The Rise of Unions & the Impact of Trump's Populism with Author Eric Blanc | SYSTEM UPDATE #395
Labor studies professor and author Eric Blanc discusses why large numbers of working class voters are abandoning the Democratic party and whether the Trump administration will deliver for unions and labor.
Please note: this episode originally included an interview with Seth Stern about Section 702 of FISA. Due to technical difficulties, it has been removed from the podcast. We will provide a free transcript of the interview to our listeners.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, of all of Donald Trump's nominees, the Washington consensus is that the one in the greatest trouble is former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who he nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence.
Unlike Marco Rubio, who was just unanimously confirmed by the Senate with every single Democrat and Bernie Sanders voting yes, Gabbard is expected to get a grand total of zero Democratic votes.
And as we reported last week, Republican senators have made clear to her that she has zero chance of getting confirmed unless she first publicly renounces her longtime opposition.
So the warrantless domestic spying powers that the Pelosi-led Congress in 2008 gave to the CIA, FBI, and the NSA were for the first time those agencies could spy on the communications of American citizens without the warrants required.
warrantless spying on Americans, which is commonly referred to as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, has been abused for many years, as ample documentation shows, including from the inspectors general and the government.
Late last year, a coalition of privacy and civil liberties groups sued the U.S. government, arguing that the most extreme types of Section 702 warrantless spying are unconstitutional in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
It actually arose in the context of a criminal case.
The defendant raised that argument, and then groups like EFF, the ACLU, and others joined in to emphasize that, the unconstitutionality.
A ruling by a federal court in that case in the Eastern District of New York was released yesterday, and it found that those parts of 702, The
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden himself and others.
I resigned from the board of that organization in 2020 rather largely just due to time constraints, but I have continued to really admire the work that it does, including having helped bring attention to this issue and this vital case.
Seth Stern is the group's Director of Advocacy, and he'll be with us in just a few minutes to discuss this long-overdue judicial ruling and what it means for Americans' privacy rights.
And it's just ironic that the ruling was issued just days after Republican senators demanded that Tulsi...
Renounce her opposition to this fine power if she wants any chance to be confirmed.
Then, labor unions played a larger and a more interesting role in the 2024 election than they have played arguably in many, many years.
The head of the nation's largest union, the Teamsters, undertook the extraordinary act of not only refusing to endorse the Democratic Party presidential candidate, but then also speaking in a prime time slot at the RNC. That reflected not only the growing importance of working class and union voters,
but also the political realignment taking shape due at least to the perception that a Trump-led Republican Party is more empathetic to working class voters than any prior iteration of the Republican Party and certainly more than the neoliberal Democratic Party is.
Eric Blank is a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and the author of the Substack Labor Politics.
He has written a new book entitled We Are the Union, How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.
And it comes out next month with the UC Press.
It examines many themes highly relevant to the 2024 election, including how Democrats have long been the party of labor and how it is that they are now losing that grip, how the populism of Donald Trump and his movement are succeeding in attracting a lot of those once unattainable voters, and what the future how the populism of Donald Trump and his movement are succeeding in attracting a lot of those once unattainable voters, and what the future of labor and The working class...
Has itself proven to be a vital force in American politics and whose new book sheds critical and often, in my view, unexpected light on what its trajectory is likely to be, both in and of itself and as a political force in the United States.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We are going to have a guest up next as well to speak about working class voters and labor unions and their role that they've been playing in politics for the last several decades.
decades.
We actually have the guest with us now, so hopefully this will be a conversation that is liberated from those connectivity issues we had just a moment ago.
He is Eric Blank, who is a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University.
He's the author of the Substack Labor Politics, and he is also the author of a shortly forthcoming book entitled We Are the Union, How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.
It'll be out with UC Press next month.
Professor Blank is also a co-founder of and currently serves as an organizer training for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, and the book he has written is, I think, a very timely one given the role that labor unions played, the more prominent role they played in the 2024 election than in any election, certainly the more prominent role they played in the 2024 election than in any election, certainly over the last couple of I think it reflects a lot of the trends he covers in his book, and we are very happy to have him join us tonight.
Professor, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
It's good to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Absolutely.
Let's begin with this, the 2024 election, which I think was remarkable in so many ways given recent political history where Democrats had basically an automatic lock on, certainly at the managerial level of labor unions, labor leaders were automatically supportive of the Democratic Party largely because the union they represented was as well.
And yet in this particular case, we saw the largest labor union, the Teamsters Union.
