High Crimes and Piss-demeanors
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Hey everybody, welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. It's a crossover. It's happening.

So we have a lot to get to today, but we wanted to start with this. New York Times broke a story today. We're recording this on Friday, reporting that Elon Musk's drug use has been far more intense than the occasional use previously reported. Here's what the Times said, and I quote...

Musk told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it. Also, the times went further into the bladder issue.

saying that Musk publicly endorsed Mr. Trump in July. Around that time, Mr. Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues. According to people familiar with the conversations, you know, Dan, you think you can trust somebody. You think you can show them your box of pills and tell them about the fact that the ketamine you're taking has led to incontinence. And then they go and tell fucking Megan Toohey.

What happened to the bro code, Dan? Have we reached the age in our life where bro code now includes incontinence? Do not reveal my bladder issues to the world. Yeah, I think that's where we're at. I think that's where we're at. Yeah, first it's like, you know, yeah, it's just different things. Yeah.

Everyone knows what we're talking about. Everyone knows what we're talking about. So Trump gave a press conference with Elon standing by his side where Trump talked about the end of Musk's time as a special government employee, talked about the future of Doge. Peter Doocy asked them about the time story and it didn't go great.

The president mentioned that you had to deal with all the slings and arrows during your time at Doge. There's this-- Some of the people-- some of the media organizations in this room were the slingers. Well, so there is a New York Times report today that accuses you of blurring the line between-- Oh, wait, wait. Is the New York Times-- is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer Prize for false reporting on the Russia gate?

is it the same organization i gotta check my bullets i think the judge just ruled against new york times for their their lies about the russiagate hoax and that they might have to give back that fluid to price that new york times let's move on so he's not mad at all that's why he's laughing they're the slingers

So he's pretty upset about the story. Dan, what was your reaction to this? I have some questions here. First, if you were to apply for a White House internship, before you can walk into the building, you have to take a drug test. Right. Safe to assume Elon Musk did not take that drug test.

Guess not. Although the story also says that he would presumably have had to have been drug tested because at SpaceX You have to be drug free and apparently he knew when the testing was gonna be he got a little heads up That's what the story found. So who knows? Yeah I mean I was drug tested when I had to work when I when I I had I got drug tested when I worked with Dan at the White House and Passed it by the skin of my teeth, but I got through

I got through. Tommy also made the point to me this morning that if we were a different party with a different media ecosystem, we would use Elon Musk's rampant ketamine use to the point of bladder failure as an argument to undo all the doge cuts that they would be. They're illegitimate for that reason, right? It's the inverse of the absurd Biden auto pen argument. Yeah. Well, I,

I think whether or not we could use it as an argument to reverse them, I do think it's worth pointing out that this is somebody Trump in power to make incredibly sensitive, important decisions about government funding, who personally led an effort that that unceremoniously ended foreign aid programs and did

healthcare programs, like genuinely threw people's lives into chaos, may have caused people lives, food assistance around the world. And he's got a box of pills. Listen, when you're at the point where you got a box, a loose box of 20 pills, that's too many pills. That's too many pills. Unless you're very sick.

It's also funny to read the story because it's clearly written with the editing help of the defamation attorneys for the New York Times. Because at one point, they're like, we can essentially they say, I'm paraphrasing, we cannot verify that he was doing these drugs while working at the White House. But there are all these examples that we're going to list in great detail about when he seemed high as fuck while working in the White House.

Yes, and the story is really buttoned up because they have both a photo of the box of pills and the box of pills as described by people.

imagine getting close enough to Elon Musk that you're able to take a picture of the bills, but not so close as you are unwilling to send it to the New York Times. That I did like, what did I imagine? Like that would make you, I mean, I understand why he's upset. It must be pretty, it must be pretty disconcerting. It must be unmooring, uh,

beyond the ketamine to discover that all these people that are they have to be have gotten pretty close to you are talking to reporters about this. We should also note that if you're listening to this, Elon Musk does seem to have a black eye.

Which adds to the kind of sense that things are off the rails. He was also asked about that. I wanted to ask quickly, Mr. Musk, is your eye okay? What happened to your eye? I know this was a bruise there. Well, it wasn't anywhere near France. So... But...

- What does that mean? - I didn't notice it. - First lady of France. - I didn't notice. - So, yeah, I was just horsing around with little X and I said, go ahead, punch me in the face and he did. Turns out even a five year old punching you in the face actually does. - That was X that did? - Yeah. - X could do it. If you knew X, you could do it. - I saw his mom right now.

I didn't really feel much at the time. I guess it bruises up. But I just watched him around with the camera. I didn't notice it, actually. Did you understand...

How broken-brained are you? I understood what he was referencing when he said France. Did you understand it or did you need somebody to remind you? I needed the reminder. And then I was mad at myself for not connecting the dots. Yeah, so for all those... That is a reference to the fact that there was a video of Emmanuel Macron getting pushed in the face by Brigitte. And then realizing that he's exposed because the door to the plane is open. That's the joke that Elon is making there.

I'm glad we'll be have a little break from getting to talk about Elon Musk, I hope. But man, what a what a deeply unserious and broken person to have been given so much power by this president. And

It's so strange to see Donald Trump in that setting trying to be protective of Elon Musk, who he sees struggling standing next to him. There's a kind of odd generosity that Trump is giving. I didn't even notice the black guy. Well, I think that also speaks to Trump's narcissism, where it's like, yeah, he meets with a guy who has a giant bruise on his face, and he's so busy thinking about himself and his own personal grievances, he doesn't even notice that.

But I do have to ask you as a noted comedian, what is, what's your analysis of the Bridget McCone joke? Like, is it a good joke? No, it's, it's a bad joke, Dan. It's a bad joke. It's because it doesn't actually make sense. Uh, the fact that somebody else had something happen to their face in France, uh,

Nobody would, the structure doesn't make sense 'cause even in the internal logic of the joke, well, I wasn't in France. So is the joke, I guess on some level, the joke would be, don't worry, Brigitte didn't get me, right? But really he's just saying, hey, somebody else got hit in the face recently. Isn't that funny?

That's somebody else that got hit in the face. That's why the joke didn't work and it needed to be explained by the reporter. Well, I like the reporter being like, I don't understand. Good for the reporter for asking the follow-up question. Yeah, what do you mean? But also, let's not just gloss over the fact that Elon Musk asked his 502 punch him in the face. What was the reason for that?

Yeah, if that's true. I don't... Like, maybe that's what happened, or maybe in some sort of a haze, he walked into a closet door. That seems more like it to me. I just...

Like, man, when you're at the and again, we've also done our deformation training here at Crooked Media, so I can't speak to this specific circumstance and I am not speaking to this specific circumstance. But we've all had people in our lives when you're at the phase of your on your substance journey where you're showing up with random bruises. Right. That's not like it's not a good moment when you're slipping in your own pee.

Right, right. Yeah. When you're like, yeah, waking up next to the toilet, unexplained bruise. Unexplained bruise, Dan, figured prominently in Real Housewives of...

Salt Lake City. I'm not caught up. There's a there's a long storyline about a bruise and its origins and someone claiming to not remember where it came from. Then somebody saying they won't say where it came from. Like years, years of dishonesty about the origins of a of a of a punch bruise. So a lot to think about there. But Trump did talk about Doge and the big, beautiful bill. If it doesn't get approved.

You'll have a 68% tax increase. You're going to go up 68%. That's a number that nobody's ever heard of before. So that's not because it's not real. That's not right. I don't know what the 68% figure is. I think it's 68% of Americans. Oh, 68% of Americans. I think. I'm spitballing here. I think that's right.

