interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
Playing Populist
by Thomas Frank
February 12, 2021
This interview with Thomas Frank, author of "Listen, Liberal" and "The People, No.", was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Thomas | My name is Thomas Frank. I'm the author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. It's about people who hate populism.
frank | Who hates populism?
These days I'd have to say liberals, unfortunately, and ironically. I say “ironically” because Populism, real Populism with a capital P, started as a liberal movement. Nowadays, liberals are profoundly mistrustful of ordinary Americans and of mass movements of working-class people. They reiterate this all the time. You see it expressed in a hundred different ways: from Hillary Clinton talking about the deplorables, to the people on Twitter speaking with an assumption that white working-class people are basically scoundrels.
Populism began with The Populists – the party — around 1890. Can you talk about the origins a bit more?
We talk about populism all the time nowadays, but unless you understand where the word comes from, you're going to be really, really confused about what people are using it to mean. The word does not come from Latin. The word is not from ancient Greek. The word was made up by a bunch of people on a train between Kansas City and Topeka in the year 1891 in order to describe a brand new third-party movement that had just started up in Kansas. This was a left-wing, third-party movement. It was largely made of farmers, but it also included union workers and other working-class types. The Populists wanted federal programs for farmers, they wanted to nationalize the railroads, they wanted to crack down on monopolies, and they wanted to take America off the gold standard. They pushed for political reforms that would have made it easier to vote. Essentially, they wanted to make the voice of the people heard more effectively in Washington. That's what they stood for. That's what Populism was all about.
Until it wasn't.
Yeah. It was immediately redefined by the people who hated all of those things. The Populist platform, the things I just described, were extremely controversial, though they sound like common sense today. In 1891, the leading newspapers of Kansas and of America more broadly attacked Populism with severe language. They described it as a movement of losers from the bottom rungs of society. They said that because these people have the right to vote, they think that they can demand to run things that they have no business running.
They didn't say deplorables back then, but they said similar things: hayseeds, riff-raff, ne'er do wells. They said that these were the worst people in society.
There were a lot of armchair psychologists at the time that would speculate about what made people sign up with the Populist movement, and it was always that there was something wrong in their brains.
That attack on populism survives to this day. This redefinition that was thrown at the Populists as a political attack has stuck. And, I should say, was thrown at them by what would today be considered the extreme right-wing, though at the time they would have been described as respectable gentlemen of New York and Boston or something like that.
Was there any prioritization of race during the early days of The Populist party? And I guess, if so, to what extent?
So the Populists did something that was very innovative in the 1890s, which was to reach out to Black voters in the South, where most Black people lived at the time. In a lot of Southern States, Black people could still vote in the 1890s, they hadn't been fully disenfranchised yet.
In the south, the ruling political philosophy of that era was white solidarity. The idea that white people's interests as whites was paramount to everything else. Whether you're a rich white or poor white didn't matter, you had to vote for the party of the white man, which was, of course, the Democratic Party. At the time, they were the monopoly party in the South.
The Populists came into the South with a different proposition.
Your class interest is actually more important than your racial interests. They openly appealed to Black and white voters on this basis.
The tactic seemed to succeed at first, but then, the masters of the South came down on these guys like a ton of bricks and absolutely destroyed the Populist movement. They did so by unleashing an incredible campaign of racial hysteria directed against Black people, using every sort of ugly racist trope that you can imagine to beat Populism down. And when they were done, in a lot of states they disenfranchised Black voters. Many Southern states went around and took the vote away from African-Americans through various forms of legislation. They enforced literacy tests. They implemented poll taxes. In doing so, they wound up taking the vote away from a lot of poor whites as well. And they did all this to make sure that something like populism never happened again.
I was watching MLK’s speech at the conclusion of the march from Selma to Montgomery. He talks about Populism as a way to awake the masses and as a uniting face in a segregated society.
I'm glad you brought that up. This Martin Luther King speech in 1965 is one of my favorite moments. He is on the steps of the Capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama. He's at the very end of this era of disenfranchisement. They're just about to pass the Voting Rights Act, Black civil rights are about to be restored, and they are going to be voting again. This long nightmare chapter of history is finally ending. As he is standing at the tail end of it, King looks back and asks, how did this terrible system get started in the first place? He says it was started as a way of beating down the Populist movement, which is, in fact, correct.
Now, I don't want to romanticize it too much because the Populists were not racial liberals in a modern sense. They did not understand the issues the way that we do today. The official Populist party doctrine was that they were going to reach out to Black voters in the South, but in truth, they weren't very systematic about it, and they didn't do a very good job of it. I mean, they were a third party, so they never really got very far with their project. It ended in incredible disaster, as Martin Luther King points out in his speech.
But even so, historians used to look back to Populism as a bright spot in Southern history, because it was the only time before the Civil Rights era that poor whites and poor Blacks had tried to get together based on their shared interests.
And, so far we don't have that.
There’s a fear of a truly mobilized electorate – but mobilizing through class over other issues is difficult. It seems like it should be what the Democratic party should be about, and yet, there's a real rejection of it.
