational colleges, to public schools. Forty percent of people with student debt don’t have college degrees because they couldn’t manage to get through school because they worked three jobs.
So this is definitely going to be a live issue. Right now, the Debt Collective is continuing to fight. We’re actually pushing—we think there should be another payment pause, because people are in such a financial emergency and the Trump administration has thrown the student loan system into such incredible disarray.
Debt is exploding under Donald Trump because cost of living has not come down, because of the changes to the student loan system. They’ve gotten rid of—they’re attacking programs like the SAVE Plan, which listeners probably know about. They’re attacking subsidized student loans looking forward.
This is going to be, unfortunately—it’s very tragic to say—more of an issue and more of a pain point for the American people. And I think instead of running away from this issue, the Democrats should own it and say, We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right this time, and we’re going to understand why the right has made higher education such a focus of their attacks.
And the last thing I’ll say is: if they don’t, the right is going to take this issue. Just like the Democrats risk the right owning the data center issue and the anti-war space, I have spent the last year listening to right-wing podcasters. I have taken in so much Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Nick Shirley. You name it, I’ve listened to it.
Bacon: Bless you, because I’m not going to.
Taylor: They talk about debt all the time. Tucker Carlson took the stage at CPAC, the big conservative conference, and said, We need debt strikes against credit card lenders. Nick Shirley’s—Why are people believing this kid when he’s doing these investigations into the welfare state? He’s like, We’re all mad because we have student debt. This is an issue in American people’s lives. People are in debt. They cannot pay.
And the problem is—there are many problems with this—when the right takes these issues, guess what? The problem isn’t the economic system at large. It’s not capitalism. No, it’s the Jewish bankers. It’s the immigrants somehow driving up the cost of something, so you have to borrow more. And so it’s incredibly dangerous for the Center for American Progress—or name other names—to run away from this issue, because they are then ceding very real pain and a very real problem to faux populists who will only deepen the problem.
And so that is something I’m worried about. And I just think—what does it say about a party when you can’t just say, Yeah, people deserve education. We stand behind education as a public good. We want people to use their real minds. We want people to learn things.
Bacon: So last question. I just got an early edition and then mostly finished reading this book called Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisers, and Israel’s War in Gaza. The author’s name is Akbar Shahid Ahmed. He was at the Huffington Post for a while and is now, I think, at a place called Notice. He was one of the leading reporters in the behind-the-scenes accounts of the Biden administration ignoring federal law in terms of arming the Israelis and allowing the genocide to happen.
So I guess the question I’m going to ask you in a democracy sense is: what do we do with a political party that I’m going to be voting for that legitimized the genocide? I guess there’s talk now about how the people who worked for Biden, who were involved in the policy, should not get jobs in government in the future. Which I’ve heard. But I’m not really sure what that does for me—if Jake Sullivan can’t be secretary of state, I’m not sure what that really does.
But in a certain sense, what should we do? How do we deal with a party that wants to say we’re going to defend democracy in this country but leaned into legitimizing a genocide and really won’t apologize for it, even now? A lot of the leaders in the party are still much more focused on Israel is good than genocide is bad.
Taylor: Yeah. That’s a huge question. How do we build the power to transform American electoral politics when we are locked into this two-party, first-past-the-post system that I know you have talked about a lot with your listeners?
There are major impediments in terms of just the way our politics are structured, and it’s getting worse—with the attacks on voting rights and the all-in on gerrymandering. Now you can do it for partisan purposes.
Bacon: And it’s happening everywhere, yeah.
Taylor: Yeah. And people—this is the thing. People need to get organized. Often when I give talks in public and people raise their hand and go, What can I do about all the problems you’re naming?—my response is always, You have to join with other people. You have to find some kind of political home where you are, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. There is no perfect solution. There is no button that will save the world. You have to build power with people where you are.