And its president not only refused to endorse the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, but he went and spoke at the Republican National Convention in a primetime slot, heaped a lot of praise on not just Donald Trump, but other Republican senators who are trying to position themselves as kind of pro-union, pro-working class.
Rightly or wrongly, people like Josh Hawley and his running mate, J.D. Vance.
Who the Teamster president said had done a lot for labor unions to stand by them.
And then, of course, we saw a lot of working class voters continue to migrate away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
What do you make of this?
Clearly, what is a shift in the political allegiances of not just working class voters, but also labor unions themselves?
Yes, it's a big question.
It's an important question.
I think the major story here is that the Democrats are reaping what they've sowed for over 40 years of neoliberal policies.
You know, going back to Carter's austerity, Clinton's NAFTA, Obama's bank bailouts.
You know, working class people have not...
Been benefiting from the Democratic Party for a very long time now.
So the allegiances that were built up over previous generations, because the Democrats had delivered big under the New Deal, have been fraying for a long time.
So this process of sort of disillusionment is not new, but it has reached a different stage.
And it's clearly the crisis of the Democratic Party with unions is very acute.
And we saw that with Sean O'Brien speaking at the...
And we see more generally with a lot of working class voters, including union voters voting for Trump.
On the whole, union members still disproportionately voted for the Democrats and had more members.
Had more workers been members of unions, Harris probably would have won.
Unfortunately, only 10% of the workforce are members of unions, so this was not able to deliver the election.
But the general trend is still very, very, very bad for the Democratic Party.
I think that...
On the one hand, it's a positive thing for unions to be breaking their deferential ties to the Democrats.
That sort of policy of backroom dealing and sort of blind allegiance has led labor largely to its crisis, where you have so few workers in unions.
On the other hand, I think just we should be real, I don't think there's much there there to, you know, the populist rhetoric of the Republicans on union policies.
There is actually a frank difference.
The Republicans have been worse, continue to be worse on unions specifically.
Just like to give one example, the first move of the Trump administration on the NLRB, which governs labor law in the U.S., the National Labor Relations Board, was to appoint just a management hack, a guy named Marvin Kaplan, to the position.
This is a guy who just always signs with business over labor.
So this is a very, very tricky situation because neither party, frankly, is representing working class people and unions are trying to figure out what to do.
I think it's good to try experimenting, but I'm very skeptical.
I haven't seen much evidence that the Republicans are actually going to deliver pro-worker or pro-union policies.
Yeah, it remains to be seen.
I want to delve into that a little bit more.
But before we get to that, one of the things I wanted to ask you is it always seems in politics, like things that we talk about as though they're new.
Are actually things that we've seen in the past that a lot of people just lived through or had forgotten about.
I remember very well, not that well, I was very young, not to age myself too much, but in the 1980 election and then throughout the Reagan years, especially 1984, when he won that resounding victory, that sweeping victory over Walter Mondale, this phrase emerged that...
People were referred to as Reagan Democrats.
And it basically meant people in the heartland who had typically voted for Democrats were part of the generation or grew up with the generation that revered FDR and the New Deal and the sorts of things that the Democratic Party was perceived to have done for people who weren't wealthy in the United States and it created this affinity with the Democratic Party.
And yet there were a lot of union members, a lot of people who were working class who abandoned the Democratic Party and they loved Ronald Reagan.
As someone who's a historian as well, the labor movement, what is it that caused that, and is that similar to what's taking place now?
Yeah, I mean, the pattern isn't new.
But the pattern is something that we have had for a very long time in the US, which is because we have a two-party system and because we have a political system dominated by big business, working people, frankly, get thrown around a lot and get their hopes raised and get their hopes dashed by a lot of different parties, including Reagan.
So Reagan was a union member famously.
He was a part of the Hollywood Union.
And a lot of unions thought he was going to be their champion.
And by the end of the Reaganomics experiment, a lot of those same, you know, Reagan Democrats were disillusioned and they voted for Clinton.
And then Clinton goes ahead and passes the worst free trade agreement.
You know, so the basic pattern is both parties failing to deliver and then workers sometimes forgetting these lessons or trying to see, well, you know, at least these...
People who are out of power, if we put them in, maybe they won't be as bad as the last round.
And so it is really sort of a very vicious cycle in which unions haven't found a way to sort of either force either party to consistently stand with them or to raise a more independent voice.
So yeah, I think what you're saying is exactly right.
There's plenty of previous examples, particularly white workers, but not just siding with the Republicans.
On the whole, this hasn't resulted in a major realignment of either parties towards working class or union interests.
I remember something from the 2016 campaign that always stayed with me because it seems so illustrative of how politics works in so many ways.
