Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: John Berger, author of the classic “Ways of Seeing,” was more than a Marxist art critic.  On the 100^th anniversary of his birth, John Powers comments on his life and work—both of which were extraordinary.  John is critic-at-large on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. But first: the governors’ races in this election are crucial to the next presidential election – Harold Meyerson will comment, in a minute.
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Now it’s time for this week’s political update. For that, we turn to Harold Meyerson. He’s editor at large of the American Prospect. We reached him today in our nation’s capital. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.

JW: Most of the election reporting has been about winning control of Congress, especially the Senate. But some of this year’s elections will also determine who oversees the presidential election in November 28th. It’s the governors who are elected this November who will be the key to the security of the election of a new president two years from now, because they have the final word declaring the winner in their state. And Republicans this year have nominated candidates for governor who have denied the results of the 2020 presidential election, and others who’ve expressed skepticism about the 2020 results. Election deniers are running for governor this year in some key states Trump carried in 2024 that the Democrats have to win. They include Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. A Republican victory next month in any one of these governor’s races could create a potential opening for Trump’s party to subvert the 2028 presidential election.
Now, things look good for the Democratic candidates for governors in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Wisconsin, it’s a little too close for comfort.  And the closest of all those races is Nevada, where the incumbent governor running for reelection is a Republican with a long history of ties to election deniers. Harold, you’ve just returned from Nevada. Tell us about Republican Governor Joe Lombardo and the Democrat who is challenging him, Aaron Ford.

HM: Joe Lombardo is kind of a standard issue Republican in the age of Trump. He’s also particularly close to some moneyed interests where the details of his record are, shall we say, questionable. After two workers were killed working on a project of the Boring Corporation owned by Elon Musk, the charges were sort of mysteriously dropped, and Lombardo’s administration says it has no record of these proceedings at all. They seem to have mysteriously vanished.
But his campaign for reelection is somewhat curious in that he’s really not campaigning very much on his record and his issues. He’s campaigning, and has been since early this year, chiefly by attacking his Democratic challenger, who is the state’s attorney general, Aaron Ford.
Aaron Ford, by contrast, is emphasizing both his working class roots, which are quite evident, from his precarious economic upbringing and his working class-oriented program. I believe he is the only candidate out there this year who is running in part on repealing Nevada’s right to work law, which inhibits union union organizing. Since there’s a very heavy Democratic majority in the legislature, I think it’s pretty clear that if Ford can win — and the two most recent polls show him either up or down by two percentage points, depending on which poll you look at — If he can win, I think it’s quite likely Nevada will, in fact, repeal its right to work law.

JW: A little background here: Nevada, I learned from your new piece at The Prospect, is roughly one third Latino, 11% Asian, 11% black–and Aaron Ford is a Black man–and 45% white. The big question, it seems to me, is, are Latinos backing the Black candidate for governor in Nevada?

HM: They seem to be. Some of the internals on polling shows that Ford is up by as much as 30 percentage points. Now, any study of Latino voting, and I did a lot of them back when I was at the LA Weekly and was looking at the rising share of Latino voters in LA and California generally. any look at Latino voting shows that they are probably the most wallet, bread-and-butter oriented demographic constituency in abroad in the United States. Wages, levels of employment and the cost of living clearly are the main things that Latino generally working class voters look at.  And boy, is the cost of living out of control in Nevada.

JW: I was a little surprised to learn from your new piece that Nevada’s people are more working class than any state outside of Appalachia and the Deep South. Tell us a little about that.

HM: If you look at the metric of a percentage of college graduates, it is the seventh lowest, after states like West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee. Metaphorically, when a state is founded, at least in its popular culture reputation, by Bugsy Siegel, that’s not quite the same as having a John Harvard, let us say, as one of the state’s founding pillars. It has an overwhelmingly working class population. The largest private sector employers in the state are MGM Resorts and Caesars Palace Resorts. Those are not the kind of jobs that require graduate school training. Though if you’re a poker or blackjack dealer, you better know as well as any mathematician what the odds are for having the House win.

JW: You said that Aaron Ford’s life was an example of economic precarity. It is a pretty great story. Tell us about what he was doing before he was elected the state’s attorney general.