So this is their only move, I guess, right, to say if Republicans in the Senate don't send this back to the House in a way that comports with what some of these right wingers in the House are demanding, taxes will go up. So that's so that's the cudgel. But clearly, like they have a big problem.

Right. Like that getting it from the House was only the first step. And actually now we're in. And even that was very difficult and required a bunch of people casting a vote in part because they know it's not the final vote. Right. They know that they could just go along with this and they'd have another bite at the apple. But but Dan, do you have a sense of how stuck this is?

in the Senate? I think it's probably not as stuck as we would hope. The point Trump's making here is they have to pass the spell. They have to pass it for two reasons. He mentions this later in the press conferences. One, at the end of the year, taxes will go up on some percentage of Americans, at some percentage that's not 68%. But also, the debt ceiling will expire and America will default on its debt at some point late this summer. So something has to pass.

And that usually forces Congress to act in some way, shape, or form. It gets very tricky with every single change the Senate makes. I think Mike Johnson went over to the Senate and met with the Senate leadership and told them how – or maybe the whole Republican Senate caucus to tell them how challenging this was and try to get them not to make huge changes. They still have a math problem because you have Rand Paul and Ron Johnson who are against increasing the deficit and you can't do this bill and not increase the deficit.

And then you have some other people who have other, like Susan Collins, who have other concerns. They can lose three votes. But are they really going to reject Trump's bill and allow us to default and have taxes go up? That seems unlikely. We'll probably get very close to the wire, is my guess. Yes. But there's other directions this could go. One would be to get this through, having lost Paul and Johnson, you are going to move...

To get this through the House, Johnson had to wrangle the moderates to vote for cuts that are unpopular and wrangle the right wingers and the Freedom Caucus types for voting for a huge increase to the deficit without having enough cuts to government spending.

The bill that will come out of the Senate will not be a better bill for those Freedom Caucus members, right? That's sort of hard to imagine. So even getting them this far was difficult. If the bill becomes more moderate, right, maybe Johnson can count on those members, but he could be losing some of his Freedom Caucus members. He already lost two the first round, right? So he's...

Basically, as long as no more fucking octogenarian Democrats fucking die, he still he needs to keep everybody together. And so you could imagine, right, a scenario where it it maybe can get out of the Senate. It it can die in the House. Then all of a sudden there's a scramble. And then there's the question of whether or not there's something that would have to pass with Democratic votes. Right. Yeah, I think.

I don't think you're going to get a single Democratic vote for it. No. If I was advising the Democrats right now, what I would tell the Democrats to do is to have a position that is we would extend the tax cuts for everyone making less than $500,000. If you just want to pick the number that was used in 2012 when the Bush tax cuts were extended, to say that and the taxes would go up on everyone else. And we would do that tomorrow. We'd extend the debt ceiling for however much you like.

No, you know, we'd even come up with some set of cuts that we are OK with that are not Medicaid cuts, you know, whatever those would be. Like right now, this is an intra party fight.

Eventually, this is about whether Democrats want to raise taxes on everyone else. We need a position that is not that and is actually more popular than what the Republicans have. I just think at the end of the day, the stakes are so high. And the Freedom Caucus has already backed off all of their principles. They think that the deficit is the end of the world. They would love more aggressive Medicaid cuts. They would love to kick more people off of food stamps and to theoretically lower the deficit.

But that's not real. But they're already agreeing to a $5 trillion deficit increase. Yeah, it's really extraordinary that there is this option sitting on the table for them, which is to just do an extension. And by the way, they could do an extension. Maybe there's two in the weeds. They could do an extension for all the tax cuts for people making below $500,000. They could do that and do some of their kind of...

estate tax issues, some of their more kind of like specific tax changes while not allowing, while allowing the tax rates for corporations and for wealthy people to go up, it would

dramatically changed the cost of the bill, it would be far more popular. But it's just pure greed. They simply cannot. They are doing this to cut those. Like, that's the purpose of all of this. So it feels like it's the one thing. And even Trump understands that he can't. He he like he keeps floating it because he understands the politics sort of like from a gut level. And then every time he floats it, he's like, ah, Johnson tells me they won't go for it. Right. Johnson won't even entertain the idea that they will. They would rather you remember in the 2012 Republican primary and they asked people of

would you raise $1 of taxes or would you be willing to raise $1? Now I can't remember what it was, but they basically asked the Republicans if they'd be willing to raise taxes $1 or cut spending by $10. And they said they would not raise taxes at all.

And that is the principle. Like they said, the Republicans have a principle that maybe Trump does not share, at least publicly. Because I mean, if Trump really wanted them to cut taxes, he could actually try. All he does is he sends a truth and then backs off in two seconds. It's really the only thing he backs off on. I guess it's his tax version of taco. But they are not going to let taxes go up. And they would rather explode the deficit. They'd rather... And I'd say they will not let...

The thing they want to do is cut taxes. But like the icing on the sundae is to also kick a bunch of people off their health care and their food stamps like that. That's the joy that comes with it. Yeah. And it's creating some tough politics for people like Joni Ernst in Iowa. She was getting some flack about this at a town hall in Iowa. Let's roll the clip. People are not. Well, we all are going to die. So they're going to say.

- Tough comment from Jody. Tough. It's true. We are all going to die. In the long run, we are all dead. But that was in response to questions about Medicaid cuts and cuts to SNAP, which is help food aid, that it could lead people to die. And she didn't like the question very much, gave a pretty flip answer. I do appreciate

That answer more than just lying about it and saying that they're not cutting Medicaid and they're not cutting SNAP. I guess if you want points for honesty, yes. Like what she said, like would, if fact checkers are people who still exist, she would not get any Pinocchios for that statement. We all will die eventually. That is a fact. Yeah, this is, I will say like they are, you know, the bill is not getting...

it's not aging well, right? The longer they're out there defending it, the longer this conversation goes on, the longer this debate goes on, the longer there's stories about the battle to cut Medicaid and cut taxes for the wealthy. I think the more

I don't know. Joni Ernst is not somebody I think that Trump can can easily lose. But the harder it will be to get a bill that looks like this or mostly looks like this through the Senate and back to the House for them to pass it. I think I guess I'd say I think there's a chance that Democrats can make the bill so politically toxic that Republicans will have to trim back some of the cuts.

Right. They can make them like maybe get some of the food, the food stamp cuts back, maybe make the Medicare cuts worse, maybe get the funding for Planned Parenthood back or take the provision that defunds Planned Parenthood out of the bill. There are some things you can do around the margins. But really what we're trying to do here, we can't stop the bill from passing like that. It's not we don't have the votes to do that.

And I'm operating the assumption that they have to pass something. Our goal is to make sure that every person in this country knows how bad a thing they just passed. And there's been – so we're recording this on Friday. It's only been a few hours since the Joni Ernst clip made the rounds on the internet. This would be in a different media environment, different world, a gigantic story. Like this is the whole thing. Like Republican Senator does not care that Bill she's about to vote for will kill people.

And earlier this week, Elon Musk said that – criticized the bill because it exploded the deficit and undid the work of Doge.

Those are two different arguments against the bill, both of which could be used with a very aggressive strategic communications operation to really undermine the bill and increase the political pressure and use it as an opportunity to raise awareness on what's happening. Because there was this Navigator poll that Favs and I talked about a couple weeks ago which showed that only 25% of people were closely following the Medicaid cuts. Most people had no idea they were happening.