Hillary Clinton had, she didn't visit many states, but one of the states she did visit for whatever reasons was West Virginia.
And she was speaking to coal workers and the coal jobs in West Virginia that had always been so crucial to that state's economy were disappearing.
And she basically told them, I guess being honest, actually, look, get over it.
These jobs aren't coming back.
We're moving to a different kind of an economy, a greener economy.
Coal is not part of the future.
And about three weeks later, Donald Trump came to West Virginia.
And said exactly the opposite.
He said, we're going to save your coal jobs.
We know that you're suffering.
You've been de-industrialized.
He blamed NAFTA and the Clintons.
And he said, we're going to bring back your coal jobs.
And then I remember a group of coal miners workers being interviewed by media and were asked about that.
And they were asked, do they believe Trump when he says, we're going to bring your jobs back?
And they basically said, no, actually, I don't really believe him, but at least he is speaking to our problem.
He's recognizing what we're going through and he's not just telling us to get over it.
And it created this kind of affinity for Trump because I do think people want to feel like they're being cared about and seen.
And at the same time, the Democratic Party with Chuck Schumer saying things like, yeah, for every working class voter that we lose, we're going to pick up two affluent suburbanite voters and it's going to all balance out.
We're going to win anyway.
It seems like on some level, Democrats have in part taken for granted these working class voters, but also have considered them kind of dispensable.
And people perceive that they're not dumb, especially when it comes to their own lives.
Is that something you think that has been going on?
Yeah, I mean, it's clearly the case.
And I would just say that, generally speaking, Trump is very smart and actually has a better read, I think, on the extent of anger and disillusionment.
And anxiety and insecurity of working class people of all backgrounds, frankly, in the U.S. And he's able to speak to that.
And so people feel heard.
Again, I don't think there's much substance to it.
I don't, you know, based on his last record.
But I think what you pinpoint is real is that unlike the Democrats, Trump has been able to very explicitly articulate and name and sort of say he's hearing working class people.
And that, you know, after you feel like you've been ignored for decades, then, yeah, it's understandable why people would respond positively to that.
Even if they haven't seen the policy changes in their lives, at least it feels like somebody up there is listening.
And the Democrats haven't done themselves any favors by this, frankly.
And it's really, in some ways, baffling that they, given the...
Mantle of anti-establishment working class politics to the Republicans, you know, and then the Democrats paint themselves as the defender of the status quo.
And that makes sense if you're doing well, and it makes sense if you're a billionaire.
It makes sense maybe even if you're like an upper middle class person doing basically fine.
But there's just a huge chasm with working class people who don't feel like they're doing fine, who feel like they're struggling to get by.
And whichever party is able to sort of speak to that and give it a political voice is going to do well electorally.
And I think we're seeing that over the last few years.
You referenced this a little bit earlier, but I just want to drill down a little bit on it.
There are a lot of left-wing critics of the Democratic Party who really have become completely soured on Democratic Party politics for a lot of the reasons you just said, think their funding and arming and unconditional support for the war in Gaza would open a lot of people's eyes to what the Democratic Party really is.
A lot of people think that Joe Biden was a disaster.
The Democratic Party itself is something that can be reformed.
And yet, even those people, the harshest critics I know on the left of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party will acknowledge that one of the areas, I mean, for me, one of the best things he did was Lena Kahn and the FTC.
But a lot of people will say actually even better were his labor board picks, the Labor Relations Board and a lot of these.
Kind of old school pro-union policies.
I heard someone this week say that they think the reason for that is that Joe Biden is just so old that he comes from that era when the Democratic Party was still kind of consciously pro-union.
There's just parts of like his DNA and his brain that just those neural connections happen.
He's like, no, we're the party that's pro-union.
And it was just kind of an apparition.
But whatever true, there is some truth to that for sure.
And yet it doesn't really seem to have registered a lot or mattered.
It registered with union officials, people who pay very close attention to those sort of things, but working class voters as a whole, even union members, it doesn't seem to have had that much of an impact.
Why do you think that is? - Yeah, so there's two things there.
One is, I don't think Biden's pro-union policies have that much to do with his age, because frankly, Biden was VP under Obama, which was not a particularly pro.
You know, union administration, and Biden hasn't been notably sort of pro-union in this vociferous way, which he actually was the last few years.
So I think the explanation is pretty simple, which is that Bernie Sanders ran and almost won the nomination, and they had to make some concessions to the left, and part of the concessions to the left were the nominations for, you know, Lena Kahn, but then also...
Jennifer Abruzzo to head the National Labor Relations Board.