HM: Well, he’d been a successful lawyer for a number of years, and his wife is a successful lawyer as well. But before that, he grew up in a household where his father, who worked in a supermarket, brought home as dinner for him the leftover candy bars. As Ford told a group of Teamsters I saw him talking with, he says he didn’t even have a spoon, let alone a silver spoon in his mouth. And something he told me in an interview, which which really struck me: in the early years of his marriage, which has been now going on for 30 years, his wife wanted to buy a home. And this was a little bit disconcerting to him. He said for him, the American dream was renting a home with an electric stove — so when the gas company shut off your bill for nonpayment, you would still have a working stove. That  suggests an upbringing in the precariat. And he is making that clear as he can to his fellow working class Nevadans.

JW: You also report that the Republican campaign against him has relentlessly publicized the endorsement of his campaign by California Governor Gavin Newsom. Why is that such a big deal?

HM: Well, the sort of supposition behind the Lombardos campaign emphasis of that is somehow the cultural vibes of California were going to climb over the Sierras and infect the Nevada flatlands if Ford was elected.  And the effect of these ads has been such that during the meeting I sat in on with his doing back and forth with the Teamsters, one of the Teamster members asked him about his California upbringing, and Ford had to say that his upbringing took place entirely in Texas, and that he’s never lived in California in his life. So such is the effect of this kind of crap saturation that has clearly been on Nevada’s airwaves and social media.

JW: You said he’s one of the most pro-working class candidates running anywhere in the country today. Does that make him something like Mamdani, or Bernie?

HM: Not really. He doesn’t really align himself with those Democrats. His hero, he says, is Barack Obama. And I think he’s sort of in the mainstream of the kind of somewhat mushy, social democratic, non-black nationalist politics we associate with Obama, but minus the ties to Wall Street, which inhibited Obama’s responses to the Great Recession.  And clearly pushing a program of higher wages, banning private equity from from owning homes — definitely a more working class-oriented platform than the kind of platform that Obama might have been running on in 2008 and 2012.

JW: So what does Aaron Ford need to do to win this election and become Nevada’s next governor?

HM: He’s getting outspent, as most Democrats are this year in the media by the Lombardo campaign, which has made a big issue of a lot of Aaron Ford’s out of state travels, a good deal of which were due to lawsuits that he had represented the state in for trials out of state and for meetings with his fellow attorneys general. Not all of them were were that, however. So he needs he needs really just to effectively introduce himself. And that’s best done with the ground game in Nevada to Nevadans. And contrast his concern for bread and butter issues with the relative indifference of the Republican against whom he’s running.

JW: The other big topic in the news this week is money in politics, especially Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. We learned the news that he has now become America’s biggest midterm spender. He has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars — at least $276 million of the reported spending, focusing mostly on trying to save the Republican Senate majority.
In 2024, he built a big turnout operation through a super PAC called America PAC. And he’s revived that. And they do door-to-door canvasing in trying to turn out hard to reach Republican voters. Texas is his biggest concern, his own home state, and it’s there that he’s spent most of most of the money of his canvass operation. This is unusual for Texas because it’s such a big state. Mostly candidates rely on TV. And it’s interesting that Musk’s canvasing operation is focused not on swing voters, but on low propensity conservative voters who voted for Trump in 2024 but are unlikely to vote in midterms. To turn them out, Musk’s superPAC is focusing on transgender issues.
Is this working?  The best poll, the New York Times Siena poll, shows that in Texas, Talarico now leads Ken Paxton 51 to 45, whereas the same poll had them tied at 47 each in June. So it seems like Musk spending hundreds of millions to turn out unlikely Republicans isn’t working right now. My question for you is: why is this unprecedented level of spending, the focus on canvasing as well as paid media, why is this having so little effect on voters in Texas?

HM: Obviously we don’t know what effect it really has until the votes come in on Election Day. But what we do know is that the outreach to the only sometime right wing voters, be they ads or visits on their doorsteps, to the extent that it’s highlighting the trans issue, that is countered by this constituency’s daily dealings with the price of everything.
This isn’t really a particularly upper middle class constituency that they’re trying to reach. The upper middle class tends to vote in midterms. it’s more working class. And, you know, working class is not exactly experiencing a very good time, as we said in our discussion of Nevada, in today’s economy. And so this is an uphill struggle, no matter how many paid door knockers Elon Musk can afford to deploy.

JW: Mike Johnson had a revealing remark in puzzling over the latest poll results. He said, “angry people vote. Satisfied people don’t.” I think he’s on to something there.

HM: He’s very much on to something there. Indignation at the government’s failure to  really perform the basics you would hope and expect it would perform is a great motivator to get out and vote. And the Democrats are riding that wave. We don’t know yet quite how far it will carry them. But the fact that Texas is in play, not just for the Senate seat, but for the gubernatorial seat, is evidence thus far that that wave is there.

