No American city has been as central to this decade’s struggles for social justice as Minneapolis. George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020 set off the biggest civil rights protest surge in our national history. Five and a half years later, ICE decided to make an example out of Minneapolis with a quasi-military invasion—which prompted a shockingly effective organized grassroots backlash that will be studied for years to come.

For the rest of the country, which associated Minneapolis more with “Minnesota Nice” than with fiery uprisings, the city may have seemed like an odd epicenter for our violent racial strife. But as Justin Ellis shows masterfully in his new book “The Cruelty of Nice Folks,” the history of race in Minneapolis makes a mockery of all that niceness. Ellis, a Minneapolis native who now writes for Defector, moved back to his hometown in order to do the research that allowed him to tell several intertwined stories: his own family history, George Floyd, the legacy of police violence, and Minneapolis’s long and sordid record of Nice White Liberals who failed to meaningfully reckon with the injustices growing on the other side of town.

I interviewed Ellis about Minneapolis, the failures of white liberalism, and whether defunding the police is possible. Our conversation is below.

How Things Work: Early on in this book, you mention a dynamic that I’ve definitely witnessed in newsrooms, which is that when some big story with a strong racial element happens (i.e. George Floyd), editors tend to try to pull in every black writer to write about it. On one hand, this can pigeonhole black writers. On the other hand, your writing about George Floyd led directly to this book. How did you make the decision to pursue the book project?

Justin Ellis: I struggled with this from the jump, even as far back as writing the essay for The Atlantic that ultimately led to the book. I’ve worked in journalism and media for over 20 years, I’ve seen the way newsrooms pursue and abandon diversity inside the house, then scramble when they feel the urgent need to tell stories about black life (only in someone’s death). It’s all exhausting and insane, and by the time Floyd was murdered I thought I was done with my journalism career.

Everything with Floyd hit so much more personally for me. I lived a few blocks away from where he was killed while I was in middle school, I could tell you what the inside of Cup Food looked like from memory. More than that, I felt really motivated by the dissonance a number of people had over such a brutal police killing happening in Minneapolis. That people would believe a crime like Floyd’s murder couldn’t happen in Minneapolis says a lot about the myths and lies perpetrated in the city’s name. Ultimately, I thought a book would let me explore that more in my own terms with my own understanding of the city.

Hubert Humphrey is mostly remembered today as a guy who lost a presidential race to Richard Nixon. But you have a fascinating section on his time as mayor of Minneapolis, where he was kind of the prototypical Nice White Liberal. What can the nice liberals of today learn from Hubert Humphrey about the limitations to that governing style?

Ellis: Humphrey really became the template for what we’d now call a standard bearer moderate Democrat. You do not get an Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, even a Joe Biden, without him. At the time when Humphrey became mayor in the 1940s he saw the threats to Black and Jewish families in Minneapolis in stark terms and he often was willing to personally intervene on the behalf of people, whether that was trouble with the police or being able to walk into certain restaurants or businesses. He saw the power in organizing committees and outside groups to offer policy ideas or create pressure around fixing employment disparity and housing segregation. He was also a model technocrat. He fully embraced this idea of giving things like “the race issue” serious study and finding solutions through lengthy reports. He was one of the earliest local politicians to believe that you could fix policing through better education and training. Credit where it is due, Humphrey could have won office without doing any of this, but saw it as a bigger moral calling.

But ultimately Humphrey’s legacy on the local level is creating the theater of equality. Every single one of those things I mentioned above are from the playbook we see today. It’s a lot of measures that help reassure white liberal voters without giving up any of their standing, while leaving marginalized groups always waiting, saddled with this expectation of fealty to one party because the men wearing blue ties acknowledge racism exists, even if they never want to take responsibility.

It’s telling that all of Humphrey’s grand ideas are all for nothing because of his ambition for higher office. He won two terms as mayor and jumped to run for Senate, and in the process left Minneapolis essentially the same as he found it for black families.

Your book, like Elizabeth Hinton’s “America on Fire,” delves into a decades-long cycle that’s played out in many US cities: Police violence, followed by uprisings, followed by promises for reform and blue ribbon commissions that ultimately produce only “modest change and a photo op.” Did you come out of your reporting with a solid idea of what a better process would look like?

Ellis: I don’t know how you can look at Minneapolis today and say they are better for choosing reform over revolution. The mayor reorganized the public safety department, then there was turnover in the leadership there. The chief who was supposed to lead the transformation of the police force recently resigned in disgrace. Like most police departments in the country, the budget continues to balloon thanks to overtime costs. And at the moment the city is failing to even meet the basics of its court-mandated reforms. By definition this is insanity, right?

I think like anything in local government, having a process for the community to guide designs and offer feedback is important. But I think the starting point has to be a total tear down, not a rebuild. That sounds simplistic, but look at where making changes on the edges has gotten us? Revised training standards and use of force policies have amounted to departments that are effectively the same. The aim needs to be so much higher.

After George Floyd, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end the city’s police department as it was constituted. Much of your book follows the long and ultimately unsuccessful fight over trying to achieve that vision. Do you think that was always doomed, or were there strategic changes that could have been made that would have allowed the city to end up in a better place?

Ellis: I really go back and forth on this. The machinery of so many cities like Minneapolis makes it seem near impossible to break up modern policing. The city’s charter commission, an unelected board whose only job is to give guidance to the city council on proposed changes to the charter, basically a kind of local constitution, was able to stall the policing referendum for one year just by pulling some procedural bullshit over a Zoom meeting.

I do think there were flaws with the proposal Minneapolis residents had to vote on in 2021, namely that it was a loosely defined black hole that voters could fill with their fears. It more or less was a ballot question that said “do you support ending policing and giving the city council space to come up with a better idea over time?” To succeed in a movement like this you need something like a diorama, a model people can wrap their heads around to visualize community safety, showing specialists in dealing with unhoused populations, domestic violence, addiction, and maybe even a violent crimes unit. And you have to get people to understand one thing: “this is a starting point,” because it’s going to take time, and most likely the current police will remain in place over the transition. Because people vote scared. There’s a reason why the final weeks of almost every election we’re all inundated with ads barely above grindhouse movies.

I think my most naive or idealistic belief is that you need a mayor willing to stake their career to support this kind of transformation. In Minneapolis you had a mayor—and even police chief—who actively campaigned against rebuilding the police department. It shouldn’t be a political calculus to say “the police as currently constituted do not really work for this city or for you.”

Somewhat related question: it has always bothered me that the debate over defunding the police (which, to be sure, was never a genuine goal of the Democratic establishment) always devolves so quickly into bitching over the term itself, rather than substantive discussions of the underlying issues. Based on Minneapolis’s experience, do you see a path forward for the defund movement?

Ellis: We live in the most absurd era of bullshit rhetoric. It’s infuriating to see how “defund the police” became this weapon that could be so easily used against anyone who wanted to point out that law enforcement budgets operate on the same logic as a venture capitalist’s wet dream of hockey stick growth. Overtime costs for most departments only go up while case clearance rates mostly remain low and black people keep dying. Yet it’s wrong to say “maybe we could use that money in better ways,” because then you wind up as a chyron on Fox & Friends.

It’s now as bloated and captured as “woke.” The problem is “police reform” is the worst of all these terms because of how easily it is co-opted and can provide cover for cynical moderate liberals and the revanchinists on the other side. In the years leading up to Floyd’s death, local activists in Minneapolis were actually successful in clawing back or diverting money from the city’s police budget. And then Floyd was killed. And Dolal Idd. And Amir Locke. I think the way forward increasingly is going to mean bending light in the direction of an abolition people can live with in their communities. I think it will amount to all the ways police departments can have responsibilities, equipment and people peeled away. Or, to quote Grover Norquist, “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

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Your own life—growing up in Minneapolis, moving away, then returning home in 2020 to both take care of your mother and to explore your own family history—is woven into this book. How do you think Minneapolis has shaped your life personally, in a way that wouldn’t have been the same had you come from another city?

Ellis: One of the things I really wanted to get at in the book is the liberal tendency to think that things will get better over time, that change can be incremental. That everything works through the often invoked and misquoted “long arc of the moral universe.” This is something that got ingrained in me at a very young age, that society is an ongoing group project that we can make better, but the results likely won’t arrive in your own lifetime. There’s an incredible chapter in Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics Of Liberation in America, that picks apart all the ways traditional coalition building is a busted premise because it works off the belief that institutions are inherently legitimate and can be salvaged if they break bad, and that you can have a working alliance between people who have always been on secure footing in the country and the people who have been traditionally vulnerable.

Now we’re seeing all the ways these traditional political teamups are failing and have so much evidence that incrementalism is ultimately bullshit that helps serve entrenched power. I think growing up around this kind of thinking helped me ground the book in the fact that a belief in good intentions or some unseen moral horizon ultimately contribute to a different, but just as devastating, form of white supremacy.

The book’s epilogue is about the recent ICE invasion of Minneapolis, and people’s remarkably successful fight against the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts. In my modest amount of reporting in Minneapolis this year, I repeatedly heard activists talk about the ways that the 2020 uprisings laid the groundwork for the actions against ICE. Do you think that’s true, and if so, how?

Ellis: Yes and no. I think on a practical, or maybe tactical level, the groundwork definitely came out of the pandemic and the period after Floyd’s death. Yes, it’s organizing through apps like Signal, but it’s also the growing influence of mutual aid. I think it’s also devising alternative methods for block-by-block safety without police. Before there were people on corners with whistles, there were protectors and watch shifts in George Floyd Square. In the aftermath of Floyd one neighborhood in south Minneapolis started an armed patrol and filed a class action lawsuit against the city because police response times to 911 calls was negligible.

More broadly, what I saw in Metro Surge made me think about the toll of the immediate years after Floyd’s death. It’s true that for many people it was a wake up call to police abuses or the underlying rage over the city’s neglect. Could that make people feel more prepared, or more outraged when ICE arrived? Yes. But something I also wondered about was, frankly, white guilt, which can be just as animating. This is a city that had the eyes of the world focused on it for a year after a black man died under a policeman’s knee and then failed to change its police department. For some people, this likely represented a second chance at completing a white savior action.

But in my talks back in Minneapolis while promoting the book, something that kept coming up in conversation is that the outpouring to support immigrant families, while noble, quietly whistles past all the same needs that have been unaddressed in the city’s black community. I do think it’s true something did crack in the city’s psyche because of Metro Surge, because there was a new willingness to use the protective powers of whiteness to aid migrant families or just face down masked goons. But it’s hard to reconcile all that effort, to say nothing of the near-universal praise the city received, with the persistent systems of inequity that made both immigrants and black families vulnerable in the city.

You can order “The Cruelty of Nice Folks” from an independent bookseller, or wherever books are sold.

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• Related reading: Talk Louder About Defunding the Police; The Consequences of Rejecting “Defund the Police.” In January, I covered the general strike in Minneapolis and ICE’s murder of Alex Pretti.

• A lot of people in Minneapolis are still reeling from the effects of the ICE raids. You can find a vetted list of mutual aid organizations to donate to right here.

• You can find an archive of previous How Things Work interviews with authors and other newsmakers here. The archives are free to read, and this entire site is also free to read. That is possible because readers—people just like you—kick in a few bucks to make it economically possible for me to run this place without a paywall. If you can afford the small price of $6 a month or $60 a year, please click the button below and become a paid subscriber to help keep us alive. Thanks for being here.

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Everyone in America is not a policy expert. In fact, a tiny minority are. It is hardly worth arguing over this fact. Consider any number of socially beneficial policies: Environmental regulation, financing affordable housing, sustainable land use, skillful foreign diplomacy, you name it. Do we expect these policy choices to arise spontaneously from public opinion polls? Do we expect to call a thousand Americans on the phone and then say “majorities of Americans expressed overwhelming support for humanitarian interventions in South Sudan, tightening restrictions on glysophate use in agriculture, and striking a grand bargain over reducing Colorado River basin water use by allotting each of the following states 17.5% of the total acre feet per year?”

No. We do not expect that. Anyone who is genuinely interested in finding and promoting beneficial government policy understands that while the general public may have broad values or intuitions, the process of enacting good policies actually involves first developing those policies based on deep knowledge and expertise, and then undertaking a campaign to educate and motivate the public to support the policies. Then there is an organizing campaign to educate and rally the public around the ideas. Most of the time, policy debates play out among experts, and the public finds out about them when this debate among the people who truly understand the issues has been more or less settled. This is not inherently bad. Virtually all specialized knowledge arises from this sort of dialogue among experts in the field. We don’t use public opinion polls in, you know, archaeology either. “Hey Jim from Omaha, quick polling question, how old do you bet the sarcophagus that they just dug up in Egypt is?”

In order for this process of “experts trying to discover the most beneficial policy solutions” to be benign, it must be conducted in good faith. That element, of course, is frequently corrupted by our political system. The experts all agreed about climate change, sure, but you get Exxon’s lobbyists involved and suddenly half of the political establishment has magically become climatologists and they must warn you that they are quite skeptical of the evidence. And so on. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. I say this only to make the point that when you see someone waving around a public opinion poll in order to argue against a policy that would benefit the public, there is good reason to ask whether that person is operating in good faith.

Which brings me to “Searchlight Institute,” a grandiose name for a group of professional Democratic centrists and former John Fetterman staffers who have started their own little think tank. (Side note, but adding “Institute” to your name is a good way to be taken more seriously than you deserve. - signed, the How Things Work Institute.) Searchlight is essentially a blog of sub-Yglesias-level quality that takes in money from donors and produces news stories about why the left is wrong and Democrats must embrace moderation. There is an entire industry of this sort of thing in Washington. What a job! At least they are fighting the good fight against their own unemployment.

Yesterday, Searchlight published a policy brief on what they call “Health Care Unity.” The purpose of this brief is to argue that Democrats should not pursue Medicare for All. This issue has been heartily debated by many Democratic politicians, experts, and writers for years. What does Searchlight bring to the table that is new?

• They don’t just write paragraphs. They make their case in bullet points, like this.

• And this.

Dumb people love bullet points. Especially if there is also bolding.

But I am selling them short. The heart of Searchlight’s argument is not that Medicare for All is bad policy; it is that the public doesn’t want Medicare for All. Please note that these are very different things! In order to advocate for a host of more modest health care reforms, Searchlight reveals their polling, the heart of which is this:

Given the complexity of the American health care system, it is not surprising that people’s views on diagnosing the problems and finding solutions are complex, too. There is a “dislike the system but like my plan” dynamic at play: Although 76% of Americans are either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their own health coverage, 59% are either very or somewhat unsatisfied with the health care system as a whole.

More Americans (34%) report trusting private insurance companies than the government (19%) to provide health care. In a recent survey conducted between Searchlight and the new media organization Zeteo, an overwhelming 70% of voters say they would rather keep their current health insurance than opt-into a government-run national health plan similar to Medicare.

While a majority of respondents feel that the government has a responsibility to ensure everyone has health insurance coverage (57%) and receives basic health care services (60%), opinions are divided on how the government should meet this responsibility: 24% think that there should be a single national health plan, while 30% feel there should be a mix of public and private plans, and 26% feel the government should provide coverage to the poor and to seniors.

The argument against the Democratic Party pursuing Medicare for All, in short, is that in a public opinion poll, majorities of Americans did not say they want to “opt-into a government-run national health plan,” and that there is no consensus majority view among Americans for a specific policy prescription that would ensure that everyone gets health care, which is a thing that a majority of Americans do support.

The rhetorical sleight-of-hand that you may have picked up on is: Who the fuck expects the general public to spontaneously coalesce around a particular health care policy plan, in a vacuum? People do not even understand how to get their own insurance company to pay a doctor’s bill. People don’t know how to find out the price of a health service. The entire experience of accessing and paying for health care in America is purposely confusing. Health care policy is one of the most opaque and convoluted areas of public policy. I am a professional political journalist and I can hardly figure out how to ask my health insurance company to pay for something. Most members of the general public—obviously! naturally!—do not have a deep well of health care policy expertise to draw on that they will use to offer sophisticated policy solutions on demand to telephone pollsters.

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Polls are used in political discourse when they serve the interests of the groups publishing the polls. When they don’t, they are not used. There is an entire industry of political pollsters that can use various wording and targeting techniques to produce desired polling answers on demand. I am not saying that is what Searchlight did. I am fully willing to accept their poll is of high quality. But what exactly are we supposed to learn from the fact that a majority of Americans—who have never known public health care, who can hardly imagine what it would be like for all citizens to access health care for a low cost, and who must cling tenaciously to their own health insurance plans like a life raft in order to survive—do not tell a pollster that they support Medicare for All? If you imagine that we are all good faith participants in a debate over the question “How do we best help people get good and affordable health care?”, does this poll then lead us to conclude that Medicare for All is an idea that should not be pursued by the more progressive of our two political parties?

Of course not. That would be an absurd conclusion. If we were all operating in good faith here, the only conclusion to take from this polling would be that it provides mildly informative data on the starting point of our organizing campaign in favor of Medicare for All. As someone who would like to see Medicare for All in America because it is the standard in all the advanced world, except for here, and because it is obvious that our insanely convoluted health care system causes infinite misery in order to enrich a handful of shareholders in private companies, what I take from those poll numbers is: A majority of Americans have the intuition and the desire that everyone should have health care, and that is a good starting point for a push in favor of Medicare for All.

If you instead take that polling and argue that Medicare for All “is not the path forward,” as Searchlight’s Adam Jentleson does, it means that you have started this entire process with a position to advocate (namely, “I oppose Medicare for All”) and then tried to frame the poll data in support of your position. There is nothing wrong with that per se, unless you are trying to portray yourself not as just another ideological actor in an ideological debate, but rather as a good faith interpreter of the political landscape who is giving good faith advice based on a good faith desire to achieve the most beneficial policy outcomes for all Americans. Like think tanks do.

If, theoretically, you started a think tank that got a bunch of its funding from, for example, hedge fund billionaires who have made significant investments in the private health care industry and are predictably uninterested in having the Democratic Party unite around Medicare for All, that might be a situation where you would be a less-than-good-faith participant in the public debate around Medicare for All. That could in theory be an instance where you would be motivated to search out polling numbers that could be framed to argue for a lesser health care reform agenda on the grounds that the public just doesn’t support this Medicare for All stuff. It’s right there in the numbers!