And so here you have Elon Musk, one of the famous people in the world, Trump's buddy, like Kato Kaelin, as John called him on this, with a very outdated reference on our most recent podcast, criticizing Trump's signature legislative initiative and saying,

The Democratic Party and everyone trying to fight this bill should make sure every single person knows about it. Because Elon Musk saying the bill is bad will be very persuasive with a segment of people. And it makes it look worse for Republicans. And the hope is, to date, that Democrats did not leap at the Musk opportunity. I hope they leap at the Joni Ernst opportunity to really put real political pressure on Republicans. We have not done that to date.

Dan, if a Democrat leaps at an opportunity in the woods, but nobody hears it, does it make a sound? I mean, this is ultimately the question of, like, there is a very good piece in the bulwark about how Democrats did not do a lot with the must piece. And it's like, and it went through all the people who did not tweet about it. And it's like, are we really like two Chuck Schumer tweets away from like mass public opinion change? No, when I say Democrats, I don't, yes, every Democratic member of Congress should do something. But I also sort of mean,

Like we're talking about it right now, which is part of the point. But every person who is in the sort of democratic media world, all the influencers out there, people, TikTok accounts, making content about this, sharing content about this, like average everyday people putting the Elon Musk clip in their group chat with their Musk fanboy cousin who disagrees with Trump on a lot of things. Like there are opportunities here and we all should be jumping at them. Yeah, I agree. There's something there's like this deeper challenge, which is like

I hear what you're saying because it's like, no, it's not really about like, does Schumer do a tweet or is enough politicians tweeting about it? It's like as an organization used loosely. Yes, quite loosely, yes. As throngs of human beings collectively, generally, ideally having the same outcome of defeating Donald Trump and his allies, there is this deeper problem where

A lot of Democratic discourse online is about how to win. And a lot of Republican discourse is just about winning. Like we have Fox News on in our office all the time. Look, we like to hear from a range of people. I like to get all the views before I make my decisions. They have a lot of content about making fun of Democrats for endlessly talking about how to win men, right? But when they're trying to...

trying to win bin back women. They're not having people on to debate the Republican problem with women. They're talking about immigrants attacking women in the streets. And so like, there's just this sort of, there's, it's almost as if on, there's this like kind of

sense on the right that how you help your side is by helping your side. And on our side, we really all put on our white gloves and like kind of have a kind of sophisticated debate about the future of the Democratic Party, but not a lot of it. By the way, this applies to me too. We're doing it right now, but it's like,

We're much more interested in this sort of meta conversation than actually like the daily grind of actually performing the outrage at what Republicans are saying and doing. Yeah. We're not as good at faking it as Republicans are. That was just one part of the problem. There's also...

two levels to this, right? Fox is doing like, I guess I'd say Republicans understand the value of, of injecting as much politically persuasive content in the ecosystem as possible. They also understand that outrage is the fuel for the algorithms. And so they do that and they do it very well there. I mean, there is in Fox's, the core of this, like we think of Fox's cable news network that is, um,

It's basically just giving sukkah to 72-year-old angry people. But in reality, it's like the bat signal for the whole ecosystem about what matters. And those clips matter a lot on social. They're clipped and sent everywhere.

But the Republicans also have these same conversations like on The Daily Wire, on Ben Shapiro's show. Steve Bannon has a lot of that. But we are missing a lot of the forces who are just pumping out content to the masses. We're never going to have a cable network. It's not an investment I would make right now. But we do need more. And you see that with some of the content creators, but we need more of them doing more.

Yeah, I went through. Honestly, we could do more too, right? We think all the time, why isn't this a bigger story? We have a big platform. What can we also do to make sure it's a bigger story? Which I think is sort of why the Joni Ernst thing is, why we're doing a sort of special topper today for a Sunday episode. Part of it is to be able to talk about the Joni Ernst thing so more people will know about it.

Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I had my little moment in the barrel over the weekend because John and I went on Jon Stewart's pod and we talked about Biden, obviously. And in it, I talked about the conflict of wanting to be honest about Biden's age as liability and then also being worried that talking about it would hurt Biden's chances when he is the nominee because right wing and right wing media would take it out of context. And I as I'm saying, I'm like, I'm going to see this. I'm going to see this again. Yeah.

And then what happened is exactly what you're saying, which is I think Fox News clipped it, right? And they put some unfair headline on it, Obama cover up, that kind of thing. And once that went out there, everybody started doing it. Everybody started picking it up because like, oh, here's a little chum in the water. This is a thing we could, this is something to follow. And yet here I am, Dan, I made it.

You made it through. It was fun watching you in Slack discover this was a thing because you had famously and very self-righteously taken Twitter off your phone. Discovering, finding out this was a thing and then going to Twitter on your desktop and discovering that you were the main character of Twitter that day was enjoyable. I really did like it. Yeah, it's a little, it does have, has Justine landed yet energy? Yes, yes. Where I like open up my computer like, oh shit. Yeah.

Whoa. And of course, what do I do? I ignore it, I ignore it, I ignore it. And then I fucking tweet at Meghan McCain. That's for whatever reason, that's the one that got me the final straw. All right, Dan, thanks for hopping on. We will be right back with my conversation with labor historian Eric Loomis. We had a great conversation about labor strikes in history. And there are a lot I wanted to talk to him because

I've just been really interested in all the different ways a diverse, disparate, often contentious movement, democratic movement can have success. And one place to learn about that are the times in which strikes have led to changes and when they haven't. And it was a great, fascinating and very useful conversation about organizing, about what works, about what doesn't work, about lessons. And you'll hear that after the break.

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And we're back. With me today is Eric Loomis, a professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He wrote a book called The History of America in Ten Strikes. I read it because I was really interested in moments when movements were able to galvanize public support, not just to make changes in a company or an industry, but to make broader political change. And I thought it was really interesting to see how the history of America in ten strikes

And as we think about this fight against Trump, as we watch this rising authoritarian movement, the answer has to be some kind of mass mobilization, a democratic movement big enough to meet this right wing one. And throughout history, labor has been central to that. And there have been moments when we've seen organizing succeed and we've had moments when organizing failed. And I was

just interested to learn about what lessons we can draw. And the book was really helpful to do that. And this conversation was really helpful to think about that,

about getting public support, the balance between radicalism and pragmatism, the ways in which violence can harm a movement, and how much it matters when you have political leaders who are supportive of organizing and labor movements and when they're hostile to them. So there's a lot of lessons, I think, for us right now, which is why I was so eager to talk

to Eric Loomis about it. And it was a great conversation, runs the gamut from a pageant of striking workers in which many were jealous that they didn't get the parts they wanted all the way through Reagan's decimation of the air traffic controllers unions and the lessons we can draw from that. But all in all, a really great conversation. Eric Loomis, thank you so much for being here. I want to start with the general strike of 1919.

Which I thought was an interesting moment where you saw basically an intersection of the radicalism of some parts of the labor movement and

And people who did not view themselves as radical did not view themselves as political. We're not part of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, which was seen as more socialist and communist, but members of the AFL. And over the course of several days, basically shut the city of Seattle down. And so maybe you could just start by telling us a little bit about what led to that moment.

So in the early 20th century, American workers engaged in strikes of all kinds. Some of them were radical. Some of them were not radical. A lot of the biggest issues were around politics, right? For union members, for workers, are we engaged in some sort of radicalism or do we really believe in like an American capitalist system that maybe needs some adjustment but is something that we can generally work with?

