Speaker 0 00:00:03 The freedom democratic. I am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will March towards a democratic victory in 1980.
Speaker 1 00:00:22 I think the democratic leadership understands that we need to bring those people into the party. We need to transform the party. We need to make the democratic party, a democratic party with a small gate.
Speaker 2 00:00:35 The future of the party is working class. And I think that what I represent and, and perhaps, you know, Senator Sanders also Senator Warren, there's a lot of working class champions in the democratic party. And I do think that that's the future.
Speaker 3 00:00:50 Welcome to talking strategy, making history. I'm Dick flux activist, retired professor of sociology at a really old guy.
Speaker 4 00:01:03 And I'm, deraco Lera more hall, slightly
Speaker 3 00:01:06 Less old guy, and also an activist and political strategist. And this season on talking strategy, making history, we're going to be talking about one of the big questions for progressive strategy here in the United States, in what we're calling a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party. Hello? Hello. Deraco Hey, good to get started. I think it's, uh, an important question. This big thing called the democratic party that, uh, progressive seem to talk a lot about, but not make a lot of sense about, so what, what was the, uh, what was the impetus for getting this ball rolling Dick? Why, why are we here talking about the democratic party? Because I keep reading things from the left about the electoral process and feeling that a lot of thinking is not there that needs to be perhaps there not only about the immediate election, but I guess even more missing is thinking beyond that.
Speaker 3 00:02:08 Why are we ambivalent about it, but also why is it a framework of action? And we've got our own experiences, you and me, that's for sure rich experience that we thought we would share. So that's the idea. I think that's a great place to start and to think about, you know, what, what is the democratic party, you know, before we can think about, should we vote for it all the time? Should we get involved with it? Should we ignore it? Should we try to replace it? And it seems like there's a lot of people on the left who understand that for one reason or another, the democratic party has got to be reckoned with, uh, we've got to have some strategy of it, but with it and around it, but it's almost like, uh, you remember that episode of south park years ago, uh, with the underpants gnomes south,
Speaker 5 00:02:56 I don't get it files one collect preference.
Speaker 3 00:03:06 Their strategy for world domination was, you know, missing key elements. So they had, you know, phase one to steal all the underpants and then phase two was missing. And phase three was a prophet. And often the left in the United States when talking about and thinking about the democratic party, there's an understanding, okay, there's phase one, we've got to get involved in the democratic party we've got to work with or in or around the democratic party. Don't really know what that means or what that looks like or what phase two is. But phase three is some kind of progressive change. We know that a good will come of it, but, but what really is it? Um, and how do you be active in it and keep your wits about you and so forth. And I think what's great about this conversation is, you know, this isn't, it's not a new argument.
Speaker 3 00:03:55 It's not a new question and we've been reckoning with it and, and, and dealing with it or ignoring it for generations. So when, when did the democratic party become a question for you? Well, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. My parents were commies. They were re I was a red diaper baby. And they were supporting for the presidency of the United States, Henry Wallace, who at that time was really the champion of progressive grass roots in America had been Roosevelt's vice president, but then kicked out of that role, uh, because, uh, conservative Democrats hated him. He was in Harry Truman's cabinet and Henry Wallace decided to run for president as an independent on a new party platform called the progressive party,
Speaker 0 00:04:41 Just the Henry Wallace in the news. Again, he's out to form a third posse. The American people must have more than a choice between evils. They must have a chance to vote or the greatest good or the greatest number only through the organization of a new party in 1948, can the people of the United States voice, their true desires and aspirations to that end. I announced that I will run as an independent candidate in 1948 for president of the United States.
Speaker 3 00:05:17 My parents enthusiastically supported him. I at 10 years old, enthusiastically supported him as you do, as you do in Brooklyn, Henry Wallace came just about a month before the November election to my street. And there were thousands of people in the street. So my view as a 10 year old was this guy is going to really mean he may not win, but there's going to be a huge vote for Henry Wallace. So that would have been like 10 years old at one of these big Bernie Sanders rallies in, in, in Brooklyn, in this last cycle, he strongly wanted a agenda for America, including national health insurance, and rights of labor and a whole variety of issues like that. And so he split with Truman, quit the cabinet and decide to run for president, but he didn't seem to think that he could run against Truman within the democratic party in those years.
