Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:06 The mayors and governors too.
Speaker 1 00:00:09 Hi friends. This is another part of our conversation here on talking strategy, making history with Jonathan Smucker, Jonathan wrote an important book called to Gemini, how to that's gotten a lot of conversation among lefties and, uh, he's story as a personal story and an organizer story. We find fascinating in the first part of this conversation, he talked about growing up in Mennonite country in Pennsylvania, moving into radical activism to graduate school in sociology at Berkeley. And then going back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania after Trump was elected to try to build up resistance in his home community. And we talked in that first part of the conversation about the day to day effort to build up at the beginning, a grassroots intensively organized activity over the past several years. So we're going to continue now the second part of that conversation, where we get Jonathan talking about the outcomes of that work both locally in his region and throughout the state of Pennsylvania outcomes that are impressive instructive about where the progressive movement can go electorally without further ado. Here's Jonathan Smucker, Durak Alara Mohole and me Dick flex.
Speaker 2 00:01:44 So I'm thinking about this frame of crisis of the crisis of representation or legitimacy that we're seeing in American politics right now. And probably, you know, could, could talk about worldwide, um, in the, in terms of, you know, democratic countries, um, I would push your narrative back a little bit like the, like a couple of names that I didn't hear and sort of that story of this populist moment in the United States is, you know, Howard Dean and Arnold Schwartzenegger. Right? Yup. So I think it goes back a bit further, just exactly. So, and in those three names, we get a sense of kind of a left populism of right populous man, a centrist populism, all of which is like the parties have failed us. The elites have failed us vote for me, um, in some way. Right. But, and then with Obama, I actually read with a lot more cynicism into what w what happened.
Speaker 2 00:02:45 And I think that some very shrewd political actors saw the potential of a social movement style in that moment of crisis, literally picked up what Howard Dean had done and made it about building something that wasn't the democratic party. And that was just about Obama, who, I don't know who was shocked. Cause he told us a million times believed right. Believed that the most important space of politics was like between right. And left. So, yep. Yep. Um, so what all of that says to me and is just has been missing and is part of like why Dick and I started this podcast is that like, none of this thinking has much to do about the democratic party as an institution and even understanding that there's disenchantment with it or angry at it on a substantive level, you know, like all the things we'd all agree.
Speaker 2 00:03:43 The party leaders have let working class people down on and let black people down on it. Let's stipulate. All of that. It sounds like a great opening conversation. Hey, do you feel fucked over by all of the elites? Yeah. Okay. Well, join us. We're going to protest, we're going to fix these issues, but the democratic party is still there. The candidates that we, we do tell those folks to vote for are 99% of the time, our democratic candidates and the 1% of the time that's usually a mistake. And so then where do we go from there? Do we just accept that this is a permanent crisis? Or do we do something with this party?
Speaker 3 00:04:22 Yeah. Uh, that's a, it's a great question. I think the first thing that's important to recognize is that this is a, an incredibly dynamic, not a static moment. It is influx. And so, you know, just anecdotally, like a lot of people are younger than me who maybe volunteered for Bernie for the first time in 2020, or maybe did in 2016 and 2020 when Bernie lost the nomination. I just saw all over this like deep depression, which is understandable. Right. They found something hopeful. And, and I mean, talk about circling the wagons to stop, uh, somebody with momentum. I mean, it's, it's, it's incredible, but like most of the people who were new or I shouldn't say most, a lot, at least a lot of the vocal people, you would see this deep, immediate kind of, um, resignation of like, we're never going to win. They're always going to stop us.
Speaker 3 00:05:19 They've been stopping us for 40 50 years. Look back. They always do it. And for me, having arrived having come of age in the mid nineties when like it was a ghost town, there was like hardly anything happening, like protest, remind me a boot. Jamal were like the biggest thing happening. And that was like at the biggest day, 10,000 people, like any time in the nineties. Right. Um, I mean, I know there were lots of other things going on different times, but it was fragmented there wasn't, there wasn't momentum. And so for me, like seeing the Bernie campaign in 2020, get, as far as it did and seeing the squad and seeing all this energy and new leaders and seeing how smarter and more savvy and how much more accurate than more leaders have.
