I read a Billy Corgan interview 10 or 12 years ago where he talked about his feud with Pavement and Stephen Malkmus. Corgan was always a jerk, and he's turned into an Alex Jones maniac, but he was also very observant about the psychology of the music industry.

The harmony isn't perfect, but I think there's a certain resonance between what he said then and progressive politics today. I find myself thinking about it a lot.

Can't quote it directly. It's been too long. Don't even remember which magazine it was. Spin? But two things stuck with me. Corgan said he knew the indie rockers were right about how crappy major labels were. Big labels were a scam.

But instead of crying about it and playing for a tiny slice of the market with indie labels, Corgan signed with a major label, became a big rock star, hired bigtime lawyers, sued his label for a bigger cut, and won.

Who is the hero here? The greedy stadium rocker who makes the big labels play fair, or the indie rocker who plays it safe, never sells out and never makes any money?

The other thing Corgan said was that indie rockers celebrated cowardice as a virtue. Ultimately, he said, Malkmus was afraid to go for it. He didn't want to find out if his work could resonate with a big audience of normal people, because he was afraid to fail.

So instead, Malkmus marketed himself to a pack of insular sonic snobs who kept telling him what he wanted to hear -- that he was great, so long as he didn't sign with a big label and get famous for real.

There is a lot missing from this account. It's totally unfair to Malkmus. People are still listening to Pavement 25 years later.

Malkmus made a pretty good living and influenced a ton of other musicians. Pavement made much more good music than the Pumpkins did, because they didn't poison themselves with rockstar bullshit the way Corgan did.

But I met enough musicians over the years to know that there was something to what Corgan was saying. Indie rockers are obsessed with beautiful losers. A lot of them don't really want to win.

I never got the chance to sell out as a musician, so the issue was basically moot in terms of my own career. But I think about it quite a bit with the state of progressive politics.

I think Matt is often too hard on people, and I don't know if he's right about the other stuff in this conversation. But this point strikes me as uncomfortably accurate. https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1250767175339646977

A good chunk of the progressive movement at this juncture in time doesn't seem serious about wielding power -- it wants to play with other progressives and prove to other progressives how progressive they all are. In the process, some of them are doing good, important work.

But as a movement, I think it has become very clear they have little to no influence within contemporary politics. Every faction just got crushed in the 2020 primary. But there doesn't seem to be much thought about what should or could come next.

Progressives don't really talk about how they might wield power in the future, other than dissecting Sanders/Warren campaign mistakes or some vague commitment to "organize better" next time.

What exactly needs to change about the existing progressive coalition? How should it be expanded? Where are the allies going to come from to make it politically potent?

I don't know the answers to those questions. But I think it's significant that two devastating crashes have now proved that progressives were basically right about what's wrong with the world -- and yet progressives are just as politically irrelevant as they were 20 years ago.