interviews
It's All About the Money
by Mike Williams
October 20, 2021
This interview with Mike Williams, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Mike | I'm on the energy and environment team, but my focus is on how we put forward energy, environmental, and climate policy in a way that supports working people. My background is working at the intersection of labor and environmental movements. I spent 12 years at the BlueGreen Alliance, focused on passing some significant climate, energy, and environmental policy alongside the labor movement.
frank | How has your work been lately?
Busy, but positive. I think there's a lot of good things that are on the horizon.
I think it's nice that everyone is starting to engage in infrastructure. Does it feel like people are finally paying attention to some of this work you’ve been doing?
Yeah, when I worked for the BlueGreen Alliance, we started pushing the connection between solving the climate crisis and remaking our infrastructure. I think we started really putting it out as a public proposal in 2012, with a report called Making the Grade, when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City. So yes. Been at this for quite a while. It's phenomenal that this has finally broken through, that folks have made the connection between climate change and infrastructure, and that hopefully, we can get to some significant solutions.
To look at the infrastructure as it exists is to realize how massive it is in scale, but also how regional it is. How do you start thinking about modernizing the infrastructure and outlining priorities?
It's an incredibly important question and it's one that gets into the nuts and bolts of how you actually implement infrastructure policy. Some folks think it can be quite boring, but it is so important because what this will eventually come down to is actually building projects that change how our systems work. We have to think about it in a couple of different ways. One, there's obviously the function of the project. We have to make sure that whether we're rebuilding roads, rebuilding bridges, building transit systems, repairing the electric grid, or rebuilding water systems, they have to be safe and reliable. In the end, we're humans who need these systems to live and to have a decent quality of life.
Water, electricity, the internet — these things are public goods. They truly have to be safe and reliable.
The mindset around infrastructure in the past has been "we need to get the best bang for our buck." There needs to be a better purpose for our infrastructure projects. In addition to being safe and reliable, they need to meet the moment and achieve the goals that we as a society have. We need to make sure that our infrastructure projects think about their goals in a holistic manner. How are our goals lifting up communities and working for people who live in them? The projects need to be paying people decent wages, providing benefits, and using unionized labor. The projects need to pollute less, or potentially eradicate pollution at the point source. So that it's making everything around it better.
When we think about reductions, specifically reducing our emissions by 50 percent, what steps need to happen for that to be seriously attempted or achieved?
Before the last nine months, I would have been pretty worried that we could get to that metric, but with the investments at the forefront in Congress right now, I think we can get there.
When we sit down and we again look at it comprehensively, each system has its role to play. Some more than others, but they all add to emissions. When you think of the big ones, like the electric system, the shift to renewables and electrification is huge.
How do we get to zero emissions? Renewables are the biggest driver of that, but additionally, there needs to be a corresponding investment in transmission and storage. We need to be able to build transmission projects to move that electricity to the population centers where people need it. These renewables are to a certain extent intermittent, so we need high capacity transmission, and be able to store energy and then deliver it when people need it.
The technologies are there. We just need to be able to deploy them, at scale. We need rapid deployment of electric vehicles, and we need a major expansion of electric vehicle infrastructure. That's not just charging stations, but an updated and functional electric grid that can deal with all of these vehicles being plugged in.
All of these pieces together can take us beyond the emissions reductions set forth in the Paris Agreement. It can get us on the path to a 50% emissions reduction, which President Biden has called for. But again, this is across multiple sectors. I didn't even get into manufacturing. I didn't get into municipal wastewater management, so on and so forth. They all have their roles to play, but it's that direct investment that will get us there.
As far as implementation goes, how does this rollout? The scale makes it seem top-down.
The coordination from local all the way up to the federal government will be critical.
Funding is top-down. Planning and implementation are generally local.
There are municipal planning organizations in every city across America that are specifically focused on planning for infrastructure projects in their area. So, whether that is Austin, Texas figuring out what we are going to do with their transit system, or whether it is Trenton, New Jersey saying their road situation is a mess, all these planning organizations have put forward their ideas of what would we do if we had this money?
Now it is a matter of starting to put those ideas into motion. The money is hopefully coming. A lot of the planning has already been done locally. The federal government has the capacity to start to approve currents and future projects quickly, and then it's just going to start to move.
But, there isn't much planning needed. A lot of this stuff has been thought out. A lot of it is fairly straightforward. For example, there's been work from the Department of Interior for more than a decade, specifically on how we permit and locate offshore wind projects. These projects need an injection of funding right now from the federal government, and we need to set forward clear goals for what that funding is used for. And so, again to harp on it, the bills that are going through Congress right now do both of those things. It's helping us meet the goal that we need to reduce emissions by 50%, and it's providing the money to back that up. Once we give the money to local municipalities, I have full faith that it can be done.
I wanted to ask about challenges that rural areas face in terms of climate and adaptation, that are different from cities which we talk a lot about.
For a long time, rural areas have been under-invested in. We can see that across multiple areas. Broadband is the most obvious one. Rural areas do not have decent internet access. That is inequitable for people who live in rural areas. You're not as competitive in the job market if you do not have high-quality broadband. That is a hallmark of underinvestment in rural areas. We're about to go hopefully forward with massive investments in our country that will include rural areas. President Biden has called for 40% to go to disadvantaged communities, black and brown communities, environmental justice communities, and that will include rural communities. That's incredibly important.
