Matthew Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton, specializing in the politics of the Civil War era. During this primary season, he has actively campaigned for Bernie Sanders, most notably penning multiple articles supporting Sanders’s nomination in Jacobin magazine, where Karp is a contributing editor. This work is not new for Karp—in a way, he is reprising a similar role he played in 2016. I sat down with him this past November to discuss his public writing, its connection to his research, and how he perceives the complex relationship between scholarly and political work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AI: I first encountered your work in 2016 before I even got to Princeton. I knew you abstractly as the guy who always writes these Bernie plug pieces for Jacobin. You put your pundit hat on then, and you continue to do so today— you’re a contributing editor at Jacobin, you’re sitting on panels at the Verso Loft, you’re popping off on Twitter. Could you talk a little bit about your entrance into the world of public political commentary?
MK: I was always interested in politics and its relationship with history, but the contents of the politics were a little bit different. For most of grad school I don’t think my politics invited, and certainly didn’t require, disagreement with those around me. I canvassed for Obama in 2008; that wasn’t a controversial opinion. Being a liberal, partisan Democrat was not a position that people would be like, “Wow you’re so political!” It was just the water that everyone else was swimming in in grad school in Philadelphia in 2008. Sure, there were a few people who I understood to be on the left in a way that was distinct from liberalism, but they actually were not very strongly represented in my social world. I didn’t think about liberal/left arguments a lot in grad school, to be honest.
I became a little bit disillusioned in the post-Occupy, post-financial crisis era, and became interested in the socialist tradition and democratic socialism. I wrote a few things in my really early days, actually, when I was a postdoc before I came here as a professor, but they were more in a historical vein. They were commentaries about the history of slavery or Civil War with maybe some analogy to the present. It really wasn’t until I finished my first book… Coincidentally I submitted some final copy edits in January 2016, right before the Iowa caucus. There’s this whole gap where they [the publishers] have to edit it, and there’s a kind of window where you could launch your second book. Or, you could spend your time rearranging your mental furniture to become a full-time Bernie propagandist. That’s what I did. I was really swept away by the ideas and the energy behind that campaign in 2016. It felt distinct from anything I had experienced in my life not just in terms of what the campaign stood for, but the extent to which it felt like it had developed a mass base for what it was fighting for. A huge portion of the country was rallying around the idea of Medicare for All, and the idea that the one percent or the billionaire class shouldn’t run our economy. Those politics hadn’t been in the mainstream in my life. I had dim childhood memories of Jesse Jackson, but that’s all.
AI: Who Bernie endorsed.
MK: Yeah, exactly. I had the best politics I ever had until I was like 36 was when I was 6, because I really loved Jesse Jackson. I was a huge fan of the Jackson ‘88 campaign, even though I can’t exactly remember why. And then, there was a long period of doldrums in the 90’s and 2000’s where I called myself a “moderate Democrat”: in some ways, basically a reactionary. But the politics were new in 2016, and the enthusiasm and the energy. He [Sanders] beat Hillary Clinton by 20 points in New Hampshire. I went up and canvassed for him there, and so I was engaged on a personal level as a citizen in a new way.
There was a huge void, it seemed to me, in the world of media and political commentary. The establishment media, the mainstream media, but also the progressive media—even flagship liberal outlets—were at best bemusedly nonplussed by Bernie. [The media] were condescendingly like, “Oh, that’s cute,” and at worst very hostile to him. So there just weren’t that many voices that were doing campaign punditry from that perspective and writing, in effect, narrative: making arguments about the shape of the race and about what the Bernie voter looked like and what Bernie’s chances were, and so on. So I really did give up much of my spring to doing that kind of work, and it felt like there was a receptive audience to that.
That was the moment; it was the spring of 2016. I think I wrote three substantial pieces about, you know, who was voting for Bernie, why they were voting for Bernie, and why Bernie could win, and what Bernie’s theory of politics was. And then there were a lot of other small pieces— reactions to things that happened. I discovered that I enjoyed responding to events in real time. I had been interested in political history and politics, but I had never seen myself as a writer of that kind of stuff. I enjoyed that marriage.
AI: Yeah, to that effect your latest for Jacobin [in November 2019] was, “Is This the Future Liberals Want?” That’s exactly about who is voting for Bernie, what his campaign looks like, why his campaign is different. You outline the fundamentally different approaches to class politics between Warren and Sanders: there is prominent support for Warren among six-figure making professionals, she stresses policy wonkery and her moderation, her campaign staff is from the party establishment. These are all things you hit.
Then, in a long thread on Twitter Vox editor Matthew Yglesias—a liberal commentator who embraces the politics that you critique, and whom you also explicitly criticize in this Jacobin piece—picked apart the piece. He topped it off with,
“For starters, the whole idea of a [checks notes] professor at [checks notes] Princeton lecturing others about the acceptable class composition of a political coalition is so absurd as to be hardly worth engaging with.”
You replied,
“Not only a Princeton history professor, but an Amherst and Penn graduate, and before that a child of North Bethesda. You could call me the JD Vance of affluent liberalism.”
