Factually! with Adam Conover - You Deserve to Be Paid More, with Dino Guastella

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Politicians love to talk about lowering prices, but they really don’t like to talk about the other half of the equation: actually raising wages. That’s because the institutions of our government treat us as consumers first, and actual human beings with a role in society second. This week, Adam speaks with Dustin "Dino" Guastella, Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 and research associate with the Center for Working-Class Politics, about how the Democratic Party has lost track of what “affordability” actually means, and how a basic shift in perspective can actually begin to address the needs of working people.--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Again, happy to have you here. You know, affordability has become the rallying cry for the Democrats. It was central to Zoran's victory in New York City, and it has now become the center of the Democrats' midterm strategy. And that's a good thing.

It's good to see the Democrats focus on, you know, the material reality of people in this country and trying to make it better. What a concept that that's something that's something that a political party should focus on, but hey, you know, never too late, glad to see him do it, and hopefully it'll lead to some better outcomes. But, you know, affordability is just one side of the equation because that's just about the price that you pay for a good or service, right? So, yes, the rent is too damn high, but, you know, it's too damn high because you're not

getting paid damn near enough because your job is too damn low paying, or maybe your job. fled to a different damn country. Being rent-burdened isn't just about having to spend a specific dollar amount on housing. It's also about the fact that you have to spend a huge proportion of your low wages simply to have a roof over your head. The point is addressing costs, addressing prices, without addressing good jobs or good wages, even though it's an improvement, it's still kind of a classic neoliberal move, where Americans aren't addressed first and foremost as citizens or as work.

but rather as consumers who need to be taken care of at the cash register, but not on the job site. So whether or not affordability works out for the Democrats in the midterms or not, the focus on it is still kind of emblematic of the many ways in which liberals attempt to reach out to regular working people, but still do not fully address the problems that they actually face or fight back against the people who are oppressing them and keeping them down, mainly the wealthy elites and corporations in this country. So how is the Democratic Party still failing to represent and fight for working people? What does the party and elite institutions like the media that I'm a part of misunderstand about what working people want?

And how can labor unions and the labor movement itself be doing more to fight that battle? Well, here on the show today talk about class politics, labor politics, trade policy, all that awesome leftist shit. We have a really smart and insightful guest on the show today. His name is Dustin Dino Guastella, and he is the Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 and a research associate with the Center for Working Class Politics. His writing can be found in the Guardian, Jackabin, and Damage Magazine.

I'm so thrilled to have him on the show. Before we get into it, I want to remind you if you want to support the show and all of the incredible interviews, we bring you week in, week out, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show, ad-free. We love to have you. And now let's get to this interview with Dino.

Westella. Hey, Dino, thank you so much for being on the show, man. Hey, thanks for having me. So let's jump right into it. There's a lot of talk right now in the Democratic Party, in liberal circles about affordability, which is very welcome. You know, the Mom Dani campaign definitely brought that back into the conversation, the material concerns of, you know, working Americans, average Americans as being something that Democrats need to address. Hey, who would have thought that might be a focus for politicians in this country? But why is just a affordability and not enough. What does it miss? Right. Thanks, Adam. Yeah, I think the affordability thing is a step in the right direction for the Democratic Party. It puts economic issues right at the forefront,

which is important. But what it's missing right now is a focus on jobs and a focus on designing an economy that can actually provide higher wages. So we can't just try to cut costs. We also have to raise wages for millions of people. And how are we going to do that? The question, I think, of working class people are going to be asking the Democratic Party is, how can I get a good job in the age of AI automation and all these things? How am I going to be able to support a family, buy a house, all these sorts of things? If we're just talking about cutting some taxes, maybe some tax breaks that try to bring down cutting Trump's tariffs, that try to bring down costs across the board. So this is a big problem. I mean, I think the progressives in the Congressional

Progressive Caucus have a lot of great plans. But if you read this stuff, there's almost nothing about infrastructure, about trade, about industrial policy, about all those jobs that have gone away for specifically non-college educated working class people that have not come back. They haven't come back under Trump. They came back a little under Biden, but they didn't really talk about it a lot. That needs to be the focus. If you want to win places like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, you need to focus on jobs, trade, industrial policy, infrastructure, these kind of issues. Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, you know, the focus on affordability, good, but if all you're doing is trying to reduce prices, you're only working on one half of the equation.

And in some ways, you're only working on the easier half, right? You're only working on the part that the consumers have to deal with, which is how we deal with a lot of problems in America. We deal with them at the cash register. And we never, you know, ask anything more difficult of the people who are making the thing or the people who are employing people. So, first of all, what's, you know, what's happened in America, to make those jobs go away and how has life changed for folks over the past couple decades,

you know, that has made the affordability problem so big, because it's not just the price you pay. It's the input that you get to your life, right? Monetarily. Yeah. So, I mean, I think this is part of the bigger philosophical problem here with affordability. There was a really high cost to allowing cheap goods to be the main economic driver for American growth. And we started that under NAFTA, maybe a little before NAFTA, but under NAFTA and really accelerated for when we allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization and basically say, hey, we're going to

fling the doors open. We want cheap goods from all around the world to come into the United States. And to pay for that, we're going to basically get rid of a ton of manufacturing jobs, high wage, decent jobs for working class people. Well, we did get those cheap goods, but at the cost of high wage jobs. And that was the bargain that a lot of Democrats. and Republicans hand in hand made from the 1990s through today. They said, look, it's better for us.

It's more competitive for us if we just let all these other countries make our stuff. And if we focus on, you know, the high tech, the college educated, the knowledge economy, all that sort of stuff. Well, the result of that is now we're having trouble with both. We can't keep costs down and we can't keep wages up. So the crux of the problem with affordability is much bigger than just the price of eggs. It's an entire global system that has been built around the question of globalizing the manufacturing sector instead of focusing on high wage jobs here at home for everybody, not just for the college educated, not just for the tech people, but for people who work ordinary

jobs without a college education, without a whole lot of high skills and that sort of thing. And, you know, if all you focus on is making the goods cheaper, hey, let's get rid of the high wage jobs and make goods cheaper. maybe you can hope that the the cheap cost of the goods outweighs, you know, all the wages you got cut, right? If you're just looking at two big levers. But what happens when you get an imbalance like we have right now? Well, and all you try to do is make the goods cheaper.

Well, there's some goods you can't make cheaper. You can't import apartment buildings from China. You can't import medical care from China. And you've got other systemic issues in the country that we refuse to address that are causing those things to be expensive. Like the price of eggs gets a lot of attention. the price of eggs is not the biggest problem in America. It's all that other shit, right?