Speaker 3 00:06:18 Never, no one ever ran against the incumbent president within his own party. And it would have been really hard, right. There were no primaries or very few primaries, right? Yeah, that's right. So they started a party called the progressive party. And, um, I think early polling show that he was going to get maybe 10% at least of the national vote. Okay. Election night, late afternoon. I remember this so well because Tilly, our neighbor upstairs who respected my parents quite well. And she knew very much that they were enthusiastic supporters of the progressive party. She comes down, she says, Mildred, I'm very ashamed of myself. Oh no, because I, I just voted. And in the voting booth, I voted for Truman. Oh, Tilly.
Speaker 3 00:07:12 Until he says, look, I was in there. And I realized that if I vote for Wallace, do we will be elected. Do he was the Republican candidate. He had been governor of New York. He was not that far right wing, but he was certainly not a new deal, FDR type Democrat by any stretch till he said, well, I just couldn't bring myself to do something that would put do we in there. So I voted for Truman. It was a close election in the end. Right. I mean, that's the famous, uh, headline of, uh, Dewey beats Truman, uh, incorrectly. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. All the polling show that do, we would win the election. So, and part of that was based on the assumption that Wallace would take a lot of the democratic vote. And by the way, the final outcome was shocking for the people who were supporting Wallace because he, he got maybe less than 3% of the total national vote.
Speaker 3 00:08:10 He got fewer votes then Strom Thurmond, who also running independent as a racist, the white supremacy candidate. Right. Got more votes than Wallace in the final election running as a Dixiecrat that year. Right. Dixiecrat. Yeah. So that, so we could call that in a sense, that's like the Tilly test that's right out into the polling booth. And she was like, look, I like this Wallace guy, my neighbors like this Wallace guy, but the math here is such that I could be in the end giving a vote to Dewey. So that, that basic mathematical question, the vote splitting, we that's the, that's what Tilly gives us that we have to always think about in these elections at the bottom line is we to prevent there from being a worse outcome than the one we don't like, there's one that's worse out there that we have to prevent that that's what Tilly teaches us now.
Speaker 3 00:09:04 Yes. And there's a language now of not only now, even back then and what the progressive party was telling people in 1948 was, don't go for the lesser evil go for the good guy. Right. And, um, people, millions voted who would have voted for Wallace won like Wallace decided to go for the quote, lesser, evil unquote, uh, there's something wrong with the idea of the lesser evil, uh, as, as a way of thinking about this, there's something wrong with it. If it keeps being UN satisfactory for people like through the people, keep pushing back on it and saying, we want to different kinds of choice than choosing between evils. And yet it also keeps coming up as a persistent reality. Um, and those, the, the, the lesser NIS, the distance between the evils, uh, growing, uh, greater perhaps day by day, I mean, as you pointed out, right, the, you look at someone like Dewey, uh, as, uh, a Paragon of a certain, certain kind of republicanism of the time, um, that did in fact accept certain conditions of the new deal, um, and was in some ways better than the Democrats, you know, in, in terms of integration and race on, on, uh, in, in certain parts of the country, at least, but it was still worthwhile to beat him now in the days of Donald Trump and a really far right Republican party, like, you know, Tillys, Tillys lesson is, is all the more and more and more people, you know, even if they don't like it, um, realize that, that there that's the choice.
Speaker 3 00:10:43 I mean, so one lesson I drew from that that has stayed with me ever since is we really do have a two-party system, at least in federal elections, national elections that could be modified, but it would have to be through, um, major reforms in how the political process works in this country. So given the two party system, uh, to work within, how, how do we advance, uh, fundamental social change, structural change in the electoral process? Or can we do so that's what I learned at that time, from that since then, I've also understood that, you know, Wallace failed to get the backing of even the most, most of the liberal labor unions at the time, because they made the same calculation, uh, and stuck with Truman. It is a good question whether, uh, Wallace had, even with all the barriers to getting anywhere, what have we had run within the democratic party, by the way, Truman did advocate national health insurance, what was then called socialized medicine in his presidential run as a way of undercutting Wallace.
Speaker 3 00:11:53 That was another part of the process is Truman went to the left, responding to the threat, responding to, uh, to a threat from the left. Yeah, that didn't mean we got any help that we still don't know. Right. But we got him to change his position. We got him to change his position. 70 years later, we still fighting for the same, uh, kind of health system that he advocated then that's right. And in the news recently, right, was the decision of the platform committee of the democratic national convention, uh, not to include a strong language on single-payer healthcare or Medicare for all, um, in this year's platform. So, um, here we are 70 years later, not only fighting to make it a reality in the United States, but it's still, um, and if anything, and, and even more difficult or controversial topic when it comes to the elite of the democratic party than it was back in the late forties.
