Get the F*** Out of Your House: Yotam Marom on How to Raise the Volume on the Politics of Powerlessness

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. If you're feeling powerless, particularly on the political front, you're not alone. We've done a lot of shows recently on the sense of powerlessness. We did one recently with my old friend, the Chicago-based cultural critic, David Masciotra.
On a nation, a country of strangers, how he imagines Americans have become separated from one another and what that's done to our politics. Just in America seems to be a global phenomenon. My old friend, Ece Temelkuran was on the show, A Turkish Exile based in Berlin. Her new book is appropriately called Nation of Strangers, Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century. For Temelkuran and for Masciotra, Home is all about politics, on rethinking and perhaps reorganizing how we deal with power and the state and governments around the world. My guest today, I think, is very much in the Temelkuran Masciotra camp. Yotam Marom is a full-time organizer, facilitator who has spent a lot of time in movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and he has a new book out. It's all about reaching beyond the politics of powerlessness, and it's called For Louder Days. He is joining us from Brooklyn, New York, one of the louder places in America. The book is out on Tuesday. Yotam, welcome to the show and congratulations.

**Yotam Marom** (2:09)
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

**Andrew Keen** (2:12)
Yotam, have we become, to borrow Masciotra and Temelkuran's language, a nation or a world of strangers? Is that the big political challenge these days?

**Yotam Marom** (2:26)
It's certainly one of the challenges for sure.
I don't know that I'm as scholarly as some of you, like as much of an expert, but you know, the sort of, the loneliness, the stranger epidemic that we're facing in the US is the result of like decades of right-wing attack on civic institutions. You know, people just used to be part of more things, more communities, things that helps them find meaning in their lives, and then also things that help them be part of political activity. And it's been a pretty concerted effort to chip away at that. So for sure people are more lonely, more atomized, more individualized. And it hurts our movements in a big way, it hurts political movements, especially progressive movements. Yeah.

**Andrew Keen** (3:19)
Is there an incompatibility, Yotam, between what you call progressive movements, and you've been part of that for a lot of your life, and liberal movements? You've done a number of shows on the crisis of liberalism, the limits perhaps of liberalism. Is liberalism insufficient? Democratic liberalism, where we show up every year, every couple of years, every four years to vote. Is that the wrong way of thinking about politics these days?

**Yotam Marom** (3:50)
I definitely think we've reached the limit of it. I mean, I think that what you're describing as liberalism, where we show up and participate in these kind of increments, is part of a healthy society. But it's not how we make big political change. And I don't think it's enough to make up a healthy political society.
I think that the right understands that and has been using the failure of the sort of liberal establishment to get its way for a long time. I think a lot of what has been successful on the right for the past decade or so, has been basically pointing to the failure of liberalism and neoliberalism. And they're not wrong about that. And people are like income inequality is growing, people can't afford to live the lives they want to live. They don't feel empowered, they don't feel the politicians are listening to them, they don't really have any leverage over them. And their answer is not my answer. But yeah, I do think there is a pretty serious limit to the kind of democracy that maybe the sort of establishment of the Democratic Party would want us to, the way that they would like us to participate. And the answer is movements, big social movements that are made up of people taking agency over their lives and being politically active, socially active.

**Andrew Keen** (5:24)
What is it that the right, people call it the radical right, the far right, there are all sorts of ways of describing it. What are they doing?
I wouldn't say necessarily right, but more effective in some ways in bringing out the louder voices. We know that they bring, they brought out the louder voices in Charlottesville a few years ago. It's very controversial. It seems in some ways, it isn't necessarily a criticism, it's just my observation, that they're more effective in bringing people out. Is it because they're better organized, they're more passionate, or perhaps people are sometimes when it comes down to it, more right-wing, more willing to go out and demonstrate against immigrants than for immigrants?