And so, you know, you can't globalize your way out of a housing shortage or out of a for-profit health care system, especially because, you know, health care is also related to employment the way we've structured it in this country. So in broad strokes, what needs to be done? I mean, the main thing that needs to be done is we need to figure out how to re-industrialize and bring, you know, I think the United States. United States needs to step down from the global scale when it comes to the economic stuff and start

focusing on stuff here at home. Our infrastructure is crumbling, right? You drive around any major city, you see it's falling apart. It's 100 years old. The last time we really invested in it was in the new deal. And these are jobs. You know, if you look around the country and see all the things that are sort of falling apart physically, those are jobs. Now, what does that do all the way down the chain? If we put a ton of money into infrastructure, well, suddenly you need the materials, that go into building bridges. What is that? That's steel, right? Are we going to say, no, we're going to build a bunch of new bridges, but we're going to import all the steel from China? Why? Why not reopen some of our steel foundries that are actually proximate to where we have these

projects? This is the way we can start to say, look, not only are we going to address a lot of the social problems in the United States, but we're going to give good high wage jobs as a result of it. To do those things, you need to have a progressive economic message that isn't just focused on bringing costs down or adding some more programs here or there or cutting some, you know, giving some tax credits here or there. It's a structural change. It's actually saying we're going to redesign the economy in order to accommodate working people rather than we're simply going to tinker on the edges and hope that at the end of the day, Democrats come out with 50 plus 1% of the vote and skate by another election. Yeah. I think we do need to dispense with that way of doing politics

and we need to have a bigger message. And I again, I think like, Like, Mamdani just pointed out to all of America that, like, if you just have the basics of like, hey, I'm going to do some big shit that'll make your life better, that can really power an entire campaign. And he was, that wasn't even an industrialization message. There's a lot of neo-FDR stuff, but it wasn't what you're talking about because that's not something you could do as the mayor of New York. But when you say reindustrialization, that's really fascinating because a lot of people will say that that's impossible, you know? and a lot of the ways that, you know, say, like Donald Trump will sort of toss out this idea. It is impossible. You know, for instance, I have heard the argument many times, and it makes sense to me,

that we're not going to build iPhones over here because, first of all, the iPhone was built around the Chinese, you know, manufacturing system. Like, they built an entire infrastructure over there that the iPhone was literally born from. You know, like we'd have to move so much shit over here. train so many people like basically create an entirely new economy that that is you know that's not realistic now let me know whether you agree or disagree with that but is there some other form of reindustrialization that you mean like are you talking about more like a new deal like works project like let's just have people let's build some bridges let's build some some water let's

let's fucking carve some some new or you know uh roads out of the mountainside is that what you're talking about yeah i mean that that that's a start you know i might be happy with some new bridges and roads. In L.A., I certainly would. I'm sure you would do in Philly where you are. Yeah, ours are about to fall into the river. But I think the bigger question is it's about trade. It's about trade policy.

We don't need to go back. You know, when people talk about reindustrialization, they immediately think, oh, we're not going to go back to 1950, where we were the, you know, the supply to all the world with all our goods. We don't need to go back to 1950. We basically have to go back to like 1996 in terms of industrial output. That's not that hard to do. Think about, just think about the public goods in this country that are used by everybody every day.

School buses, transit buses, trains, all these things require mechanical parts. They require steel. They require tons of manufactured goods to go into them. In order to make those things, you need to have factories that are running at a decent capacity, that are run well and that are organized well. Well, we have let all of that go fallow. We've basically said we're not emphasizing that. We're not worried about that. We don't want to be competitive in those fields.

We don't want to care about those fields. Reversing this is a policy choice. Now, there is a secular decline in the amount of jobs that manufacturing is going to produce. But we have not reached it. There's no way that we can say with the terrible amount of transit that we have in this country, in mass transit that we have in this country, with the lack of a unified electrical greed, that we've maxed out our capacity for building stuff in America. It's crazy to think that way.

Yes, China is going to have. have a dominance over certain high-tech goods. But the fact is, we don't need to make those high-tech goods for most people's lives to be better. We need better basic things, better low-tech things in order to have more jobs and rebuild a manufacturing sector that can function. Not one that needs to compete on every single level with the big manufacturing countries around the world, but one that can provide goods here in America and jobs here in America that need to be basically made in America. Yeah, it sounds like what you're talking about is just, creating a governmental focus on doing this in as many areas as possible in a broad way.

And like, hey, some things we're not going to reindustrialize. Some things we're not going to do here. But let's start by talking about the things that we can, right? Let's start by bridges, steel, whatever. I mean, I don't think this is what you're talking about, but I've finally got fiber optic on my block. I've been waiting 10 years. I literally go to like AT&T fiber. I've lived in like six different addresses.

When are they fucking lay in some cables, right? And that's not quite what you're talking about, but it shows a lack of desire to build necessary infrastructure in this country at all. If we looked at everything like that, hey, why aren't we running the necessary cables from here to there? Why aren't we spinning up the necessary factories of whatever kind, you know, as a broad approach, we would be, A, more competitive globally,

B, have more local jobs. Let's talk about the political piece of it. You know, Donald Trump sort of famously, at least, you know, aesthetically tilted, you know, towards the working class the last couple elections. The Democrats tried to do so in a lot of ways that really failed.

How do you see, you know, the current state of politics as it pertains to, you know, everyday working Americans. What are the Republicans doing right and wrong? And what are the Democrats doing right and wrong? Right. So the big story last election was that Trump really made big inroads among a lot of former Biden voters, working class, former Biden voters. And that was, you know, a huge failure on the part of the Democratic Party, especially the Democratic Party establishment.

But what we're seeing now is about 20 percent of Trump's voters are saying, look, they're not interested in voting for the Republicans next election. We think the Center for Working Class Politics, we think about 11% of those voters are winnable to the Democrats. The rest of them, unfortunately, and this says a lot about where the Democratic Party is, are planning on sitting out the election or voting third party or anything but the Democratic Party, right? So there's a real frustration and a real anger out there among blue-collar voters toward both parties. And that makes sense, right? This was a bipartisan economic agenda that's, you know, taken years to come to fruition. And people aren't just blaming one party.

They're blaming both parties as a result of that. But the truth is that Democrats can capture a decent amount back if they listen to what working class people want, right? Just all the stuff we've been talking about, that's a big part of the agenda. The economic populism, that's a part of the agenda. But the other part of the agenda, too, is stop nominating, you know, white shoe law firm types, stop nominating foundation director types that fundamentally are alien to what a union hall looks like, what it's like to talk to somebody in the middle of Pennsylvania.

These kind of candidates just put people off in these areas. You need to find candidates that come from the working class, that come from blue-colored backgrounds that can make this pitch. And there's two reasons for that. One, it's immediately apparent when somebody's got a Harvard education, when they stand up there and they've been in front of the class with their arm in the air, waiting for teacher to pick them for years and years and years, versus somebody who's a blue-collar person.

That's immediately apparent in everything they do, their mannerisms, the way they speak, all of that. But the other part of it is the cultural values, right? It's very clear to people that upper-class Democrats have different cultural values than working-class Democrats do. And the way you speak about issues, the rhetoric you use, all of that comes across. So one of the big debates, I think, in the Democratic Party right now is to moderate or not to moderate.