And there's very few, quote, general strikes in American history for a number of different reasons where workers from across multiple industries, across a city, never really across the nation, have come together to, say, shut down a particular city for a given time. And Seattle in 1919 is one of the most important and interesting ones. And one of the fascinating things about this strike and about the other limited general strikes

is how rarely they've actually come out of self-proclaimed radicals, whether it's the IWW, the Communist Party, etc. And that was the case in 1919 as well. It really just started with longshoremen strike. Shipyard workers had gone two years without a pay raise. You had 35,000 workers walk away from their job. They thought they were going to get a raise after the end of World War I. It didn't happen, etc., etc. They go on strike. A couple of weeks passed. Pressure's really growing on the workers.

For the Seattle labor movement and the labor movement more generally, they really see this as an attempt to roll back gains that the labor movement had won during World War I. And so the general strike of Seattle begins with the Metal Trades Council, which were just traditional American Federation of Labor non-radical unions because they just felt like they all had to come out in order to support these workers because an attack on these longshoremen workers

That was an attack on everybody. And over the next few days, they basically shut the city down, but also engaged, and this is an important thing, I think, throughout the way we talk about these things in terms of the relevance for today.

They engaged in a social movement unionism where they made sure they were able to feed the people, where they made sure hospitals were staffed, where people were having fun, where it wasn't, you know, essential workers may still be working because the city has the people of the city has to continue to be able to live there and support that strike.

And it's able to succeed more or less until national labor leadership, scared of the potential radical implications, shut it down. And in fact, that becomes a disaster. Seattle labor movement falls apart in the aftermath. But that's one of those moments in which you do see unions come together across ideological lines to support a larger principle of unions surviving, of workers having dignity, of

and of trying to move a fight forward in which all of us can come together to make a positive change.

It was interesting to me that it was motivated in part just by inflation, right? Like by definition, if you are going to have a general strike, it is not going to be led by a fringe. It's going to have to be led by the great majority. And those are less ideological participants. They want a wage increase. They want good conditions. They want to be treated fairly. And to the point you made about public support for it, it was interesting throughout the book. It was one of the themes I want to talk to you about, about when...

labor organizers have sought to rally the public

to their side and when they've alienated the public and when disruption is the order of the day to demonstrate your power versus when disruption alienates the people whose backing you need and thereby costing you the politicians. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that. OK, first of all, to your first point, you're absolutely right. I mean, I often get people emailing me and stuff and say, oh, you know, what do we need to do to get the general strike? And, you know,

there's a lot of sort of fantasies in the political world, I think, of what I would call politics without politics, right? Where like people come together in some way without the messiness and dirtiness of organizing and the complexities of dealing with real people and just like good things are going to happen. And it's like the general strike requires like the workers that you hate to also be part of the strike. It requires Trump voters to be part of the strike. It requires your racist uncle on Thanksgiving that you can't stand to

to also be part of the strike, right? It's going to be messy. And I think that's really a really, really critical point to not romanticize the strike or romanticize labor or romanticize change, but rather to understand what it really takes to create that change. And that leads to your second point about the public. I think a lot of people would like to think, I mean, there's a kind of a

of a messaging around the labor movement today inside the labor movement that I don't think is very helpful. And basically it is the kind of quote that gets thrown around a lot is the strike gets the goods. Like if we just go on strike, it always works and only the union can sell us out, you know, from our power going on strike. But historically that is not the case and nor is it today. Strikes could be an amazing political tool or they could be a complete disaster.

And it depends in no small part on that issue of public support. Okay. General strikes are actually technically illegal in the United States now as part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. So it would be really hard to actually have a general strike take place in this country because it would be an illegal act. Okay. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but it would be illegal. But you have to have public support in some way or another.

And when unions have had broader public support, when they've engaged in a kind of unionism that builds support through the community to understand that what's happening here is that we're going on strike and inconveniencing you in many cases for the benefit of us all versus we're doing that for the very small benefit of our personal desires and needs.

It leads to two very different kinds of outcomes. Yeah, so let's talk about two different versions of this. Maybe this is a good way to do this. So let's talk about the 1937 Flint sit-down strike. And then I want to talk about the air traffic controller strike, which, by the way, like I...

totally did not understand that. I had an image in my mind of what happened that was so, um, simple and wrong. So I, I think it's, I think people will be interested in that, but let's talk about the 1937 Flint sit down strike. Uh, there's a, a line from, uh,

A leader in the UAW says, I'm convinced that the police lost not only that night's battle, but the whole Flint war by providing us with the finest audience we had ever had. It served to nudge thousands of Flint workers off dead center and into an open commitment to the UAW.

So can you talk about what led to that moment? The famous story, and some of your listeners may be familiar with this, is that in the beginning of 1937, auto workers in Flint, Michigan, took over one of the plants for General Motors and sat inside and refused to leave to force GM to come to an agreement with this brand new union they were forming called the United Auto Workers to bring unions into the auto industry for the first time.

And workers were scared, right? I mean, like, because GM basically controls Flint. That was common in the auto industry. Ford controls the town of Dearborn, for example. And that meant controlling the police forces.

And so, you know, this small sort of vanguard, I guess, of workers decides to sit in in this one factory. They're able to do so. And the idea is in part that, you know, if you're going to get if the workers just go out on strike, they'll be able to the GM will be able to bring in replacement workers. This makes that impossible. Right. So they're sitting down on the job.

And there's been kind of a myth that forms around this in a sense that part of the strategy was GM would not have wanted the cops to destroy their own facility. But in fact, GM was fine with the cops destroying their own facility. They want to do anything to keep that union from forming. So you have men inside and then you have their men.

wives, sisters, daughters, mothers on the outside in what was called a ladies' auxiliary, providing support services, giving talks, making sure food got to these guys, etc. And this begins to build a kind of community solidarity where people are coming out in support of the workers.

And then one night, GM, you know, tries to get the cops to come in and tear it up. And GM, you know, the workers inside start throwing stuff at the cops and the cops retreat. And this happens in front of everybody. And, you know, there was a lot of outrage. But the critical thing that they did actually came the previous year. And this is an important point in terms of thinking about the relationships between unions and politics.

The most important thing that workers require to win strikes is to neutralize what tends to be a frequent corporate political alliance where the state supports the corporation in whatever is going to happen to bust that union. Workers in Michigan had elected a guy named Frank Murphy to be the governor, and Murphy had campaigned on never using state forces against the unions.

And so GM is calling out Murphy to send in the National Guard. And Murphy, who's a very nervous guy, basically has an anxiety attack over this and disappears for a day or two. Cool. And then comes out and says, no, I'm going to stand up. We're not going to do that. And when Murphy refuses to send in the National Guard, General Motors gives up. And they sign a one-page document that is the first contract in autoworker history.

I deeply empathize with somebody who panics for 48 hours before finding the courage to do the right thing. I think that that's a cool vibe and an energy that I appreciate. So it's interesting because it reminded me all those years later when the SEIU is organizing janitors in Los Angeles and you have a similar –

public outcry when the police are unleashed on a group of striking janitors in Century City, which is not far from where we're recording this, as they're kind of wealthy tenants who don't have any stake. They don't win or lose if the landlord pays the janitors more, but they certainly don't like looking out the window at their fancy offices and seeing people being assaulted. And it led to the mayor, Tom Bradley, for whom our awful airport is partially named, to side with the workers. The

The reality is people don't necessarily care what happens to workers very much. I mean, I think that's that's if they don't see it, they don't necessarily think about.

but they do often care if they see it. I mean, basically you have janitors who were, you know, kind of at the forefront of a lot of the terrible work situations that are now incredibly common, in this case, subcontracting, where basically the owners of these gigantic downtown office buildings were ending their direct employment of janitors and instead using subcontractors to bring in the janitors for much lower wages.