Speaker 3 00:06:05 Right. Yeah. I'm like, wow, holy, wow. You know, like, like we almost did it. Right. And so for me it was like, oh, we are on a good trajectory here. And so I think that's important to realize, and let's just break it down a little bit further. Right? Well, one, I think that there's always some populous elements in politics like populism, I'm kind of the like look cloud moose camp with populism. Populism is in some ways a rhetorical form. Uh, it is, you know, it boils down to, and this is neutral between left wing and right wing populism, like calling out the elites, the corrupt establishment and articulating the premises of the people, how those two sides do that. His very diametrically opposed. Right. The crisis of authority really, um, kind of crosses a threshold in the second half of the Bush administration, you know, infrastructures, you know, hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war as a huge deal.
Speaker 3 00:06:58 Right. And then, you know, really culminating in the financial meltdown. Um, and that's the first time that the elites get the memo that like, oh wow, we're in trouble. Um, so that happens. And I think unorganized that rebellion against the leadership, uh, takes the form of abstention ism, right? Unorganized it's abstentionism. And so you had, then the tea party emerge overnight after Obama was elected and start the organized insurgency in relationship to the Republican party's leadership. And it wasn't until three years later that you have occupy wall street emerge, right? So already the rights insurgency, which is translating that abstentionism, which already is affecting the democratic party in a much more detrimental way, considering who are traditional basis. Right. But the right is, is taking that abstention as I'm on the right and translating it into political action with the tea party occupy wall street.
Speaker 3 00:08:02 So think of the three-year headstart before occupy wall street comes and then occupy wall street is allergic to electoral power in, you know, in, in pretty fundamental ways. And so meanwhile, the tea party is like taking out Eric cancer and like, you know, building up this muscle and you don't really have the electoral form start to start to take form on our side, you know, at the national level I'm talking about at the, you know, the stage, um, until late 2015 with Bernie Sanders, he really starts taking off in 2016. But then, you know, that's kind of once and done, you don't really start seeing the electoral insurgency on the democratic side until 20 17, 20 18 with the squad. And so there's like basically an eight or nine year headstart on the right. Um, and that culminated with Trump, um, and Trump, you know, really consolidated as much of that into political action and voting behavior as what the Republican party was going to be able to do.
Speaker 3 00:09:01 And meanwhile, you've got the democratic side, its fits and starts. It's scattered. They defeated the candidate who symbolized that, who was bringing in new bases of young people if this affected working class people. And then meanwhile you had, and here's where we land with Pennsylvania stands up. You had organizations like ours and like <inaudible> and like unite here going around to working class people all over and being like, please come out and vote too much as of stake. And we got people to vote, right? And so Pennsylvania stands up is probably responsible for about 54,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a good chunk of Biden's margin of victory. But you know, it didn't translate into enthusiasm for the democratic party. You know, in some ways we barely won and we lost all these down-ballot seats because we are still, the democratic party is still fundamentally battling with deep abstentionism. It hasn't consolidated that in the way that, that, that somebody like Trump was able to
Speaker 1 00:10:00 One take on that is that COVID meant that door to door canvassing was eliminated for that campaign. As part of the explanation for the down-ballot weakness. Do you buy that?