Hopefully, we make this investment, and hopefully, we do it right. We also need to be thinking about 5, 10, 20 years down the road, when ongoing maintenance needs to happen, will we have set up processes that are providing consistent financial support to ensure disadvantaged communities aren't left behind? Hopefully, this will not just be a one-time thing, but that we actually provide the consistent financial support to ensure that there's equitable access and equitable funding available to these places.
In terms of revitalizing parts of the US that were sucked dry from abandoned industry – when it comes to new climate-oriented infrastructure do people seem excited or is it politicized and pushed back against?
Yeah. It's a critical question. And I appreciate you asking about it. Deindustrialization has been one of the biggest drivers of inequality in America. We should be thinking about how this could be a way to help communities build for the future.
One current example is Rivian in Normal, Illinois. It was the old Mitsubishi manufacturing facility. They closed down, they were purchased, and are now making electric trucks. I think they're gonna start putting them out in public by next year. It's a pretty darn cool story, that would be even better if they honored that plant and town’s history and allowed their workers to collectively bargain. Normal, IL is benefiting from this investment. I saw an article that referred to them as a boomtown because of this investment. It's a great story. But, it's not always going to be just that specific story. I hope there'll be a lot of those stories. The way we make this happen, the way investments need to be made, they need to be made with domestic content included so that we're making investments that have American manufacturing incorporated into it. They need to make the investments that are made so that when projects are built, they're built using union labor so that we are truly lifting up as many people in the community as possible. Again, we need to think about this holistically.
Investment in infrastructure allows for that community to build for the future to think about what they can do to support the people there. So whether it's building out broadband, refurbishing the schools, making a small incubator for craft beer – that's a choice that they can make once the investment in infrastructure comes on top of that back.
And circling back to your question with this massive investment and influx of funds into the clean economy, there will be an expansion of the supply chain. Batteries, the parts, and components of wind turbines–there's roughly seven tons of steel per turbine–all of this can be made in America.
If we're truly incorporating domestic content in these investments, that's going to support American manufacturing. Same with solar panels. You know we make glass in America, that's put into solar panels. We used to make polysilicon, it's critical for making photovoltaic solar panels, but over the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of that production moved to China. That's a long way to answer your question, but thinking about how this investment should help de-industrialized and disadvantaged communities and disadvantaged communities is critical to the success of this investment, and should be prioritized.
Outside of rehab, what are your thoughts on helping people move from areas that can’t be saved? I know retreat is looked at in this really negative way, but sometimes that’s inevitable.
It is a hard and controversial question. When will folks say, “South Beach doesn't work anymore?” I mean, it's a horrifying question to ponder, but if you trust science, it's a real question that will need to be pondered. It coincides with a need for investment in resilience in communities, the ability for a community to adapt and thrive in the face of climate change and its impacts.
Because we will see these changes, they are already baked in. We are going to have to deal with that in places like Louisiana, Miami, New York. We have to invest in resilience, so that we can make that determination in the future, with more clarity.
I'm punting because I think we have to punt at this point.
We haven't actually made that investment in resilience in our communities in any big way. We have to do that first to see what we can salvage for the people who live there. That is job number one. And then from there, we then can start to evaluate the really hard question of places we can't. That's already happening in Louisiana.
The seas have risen across Southern Louisiana in the Gulf, and they are losing a football field a day of land. There are communities down there that are already swamped. There does need to be an investment in and support for communities that are already dealing with this, that can't punt that question, but for the rest, it truly is a matter of, we have to make this investment in resilience first.
I want to be careful of your time, so I'll make this additional question quick – are we past the point of arguing about the existence and impacts of climate change? There will be arguments about how to move forward, but are we done with the denial?
I hope so. I really hope so. It's hard to say that I'm optimistic that we can get there, but I sure hope so. There has been polling done by Yale and others, and the polling is positive across the board. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals agree that yes there is a problem, and yes, we should deal with it. The vast majority of people seem to agree. Where it starts to falter is when it gets into our political system.
And our political system is making a lot of things falter these days. I think climate change has been a harbinger. This issue became very partisan, but it didn’t used to be. We entered the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an effort to bring all countries together to fight climate change in 1992, under President George H.W. Bush. George W. Bush ran on pursuing climate action in 2000. He didn't actually do anything. In fact, he made it worse. John McCain ran on passing a cap-and-trade bill in 2008. These things used to not be partisan, but they are now and that's terrible.
It would seem like Governor DeSantis would have a lot to gain from putting Miami first in terms of resilience and climate. Even if that’s cynical, I don’t understand the hold-up.
Do you know who one of the few Republicans in Congress has stood up and said, “We need to act on climate change?”
Who?
Matt Gaetz.
Right.
A very far right-wing representative from Florida. He's from the panhandle of Florida and has seen direct impacts.
A number of years ago, Congressman Bob English from South Carolina came to a realization that we need to do something about the climate crisis; he got primaried because of it and lost.
But, that was a number of years ago. I agree with you, I think a person like Governor DeSantis could actually make a positive move on climate that would be very politically beneficial.
That the climate crisis became such a partisan fight was simply a harbinger of how everything has become a partisan fight. This was just the first of the other big issues. We have seen this happen to others. Immigration used to be a very bipartisan issue. It is no longer. Hopefully, this fever will break. Again, as I said before, I don't know if I can say I'm optimistic right now. I hope so, but I'm not sure.
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.