And I think this really misses what's the crux of the issue. Because on some issues, yeah, moderation. But the real thing is, are you going to cater to wealthier, upper middle class Democrats, or are you going to cater to blue-collar voters? That's the real divide in the party. And that divide isn't so neat on moderate or progressive, because working-class voters are more interested in economic equality than upper-class. voters are, obviously. They actually favor all of these economic populist policies. They favor

economic progressivism. They like this stuff. A lot of times more than college educated voters do, but they're a little more socially moderate. They don't like a lot of the liberal cultural appeals. They don't like a lot of that stuff. All of this is in the mix. If Democrats want to win these people back, they need to think this way. The easiest way to do that is fine candidates that already think this way, that already come out of the union movement, that come out of the working class, that know how to talk about these issues in a way that relates to ordinary people. If you can do that with an economic populist message, you can win back that chunk of Trump voters that you need to turn things over. If not, it's anyone's game. And just as Trump sort of shocked

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Lisa.com, you can get 25% off select mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code factually exclusively for my listeners. That's L-E-E-S-A.com promo code factually for 30% off-select mattresses, plus an extra $50 off, support our show, and let them know we sent you after check out, Lisa.com promo code factually. Now, when you talk about those different cultural values, what values in particular are you talking about? Like, there's plenty of things that are, you know,

values of the culturally elite or whatever in their aesthetic qualities. But you also hear people who are making the same argument that you're making or something that sounds similar that rhymes with it. And what they're saying is, Democratic Party needs to stop caring about trans issues, for example, because they see that as the issue of a college educated working class. Now, I happen to disagree based on, you know, the trans folks who I meet around the country when I'm on the road.

It's not, you know, we're not talking about like Harvard grads, you know, who are, you know, socially transitioning in Indiana or whatever. There's trans folks all over the country. So, and, you know, I also personally don't think that it's true of like, you know, racial justice or anything like that. But maybe you disagree. What exactly are you talking about when you're talking about cultural values? So I think immigration is a great example. When Trump got elected in 2016, a lot of liberals were sort of dumbfounded by the bill of the wall message. They were surprised that a lot of people voted for this.

And they wrote them off as xenophobes or bigots. Sure, a lot of them were that. Some of them were that. But what was missing from this is that there is a class story here. At the same time that we started getting a large increase in immigration in the United States, a lot of factory jobs. jobs were leaving this country at the exact same moment. Now, a lot of non-college educated people who work in construction and in the skilled trades, we're also seeing the wage-suppressing effects of immigration in their industries. There's a reason why big corporations love to have undocumented immigrants in a country because they can pay them less, they can exploit them more, and they can treat them very badly, right? This has an effect on the industry that you work in if you're in

construction or if you're in the manual trades, you can see it very directly the way in which immigration is lowering standards, it's bringing down wages. Now, many of these guys have talked to them. They don't actually dislike the immigrants. They dislike the system. They dislike a system that incentivizes people to come to the country and work for lower wages than the native-born population would work for. They know that these are hardworking people. They know that these are their neighbors. They don't want to see them rounded up. And many of them are frustrated that they're getting rounded up by ICE in these violent, brutal attacks. But they're also frustrated by Democrats who act like, no, no, no, no, this isn't an issue. Stop talking about it. In fact, immigration is only

ever good for everybody all the time. And that's what they're hearing from a lot of Democrats. Now, Biden and some other Democrats have changed on this regard. They've moved toward a position that says, no, we actually do need to worry about borders. We do need to worry about our labor market and making sure standards are okay. But here's a great example where I think a lot of college-educated liberals just have no idea what it is their working-class counterparts

are thinking when it comes to a question like immigration. They think immigration is just about tolerance and openness. They don't see the wage side of the equation. They don't see the economic side of the equation. And that's somewhere where a lot of Democrats still need to figure out how to talk to and about working-class interests. Well, so what sort of policies do you look for?

Because I see, you know, Trump's actual, you know, yes, he's tapping into a real economic problem that is affecting the material reality of working people, right? He is also tapping into a genuine bigotry that a lot of people have. And his policy solutions are all violent and bigotry based, right? They're treating the people who are doing the immigrant, the people who are crossing the border as criminals that need to be removed when if you look at it instead, as you put it, you know, the companies love to have undocumented immigrants because they can use those people to undercut the wages, right?

I agree with you about that. That's true. That's, in fact, been the history of immigration across the southern border for basically all of American history was we're going to import cheap labor, treat them like shit, make them illegal or put them in a legal gray area that allows us to treat them like shit. And then we can go back and forth, kick them out of the country, relax the borders, kick them out of the country. Again, it goes back to the Bracero program and before that.

I mean, some of the worst jobs in this country, specifically in the making of food, have always been done by those folks under brutal conditions. That's a system that was set up on purpose. And part of the reason was to create a population. that you can just fucking brutalize and pay less over and over again. And, you know, the Trump administration has taken advantage of that very system in the same way and is taking advantage of real bigotry to advance what's also a bigoted agenda. I mean, the people are just fucking racist who run the country at this point.

And they enjoy seeing heads broken. And there is that element as well. So if we were actually going to have a real progressive working class focused immigration policy that respected the humanity and the dignity of the people, you know, who have always crossed the southern border to work here, right? Make sure those people are well taken care of and take care of Americans and, you know, not let the corporations off the hook. What kind of policy does that look like?

Because I've still not seen the overall pitch that has made sense to me yet. Yeah. So I think there are three elements. The first is you have to actually talk about it, right? I think a lot of Democrats still don't want to talk about it because it's Trump's issue. They think that, you know, the only way to talk about is to be the opposite of Trump. And that's not going to work, right? You have to be honest about the issue. So I think people need to talk about it a lot more. Two, it is about trade. Trade is a big part of this. One reason why we have such pressure at our

southern border is because wages are so low in South America, in Latin America as a whole. That is by design. NAFTA made that the case. We want to keep wages low down there. We want to keep things harder for those people. That's why they keep coming up here for better jobs. So you have to fix the trade situation such that you can raise wages in the countries of the global South. And then thirdly, I think one of the huge things that we need to start doing is saying, look, when we say that we want a path to citizenship, we have to mean that effective and quickly for the people that have been working here, not committing any violent crimes, so that they can get all the protections needed by minimum wage law, union right law, all that kind of stuff. That right now, as you said,

they're in a legal gray area. So these things all have to be in the mix, but you can't neglect the border. You can't talk about open borders. And you can't just say everything the opposite of Trump, you know, it has to be a serious understanding that there are real problems with our immigration system. And companies have been taking advantage of it to the detriment of working people in this country. Fixing that's not going to be easy. I'm not saying there's a switch that you can do it, but politically talking about it has to be the starting point. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about something very complicated. You're talking about an overall plan, which is what we need that, like, addresses every

single input to the system that makes it fucked up. What you have seen Democrats doing is, oh, we need to talk about immigration. That means we need to talk about it like Trump. We need to, like, enforce that we need to build the wall and we need to, like, kick people out and bust some heads and whatnot. I mean, the part that interests me the most about what you have, what you just said is as relates to how we treat the countries south of us because in many ways we have punished those countries through foreign policy to, you know, keep them down. We've like kept those countries degraded.