And SEIU, Service Employees International Union, which today is one of the largest unions in the country, in part by organizing this kind of worker, is able to bring a lot of these workers together. A lot of them had escaped places like El Salvador and Honduras. So they're like fleeing right-wing paramilitary violence. And so they're not really that scared of the LA cops in comparison to what they had dealt with, with say, you know, US supported militias in El Salvador.

Right. One day, right, the cops just start, this is I think in 1990, the cops just start beating them in the streets. And, you know, like one woman who's pregnant, miscarriages. I mean, it's ugly. And as you point out,

You know, if you're a company that's renting a floor in an office tower, all you care about is that the garbage cans are emptied and the bathroom's clean. Like, you don't care about anything else. And all of a sudden, these people are watching, like, Salvadorans get beaten by the LAPD on the streets. And they're like, what on earth is going on here? And it was a huge mistake by the...

Well, by the LAPD and by the corporate leaders, and it leads to a big victory that spreads across the country and sort of brings a lot of janitors and other low-wage service workers into SEIU and makes it the powerful force in American labor unionism and American progressive politics that it is today.

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Let's talk about the air traffic controllers under Reagan. The air traffic controller union at the time, which no longer exists, it's a different union now, it endorsed Ronald Reagan.

What I thought when I saw that as well, you know, this election we just went through, we had the Teamsters head speaking at the Republican National Committee. So it felt resonant. Take us from the air traffic controllers union endorsing Ronald Reagan to within a span of a few years being destroyed by Ronald Reagan. In the 70s, like.

Planes crashed all the time. Of course, this may be happening now with Trump and the gutting of air traffic control. So this may become more relevant again. But air traffic controllers do not have the technologies that they have now. I mean, you're basically like dots in the sky on a radar screen and trying to get them to not run into each other.

And it was very stressful. And the way the FAA worked is that most of the leadership were old officers, often from the Vietnam War. And a lot of their everyday traffic controllers were rank and file guys from the Vietnam War. And their bosses basically treated them like they were enlisted men, telling them what to do, yelling at them, just adding to the stress. And this was not appreciated by a bunch of ex-Vietnam vets who were pretty angry anyway about their experience in the war and everything else that was going on in the 1970s.

So they formed this union. It gets quite a bit of publicity. And it's a very radical militant union in certain senses, not politically radical, but radical when it comes to direct action. So they spent the 70s slowing down the airlines, you know, engaging in what we call work to rule, which is like following the terms of the contract in a very specific way, which like malicious compliance is what we would call it now, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they were politically conservative men, by and large.

Right. I mean, we know that there was a lot of sexism and racism toward women and workers of color there. It's a bunch of politically conservative white men who have a very strong militant culture. Bring in the Carter administration. And Jimmy Carter was terrible on labor issues. I mean, this flat out Jimmy Carter began the period of Democrats really turning away from the labor movement.

Reagan actually did not have an extreme anti-labor record as governor of California. He had signed bills for, you know, say, expand collective bargaining rights for public sector employees. He had led a union. Hadn't he led a union? He was. He himself had been the head of the Screen Actors Committee. Right.

So from the traffic controllers, they sort of see, well, Carter's terrible. We actually like a lot of the tough talk that Reagan gives about forward policy. So let's endorse them. And then they had planned for a long time to go on strike in 1981. But, you know, then you look at the things they were wanting on their strike. There was no sense of solidarity with other workers there. Let's put it that way. They didn't care what the flight attendants thought. They didn't care what the pilots thought or the machinists thought.

They were out for themselves, and some of the things they were demanding were free flights to Europe, which is not exactly going to give you that solidarity. And notice, well, that in the 70s, you know, it was a terrible time for private sector workers. You had the recession after 73 and the oil crisis.

And so you had a scenario in which wages for private sector workers and union rights were declining and government workers were winning these great contracts and they were rising. And so there was a lot of anger among kind of a general public that fed into this larger anti-government backlash about greedy public sector workers. And the air traffic controllers kind of summarized that. So they go on strike against Reagan and Reagan, even though he had appreciated their support, it was like, this is an attack on me. It was technically illegal.

And so he fires them all. It's the greatest disaster in the history of organized labor. And I do think there's like there is a lesson there, right, that they thought they had this power because of the important role they played in infrastructure. But the lack of public support

gave Reagan the space to fire them all, blame them for the ensuing chaos that happened that they slowly sort of came back from. And I mean, the union stops existing, right? That's it. The union that follows, uh, is a completely different organization. Yeah. And the AFL-CIO had begged PACO leadership to not do this. They knew what Reagan stood for. Reagan did not respond well to people trying to bully him. Um, and, uh,

They didn't care. And this is when I think...

We have to push back a little bit on some of the rhetoric that's very popular on the left today when we talk about unions, because it's ideology. It's not really rooted in fact sometimes. And some of this is the more democratic a union is and militant it is, the more successful it will be. Just empirically, that is not the case, right? PACO was a very militant union, a democratic union that had overthrown its own leadership for not being militant enough. And they need a,

a strike that is an unmitigated disaster and that then emboldens the entire private sector to realize that they can act toward their unions like Reagan acted toward the air traffic controllers and they start doing the same thing and the 80s become a catastrophic decade for the labor movement. Strikes basically go from, you know, in the 70s, really tremendously common, huge strikes the whole decade. So,

to almost nothing by the end of the 80s through the 90s and really through the 2000s as well. Unions are scared to strike. You got to be smart about these things. This isn't something to romanticize. It's a strategy that's a very intense strategy that can work and can be transformative, but could also be utterly disastrous. And I think honest discussions of the labor movement

and honest discussions of striking are really necessary on a broader left today. That's frankly too often romanticizes things and reverse to talking points rather than deal with the messiness of Americans and their various and often contradictory politics that do not lead to wide scale class solidarity in this country. Can you talk about, uh,

one of the examples in the book of a more effective example of organizing and striking when the action was effective, both in galvanizing the public and in getting concessions. Yeah.

I mean, I think a great example is the United Farm Workers boycott of grapes in the 60s and 70s, right? I mean, this is an epic, legendary struggle that really is from a very small set of workers. I mean, these are pretty disempowered workers.

Mostly Mexican-American, but at that point still a lot of Filipinos as well out in California who are picking grapes and asparagus and lettuce and other crops in really awful, terrible conditions. People are dying of heat stroke and pesticide poisoning and all kinds of other terrible things. And, you know, there's some pretty serious organizing going on out there. Going back to the legendary organizer Saul Alinsky who sends some of his people out there, a guy named Fred Ross.

Ross brings in a couple of local people named Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and they eventually start leading a different kind of a movement, a workers-oriented movement that eventually becomes the United Farm Workers, beginning in 1965, gauging a nationwide boycott against table grapes because the grape growers were so anti-union. This sort of galvanizes laborers

across the country. It becomes a national movement. People volunteer for this and they live in like UFW houses in various cities around the country, working, flyering, getting people to support the movement, getting stores to not buy these grapes. And it becomes a national movement that eventually...

eventually leads to some pretty major victories for the farm workers and really solidifies Chavez and Huerta as legends of American organizing and American progressivism. They were able to take a really small group of workers and make it a national cause by building on a kind of a broader sense of solidarity that existed at that time where people in New York or L.A. or where I live in Providence

saw these workers out in California that they barely knew existed and learned about their conditions. And people were horrified about this. And it leads to enormous changes in the law in the state of California, leads to this big time social movement, leads to a lot of major victories for these workers. So I mean, that's one good example from the not too distant past.

Is it just as simple as their demands were reasonable, their conditions were terrible? Or was there something about the ask of Americans who obviously were not directly impacted? What exactly, to drill down, made it catch such attention? It was the appeal to a broader sense of justice that was a big part of American life in the 1960s and 70s.