Speaker 3 00:10:14 I think that is a factor and you know, Trump didn't wait on that Biden did, but there's other factors like Biden, the Biden campaign didn't ID for down-ballot races. It's crazy. They didn't ID for them. And not only that, the Biden campaign, uh, ran a campaign that was so anti-Trump that it almost redeemed the rest of the Republican party. He, you know, there was some policy stuff, right. But in many ways it was a campaign about the person of Trump and demographically Biden really leaned into what the democratic party has been doing way too much up for the past 40 years, which is going for these kinds of elusive, you know, affluent, suburban voters who, who are highly likely to vote, but might flip between democratic and Republican. And I'm not saying don't go for them at all, but don't just go for them. If you're just going for them, you're bleeding out your working class base. And when I say working class, I don't just mean white working class. I mean, you look at the numbers and places like Philadelphia have decreased voting behavior from 2016 to 2020. And so that's
Speaker 2 00:11:22 Yeah. W well, I want you to speak more to that in the public debate about class and race and identity and these movements in a second, but I just want to kind of follow up on, on something that you said about, you know, we look at what's happened on the right and in so many examples, in so many ways, our leaders are afraid to let similar things happen on the left, like in the democratic party. And they're able to ride these waves of extra participation, as you're saying to victory, um, we don't let the same fire happen on the left for various reasons. And I think that's really an important point of comparison, but I also think that one difference between the tea party and occupy is that, you know, as feed a scotch poll fan right in her study, right. What was it like the first topic of discussion at the first meeting, she went to have the tea party in Massachusetts. They were like, how do we take over the local Republican party? Whereas occupy was like, fuck the Democrats.
Speaker 3 00:12:26 So, I mean, to be fair, not all of us were, but yes, of course,
Speaker 2 00:12:29 Of course. But I mean, that was like, I mean, I also was involved in occupy and I was at the time a county democratic party chair. So, and, and, and, uh, the California state party passed a resolution in support of occupy, encouraging every county party to support it in some way. So people were dropping off. So obviously that wasn't even empirically sound on their part, but you were there for this breakdown of that dogmatic opposition to electoral politics and how Bernie made voting and so forth, like safe for the left. But again, I really want to know what you think about, like, what about this next piece? That's about the party per se. And that's where knowing about the different historical waves becomes important because, you know, my experience was the Bernie people came in and, and just shat all over the Dean people like that's what
Speaker 3 00:13:20 Happened. And it was, well, look, I mean, electoral insurgencies are not going to be clean and neat, right. Part of what's happening is you're bringing in disaffected people, working class people, um, and young people who are unexperienced and they're mad for good reasons, and there's going to be sloppy stuff. There's going to be breaks in decorum. Um, so, so that that's going to happen. It's not going to be the, it's not going to be clean, but the answer isn't like, screw these people, you got to win them over. Right. Um, and you know, one, one thing I really do want to address in, in what you're saying is, I think it's so important because you could, you hear what I just said about, you know, the electoral insurgency of Trump and, you know, if you're a third way Democrat, you could be like, well, we've been doing it right.
Speaker 3 00:14:04 We haven't been letting our riff Raff take over our party. Um, we don't want to become just like Trump or the mirror image of Trump, but what's so mistaken about that is that the tea party in Trump took over with an extreme politics that isn't popular on the issues, right? The rhetoric can ring true. The hollow rhetoric like drain the swamp, et cetera, and fear-mongering and division, especially over race and especially, uh, immigrants, you know, that's key. Um, but the content of the insurgency on the democratic side is fighting for policies that are actually popular fixing our healthcare system, you know, progressive taxation, uh, you know, public education, um, college debt forgiveness, right? The, the we're talking a progressive kind of new deal, new, new deal agenda that's overwhelmingly popular. And so
Speaker 1 00:14:57 Say that that's sort of, that was back to where we started the conversation. If the root of the malaise of ordinary people with participation is the belief government can't do anything for us. Then this kind of populous politics based on a real agenda of program that actually if implemented would make a real difference in people's lives. I mean, FDR saw that back in the thirties, and I think a one way to bring Sanders people more hope is to say, look, what you built with the Sanders campaign is coming to be voiced by what the Biden administration is actually saying. It's going to do what the policy they're actually outlining fundamentally the direction that Bernie was, uh, had laid out. I think that's the way the narrative of our time will be written if we, if we prevail at all that the Sanders campaign led to a real change in the, uh, in the promise of, of a democratic administration. Um, I mean, widen at no point during the campaign, was he articulating what he's now articulating so much more forcefully.