We've degraded their governments. We've kept, you know, sometimes keep them as like client states to the United States or whatever. Trade policy. And trade policy. With trade policy, what we've effectively said, look, one of the things I think a lot of people don't get is when we got rid of manufacturing jobs in the United States, we got rid of high wage jobs, but we didn't send high wage jobs to Mexico and China. It wasn't like we took jobs that were in Michigan represented by the UAW making decent wages, and we said, we're going to take that same job and put it in Mexico. We're going to take that same job and put it in China. We took the functions those people were doing and then said, we're going to pay you a dollar a day to do it in Mexico or in China. That was trade policy.

We deliberately said we want to get rid of good jobs in the United States and employ effectively slave labor in the global south to make goods cheaper in, you know, in our consumer world. Fixing that is not as hard as people think it is. It requires a genuine trade policy that says, we're actually not going to reward companies for moving abroad and paying a dollar a day to workers. We're going to reward those companies that actually pay their workers a decent wage. You start doing that, and a lot of companies are going to start raising their wages,

because guess what? The United States has the largest consumer market in the world. people want to be able to ship their goods here. They want to be able to come into the door and sell stuff to Americans. The only way we start using that leverage to our advantage in ways that can fix our immigration problems and ways that can fix our industrial and wage problems is by enforcing a reasonable trade policy and renegotiating trade such that we don't ever have a NAFTA again. And we start having fair trade instead of the free trade that's been dominating politics for my entire life. I mean, this is my first time thinking about this, but is there any, like, hypothetical

policy that we could have done instead of NAFTA, for example, in that moment where it's like, hey, we want to allow goods from other countries to come in, where we would require those, you know, countries to have policies that require their workers to be paid a certain amount, or in which we're saying, hey, we're going to open our borders to certain types of trade, but guess what? we're also going to enable and empower the UAW to go, hey, here's a billion bucks for the U.S. labor movement. We want you guys to set up like satellite unions across, you know, the global south or whatever. Like, you know, I'm fucking making this up, but you see what I'm saying.

If it's like a matter of keeping wages up as we're, as we're doing this. In terms of intellectually, yeah, there was a million things we could have done to avoid the, what happened, you know, the collapse of manufacturing jobs and the downward spiral. of wages across the world, the race to the bottom that globalization created. But politically, I don't think so, because I think the forces that were pushing for this in both the Democratic and Republican parties had the largest corporations behind them. It seemed as if there was no way of stopping the train that was moving. I mean, there was a real cryout for help in Ross Perrault's campaign, which, by the way, did very well among a lot of blue-collar voters.

I want a blue-collar Democratic voters, specifically because he's a real cryout for help in Ross Perrault's campaign, which, by the way, did very well, among a lot of blue-collar Democratic voters, specifically because he said, look, what's going to happen here is we're going to get rid of all of our good manufacturing jobs. And he was right. And Clinton and a lot of elite Democrats acted like he was a lunatic and a crank for saying those things. Well, the chickens have come home to roost. And I think we've seen what the destruction of trade of industry has done to the United States, not just in terms of our wages, but in terms of our political and civic culture as well. We've destroyed a lot of the foundations for what made the New Deal possible. those unions, those associations, those fraternal groups, stable working class neighborhoods, all of that went out the window when we de-industrialized. And we replaced it by saying, look, it'll be fine. You'll get cheap TVs, as if that's going to replace the kind of thick social lives and worlds that working-class people had under a better industrial system. You know, you're making me want to go back and like re-examine Ross Perrault because I was a, I was a kid then, you know, and it was like, oh, you know, see, see Dan and Carvey do them on SNL.

sort of like, oh, here's a weird thing. But like that was such a fascinating moment in retrospect in American politics. There hasn't been anything like it since. And, you know, we've had plenty of billionaires run for office with such and such a message. But that was really a sort of a moment that I think took a lot of people in America by surprise. And I'm not sure that we've, people don't go back and talk about it that much exactly what, what Perrault was all about. It was a Medicare for all supporter as well. Was he really?

There was a lot of things that he saw that, you know, we look back at now. We're like, wow, it could have been a very different couple decades. Yeah. I want to talk about, I know part of your analysis is about the role that liberal NGOs play in left politics. Tell me about that a little bit, that, you know, as unions have declined, these sort of orgs, what kind of org are you talking about that's filled the gap and what have they done? Yeah, so this is a story that starts, you know, around the same time in the 1990s. Once we start seeing the decline of the labor movement, both in terms of sheer numbers of

workers and unions, and in terms of their influence at the top levels of the Democratic Party, the thing that filled that hole was the rise of these foundations and nonprofit groups, right? We've seen them. There's millions of them. Everybody has some kind of nonprofit that's doing some kind of political advocacy on the hill, right? They claim to represent some group, usually, but typically they don't actually have members. They don't have like, they don't have a convention where 10,000 people go and vote on what they're going to be doing. They just have, you know, a board of directors that goes out and does media stuff and does some lobbying. But you're about like the like the ACLU for example. Like if you're a great example,

if you're a member, you pay 50 bucks a year, but they don't actually go to you and say, come to the convention. Let us know what you want. It's like you pay your dues. They do their thing. They're not a mass membership organization like a union or the comparison. I've made on this show is to like the NRA, which actually like is a kind of mass membership organization that mobilizes people, gets them to turn out and has sort of a back and forth with its membership, right? Exactly. Exactly. And these organizations proliferated. I mean, they've exploded. And now people set them up all the time. You'll see in campaigns, people set them up just for them to exist for six months out of time, just so that they can get their issue into the media world so that they can talk

about it and influence Democratic Party politicians, right? Now, two reasons why these things have had such purchase. One, the candidates themselves, the leaders of the Democratic Party themselves, are fluent in this world. They come out of this world. They come out of the foundation world, the NGO world, the lawyer world. They're attorneys. They're people who've dealt with these people. They've sat around these tables. They've eaten these dinners, these fundraisers and all that kind of stuff. They're used to that. That's kind of the world they live in. They don't live in the steel towns anymore. They don't go to the union meetings anymore. The world they live in is the foundation world. And they've they've sort of made their social bones and political bones through

climbing those foundation ladders. So that's one way. There's just a social connection that a lot of Democratic Party leaders have to these NGOs and nonprofits that influences them profoundly. But two, there has been no other group that has taken the place of a kind of temperature check. of what people are thinking, no membership groups, you know, the decline of membership associational groups, unions, all that kind of stuff means there's not a real group you can go to and say, hey, you know, I'm playing on running for Congress and, you know, I'm wondering what your bowling league, what your fraternal organization, what your union thinks about this issue. So instead, they go to these nonprofits, right?