Which I thought was very funny. But, when identity and background play such a central role in political discourse on the left, I guess I want to play devil’s advocate for a minute for Yglesias: Why should we be listening to you as a wellspring of left commentary? In the context of Princeton, as a tenured professor, how can you or can any other professor with similar politics extricate yourself from the more inert politics of the university administration? What is the relationship here between academia and activism?
MK: There’s so many things to say here. Just to indulge and wax biographical for a minute: On the one hand I grew up in an absolute lap of privilege in Rockville, Maryland (they call it North Bethesda for real estate purposes). On the other hand, I was raised by a single mom, and I was a financial aid student in college at Amherst. It’s not like I was a “horny-handed son of the working class,” but in some ways I did have a very particular kind of class consciousness—the middle middle-class kid surrounded by upper middle-class kids. I mean, my mom was a middle manager at the NIH; there was food on the table at dinner. But yeah, I grew up in county-subsidized housing in a very rich county. Very comfortably, but also aware of some distinctions.
In all those years of being aware of those subtle but still real distinctions, I actually never turned to the left. It’s only since I’ve got this incredible, fancy job here that I’ve accepted a more sweeping left critique of class society than I ever held while I was striving within it. In some ways, it’s only when the narrative confirmed my own privileged place in the universe that I think I became more convinced of its deeper inequality and basic wrongness.
So where does that leave me? I got a job here; I didn’t choose to work here obviously. But I’m immensely lucky to work here. I know that my work here, and the work of this university, the social function of this university, is to reproduce many of the class stratifications that the Bernie campaign is out to oppose. Of course, the society I want to build is based on free public education, rather than expensive, meritocratic private education that they just dole out to the lucky and chosen few of the non-capitalist classes. So in that sense I’m complicit in this society. And the cheap but also fundamentally real answer is that we are all embedded in this society, in this class society.
I think it’s a mistake to believe that any individual moral or ethical acts can transform that society. Instead, what we need is political struggle to provide the quote “big structural change.” I’m convinced that [change] is best pursued in two venues: in labor struggle, and in electoral political struggle. The Bernie campaign represents a kind of bridge towards a better and more equal future in a way that I don’t feel any number of radical individual life decisions would achieve. I could quit this job tomorrow; somebody else will come in and do it. It’s not going to have any desired effect in leveling society. Is there an element of intrinsic, irreducible hypocrisy in that? Probably, and I’m willing to tolerate that. But I also think all my arguments about politics will always be greeted with some skepticism based on this position, will always be set up to be dunked on by the Yglesiases of the world. But the presumption of that dunk, as other people pointed out on Twitter in response to his comment, is that anyone who has scrambled to a place of privilege in this economy should just naturally have contempt for any attempt to change that society—which points out the fact that we need a new society! All these cynical dunks end up actually naturalizing these inequalities that exist.
The issue is, what kind of world do we want to build? In the world that I want to build, that I think Bernie is a step towards building, it wouldn’t be taken as a natural fact of the universe that the upper class should scorn and despise the lower class. That’s the horizon that we are aiming for. On the road to that horizon, there are inevitably contradictions.
In terms of my personal experience—to come to the question about academia and activism—I haven’t found too much contradiction yet, probably because I haven’t rocked the boat sufficiently. People outside the university would give me that question sometimes, especially when I was an untenured assistant professor: “Do people in the field feel threatened? Do your colleagues, or the institution, or the administration feel threatened by that?” The answer is no, or maybe, not yet. If Bernie actually becomes President, that could change. I do think that part of it is that this movement, this new left momentum… Its trajectory and its strength are still very uncertain. It hasn’t forced its opponents to respond to it with the fullness that it can expect to be responded to.
AI: That’s one of the funny things I see in academia in general, is the degree to which certain radical scholarship is accepted or even striven towards, but actual radical politics… There’s a lot of professors that use a very obviously Marxist analysis when they’re dealing with literature or history, but their politics are firmly left-liberal. I think it’s just because Marxist discourse has become such a pillar in the American academy, whether or not this is actually affecting any change. I feel like this is an odd thing.
MK: I agree. There are a lot of things to say about the place of Marxism in the academy. According to some accounts, political Marxists were largely driven out of social sciences a generation ago or more, and that even in the humanities they’ve been superseded by other forms of progressivism or radicalism that are less threatening to the power of capital. In some ways this goes back to old arguments in the 1990’s about questions of representation and recognition as opposed to redistribution. I think there is some truth in the analysis that a lot of the new demands for representation and recognition have been much more prominent in scholarly work for over a generation, and that they have found favor at the administrative level too. Whereas, candid, blunt demands for massive material redistribution have shown up with somewhat less frequency in the academy, and it’s not a coincidence.
AI: Radical politics has very much informed your scholarship, public or otherwise. In your Civil War lecture course last year, I remember you made a point that slavery didn’t start the Civil War—antislavery started the Civil War. Assertions like these generally have a wider implication that it’s progressive or revolutionary movements which must consciously push history forward, that history happens through action rather than reaction. It’s not a big leap from this view of history, to throwing support behind Bernie’s campaign.