JW: One last thing. Our political definition of the week: J.D. Vance was asked at a recent press conference to define socialism. He said, “I think in reality, what the term means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls sports.” I wonder if you have any comment.

HM: Let’s just say I don’t think Karl Marx would recognize that. I don’t think Eugene Debs would recognize that, or Norman Thomas, or Michael Harrington, or Bayard Rustin, or A. Philip Randolph, or Zorhan Mamdani,or Bernie Sanders, or AOC.

JW: Harold Meyerson: Read him at Prospect.org, where his terrific report on politics in Nevada has just been published. Harold, thanks for talking with us today.

HM: It’s good to be here, Jon.

JW: And remember that this Saturday, October 17, is No Kings Vote Early day.  The No Kings coalition has shifted its focus from dramatizing opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism to support for voting, especially voting early. The best election protection is huge margins of victory. More than 2,000 places will hold No Kings Vote Early events on Oct. 17.  Check the map at NoKings.org to find an event near you.  I really like the No Kings map – 2,000 events, with events in every state of the union -it shows that we are everywhere.  So Vote Early, on Oct. 17 –and join No Kings Vote Early events.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about John Berger, the British Marxist who wrote about art and a lot of other things, starting with Ways of Seeing in 1972. It’s the 100th anniversary of his birth this year. For comment, we turn to John Powers. He’s critic at large on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where he has an audience of millions. John, Welcome back.

John Powers: Glad to be here.

JW: John Berger first became known in 1972 with what was a four-part BBC TV series, “Ways of Seeing.” The Guardian recently said he appeared there to be “an insurrectionist, the critic’s equivalent of a rock star or cult leader.”  In 1972, you were something like 20 years old, a college student. What was it like for you to watch that show?

JP: It was life-changing. I would very rarely call something life-changing. But somehow seeing that show made me think there was an entire new way to think about art and politics and life. In watching the show again, I can see why he might have seemed like a rock star. He had this long, long, curly hair and wasn’t dressed in a suit the way presenters were back then. But what was striking was he was simply telling you things that as soon as he said them, were transparently true. For instance, one of the most famous parts of Ways of Seeing is talking about the history of the nude. He was the first person I ever heard who came up with the idea of the male gaze.  And he drew the distinction between nakedness and nudity. And he talked about the politics of who’s seeing who and why. And that changed my life.
When he would show you a landscape painting and say that basically the meaning of this is about the ownership of the land rather than the beauty of the landscape — that blew my head off. So, it was extraordinary.

JW: And one of the striking things to me rereading this book now is how much he loves European art. He’s steeped in European art. There’s da Vinci and there’s Rembrandt and there’s Picasso and so on. But as you say, it’s a completely breathtaking and thrilling way of looking at this, even today.

JP: Part of what makes him great is that he’s not a demystifier purely. There’s a passage where he talks about a painting that Rembrandt did of his wife, where he basically explains how it’s a painting from love.  And his way of describing this, the sensual feeling and how she’s not being there to be seen, and how Rembrandt looks at her. And he’s honoring and loving the painting for itself. And at the same time, explaining all the stuff around it.

JW: My only complaint is the Penguin paperback, which has been on our shelves for 40 years – the reproductions are just tiny thumbnails in black and white. It’s horrible to look at, especially since this whole thing is about looking. But the argument is still, I would say, thrilling.
Then, in 1972, Berger also published a novel. The title was G. It won the Booker Prize, and his acceptance speech is probably as well known as the book. Let’s talk about the acceptance speech.

JP: I guess the first thing is it’s a historic it’s a historical novel filled with sex and politics and ideas. It is, as they say, post-modern, meaning that he talks about partly the process of writing it. He talks about how we write things. Slightly difficult book, but not difficult by the standards of, say, Gravity’s Rainbow. I think to everyone’s surprise, he won the Booker Prize, and it was announced, and he had this speech prepared. And the legend of the speech–I knew the legend of the speech before I actually read this speech–was that he got up and essentially insulted the people there, the people giving the Booker Prize, by saying that the McConnell Booker company made its money from slavery. And so therefore, “I’m going to give half the money to the Black Panthers.” And that’s how it’s presented almost always, which is him being rude and all the rest. Then you read the speech and it’s, in fact, a carefully reasoned speech where he starts off talking about the idea of literary competitions and how that links to the marketing of books and to excellence. He then praises the jury for choosing other very worthy books that he was very honored to be alongside.
And then he goes into a discussion of more or less how he was going to work on a book on immigration, and that when you were working on a book on immigration, you can’t fail to notice that lots of the immigrants in Britain came from the Caribbean, and that those people from the Caribbean partly came there because they’d been impoverished by companies like McConnell, Booker. And so therefore, that he wanted to turn the award against itself slightly by giving half the money to the Black Panthers.
When you read it, it’s exceedingly eloquent. It’s exceedingly well argued. And it is, while controversial and clearly point making, it’s not strident in any rational meaning of that term. I would add in connection with that, that part of the importance of the speech is that he had become famous a bit because of Ways of Seeing being on television. One of his earlier books was a book about Picasso and about Picasso losing, as his fame increased, he lost touch with his connection with the world. And I think Berger was partly, in doing this, trying to make sure that he himself, in accepting this award, didn’t get folded into the literary establishment and the British establishment that he spent his entire life fighting.