You know, that this was a way in which everyday people, I mean, think about it today, right? Like, you know, there's a lot of people out there who, no doubt listeners of this podcast, who really don't know what to do right now, right? I mean, they're flummoxed, they're flustered, they're horrified, they're angry, but their anger other than like, you know, got to make sure we win the House in 26 and try to find somebody else. They don't know what to do necessarily. And that's been kind of a theme, I think, since the election.

Well, you know, part of what the UFW boycott does is give people something to do, right? It gives them a way that they can become invested in a movement by handing out flyers, by, if nothing more, by like taking the flyer and then saying, I'm not going to support buying these table grapes, right? I'm going to boycott a store that is selling these grapes. I'm going to engage in me, you know, I'm going to engage in a solidarity action.

That might slightly inconvenience me because, I don't know, my kid likes grapes and, you know, I like this store or whatever. But I'm going to put pressure using my consumer power to live by this boycott that then brings

means that I am actively helping these workers out in California who I've never seen because I've never been to Fresno. And I'm going to use my little bit of power to do something to help these workers. So I think it's not just like, I mean, look, like workers are in horrible conditions today, too. I mean, the pandemic and like the meatpacking workers who are dying of COVID on the job because they're considered essential workers are an example of that. And we didn't necessarily have actions to support them per se.

But there are ways to build bigger public support by doing the work of organizing in a broader general public to have an ask of people to do something concrete to help support of labor rights or immigrant rights or the other horrible things that are happening to this country today. There are ways that we can learn from the past to engage people to do real actions. They're not going to dominate their lives, but to do something.

concrete that leads to a bigger, broader set of social changes. What we need for that, though, is the organizing capacity and the leadership to make that happen. And that's not easy to do. That's the kind of infrastructure that has to take place in the organizing world first to be able to engage people who are not going to come out to a million meetings, but get them to do something.

Part of what the organizing has to do, right, it's not just that it gave people a concrete step that they could take. It was also an action with a specific goal, right? We're not boycotting these grapes forever. We're not doing this to raise awareness. We are taking a specific action for a length of time to exact some kind of a change, a specific step.

define change. And that requires organizers who understand that balance right between not being so complacent or establishment oriented as to not demand enough, which you talk about in the book a fair amount, but also to not be so ahead of where the public is that either your demands are seen as impossible or don't get the support of the public to try to make sure you get that result. Yeah, that's a really outstanding point. I mean, I think that so often in our

world to our liberal left progressive worlds, how we want to define these terms today. We've often lost, I think, the first core tenet of organizing, which you have to meet people where they're at, not where you're at, right? And so if you're asked, is the revolution, like people are not going to be there for that because they don't know what you're talking about, right? That the idea, and you saw this a little bit with like, I mean,

you know, say, Occupy Wall Street, right, which is now quite, you know, 15 years ago, and was a really important moment in rebuilding progressive capacity to do anything at all after the long 90s and 2000s where, like, people just weren't really on the streets. And it's a very important moment. But, you know, look, I mean, when it becomes about just occupying the space for a long, long time, people are not going to really see that connection, right? And that begins to sort of

People start cleaving off of that at that moment in time. And I think you see this in a lot of other cases today where organizers end up having kind of maximalist demands that don't seem realistic, right? The organizers themselves have to have discipline. And the United Farm Workers, let me tell you something about the UFW. You as a volunteer, you didn't have autonomy over your life.

You couldn't choose when or how to engage. If you were working for Chavez, he was the boss and you knew it. And going against that meant you were out. Discipline actually matters. And like today, I feel like we are, and then it includes much of the labor movement, all these like super hyper-powered individualists that do not submit to group discipline. And that actually is really critical to making change. It's kind of against the way a lot of us feel today.

But you actually do have to have discipline. And some of that discipline is we have to have, we have to decide first what our concrete goals are. We have to decide how we're going to get there, how to stay on messaging and how to get people to then support those goals. And when we win those goals, then we declare victory and move on to a next stage of organizing. We're not really at a lot of those points today. And I think this is part of the larger problem in figuring out how to collectively respond to Trump.

We'll be right back with more of this conversation after this break.

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Thank you.

It's funny that people are reaching out to you to ask about a general strike because you see it floated all the time and people are like, oh, we need a general strike. And it's, well, like, I don't know.

how do we get there? Right. What are the steps to building up the capacity and the kind of collective, uh, sense of imagination that such a thing could, you know, like before you can have it, people have to start to believe it's something that's realistic. That requires a lot of organizing along the way. One thing that struck me too, is you have this big strike in 1919, uh, led by people that had served in world war one. There's a, uh,

A general strike that shuts down Oakland in 1946. There's this series of strikes you were talking about with Vietnam veterans returning home. Something does happen in this country when people are returning home from a war.

and then don't feel like they're getting what they deserve or what they feel they're owed by the country. And they have a sense of discipline and camaraderie with the people that they're working with. There's a series of strikes. There's one in Connecticut. They start cascading across the country. They end up in Oakland in 1946. Can you talk about the Oakland general strike? Yeah, absolutely. And so

In some ways, the Oakland strike is a little bit like the Seattle strike, you know, coming out of a union movement that was not actually that radical, right? And by 1946...

understand that the union movement is now split into two groups. There's the American Federation of Labor, which represents the older forms of unions that tend to begin to be more politically conservative. And then the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, that includes the auto workers and the steel workers and the rubber workers and a lot of communist-led unions, and had really embraced that radicalism and mass organizing. But ironically, the

The Oakland general strike, like in Seattle, came out of these fairly conservative AFL unions. And this was very much about what did almost everybody have in common in 1946. They had not spent any money in 20 years, right? You had the great depression and you had world war II. And of course, nobody's making any money during the depression. And in the war, people are making money, but they can't spend the money because there's nothing to spend it on.

And by 1946, you have a lot of pent-up demand, and these people want pay raises. They want big-time pay raises to get the pay they deserve for the work they've done to win the war. And not surprisingly, the business class doesn't want to do that.

And so this is a situation where it starts among women, actually, department store workers. And they shut down the city for three days until, lo and behold, the Teamsters, led by a corrupt leader named Dave Beck, pulls their union out. And that was in some ways kind of devastating because at that moment, the CIO unions were about to join the strike. But it's another one of these situations where they shut the place down for three days, and it's like a giant party in the street.

You know, the bars can't sell alcohol, but they put their jukeboxes out on the street. People are literally dancing in the street. And it's this kind of joyful moment of workers expressing this power. They don't necessarily win the strike or some of the political aims, but these kind of things do lead to the

the massive pay raises and benefit raises that workers in post-war America got that turned American working class into being barely able to feed themselves to being able to buy a home and a new car and maybe send their kids to college and the kinds of hallmarks of, I think what's become called the middle class, but in still large parts is a working class that is a more prosperous working class. And so like the strike is not in itself necessarily successful, but,

but it lays the groundwork for employers over the next 25 years to giving really gargantuan pay and benefit raises to the American working class that significantly improved the lives of American workers. And I think that's also an important point that's worth making is that

Well, for a lot of people, it's a kind of a radical, you know, being involved in the labor movement is a kind of radical thing with the idea of socialist aims and whatever. And that's cool. I mean, I support a lot of that too, but having grown up pretty poor, you know,

Having more money in the bank is a revolutionary act. We're in this political moment where you have a lot of kind of Republicans saying, oh, we need I think it was the White House spokesperson yesterday. We see we need fewer LGBTQ graduates from Harvard and more plumbers and more kind of people that work with their hands.

