Whereas if we talk to these people who are all, who are concerned mostly with cultural issues,

with representation, with, you know, are we kneeling because of the protests and wearing, you know,

kentacloths and making demonstrations like this, but not actually doing substantive things

to improve people's lives, that's more comfortable for us moving forward as a policy agenda.

I think that there's definitely an element of that. And also, maybe even the harsher way that I would

phrase it is that in some progressive liberal circles, there can be a sense that, yeah, yeah,

we want everyone to get health care. But do we really want the bad people to get health care?

Do we really want the Nazis to get health care when there are so many other issues that can move to the front of the line? I think that's definitely there. But an underrated part of the story, too, is just how siloed the political classes in general, but maybe in particular, a Democrat political class, but which I mean, there are the campaign operatives who are off in one zone. And from what I can tell from the outside, they really do not have much to say with the policy types. And the governing administrators, they're just very different worlds. And one of the key characters in my last book, Left Adrift, which is a sort of focused examination of how this transformation that Sarenlef has played out, not just in the United States, but in lots places around the world. It's this fascinating character, Stan Greenberg, who's a baby boomer in the 1960s. He's an academic Marxist, who's reading Gromschild in his spare time, but also volunteering for Bobby Kennedy and really believes that there's a way to bring back that New Deal coalition, even after the 60s and the counterculture

and all of the rest. And looking back on his career in 2009, he has his memoir that comes out.

And by this point, he's advised Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, Gerhardt Schroeder, Nelson

Mandela, this extraordinary cast of characters. And he says, when I look at how these people campaigned and then governed,

I realized that in almost every case, I ended up urging them to run as this kind of combination of

economic populace and cultural moderates, because that's where I thought working class voters

were. All the research I was doing said that if you wanted to get these voters back to the left,

it was a combination of economic populism and being in touch with them on the culture war. And it turned out that that worked, that when the election was on the line, Bill Clinton, even Tony Blair, they could do a plausible presentation of that case. But what happened after they took power? Greenberg says the very first thing that they did is that they stopped listening to people like me, and they start listening to the people who run the economy. Finance, capital, you can see the, it's a buried academic Marxist and Greenberg breaking out again on the other side of his career. And Krenberg, by the way, he's fascinating because, among other things, he goes into partnership with James Carville. It's the economy stupid, is the kind of popularized version of the way Greenberg thinks about the world. And Greenberg says, so you have Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, they go talk to Wall Street, Alan Greenspan, whoever, and what they hear is that economic populism stuff, that we're talking about on the campaign trail, but now it's time to grow up. Now it's time for neoliberalism.

And that argument turns out to be very persuasive,

especially when they realize that getting these economic changes through is going to be really hard. And at the same time that the economic stuff is hard to deliver on, the cultural stuff, the people who are in the economy don't care about that. Or maybe they're even in favor of it. And it turns out that your base,

that the activist within the party,

they really, really care about this stuff too,

and it's just a much easier lift.

So what happens is if you're Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, maybe you can win for reelection because you're that compelling, people are invested to you from the first time around. But eight years later, on the other side of the administration, the working class voters who voted for you because you are an economic, populist, cultural, moderate, what do they see that you turned into a progressive neoliberal? And they're going to be pissed off about that. And Greenberg in 2009 is saying that what I'm worried about is step one of a process like this is that it feeds into disenchantment with working class voters. But step two is you're pissing them off so much that eventually there's going to be hell to pay, that we are laying the foundation for a right-wing backlash to come.

And if you're looking for a deeper, not quite, it's like Marx capital-level structural explanation,

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