Speaker 3 00:12:55 And that's a bunch of history, right, that, that we have in between, uh, Wallace running for president as a big P progressive and today, and a lot of history that you've been involved with, um, as a thinker, but also as an activist in students for a democratic society, what kind of democratic party as a young adult, did you confront as an activist with your compatriots, your fellow activists, uh, trying to push for more fundamental and radical change in the 1960s? So 1962 is when SDS was founded and we actually discussed this in great depth, uh, because at that time the democratic party had its Southern wing, the same Dixiecrats. And what that meant among other things was that we had a number of Southern states that were one party state democratic party was the only party the senators elected from those states had greatest seniority in the Senate.
Speaker 3 00:13:59 So the heads of the major Senate committees were all white supremacy. I don't mean just reluctant to pass civil rights laws. I mean, white supremacists, the head of the judiciary committee was James Eastland. That's it? That was his entire agenda, white supremacy, uh, and they were Democrats. So of course from our point of view, at least in the SDS, uh, world, the first task is to drive those people out of the democratic party. There was a political science, uh, doctrine in those days, maybe still that a better system is where the two parties represent ideological difference. They called it right realignment. So one goal that we supported was driving the Dixiecrats or the Southern, uh, white racist side of the party into the Republican party, drive it out of the democratic party, uh, which I must say, did huh? Not just because of the activism of the new left or SDS, but no civil rights movement, primarily pushing the democratic party to be an inhospitable place.
Speaker 3 00:15:09 That's right. For the Southern Democrats, Lyndon Johnson signing the voting rights bill. He said, I've just killed the democratic party in the south because, uh, if we give blacks the right to vote, the whites will be voting and it will not stay with the party. And the election map has borne that out. Yeah. The other, the other part of the, of the, of the democratic party that we despised, uh, wa where the urban machines most famously at that time was the mayor Daley democratic machine in Chicago, uh, which was maybe the last, really, really dynamic urban machine in the country. Uh, there had been a long process of battling against the machine by reform minded Democrats and, and civic people. Uh, the machines were, were these patronage operations that provided, uh, people living in the cities sort of divided them by ethnic identity and, and provided them with jobs and services and, and a kind of, uh, an, a kind of identity really, but not, not poly, not much in the way of progressive policy.
Speaker 3 00:16:22 And, uh, it's a pretty complicated story, but the machines were profoundly undemocratic and in Chicago, that was, uh, uh, another one party dictatorship. So I would say the Southern racism and the, and the Northern corrupt machine politics, that's how the democratic party to a great extent look to young people. But, uh, we were at least in the, in the, uh, Bakshian or in the tribe, that thought reform was possible as well as necessary. And that's what both what I did a lot in the sixties and beyond, and my wife too, she was very active in local democratic politics, wherever we lived. Um, and the battles in Chicago were very colorful in the later sixties around those kinds of issues. Uh, and by colorful, I mean, in terms of race, as well as drama. So in between those years, you know, the democratic party has become a lot weaker as an institution. So by the time I came on the scene and was involved, um, and had my own Tilly moment, you could say in 2000 watching a, uh, a presidential campaign, actually not even make the threshold of 3% in order to get matching funds and yet be the margin of victory for a reactionary Republican. And so that, that was an you're talking about the Nater campaign, talking about the Nadir campaign in 2000, exactly. We think
Speaker 2 00:17:54 Growing support for you in the polls and recent days leading up to the election, but what are you saying to your supporters to keep them from going into that ballot booth and getting a last second moment of panic and voting for Al gore? Instead, I'm saying if they believe in the causes that we're espousing and they're very often there causes universal healthcare, a real move on poverty, abolishing, corporate welfare law, and order for the rich and powerful, uh, clean environment. Uh, the vote for us,
Speaker 3 00:18:23 I was working for DSA at the time of the election as its youth organizer. That's the democratic socialists of America. And traveling around to college campuses, talking with, with college activists about politics, including the election, and just hearing over and over again, this mantra from activists that it didn't matter who won that there were no consequences either way or that, um, you know, once again, people should vote their hopes and not their fears or not vote for the lesser evil. And after eight years of Clinton in a sort of similar moment to after having many years of Roosevelt and the new deal, it, it was an attractive offer for a lot of young voters, something that breaks with this, uh, consensus around neoliberal politics and, uh, an emptying of, of political possibility that seemed to happen in the nineties. So there was a real hunger for something different in the 2000 election, but the consequence was that not enough people had that moment in the ballot box and recognizing the threat from the Republican side and the threat of a Republican victory.