Speaker 3 00:16:11 Yeah. And, and you really have to have your head very far in the sand, in the democratic party leadership. And many of them still really do, uh, to not see the writing on the wall with the shifts of the party and the shifts of them. I mean, the millennial and generation Z, I mean the progressive politics in these generations is incredible when they come to power. I mean, it's, it's going to be big changes, but that is what gives me kind of optimism in this moment. I mean, nothing's a done deal, but the Biden administration has not the Obama administration already. It's very, very clear. It's a different style. I think some of the psychology of the individuals, I mean, Obama was still new, had to like prove himself and was oriented to proving himself to the establishment. And then the objective conditions were by just like, you know, you couldn't be like, we're going to do this, right.
Speaker 3 00:16:57 He doesn't have to prove themselves. And he has all those Senate relationships. So the mechanisms he's much better equipped. And then the biggest thing is the crisis. And I think both, both Biden and Chuck Schumer understand that, you know, they won in 2020 because a lot of people voted against Trump and they're not going to win in 20, 22 and 20, 24 people already voted against Trump. They have to deliver big or else it's going to be a slaughter. And I think they actually understand that. And that's, you know, that gives us some real room for maneuver, right. It's
Speaker 2 00:17:32 Always structured really an uphill battle for a Republican candidate for president right now. And without Trump, I think the Republicans and, and certainly with a fight between Trump and the rest of the party, I think they're going to be in a very, very weak position next time. So I think that's like makes it even more incumbent, especially for congressional elections.
Speaker 3 00:17:55 Yeah. It's a potentially perfect storm, but don't, don't underestimate the democratic party's ability to, uh, uh, to blow it snatched defeat from the Johnson.
Speaker 1 00:18:06 Exactly. But one of our points on this podcast has been to emphasize don't reify the democratic party. It's such a multiple, uh, complex, fragmented phenomenon that we don't need to talk about it in that way. Right.
Speaker 3 00:18:21 It is a terrain. It is not real
Speaker 1 00:18:23 Terrain exactly the language we want. So in that line, and before we want to close is, is to just fill out a little bit about understanding the statewide evolution of what you started in Lancaster, the standup, and how does that relate to the democratic party?
Speaker 3 00:18:41 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's complicated, you know, it's, uh, both like we've gotten lots of pushback from the democratic party and we've impressed the democratic party. Um, I mean, they've seen our results. So, you know, this year Pennsylvania stands up, actually ran field directly for a number of the candidates. Um, they ran the phone programs, the text programs, you know, directly, uh, because you can do that in Pennsylvania statewide for state candidates, not for, not for federal. And so, you know, there's, it's very kicking the ball in the same direction, but there's tension, you know, like we, we know who our candidates are, but we're in a really interesting spot where a lot of our candidates have won and shown that they're more popular. You know, even though just king didn't win, she showed that she got more of the vote share running on this platform.
Speaker 3 00:19:27 Um, you know, we elected layer Krasner. We elected people like, um, like Helen and Philadelphia and Kendra and, and, uh, Nickeel so our kind of squad in Pennsylvania is really gaining traction and has a coherent politics. That's winning we're in an in-between, um, phase. You know, I think the relationship is, you know, we are now on the map, we are a force to be reckoned with. And so pragmatic people within the democratic party are recognizing that it's complicated also, like we shouldn't merge, right. Because what you're saying, Dick, I really agree. You know, we want people to take over the democratic party to see it as a terrain, but at the same time, organizations like ours right now are positioned to reach people who the democratic party can't reach currently. Right. Because we are like, we're not the democratic party. Right. We have a lot of problems with the democratic party and you have to have that fight and that tension in a populous moment like this. And we do it in a way that's not burn it all down, blow it all up, but people like us can change it. I think
Speaker 2 00:20:30 That there's like a, a very sharp, you know, like line of diminishing returns on that. And that it really only takes like, like you said, like you, you now have people who you put in office who are part of the democratic caucuses in legislatures and having to now operate within the structures of the democratic party. And so you're there, you're in it. Yep. And the, I, my push and, and this is not picking on you. This is like, to everybody is let's just be in it. Um, and, and because riding this populous wave and stoking the anti partisanship part of it, instead of actually doing the hard work of transforming it into something more pragmatic, it comes to bite us in the ass. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:21:19 I mean, I hear what you're saying, but I just don't think it's either, or I think it's a needle that we can thread. And it's one that we've, we've done effectively, right. Like at the door. And it's part of it again, is like a pedagogical process that you're, you're walking a base through. Right. You meet somebody who's disaffected, you have to critique the political establishment, kind of a, both parties in order to, um,
Speaker 2 00:21:44 You don't, I mean, I, I, you, you add a door, I would never say to somebody, this establishment of both parties are equally to blame.