It’s not that any of this is surprising. It would just be nice if we could be more precise in the ways that we think about who is offering polling evidence on various issues, and why, and whether that polling is actually telling is what it is purported to tell us, and whether we should be looking to public opinion polls to guide us to good public policy stances in the first place. Or whether it would be okay if we just figured out the way to help the most people and then did our very best to accomplish that. The Republicans don’t want to help people. If you allow the Democrats to choose as their starting point in policy negotiations “We don’t want to help people too much,” we are not going to get too much. Unless we are paid by hedge fund billionaires.

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• Related reading: What Is Centrism?; People Don’t Know Anything About the Government; How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Don’t Take Advice From Your Enemies.

• Nate Wendt is a union activist from South Dakota who is currently fighting cancer. I met him a few years back at Labor Notes and he is still fighting the good fight. He is raising money to help with his recovery. I’m sure that anyone who is able to donate here would be greatly appreciated.

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Union density. Union density. Union density!

What is the reason for our problems? Union density. What is the answer to our problems? Union density. What explains our plagues? Union density. What must our goal be? Union density.

Everybody should be talking about union density. Always. Union density—the percentage of the work force that is represented by unions—has been declining since the middle of the 20th century, almost without pause. In the 1950s, one in three American workers was a union member. Today, it’s only one in ten. This decline goes a long way to explaining our half century-long rise in economic inequality, the slow collapse of our civic society, the enormous fortunes in the hands of a small number of billionaires, the capture of our electoral politics by money, and more. Union density has been crushed so the power of working people has been crushed and unions have less economic and political power and as a result corporations and the rich have more power. And here we are.

For the same reasons, increasing union density is a key to reversing all of those deleterious trends. Many regular people can see the ways that our society is socioeconomically broken, but they are not exactly sure what to do about it. The simplest and most elegant answer is: increase union density. This will increase the power of working people and decrease the relative power of corporations and the rich, put more wealth in the pockets of the working class, and create political power that can be used to do things like “give everyone health care” and “tax the rich”—policies that would themselves help to fight inequality, but which have proven to be politically impossible when the working class has less political power than the rich.

I wrote a book about this if you’re interested in a longer discussion.

Despite its importance, union density doesn’t get a lot of attention in mainstream political discourse. I’m always keeping an eye out for new UNION DENSITY FACTS. And this week we got some: a new report from the Economic Policy Institute that quantifies what would happen if we could triple union density—if we could once again make 30% of the work force union members, as they were in the mid-20th century.

Among the findings of the report (bolding added):

• “If we tripled union density from 10% to 30%, the real median wage for all workers (including both union and nonunion workers) would rise from $25.67 in 2025 to $29.39 per hour—a 14.5% increase. A full-time, full-year worker earning that wage would see annual pay rise by more than $7,700.”

• “Assuming the 14.5% wage boost we estimate from a tripling of union density applies to the bottom 80% of the U.S. workforce, this would raise these workers’ combined pay each year by $1.2 trillion.”

• Unions also bring benefits to health care coverage. “If union density tripled and all states were high-density states, the national nonelderly uninsured rate would fall by about a quarter, from 9.8% to 7.3%.”

• Unions help ensure that workers get their unemployment benefits when they’re eligible. “In recent years, the average UI recipiency rate in high-union-density states was 36%, double the 18% rate in low-union-density states.”

• Economic research has established that increasing union density raises wages even for non-union workers, because all companies in the market have to compete with unionized companies for labor. Because the economy-wide benefits of union density don’t really kick in until it hits 15%, EPI says, they are probably underestimating the economic benefits: “Below 15% union density, a one percentage point increase in density is associated with just a 0.2% increase in the median wage; above 15%, the median wage increases by 0.9%—a wage response more than four times as large.”

Note that the huge economic benefits from this increase in union density would happen without any new taxes on the rich or other direct redistributive government action. They would happen because workers would have more power, and they would use that power to collectively bargain for a fairer share of the wealth they produce. Unions, as a solution to our political and economic problems, do not require some omniscient policy expert to determine the right solution for every working person in every place. They simply give working people the power to advocate for themselves in a way that actually works for their particular situation. Mass unionization produces infinitely more nuanced and workable solutions than any other path to reform.

But How?

The incredible benefits of increasing union density are clear. Okay. Great. How do we do it? This is where we see more clearly the problems inside of the labor movement itself. EPI’s report lays out a purely legislative path to increasing union density: Pass the PRO Act to reform America’s anti-worker labor laws, and enact another federal law to give collective bargaining rights to all public sector workers nationally. They also advocate laws guaranteeing annual cost-of-living raises for all union workers, and automatic collective bargaining in any company where the CEO-to-worker pay ration exceeds 100-1.

Neat. Good ideas. Please wake me up when we can pass any of these laws.

Next year will be the 80th anniversary of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the bad bill that created anti-union “right to work” laws and gave businesses the tools they have used to cause the long decline in union density in the first place. Eighty fucking years, and the labor movement and its political allies have not repealed this bill. Should we? Yes. The PRO Act would do the job. But saying “we should triple union density” and then saying “the path to doing it is to pass a bunch of laws that there is no indication we can pass” amounts to magical thinking. It is, in fact, precisely the strategy that organized labor has been leaning on for decades now, with futility.

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I am not trying to sound combative here. I support all of these laws! Unions should continue their efforts to get them passed! The thing is, we need a serious plan to increase union density in the meantime. That, unfortunately, does not exist. Liz Shuler, the head of the AFL-CIO, was on the press call for the EPI report. I asked her what the path is to raising union density absent these legislative changes. She said that we need “multiple strategies,” including targeting individual states and using them as laboratories for reform. “We are fighting on all fronts. But we need the air cover of policy change and legislation. It’s not the end all be all, but we know how broken labor law is in this country.”

EPI’s Heidi Shierholz pointed out that public approval of union is at 60-year highs, far higher than it was under Obama, when the last major Democratic push for labor law reform fell short. So there are rational reasons to say that we are in a new moment that is more promising for legislative reform. Still, the fact remains that while we certainly do need labor law reform, history tells us that we shouldn’t expect to get it, even though we will continue to fight for it. The labor movement cannot subordinate itself to Congress. We need a concrete strategy, controlled by us, that we can pursue until the “holy grail” of legislative reform happens.

In short, what the labor movement has the power to do now is to massively increase funding for new union organizing. The real meaningful conversation, for those who take the idea of increasing union density seriously, is “where are we going to get the money to do the organizing we need to right now?” Much of the money is already sitting in the coffers of major unions, who just have to decide to spend it on organizing. More of it can come from the private sector, which has not been adequately tapped for this purpose. And more of it can come from the government, which can commit to funding union organizing alongside other legislative priorities.

The public should know that union density is vital, an answer to our most pressing problems, something to be focused on and talked about and pursued. Politicians should know that labor law reform must be a top, top priority for Democrats when we retake the White House, and that we are going to have to eliminate the filibuster to get it, and politicians unwilling to do that should suffer our wrath.

But the labor movement itself needs to be talking about: Where are we getting our first billion dollars for the big organizing push? If we are not talking about this, we are not taking seriously our obligation to give all workers access to a union. Not really. Therefore, we are failing. We cannot blame the evil bastards of corporate America for our decline if we are not actually trying to do the things that might turn it around.

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• Related reading: How the Government Can Help Build Industrial Unions; Ten Times This; Your Money Is On the Table.

• EPI is a great research organization and you can read their full report here. You can order my book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” from an independent bookstore here. You can contact EWOC for help organizing your own workplace here. You can donate to support union organizing drives here.

• Thank you all for reading How Things Work. We are slowly rebuilding a functional independent media ecosystem out of the smoldering wreckage of what was once the journalism industry. The only way this is possible is with the support of readers like you. If you like this place and would like for it to continue to exist for another year, please take a quick second right now and become a paid subscriber, for just six bucks a month or sixty for the whole year. Paid subscribers are the only way that we keep doing this. I appreciate each and every one of you.

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Politics is hard. Assembling coalitions, building strategies, overcoming ruthless opposition—it’s a lot. For the Democrats, the political moment is defined by a rising faction on the left, corrupt fascists on the right, and looming midterm elections intermittently overshadowed by regional crises. What, exactly, are we to do?

Fortunately, there is an entire universe of pundits that Democrats can turn to for help in navigating this challenging environment. For example, David Brooks in The Atlantic:

To encourage my Democratic friends, I would remind them of this fact: The Democratic Party became great not while pushing against the right. It became great while pushing against the left. Democrats can argue against Republicans in their sleep. They have a comfortable set of moves they can go to: trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the rich.

But mainstream Democrats have to think hard when arguing against the left. They have to toughen up. They have to clearly define what they believe and what they do not believe. They have to rally grassroots supporters willing to fight alongside them. They have to come up with some new agenda to compete with the get-everything-for-free agenda that the left is now offering.

Or Bret Stephens, in the New York Times:

What all this means for mainstream Democrats is that they resemble a national army under attack from an insurgency: They offer order and predictability when they need to be shocking and surprising; they seek to win by delivering incremental victories while their guerrilla opponents promise political transcendence. Unless something changes, those dynamics tend to set the army up for disaster.

What could change the dynamics? It would help if a Democratic leader stood up to make the case that democratic socialists are neither liberals nor progressives, at least in any honest sense of those words. They are atavists, blasts from a discredited and discarded past.

Or persnickety bow tie George Will, in the Washington Post:

The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics… Never mind that Platner is a lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents. Rather than assess him as — Heaven forfend! — an individual, Democrats anointed him the embodiment of a category: the working class. He could be their favorite thing, a victim. He could make vivid their simpleminded binary of “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Oblivious of their insult to America’s working class, Democrats wonder why what once was their base has abandoned them.

Or Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal:

You might think that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head Kirsten Gillibrand would be shouting “I told you so” and “the grownups are back in charge.” They are the “establishment” that the progressives unwisely defied by recruiting Mr. Platner.

Mr. Schumer had recruited the popular Gov. Janet Mills to take on GOP Sen. Susan Collins. Ms. Mills is a vetted professional with a lifetime of public service… She’d have been a formidable challenger.

Or her esteemed colleague, former Bush strategist Karl Rove:

Before the election, [DSA-aligned candidates] will help Republicans paint the Democratic Party as radical… Socialists running in deep-blue districts can keep saying outrageous things and win. But it’s places like Colorado’s Eighth District, pitting the former Army helicopter pilot against the leftist Yale law graduate, that will decide which party runs the House. Game on!

With such abundant on-the-record free advice, the Democrats can’t say that they weren’t warned about the perils of the leftist trap they are falling into.

These columns—a selection of what has appeared just in the past week—are examples of a particular genre of punditry that should not exist at all. That genre is: “Advice from your enemies.” The fact that these things continue to be published at such a rapid clip is evidence of the frail-mindedness among the readers, editors, and writers of these publications.

Writing about politics is fine. Writing about what your political enemies are doing is fine. What is stupid, farcical, at best a trap and at worst a sign of a devastating collapse in American logic, is to purport to give political advice to your political enemies. It is one thing for a Republican pundit to write “I dislike socialism.” It is another, more ridiculous thing for a Republican pundit to write “Democrats must reject socialism, for their own good.” The only thing that exceeds the uselessness of writing these types of columns is the reading of them.

If you, a citizen who does not spend an unhealthy amount of time reading political punditry, have ever made the mistake at nodding sagely at one of these columns and filing their advice in the serious side of your mind, I now give you a gift: the gift of never having to do that again. Taking advice from people who do not share your goals is and will always be a trick, and a waste of time. Stop it!

Do I, on the opposite side of the political spectrum from these pundits, have opinions about what Republicans should do? I sure do. They should fall to their knees, grovel before their false gods, beg forgiveness from the oppressed people of the world, and reverse all of their political beliefs. It is fine for me to share all of these correct thoughts. But I hardly expect Republicans to consider this to be advice. I do not share their goals. I want their entire political project to fail. Imagine me pretending to strike the pose of Analytical Observer Whose Guidance Should Be Considered Valid Because It is Purely Strategic in Nature. Why the fuck would I do that? And why would they ever believe me? I could never have a genuine thought about what Republicans should do in order to help Republicans. I do not want to help Republicans. Such a thought would be contrary to my entire nature. And if I ever did have a useful idea to empower Republicans, why would I ever share it? I might as well write “A Burglar’s Guide to Breaking Into My Home While I am Out of Town This Weekend.” The very act of writing such a piece would reveal me to be either an undercover cop or a moron.

That is exactly what you are getting when you read a piece by David Brooks or Bret Stephens or any Wall Street Journal columnist about what the Democrats should do. (And I am only using the strictest definition of this dynamic here. In reality, it should be expanded to include all essays about What the Left Should Do by corporate Democratic officials, mewling centrists, “common sense” Democratic operatives who now write for the Free Press, and so on. In all of these cases, people who fundamentally disagree with your goals are allegedly giving you good faith tips on what you should be doing.) Our national political media discourse would be greatly improved by eliminating all of these pieces. Already, wise editors do not commission them, non-hacky writers do not write them, and smart readers do not bother to read them, except for comedy purposes. They exist in an intellectual world that is by and for suckers. If you find yourself in that orbit, now is a good time to show yourself out.

If you fear that you will miss something by not reading this style of essay, let me assuage your concerns. Here is the advice you will get in every single one: “My opponents should be more like me.” There you go. Never say I have not saved you time in your life.

When reading any piece of political advice, stop and ask yourself: “Does this person share my political goals? Are we trying to accomplish the same things? Is this a case of two people who share the same destination discussing the best way to get there? Or is it a case of someone who wants to go somewhere else trying to lure me away from where I want to go?” Pundits who are honest will make this distinction clear. They will say: Your beliefs are wrong, and mine are right, and you should join me, and here is why. They will not do the editorial version of the Steve Buscemi How Do You Do, Fellow Kids meme. You only have to imagine David Brooks in a fleece and Oxford shirt raising his hand in a DSA meeting to weigh in on the next Palestine protest to viscerally understand how absurd this whole style of criticism is.

Pundits can critique, insult, denigrate, and eviscerate their political opponents. That’s fine. Normal stuff. They can also try to sway their opponents from their misguided positions with passion, logic, and moral reasoning. Sure. Give it a shot. What they cannot do—not if they are honest, which is to say not if they are worth paying attention to at all—is to levitate above the earthy world of political beliefs altogether in order to deliver a dose of tactical wisdom that is untainted by the muddy blur of conviction. No. That one is a lie. Its pervasiveness in particular publications is one of the primary things that makes those publications such a big waste of time.

If you are my enemy just go ahead and try to defeat me. Don’t tell me how to be more like you. You suck!

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• Related reading: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory; Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation.

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Everyone—you, me, politicians, Wall Street, tech people, philosophers—is a little bit scared and dazzled by AI. This is natural. Nobody quite knows if it will kill humanity or cure cancer, destroy all jobs or create infinite prosperity, be a pivotal moment of planetary history or a glorified office assistant. All of the above? Finding out is the fun part!

Unfortunately, this very normal uncertainty about the technological future of AI has bled into some unnecessary political uncertainty about how to approach AI regulation. Some of this, of course, is the usual consequence of corporate influence-buying to insulate themselves from all restraint. But another factor is that the flashy unpredictability of AI seems to be convincing political leaders and a concerned public alike that our current tool set is not up to the task—that this exotic new industry will require an equally exotic new regulatory approach.

This is untrue. It is also damaging the public interest, because it causes a delay in getting some solid regulations on the books. That delay is not only wildly unsafe, but also allows AI companies to race ahead with little oversight, laying the groundwork for the classic “Well, we’ve already come this far, so we can’t go back” style of corporate regulation-dodging.

Perhaps the best example of this somewhat confused approach to AI oversight is Bernie Sanders’ proposal for the federal government to take a 50% stake in the biggest AI companies, and use the proceeds to create a sovereign wealth fund. I have written before about why this is not the best idea. I apologize for returning to the same topic again, but, shockingly, my last piece did not cause Bernie to drop his plan and rally to my side. It feels worth one more stab at clarity on this issue. If progressives genuinely want to get ahead of the dangerous consequences of unchecked AI—and I know that they do—it’s important for all of us to know that everything we need to do so is right there waiting for us.

In my lifetime, we have already witnessed the full arc of a powerful new industry growing up and taking over the world with insufficient regulation. That would be the tech industry. The failure of the US government and of organized labor to get ahead of the tech industry’s wild growth has produced: A crisis of economic inequality; an outright oligarchy with centibillionaire tech executives at the top of pyramid; a near-total absence of labor unions in the world’s richest industry; and massive psychological and societal damage as a result of unregulated social media and algorithms assaulting the overmatched human attention span. Collectively, it is safe to say that the way that the tech industry’s growth has played out this century is not something we want to repeat.

AI, for all of its novelty, is the latest iteration of the tech industry. It has the same explosive economic growth, creeping disruption of existing industries, and grandiose claims to being different from all that has come before. Now is the time for us to recognize that we have three tried and true tools at our disposal to prevent AI from becoming a socioeconomic rerun of the devastating example of the tech industry.

Taxes

Taxes. Yes! The government can levy taxes on companies. Are you afraid that unaccountable and soulless corporations are growing too powerful because they are making too much money? Tax them. This leaves them with less money. It leaves their potentially oligarchical owners with less money, too. Great.

Compare “raising corporate taxes” to “having the federal government take 50% of the equity of select large AI companies.” The first option has a number of advantages over the second. For one thing, taxes fall on all companies across the board, or of a certain size. There is no need to guess at which companies will be successful, or for the government to risk locking in the current dominance of a handful of companies by becoming shareholders in them. The companies can do what they do, and their position in the markets can rise and fall as it will. Don’t want ultra-powerful AI companies coming to dominate the economy? Tax their money away. Don’t want AI company CEOs becoming trillionaires? Tax their money away. Don’t want corrupt Trumpian administrations using their stakes in corporations as a slush fund? Don’t want to put the American public in the absurd position of saying, “Oh no, we must bail out OpenAI because we are all shareholders in it, and we want it to do well?” Don’t make the American public shareholders in these companies, then! Just tax them. And if you want to make a particular outcome like, for example, “automating all the customer service jobs” less economically attractive, you can tax that specific thing as well. It is a simpler, more direct, and more powerful way to accomplish what Bernie is trying to accomplish, without the potential pitfalls.