And there's this sort of, I don't know, nostalgia for the factory because those are the real jobs for the men. Right. Those are those are real jobs with dignity for men. But it almost seems to me that it kind of gets it backwards, that that the reason we associate those jobs with dignity jobs.

And that American spirit is because people fought to make them well compensated. And because they were well compensated, they had a kind of prestige and a respect. Right. And that that that there's nothing inherently more dignified about that job than a service job. It's just that unions successfully organized those places when these people were forming memories about like a Rockwell style America.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, just from the work perspective, we know absolutely that there's nothing inherently better about a factory job than working at McDonald's or working as a home health care worker, right? Jobs that actually exist today, as opposed to factory jobs that are not coming back, even if all the tariffs happen and, you know, all the production comes back to the U.S., it's going to be automated, right? There's maybe a few workers in there, but it

We're not talking about 1950 anymore where you've got 25,000 people working in the same factory. That is never happening again. But I do think that there is a tremendous amount of instability in the workplace today. There's been a huge amounts of attacks on organized labor and

open attacks from Republicans and indifference from too many democratic leaders, Joe Biden being a very important exception to that, very pro-union guy, and one of his strongest things that did not really pay off politically, unfortunately, with union workers, which is a whole other set of conversations. But, um,

People are going to react to nostalgia, right? People are going to react to a feeling that things were better in the past. The truth barely matters. We have to deal with the reality that people do not feel comfortable and stable in their work lives. The rise of AI is only going to make this worse. And we actually really have to get ahead of figuring out what does the future of work look like? And people value work. Work is one of these things that...

All societies throughout history have had work in certain kinds of ways as central to their societies.

often connected to gender norms. And this is something we're going to have to figure out. We can't just tell people that they're wrong. We have to, once again, organize them where they're at to try to get them to a place that is less nostalgic and more useful and more organized to moving toward a politics that actually makes sense in the 21st century to make work life better for everybody. And we're not very close to that yet.

Yeah, it's worth talking about the Joe Biden example because you wrote this in 2018. And in the next two years, we elect Joe Biden.

He is the most pro-union president in our lifetimes. And then Donald Trump, who promised to be a pro-worker president, but ultimately deregulates and cuts taxes for the wealthy, makes gains not just with white people, but makes gains with black voters and Hispanic voters, especially men, and makes a kind of broad gains in ways that seem to suggest that Joe Biden's

kind of pro-union position didn't get him anything. And I'm just wondering, we don't know, you know, it'll take time to figure out what happened here, obviously, but I'm just wondering what your first reaction was to that. You can make the case that Joe Biden, in terms of actual support for unions, was more supportive of unions than FDR or Harry Truman, who actually, in truth, had very mixed records in terms of actually supporting what unions were doing and using the government to actively support unions. And it didn't, you're right, it didn't matter. But,

My main thought is that contemporary liberals think policy matters more than it does. And they don't put enough emphasis on communication and frankly, propaganda. You know, so you see these, you know, you see the signs up from the infrastructure bill on our highways and everything. And rather than have a big picture of Joe Biden up there saying, I did this for you, it's

Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Well, that's not helping Joe Biden at all, right? Like we on the liberal side, we have a kind of belief that good policy and like, oh, let's like raise the earned income tax credit is somehow going to connect with everyday people who feel insecure in their society and they don't really pay attention. And those are the actual voters you have to win.

I think the lesson is you have to message what you're doing. You have to tell the workers and make it convincing to them that you are the one who is going to change their lives. And it's funny, if you go back to the 30s and you like watch movies or art or anything else, the level of propaganda that FDR is pulling off would be shocking. I

I mean, it is just and you can see why people who hated FDR really hated him because he's engaging in activities that we would find so radically over the top in terms of promoting himself that it honestly makes Trump look like a piker when it comes to propaganda. It's really it's really remarkable. That's what we'll you know, honestly, that's what some Trump defenders say that like this. We're not doing anything that you wouldn't have applauded and haven't spent a century applauding when FDR did it. I wonder how much of this, too, is just.

Joe Biden's taking the right steps for labor, but it's just incomprehensible. We'll never get to do the double-blind experiment where we have a president who's doing what Joe Biden's doing, but isn't slowly losing the ability to fucking talk as we head into the most consequential election. Speaking of being too college educated, there was a story in the book that it just reminded me of social media, which is the Patterson strike pageant.

Oh, yeah. Which just was very sweet. And I thought was like and that I felt like, oh, that's like that. That could be a movie in and of itself. You just tell people what happened when Strikers in Patterson, New Jersey, decided to put on a show. OK, so it's 1913.

And you have a lot of militant workers out there. I mean, a lot of people who are immigrating from Eastern and Southern Europe, they bring over ideas of radicalism with them, particularly Jewish immigrants who are fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. And a lot of them had already committed to socialism. And so they're bringing these ideas into the American labor movement and really energizing it and turning it into a modern movement.

And, you know, the American Federation of Labor is like real scared of immigrants. It's a real problem for them. They're very anti-immigrant. Since the AFL is not organizing these apparel workers working in these like textile plants in Lawrence, Mass., at Fall River, New Bedford, Patterson, New Jersey.

The IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World are going in and doing it. And the IWW is like, we romanticize the heck out of them because they're really good at culture making and images and doing cool, dramatic stuff. They're not actually very good at organizing, to be totally honest at the time.

And so they have a lot of like wealthy supporters in the arts. They have these conversations that like, let's put on a big play to like show the people what the conditions are really like in New Jersey. And so they rent out like, you know, the big hall in New York City and they have this pageant. Let's get the workers on the stage and let's show them what's up. And, you know, we'll do these songs and dances and have these dramatic scenes. Right.

And so you have this play that's supposed to raise money and all these cultural people come out or like, yeah, you know, we're going to do this in solidarity. But the functionality is, is it does two things. It pulls people from the picket lines.

And then it divides the workers themselves between those who are like chosen to be on the play and those who are not. And the ones who are not are obviously like, why are I chosen to be in the play? They're like, this sucks. They're hurting people's feelings. I just think it's like these kind of gruff workers are just not getting their part. They're going running up to the board to see that they're not in the fucking play. Yeah, they're really upset.

And so it actually helps destroy the strike. Like there's this idea of like, let's put on this cultural thing, destroys the strike and the strikers totally lose. And it actually ends the IWW's attempt to organize in Eastern factories by and large, because they figured out they don't really know how to do it. It's kind of a funny story in some ways, but it's an example of how, just because you have like your finger on the pulse of American culture, uh,

and you are really good at producing, leftist culture does not mean it's actually good for the workers. And I think that's something we always have to keep in mind. When we're trying to engage in an action of solidarity, it's not about us. It's about the workers. Too often, I think, in this extremist individualist age in which we live in, acts that we claim to be solidarity acts are so often really just about making ourselves feel good,

And it needs to come from the workers themselves. And the solidarity is us doing what we can to assist the workers, not sort of imposing ideas upon them. So,

I think we should wrap up by just talking about where we're at now. Only 6% of private sector workers are currently in a labor union. I thought this was a stunning fact that more than half are located in just a half a dozen states in the Northeast, right? Which means whole parts of the country are just not unionized at all. We've also just been through an election where, you know, it's...

We lost. We lost to an anti-union, anti-labor president who is right now trying to stack the NLRB and undermine labor at every turn.