I didn't really plan on asking, but I'm curious how you see the media in this. How do you think media propels an anti-Populist narrative through criticism, many times using the same language populist critics were using a hundred years ago?
Yeah. A lot of these criticisms of Populism began on the extreme right, and now those criticisms are, word for word, enunciated by liberals. That is largely because liberalism has changed. The Democratic party today is not the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt or of Martin Luther King. It's a party that is overwhelmingly concerned with the fortunes of highly educated, affluent white-collar workers, and not working-class people. If you look at who donates to the Democratic Party, and who supports the Democratic Party, you see that it tends to be people from the knowledge industries, industries where your position is based on credentialed expertise. Wall Street is a huge supporter of the Democratic party. Silicon Valley and Hollywood are as well. Various academia, of course, too. And the Democratic Party does extraordinary favors for these industries and for these people.
They don't understand themselves as the voice of the working-class. That went out of style in the 1970s. By and large liberals today have taken up the positions of conservatives of yesterday in a lot of ways; they occupy the cultural position that conservatives did a hundred years ago. Liberals understand themselves as the best element of society, and they look down upon the riffraff. They've taken over where the conservatives of the 1890s left off.
I heard a criticism of Al Gore that I hadn't thought about, which was Al Gore was a specific kind of southerner – one who left the South, abandoned his accent, attended an Ivy League school, and then presented as elite. This was from a southerner. And it really got under his skin. Whereas Bush was – real or not –
Well, they were both elites.
Yes, but Bush was at least pretending not to be.
Pretending to be for the people, yeah.
Bush's dad was even worse. George Bush, Sr. was probably the preppiest man in America. He comes from extreme wealth that goes back generations. You can trace their ancestry back to like colonial Massachusetts. Then, when he's running for president against Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bush does this phony populist act in the most outrageous way. He goes around the country, eating pork rinds all the time, hanging around with country and Western singers, and touring flag factories.
Why flag factories? Because the entire campaign was about the culture war. They found some instances where Dukakis had said something along the lines of you don't have to say the pledge of allegiance in school, and they made this into a national issue. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous.
They always do. They walk right into it and they nominate this guy, Michael Dukakis who says it's not about ideology, it's about competence. He is, of course, the most competent of the competent. His white collar has a white collar. He's like the ultimate technocrat.
Why do the Democrats keep nominating these guys? Someone once described Jimmy Carter as a passionless technocrat. The description works just as well for Dukakis. The Democrats keep choosing these guys: Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton. Even Barack Obama to a certain degree is one. They keep choosing them and then getting beat by fake populists.
That story is absurd, but it's like, at least they have the good sense to pretend.
These guys — the Republicans — are extremely good at the game. They come out of the business world. They're endlessly dynamic. They will say anything. They will do anything. They will try anything. They're incredibly innovative. If one thing doesn't work, they drop it and they try another. They'll contradict themselves. Whatever it takes to win, they will do it.
I believe it. I so, so believe it. When I first heard that criticism of Gore, I rolled my eyes, because you think of the difference in presidencies between him and Bush.
Dukakis would have been a better president. There's no doubt about it.
You just think I don't really want to hang out with you at all. How far does that go in terms of getting people elected?
Well, take Trump versus Hillary. There's no question that she would have been a better president than Donald Trump, but Donald Trump is the epitome of phony populism. Here's a guy that seems to speak to the public outrage of the moment in a really emotional way. He's everything that the media is telling us we need in politics: he's out there, he's open, he says whatever he thinks, he would be fun to have a beer with. He becomes president. I just have to say, I am glad we are at the end of this. I'm so relieved that he's done.
I mean, there was a very good chance that this guy was going to get reelected up until COVID. The economy was booming. You had real wage growth in this country, which we haven't seen in a very long time, because the labor market was so tight. If COVID never happened or had he shown just the slightest bit of leadership during the pandemic, he probably would have been reelected. But what a dumbshit. He shows no leadership at all. His narcissism cancels everything else out.
You would think that would shake the Democratic party.
No, no, no. The leadership clique of the Democratic Party are all geared towards mentally or culturally staving off challenges to themselves. Like you think about the people that ran Hillary Clinton's campaign, they all came right back. They all have high places in the party or in academia or the DC thinktanks. There is no accountability with these people. At least with the Republicans, you see shreds of accountability. When somebody screws up really badly, they're done. With Democrats, once you're in the club, there's very little accountability. This is a problem across the board. Look at Obama and the Wall Street banks. There was a complete failure to hold these people accountable.
Could you imagine a successful new wave of populism from the left happening?
It's something that should happen. Lord knows we could use it. America as a great middle-class society has been deteriorating for decades. It's in shreds. Unfortunately, we came to a point where a reckoning had to happen urgently, in the financial crisis in 2009. People like me thought that reckoning was about to take place, but in fact it never happened. There was a time when the public anger at Wall Street was volcanic and effective. It elected Barack Obama.