But, uh oh—what if taxes are not enough to stop these AI companies from doing bad horrible profitable things?

Laws

Laws. Yes! The government can pass laws that prevent the AI companies from doing things. Don’t want them releasing dangerous new models without government oversight? Don’t want them doing autonomous killer drones? Want to make sure there is disclosure if AI is used in media or entertainment? Want to keep AI slop out of public education? Pass a law. Taxes can change the economic incentive for companies to do things, and laws can stop them from doing things at all. Together, taxes and laws are what “regulation” means. I will not go on and on about this, because it is pretty straightforward. It is familiar. It is a regime that already exists.

When you realize that the federal government has the ability to levy taxes and pass laws, it becomes clear how misguided and unnecessary the idea of becoming an equity shareholder in AI companies is. If the government wants half of Anthropic’s money, it does not need to hold stock in the company; it can just tax it away. If the government wants to stop OpenAI from doing something bad, it does not need to go into the boardroom and say “you better listen to me because I’m a big shareholder!” No; it simply needs to pass a law. The federal government is not a person that needs to build up a big war chest of stock in order to throw its weight around with corporate America. The government is an entity charged with protecting the public good, that sits above corporations, and is empowered to take their money and set rules governing their conduct as it sees fit.

My argument is not that it is politically easy to regulate the AI industry; it is that we should pursue a method of regulation that is the best and most effective and has the least downsides. That method is taxes and laws. It is not “having the government go into the AI business.”

But, uh oh—the government is subject to corporate lobbying and regulatory capture. What if our attempts at taxes and regulations of AI aren’t adequate quickly enough?

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Unions

Unions. Yes! Labor unions. One woefully underdiscussed reason why the tech industry has created such profound economic inequality and has operated with such grotesque impunity is that virtually none of the major tech companies are unionized. This fact has allowed the company owners to hoover up bazillions in profits that would have otherwise been shared widely with hundreds of thousands of employees. It has allowed people like Mark Zuckerberg to pursue decisions that range from wasteful (the Metaverse) to morally horrific (enabling ethnic violence) with little effective internal pushback. The government clearly had no ability to or interest in preventing these and other bad tech company actions. Do you know what could have, though? A union.

Unions create a power center inside of companies that is separate from both the government and the management of those companies. Unions are not perfect, but they are the single most effective check on corporate power when they are strong. Had the tech industry been widely unionized, America’s economic inequality today would be drastically less, and the power of tech billionaires would be vastly reduced. Also, the labor movement itself, which has been weakening since the mid-20th century, would be significantly more influential both politically and economically, which would change our entire political landscape and could well have prevented the Trump era from happening altogether. It’s a big deal. I won’t go on about this forever, but there’s a book you can read that expands this argument.

Recognizing the potential of unions inside the major AI companies to mitigate some of the worst outcomes of the industry’s evolution, we can make reforms that make it easier to organize and sustain unions a bedrock part of our overall approach to AI regulation. If we really think it’s important, we can even pursue mandatory measures like reserving a significant chunk of board seats for worker representatives at these companies, as Germany does. It’s ridiculous for the federal government to be involved in boardroom agitation—but it is incredibly healthy for workers to do so.

AI… so new! So powerful! So unpredictable! However shall we regulate it, make it safe, channel it in the best interests of humanity? My friends, we can do it. In the most boring ways possible. In ways that already have centuries-long track records of being effective. We tax the companies. We pass laws to regulate their conduct. And we empower the workers at the companies to unionize and act as a check on the power of the cutthroat bosses. This stuff works. My plea—to Bernie, to progressives, to everyone with common sense who is nervous about how the AI industry is going to fuck us all up—is for us to focus on these powerful tools that we already have, rather than wasting more time brainstorming needlessly elaborate new tactics.

This fight will not be hard because it is impossible to figure out what to do. It will be hard because there are trillions of dollars on the side of doing nothing. The sooner we all get moving in the same direction, the better.

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• Related reading: An AI-Funded Sovereign Wealth Fund Is Dangerous; AI Is an Existential Threat to Organized Labor; Capitalists Implicitly Expect Us to Save Them From Themselves; The Failure to Unionize the Tech Industry Will Eat the Labor Movement Alive (2020).

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Political moderates are those who believe that wisdom begins with the rejection of perfection. It would be nice if the world were the way that we wish it would be, but it’s not going to be that way any time soon, and insisting that it should be is therefore a mark of unseriousness. Incrementalism, they believe, is the adult choice; everything else is utopianism, which is an immature waste of time. The moderates, the centrists, the incrementalists, the adults in the room—all are eager to discard the great leap forward in favor of a modest step in the right direction. In many cases, their embrace of this philosophy is rooted in a genuine belief that it is the best that they, and we, can hope for.

Even if we grant the moderates the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their sincerity, we do not have to grant them anything when it comes to their skills as negotiators. They are masters of bargaining against themselves. Their most reliable move is to cede ground before the battle even starts. While they imagine that picking a more modest starting point marks them as realists, it actually marks them as marks. They give their opponents something for nothing. It is not necessary for the other side to wrestle them as far. If the moderates had had the courage to ask for everything rather than an increment, they would, after all the tussling was over, land closer to where they actually wanted to be. This basic principle of negotiation is clear to anyone who has had to struggle for something they need. But since moderates need nothing, and approach politics with a bias towards stasis rather than progress, they are prone to the pitfall of giving up on political substance in exchange for keeping the struggle itself as genteel as possible.

Another way to say this is that the philosophy of moderates, their approach to politics, only works if the people on the other side are moderates as well. Theirs is a game with intelligible rules played by people who live in horror of being perceived as extremists. When a moderate comes up against someone whose political beliefs are stronger than their beliefs in decorum, the moderates get destroyed. They get yanked towards their opponents position due to their own abhorrence of sweat, of conflict. If moderates had deep ethical beliefs, they would recognize the need to change their strategy when their opponents grew more radical. Sadly, the moderate mind, lulled into paralysis by the air-conditioned air of Washington, DC conference rooms, always seems unable to rouse itself to evolve past the rudimentary epoch of polite political jousting.

Americans today are living in the socioeconomic rubble left by the failure of the incrementalists. The Democratic Party, dazzled by the passing success of Clintonian triangulation theory, has been institutionally unable to recognize that that era has passed, and a new and more brutal period of political war has settled upon us. As a result, we have all been subjected to the humiliating spectacle of mainstream liberal institutionalists harrumphing about norms as an increasingly fascist Republican Party gleefully smashes up all of their hallowed traditions with hammers. The destruction of the Trump era, of course, does not affect the material lives of Democratic political leaders one bit. They suffer only mild chagrin. Regular people pay a higher price.

The thing that Democrats, as a party, have still not yet accepted is that they have to solve the problems. Incrementalism, by definition, solves only part of a problem, which to the regular people who suffer the genuine consequences is the same as not solving the problem. What does this mean, concretely? It means that you need to give people decent health care that they can afford, rather than boasting about taking minor steps down the long road towards that goal. It means that you must give people wages that they can live on, rather than boasting about small economic gains that still leave them too broke. It means that you must attack the power of billionaires until the billionaires do not have too much power any more, rather than advocating for modest tax increases that leave an oligarchy substantially in place. It means you have to expand the Supreme Court and put in term limits and end the antidemocratic unaccountability of the institution, rather than hoping that the inherent robustness of our storied institutions will somehow reassert itself in time to save the day.

The distinction that I’m making here is less ideological than practical. The entire pseudo-civil war inside of the Democratic Party over “socialism” is a canard. Nobody really knows what socialism means, and the policy overlap between the socialists and the “progessives” is significant. What is propelling the popularity of the socialists in certain districts is less an upswell in Marx-reading and more the fact that these candidates are touting both policy positions and a fighting attitude that would solve the problems of the people. Medicare for All solves a problem; incremental improvements to Obamacare do not. Aggressive wealth taxes combined with aggressive promotion of mass unionization solve a problem; minor tax increases on the rich and “business and workers can thrive together” platitudes do not. Expanding the Supreme Court and imposing term limits on justices solves a problem; calling on the next Democratic president to appoint someone liberal does not. This list can go on and on and on. The point is that in each of these cases, the left-most position is the one that would actually make a significant positive material impact on the macro-level problem, whereas the incremental approach would mitigate the underlying problem to such a small extent that the average person could be forgiven for not perceiving the change at all. Instead of thinking of the differing approaches to these issues on a left-to-right or radical-to-conservative axis, it can be helpful sometimes to just ask: “What would it take to actually solve this problem, as opposed to just moving somewhat in the right direction on it?”

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The ultimate failure of the moderates is that the thing they prize the most—their savvy realism—is a big illusion. When the reality of life is extreme, the radicals are the realists. They are the ones trying to bring about a change appropriate to the severity of the problem. This is not quite a perfect metaphor, but when I think of political centrists, I often imagine a person dying of thirst in the desert who finally crawls up to a stand selling bottles of water.

MAN DYING OF THIRST: A liter of water, please.
VENDOR: Sorry, we only sell two-liter bottles.
MAN DYING OF THIRST: Well, forget it then. That would be too much. [dies]

Institutionalists who imagine that they are playing a civilized game with honorable peers are neither savvy nor realistic when they are actually facing religious zealots, corrupt strongmen, gutter racists, and fascists whose goal is to crush their opposition by any means. Achieving your political ends means, first, accurately assessing who your opposition is and what it will take to overcome them. That assessment will naturally lead you to more radical measures as your opponents themselves grow more vicious. An unwillingness to accept this will leave you impotent, as today’s Democratic Party institutionalists are.

Taxing Elon Musk’s wealth from a trillion dollars to $900 billion will not alter the fact that a small handful of ultra-rich oligarchs hold wealth and power that exceeds that of the majority of America’s citizens combined. No. You need to relocate enough wealth and power from the oligarchs to the public that the underlying problem is solved. What is the point of saying “We’ll start with a little, and then down the road we’ll get more”? You’ll never get more. You will get beaten, because you did not attack your opponent with enough force to stop him from coming back and beating you. Moderates seem not to comprehend that it takes roughly the same amount of political capital to do a little bit of good as it takes to do a lot of good. It is almost as hard to raise taxes on billionaires by 5% as it is to raise taxes on them by 90%, because it is the direction that generates the opposition, more than the magnitude. Billionaires are going to fight against you raising their taxes, period. If you’re going to have the fight, it might as well be over a change that would, if you win, solve the problem. Moderates are shocked when they can’t mobilize Americans over policies that would not meaningfully change their lives for the better. This is, frankly, stupid.

Assess our economic and social and political problems honestly. Decide what measures are necessary to solve those problems. Then fight for those measures. Do not cut your request in half before you begin to fight, due to your mistaken belief that this will make winning your fight more realistic. It won’t. Your fight will be just as hard and even if you win you still lose and the public won’t be happy either way because the problems are still there. There is no such thing as solving half a problem. You solve it, or you don’t. If you’re not willing to go all the way then you are in favor of keeping the problems in place. This is all common sense, if you haven’t been deluding yourself for too long.

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• Related reading: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Confiscate Their Money; What Is Centrism?

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This story first appeared in In These Times magazine.

“Are you all ready for the most epic party in all of American history?” asked Monica Crowley, the U.S. government’s protocol chief, from a podium on a towering stage set gracelessly in the middle of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Hell —we sure are. Better than Mardi Gras? Better than Woodstock? Better than the Boston Tea Party, Burning Man, or Freaknik? Sounds good. America has had a tough few years. We’ve made it to our 250^th anniversary. We deserve a reward. We are ready to party.

But from whence shall our party come? Taking in the scene in downtown Washington on June 24, it was clear that the most epic party in U.S. history is not going to come from the people who have arranged a portion of the Mall into a heavily militarized version of Epcot. This, the formal kickoff for the ​“Great American State Fair,” which will celebrate America’s wasted stumble through its first quarter-millennium, was less of a party than a symbolic embodiment of the presently dominant vision of our nation as Shit Disneyland—a fake place that you have to stand in line for a long time to get in, even though you don’t really want to be there.

One of the only nice things about downtown Washington, D.C. is the fact that anyone can stroll freely through the Mall. Now that’s been ended. To celebrate America, security fencing has been erected and entry is restricted to a couple of access points that are manned by heavily armed National Guard, Metro Police, Park Police, Capitol Police, U.S. Marshals, Secret Service, TSA, and anyone else capable of carrying a gun and doing seemingly nothing at all. All of this to access a space that consists of: sod. The grass is nice. Unbroken by a single tree, its greenness under the broiling sun is a nod to the golf course style that is fascism’s highest aesthetic.

“When you walk around Washington, D.C.,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, one of the night’s warmup acts, ​“not only is it safe again. It’s beautiful again.” As she spoke, a line of black-clad snipers were clearly visible on the roof of the Agriculture Department headquarters across the street. Their rifles commanded the entire field of sweltering sod. These square blocks of our nation’s capitol, from 12^th to 14^th street, have been made both safe and beautiful, simply by fencing them off, filling them with soldiers, and redesigning them as a suburban lawn. First, these blocks, and next, the world.

You might already know the humiliating backstory of this entire event: first it was announced as a big concert, and then the announced acts—all the way down to Milli Vanilli and Bret Michaels—pulled out in fear of public backlash, prompting a petulant President Donald Trump to declare that he would ​“take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ​‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward.” So the unlucky planners of the event were forced to cobble together a show plausible enough to satisfy the president’s ego, without the benefit of any actual celebrities.

The resulting event leaned heavily on speeches by second-tier members of the cabinet and music from the Marine Corps band, giving it the air of a boss who threw a birthday party and required his employees to attend. To honor the total capture of America’s institutions by cronyist incompetence, Alexis Wilkins, the country singer girlfriend of podcaster-turned-FBI Director Kash Patel, sung the national anthem. Christopher Macchio, a Trumpian crooner, did a cruise ship version of ​“Hallelujah.” The military band sent up uniformed singers and guitar players for karaoke-level covers of ​“Gloria” and ​“Walking on Sunshine.”

The whole thing felt like a show that might be inflicted upon a desultory crowd of students at a reform school, forced by their principal to listen to the hits of the past, with the threat of juvenile hall looming over anyone who made a wisecrack.

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Who goes to an event like this? One answer is ​“not many people.” Despite the grandiosity of the occasion, the crowd did not even fill the Mall all the way from 14^th to 12^th street, meaning it was about one square block-and-a-half’s worth of dead enders. Subtract the security forces and the prowling journalists and the temp workers in neon orange ​“EFFORT LLC” shirts cursed to pick up trash, and what you were left with was a meager mixture of lost young bros in golf shirts, doddering grandparents, tourist families in American flag apparel and church people. One of the latter leapt out at me as soon as I entered.

“Has anyone ever told you that God loves you and has a plan for your life?” he asked me from close range. It struck me, somehow, as a threat. This was not the sort of crowd that you want making plans for your life under any circumstances.

Lee Greenwood, a pickled husk of a man, came out and sang ​“God Bless the USA” in a thin and reedy voice. My bus driver in elementary school played a cassette version of that song every single day he drove us home in the 1980s. Like the United States itself, it has aged poorly. Trump doddered out and began speaking in his weird declarative manner. His topic, as best I could tell, is that America is good. His method, proven effective by time, is simply to restate this point over and over in different words.

“Together, we’re making it bigger and better and stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before,” he proclaimed. ​“We have the greatest culture on earth.”

Do we? People clapped, but I feel comfortable saying that few people on the Mall yesterday have spent much time in deep, respectful study of all the other cultures of the world. ​“Nobody is laughing at us anymore!” declared Trump, like a school shooter explaining himself.

“We banned the transgender MUTILIZATION of children,” he said, to cheers.

“We’re taking power back from the far-off political class,” he said, while standing just blocks from his home, the White House. Then, as he likes to do to test his audience’s patience, he launched into meandering asides about the Grand Prix race he has planned for D.C., and the rodeo that is coming to the Mall and his various building projects around town. He told everyone about how he had fixed up a fountain.

“That white marble is nice and clean!”

As the speech went on, more and more of the crowd began to leave — proving, I guess, that even Trump’s base has a limit to their willingness to be suckered. It is tempting to scoff at the night as one more farcical step towards America’s fate as the world’s intellectual toilet bowl. But that would be a bit too pat. There was menace here as well, the menace that fascism always ensures is at the forefront of the public imagination.

The night was punctuated by a series of flyovers by military jets. First a pair of F-16s, screaming in from over the Washington monument and peeling off in separate directions; later, a flat black stealth bomber flying low from the south. You could look up at its streaking, sawtoothed form and put yourself in the shoes of some poor people in some faraway dusty land for whom that was the last thing that they ever saw. A couple of 2,000-pound bombs dropping from that plane could have wiped out just about all of us there, and the snipers on the roof could have mopped up the rest in a minute or two.

The transformation of America’s anniversary into a pompous show of force was not just a reminder that everything we have we got at gunpoint. It was, equally, a reminder from Donald Trump that he, for now, controls the guns. His supporters laughed and clapped as the fighter jets hit their impossibly loud afterburners overhead. They could not imagine being on the opposite side of this sort of military power. Such empathy is not a part of America’s culture — the greatest culture in the world.

As he read our nation’s achievements off the teleprompter in a bored voice, there was one moment when Trump perked up.

“We won two world wars. Defeated fascism and communism,” he said. Then he interjected, ​“We’re gonna have to do that again.” When he’s right, he’s right. Even when he doesn’t know why.

Happy anniversary, America. The worst is yet to come.

This story first appeared in In These Times magazine.

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• Related reading: You Are Invited to the Predator’s Ball, as Food; America Is Built to Feed Us Poison; Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!