I’ve seen a recent proliferation of popular articles from you and from others about the Civil War era, and I don’t see that as just a coincidence. So has your focus on the Civil War era—this time of radical politics and change—influenced how you interpret the current left movement, or has it worked backwards, that being alive in this political time today has changed how you look at your period of expertise?
MK: I think it’s probably the latter. I’m persuaded that all history reflects the conditions of the present probably in a more substantial way than most historians would acknowledge. My first book, which was about slaveholders and foreign policy, came out of trying to unpack a foreign policy worldview that was definitely influenced by the war in Iraq, the Bush administration, and this idea (which in retrospect the Bush administration didn’t even represent that well) of a small and restricted government at home, and an expansive and powerful state abroad. I found parallels between American foreign policy in the 21st century and slaveholders’ idea of foreign policy in the mid-19th century. That definitely shaped the first book, and its emphasis on the slaveholding worldview, which was fundamentally about conservatism, or about a reaction. It is worth saying that that’s the book that got me this job; that’s the book that got me tenure, in effect; and that book was born out of a left-liberal politics, even though by the time I was revising it I had started to make an ideological shift.
I would say it’s impossible to avoid, and I don’t even want to run from the conclusion, that this new project I’m working on now about antislavery politics is imbued with the experience of the Bernie 2016 campaign, a belief in the possibilities of mass politics, and—I think you put it really well, about agitation and radical organization driving the motor of history, not just reaction—the possibilities of specifically electoral struggle. There is a reason why this book is focusing on the creation of the Republican Party as a national party contesting presidential elections. I hope I’m not strip-mining this history for usable parts for politics 160 years later, but I do think the example of the mid-nineteenth century United States is something that radicals or progressives or anyone who wants to transform society broadly from the left can’t afford to ignore. There is a lot more to be said even than what the current scholarship says about the political process, the political revolution, that produced an antislavery government.
AI: Could you summarize your take on Bernie: Why should we support him, and why can he win?
MK: Why we should support Bernie and why I think Bernie should win really amount to the same thing. In 2016, Bernie uncovered what I would call something like a sleeping majority for social democracy that the United States, that a huge chunk—I think in fact polls now do show a pretty healthy majority of Americans support things like health care for all, jobs for all, college for all, and if you polled even further I think you would get support for housing for all and other universal programs that would fundamentally transform not just the welfare state, but the experience of deprivation and scarcity and misery in American life. These ideas had been studiously kept off the table by almost everyone in the Democratic Party for the last 30 years, and we didn’t know how popular they were or weren’t. Bernie found that they were popular, and especially then married those ideas to a class-centered political analysis that put the blame for why we don’t have healthcare, college, housing, jobs for all on the 1% which has siphoned the wealth out of the economy for the last 40 years while wages haven’t grown, and the average standard of living for a median American has arguably stagnated.
Bernie developed that analysis in mass politics. He built a constituency for it that connected the social democratic platform with the critique of the billionaire class, and he’s built it into a diamond-hard formula that has enormous traction nationally. If he were the Democratic nominee, a general election fought on those terms, even just the election campaign itself, could really transform the country in a way that no primary campaign could. If you think about how much he achieved in 2016 just in the Democratic primaries—in which about a quarter of the amount of people voted [as the number of general election voters]—tons of Americans have heard of Bernie Sanders but barely know what he stands for. I still think that’s true about non-voters, people who didn’t vote at all in 2016. But polls show that a lot of those Americans support his ideas, and when those ideas can get politicized in a general election campaign it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity. I don’t think any of the candidates in the Democratic field, however much they embrace parts of that rhetoric and parts of that program… They remain too committed to a standard Democratic Party way of doing business that fatally limits the appeal of those ideas in a general campaign.
AI: Say he does win. How can you see a Bernie victory influencing your own scholarship?
MK: Yeah, I mean that’s really interesting. I’m toying with the idea of writing a trilogy that goes through the Civil War era following the Republican Party. First, the political revolution of the 1850s that brought antislavery to power, that’s the current book. This is a slightly grandiose scheme, but I would need to take the story through the military revolution of the Civil War, and the governmental revolution of the Civil War, in which emancipation was achieved, but the government and the party were transformed. That second book would go through to the 14th amendment, or to the Reconstruction Acts, to the summit of the political and wartime radical revolution. The third book would consider the triumph of reaction. Centering the experience of the Republican Party as the vessel that produced the Civil War, won the Civil War, and then lost Reconstruction internally, I would put the causality or the emphasis there.
The experience of a radical politics when it gets into government and what it can and can’t achieve is something I definitely would want to explore, and I hope to God we have the chance to have that experience. My sense is almost certainly that it would involve mass disillusionment, but it would be the kind of disillusionment that I think would be wonderful to experience as opposed to the disillusionment of simple defeat.
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