And just frankly, the Biden NLRB has been amazing.
It's been literally the best NLRB since the 1930s.
And it has made a big difference for workers who are trying to unionize.
And so the Starbucks campaign, the Amazon workers, the United Auto Workers, you know, frankly, for them, it has made a big difference, and which is part of the reason why, for instance, the auto workers, even the rank and file, tended to vote for Harris.
Okay.
That being said, The big story still is just too little too late.
It hasn't made up for the overall cost-of-living crisis.
It hasn't made up for decades of neoliberal politics.
And there's an additional thing, which I would add, which is that, frankly, unions didn't seize the opening that Biden gave them.
So I'm all for blaming the Democrats as much as anybody else.
But there's a certain amount of, and actually a major amount of...
Blame to be laid on the doorstep of the labor movement as well, because the Biden and LRB created this great opening for potentially unionizing millions more members.
And if union density stays at 10%, well, then it's understandable why pro-union policies aren't going to be a decisive impact on the presidential election, because just the vast majority of workers aren't in unions.
So what do you do?
Well, the labor movement has to grow.
The labor movement literally has to organize millions and millions, tens of millions more workers.
And that, in turn, really would.
Have a profound impact on the overall political dynamic in the U.S. But instead of doing that, in part, unions have been so used to just backroom dealing with Democrats and sort of deference to Democrats, they've fallen out of the tradition of new organizing.
They haven't invested in new organizing, even though they have $38 billion in net assets.
And so they just blew the opportunity, frankly, rank-and-file workers from below.
Sort of seize the moment.
That's what my new book's about.
But the vast majority of labor unions did exactly what they were doing before, which was just sort of backroom wheeling and dealing.
They didn't grow.
And so it's not surprising then that they weren't able to deliver a major electoral one to the Democrats, their preferred candidate.
Let me ask you to get back to that topic that I said we're going to get to in just a little bit, which was your view that I think a lot of people share that although Donald Trump is a very...
Skilled politician, I think we can all acknowledge that at this point, finally, at least with respect to a lot of things, including, as you said, making working-class voters feel like he connects to them and understands them.
Actually, I remember when I was living in New York, before I was a journalist, I was a lawyer, and I remember one time, I don't know why this stuck with me, Donald Trump obviously was a huge cultural figure, tabloid figure in New York City.
And I remember he once went to a construction site, and that was a big part of his business, was building buildings.
So he was around construction workers a lot.
And he went to this construction site, and afterward he said, yeah, when I go to these construction sites, the guys with the hard hats all scream my name, and that to me is the most valuable kind of fame.
Not that when you're known by D.C. insiders and kind of New York elites, but when sort of the average American, the working class American knows you, I think he's, you know, To me it seems
like there's at least some part of the Republican Party which Is trying in a more substantive way to get out of Reaganomics, the idea that the only thing the Republican Party is supposed to do is help corporate profit and corporate power at the expense of working class people.
It was Josh Hawley who was the only one who stood with Bernie Sanders to veto the COVID relief bill because it had no direct payments to American workers and then Trump vetoed it because the payments weren't high enough.
J.D. Vance is a huge fan of Lena Conn, has often spoke about that, so has Matt Gaetz, so is Hawley.
They speak about the future of the Republican Party being a multiracial, working-class coalition, which is language totally anathema to the Republican Party.
And I think in politics, sort of the more worker, the more voters of a certain kind you attract, the more compelled you feel to service them in order to keep them, in order to kind of placate them.
Whereas if they're just your enemies and never going to vote for you, you kind of turn away from them.
Do you see any prospect, and I know it's ingrained in so much of us to believe the Republican Party couldn't possibly ever do this, that the Republican Party could actually, following the lead of some of the people I just mentioned, start to be more genuine and not just rhetorical and political in their appeal to working class voters?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I will say that...
It's very hard to predict the future.
So, you know, I know just as much as you do as far as what's going to happen.
I think there's very little evidence yet that that minority wing, which you're right, does exist, will have the potential avenue to become hegemonic in the Republicans.
So just to give you just, you know, a couple examples.
Look at the Trump's inauguration, right?
Like, look who is standing with him.
These are some of the worst union busters in the whole country.
You know, Bezos, Amazon.
Elon Musk is literally suing to overturn the NLRA, the National Labor Relations Act.
So the people who are in a decisive position of influence at this point are literally the billionaires who would stand to lose the most for mass unionization and who are not just rhetorically but actively as we speak doing the most to try to destroy unions.
You know, Amazon is the worst union buster in the country.
So given the influence that, you know, these folks, particularly Elon Musk, have within the administration, you know, that's the hegemonic position right now.