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The farther south you go on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn the more it becomes the sort of lively hectic commercial strip/ party that exists in few places outside of New York. The new sneaker stores and roti restaurants and weird places to buy garish $200 suits and fishnet body suits sit in chipped brick buildings with slapped-up painted wooden signs and you can feel the continuity of history pulsing through, like you could close your eyes and slide right back to the cigar stores and dressmakers that filled those spots a century ago. Set amid this strip is the refurbished King’s Theater—impossibly grand inside, soaring carved wooden columns with twisting, golden wooden flowers and fleur-de-lis and rich crimson curtains dripping in gold fringe. Spectacular. Its unlikely grandeur is somehow enhanced by the fact that it’s shoved down there next to the discount liquor store and the Taco Bell Cantina.

Yesterday afternoon, it was hot and the King’s Theater was full of socialists. The lower level seats, each curved row bookended with handsome decorative woodwork, were full of mostly young Brooklynites who had showed up to a DSA-sponsored Get Out The Vote rally in the hours immediately after the delirious New York Knicks championship parade downtown. New York City was riding high, baby. One girl of twelve or so strode boldly up the aisle in a fresh Knicks hat and a Biggie Smalls “Ready to Die” album cover photo t-shirt and seemed to carry the swagger of the whole city with her, lightly. These are my politics—the girl in the Biggie t-shirt at the King’s Theater socialist rally. The rest of America can come along with us.

Zohran was there, and Bernie Sanders was there, and all of the DSA-approved candidates who are on the ballot were there, all rotating through short and punchy speeches. This rally had a bigger purpose, a bigger frame, than just recruiting canvassers before Election Day next week. Democratic socialists in 2026 are having a moment that is—not to be too bold, not to get too far over my skis in historical terms—more hopeful and more substantial than anything we’ve seen since World War 2. It’s not a momentary moment, since it has been at least a decade in the making, since Bernie’s first run for president began reviving DSA in earnest. It’s years of organizing work coming to fruition. The era of electoral success for the left is here. Yes, it is geographically constrained, and no, it is not an era of political dominance—but the dream of having an organized faction inside of the Democratic Party that can pull it left in a systematic and irresistible way, in a way more powerful than futile appeals to morality, is on the cusp of becoming a reality.

Consider: Zohran won the New York City mayoral election last year. Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is set to become the next mayor of Washington, DC. DSA-adjacent Nithya Raman is in a runoff with incumbent Karen Bass for Los Angeles mayor. The reds are taking the cities! Rahhhhhh!

And they aren’t the only ones. On stage yesterday, Bernie called out other successes: Analilia Mejia, elected to Congress in New Jersey last April, and fellow leftist Jerseyite Adam Hamawy, likely to win a Congressional seat this year; Graham Platner in Maine, neck and neck in the Senate race; Chris Rabb, set to pick up a Congressional seat in Pennsylvania; Randy Villegas, a lefty who defeated a mainstream Democrat in a competitive California Congressional district; and recently victorious pro-union progressives with blue collar credentials shooting for Congressional seats in red or purple states, like Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, Brian Poindexter in Ohio, and Sam Forstag in Montana. Not all of these candidates are formally aligned with DSA, but all of them are benefiting, to varying degrees, from the post-2016 yank to the left on the zeitgeist that DSA’s national organizing work has accomplished.

In New York City, we have the privilege of voting for an honest to god democratic socialist slate. Yesterday’s rally boasted five DSA-approved state assembly candidates, followed by three Congressional candidates: aw-shucks Park Slope dad Brad Lander (“People talk about politicians representing Wall Street or Main Street,” emcee Ilana Glazer said. “This guy could represent Sesame Street!”); sober union organizer Claire Valdez; and polished uptown educator and activist Darializa Avila Chevalier. All are trying to establish the supremacy of the left in Democrat-on-Democrat contests. The most important thing that their victories would accomplish would be demonstrate to the national Democratic Party that the DSA is fucking force to be reckoned with. These elections amount to a marker that can be cashed in in 2028, when the grand struggle over what the Democrats will be after Trump goes down.

Since when have you, a frustrated progressive voter, had a slate to consult? This is the good kind of machine politics, a thing that has not happened to this extent in modern Democratic Party history. This is an organized faction inside of this shitty and frustrating and corporate-captured party that can actually win and thereby wield power and force the centrists and the money candidates to listen to the left’s demands. That is a new thing. New York City is the most concentrated site of DSA power, and what happens in these New York races matters nationwide, because the bigger the beachhead that socialists are able to build in Congress and in statehouses, the more muscular they can be in positioning the party in presidential campaign season. It’s best to think of the Democratic Party not as one organization, but rather as a field of struggle between many different political factions. The left, at last, may be poised to be strong enough to not get pushed off that field when it matters.

If the 2026 elections go well for DSA candidates, it seems very likely (just based on common sense) that AOC will run for president, becoming the successor to Bernie’s legacy and the focal point for all of the left’s growing political energy. These are the stakes in these lower-level races. Every win matters. We all need to think of the big picture. Claire Valdez, for example, is running against Antonio Reynoso, who is also very progressive and very pro-labor and who, I trust, would be almost completely politically aligned with me if he were in Congress. But a win for Valdez comes with the added importance of serving as a demonstration of DSA’s power. That, by itself, is vital, and therefore I hope that she wins.

Bernie Sanders is 84 years old and he has been trying for decades. This current crop of elected socialists amount to the culmination of his life’s work. He, like MLK, is not going to get to the mountaintop with us, but his presidential campaigns and infusion of energy into DSA may be the fuel that propels a new generation to that peak. I want everyone to vote for DSA candidates in 2026 not just because I am a socialist, but because each vote amounts to ammunition for the left’s larger, looming battle inside of the Democratic Party.

For my entire lifetime, the left has been splintered, marginalized, and often demoralized, grasping for momentary small victories amid a ceaseless background of defeat. Bernie’s successes, inadequate though they were, gave the left more genuine electoral hope—but it was very much tied to Bernie himself. Now, we are at last seeing the glimmering possibility of systemic, organized left politics that are robust enough to break free of any one personality and flourish in both likely and unlikely districts across the country. “Our work has never been about one person,” Zohran Mamdani, the most popular man in New York City after Jalen Brunson, said on stage yesterday. “Our work has been about one movement.”

This is not about DSA. This is about the vision to see the American left as an actual movement—a movement for people over money, workers over investors, human rights over corporate rights, socialism over capitalism. DSA has built a platform strong enough to carry that vision into the political mainstream, and we all owe them our thanks. But we’re all riding in with them. If we’re smart, we’re all going to get together and go through the door that is opening and not keep banging our heads against the wall. This election is the appetizer and 2028 is the chance for a left wing main course for America. It feels more promising, in that particular sense, than any era in my lifetime or even my parents’ lifetime. Opportunity is knocking, my people. Get on board. It’s okay to feel a little hopeful. Follow NYC to the mountaintop now.

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• Related reading: New York Socialist City; Up With Zohran; On Zohran’s election; Our interview with Zohran; Our interview with Claire Valdez; Our interview with Brad Lander; Bernie Sanders in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone (2015).

• Join DSA. They are looking for door knockers right now. Get in touch with an organizer to help you unionize your workplace. Unions are the backbone of the left and we need a lot more of them. Here is a book you can read about that.

• Let me be up front with all of you and say that another aspect of “struggles for the left” is “the struggle to maintain a thriving left wing independent media publication in 2026.” It ain’t easy! How Things Work is able to exist only because people like you, who read it, want it to exist, and therefore become paid subscribers. That’s it. That’s why we are here. That’s all. No secret billionaire funders. Dang! My point is, if you like reading this site, please take a quick second to click the button below and become a paid subscriber, for just $6 a month or $60 for the whole year. It think it’s worth it. Together we will survive and thrive.

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I just got back from Labor Notes. It’s the biggest conference of the grassroots, activist wing of the labor movement. Thousands of union members who are fired up to make the world a better place. It’s a thing that will make you feel hopeful.

There are hundreds of panel discussions and workshops at Labor Notes, and no one can go to more than a small fraction of them. But I want to discuss one of them, which focused on what is, to my mind, the most important union action of the past year: the long and ultimately successful struggle by the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul against ICE’s militaristic occupation of their cities.

I got to moderate a panel that included both elected union leaders and rank and file members from the Twin Cities, who talked about the nuts and bolts experience of the ICE surge, the rapid resistance to it, the enormous citywide march against ICE on January 23, and the aftermath. It was fascinating and inspiring and it helped to show us all not just what unions are, but what they can be.

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These were unions representing teachers and hotel workers, service workers and janitors and telecom technicians. Regular working people. They spoke about the brutality of ICE’s operations, and how they sprung into action. The teachers made plans to protect their students and schools. The unions all plunged themselves into mutual aid and protection for their immigrant members. And, after an initial phase of figuring out how to safeguard their own people, they threw themselves into a staggering citywide effort to resist ICE in every way possible.

The Minneapolis area has one of the most impressive citywide labor movements in America. It has a rich history of strikes. The leaders of the city’s unions today have had the benefit of going through both the George Floyd protests of 2020, and of planning and executing a multi-union, multi-industry coordinated citywide contract fight in 2024. They have practice working together—like a real movement, rather than an atomized collection of interest groups. When ICE came to town, they were able to exercise those muscles immediately. When they decided, with only a couple of weeks’ notice, to have a huge march and shut down the city on January 23, they were able to pull it off. And the city’s unions were able to bolster the larger projects of mutual aid and immigrant protection and protest and resistance that pulled in everyone, not just organized labor. One union leader described speaking to leaders churches and community groups and saying: You figure out how to build the most power in your thing, and we’ll figure out how to build the most power in our thing, and we’ll all do it on this timeline. Decentralization with a common cause. It works.

Resistance is not free of consequences. Minnesotans who were watching ICE were killed. Thousands more were arrested and assaulted by federal troopers, and some 1,700 were deported. The economic loss to the city as a result of ICE’s operations has been estimated to be $700 million. The human cost is incalculable.

Yesterday, the Trump Justice Department announced that it has indicted 15 anti-ICE protesters from Minnesota, branding them “Antifa.” Workday Magazine reports that some of those indicted are trade unionists whose presence at worker assemblies organized by local unions is included as evidence of their criminal activities. Kieran Knutson, the president of a Communication Workers of America local in the Twin Cities (and who spoke passionately on the panel at Labor Notes) told Workday that the worker assemblies were organized as a way to allow members of different unions across the area to come together “across different unions, across different industries, across different trades, in a way that’s directly democratic, to talk about and discuss and debate issues.” In other words, the basic stuff of movement building is being met with criminal charges.

You can read the indictment here. It is Orwellian. Hinging as it does on the vague rubric of “Antifa” and the equally vague crime of “conspiracy,” it charges these protesters with actions like “Utilizing social media, text messaging, encrypted messaging applications, and word of mouth to advertise and promote specific direct actions.” Among the “overt actions” listed as evidence are attending civil disobedience trainings, starting Signal chats to coordinate protests, writing an article for an “anarchist blog,” blocking a road leading to ICE’s headquarters, and raising money for protests and mutual aid. At every step, the indictment makes it a point to note if anyone was wearing an “Antifa” sweatshirt, or had some antifa patches in their home.

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We are all antifa now. We have been since last September, when the White House’s memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” instructed federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute those practicing “anti-fascism,” which is described like so: “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Buddy, that’s everybody I know! Like many things that happen under fascist governments, this sounds like a bad joke and you laugh at it right up until the police break down your door. The people just indicted in Minnesota are all of us, exercising the same rights as the rest of us, in defense of beliefs we all hold. They are the unfortunate ones swept up and punished as examples to all of the rest of us. The persecution of the few is intended to instill fear in millions more.

Anti-fascism, a philosophy that should be considered a minimum standard of human decency, will be a long and hard fight. It will require not just actions, but institutions. The unions of the Twin Cities—and the churches, and the community groups—are examples of what those institutions can be. They were building strength in the community before the fascists showed up. They can tap into that strength to oppose the fascists. And they will still be there when the fascists finally pack up and leave. It is a good thing to go to protests, but it is more meaningful to unionize your workplace. Actions come and go, but institutions last. They are durable. They have a transformative power: you are not just a hotel room cleaner or a janitor at Target or a cable installer at AT&T or a middle school teacher—you are a member of a union and a part of a labor movement that is strong and united and can wield political power that you alone cannot.

I was in Minneapolis the day that Alex Pretti was killed. Standing out on a tear gas-choked frozen street that resembled a war zone, I had the distinct thought, “This is coming for everyone.” Minneapolis is not unique. It is a preview. The labor movement of Minneapolis is not something to be admired from afar; it is a road map for the rest of us. Get yourself a movement, before the fascists come knocking on your door.

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• Related reading: Dispatches from Minneapolis on the day before the January 23 strike, the day of, and the day when Alex Pretti was killed. Also, in September, Haymarket Books will publish a pamphlet about the lessons of Minneapolis titled “This Is How We Win,” which I contributed to along with many others. You can preorder copies here.

• For the good of the labor movement, please be sure that you are subscribing to both Labor Notes and In These Times magazine. I wrote a book about the labor movement called “The Hammer,” and if you want to order it from an independent book store, you might like it. You can read these things while wearing a fly “How Things Work” t-shirt.

• Independent Media: another institution that we need. I hate to be a broken record over here, but it is a fact. You may notice that the publication you are reading right now, How Things Work, does not have a paywall. Anyone can read it whether they can pay or not. The only way I am able to do that and still make a living is that I say to all of you: If you like reading this site and you can afford to contribute a bit to its existence, please become a paid subscriber today. As long as those can afford to pay do their part and toss in, the whole system can work. Socialism in action. Thank you all for being here.

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I have always found grocery stores fascinating—both as endpoints of a staggering global web of logistics, agriculture, and commerce, and as labor stories. So I was enthralled by Ann Larson’s new book “Cleanup on Aisle Five,” a first person account of working in a grocery store during the course of the pandemic, which was just published this week.

Larson, a writer, academic, and cofounder of the successful activist group Debt Collective, writes in the tradition of workplace classics like Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed.” And Larson is no poverty tourist. She found a job at a grocery store in Utah in the fall of 2020 out of economic necessity, and worked there long enough to experience firsthand the struggles endemic to the industry. I spoke to her about class, service industry labor, and the harsh realities behind the smiles of your grocery store cashiers.

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How Things Work: In your book’s conclusion, you write, “I urge my college-educated peers to abandon the idea that our degrees entitle us to live lives of dignity denied to others.” Given your background, were you surprised when you ended up working in a grocery store? Or did it strike you as a pretty natural thing, given the precarity of the American economic system, which you know well?

Ann Larson: I was not surprised. My life as a white collar professional had always been precarious. I had experienced what people call “downward mobility” on a couple of fronts. I had wanted to be a professor, but the adjunctification of higher education made full-time jobs nearly impossible to come by. As a cofounder of the Debt Collective, I saw firsthand how difficult it was to maintain the organization financially in a system where fickle foundations call the shots. In some ways, the supermarket job was the most stable work I had had in years! But knowing that I had fallen down the class ladder did not mean that I felt that retail work was beneath me or that I deserved better because I had an education. As a person of the left, I knew that meritocracy is a myth, and that social class explains people’s occupational outcomes. I still hoped that I would be able to maintain my hold in the white collar world. But I had run out of options.

You’re an experienced organizer, and you write about the benefit that a union would have brought to the grocery store. But ultimately you decided not to try to organize one in your time there. What was it about the nature of the workplace that led you to that decision? Was UFCW, America’s biggest grocery union, a presence in your area, or not really?

Larson: I worked in Utah, what the right wing calls a “right to work” state, where there are high barriers to organizing a union. To my knowledge, UFCW was not in the community. I didn’t know any other stores that were unionized. Moreover, in my 13 months on the job, I never heard any employee use the word “union.” I write in the book that collectivizing our struggles felt foreign, even dangerous, as if the idea existed in another universe.

Given this context, the main reason I did not try to organize was fear for my colleagues. I knew that it was illegal to fire workers for trying to unionize, but what if the store fired people anyway? I couldn’t imagine putting my colleagues at risk so that I, someone who did not plan on making a career at the supermarket, could impose my view of what needed to happen. I have only become more convinced in recent years that organizing in retail will require a big support system outside stores. Shoppers and community members are going to have to do some of the heavy lifting such as raising money for a strike fund, making it clear they won’t shop at a non-union store, and providing other kinds of solidarity. The idea that retail workers are going to carry the burden alone, even with the support of professional organizers, is a fiction.

You write eloquently about the dilemma of being a supervisor, and how that challenged your own ability to think in terms of solidarity with your coworkers. I liked the descriptions of your own internal struggles as you tried to reconcile your own day to day responsibilities at work with some of your broader beliefs. Why is it so difficult to build solidarity in that sort of environment, where every tiny microlayer of management is designed to enforce the company’s rules on everyone below them?

Larson: The supermarket is an open, quasi-public space where anyone can come and go. But in another way, it is a closed universe that operates according to its own laws. I came into the store with an understanding that working people were exploited by employers who extracted labor for profit. But that idea—as true as it was—didn’t provide a road map for how to manage the store.

I tried, for example, to be a “laid back” supervisor. At first, I didn’t complain when cashiers and baggers extended their break times or took a long lunch. I figured people were tired and hungry! But I quickly learned that allowing one person to break the rules put pressure on others. If someone came back late from a break, the cashier who was next to go had to wait. And if everyone took a long lunch, then we would be short staffed which forced people to work faster.

Enforcing the law was the only way to be fair. But it could also come off as rigid and inflexible. Such contradictions meant that it was impossible to reconcile my beliefs with daily life on the job. It wasn’t until I left the store that I realized that an effect of the hierarchy was that one person’s perk always came at someone else’s expense.

You worked at the store during the pandemic, and you discuss the fact that grocery workers took enormous risks to keep the public fed during that time and got virtually no permanent gains for themselves as a result. That’s always struck me as one of organized labor’s greatest failures of the pandemic era. Can you see any way that that might have turned out differently, or is the power of workers in the grocery industry just too weak?

Larson: I share the view that labor failed to take advantage of the pandemic as an organizing opportunity. This was a moment when unions could have made demands. I don’t have enough of an inside view of the labor movement to know why that didn’t happen. I do remember a lot of fighting about culture war issues, some related to the pandemic and some not, that took up most of our public discourse at the time. Zooming out a little further, I see labor’s failure as symptomatic of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of working people in favor of a politics focused on professional class concerns.