Right. And they ask them what they think about these issues or more likely the nonprofits are asking the candidates and trying to inform the candidates about what they think about these issues. Then the candidates go out, meet the general public, and are shocked, then people don't think the same way as a board of directors for some nonprofit that has an issue, right? And last election, we saw a lot of hand-wringing among Democratic observers about the groups, right? Yeah. The influence of the groups. Ezra Klein was talking about this a lot. And I don't think you're normally the kind of guy who agrees with Ezra Klein about a lot of stuff, but that was a big

concern. Oh, the groups are telling the party what to do. Honestly, a lot of times this was another way of saying, oh, the party cared too much about social justice issues, which again, I have complex feelings about. Well, it depends on how you define, right? And it depends on what is the issue at stake here. And I think that they were right to be concerned about the groups. But I think there was a bit of, there was a bit of amnesia here on why these groups. came to have such a profound impact in the party. And many of the same people associated with the establishment wing, the elite wing of the Democratic Party, who were complaining about the groups, were people who were basically hatched out of these same networks and grew up in these same networks.

And so there's a lot of, you know, hypocrisy going on here where they're saying, oh, these groups, these groups, and it's like, who empowered these groups? Many of the same people who were complaining about them today. And the reason why they have so much power is because everybody in the Democratic Party elite, from Clinton onward, said the unions have too much power. And the unions were the problem. So we have to get away from the unions and instead embrace these more forward thinking, more sort of new knowledge economy-based organizations that are digital, they're mobile, they're this, they're that. But they are fundamentally embedded in the infrastructure of the Democratic Party now. Now, how do you get away from it? It's much harder

than I think a lot of people think. A lot of people think, oh, just tell them no. Just say no. But these organizations now make up the basic recruiting ground for your activists, your candidates, your policy papers, all of that has been farmed out to these organizations. We no longer have the institutions, the mass institutions. The NRA is probably one of the last ones. I think maybe the AARP is another one of the last ones of these.

Yeah, kind of. these mass membership organizations that actually have, you know, a mailing list that can reach a decent amount of people and that people actually interact with, right? Those organizations don't exist anymore. The labor movement is maybe the last of them in the world. But once you get rid of them, it becomes very difficult to take the temperature of the people and to find organized networks of people that can do the kinds of things that political party needs it to do. go out knock doors, you know, brief people, lobby people, all that kind of stuff needs people who are organized to do it. Well, we've disorganized our entire country and instead sort of siphoned up at the top and said, hey, these nonprofits and NGOs, they're going to do all that for us now.

They're professionals at doing that for us now. Well, they have the same disconnect from the rest of the people as the elite politicians do. The irony that you're talking about is so clear, and I love it, because when the Ezra Klein types, I don't want to argue with. like Ezra specifically because I don't want to have to go back and read a colony road two years ago. But let's just say types like that are complaining about the groups. Oh, the groups have too much power. You know, when a Harvard-educated elite person says that, what they're saying is, we're listening to the wrong Harvard-educated elite people.

We're listening to the ones from the NGOs. What we should be listening to is the Harvard-educated elite people who run the Democratic Party, right? And they can tell us what is going to help us win. Oh, we listen to the wrong group of them. But this is a conversation between three different groups, pundits, you know, NGO runners and Democratic Party runners that are all the same upper class higher, higher educated, highly educated people. And there's a revolve door between them, you know. Yes. All of these people often work at foundations for some period of our life or sponsored by some foundation for some period of their life.

And when they're working on campaigns directly, they're completely swimming with foundation directors and executives that they need. for donations for for their campaign, right? So the point is, I think Ezra is right that the groups do have too much influence, but I think he's he's a little hypocritical in recognizing that, you know, the modern Democratic Party is the cause for that. It's an elite Democratic Party that is the cause for that. And also, I think it's much harder to extricate the party from that than people think. It's not just a matter of flipping a switch and saying, we're going to stop listening to the groups. These groups are profoundly powerful and a big part of the Democratic Party today, figuring out this thing is much more difficult and it's going to require a social

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Hell, sounds easy. Anybody could do it. Yeah, I mean, I've seen that happen in the spheres in which I work in in California politics because we do have some strong unions here that represent actual blue collar workers, you know, organize them, say, what do you need? Are built in a structure where, you know, someone who's a hotel hospitality worker who's cleaning apartments or hotel rooms can show up to a meeting, express their views, get a role in the union, have their opinion be filtered up into an officer, you know, or whatever, a, a political organization that is then putting pressure on the city, on electives, is knocking doors, is, you know, raising money to do political work. Now, that's happening at the local level.

You can find examples of individual unions that still do that strongly in cities. What we don't have is an overall national system of that, then filtering up to the top, where you've got that happening in states across the country. And then the, you know, entire Democratic Party or Republican Party or any group is connected to those people, right, that goes all the way from the bottom to the top. And when we compliment, by the way, the NRA on this, and the NRA has crumbled in a lot of ways. But, like, you know, it's been an example of one of the few sort of nonprofits that isn't organized around a union, but does, has had this structure to a certain extent and has gotten it

to get policies passed successfully. And, you know, when you look at some of the historic strength of the right versus the left, it's for that reason. But this is the type of group that on the left, the right has kept some of theirs. On the left, we've systematically destroyed ours and stopped them from having an influence. And so why is that? To me, it looks like there's two types of blindness that are happening in the liberal or left-to-center circles. One is to how much the priorities of corporations have run our policy and political decisions

and B, our blindness to class in the Democratic Party as like an axis. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I think I would also add that it's not all, it's not all agentic or voluntary. A lot of this happens to do with the fact that our social world has eroded underneath our feet because of the economic structure, right? We no longer have, we have a global and digital economy now. We no longer have an economy that's sort of rooted in place. It's very hard to start organizations when you don't,

don't have those kind of anchor institutions that provide good jobs and build decent neighborhoods, you know, one of the big stories of bowling alone, you know, that Robert Putnam book is deindustrialization. You know, that's the, that's the story. And as we've kind of gotten rid of those jobs, as we've gotten rid of place, we've replaced it with digital technologies that make it much easier to actually unplug from the social world, right? So social media was heralded as, oh, it's going to be this thing that's going to allow anybody to talk to anybody and and really move policy and this huge democratization. But the reality is it's kept us more siloed and more alone than ever before, right?