Speaker 3 00:21:53 I would never say that equally as different, equally, as different than, than giving a critique because people, I mean, we're talking about people with decades, long memory. I mean, like the Democrats have not delivered for us. You've got to meet that. And then you've got to point to the ground that you've gained the people that you've elected, what they're fighting for. And so, but the,
Speaker 2 00:22:13 The huge innovation that we've gotten from AOC is having that conversation and using we and saying, you're right, the Democrats haven't done X, Y, and Z. I'm a Democrat. I agree with you. And I'm committed to fix it
Speaker 3 00:22:28 To be part of, I agree with that completely
Speaker 1 00:22:30 Take it. That's what Phillip Pennsylvania stand up is saying, right. You're going to change the democratic party. I mean, the one way I've, I don't know if you like this message, but I'm saying, can the democratic party be a people's party? That's what it's sometimes claimed to be, but it isn't, it hasn't been,
Speaker 3 00:22:49 I think that's right. I just think that there is an essential ingredient here, and that is that we need an organized faction that is both inside and outside the democratic party. When I say outside, I don't mean in opposition to, I mean, the logic of the party, it doesn't have the same logic. It's main thing is, is a, you know, working with a base, working on issues, working on demands and moving the party, but also electing the party and being the party. This is
Speaker 2 00:23:16 Great. But I think we can maybe synthesize this because one thing that you guys just said, right, was that we shouldn't personify the democratic party and make it into this, like, you know, like we do with God of like an old man on a throne, because it's so complex and a morphous. And in the same sense, that's why I think the spatial analogy that we use of inside and outside is bewildering and wrong because what you described, like being, you know, but having an agenda within that, that we're moving, that's critical of the leadership. I mean, that's everybody in the democratic party, that's a courage campaign, all to DSA. Right. That's everyone. So I don't think that we should ever talk about outside unless we really mean exactly as you put it in opposition to, unless you are running candidates in a general election against the Democrat, you're functionally, you're inside.
Speaker 3 00:24:12 I mean, outside, I mean that we're building organization, that part of its agenda is within the democratic party. And part of it is like organizing workers. Part of it is, you know, like there there's, there's other agenda items outside of that. Um, but I think we're, I think we're a little hung up on terminology. I think we agree. I do too. I
Speaker 1 00:24:34 Think one comment I would make, uh, from my remove is that as such efforts move forward, which I am very optimistic, they will, uh, nationally the kind that, that you were describing in Pennsylvania, the party will have to figure out, do they want to try to own this local organizing or somehow partner with it, facilitate it. And I think the latter is more likely to, to be the way it has to go, but it's difficult to conceptualize. So to me outside simply meant what you're saying outside means the day-to-day of what we're trying to organize in Lancaster is includes activity that may not be, uh, related to partisan electoral process. It might be. And so I think Baraka and Santa Barbara, you've tried to build a party organization here that lends itself to in support of struggles that are going on, whether or not they pay off electorally for the party per se. Right? Yeah. Well,
Speaker 2 00:25:34 Yeah. And precisely, so an activist never has to make a decision about being inside or outside or whatever. It's part of an identity as being a Democrat and part of an identity as being a feminist and part of it's being active in black lives matter.