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Grocery stores seem like miracles of logistics and modern convenience. You write about both the ways that supermarkets made life better for Americans, and the ways that much of that convenience has been built on the abuse of the grocery work force. Tons of your coworkers were broke, sick, injured, or all of the above at any given time. What do you think would most surprise the average shopper about the way that the people at their local grocery stores are treated? And why the hell can’t cashiers sit in a chair???

Larson: Shoppers might be surprised to learn that cashiering is dangerous. I was shocked at the level of suffering that I observed and experienced. Scanners allow cashiers to work fast which is a convenience for customers. But scanning leads to pain in the arm, hand, and wrist. And standing leads to back and foot pain. (When I started the job, I was told that cashiers had to stand because a standing worker looks more eager to serve.) It’s extremely difficult to get any kind of workers comp or disability. One reason is that OSHA, the federal organization that is supposed to protect workers, has been underfunded for decades. A bipartisan failure. Cashiering looks like a chill, easy job. But I want shoppers to understand that when they walk into a supermarket, they are walking into a meat grinder that is churning through bodies for convenience and profit.

Making grocery (and other service industry) jobs more humane and livable is one of the deepest challenges in American labor. What do you think would move the needle the most on this, in terms of government policy? In terms of organized labor’s own actions? And in terms of actions that individual shoppers can take?

Larson: Unionization is at the top of my list of what can move the needle. If I could flip one switch tomorrow, I would eliminate “right to work” laws that have made states like Utah so hostile to organizing. I would also like to see an increase in the federal minimum wage which has not been raised since 2009. Raising the minimum would communicate to employers that they can no longer get away with paying as little as possible.

In terms of organized labor, my experience confirms something I learned from your book, “The Hammer.” Unions should invest more in organizing at the grassroots level. I suspect that one reason no one at my store ever talked about unionizing is because they had never been approached by an organizer. When it comes to shoppers, I urge people to get to know who works in their store. Say hello to your cashier and ask how she is doing. Those of us who don’t work in stores should also get ready to support retail workers on strike. We can refuse to cross picket lines, donate to strike funds, and communicate to stores that we won’t shop in outlets where workers are not unionized. Organizing in retail can’t be done by workers alone. It’s going to have to take all of us.

You can order Cleanup on Aisle Five from an independent bookstore at this link.

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• Previously, in How Things Work author interviews: Megan Greenwell on private equity; Chris Mathias on fascism; Jeff Schuhrke on labor’s foreign policy; Eric Blanc on organizing; Tom Scocca on mortality. Also, on groceries as a labor story: In 2021, I wrote a profile of the workers in a single grocery store over the first year of the pandemic; and in 2024, I profiled the insurgents trying to reform the UFCW from within. Larson and I have both been fellows at the excellent Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization that supports journalism about these sorts of issues.

• The Labor Notes conference will bring thousands of labor people to Chicago this week. If you’re going, great news: My friends at In These Times magazine are sponsoring an after party on Sunday, June 14, featuring me, Alex Press, Kim Kelly, Max Alvarez, and music and comedy more. Get your tickets right here. See you there hell yeah.

• Have you ever wondered, “How is it that independent media can keep existing in this time of techno fascism and the increasing capture of the media industry by rich bastards?” Maybe not. But, if you have, the answer is: “Because readers like you chip in a few bucks to keep independent media going.” Without that, there will be nothing but Bari Weiss and Elon Musk left. If you enjoy reading this site and want to help it keep on existing, take a quick second right now and click the button below to become a paid subscriber. If we all give a little, we can do big things. Thank you for being here.

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We are all worried about AI. Bernie Sanders has a bold proposal: The federal government will take a 50% equity stake in the big AI companies, and use it to create a sovereign wealth fund that will benefit all Americans. “[This] legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” Sanders wrote. “If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.”

I am just as freaked out about AI as Bernie, and for the same reasons. The actions (or inaction) that the federal government takes in the near future on AI regulation will be of great consequence to the political economy of America and the world. Bernie is trying to set a marker for a left wing, humanistic approach to these issues. The left does in fact need at least some policies to rally around, lest we all holler frantically about how dangerous AI is while the real decisions are made elsewhere.

But I can spot a few potential pitfalls in the approach that Bernie is advocating. In the spirit of advancing the discourse, let me touch on them briefly. First,

We Don’t Need a Sovereign Wealth Fund

The United States of America’s federal government does not need a sovereign wealth fund. We issue our own currency. Money is not a thing that the federal government needs to take from outside of itself and hoard in an investment fund like a retiree. If the federal government wants to spend money, then Congress just votes to do so, and the money is created. We did just that during Covid. Remember? And also to fund all those wars and things. If Congress wants to issue every American a $1,000 per month check, they don’t need to check an investment account that is populated with the stock of major companies and see what the balance is. They just do it. The meaningful constraint on the federal government’s spending is inflation. The meaningful constraint on our economic development in general is “what can humans do in the material world.” Money is just an accounting tool.

The economist Stephanie Kelton—a former economic adviser to Bernie Sanders!—explained it well last year, when she wrote that “Just as the NFL understands that the Superdome doesn’t need a storage facility to accumulate a hoard of points ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl, and Delta Airlines knows it doesn’t need a strategic reserve of #SkyMiles in order to dole them out at will,” the federal government does not need to seed an investment fund with assets in order to disburse dollars to Americans.

Now, there may be political reasons to pretend that the act of the federal government giving us all money is a thing that is directly funded by a particular investment account. It is the same reason why we all pay into Social Security, rather than just having the government tax us an appropriate amount and then when we get old pay us an appropriate amount: It creates the widespread belief that these payments are justified, that they are a thing that we all deserve, that the federal government has a responsibility to responsibly manage its budget in the same way that you do for your own household. It is a thing that people can intuitively understand and this helps to insulate these programs from political interference. (Notice how easy it has been for right wing ideologues to slash funding for various government programs, and compare that to how hard it would be for them to slash funding for Social Security.) But it is not, strictly speaking, an accurate way to view the way that the federal government funds things.

In this case, the way that people understand what is happening between the government and the AI companies actually matters. Because if we forge ahead with the idea that we’re gonna take a bunch of OpenAI and Anthropic stock and put it into a sovereign wealth fund that will give you payouts, we are creating…

The Investor Mentality

This is extremely dangerous. This, in fact, is capitalism’s most pernicious tool for preventing all of the nice things that The Left says it wants. Virtually all of our collective economic assets—all of the wealth of public pension funds, of labor unions, of college endowments, of hardworking people everywhere trying to save enough to buy a home or retire on—are invested into the stocks and bonds of corporations. Whether you are very conscious of it or not, we are all very much invested in the economic success of all of the corporations whose equity makes up the markets that we are all invested in. Capitalism therefore creates a direct economic incentive in the profitability of these companies, even while the things that all of the companies are doing to be profitable are the things that are fucking us up—crushing labor power, buying off the government, and so forth. (I wrote more about this process here.)

A side effect of Bernie’s proposal is that it would create at national scale the impression that all Americans are investors whose economic well-being is tied to the financial success of the AI companies whose stock is in this sovereign wealth fund. That’s an illusion! The public, as represented by the federal government, does not need to hope that OpenAI stock goes up so that we can get some money. We can just tax OpenAI. Or we can just appropriate money to people. Or, preferably, both. The point is that by setting up the sovereign wealth fund, we would, in one grand gesture, make hundreds of millions of Americans believe that their own incentives are aligned with those of the AI companies, because they are investors in them. In this sense, it would be the greatest and most permanent public relations coup that the AI industry—which is unpopular because it might, you know, destroy humanity—could ever hope for.

Maybe that is why the AI companies themselves as well as Donald Trump are kind of enthusiastic about some version of this plan?

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What Problems Are You Trying to Solve?

Bernie correctly points out that AI is a technology that has been built using the raw material of the collective intellectual product of all of humanity. It comes from all of us. To allow the proceeds of the technology to be captured by a lucky few would be a disaster for economic justice. True.

There are other issues with AI as well. If I were to summarize the things that The Left is worried about when it comes to the way that AI’s development is playing out, I would say the main things are:

1. It’s going to supercharge economic inequality and create a tiny group of unimaginably rich and powerful tech oligarchs;

2. It’s going to automate and destroy a lot of jobs and crush the power of labor;

3. It’s going to zap all of our brains and make us unable to think independently, and;

4. It will maybe, you know, become superintelligent and enslave humanity.

With these basic shared fears in mind, consider the consequences of taking half the stock of the biggest and most powerful existing AI companies and putting it into a sovereign wealth fund. That path would do something to mitigate problem #1—it would reduce by half the potential wealth of the owners of the AI companies. Yeah. Good. Ok. But it does this at a great cost. Because, by promoting in the American public the idea that we all have a direct stake in the economic success of these companies, a sovereign wealth fund encourages everyone to think not as citizens, but as investors. That means that in exchange for addressing part of problem #1, we have created an incentive to give up on problem #2, #3, and #4. Why? Because while normal citizens worry about the damages all of these things will do to people, investors think about and value corporate profits above all. And the corporate profits of AI companies will increase as they become more successful at automating jobs, marginalizing labor, insinuating themselves into the educational and creative spheres of life, and becoming ever more superintelligent. If you don’t believe that being an investor in a company can overpower your abstract political beliefs about the social good of the company’s actions, try being a union pension trustee some time.

The trade that I am describing here is, in sum, an attractive one for the AI companies. Which is why Sam Altman is right there in the middle of the discussions for some version of this plan.

Think instead about what sort of approach we might take in order to try to address all of the problems. That approach would be, in short: Regulate and tax the AI companies. Regulations can put hard guardrails on how companies can use AI to replace jobs, and on how AI can be used in schools and in creative fields, and strict safety and monitoring protocols can be created to try to make sure that these incredibly powerful and wealthy companies do not create the Terminator while they’re fiddling around in search of profits. Then you can tax the fuck out of them to head off the oligarchy and inequality problems. Collective ownership of the equity of companies can certainly be a part of this package, but it is quite dangerous to make it the primary part of the package. We can accomplish the same goals in more socialist ways with less downside. There is much to be written about every aspect of this, but for now it is enough to just highlight the contrast in these two approaches. On one hand, strictly regulate what the AI companies can do in order to prevent harms before they happen, and tax them to balance the scales economically; on the other hand, tell the public that we are all investors in these companies, make people think their own economic well-being is aligned with that of the companies, and create incentives for everyone to overlook the various society-wide problems that the operations of the companies will produce, in the name of maximizing profits.

For these reasons I suggest that we on The Left rethink the sovereign wealth fund thing.

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• Related reading: Capitalism’s Washing Machine; Financing Our Own Destruction; An Existential Threat to Organized Labor’s Ability to Help People.

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On a brilliant, sunny Wednesday afternoon, a group of women in purple t-shirts huddled along the sidewalk of Willoughby Street in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Behind them was the gothic black metal fence surrounding Mercy Home for Children, the sprawling brick building where all of the women worked. They were out front, today, in their 1199 SEIU union t-shirts. They were on a picket line. They want a contract. They want respect.

Mercy Home is a place that takes care of children and adults with developmental disabilities. It has more than a dozen locations across New York City. Since October of 2025, the employees have been trying to negotiate a new union contract with the company. The union says that Mercy Home pays its workers less than their peers in the city, and significantly less than people who do similar work in nursing homes. The company is offering only paltry raises. Yesterday’s picket line was an attempt to prod the negotiations along. I went out there to Willoughby Street to speak to some of the women about what their jobs are like.

Nadine Johnson

“I’ve been working at Mercy Home for 23 years. I’m a medical direct support professional. I take my individuals to my appointments, make sure they don’t miss anything, and just teach them everyday life skills. But the most important thing is medication, and making sure they get to see their doctors.

We need more money. Everything is going up but our pay. Gas, rent, electricity, everything has gone up. So we just want a decent wage to live. That’s it. After 23 years, I’m not even making $20 an hour. And that’s sad. That’s very sad. My son works in the mail room, and he makes more than me. That’s a shame. For the job we do, the effort, we treat these guys like family. It’s so unfair. So unfair.

My day starts off dropping off individuals to programs right here at this office. Then I run around and do my appointments. After my appointments, I’m running to sit with another individual who’s in a nursing home right now. Then I’m running from there back here to pick them up and take them back to the residence. So by the time I get back, my day is done. I’m in the streets all day long. Show me some respect with my pay. All I’m asking for is fair pay and respect. That’s it.

Negotiations with management have been terrible. They are not giving at all. It’s like pulling teeth. They’re not negotiating. They’re stuck at this certain number, and it’s doing nothing for anyone. They wouldn’t want those number. Two percent [raise]! That’s nothing.

We literally do the work. They sit back and get the pay. That’s not fair. Come on, at least give us a decent wage. We’re not asking for much. Bring us up to $20 at least. We’re not even there. That’s sad!”

Mona Ford

“I’ve been here 20 years. I’m an overnight direct support professional. I work overnight shifts, like last night. We work from ten in the night until eight the next morning. For the past four years I’ve been doing this. I did 13 or 14 years on the evening shift, which is from three in the afternoon until ten at night.

You have to cook. When the individuals come off the bus, you have to get them ready to get their snack. After snack, they go to the recreation room, and after that they come back. They have dinner. You take them up and you shower them. You give them the medication. So we’re doing [Licensed Practical Nurse] work when we give them meds, because you have to pass this exam every year so that you can give medication. And after that, you have to sit and do the goals—all their goals, what they can do, what they can’t do.

So it’s a long haul, and you never finish. We have runners. They run out the building if you’re not watching. They’ll go out one stair and come down the other. You have to keep an eye on them at all times. Right now we have three people here, but at my other [location] I have 13, all ladies.

I like the work. If not, I wouldn’t be here. The individuals—some of them have no one but us. Some of them, bank holidays, Christmas, birthdays, no one comes to see them. We spend more time with them than we do with our own families. We’re always there. We’re nursemaids, we’re housekeepers, we’re the doctors, we’re the cooks, we’re family, we’re friends. Everything. Some of them were there from [the time they were] babies. And now they’re getting older.

It’s been nearly two years, and we need a contract. I think it’s unfair that they just, they’re not coming to the bargaining table trying to help. If you are negotiating, you bring your part and I bring mine and you meet in the middle. They are not doing that.

We need respect from management, from the office. And proper pay. That’s what we need. They want to speak to you as they like. As I told them before, they have a plantation mentality. They think we are slaves to them. For these past [snowstorms] that we had here last year and early this year, some of our staff worked five and six shifts straight. They didn’t get home. You would think they would show us at least a little bit of respect, knowing that we are there for the individuals, not for them. They don’t care. They think we have to do it, and we have to take whatever they pay us. It’s not fair.

We’re under $19 an hour, after 20 years. Don’t come to work here.”

Chevelle Hall

“We’re not getting enough pay. We’re overworked. Three people cover the night shift. If someone doesn’t come in, two people work. Where does that pay go? It’s a three person job. Two people do the job, where does that other money go? We have three individuals each. I’m responsible for three girls, she’s responsible for three guys, and if that person [doesn’t come in], there’s three more. We’re doing medication, we’re getting them up, we’re getting them showered, we’re making sure they’re eating. We’re helping them. We’re their hands, their eyes, their mouths. During the day, they go to their programs. It’s like school, a little bit.

I started a year ago. After me, a lot of people started, and they stopped. I’m only still here because of the individuals. You come here and you grow a bond with them, and you see that they really need you. You don’t want people to come in and take advantage of them, so you’re there to help. We’re there, and we’re helping. I think the least you could do is to take care of us. We’re taking care of them.

Some of them, their parents are still in their life, or their family. Most of them, they’re not. We are their family. We are their friends. We are the person they see every day. We will celebrate the holidays with them. It’s we and them.

We would like daycare here. We would like more pay. We want more than the 2%. Everything goes up but the pay. We have kids! We’re leaving our families at home to help take care of [the people here]. At least we could get the basics.”

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• Find out more about 1199SEIU here. Find out how to contact Mercy Home for Children here. Find out how to contact your New York City Council representative here. Get in touch with a union organizer to help you organize your own workplace here.

• Related reading: On the LIRR Picket Line; At the May Day union rally; If you don’t have a union, someone is stealing your money.

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Today, the Florida legislature is meeting in a special session to consider oafish brute governor Ron Desantis’s proposal to slash the state’s property taxes. Currently, Florida residents can exempt $50,000 of their primary home’s value from taxation. Desantis, seeking a signature policy win before his term is up at the end of this year, is trying to raise that exemption first to $250,000, and eventually to zero out property taxes altogether for 92% of homeowners.

One obvious thing to be said about this plan is: if you get rid of property taxes, you are going to cost local governments a lot of money. School districts are particularly worried. For good reason. The Florida Policy Institute took a stab at calculating the losses for every county and school district in the state. The initial $250,000 exemption would cost school districts $5 billion a year. That number would rise to $8.6 billion per year with total property tax exemption, which Desantis wants to have by the year 2030. Poorer counties, where property values are lower, would be hit harder by first tranche of the policy— “In many rural fiscally constrained counties, due to the assessed value of properties, the cost of a $250,000 homestead exemption is close to the cost of full elimination,” according to FPI.

Education officials, whose own initial estimates of revenue losses echo those of FPI, are freaking the fuck out. “It would have a significant adverse effect on the quality of education here,” the Pasco County superintendent of schools told the Tampa Bay Times. Even a $150,000 exemption, the very first step up Desantis’s proposed ladder, would amount to “about an 18% decrease in teacher salary, to give you a scope of it.”

“‘Concerned’ is probably an understatement,” Winter Garden City Manager Jon Williams told the Orlando Sentinel. “We don’t have that kind of capacity within our budget to be able to absorb that.”

“It’s going to mess up a lot of stuff,” said Ocoee Mayor Rusty Johnson.