Instead of trying to go form some kind of advocacy organization to say, hey, look, we have this problem. We want to go to Congress. We want to get a bunch of people to agree with side of petition, walk around, you know, do all this kind of stuff. Everything takes place in the digital world. And the challenge of that is, yes, you can get a million signatures. in a night, right? But none of those people are connected to anything. It takes so little effort

to click yes to the thing or to accept the invitation to whatever, whatever protest or whatever activist thing you're trying to do. But it doesn't actually build any kind of stable organization. It doesn't build any kind of real rooted functional organization that can go and say, hey, we have 10,000 members. And those 10,000 members have ideas about the world and have intelligent things to say on policy. And this is what they have to say. So those two things also contribute to our atomization as a civil society. And that has increased dramatically over time. Right now we are a very much alone society. We do more and more things alone and at home than we ever have. Fixing those things is not just the flip of a switch. Those things are going to take

a change in the way our economy functions to actually get us back to being a more more social and associational society, one that has a thicker civil society, an in-person civil society, rather than just all digital, all liquid all the time. I mean, I remember, actually remember this really distinctly somehow in the, which was the Howard Dean election, was it 04? Yeah, it was 04. And I remember just like talking to somebody over like AOL instant messenger or something who was involved in his digital organization saying, hey we can this is really cool we can like go to people all across the country we can like you know mobilize people etc and you know Howard dean's campaign was the first one to sort of do those small dollar digital

donations and stuff like that and that was like at the time oh we're gonna we're gonna be able to to bring the people in right and what that has turned into is we're going to endlessly ask people for $25 which is what what we all get now we all get this flood of text hey can you give me a buck can you give me a buck, you know? And I think the best version of that is Bernie Sanders, right, who does have some kind of organization that tries to keep people around and has a lot of the class analysis that you're talking about. But even that is like, you know, a website or, you know, a couple accounts to follow. It's not like a real thing you're a part of, you know? And, you know, the union I'm most active in the Writers Guild, you know, we have about 10,000 members. We do,

organize people for their priorities. And often it's about, it's around political stuff. We do a lot of antitrust work, for example, because mergers have actively affected our members. Our members are actively pissed off around them. And so when we do political organizing, it's us reaching out to people who we know in person have come to a meeting saying, hey, we're going to go to Washington and we're going to yell at them about this one issue that you know affects you. And then when we go to D.C., as I've done as a part of the Writers Guild, when we sit down with people, we say, hey, we actually represent 10,000 people who actually care about this. And then if you come to LA, we will actually get a bunch of them to show up and meet you and talk to you in person. And that's, look,

the Writers Guild is in many ways a white collar union, blah, blah, blah. It's not that huge. But like, I've seen the difference that that makes when you actually have connected the worker at the bottom to the political output on the other end, like, in a chain of like, we're showing up in person. perfect, but like it's better than what you get from a lot of these like very loose, hey, sign a change.org petition and give us five bucks. And then you're never going to hear from us again until next time because why would you? It's just a website. It's not something that's like part of your life. You're talking about like reconnecting materially to people's lives, right? Yeah. And it's another thing that is sort of oddly missing from the political conversation. I know it's a

very difficult problem to solve. I don't think you could just sign a bill that says reinvigorate our civil society or something like that. But one of the things, when you talk to people, one of the frustrating things that everybody knows is that social life is kind of miserable right now. People are pretty lonely. There's a real crisis of social atomization. And it's just not anywhere on the political field. And I'm not quite sure why that is. But I think those people who want to reach a lot of working class voters, especially young working class men who are, undoubtedly the most lonesome group in America right now. We have to talk about this problem.

It's a big problem. And it's a problem that was created in large part by the twin forces that moved like a pincher, deindustrialization, and the hypercharging of tech and saying, look, we're going to give Silicon Valley basically carte blanche to do whatever they want with their technology. And they created a whole host of technologies that have been very harmful to our psychology, our collective well-being as a society, and we've done nothing really to say, hey, maybe we should stop that. Maybe we should put the brakes on some of this stuff. Instead, it's been like, no, keep going,

keep going, keep going. If somebody starts talking about this, I think they will catch fire with a lot of young working class men. But right now, it's hard to even hear anybody talking about it because I think, to a certain degree, the social gap is so great at this point that a lot of when elite Democrats talk about this stuff, they've read it through 700 different poll tested talking points. It's not because they sat down at a bar in central Pennsylvania or Ohio and talked to some young kid who isn't going to go to college and talked about the things that he's actually dealing with. And until they start doing that, until I start understanding these problems, they're going to continue to sound, I think, pretty wooden and stiff, even when they have some of the right ideas about policy or even when they have

some of the right ideas about economic issues. And it's not just sitting and talking to the person, I think, because that's easy, right? You can go do that once a month if you feel like it. it's bringing those types of people into your organization in a real way. It's like saying, okay, we're going to build an organization that is going to have representatives from those communities, from those classes, and give them real power in the organization, right? And maybe have some of those people be the people who run or, you know, have the person who's running be connected to those folks.

And that means the elites giving up some power, right? And saying we're actually going to give up real power to these folks. I want to talk about what can actually be done. We've been talking about what has happened and what hasn't happened. But let's talk about like specific groups. And let's move off of the Democrats for a second and the politicals. And let's talk about the labor movement because the labor movement is my favorite thing about the labor movement is its own political structure. It's its own like lever of power that is parallel to in some ways unrelated from, you know, it's democratic at its best.

but it's not Democratic where you go vote in a constitutionally elected office. It's like you go vote in your union. Your union exerts power and decides what to do. And the labor movement itself and the leadership of the labor movement, in my view, has made a lot of mistakes over the past 50 years and could do things now that would actually move the ball forward. You are an officer in the Teamsters, one of the best, most powerful unions in the country, biggest union in the country, I believe still. So what should the labor movement be doing specifically?

I mean, I think that, you know, the two big things are organizing. You know, we need to spend a lot more money. The labor movement has a lot of money. We spend it, I think, overwhelmingly on incumbent Democratic candidates who really don't do very much for us. If we spent more of that money on organizing, I think we'd be in a better shape. That's number one, you know, always organize, organize, organize, organized. That's going to be the most important thing.

And for those of you who are not familiar with what the labor movement means, what I mean is make new unions, make more unions, get more people involved in, in the labor movement, find more people up for union jobs, get more people into unions that aren't. But the other thing that I think we can be doing, which very few labor federations here and there around the country are doing, and it's something that we've found to be pretty successful, is actually building political programs to run our members and to run our members as labor candidates. You know, people who are back by their unions, people who are going to fight for their union's issues, and people are going to come up through an infrastructure that is owned and directed by the labor

movement independent of the Democratic Party, right? Something that can develop these candidates and have the ability to stand behind them while they're on the campaign trail that doesn't have to rely on the millionaire donors, you know, kissing the butts of certain Democratic Party bigwicks, you know, all that kind of stuff. And instead says, look, we actually have these candidates. We know they're good candidates because they know everybody in their time. town. We know they're good candidates because they're a shop steward for 15 years or there are a business agent for 15 years or there are some kind of union rep and they know how to deal with people. They