Speaker 3 00:19:30 And so George Bush became the president, and I'll never forget reading an op-ed by filmmaker, Michael Moore, a couple of months into the Bush administration, um, saying that, you know, Bush, wasn't doing anything that president gore wouldn't have done, um, that that really affected me as some really bad thinking on the left and bad thinking by progressives. But this, this, these machines and these organizations, these strong organizations, um, uh, by the nineties and after the, the, certainly the Clinton era, they were much weaker and less decisive in politics than the institutions that you faced as a, as a young activist. Well, because part of the reason it was, was that we had won some victories. I'd always wanted to change the party. McGovern led before he was presidential nominee. Uh, he was one of the leaders, key leaders in the party of a massive reform of how, uh, the party would parties would be constituted who would come to the national conventions, breaking the power of the machine to control presidential nomination process.
Speaker 3 00:20:42 And by 1972, and McGovern became the nominee. But the fact that private party primaries that the people themselves could choose who the party candidate would be. That was very barely present until, uh, the late sixties, Hubert Humphrey was nominee of the democratic party. He didn't win primaries. He was the choice in the, in the smoke-filled rooms. There really were smoke-filled rooms, and they really made those choices that way. And I, I was just reading about Kennedy in 60, getting he did win primaries, but the popular choice in terms of poll numbers probably was Adley Stevenson still to, to run again. But the deal was in the smoke-filled rooms, that Kennedy would be the nominee. So 72 probably marks is the first presidential election in the, in the kind of new democratic party. The Southern racists were out of it, and the machines have been surpassed.
Speaker 3 00:21:45 We weekend the machines hold over the party by opening up the nomination process to the electorate while not having any kind of campaign finance reform or other political reforms has really that hastened the neo-liberal takeover, if you will, of the party, you know, those smoke-filled rooms as, as bad as they could be when you had the wrong people in them also were rooms filled with trade union leaders and social movement leaders, and, uh, representatives from different minority groups and so forth. When we're heading into the nineties, it's really the candidates with the most money, the most charisma, the most media appeal, uh, that make it through primary. It's not just at the presidential level, but all the way down the ticket. And I'm not sure in the final analysis, whether that was helpful or harmful to the quest for a more progressive, or at least a more reliably progressive democratic party.
Speaker 3 00:22:47 Yeah. And I think what you're getting at too, is that, um, in the vacuum, if the machines go away, there's a kind of vacuum that can be filled by the, uh, highly professionalized class of people who run elections and who raise enormous sums from rich people to finance candidacies. And, and so the bad defeat of McGovern may maybe taught a lesson to ambitious Democrats who wanted to run for high office, which is you're not going to get anywhere if you're progressive, because you're going to be a weak candidate with a weak foundation. Uh, but the corporate sector was willing to finance Democrats, which I don't think in the sixties, we were quite aware of that whole dynamic, but there's another part of the dynamic that I experienced directly. Mickey. My wife was a tenancy delegate in 1982, the national convention in New York, Madison square garden.
Speaker 3 00:23:42 And I was quite moved emotionally by the fact that the convention process was filled with these caucuses representing, uh, the different social movements, women's caucus, environmental caucus, of course, the black caucus, the Latino caucus gay caucus. And it just seemed to me overwhelmingly the fact that the grassroots people at the convention came there through social movements, not as they were party regulars so much as because they then saw being present in the party was important part of their activism as movement people. That was, I think very much the character of that. Uh, the party beginning in the, in the eighties, at the base, not in terms of what the party as, you know, bureaucracy represented or nationally. And that's what my research academically has shown over the years is that, you know, really since the fifties, the average rank and file democratic activist and someone who's motivated by ideas and values and issues, um, certainly not the, uh, instrumentalist activist of, you know, the, the, the forties or the, or the machines of someone who's a precinct captain, because they know that we'll get them a job right from the fifties on.
