Would you say that the billionaires election,
talking about it that way, is sort of a coded
way, a coded critique of capitalism?
And now, when you have Michael Bloomberg coming
into the race — he won’t be in South Carolina
so much as Super Tuesday — his pouring millions
into taking on Bernie Sanders and trying to
make this an issue about socialism, redbaiting
him as much as possible, trying to pose it
as “You either have me, or you have Cuba.”
This is such an American talking point that
Michael Bloomberg is engaged in, that we all
need to educate — first of all, you know,
I think — look, I think there are some people
who had a great life in the 20th century,
who should have considered remaining in it.
Right?
Like, if your framework — like, if you are
still running nuclear drills in your mind
— right? — you may not belong in the 21st
century.
Like, a lot of the — and I see it on TV
all the time.
Like, there are people who clearly have Cold
War trauma, and I feel for them, but we’re
not actually in the Cold War anymore.
Right?
We’re in just a completely different era.
Right?
And just as it would have been unhelpful in
the Cold War to be like talking about what
we need to do in the trenches of World War
I — it’s just not a helpful framework
for the Cold War, because it’s just not
now — it’s not particularly helpful now,
in 2020, to be reliving your own Cold War
trauma as guidance for the United States.
Michael Bloomberg is trying to present this
old American talking point, that you’ve
got two choices, people: We can either be
a Goldman Sachs country, or we can be Maduro’s
Venezuela.
Those are your choices.
Those are your — that’s the whole choice.
We have come to a place in America, which
I find fascinating, where our understanding
of gender is more fluid than our understanding
of capitalism, socialism and democracy.
It’s remarkable.
I never would have expected that.
We’ve made tremendous progress in understanding
that it’s not like men, women, nothing in
between; it’s complicated.
People fall all kinds of places on that distribution.
But capitalism and socialism?
No, no, no, it’s one or the other.
The reality is, for any person who’s actually
traveled or read a book, every country in
the world, with maybe a couple of exceptions,
has some mix of capitalism and socialism.
When you’re on the highway, the thing beneath
you, socialism; the things on the highway,
capitalism — the cars and the trucks carrying
stuff.
When you are on Wall Street, the banks, capitalism;
the regulators that make sure that brokers
are not stealing their money, socialism.
Right?
When you work for 40 years at IBM, capitalism;
when you retire and have Social Security and
Medicare take care of you, socialism.
Right?
It’s early in the morning.
I have, already in the course of this day,
by eating certain things, engaged in capitalism.
By taking a car here, engaged in capitalism.
But I have also benefited profoundly, just
by 8 a.m., from socialism, from the fact that
people — you know, there were roads.
It was nice to have roads on the way here.
It made it a much faster commute.
You know, all the ways in which capitalism
and socialism are actually part of every hour
of our lives, let’s end this ridiculous
binary and have some understanding of economic
fluidity.