know how to talk to people. They know their issues. They know their town's issues. And they should run for office. The places where this is happening, New Jersey is a great example of this. Alaska is actually another great example of this. Places where this is happening where the AFL, CIO and other independent unions are actually trying to do this. These candidates do remarkably well. They do really well when they're out there talking to people. They know the issues. They know the local issues, right? Here's another thing. Go back to the conversation about affordability before. It's not a local issue. So if you're trying to get somebody elected to a congressional seat in a particular congressional election, talk about affordability, affordability, affordability, you know, that's fine. But some of these people

want to know about what's going on with the MAC plant. You know, are there going to be layoffs at the at the MAC plant? And what are we going to do if there are layoffs? If you don't know about that issue, if you don't understand that issue viscerally, you're not going to be able to, you're going to be able to talk about it. You're not going to have any idea what to say when those workers who are afraid of being laid off come up to you and say, hey, this is a huge problem. What's your plan? But our candidates will. Union candidates will. They will be inherently local, plugged into organizations that can help them and have the ability to talk about these issues in an intelligent, thoughtful, working class way that can move people. So in my opinion, on the economic

side, we need to be organizing. And on the political side, we need to be organizing. We need to pull people up from the ranks, from the shop floor and say, hey, you should run for office. You know, you got a great chance. We'll back you. We want you to run. And the Democratic Party is going to have to deal with that. When those candidates come up, they're either going to say, okay, we like you and we want you to run or they're going to fight them toothed and nail. We'll see what happens in a primary.

Are you imagining, I mean, the sort of structure that comes into mind is like some sort of meta political group in the labor movement that can be encouraging these candidates. because you probably don't want one union to do this, right? You would want it to be... I'm almost picturing something like, you know, cities that have a strong DSA where they're, you know, organizing to sort of choose candidates, come up with policy, and they're not themselves the party,

but they are like a political organizing structure that tries to push for certain outcomes that becomes powerful enough that the rest of the political system has to deal with it. Are you thinking of something like that connected to the labor movement? Like a political electoral movement that's associated with the labor movement. So the labor movement already has these institutions. They've just atrophied, right?

If you're in any union, you have either, you know, in a lot of AFL unions, they're called cope funds or their PAC funds, all these things. These were developed for this exact purpose. You know, the word PAC today, political action committee, we forget that that was a, that was a labor movement invention. We were the people who came up with that. We said, hey, we didn't have a way of running candidates that we like in these elections. And so we created what were called political action committees. Now, since then, you know, fast forward, they've been dominated by the business class. And they've been the ones that have benefited more than anybody from the super PACs and the dark money and all that kind of stuff. But the kernel of the idea, the political

education funds and the political action committees, those committees are still there. They still exist. Yeah. We need to be reinvigorating. Beyond that, yeah, you're right. You need to be work together. We have infrastructure for that, too. The area labor federations, the CLCs, all across the country, these organizations exist that can unite unions across the board and say, hey, look, we've got a candidate. You know, we think this steam fitter is really good for this race. We want you guys to meet him. We want you guys to endorse him. You can do that at an ALF meeting, right, of your local AFLCIO. You can do that at a CLC meeting, right? These are the infrastructure that we've already built that have been dormant for about 100 years and have not been used very well for a very long time. But they're

there and they exist. You can build on that. That's something that we can work with. I don't think we need to do something whole cloth brand new. But I do think we have to have the political imagination to say, hey, there's better ways of doing things. Well, let's talk about why it hasn't happened or one of the reasons it hasn't happened in my view. And this is, to me, one of the thornyest problems about the labor movement that I don't know if we deal with well enough as a movement. I would love your opinion on because look, a labor movement at its best, a labor union at its best, is there to serve the interests of its members, right? The members get together. They democratically elect their leadership.

They pool their money and they say, we want the leadership to look out for our interests, right? And ideally that involves getting involved in the political system. The problem is, to me, I've seen it be very difficult for some unions to look past the narrow interest of their members because they are set up. up to serve the interests of their members. And so what you'll have happen, I'll do a little bit of rough analysis of, you know, the labor federations here in California. We got some powerful labor unions that are looking out for their members.

They federate into an AFL. And then they exert power on the political, the political structures. But they do so only in order to, hey, let's make sure we're getting contracts for the building trades. Let's make sure that all the hotels are unionized. let's make sure that, you know, we've got our 50,000, 100,000 members taking care of. That's great.

But what they end up doing in order to make that happen is they sort of just sort of take over the regular democratic establishment. They're like, we're going to support the current mayor, we're going to support the current governor, and we're going to use our resources to twist that person's arm to say, hey, make sure that, you know, when this new hotel is built downtown, it's a union contract, make sure that when the Olympics come to town, it's unionized, blah, blah, blah. That shit's all good, right? but it ends up holding up the existing political structure, right?

And it's hard for those unions to say, you know what we actually need to do is build something new that is going to be a little bit more radical and is going to benefit the labor movement overall. Like I'm a member of two unions, right? I know how hard it is to in a union meeting, in leadership to say, hey, guys, we need to do something today

that doesn't just benefit our members, but that benefits the labor movement overall and benefits the country's political situation overall. Because you're going to be met with a bunch of faces saying, hey, actually, you know what? I was elected to look out just for the people who elected me, and we only have a certain amount of money. And you're asking me to do something that doesn't immediately benefit them,

and I might get a lot of angry phone calls for my members. This stuff is tough. You know what I mean? And it's real. You know, you look at a, I remember Bernie Sanders went to the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, said, you should support me. And they went, well, you know, we have a strong health care plan. and Medicare for all will get rid of it.

And we don't know what's on the other side, man. And so our members want to protect our health care plan. That's a real issue, right? That's not, we can't wave that away. So to me, this sort of incentives in this push and pull is like part of the political problem we need to figure out. And I'm just, for my own part, as a guy in the movement trying to figure out what, what is our next step?

What do we do about it? How do we get outside of those dynamics? I'd love to hear your view on it. Yeah, I mean, I don't have the easy answers. There is no easy answer. How do we get started? I mean, I think the big thing is going to be leadership, right? There is a generational changeover that's happening in the labor movement.