Speaker 3 00:25:48 Yeah. So I think the last point I would make on this, and I'm not at all attached to the, I mean the inside, outside vocabulary, that's something I'm attached to. But I think that regardless of, not, regardless of both within the democratic party and adjacent to the democratic party, we are in a race against time to build up a new crop of leaders who don't just have an analysis, but have these skills of how to knock doors, have a man volunteers, how to run for office, how to run a campaign, how to raise money, how to talk to the media, these skills that, you know, in the aggregate, give us the capacity to, to outmaneuver the entrenched establishment of the democratic party that needs the old guard leadership that really needs ultimately to be replaced and the two to beat Republicans and to win the future. And so we need to build that leadership up because for too long, we've been on this trajectory of just professionalization, just kind of you, uh, weakening into the professional class. And so, um, that's, that's something,
Speaker 1 00:26:48 Well, I wanted to add one thing to that. And it's a question to both of you, but my experience in the sixties was we had this wave of college kids, black and white, who decided to go back into communities for the civil rights movement, but then for the anti-war movement and for other organizing, uh, and that's part of the origin of the community organizer as a role was the middle-class student, whether, uh, going into new communities, not necessarily where like you do, going back to where you came from, but some of people did go back to where they came from, and this wasn't just white students going into poor white neighborhoods or into black neighborhoods. It was the Snick organizers. Initially they were like this too. They were college graduate, uh, or were dropouts who went back or never were in the south, but went to the south. Yeah. So does CRM value to building up that story again for this generation of kids in college saying you have a mission now to reach out to America, uh, through these various avenues that are, uh, emerging as a new wave of community organizing, or it's already happening, why don't you join it kind of story, because I think I'm speaking as a, as a professor type, uh, that's a story that can be communicated to students that is likely to have a big effect, but is it, uh, is something you would welcome? Absolutely.
Speaker 3 00:28:17 Um, I think one difference between then and now is at that time, um, the leaders of those movements as an emerging class, that class was on an upward trajectory, you know, the rise of the kind of professional managerial class that a lot of that leadership was kind of part of that cohort. And now you have a downwardly mobile class, so that there's class elements that are really interesting to analyze in terms of like every, like most people, even with a middle-class background are in a precarious generation now. Right. And that's going to be really interesting in terms of its ramifications for, for bridging that class, divide it and organizing, I think there's a lot on packing and what you said, but yes, I think absolutely. And there's a lot of complicated things with people with more access to education often become the organizers and they shouldn't be paralyzed by, you know, kind of like guilt from that. There's a role to play and it's not easy to play. It's like, you know, you read about steak and you read about all the experiments and it's like, they did so many amazing things and it was like really hard. So that's the
Speaker 2 00:29:20 Deep sociology that I really appreciate about your analysis and your reflection on your own organizing experience. And that's why I've just really want to hear at least a few words because, uh, you know, we've got a, an authentic white working class guy on our show. And I feel like after the election of Donald Trump, there were like competing absurd debates and frameworks dogmas about who the working class is or isn't, and you'd see these headlines, like there's no such thing as the white working class, it's racist to talk about the white working class or the white working class is a bunch of racist and we should burn them and not care about their vote. If you you're writing a little, op-ed about like what to think about, uh, you probably have the so-called white working class in American politics with populism going on and so forth. Like what's a smarter takeaway and way to think about this. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:30:14 I have written some on this. I think, I think it's, it's complicated. Um, I think first of all, I think it's really important to recognize that the democratic party's problem with working class voters is not limited to white working class voters. Um, it's been a bleed across race. Um, it's been more pronounced among white people, but it's bad when people of color
Speaker 2 00:30:37 Lead to Republicans or a bleed to abstentionism,
Speaker 3 00:30:39 Uh, both, uh, I mean, bubbly abstentionism is far worse, but the, the Obama to Trump voter is, is a real phenomenon. And I mean, when you look at Trump's numbers with Latinos and black voters, I mean, of course it's still a majority are going, but th the inroads that he was able to make are incredible, and it's not really popular to look at that, but we need to be analyzing that data. Right. So, first of all, the democratic party's problem with, uh, working class voters is not just a problem with white working class voters. I think that's really important to recognize. Um, yeah. And then, you know, look, I have no patience for people who are dismissing the white working class. This is a, an economy that people are suffering and it's not, I don't think we should, excuse XYZ behavior. And, you know, I mean, you look at most of the people who were participants in like the Capitol insurrection, and they're not working class people, although there are some working class people, uh, in that, but not, not the majority.