JW: I want to thank you for suggesting I read the text of the speech and not just the posthumous couple of sentences about it. It’s one of the most eloquent political statements I’ve ever read.

JP: And you know, it is. It actually shows him at his best.

JW: I think for me, in the most eloquent sentences, he talks about the current struggle against exploitation and neo colonialism. And he says, “it is only by virtue of this common struggle that it is possible for the descendants of the slave and the slave master to approach each other again with the amazed hope of potential equals.” Fantastic.

JP: Many people were unhappy. One of them – Edna O’Brien’s, I think, ex-husband, said, “if you want to give money to murderers, why not give it to the IRA?” Angrily, because the event was so, I think, so decorous before then, that to give a very rational speech like that would seem like a slap.

JW: And let me just say, as a footnote, the Booker Prize has changed a lot since then. Right now, they have a big web page about Berger’s speech. They have photographs from the event. Obviously, they consider it now kind of a historic moment in their development.
After the success of the BBC show and the prize for the novel, he left Britain and moved first to Geneva and then to a peasant village in the Alps of southwestern France called Quincy. Was this like Orwell going to live with the miners in Road to Wigan Pier, to report on their exploitation and resistance?

JP: Well, if Orwell had stayed at Wigan Pier for 50 years — because Berger spent almost the rest of his life there, that was his base. He was leaving England. And here is where one should say that part of the glamor and excitement of Berger, in addition to his good looks and dashing style, was that he was a seeker. In this he’s linked to D.H. Lawrence on one hand, and probably in Italy, Pasolini on the other, which is looking for some sort of pre-capitalist authenticity. But in fact, he was trying to find a way that was not just living in more or less hypercapitalist London. He didn’t want to be part of that life. He also, historically, because he lived among peasants and was probably notorious, not just famous for not having an indoor bathroom in his house there, even though the peasants around him did have indoor bathrooms. Okay. And I think his landlord there always referred to him, called him “the actor” because he was like this, this glamorous British guy showing up. But he then did help them doing their work. He did help. Like during hay season. He would actually help. He wanted to be part of this community. People do find some sort of earlier model of less alienated way of living, and he was clearly drawn to that.

JW: The big writing project of his first years in Quincy was he had described in the Booker speech: a book about migrant laborers. It was published in 1975 called A Seventh Man. What was that book like, and how does it hold up today?

JP: It’s a combination of more or less political analysis and reportage with photographs by a guy he’s worked with named Jean Mohr, a Swiss guy. It’s following not specific immigrants, but almost following some sort of idealized or generic immigrant from the moment they leave their village, all the way through the process of getting exploited and all the things that happened to them.
It still holds up. It’s a different group of immigrants. It now seems slightly dated because the immigrants are fleeing in a different way than they did before, and the world is less sympathetic to them than, weirdly enough, back in the mid-70s, there was the talk of how badly exploited they were, and now it’s probably even worse through much of Europe. But in fact, it really holds up exceedingly well. There are just beautiful passages where Berger writes about what it means to leave your village, where the framework of your life is suddenly shattered, and you’re off, where you basically know nothing, and you’ve made the decision to do that. And the money situation is so bad for you that your mother wants you to go. And how often the immigrants take food with them to remind them of home. But they eat it too soon because they need to be anchored in it. I mean, it’s beautiful stuff with the political analysis of how the European economy works and how it needs those people to work cheaply and be exploited.

JW: And then the last part is about returning home, and about the complexity of your family that stayed behind that you have had to support with your money now is kind of alienated from you and you from them.