Speaker 3 00:25:08 And, and, uh, especially out here in the Western United States, uh, you, you find your, your precinct captain is somebody who exactly, like you said, like got their start as a college feminist activist or an antiwar activist. And each one of these social movements tends to replenish the ranks of the activists year by year. So, you know, the, the folks who are, uh, uh, on the older side of the curve now, um, in the party say here in California, um, that I run into, you're talking people who cut their teeth in anti-apartheid work, or, um, in the struggles for, um, uh, against the, the attacks on affirmative action in California, back in the nineties, like that generation of Latino actors, activists for example, are now very well-represented in the legislature and in the ranks of the democratic party. So one of the things we've got to kind of get on the board here about the democratic party and what it is is that it is a space that is constantly churning with social movement, activism and social movement demands, right.
Speaker 3 00:26:16 And, uh, you know, just to be historical about it a little. So when we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1960, we became very aware of the fact that that party had been remade by the United auto workers union and allied with liberals. They took over the party in the, in the forties and fifties from old line Democrats of the machine type. And by, by 60, you think that the democratic party of Michigan was like a labor party in England, given what it stood for and who was active within it. On the other hand, another indelible memory was a meeting that we had Tom Hayden, I, and a couple other SDS people with a guy named Neil Stabler, who was the, had been the head of the democratic party at Michigan and had been a partner of Ruthie and others in remaking the democratic party.
Speaker 3 00:27:12 We had lunch with him. I remember this. And he said, well, I re I was like you guys in the early thirties, uh, I was a socialist. And then we realized with the new deal that we needed to be in the, in, in the Roosevelt Alliance and the Roosevelt coalition. And he said, so we learned to take the red ties off. We didn't wear a red tie anymore, but we were in the democratic coalition, the new deal coalition. And, and here's what got us. We won everything we wanted. This is, this is in 1962 when the civil rights movement is in its most intense moment. And he thinks they've already won, uh, what they wanted back from the thirties. Well, we knew we had to replace this guy as well, however nice. And well-meaning, uh, he, we might've thought him to be, so, you know, I, and I don't know what I, what point I'm making with that. Other than that, there's always fuel within the democratic party for the upstart new to challenge, uh, those who were running it because whatever compromises or, or fatigue, you know, they were experiencing. And we found in the early sixties that that thirties generation was pretty fatigued and pretty complacent, uh, and pretty retrograde in terms of what needed to be done about race and about the war and the arms race as two examples,
Speaker 5 00:28:40 <inaudible> fast forward to today.
Speaker 3 00:28:52 And there seems to be a lot of young activists in and around the party, or, uh, engaged in the Bernie Sanders campaign, engaged by the Bernie Sanders campaign who are sort of in a similar moment right now, and talking with, uh, previous generations of leaders, even folks who would have a radical background or social movement background, who now are leaders in the democratic party or elected officials, or both who are saying, Hey, we've come so far. We need to be realistic about what we can achieve, um, or seem to have complete blinders or blind spots for whole areas of policy or whole areas of struggle. So in the same way that, uh, a new deal Democrat who'd made his peace with the establishment for the sake of higher wages, unemployment insurance, and all of those things that must have felt like gigantic achievements for anybody who would come up, come up in the thirties, um, that they were uninterested in pushing the envelope on the question of racial justice.
Speaker 3 00:29:54 In the 1960s, a question was called in America about racial justice. It was one of these moments, uh, that happened throughout American history in which there's a conflict point over lingering inequality and lingering white supremacy and structures of white supremacy. And that question was called directly on the democratic party and activists, black activists, and white allies in the new left and so forth. And, and in the labor movement said to democratic politicians and democratic leadership, we can not be both a progressive urban, uh, anti-racist labor party in the north and the party of the planter class racist class in the south. Like we can't do both anymore. And the question was forced on the party. It seems to me that there's a similar existential question for the democratic party around the power of corporations and the wealthy, a question that the democratic party actually wrestled with and took aside back in the 1930s, it sort of come back.