Of course, the same local officials seem to take it for granted that Florida voters would approve the tax cuts, as they would need to in order for them to go into effect. A poll in April found that 77% of state voters were either “definitely” or “probably” in favor of rolling back property taxes. Floridians, many of whom are the sort of people to deny climate change at the same time that a hurricane is carrying away their roof, are generally happy to make poor long term decisions in exchange for short term benefits. (As a Florida native, I reserve the right to speak accurately about the many idiots in Florida.) These people will fill every last wetland and kill every last endangered species in the state in order to build enormous highways that take them to a simulated walkable city overseen by a cartoon mouse. We should not expect too much wisdom from Florida voters, at least not as the voting base stands right this minute.

Desantis is making vague promises that all of these revenue shortfalls will be replaced by grants directly from the state to local governments, to maintain “core local services.” Even if you are foolish enough to trust that such grants would come close to replacing the revenue that will be destroyed, you will notice that this would shift power over local budgets from cities and counties (some of which are Democratic) to the state (which is, at the moment, solid red). It is a state version of the ideological veto that the Trump administration has wielded ruthlessly against blue states, cities, and institutions of all sorts. If a Florida locality passed a law that displeased erudite humanitarian Ron Desantis, he could threaten funding for their libraries and street sweepers and everything else in order to scare them out of it. Thus, the plan would not only scratch the Republican itch for regressive tax cuts, but also for centralizing power in their own gerrymandered hands. It would prompt local governments to immediately try to fill the hole by imposing steep fees on every last transaction and license and raising taxes on every last property not covered by the homestead exemption. It would leave citizens more beleaguered, with worse services and schools, and more subject to the political control of “Moron kid of the owner of several regional Ford dealerships, who wants to hurry up and sign whatever the governor wants so they can get back to sexually harassing high school waitresses at the golf course clubhouse,” which is a fair description of the median Republican Florida statehouse member.

Axing property taxes is just the latest manifestation of the grand right wing project—which has defined the South for generations—of making states into little dystopias of poor public services and poor public education in order to give wealthy residents low taxes and a large pool of desperate, low-wage labor to fulfill all of their needs. For red states like Florida that have already done away with state income taxes, property taxes are the final barrier standing in the way of fully realizing this ill-advised model of government. Republicans imagine that pushing taxes on wealthy residents as close to zero as possible will attract an influx of rich people to their states, and that those rich people can send their kids to private schools and start profitable businesses with all the low-wage labor, and this will lead to a state with great golf courses and rich private developments behind security gates and awful public schools and well-funded militaristic police forces to keep the poors at bay. What the South already is, in other words— just more so.

“This is really a historic opportunity to have more money in people’s pockets and to actually have their home be their private property that the government just can’t use as a piggy bank,” says Ron Desantis, who assumes that voters are gullible rubes with the understanding of a child. Paying property taxes means that “you never actually own anything. you just rent it from the government forever,” say a zillion gullible rubes online, proving him right. Southern Republicans have had great success by wagering that their voters have the attention spans of goldfish and economic reasoning skills of hyperactive kittens: They will vote for all tax cuts, complain about how the government doesn’t do things well, and then blame immigrants and/ or their black neighbors. It’s been working for a long time!

If there is any tangible lesson to be extracted from this latest step down the path towards a government that exists solely to defund everything except the police who will tackle you when you protest the government, it is that the political opposition must be able to articulate a positive vision of what government can and should be—along with a negative vision of the bootlicker goons whose entire political platform is to fuck up your schools and cut your wages and funnel your state’s wealth into the pockets of New York investment funds. Have some fucking self-respect, Florida homeowners! You are being treated as weak pawns who will give up all the promises of civilized society in order to save a few bucks on your tax bill. You will get a tax cut and in exchange you will give up any possibility of having a state where everyone has equal access to a decent education and functioning public services and the plausible possibility of making a better life for themselves than their parents had. That ain’t gonna happen when you defund local governments and put total economic power in the hands of people who consider Fox News their favorite philosopher. I’m sorry for sounding like some kinda MSNBC boomer here, but come the fuck on. Republicans want you dumb and desperate and willing to serve them drinks on a golf course for less than $15 an hour. That’s it! Enjoy your tax cut, suckers! Huddle in your home and pray there are no storms this year. They ain’t coming to rescue you. They cut the funding for that. Maybe that money you saved on property taxes can buy you a bus ticket to a blue state.

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• Related reading: The Cannibal South; Fascist Economics Don’t Work; The Confederacy Won’t Die Until Florida Does.

• Florida politics are particularly interesting because… demographically, it’s barely even a red state! There is no reason the Democrats in Florida should be so pathetically weak, except for their own pathetic nature. Florida is a state powered by a tourism-centered service economy. That means that organized labor can be powerful there. If you want to make Florida’s politics better, join a union. Here is a book that can tell you more about how.

• The year is 2026. The economic model of journalism that existed for the past century has collapsed. Now, we all need to pay for the publications that we like to read, or else they will not exist. That is the situation today. Annoying, I know! But here at How Things Work, we have been existing for three years on the strength of readers like you who choose to be paid subscribers, because they understand these hard facts. If you like reading this site, and you are not destitute, take a quick second to click to button below and become a paid subscriber yourself. It’s not too expensive and it really matters. Thank you all for being here, always.

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There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.

Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.

The most likely reason, though—one that often overshadows the other ones—is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.

Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes. Bilton has had a successful media career, certainly, but the nature of his success has never been “he is a super smart journalist,” nor has it ever been “he is experienced in television news.” I have never felt it necessary to follow his work closely, so I do not want to caricature him unfairly, but he has always been slotted in my mind in the category of “People who are successful because they put a lot of effort into having fashionable eyewear.” (This will take you far, if you’re in the right rooms.) Hiring Nick Bilton to lead the most storied and respective investigative program in television news history is kind of like hiring a NASCAR driver as CEO of General Motors. I mean, yes, you have some experience in the field, but…………….

This job also comes with a lot of CONTEXT, which looms over CBS headquarters today like Godzilla about to breathe fire. David Ellison, the rich kid of one of the world’s richest men, wanted government approval for a merger of Paramount and Warner Bros, and so he has decided, as a calculated business decision, to disembowel CBS news’s credibility and make it more flattering to the Trump administration, and to carry out that task he put Bari Weiss in charge of the network, and she is well on her way to disgracing and ruining the institution already. As the crown jewel of CBS News’s journalistic image, the ongoing dismantling of 60 Minutes’ credibility has been particularly striking. Bari breezed in and started meddling with stories for political reasons and firing journalists who objected and generally smashing up, in a few months, editorial prestige that has taken decades to build. There is every indication that 60 Minutes is on its way to being transformed into something more like CBS Sunday Morning—a show with nice stories about kittens and celebrities and interesting trifles of Americana, but nothing that would offend anyone who holds the sort of power that might affect the business interests of David Ellison.

(I wouldn’t worry too much about CBS becoming another Fox News. Roger Ailes, who created Fox News, was a genius—an evil genius, but a genius nonetheless in the practice of manipulating the medium of television for political ends. Bari Weiss is not this sort of genius. Rather than being transformed into a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, it is more likely that CBS News is just made dumb and pointless.)

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So as you can imagine all of the real journalists at CBS News, and at 60 Minutes in particular, are on edge. And in comes Nick Bilton, a guy with carefully groomed stubble and no TV newsroom experience, as if everything is fine and dandy, and he hits them with a staff memo that says things like, “On the very first episode of 60 Minutes Mike Wallace said: ‘If this broadcast does what we hope it will do it will report reality.’ I can’t think of a better north star for 60 Minutes than that. Above all, that means a commitment to fairness—in story selection, in the edit room, and in the broadcast.”

These are the words of a hatchet man. There are more red flags flying over this memo than a Soviet military parade. Heyo! Let me mention two. First, the most glaring: If you walk into a newsroom that values editorial credibility and has very recently had that editorial credibility fucked with by Bari Weiss under the guise of “fairness,” and you make “fairness” the center of your memo, you are telling everyone in a not very subtle way that you are there to continue the corporate project of fucking with the editorial credibility. Second, and only slightly more subtle—by not directly mentioning the CONTEXT monster that is in the forefront of the minds of every journalist at CBS, Bilton reveals himself as a goon, a soft-peddler, a PR man, an obfuscator; the opposite of everything that 60 Minutes is supposed to be.

Journalism—real journalism—is, above everything else, allergic to bullshit. Bullshit is the mortal enemy of journalism. Real journalism aspires to be the opposite of bullshit. You can be a great journalist without being attractive, friendly, likeable, charismatic, as long as you possess a determination to root out and expose bullshit wherever it is found. Indeed, many journalists are unlikeable because they have this quality. The ideal leader of a hard-hitting investigative journalism operation is someone who is smart, driven, and virtually unemployable in any other context due to their pathological hatred of the corporate niceties used to obscure the lies of the rich and powerful. A willingness to studiously ignore the devastating political proclivities of your billionaire bosses may be good for most careers, but it is a very bad sign if your career is supposed to involve doing real journalism.

If you decide not to promote and defend bullshit, there are some jobs that you will not be offered. And if you decide to make a career of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and whatnot, there are some jobs that you should not take, under any circumstances. Not if you have self-respect. Not if you care about any of the stuff that all of us have been saying we care about. This is not some high-minded rhetoric meant to imply that journalists are heroic; it is a baseline standard that thousands and thousands of journalists who are not and never will be famous have adhered to for their entire careers. Because they are journalists! Why else would you do this? For 98% of them—all the ones who will never get jobs at anywhere as famous as the New York Times or 60 Minutes—this industry is one of low pay, little prestige, and high instability. The only benefit to being a journalist is that you get to call bullshit on powerful people. If you’re not interested in that, do something else!

Once you take the hatchet man job, everyone is going to know what sort of person you are. A high salary can’t buy back respect.

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• First, Kill the News

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• When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?

They say that the Age of Exploration is over. Everything out there has already been discovered. We’ve been to the top of Everest and the bottom of the Marianas Trench; we’ve staggered to the North Pole and frozen at the South; we’ve trekked from East to West, shot satellites into space, and mapped the Earth’s surface down to the inch. The only suckers left chasing mystery are tuning into “Ancient Aliens” and falling for internet scams. A long line of conquerors, from Magellan to Google, have at last subdued the unknown. If you want adventure now, better look to Mars.

That’s what they say.

Buy into that line of thinking, and you’re sure to live a small life with short horizons. Reject it, and your eyes will open to the infinite grandeur. The world is full of baffling enigmas. Life is but a momentary chance to shine light in its shadowy corners.

Let me give you an example: I like pie. It’s one of my top interests. Everybody knows that about me. Now, one day I was looking at a map and I stumbled upon a dot in the remote New Mexico desert: “Pie Town.” Isn’t that interesting? A town called Pie Town. And there’s a place there that sells pie. How about that? You better believe that caught my eye.

But there’s more. Right down the road from Pie Town was another tiny dot: Datil, New Mexico. At that, my intellectual excitement went into overdrive. You see, I come from St. Augustine, Florida. Do you know what grows only in that part of Florida? Datil peppers. We make hot sauce out of them down there and it’s very tasty. Anywhere else you go, nobody knows what datil peppers are. Their loss!

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Right there, in parched west-central New Mexico, you have Pie Town, close by to another little town with a name that has something to do with me. What are the chances of that? Is that a coincidence? Is the universe sending me a message? What goes on out there? If I didn’t find out, I would forever be haunted, like explorers are by buried treasure. But my buried treasure is pie. So I booked a flight to Albuquerque.

“I’m going to Pie Town,” I’ve been telling people recently.

“Pie Town?” they would say.

“Pie Town.”

“Okay.”

“That’s right. I’m going to Pie Town.”

“Okay. For what?”

For what?? For what did mankind go to the moon? To have a damn barbecue? I’m going there to find out what’s there. I’m going there because life is a journey and all journeys must have destinations. In doing so I join a long line of adventurers who overcame the nagging of those with small minds. “Oh, Shackleton, why go all the way to Antarctica? Will you be home for church on Sunday?” This is the sort of inertia that drags on everyone who chooses to be a bit unorthodox, a bit daring. While I condemn many of the things that conquistadors did in their quest for gold, I understand the crazed compulsion of the search itself. There may be an entire town made of pie out there. If you think you’re keeping me away from that, brother, you don’t know me very well.

When people accept that they cannot hold you back from your task, they move on to adjacent forms of subversion. “What’s there? What does it look like? How will you get there? Why don’t you look up some videos of YouTubers who have had this same idea before you?” These are the wheedling cries of those who would turn on the lights at a haunted house. “I must know everything! I must leave nothing to the imagination! I aim to drown myself in information, allowing it to suffocate all romance!” This attitude accounts for much of the misery of modern life. As Charley Crockett said, “When that open road starts to calling me/ There’s something over that hill I just got to see.” If you look up everything on Google Maps first, you’ll never need to see anything. Chill out.

Undertaking a spiritual journey into the desert gives you a certain kinship with those who came before. Just as the hardscrabble dreamers used to wake beside their covered wagons and gather wood for a morning fire, I too wake in the Albuquerque airport Sheraton and pour the water into the little single cup coffee maker. The details may have changed, but the need to buy some water bottles and gas up the Toyota before you turn west off of Interstate 25 at Socorro has not. Once you get on Route 60, my friend, you are really out there in the middle of nowhere. You would have to hitchhike all the way to Magdalena just to find a coffee shop. Look within—out here, you are on your own.

The Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion is dusted with shrubs of various sizes, brown grasses interspersed with the grasping fingers of the creosote bush and isolated Cottonwood trees. It’s not the featureless, undulating red sands of the Sahara, but the pointillist palate of Van Gogh if he ran out of everything but green and brown and yellow. I’d call it a scrubbedy landscape. The sun is hot and the dust attacks the windshield even if you keep on spraying the wiper fluid every fifteen minutes. I bet navigating this land by horse was a real nightmare. And many of them, in the olden days, were doing so while drunk on whiskey. Hot and sweaty and drunk and falling off your horse into a thorny bush, growing more ornery by the hour as your modest canteen was drained. What a nightmare! This general experience probably has much to do with why many of the Old West “ghost towns” in this region are now abandoned.

Yet mankind persevered. Twenty miles outside Magdalena you’re thinking about six shooters and covered wagons and prairie dogs and then—bam!— you see a hulking, white space telescope. Pointed up at the stars. Keep turning your head and you see another. And another. And two dozen more, gleaming white dishes the size of buildings slung out in an enormous crescent over miles of open desert, antennas reaching up to grab some cosmic rays that I’ll wager are very interesting indeed. This is the Very Large Array, the self-descriptive name of one of America’s most important astronomical sites. Where our imaginary drunken cowboy was draining the last drops of his ill-advised whiskey and cursing at wolves just a couple centuries ago, scientists now come to look at black holes and wonder what’s happening inside them. As parables of optimism go, this one is hard to beat. Never lose hope. This land may be inconvenient for an afternoon stroll, but you better believe we’ll figure out something useful to do with it.

Forty more miles down the road is Pie Town. The first and main thing you’ll see there is the wooden general store-looking Pie Town Pie Company building. Inside is the entire Pie Town EMS staff in matching t-shirts, taking up a corner table. There was a line of tourists waiting to get their hands on some of that pie. A harried and forgetful woman took orders at the counter. I waited patiently. When I finally made it up there, I ordered one slice of New Mexico Apple Pie—flavored with a little green chile—and one slice of Blueberry Lemon Buttermilk. They were both good. Lemons aren’t native to these parts, but thanks to modern shipping they are transported fresh all the way out here for inclusion in the pies. Wonderful! A triumph of logistics.

There was also a peaches and cream pie, and a cherry almond pie, and a few others. Based on the ones I had, I feel confident that those other ones are good, too. I can say all the pie was good to eat, whether you’re talking about the crust, or the filling inside. I enjoyed it. What am I, a restaurant critic? You know that pie was tasty.

There’s not much else to see in Pie Town so I headed back down the road. At Datil, I pulled off and talked to the lady in the gas station. “I come from St. Augustine, Florida, and we grow datil peppers there!” I told her. “Oh really? Wow,” she said. She didn’t give a fuck. I thought about buying a hat but they cost $30, which seemed a little steep for a joke that takes so much explanation.

Like a free diver on a world record descent, I didn’t linger unnecessarily. I had been where I was going. I had slipped the surly bonds of everyday life to touch the face of Pie Town. I’d had two pieces of pie and I was happy as a clam. Is this what life is all about? If so, it’s okay with me. David Hume taught us that we’re not promised tomorrow. You have to take advantage of every sliver of daylight. Keep it moving. I hit that gas and pushed on, screeching south at Socorro heading towards Elephant Butte. Past Truth or Consequences, on the road to Las Cruces, staring out at those craggy Sierra de las Uvas Mountains looming dead ahead. There’s something over that hill, baby, I just got to see. For me, it’s pie. What is it for you? You better go find out, before that sun goes down.

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Also

• Previously, on the open road: America Is Becoming Dallas; Ride or Die, Cowboy.

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Jeff Bezos (net worth: $275 billion), like John D. Rockefeller handing out shiny dimes, says that the bottom half of American earners should pay no income tax. This offers us a good opportunity to clarify and hold prominently in our minds the underlying battle for power that frames all of American politics today.

There are a number of things that can be said in response to Bezos’ comments in a CNBC interview this week. “Fuck off back to your mega-yacht and contemplate the grim reality that death will come for all of us, Jeff, you testosterone-swilling union busting devil.” That’s one. Another would be to point out, as the economist Gabriel Zucman did, that Bezos frames the discussion over taxes in an intentionally misleading way to elide the fact that low and middle income earners in America have a higher total tax burden than the very rich, which is why billionaires like Bezos love to crow about the absolute number of “billions” they pay in taxes rather than expressing such things as percentages of wealth. Another would be to note that the economic benefit of tax cuts to low earners is limited to a portion of the low amount they earn, giving them no redistributive value, which is why Republicans love to offer them in lieu of actual government benefits, which they brand derisively as “entitlements.” It does not take a very sophisticated understanding of mathematics to understand why “everyone keep more of what you earn!” is a policy that helps someone making billions of dollars more than it helps someone who earns $50,000.