If it’s a data center fight, join a data center fight. If it’s Indivisible or a chapter of DSA, or if you have the ability to form a union or join a union—a tenant union—join the Debt Collective. We have to join things, because they have money, and we have the many in theory, but we have to be organized to exert collective power. And I do think we need that organizational force, and then we need that moral clarity.
I think we were told right after the 2024 election, Oh, there’s a vibe shift. Cruelty is cool now. I think we can say now that was bullshit, and it was wishful thinking, not just on the right, but among some in the Democratic Party.
Bacon: Today is the day to abandon trans people was literally said by, from November to January after the election, by all these people.
Taylor: It was real wish-casting. And I think—no, we’re not throwing people under the bus. We’re going to have moral clarity. And I think, in this moment—Naomi and I end this book by saying: yeah, we need to say international law, we should try it. Universality, let’s try it. Let’s really mean it—that these are principles that we take for granted. But if you actually try to enact them, they’re really radical. And that’s the horizon we need to work for.
And the thing is, at this point, on the issue of Palestine, the American people in general are absolutely opposed to what happened and what transpired. And there’s still just enough democracy in our diminishing and racing-towards-fascism society that I think the party is going to have to respond to that.
And we just need the courage of our convictions, and we need to organize. And that’s it. And that means doing Substack Lives and talking, but it also means getting offline, meeting with people, and building those relationships and doing the annoying work of social change.
Bacon: As you’ve been talking, the thing I’ve been heartened by the last year—until this conversation, I was probably thinking about the New York race where they had this unknown person who brought enthusiasm, energized people, and also had a lot of moral clarity, as in Zohran. But I think the data center fight actually might be a better example of the kind of organized democracy we really need. It’s not about one person—it’s about the many.
Taylor: Yeah. And it is an opportunity for people to see how much they have in common with each other and to break us out of these cartoonish narratives about each other. That’s also why I stay committed to the Debt Collective, because medical debt—that’s another huge unifying point.
I think something like 92 percent of people, according to polls, believe that medical debt should all be canceled. There are so many issues. The issue of money out of politics. There are so many issues that people could organize around.
I think on the electoral reform front, it’s more parties. We—you know what we hate? We hate the Democrats and the Republicans at this moment. A more parties movement could actually be one way of framing a horizon—more proportional representation, money out of politics.
And that’s not to downplay what we’re up against. I’ve been in the trenches for a long time at this point, and it’s hard out there. And the presence of a fascist trillionaire is going to make it that much harder. But that means we have to meet the moment, and we have to get organized. And I think there’s so much to work with right now. And that whole moment where they were like, “Progressives are over. We’re on this reactionary train. Get on board”—no. That was a total lie.
And so there’s something bubbling up in this moment. And as a result, even after writing a book called End Times Fascism, I’m not completely discouraged.
Bacon: That left me thinking—and I’ll ask my final—is it better to be focused on one person or one movement these next couple of years? How important is it that AOC or Ro Khanna fills all our needs and runs the greatest campaign of all time? And is there any alternative to that?
Taylor: Yeah. To me, the electoral dimension is important. But we—the American political system is geographically based. And so ultimately, I vote in a primary, I vote in an election, I donate to people I like. But that’s not where the work is. And these people are not messiahs. AOC’s one person in a large Congress, and she’s in a party that has the minority. So it really should only take a tiny amount of my brain space.
What really matters, I think, is how we are organizing in other realms to change conditions or to spread different ideas. That’s why I’ve stayed dedicated to the Debt Collective for all these years—it’s a space where I think I can help build power with other people and change the political conversation and maybe change the political terrain.
But I think sometimes we spend too much time on the horse race and expect too much of people who are in these elected positions, when what we need to do is continue to work so that they actually are able to exercise more power in the ways that we want them to.
Bacon: Great place to end. Astra, tell people where they can find your work—I know you’re on social media and so on.
Taylor: On all of the platforms that are bad. But really, what I want people to do is: if you have debt, or if you consider yourself an ally of people who lack wealth, then join the Debt Collective. That’s my top request all the time.
Bacon: All right. Good. Astra, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
Taylor: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