But at the same time, we've seen kind of revived efforts to organize. We've seen, I think, organizers trying to figure out how to organize people that work in offices, organize the media. We're sitting here in the auspices of Crooked Media. We got the Crooked Media Union on the ones and twos. If I did anything wrong, they'd have dumped out. You know, if I went too pro-management in this interview, it would be shut off. It wouldn't continue. They're laughing too much. And then, but it just, it's hard not to feel what you're feeling. Like I,

one thing I take away from the book is just when corporations have unleashed violence against organizers, it has blown back against them. When unions have had violent elements, even just acting on their own, it has destroyed solidarity with people that aren't in the union. And the reason I bring that up is you start to see this kind of

this desire to find someone to fix it, whether it's a politician or whether it's people kind of praising someone like Luigi Mangione. And it just feels like we're not at a moment where people want to or feel motivated to participate in broad protest or broad actions. You see some rising protests in the last couple of months, but nothing that compares to what happened in 2017. And more broadly, what you see

is protest not as a mean to exact any specific outcome, but simply to raise awareness, right? Protest to highlight a topic, express discontent, voice concerns, but not the kind of organized protest

movements that are designed to exact specific policy outcomes. And so when I think about the long road we have to a moment where millions of people might have to take to the streets because they're trying to protect us from a further descent into authoritarianism, I feel like we're so far away from that. And I just wonder what you see as either glimmers of hope or places where you would like to see greater organizing to start rebuilding that muscle. Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly agree with you in

Much of what you said. I mean, it confounds me that in a post-2024 election, the kind of giving up by seemingly by large parts of the social media or the Democratic Party. I mean, if you look back to, say, the

against the Muslim ban in 2017, I mean, it was tremendously effective, right? I mean, people came out and they occupied those airports and it forced Trump on his heels and it gave courage to judges to push back on Trump. And like, I feel like there's an attitude up here and maybe we learn our history wrong. Maybe this is a problem in that like,

people seem to think, well, we tried this one time and it didn't work. So I don't know. And it's like the civil rights movement, it was not just a march on Washington. And then everybody just sort of said, oh, okay. Like Martin Luther King is correct. Like, like that happened that way. It was decades of hard work of people dying, right? The women's march, the, the anti, uh, Muslim ban action, these were hugely effective actions. And I, it disturbs me that, that people have kind of like lost that. Um,

But there is a glimmer of hope out there, which is that never in American history, including at the peak of union power in the 40s and in the 50s, have unions polled as strongly as they do today. Americans kind of love unions today, at least in theory. It doesn't mean they're part of one, because we know 10% of American workers are members of unions, 6% of private sector workers, as you said.

So very few people are actually part of unions, but they poll tremendously well. Like unions are actually quite popular. The problem is the total capture of the union process, the union election and contract process by corporate America. Joe Biden typically attempted to do something about this.

And that was the PRO Act, which had a lot of support in the Senate, but not all Democrats supported it. And you're not going to get it through without getting rid of the filibuster anyway. But that would have taken away a lot of the power that corporations have to bust unions and to stop elections from happening and to be forced them to sign contracts and these sorts of things. So...

We're at a moment in which there's a lot of people who are looking for something, right? And they're looking for a movement that can mobilize them and get them to do something because I think people do feel unmoored and lost, right?

And so people see unions as maybe the kind of thing that could happen. And like the Starbucks union campaign is an example of how this can kind of mushroom up. Or the teacher strike wave in 2018 was another case, which went from deep blue LA to deep red West Virginia and Oklahoma that transcended politics and mobilized teachers around the country. But it's hard to take that kind of like vague, I really hope,

somebody will organize me and get your actual union, right? And that's because companies can do so much to stop a union election from happening, engage in intensive anti-union meetings and put tons of propaganda on workers that makes them scared. And then even if the workers win that election, the company can delay and delay and delay into signing a first contract, which is why you still don't have any contracts at Starbucks. Right.

And this leads to one final point, which is that Democrats actually have to be pro-union. And I would be remiss here in not talking about how disgusted I am by Colorado Governor Jared Polis right now, who the Colorado legislature passed a law that would repeal their right to work statute, which came out of the horrible Taft-Hartlack in 1947 that is called right to work. But what it really does is allow workers to leech off the unions without becoming members.

and is used as an anti-union tool in Republican states. Colorado has moved significantly to the left in its politics. They have a Democratic legislature that passes a bill to repeal this, which should be the peak demand of any Democrats in purplish states.

And Jared Polis vetoes it because he doesn't believe in unions. And frankly, if you don't believe in union rights and you don't believe in the power of unions to transform the American people, then I don't think you're a Democrat. I don't think you belong in the Democratic Party. I think you should be read out of the Democratic Party because to me, it's just as big of a moral crime as being a Democrat and saying, I don't support gay marriage.

or being a Democrat and say, I think abortion should be banned, which would be red lines for a lot of Democrats. But being anti-union is not a red line for too many Democrats. And so we need a better Democratic Party as well to show the American working class that this is the party of the worker and you need to rejoin the party and become the kind of Democrats, working class Democrats that we have in this country from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Well, gauntlet thrown for Governor Jared Polis. We'll have to ask him on to respond to it. And it's interesting because you do strike this note in the book, which is both the importance of making sure the Democratic Party, pushing the Democratic Party to represent

to represent unions effectively, but also to acknowledge that we have a two-party system and we have to fight to make the Democratic Party as pro-labor as possible. But to me, the lessons I take from the book are, one, the balance between radical action with sort of pragmatic goals and aims and understanding that most people have material, personal goals

financial needs and necessities that will motivate their participation to the importance of Pro labor government as the difference maker often three that nobody is more powerful than the forces in the economy that they're not a control of right that like that these that unions were not able to stem the tide when you have something like NAFTA and you have jobs going overseas but for

this importance of having the public behind you that the air traffic controller spent their goodwill long before they struck or Having violent animal elements inside of your union will alienate the kind of middle-class less involved Participants that you need to succeed and to me those were those were four of the lessons that I took for what we need to be doing now and

I really appreciated the book. It was a really helpful history. I also just, as I was reading it, realizing how much of what we learn growing up and just sort of what is considered history just does not cover labor history and economic history in what we study as kids. And it's an example to me of where you do have kind of propaganda in ways you just don't normally even understand it.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you for summarizing the points of the book so effectively. I mean, I hope those are the takeaways. And let me, I guess, close with an example. The March on Washington in 1963, everybody knows it for the I Have a Dream speech. And of course, that's been corrupted by Republican distortions of what Martin Luther King was saying.

But what is forgotten about, even by liberals and in the way we teach this in K through 12, often at the college level and is part of our general understanding of society, is the actual name for it is the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And economic demands were as central to the civil rights movement as desegregation, as central to the civil rights movement as legislation, as central to the civil rights movement as equality in schools.

but they get dropped from the overall memory of the civil rights movement because economic demands are, in many cases, more challenging to established power

than even demands for civil rights. I mean, the idea for the March on Washington came out of A. Philip Randolph's World War II level movement, and he was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleepy Car Porters Union. He speaks at the March on Washington in 1963. Walter Ruther and the United Auto Workers pay for most of the March on Washington, and the March on Washington had economic demands that

that included a $2 an hour minimum wage, which in the contemporary economy of 2025 is something like $18 or $19 an hour. So they're pushing for widespread minimum wage legislation as well. All of that is totally erased from our memory of civil rights, not only on the right, but in liberal world as well. And we need to think about why that is. Why do we, even when we do teach other justice movements,

And on the left, we do do that more. We teach women's rights. We teach gay rights. We teach civil rights. This is very important. These are big advances in the way we teach history. Why are we leaving labor out of that? And that's a question we all need to think about. Eric Loomis, thank you so much for your time. It was really good talking to you about this. The book is The History of America in 10 Strikes. I recommend everybody check it out. Thanks so much.

Hey, thank you for having me.

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