JP: Yes. It’s kind of like war in a way, which is you’ve had this completely life altering experience and you no longer mesh trying to make the better world. You probably make it worse for yourself.

JW: And we should note that Verso reissued a Seventh Man in paperback last year.  I think perhaps for the American context, where Trump’s attacks on immigrant workers from Latin America have been such a definitive part of our politics for the last decade.

JP: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s one reason why the book is so relevant, because what Berger was always great at was both understanding and empathizing with people who were not like, probably, a person reading the book. He could have had the cushy life of a prosperous intellectual. He could have come to the US probably and written for Vanity Fair like Christopher Hitchen,s or written for others like Alexander Cockburn, like all the Brits who came over, he could easily have done it. And he didn’t. He went to France and lived in a peasant village and wrote a masterful book about the life of the peasantry, because it’s a vanishing form of life. And he wanted to capture that.

JW: Berger died in 2017 at the age of 90. Now that it’s the 100th anniversary of his birth, we’re getting a new biography by Tom Overton, who had been talking with Berger for a long time. It’s called From Life. It’s being published in the United States right now. I mean, the first thing everybody wants to know about Tom Overton is what does he say about Berger’s chaotic personal life, his string of wives and lovers?

JP: He’s rather matter of fact about it. Berger was involved with so many different women and was also just theoretically a sex guy. Which is to say that the hero of G. —

JW: The novel.

JP: G, that won the Booker Prize, is a guy who goes around seducing women and believes that it’s important to have the sensual, intimate, personal experience that’s essential to living properly and is progressive. In addition to all of that, that which was Berger’s thought. And so along the way, he has different women. At some point they break up for reasons that people break up. He had four wives. That’s one more than me. I’m in no position to be sanctimonious about it. There’s a point where Berger has written an eloquent thing about free love and Overton notes that he did have his wife of the time type it even as it was his defense basically, of going off and sleeping with somebody else. And so that there was that side to Berger that probably wasn’t altogether sweet. Like many womanizers, he was in himself deeply. What’s important about the sex stuff? One reason I love him so much is he seems like his work is such an ideal antidote to digital culture, because he is about the look, the taste, the feel of the actual world. He is about like not just feeling bad for immigrants, but going and meeting them, shaking hands with them, riding in vans with them. So, I mean, for him, the physical fact of the material world is essential to everything. I mean, he would just be, I think, aghast and think it’s the proof of ultimate capitalist alienation that people now think they can know one another with, without even wanting to touch them because he was a skin contact guy from the get-go. And that in some ways probably made him a bad romantic partner, you know? But it probably did make him also brilliant when he wrote about it. And for me, at some level, I don’t care that he was foolish on certain things, I don’t care. The actual work he wrote was so great that only an idiot would think that somehow it disqualifies him that he had too many girlfriends.

JW: Verso is currently publishing 14 books by John Berger. That does not include Ways of Seeing, which has been a Penguin book for decades. Penguin notably is releasing for the first time an audiobook of Ways of Seeing in December, and it’s not revealing who the reader is going to be.  Since Berger’s own voice in that original BBC show is so authoritative and recognizable, it is kind of a challenge for someone else to read this to us.

JP: He was good friends with Tilda Swinton, so maybe Tilda will read it.
The NLRB classics is bringing out his trilogy about peasant life – that’s in the spring. This last summer, they brought out G. And at the same time as Overton’s biography, they’re bringing out a collection of his called About Looking, which I highly recommend, I think everyone should buy because every single essay in it is fantastic. There’s a great one about looking at animals that is brilliant, has been loved by animal rights people ever since he wrote it, and it was a long time before people were doing it. He has a fantastic piece on Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, in which the argument is talking about how Bacon and Walt Disney flatten human life and how they do it in different ways. But in fact, what they share in common is that what Bacon shares with Walt Disney, the bleakest, darkest person, and Walt Disney. It’s a brilliant essay. Every essay in it is fantastic.  About Looking.

JW: Finally, Berger once described himself as “a Marxist, among other things.”  And the socialist magazine Jacobin, when he died, said “his basic commitment was to the idea that solidarity with the voiceless was a duty, and that capitalism was the bitter enemy of all creative labor.” That seems pretty good to me.

JP: It is. That’s absolutely true. I don’t think I could think of anything he did where that wouldn’t be a proper description of it. With the proviso that he is “a Marxist, among other things.”  He does change the way you see the world. In my life there have been maybe two or three people who’ve done that, and he’s one of them.

JW: John Powers – you can hear him on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. John, special thanks for this one.

JP: My pleasure.