But Obama failed and the Democratic Party has yet to reckon with Obama's failure. As a president that was faced with an urgent historical task, he failed. You can blame the Republicans for that if you want, because they were obstructionists. They wanted him to fail. But still, there is a whole lot more he could have done about the anger towards the financial crisis and the larger public anger, the disappearance of the American way of life. His heart was not in that fight.
I'm referring not only to the fact that he didn't prosecute these Wall Street guys, but he never made it clear what the financial crisis was about and how we were going to make sure it never happened again. Not only that, but he also rationalized what was happening to people by saying people need to be educated or have an advanced degree to survive. All these Democrats do that. Actually, Joe Biden doesn't, but he’s the exception. I was just watching CNN yesterday, and this guy came on and said that Trump supporters have no one to blame for their bad situation, but themselves, because they didn't get advanced degrees. Are you serious?
That is nuts.
I always think enthusiasm about your alma mater, rather than some embarrassment you were able to attend, means you have worms for brains.
Really? Wow. I live in Bethesda, Maryland, this very affluent place. Every high school student, every elementary school student here has internalized the hierarchy of universities. Everybody knows which university is higher than which other ones. Everybody wants to know where everybody else went to college so that they can place them on this hierarchy. Everybody does this here. It's part of who we are. I kind of admire you for being revolted by that. And I mean, to close the loop, this is an extremely liberal area. These are all Democrats that I’m talking about.
And the right is able to capitalize on it.
Right. The Tea Party movement managed to get themselves in front of the anger towards the financial crisis. They made themselves the face of public anger and captured it. They succeeded in stealing that momentum. They built a fake populist movement out of thin air and they were very good at this, but they were able to do it because the Democrats and Barack Obama failed. He never put any of those executives on trial. The public never really understood what had happened. A mass movement on the left never got going. Occupy Wall Street was too late and too little; it didn't come up until 2011 and it never really became a mass movement in the way that it needed to. The left was not able to generate that kind of populist feeling when we needed it most. And that had terrible consequences for us, the terrible consequences being the right’s capture of dissatisfaction and subsequently the election of Donald Trump.
Everybody knows the middle-class society is in pieces, but only one party is willing to talk about that, admittedly, in an upside-down way. Democrats deny anything is wrong. That is a recipe for disaster.
The theme that runs through everything I've written is the question of what happens to a middle-class society when the party of the left isn't interested in being a party of the left anymore. The Democrats, whatever you want to say about them, are our party of the left.
They don't want to be a party that cares about the economic condition of working-class people. That's not what they're interested in. They're absolutely crystal clear about that. What happens when that's the case? Well, two things happen. One is this kind of incredible inequality that we're in right now where some people do extremely well, and are some of the richest people in the history of the world, and there's no hope for everybody else. And you have politics that constantly veers further and further to the right. That's where we are. And I don't see that changing anytime soon until the day the Democrats rediscover their original purpose.
Did you think Bernie had a chance at being that champion?
I did think he had a chance. He came very close in Iowa in 2020. He won in New Hampshire. He looked like he was on a roll. He was clearly the front runner at one point. I thought it was possible.
He does represent that older tradition in the Democratic Party that's focused on economic well-being of working-class people. And I think that's one of the reasons that the Democratic Party hates him.
There's a generational aspect to this. The Democratic Party’s move to the right was a product of that sixties generation. The Bill Clintons, the Gary Harts, the Al Gores, those who called themselves the New Democrats.
A “new kind of Democrat”...
Yeah. They called themselves the New Democrats. They framed their version of the Democratic Party as a rising up against their parents, the New Deal generation, the World War II generation. They said, out in the open, that they were going to take the Democratic Party away from that Franklin D. Roosevelt orientation. Bernie Sanders is the opposite of that. Bernie Sanders represents the repudiation of that generational project. That's why he's totally unacceptable. He's a throwback to what the Democratic Party used to be before Bill Clinton came along. That’s why he can’t be spoken about in polite company or whatever.
In the end, though, Bernie didn’t have the votes. I’m sure there were contributing factors that were political, but he didn’t reach broad swaths of the working-class, especially those who consider themselves ‘conservative’. Do you think there will come someone who can cross over?
There has to be such a person. I mean, this can't go on.
As soon as I say that, I take it back.
This can go on. An increasingly radicalized Republican party versus this increasingly passionless, technocratic, Democratic Party? Yes. That can go on. That can go on for a really long time without delivering anything to anybody, as long as you have some way of blowing off their steam. We're coming up with ways to do that.
If people continue to feel like their legitimate concerns are not being heard, it's not healthy. This is not a healthy society right now, and it is going to become less healthy. And I don't see an answer on the horizon right now.
It's certainly not coming from the Lincoln Project, it's certainly not from the Democratic Party and it's certainly not from the Trump Republicans — the Ted Cruzes and Marco Rubios who will likely make a comeback after Joe Biden crashes and burns.
What a nightmare.
Well, hey, let's, let's be optimistic, Joe Biden might also succeed. The 78 year old stepping up to the plate might hit a home run.