And younger leaders need to be forward thinking out of necessity. It's layoffs are coming. Anybody who thinks that they could continue to sit in a union position that, you know, for decades, maybe you didn't organize anybody, but you basically had the number of members that you always had. As long as you got the right people elected, you could. you know, stave off the worst. Well, that's going to change. I mean, I do think that it's going to be very difficult to fight off some of the layoffs that are coming from automation, some of the

layoffs that we're going to be seeing in the future. If you're serious about holding on to this thing that we call the labor movement, you have to change. We have to start thinking in new ways. Younger generations of leaders are going to be thinking in those ways. They're already thinking in those ways, you know. But the big thing is, as you know, the labor movement is like, you know, it's like a container ship. Turning it, it requires a lot of birth, a lot of, of push and a lot of energy just to get it to move a couple inches in one direction, right? So we have to remember that. It's not like, it's not going to move as quickly as other things. But things change over time if you're sort of pushing in the right direction. So we have to keep that in mind. I think

we should be optimistic about the changes that we have seen in the labor movement. But the bigger thing that I want to say, and this is more of a challenge, so it's going to set us back a little bit. One of the un-sort of foreseen consequences of the knowledge economy, the shift to say, hey, everybody, let's go to college, let's do tech, let's do that. One of the big challenges that that created was he took a bunch of really smart working class kids and plucked them out of the unions and said, hey, you should go to Harvard. Hey, you should go to Yale. In the 1930s and 40s, those kids would have been union presidents.

and they would have been just as capable of steering the politics of the labor movement as they would be at some, you know, consulting firm in McKinsey or whatever. But those people were plucked out of the working class and put on the ladder to say, hey, the right way to go is through the college, the college way, right? Damn. I don't think that that has an insignificant effect on what has changed in the labor movement. It's much harder now to tell young, intelligent kids, hey, no, you should. stick with the Teamsters. You should stick in the electricians job. They want to go to college and they're right to want to because the wages are much better if they can make it through, right?

So the challenge there, too, is economic and social. It's not going to be the case that a lot of ambitious young people, the kind of stuff that we need for leadership, a lot of ambitious young people are not looking at the labor movement as this force for dynamism, right? It's just not true. And so there's a challenge there that needs to be navigated as well. That's not. not to say that we don't have the raw material. We do. I think our unions have very intelligent young people who can be put into leadership positions if the current leadership can recognize it. And if they're able to, you know, as you point out, if they're able to sort of think a little bit further ahead, then they're accustomed to thinking about what is needed in our

industries, what is needed going forward, how are we going to unite our unions across industrial lines, how are we going to unite them across sectional interests to do what's best for the American working person. I think there is leadership there that can do that, but they need to be forward-thinking enough to look at their own members and not to keep looking outside. Amen to all of that. I mean, you really, man, that's that, that is a really perspective shifting argument and it makes me think about how, you know, so much of our national ethos around improving your lot in life, you know, the next generation doing better than their parents is about leaving the working class, going to college, becoming a member of the elite,

right? And a lot of times when we talk about somebody, you know, doing better than their folks or climbing the ladder or creating a system of opportunity, we're like imagining everyone's going to get to go to Harvard or whatever. You know, oh, we want to make sure that little kid from the sticks can go to Harvard. Well, guess what? The whole point of Harvard is that not many people can go there. They refuse to expand that education to more people. And what if we shifted our view of what it means to do better than your parents to be,

what if you are somebody who made a better life for everybody from your town, right? Or everybody from your walk of life. And we were all pulling each other up together, right? rather than the goal is to leave where you started. What if the goal is to improve where you started, you know, or your community, not leave your community, but better your community. That's just like a very broad cultural value,

but it's what it makes me think of. We only have a few minutes left. Where are the bright spots that you see? Who is doing it right, either in the labor world or in the world of electoral politics or other forms of organizing, that we could say we can point to and we can go, look, not only are these ideas good and we agree with them, here's where they're having success and we should build on this and blow on those embers.

Yes, I'll just say, I'll put in a plug for Bob Brooks in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. He's a 20-year firefighter, head of the Firefighters Union, decided to run for Congress. Just one is primary in the Democratic primary. And this is, in my opinion, the crux of these two things, right? It's a labor movement candidate. He's won in a Democratic primary on a very populist political platform. And he's doing it in a very tight Republican district. It's a one point Republican district.

It's a one point Republican district. If he wins, he'll flip the district red, but more than that, it'll- You mean blue. Sorry, he'll flip the red district blue. But more than that, he'll demonstrate that, you know, that progressive economic message works. and it can work among Republicans. Because right now, I think a lot of progressives are, you know, Mundani, all these guys are working in very blue areas.

And there's yet to be a case to be made, hey, we can actually win in Trump areas. And that needs to happen as well. So somebody I think you can look to as an example is Bob Brooks. I think, you know, he's running right now. You know, I think he's exactly the kind of candidate. We need more of. He's the kind of candidate. More of the labor movement needs to start producing and thinking like,

And he's the kind of person that if he wins, it demonstrates that, you know, our economic message resonates. People know what's wrong. People know there's a problem, that the inequality is too bad, that there aren't enough good jobs, that all of this stuff is coming home because we've allowed our economy to basically become a function, a play toy of the rich, instead of letting it function for most people. People know that. They know it in their bones. But you need the right kind of leaders to actually demonstrate it to win elections. You talk about this stuff so clearly and you have such a clear political plan. Are you going to run for something yourself?

Are you trying to build this yourself? I know you're like, ah, da, da, da, da, but hey, somebody's got to. Just, you know, how do you feel about that? And are you doing that political work on your own end and your own community? Yeah, I mean, for me, it's trying to make this stuff happen in the labor movement more than anything. That's where I think there's real promise. You know, Adam, you know, our labor movement is, it's not on. It's not as strong as it once was, but it still is a thing that can move millions of people.

And I think it's where we need to be focusing to try to build up strength. Well, I'd love to see your philosophy and perspective on this be spread throughout the labor movement. And again, you know, you maybe feel the same way I do, which is sometimes people ask me, why don't you run for something? And I'm like, my work in the labor movement is a place where I am actually affecting shit that I care about in real ways that does not require me to, you know, join the political system. It is a lever that less people are using that I feel like I can, you know, build real power for shit that I care about within.

And that's a real piece of work to be done. And I can tell you're doing that work. And I hope that your philosophy spreads and that you keep doing it. Where if people want to get involved in this work, what should they do? Where can they find you and other work that you've done on this? and how do they jump in? So I'll plug, you know,

you could get a job as a Teamster if you like, but I'll plug. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that, now that's the fucking best call to action plug I've ever. People don't want to say buy my book, go to my website, subscribe to my substack.

You're like, no, fucking join the Teamsters, like join the trades and become a union member. Like, get a job as a team. That's sick, man. But in terms of writing stuff,

working class politics. org, a lot of the stuff, Center for Working Class Politics is where a lot of my, where I'm writing and thinking about. And it's a small organization. So, you know, anytime I get a chance to, to plug it, it's, you know, doing, I think, very important work with almost no money. Basically, a few unions give us some cash here and there, but we don't really have much money. So if you're interested in this kind of stuff, and this is kind of the politics you like, workingclasspolitics. org is where you'll find it. Dude, you fucking rock. It was so wonderful having you on the show, Dino,

and I hope you'll come back again and talk to us about this as this stuff develops. And thank you for pushing on what you're pushing for. And yeah, appreciate you. No, thank you, Adam. I'm glad to be here. And thanks for the invite. Well, thank you once again to Dina Gwastella for coming on this show. I found that conversation so enlightening and inspiring, honestly.

It's an incredible call to action for me. And I hope for you, too. If you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you, Patreon.com slash Adam Conover is that URL. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for $15 a month. I will read your name in the credits. This week I want to thank Matthew Bertelsen,

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