Speaker 3 00:31:38 I mean, class is really complex, right. And it's important not to, uh, I mean, it's important to analyze the data for one, but you know, like there is, I mean, part of how Trump's appeal worked is he punches down by scapegoating. I mean, this is classic reactionary, populism punches down by scapegoating, especially immigrants and Muslims were his favorite targets to really, you know, otherize, somebody demonize somebody as a way of solidifying solidarity among his base. I know solidarity is not a great word to use. People have good associations with that, but he was doing that. People felt like they were part of something. They felt in solidarity with each other. And that was a lot of his power, but he also does it by punching up, not at the economic forces at the very top. He taps into that anger at the very top, right.
Speaker 3 00:32:28 But he punches at the people in the top 10%, the affluent liberals, right? The democratic party politicians, the media, Hollywood academia, and it works. It works one if the democratic party is not naming the economic power at the very top, then there's a void to name a villain. And two, it works because there's too many people saying condescending stuff in that democratic party and not just the democratic party in the affluent liberal base, right. There's people like James, Carville the specing Pennsylvania, Pennsyltucky, there's fly over country. Those basket of deplorables and where economic power is abstract. The people when you're down at the bottom and you're looking up at the top 10%, the cultural elites, it looks a lot like the top and condescension has felt viscerally. And so that's not an excuse for people who are then going off onto a, you know, whatever kind of voting behavior or activities.
Speaker 3 00:33:25 But we, we have to have an alternative to that narrative and we'd seen houses. Yeah. And we can't use, you know, like academic vocabulary as a bludgeon against working class people. We have to be organized. We have to be going door to door. We have to be listening to them and you're not going to win a lot of them. Right. I mean, the, the ship has sailed with a lot of people with Trump. The damage is done, but there are a lot of people still in the middle, a lot of people with, I don't like in the middle, but a lot of people who are open to different narratives and we found this, you look at the data of the race class, narrative, and people are persuadable and we have to do that work right on.
Speaker 1 00:34:06 Well, this has been great. And, uh, we probably have many more hours we could spend
Speaker 3 00:34:12 Talking with you guys.
Speaker 1 00:34:13 Yeah. And, uh, you're writing another book.
Speaker 3 00:34:16 I am. Yeah. Can I, can I, can I curse on this, on this podcast? Absolutely. Uh, yeah. Well, it has the little asterix, but the title is fuckers at the top. Um, a practical guide for overthrowing America's ruling class. And it it's about, yeah. It's about this conversation, right? It's, uh, it's the book version it's supposed to be out, uh, somewhere in the first half of this year. So I got to move on it. Um, you know, it was kind of written last year, but a lot's changed with Biden and everything. So it kind of has to be rewritten for the moment, but it's, it's kind of a, a book form of, of this conversation really. And some of the, really, both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical, how do we do this, uh, all the way down to the kind of nitty gritty of tactics.
Speaker 1 00:34:59 Great. And by the way, you did mention that you had early, had put out a kind of handbook on local organizing front that proceeded the indivisible stuff. Is that still available?
Speaker 3 00:35:11 Yeah, I can send that to you. I mean, that was very formal. I'm
Speaker 1 00:35:14 Trying to get my, maybe listeners would be interested to know, well,
Speaker 3 00:35:18 I can, I can figure out how to get that, uh, that link to you. It's just like, I mean, it's just a long Google doc about how to organize a mass meeting and then pivot those folks into, into organizing.
Speaker 1 00:35:28 It might be useful to have us post that. Yeah. Great. Well, so much. Thank you. And, and, uh, maybe next time we'll Becca on, because she's got her own stories, right. That are a force anyway, best of luck to all of us as we try to pull through talk it all right. Enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you all for your time. That was really awesome.
Speaker 3 00:35:56 Yeah. My pleasure. I really, really good talking with you guys to be continued.
