Marshal and Saga here. Welcome back to The Realignment.

This week we're excited to speak to Chris Arnotti. He's the author of Dignity Seeking Respect

in Back Row America. Chris has a really interesting story. He's the former Wall Street trader

his physics PhD. He abandoned his career just to go photograph and talk to people. Started

off in the Bronx, handed up walking and traveling the entire lengths of this country. And

the interesting thing about Chris is he never intended to become a political figure. But

when 2016 was happening, he decided to tell everybody that they didn't really understand

what was happening in the rest of this country. And I think that that's what makes him

very interesting to talk to. Yeah, and he was great to talk to because after the election

a lot of people sort of said, let's go out into Trump country, let's go to Wisconsin,

let's go to the Midwest and see why people didn't vote the way we expected them to. But he's

very clear that this book isn't about Trump country. It's not about Trump voters. It's

actually about people in urban regions. It's about the Bronx. It's about Brooklyn. It's

about Bridgeport, Connecticut, but it's also at the Midwest too. His central idea, this

book is about people who don't buy into our system anymore that are non voters. So

the other thing that he really did that was so useful for us as a show was he brought

this construct, the idea that we have a front row and a back row America. Think of a classroom,

the way that we could explain a lot of our divisions today is that we have the people

in the front who have the best jobs, who went to the fanciest schools. Now in the back

area of people who are more rooted in their communities, their people who don't necessarily

have even gone to college or even graduated from high school. And if we don't understand

that there's a division along those lines, we're going to have a hard time understanding

...