Rather than rehashing these obvious points—true things that would already be well understood were it not for the fact that people with a lot of money have spent generations spending money to obscure them—I prefer to use the gift of Jeff Bezos opening his mouth as a chance to ruminate on an even more basic dynamic at work here. This is one of those things that is certainly not a novel insight, but is something worth reminding ourselves of periodically so that we don’t fuck around and lose our way.

The state, and capital. Two competing power centers. The state has the theoretical ability to limit the power of capital. In a democracy, where the state is theoretically subject to the input of the working class, and may theoretically be made to function in service of the interests of the large majority of the population who hold little capital, the power of the state is always a potential threat to the power of capital.

How powerful should the state be, and how powerful should capital be? Capital (representing both corporate interests and the rich) has a simple answer: Capital should have maximum power. Capital wants to do what it wants to do without being told that it can’t do everything it wants to do. Don’t we all!

So capital has two options. It can seek to co-opt state power—by buying politicians, influencing the electoral system with money, pursuing regulatory capture of government agencies, etc—and neutralize the desire and ability of the state to work against the interests of capital. Or, even more straightforward, it can seek to eliminate state power entirely. In addition to electing Republicans who slash regulations and eliminate state functions, the easiest way to do this is to starve the state of funding. When you starve the state of funding, you destroy its ability to carry out the regulatory actions that would limit the power of capital, even if the mandates to do so are still on the books.

Additionally, the functions that the state becomes too weak to carry out can be privatized and shifted under the control of capital, meaning that capital has the incentive not only to murder the state, but to feed on its corpse. A little added bonus.

State funding comes from taxes. The reason why the forces of capital are so intent on slashing taxes is not only because they want to keep more money in their own pockets; it is because slashing taxes defunds the government and naturally drains the hard power of the state, laws notwithstanding. You can tell the IRS to diligently monitor every billionaire’s finances in order to collect every last tax dollar legally owed, but if you lay off all the auditors at the IRS, they just won’t do it. Multiply this by every government regulatory agency. This is the perpetual battlefield of American power, which gets branded as “Red vs. Blue” and whatnot, in ways that are mostly misleading.

In modern American history, capital has owned essentially all of the Republican Party, which operates with the primary purpose of serving the interests of capital, and also has bought as much of the Democratic Party as possible, in order to neutralize the chance of substantial opposition. The main thing that has distinguished the Democratic Party from the Republican is that the Democratic Party is at least contested terrain for the interests of capital, whereas in the Republican Party it has always been a settled issue.

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Normal people don’t like paying taxes, understandably, for the same reason that people don’t like big bills for any reason. That’s to be expected. The forces of capital understand this and have always sought to weaponize for their own project of starving the state. All organized anti-tax political projects should be understood through this lens. Jeff Bezos is just the latest self-interested capitalist trying to put an appealing face on tax cuts which would ultimately serve his interests. Jeff Bezos would be happy to pay a modestly higher personal tax rate in the short term in order to raise public support for cutting taxes in general in order to weaken the federal government and thereby make it easier for Jeff Bezos’s companies to do whatever they want in the long term. Weakening labor regulations and safety regulations and environmental regulations will enable Jeff Bezos and friends to add far more wealth to their own accounts in the long run than they would pay today by picking up the tab for low earners as a PR move. This is all pretty transparent.

When Democrats who should know better start touting tax cuts out of political desperation—well, that is when it is worth saying: Hey, idiots, stop. Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen and Katie Porter and other ambitious Democrats who are pushing middle class tax cuts—rather than wealth taxes on the rich—as their signature economic proposals need to pause and look in the mirror and say, “I wonder if it is a bad sign that I have the same signature economic proposal as Jeff Bezos?” Sometimes Democrats do this because they are bought and paid for by the interests of capital, and sometimes they do it just because they think it is political clever and electorally popular, but either way, what they will accomplish if they succeed is to make the state weaker and consequently make capital itself stronger and more able to dominate the lives of humanity. I do not think it is a radical request to ask that Democrats not do that. Fucking idiots.

Into this two-way power struggle, let me remind you of one other power center that has the theoretical ability to compete in this game: labor. Organized labor can be its own power center. It is not the power of capital. It is the power of working people, organized and acting together for their common interests. In a healthy America, organized labor would be competing on an equal playing field with capital to influence the state to serve its interests. The state would have two clear, strong, powerful constituencies competing for influence: on the one hand, a few billionaires and mega-corporations, and on the other hand, the vast majority of the population, who work for a living. The weakness of organized labor in America tilts the battle for power into a two-way struggle, between capital and the state, rather than a more balanced three-way struggle between capital, workers, and the state. Needless to say, capital much prefers a simple two-way struggle. Without the power of organized labor backing it up, the state itself has less ability to resist the constant effort of capital to co-opt and destroy it. So when you contemplate our unhealthy and imperiled democracy, never forget that a strong union movement would drastically improve the entire dynamic, in favor of humanity’s interests. I wrote a book about this if you’re interested in a longer discussion of it.

Until organized labor grows substantially more powerful, we are left to watch guys worth hundreds of billions of dollars try to put a friendly face on the project of weakening government power so much that it can no longer get in the way of their ability to own everything and control all the wealth and not have to answer to anyone. Protecting state power and making that power genuinely answerable to honest democratic elections is the whole ballgame right now for 99% of us. Don’t think it is cute or clever or populist to help capital destroy the only thing holding it back from utter domination.

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Extras

• Related reading: Why Republicans Love to Offer You Tax Cuts; How the “Working Class Republican” Scam Works; We’re All Mice Trying to Chew Through a Trillion-Dollar Tree.

• This week, I went on The Valley Labor Report, the best labor show in the South, to talk about union power and inequality and the public sector right to strike and more. I also spoke to Alternet about the rise of Christian nationalism in a Substack live, which you can watch here. Also, I spoke to the French organizer and writer Lumir Lapray about labor power, in an interview that you can read here. That interview is published in French. I don’t know what it says but it sounds very poetic. If you’d like to read a longer discussion of why organized labor is the key to solving our national predicament, you can order my book “The Hammer” from an independent bookstore. If you would like me to come speak to your college or union or other group about these things, email me.

• Adjacent to the project of keeping the power of capital in check is: the media. The publication you are reading, How Things Work, is true independent media. We have no corporate sponsors and no paywall. This place is wholly supported by readers just like you who toss a few bucks in the hat to help keep us going. This is socialist journalism in action. If you like reading, please look deep into your conscience and then take a moment to click the button below to become a paid subscriber. It’s affordable and it helps us survive. I thank you all for being here.

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Bruce Springsteen played Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Bruce Springsteen! Madison Square Garden! Every upwardly mobile white middle aged couple in a fifty-mile radius was seeking to make their way into the city for date night with The Boss. Standing on Seventh Avenue and 33rd street under the watchful eye of an Ariana Grande for Swarovski billboard, you could watch them all stream by, holding hands, waving on their friends, ready to celebrate their good fortune. In they came. From Jersey! From White Plains! From Westchester! And, oh yes, from Long Island!

It was a perfect night to launch a Long Island Railroad strike.

More than 3,000 LIRR workers from five different unions are now on strike, for the first time in more than 30 years. Nothing prompts angry denunciations from the city’s reactionary media outlets like a public sector strike, particularly one involving blue collar workers who make six figure incomes. The very concept offends the most basic values of the sort of person who owns the New York Post. Rather than descend into the muck of manufactured anger, I prefer to take a big picture view: Union power is rare; here is an important economic chokepoint that is subject to union power; these workers are using that union power to get themselves the best deal that they can; strikes that successfully demonstrate the power of organized labor are good.

At issue in the strike is a relatively small gap between the raise percentage requested by the unions and the raise percentage that New York state is willing to pay. Because the LIRR workers are subject to the byzantine bureaucratic demands of the Railway Labor Act, they can’t just strike willy-nilly; this strike comes after three years of navigating successive government boards and mediation processes.

On Saturday night, a small group of strikers huddled with picket signs outside of Penn Station’s soaring, pointy glass LIRR entrance. They chanted about the head of the MTA: “Janno Lieber/ Has no clue!/ Fair wage/ Good for you!/ Good for me!” Occasionally, a passing Springsteen fan would give them a pumped fist in support.

Ian Parfrey wore a colorful bucket hat and a long goatee. He has been a locomotive engineer for the past 12 years. He drives trains from Grand Central out to Ronkonkoma and back. “We’ve reached the complete end of our labor process here. They’ve dragged out giving us a new contract for over three years now. The sticking point mainly is that we want a wage increase that at least covers inflation, and they’re offering a wage increase that does not cover inflation. Plus they want givebacks on top of that,” he said. “Some of these guys work jobs that are eleven-and-a-half hours long. They do four round trips, six round trips. They’re going back and forth like a pinball with barely time to eat or piss.”

“We are highly qualified and skilled people. We know how to operate any kind of train over every mile of track that this railroad has,” he said. “The training process for this job is over a year long. It consists of multiple examinations. Some of the written ones are incredibly difficult. We are very qualified. And, you know, frankly we deserve this money.”

George Barreto, another member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, has been on the job driving trains for 28 years. He grew up in New York but now lives in Philadelphia and commutes to work five or six days a week. “On Thursday, I ran a train out of Grand Central to Babylon, after the fire outside of Penn Station in the tunnel caused a massive service disruption. I got a call from the railroad, an ASAP call, ‘How fast can you get in? Can you get to Grand Central at 1:30?’ So in a half hour, I was at work in the blink of an eye. My day changed from a relaxing day off to, I’m helping the railroad out of a disaster, just like that. It happens all the time,” he said.

“You’re never really ready to go on strike. It’s a hard thing. The fact is, anybody who ever says ‘I wish to go on strike’ has never actually been on strike. It hurts everybody. It hurts the passengers. It hurts the riding public that we don’t want to hurt, because they’re our friends, our neighbors, people we care about. The people who care about us. We’re not looking to inconvenience them,” Barreto said. “The amount of studying, the amount of dedication required to get these jobs is often insurmountable. When you do finally qualify, you’re working nights, weekends, holidays for years on end. Mistakes are punitive. They can come after you very quickly. In short, we’re responsible for people’s lives. You cannot make mistakes. It’s a little different from working in an office.”

Some of the LIRR drivers are in the Teamsters. One of them was Ezekiel (whose last name I missed), who was hoisting a picket sign with one hand and passing out red Gatorades with the other. He had been a locomotive engineer for only a year and a half, making him one of the youngest people out there. When I asked him why he chose the job, he smiled shyly and replied, “I’ve always liked trains.”

Despite his energey on the picket line, “It kinda blows,” he said. “I know it blows for the commuters, it blows for me. Hopefully the Long Island Railroad comes to the bargaining table.”

A group of union officers, stout men in tight polo shirts, stood chatting off to the side. One was Mark Wallace, the BLET’s national president. He has a southern accent, unlike his extremely New Yawky members on the line. He narrated some of the years-long process that led up to this point.

“Two panels. Six arbitrators, that were picked by Donald Trump as a Presidential Emergency Board. We don’t like Presidential Emergency Boards either! We’ve had to eat out of a bad plate of food many times because of a Presidential Emergency Board. But that’s what’s always been the basis for the agreement we end up coming to. And [the LIRR] refuses to recognize that,” he said. “That was six independent arbitrators saying, ‘This is what’s fair to settle this.’ And this is the first time in our organization’s history—the BLET, we’re 164 years old—that we’ve asked for a Presidential Emergency Board. We normally would push back and say, ‘let us handle this on our own.’”

Though strikes under the Railway Labor Act are rare, this is Wallace’s second in two years—New Jersey Transit workers went on strike last year, over similar issues. So the union knows how fast the pressure will build. “The cost [of the LIRR strike] to the economy of New York, the comptroller said yesterday, it’s $61 million a day,” Wallace said. “That’ll pay for years of the increases we’re asking. They’re the ones that chose to go down this path.”

The mood was fairly happy out there, among the giddy Springsteen fans, with the Empire State Building looming in the background like a giant needle. But that was just the first day. Today is Monday, and the strike is still on, and that means that it is the first day that commuters are fucked. This can’t go on too long. There will be much grumbling. But look up Seventh Avenue and you will see Billionaire’s Row, and look down Seventh Avenue and you will see Wall Street. There are worse things than a few thousand well-paying union jobs for the people who drive our trains. Don’t be mad when union workers make a good living. Instead, get a union of your own, and join them.

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More

• Related reading: Vibe to Heal America; The Consequences of Bad Labor Law; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members.

• Here is a map of picket line locations for the LIRR strike, if you would like to join one in support. If you would like to organize your workplace and need help, contact EWOC. If you want to learn more about the labor movement and why it is so important to saving our miserable country from the fate that capitalism hath wrought for us, order my book “The Hammer” from an independent book store.

• Labor reporting in the United States of America: There’s not very much of it. Not even enough to send a reporter out to all of the strikes that happen, even though we don’t have nearly enough strikes. Sucks! One small thing you can do to mitigate this is to support independent media of the sort that might write about labor issues. Media such as… How Things Work, the publication you are now reading. We exist solely because of the financial support of readers like you. If you like reading How Things Work, please strongly consider clicking the button below and becoming a paid subscriber, for just $6 a month or $60 for the whole year. We will hang together or we will hang separately, my friends. Thank you for reading.

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported that venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz has become the single largest political donor in this midterm election cycle, dropping more than $115 million to support their own business interests. This is horrifying for our democracy, sure, but the story did have one paragraph that made me chuckle:

[Pointy-head billionaire technofascist Marc] Andreessen has told friends a story about a confrontation he had about a decade ago with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, at the headquarters of Condé Nast, which owns the magazine. Mr. Remnick’s team argued that the tech elite were out of touch, a person who heard Mr. Andreessen’s version of the story said, but when the investor saw how well appointed the Condé Nast offices and bathrooms were, he concluded that it was the media elite who were out of touch.

Astute readers will detect in this paragraph strong echoes of the interminable accusations of being “elite” that have helped to make America’s political rhetoric of the past decade so nightmarish. Republican elites calling Democratic elites “elites,” and vice versa. The observation “Hey, all the people calling the other side ‘elites’ are actually elites themselves!” is true and also has been made often enough at this point that we do not need to keep on making it aloud.

Now, the spectacle of a Silicon Valley billionaire accusing the nation’s most prestigious magazine editor of being out of touch is like watching a quadruple amputee and a triple amputee argue over who is more likely to win the Olympic pole vault. But the fact that such an accusation could even creep into Andreesen’s misshapen brain is an illustration of why such arguments are so alluring. The rubric of being “in touch” allows those who are undeniably elite to indulge in the fantasy that they can claim solidarity with the Regular People just by cobbling together a list of characteristics and activities that they have in common. It is a cheat code for soothing the egos of those who would never want to actually be a regular person, but who yearn for the populist shield of being sufficiently in touch with the experiences of regular people to lend their opinions credibility and insulate themselves from accusations of elitism.

Thus, proclamations of being In Touch tend to quickly devolve into laundry lists of the sort of shallow factoids found in dating questionnaires: I like sports! I listen to popular music! I recently pumped my own gas at a gas station, with no assistance from a service worker! The nature of these justifications is that they must be things that someone whose life experience is substantially out of the mainstream can do without altering anything about their own material circumstances. They often include things that happened before someone became an elite (I went to a public elementary school!) or things that amount to inconsequential safaris into the Land of Normal Folks (I went on a hunting trip, just as country people do!). The fantasy here is that the more behaviors one can claim that are shared by the median American, the more one can claim spiritual kinship with the median American, while studiously ignoring the market value of the home you live in.

In order to keep our national dialogue free of obscurity, it is imperative that we have crack down on these discussions of who is and is not out of touch. Most of the people who engage in them fail to live up to even the paltry standards of their own discourse. Just ask the questions with a tiny bit more clarity:

• Have you taken a flight recently? The majority of Americans did not take one flight in the past year.

• Did you read more than two books last year? You’re in the minority.

• Have a college degree? Also a minority.

• Do you eat out? The most common place that Americans eat out is McDonald’s, and the most popular sit-down restaurant brand is Olive Garden. Is that where you go? Or do you go somewhere fancy, like, you know, TGI Friday’s? What—fancier than that? Wow.

• Are you a white male? Seven in ten Americans are not.

Etcetera. I can barely imagine what qualities Marc Andreesen believes that he has that qualify him for being In Touch, but I guarantee that they are all very stupid.

The thing to recognize here is that this entire framework is wrong. It is a childish exercise in self-justification that does not even take itself seriously on its own terms. Elites—economic, cultural, and otherwise—feel deep shame and guilt at their own unjustified position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, or anomie at their own isolation from the rest of mankind. They search desperately for trivial points of commonality to make themselves feel a part of the society that they have worked so hard to ascend away from. Yet, if they were being honest with themselves, they would have to confront the hard reality that the one life experience that would prevent them from being out of touch will remain forever out of their grasp, by its very nature.

Because being in touch with normal people is not about having similar hobbies or watching the same TV shows. (The very idea that there is a median “normal person” that you can measure yourself against to ensure your own normality is a meaningless statistical fiction in a country as large and diverse as ours.) I submit to you that the one characteristic that unites the lives of all Normal People is this: They are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. They have to work for money in order to pay bills in order to survive. They are at all times subject to the cruel depredations of fate. Even if they have savings, the stability of their lives could be snatched away by a single disaster. If they rest for too long, they will lose their ability to support themselves and their families. They are all, to varying degrees, in the position of having to do things that they would not choose to do, because those things are necessary in order to earn money and live and navigate their position in society.

And guess what? Once you have a few million dollars in the bank, you are no longer in the position that I describe. Once you have a few million dollars in the bank, you may still choose to work, and you may still want to get richer, and you may decide to live a more lavish lifestyle that requires more income, but you are fundamentally removed from the necessity of shaping your life around the need to work to live a decent life. A few million bucks in the bank means that you have passed from the world of need to the world of choice. You have gained the ability to dictate the substance of your life. You have finished weaving the safety net that will prevent you from falling into the pit of penury. You may still like the same things that other people like, but you do not share the most powerful defining feature of their lives. You are free in a way that they are not and never will be.