Speaker 3 00:31:05 And once again, the democratic party is in the United States, trying to be both a party of working people, consumers middle-class folks really like everyone in the economy, except for corporations and the wealthy, but also get money from, uh, get policy from get support from, uh, exactly that, uh, ruling class. So that upper-class, and that not that I think the party will ever become a, a pure party of any kind. It seems that there's right now, a struggle, trying to get it, get the party to take sides. Yes. And the healthcare issue is actually about that. That's what it's about because, and I think it's been largely miss reported in a way, because it's, it's like people don't want to give up their own, their insurance and have a government program. Uh, that's probably not a very good argument against Medicare for all the argument that's never made, but it's probably the thing that's operating is, uh, if you put Medicare for all, and you pretty much destroy the business of the, of the health insurance industry, you are putting the, uh, pharmaceutical corporations under public control in a degree that you, uh, that they don't want to have, right.
Speaker 3 00:32:28 Uh, those at least two, and not to mention the, uh, you know, the hospital industry, whatever you call the, the, the medical industry itself. Um, and, uh, that's, to me, the nub of the matter can a government of the United States basically tell a major private corporate interests. You are going out of business to a great extent. You're going to become a much more marginal business than you ever have been before. While we create hated that industry, uh, you know, only a few decades ago also through pub public policy. So it's not like it fell to earth from heaven, um, or that, you know, people have been engaged in health insurance as a craft for generations that we have to, we have to preserve you're right. That's one example of, I mean, the entire green new deal is about corporate power being, being constrained and overcome, uh, the whole housing issue.
Speaker 3 00:33:29 Uh, we, we have housing as a, as a commodity in this country. When in fact the private housing industry cannot provide affordable housing for the majority of American people. That's evidently true. Uh, just those three examples, not to mention the need for a strong, uh, protection of labor organizing rights, uh, vis-a-vis corporate power. Uh, and, and even what, uh, was with Warren had proposed, which is, uh, having workers representation on the boards of directors of major corporations. That would be another fundamental reform. So the, those are all parts of the emerging or unfolding progressive policy agenda that hopefully after November, we can really battle for. So what I've, what I've heard is a whole, a series of questions that we've got to tackle before we can talk about what, what this phase two is after we've collected the underpants, what do we do with them to turn them into profit after we've decided, okay, the democratic party certainly far from perfect, it's a, it's an arena of struggle and, uh, but, uh, a, an indispensable one and, uh, and represents a kind of iron logic or an iron, the Tilly rule that at the end of the day, we, we have to do no harm and we can't be, uh, engaging in electoral, uh, activity that actually puts someone worse in office.
Speaker 3 00:35:00 So with all of those things together, I, I think that we've got to first talk about what the democratic party is as a, as an institution or a set of a set of institutions. Um, what does it mean to be a political party when the choice of candidates is made by thousands or millions of people casting an election, often people that don't even have to register with your party. So what actually is there of the democratic party. And then we've got to talk about the idea of organizing outside of it, or if the, the left or socialists, or Progressive's, we want to call it, call it should go out and start their own party and break with it. Um, and that debate is still really alive of course, out there. Um, as new generations of activists, um, insist on repeating the mistakes of their forebears or figuring out the questions on their own, depending on your perspective.
Speaker 3 00:35:58 Um, and then you raised this question of about, or the, the issue of realignment and the fact that, uh, it took a whole bunch of work and struggle, uh, 50 years ago to even make of the two parties, uh, rational left and right, right. We had the parties where we're neither left nor right when you started out, uh, uh, in politics in, in the forties. So it has that, what does that mean now? And in what ways are the parties still too similar? Um, and then I think we've got to talk about what strategies and tactics and path we can take. What would it mean to be a left organization or party within the democratic party? We talk a lot about, uh, the need for both inside and outside strategies, but what does that inside part actually look like? Especially when the, the tent that we're talking about is, uh, kind of more circusy than military.
Speaker 3 00:37:00 Um, and I think over the next few episodes, we should dive into those questions, get some perspective from people who are out working on these issues in the field, around the country, possibly around the world. Um, and, you know, keep coming back to these themes of, uh, uh, of the, the, the absolute necessity of taking the democratic party seriously, but also not taking its current policy positions or where it's at, at any given given moment for granted. So I would add one maybe ultimate question, uh, and that is that we would try to encourage ourselves and people who are sharing this podcast, a quest for what kind of party can we make of the democratic party. It claims to be a people's party. Can it be, how would that look? What kind of party would it be as we go forward? That's one of the underlying themes. I think in all that we're trying to do here, <inaudible>, That's our show for now. You've been listening to talking strategy, making history. The first season of which we call a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party tonight was one installment. You'll be hearing more in weeks to come. You can support us and get exclusive full interviews with our
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