This does not make you a bad person. This does not mean you don’t deserve to be happy. That doesn’t mean that you have no problems. I am not sitting here telling you to feel guilty. I am simply stating the material fact that at a certain level of wealth, it becomes impossible to be truly in touch with the life experience of most people, because the most significant aspect of that life experience is one that disappears when you surpass a certain level of wealth. If you do not have to work to live then, yes, you are out of touch with the organizing principle of the average person’s life. You may feel sympathy for them, or spiritual and political affinity, but your life is of a fundamentally different type than theirs.

Congratulations! You’re out of touch. Enjoy it. If you don’t like it, give all of your money away. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

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Also

• Related reading on the psychology of the rich: Grievance Poisoning In the First Degree; Prisoners of Fortune; Abominations of Capital.

• One good labor story to read today: Emily Markwiese on how a coalition of union activists in Washington state saved one of their comrades from being deported by ICE.

• Did you know that you can buy fly ass How Things Work t-shirt just in time for the spring? It’s true.

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If someone were to steal the land you lived on and then go try to sell it at real estate events overseas, I bet you would be upset. I bet you would be happy if people protested it. This, in essence, is the situation unfolding at the series of “Great Israeli Real Estate Events” being held this month in the New York area, and the public outrage accompanying them. These events market land in Israeli settlements to buyers in America. Last week, there was a raucous protest of one of these events held in a Manhattan synagogue. Yesterday, there was another such event at a synagogue in South Brooklyn. Another protest was announced. Another chance for confrontation. A miniature local theater in a sprawling global war.

The event was advertised as being in Flatbush, but I would call it Midwood—Avenue L and Ocean Avenue. It is a heavily Jewish neighborhood, just down the street from the grand facade of the East Midwood Jewish Center, where a banner advertised “The shul with the indoor pool.” Yet this slice of South Brooklyn is too diverse to be an enclave. Get off the Q train at Avenue M and you see Jewish families and Middle Eastern families and black people and white people and Mexican people and everything else. There are kosher bakeries but also sushi and Italian ices and a Georgian Khachapuri restaurant. The sun was still shining bright at six PM. A group of Latino kids played handball in the park on East 18th Street, right next to a group of Jewish kids playing basketball in their athletically disadvantageous outfits of long black pants and white button up shirts. A girl threw a ball to a dog. Birds chirped. Leaves bloomed. A fine spring night in the city.

A block away, Ocean Avenue was closed by a long police barrier manned by dozens of cops shifting from foot to foot. To get over to the action you had to walk the long way around, down East 19th, a lovely and leafy block of spacious suburban-esque homes surrounded by mature trees and trimmed hedges. Then you could walk down Ocean Ave itself, also blocked off and eerily quiet. Some people loitered on fifth and sixth floor balconies, peering down at the intersection of Ocean and L, fenced off with metal police barriers and rapidly filling with angry people.

Most of the angry people, numerically speaking, were pro-Israel counterprotesters. Hundreds of them filled a designated area on Avenue L, waving Israeli flags and American flags and pro-Zionist signs. Directly next to them was the designated press pen, which I avoided getting in on the principle that you never want to be in an enclosed area when shit goes down. I don’t generally believe in press passes—the First Amendment is every American’s press pass—but I did put mine on last night. At things like this it can help you avoid being snatched by cops or swung on by angry protesters, at the margins. It was not enough for one twitchy photographer who slid up beside me and whispered, “Watch your back. They don’t like press either, this community.”

The first actual protesters to arrive were a group of Orthodox Jewish people from NKI, who oppose Zionism for religious reasons, and who show up at many pro-Palestine protests. They set off a back and forth round of jeers. “State of Israel, shame, shame! You don’t speak in the Jewish name!” they chanted. “You’re not Jewish!” chanted the other side back at them.

Some standard issue keffiyeh-clad pro-Palestine protesters began to trickle in. An old woman holding a miniature Israeli flag sidled up and said “Animals. Animals” at a bored-looking white guy slumped across the handlebars of his bike. Swarms of neighborhood Jewish teenagers had formed around the protest area, and were posturing and yelling and zipping back and forth on electric scooters. “I’m right next to the jihadist!” one kid hissed into his cell phone with a grin plastered across his face. Cops were everywhere. Every few minutes a fight would almost start, but there was always a cop a few feet away to break it up. Even those of us who favor police reform would admit that this was in the category of “good uses of an army of cops.” Without the NYPD lining every surrounding block the entire thing would have degenerated into a wild street brawl in two seconds.

The vibes were vicious. Testosterone permeated the air. It smelled like cologne. Whether that was from the men of Midwood or from the cops, I’m not sure. The Jewish teens, seized with the energy of being on the bigger side of a crowd, hollered increasingly vicious taunts, egged on by a handful of middle aged right wing men who were poor role models.

“You can shove your Palestine up your ass!”

“Fuck Palestine and your mother!”

“Muhammad is a rapist! I’ll break your face!” This sort of thing. It was not an atmosphere conducive to reasoned conversation about the difference between Zionism and Judaism and the actions of the Netanyahu government and so forth. Not that some of the pro-Palestine people didn’t try. “They’re using dogs to rape prisoners,” one explained to an impassive cop standing between him and a red-faced screaming man in a yarmulke.

After a while the protesters filed out of their little area in the middle of Ocean Avenue and marched back around the block. They walked briskly down the sidewalk, surrounded by a line of police, and then a pack of hooting and enraged pro-Israel people strode beside them in the street, issuing insults and threats. A moving gauntlet, for three blocks, back around to Avenue M, where the protesters gathered in the intersection, finally together in numbers, slightly less intimidated. Some people threw eggs at them, which broke on the dark asphalt of Ocean Avenue. An NYPD chopper hovered overhead. The protesters were standing in the street which was arched like a small hill, so that from the edges all you would see, every couple of minutes, was a surge of photographers running towards a bunch of people’s backs, where some minor scuffle was popping off. Here, the protest played out as most protests do, albeit one taking place on a little concrete island surrounded by unusual levels of menace. A kid wearing a sheisty shot down the street on a scooter with a huge Israeli flag. An angry middle-aged white guy of a familiar type poked his finger towards college students in keffiyehs and screamed “You and me! Let’s go! As a matter of fact, bring three of you! You and me!” The mutual anger settled into balance.

I have but little to add to the substantial global commentary about the atrocities and oppression that the government of Israel has carried out against the Palestinians. There was a right side at this protest: The people defending the beleaguered Palestinians were right, and the people in the grips of religious-nationalist fervor screaming for their blood were wrong. For an American, though, the most useful thing about these particular protests may be a chance for us to get a new perspective on what it looks like when a nation acts just like us. The historical precedents of Israel and of the United States are quite different, yes, but the basic dynamic of “religious minority feeling the sting of persecution secures homeland by forcefully taking the land of other, weaker people who were not the ones persecuting them, while being extremely self-righteous about it”—well, that should ring familiar to anyone who has ever watched the Dallas Cowboys play the Washington Redskins.

When you stand surrounded by hundreds of flexing young men drunk on rage, testosterone, and politics, you can really feel part of a tradition running through all of human history, and through all of the world’s nation-states. Any country that wants to draw borders and motivate its young men to kill for them must whip up a crowd like this, at scale. Give all these teenagers uniforms and machine guns and you have an army. Call them heroes and point them at your enemies and you have geopolitics. Drape them in flags and make up songs celebrating them and lavish praise on their dead bodies and you have patriotism. Some causes are righteous and some are not, but if you know the exhilarating, giddy feeling of standing in a big group of your friends and feeling collectively ready to beat someone’s ass, together, then you can understand much about why it is so difficult to achieve peace on earth. There will always be young guys soaked in testosterone and high on dreams of Defending Their People, and, thus far, there have always been older men willing to send those wild young men to fight to protect the things that older men have. It is easy to get young men to fight. They will fight for a girl, for their family, for each other, or just for the sheer hell of it. It’s not really their fault. We can work to dissipate that energy, to channel into less murderous arenas, and we can hold up love of humanity as our highest virtue, or we can wave flags and extol the need for Real Men to protect God and Country at gunpoint. All societies make their choices.

Eventually the protesters and their infuriated entourage began to march back to where they began. I broke off and slipped into Falafel Tanami, on Avenue M, where you could see all the police right out the window. “What’s going on out there?” a portly Orthodox man with a beard asked the kid working the counter. “I have no idea,” the kid shrugged. The man behind the counter handed out fresh falafel balls to everyone waiting in line, as a little treat. They make a great falafel there. Everyone was happy. Everyone likes falafel.

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• Previously, in street reporting: Minneapolis when Alex Pretti was killed; Springfield, Ohio waits for ICE; New Orleans versus the fascists; At the Houston Rodeo.

• Save the children. Organize a union. Join a protest.

• Where is the best falafel in New York? If you know the answer, sound off in the comments. Otherwise I will be forced to do the hard work of finding out myself.

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Yesterday, the national co-chairs of the Democratic Socialists of America published a piece in Jacobin headlined, “We Need a Left-Labor Presidential Candidate.” In it, they say they “are calling for a new popular coalition of social movements, labor, and the Left to recruit and run a candidate for president of the United States” in 2028. Given the fact that this demand is coming from the organization that just powered Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York City mayor, and that has produced Congressional and municipal candidates across the country, it deserves to be taken seriously.

In a vacuum, I think it is encouraging that The Left (such as it is) is undertaking some sort of formal planning well in advance of 2028. I can also foresee a number of potential obstacles that stand in the way of the plan that DSA’s leaders are putting forward. In the spirit of Encouraging The Discourse, I’m just going to spitball all of that below. Let me stress that I have not spoken to any of DSA’s leaders, so this is just a reaction to the piece that they published. Please be a responsible internet commenter by reading their piece yourself before jumping in with opinions on it.

Stipulations

Much of the piece is spent making the case that Trump is awful, that public appetite for opposing him is high, and that the Democratic establishment sucks and will surely unite behind a shitty candidate unless the left does something. All of this is true. Also, we are stipulating here that we are discussing running a candidate in the Democratic Primary, and not as an independent. Running a third party left wing candidate for president is a bad idea for reasons I have discussed before.

Stuff I Agree With

“Zohran’s victory has reshaped expectations about what is politically possible… The Left has a historic opportunity — and a responsibility — to seize the moment.” Yes. The political position of DSA today is much elevated from its pre-Zohran levels. It has more supporters, more name recognition, and more momentum. In politics, there is great wisdom to striking while the iron is hot. Running full speed into the momentum you have tends to be more productive than saying “Let’s sit back for four years and build ourselves up until everything is perfect.” While it’s true that DSA doesn’t have the infrastructure of a national political party, backing a primary candidate could be the perfect opportunity to start building that infrastructure in earnest!

Having a candidate you really believe in at the top of the ticket tends to animate voters, helps turnout, helps your candidates farther down the ticket, and gives priceless visibility to your policy positions. It helps you recruit new followers and builds the movement. We saw all of this with Bernie’s presidential campaigns. Even though Bernie lost, his campaigns gave great energy and support to The Left. Running a credible campaign and losing leaves you stronger than not running at all.

There must be a credible left wing candidate in the Democratic primaries. That much is certain. Someone needs to be occupying the lane that Bernie has so successfully carved out. Not to have that would be a disaster for the Left and for America. However. There are still some…

Tricky Questions

What about AOC? What about AOC? AOC seems quite likely to run for president. If she does, she immediately becomes the most credible left wing candidate in the Democratic primaries—the one with the most charisma, the most resources, and the most name recognition. Does DSA envision automatically anointing her as the candidate they are describing, if she runs? Would she need to audition for their support? If AOC sought to put some amount of formal distance between herself and DSA, would DSA seek to run another candidate against her? You see what I’m getting at here. One can envision a scenario where AOC runs, seeks to present herself as slightly more mainstream in order to draw in broader primary support, and by doing so pisses off the Left, which proceeds to recruit and run another candidate in the same races.

Splintering and factionalism are the oldest stories on the Left. I’m not saying this will happen, but we should establish up front that this would be bad. Given the Left’s position in American politics, it is vital that we do our best to coalesce around ONE credible left candidate, and do everything possible NOT to split the left wing vote in the Democratic primaries. Maybe AOC would run and DSA would back her and everything would be smooth; or maybe AOC would run and a lot of feathers would get ruffled over purity but DSA would ultimately overlook that and back her for the cause; but either of those outcomes would be preferable to the Left splitting its precious resources between more than one candidate. That is a path to losing. Also it would produce tedious diatribes against DSA among mainstream Democrats that we would all have to listen to for the next decade, and that is boring. Let’s not split the vote no matter what.

The DSA leaders write, “We need a broad left-labor coalition, composed of labor unions and other mass organizations, that can draft a platform, recruit candidates for federal, state, and local office across the country, and nominate a viable socialist candidate for the 2028 presidential election. The work of identifying that candidate — ideally a nationally known elected official or labor leader — must begin now.” What does this coalition look like, exactly? And what process will be used in order to make its nomination choice? Even among groups that are fairly ideologically aligned, there is sure to be a turf war, given how high the stakes are. Who decides who gets to be in this coalition? How much power does DSA envision wielding in this coalition? If this process is led and dominated by DSA, that would tend to attract to the coalition only groups that perceive themselves as less powerful than DSA, while groups that perceive themselves as just as important or more important than DSA would tend to be less willing to subjugate their own political choices to DSA’s. If DSA is a minority member of this coalition, how will power be distributed? Is it based on the membership of the respective groups? Does each group in the coalition send one representative to a big caucus? How do you ensure that the full membership of each respective group respects the candidate choice that this coalition makes?

These are just examples of the things that make something like “a broad left-labor coalition, composed of labor unions and other mass organizations” challenging. I am not trying to be negative! These things can be navigated! They are just things to have clarity on before The Left plunges headlong into this process.

And I can tell you that the most challenging part of a coalition like this would be….

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The Labor Part

When you imagine the sort of “left-labor coalition” that could power a credible presidential campaign, you probably imagine the “labor” part of it as: Big national labor unions. If you want political power you want SEIU, you want the teachers unions, you want AFSCME, you want the Teamsters, you want UAW, you want the AFL-CIO, you want the biggest and most well-financed national unions with the biggest membership coming together to christen and support a Labor Candidate that can credibly claim to be The Labor Candidate because of this strong union backing.

Will these sorts of major national unions come to the table as members of a DSA-led left-labor coalition? Will they agree to subjugate their own political agency to this coalition? No. They will not. Big unions in America have been losing power in the workplace for many decades (here is a good book to read about that). But do you know where they still maintain a fair amount of power? Inside the Democratic National Committee! Big labor unions, to a large degree, are the Democratic establishment. They are a junior partner to capital, sure, and they have often been marginalized and taken for granted by Democratic administrations, but they jealously guard the access that Democrats grant them. Unions got a lot from Biden and the vast majority of AFL-CIO unions would be ecstatic for an exact repeat of the Biden administration. Most of the major unions endorsed Hillary Clinton and Biden rather than Bernie because they treasure their open door to the Democratic establishment and would not want to see it closed because they pissed off the establishment by backing an insurgent—even if that insurgent is, objectively, the most pro-labor candidate.

Getting the big unions to make themselves a part of a left-labor coalition that explicitly seeks to challenge the Democratic establishment will not happen until the big unions perceive that the Left is where the power is. As DSA Congressional candidate and union activist Claire Valdez told me recently, “We need to demonstrate that we can win” before we can expect these mainstream, less ideological unions to coalesce around left wing, pro-labor candidates.

What the labor part of a “left-labor coalition” that could be built today would look like in practice would be, you know, a bunch of left-leaning locals and a bunch of progressive labor-aligned groups that are not unions, along with maybe the handful of big unions that tend to be more progressive (UAW, AFA, Unite Here, etc.)—though even those unions would surely reserve the right to make their own political endorsements should they choose to. It’s not just that unions tend to be pragmatic and transactional politically. Unions, at least the ones who might care about left wing values, are also democratic organizations that will do a lot of fretting over anything that might require them to subjugate their own political preferences to a larger group. This is also why it is hard to get the AFL-CIO, a coalition of many dozens of unions, to do anything bold.

Given all of this, it is also easy to imagine a scenario where DSA and friends back a left wing candidate and say that This Is The Labor Candidate, and meanwhile there is another Democratic establishment candidate who is standing up there with the endorsement of all the big unions. This, in fact, is what happened to Bernie! It’s not the end of the world or anything, but it goes to show why it is hard to realize the dream of unions showing enough solidarity to make themselves legitimate progressive kingmakers in Democratic politics.

If you object to this by saying, “But it would make more sense for unions to support the left wing candidate who is objectively more pro-labor on a policy level and who will be less likely to sell them out down the road,” I say to you: Hey brother, welcome to my life! I been writing this shit for years and years and yet progress has been slow. This is why I have a sense of some of the challenges ahead. You don’t have to convince me. You have to convince the inexplicably powerful Senior Vice President of the Amalgamated Widget Union whose most dearly held value is his ability to get backstage access to the Democratic National Convention and take selfies with someone famous over by the open bar.

Big Picture

Nitpicking negativity is much easier than organizing. So let us not lose perspective. It is vital that there is a credible left wing candidate in the 2028 Democratic primaries. Maybe that will be AOC, but maybe not. Credit to DSA for starting this conversation before it’s too late. A left-labor coalition is a desirable thing. If you are a union member, you can help bring this dream about by getting involved in your union and running for a position and helping to move your union left. If you are a left wing person not in a union, you can help bring this dream about by unionizing your workplace and joining the labor movement. If America’s union density continues to decline, so too will the utility and power of any left-labor coalition. The job of creating more union members is one that is vital no matter what is happening with electoral politics

Never in my lifetime has it been so clear that the political establishment has failed miserably and that its failure may well destroy us all. Don’t underestimate the chances of a left wing candidate in 2028. Pendulums swing.

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• Related reading: How to Win Red States With a Labor Party; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; Bernie Lost Because American Doesn’t Have a Strong Labor Movement; Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What.

• I wrote a book called “The Hammer” about why organized labor’s decline has gotten us into the fucked up position we are in today, and how we can turn that around. Relevant. You can order it from an independent bookstore. You can also get help organizing your workplace, donate money to support union organizing, or join DSA.

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