There is not, like, an ambiguity as far as what the overall position of this administration is towards labor.
Could it change?
Well, I would say it would be great.
You know, I would love to see a world in which Republicans pass labor law reform and, you know, provide some, you know, benefits to union workers.
Possible that they would do that in a sort of nativist, exclusionary way, which, you know, could really divide the working class and be problematic in some ways.
But frankly, I just think there's not much evidence of this happening yet, because what you would have to do in order to overcome such powerful influences within the Republican Party is essentially...
Get rid of the influence of the billionaire class within this party, which has it on full lockdown right now.
So good luck to them.
If they can do that, I think that people like Bernie Sanders and others would like to get whatever votes they can get from the Republican side for pro-worker policies.
But just to give one last example, you can look at the way the vote went down for the NLRB just a few weeks ago.
There was a vote to maintain a pro-union NLRB. It would maintain the current appointees, essentially a majority pro-union.
And every single Republican voted against it.
And it ended up losing because Manchin and Sinema ended up voting against it.
Not a single Republican was willing to vote for the pro-union NLRB. And so to me, this is indicative just of the balance of forces.
Could that change down the road?
Yeah, maybe.
It seems to me, you know, far less likely than...
Within the Democrats, for all of their limitations, overwhelmingly, minus two people voted for a pro-union NLRB. So just the evidence we have as far as the relative influence of pro-union forces within these two parties, both of which are dominated by capital, is pretty clear.
So I don't really see why we would expect the Republicans more than the Democrats to eventually become a pro-worker party.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But let me just ask, though, that it seems to me like when we talk about working class voters, the working class in general, There are two very significant changes from how we used to talk about working class voters, say, decades ago.
One is that, as you pointed out, only a small percentage of Americans belong to a union now.
I think previously when we talked about working class voters, maybe the working class in the 50s and 60s, it was almost synonymous with labor unions.
Working class voters were largely union members.
Now there's a huge number of working class voters who are not part of labor unions.
Maybe it's possible to attract working class voters, even while still not being particularly pro-union or even actively opposed to unions, as you said.
And then the other part of it was, and you alluded to this as well, is that I think when we talk about...
Working class voters, for decades, we pretty much were referring to the white working class.
And the working class was largely composed of the white working class.
Now, it is very multiracial.
There's a huge number of black working class voters, and Latino working class voters, and Asian working class voters, and Muslim working class voters.
And this is a big part of what we saw in the shift from Democrats to Republicans as not just white working class voters, but working class voters of Every different racial group and minority group.
So is it possible to envision a party that is pro-working class without necessarily being pro-union, especially given, as you document in your book, that the percentage of unions has reduced pretty significantly for a lot of reasons?
Well, I mean, it depends on what your analysis of U.S. society is.
Basically, if you think that it's possible to sort of systematically raise the living standards and make lives better for working class people without challenging the power of capital, well, then, yes.
And I think that this is the hope of certain wings of the Republicans, is that there's a way to sort of coexist with the billionaires while providing maybe some more welfare state benefits.
And, you know, you don't even necessarily, as you mentioned, need to be pro-union.
Maybe you can get some more manufacturing.
I think the essential problem just in that power analysis is that Experience has shown that in order to really significantly improve working conditions and living conditions, the major block for that is the power of capital, right?
The corporate sort of just dominance over everything is what is blocking that.
And so the question is, how would you overcome that resistance?
Maybe you could do that purely electorally.
There's not that much experience to suggest that's the case.
Historically, and I think still today, The major mechanism to overcome corporate resistance so that you can pass all these good things, right?
So you can force politicians to pass good policies despite sort of like big business, you know, scaring them that they're going to get, you know, primaried out by, you know, some well-funded challenger.
The way you do that is by organizing working-class people, and that's what unions are.
So, you know, if other people share a different analysis, my starting point, and I think there's a lot of good empirical evidence for that, is that workers and bosses have different...
And therefore, it's not actually possible to be consistently pro-worker if you're not pro-union.
And so that's a contradiction, I think, that the Republicans have.
And I think that, frankly, if a politician wants to be serious about supporting working-class people, then you can't do that and say you're also opposed to unions.
Just to me, that seems like a contradiction in terms.
Clearly, some workers disagree.
Yeah, I just had the last question.
You're right.
So that's true.
It's possible that they'll be able to keep on sort of winning people over rhetorically and through some different policies.
But I don't think that would lead to the type of transformation in their lives that you could have if it was combined with a real challenge against the billionaires and through a pro-union approach.
Right.
I totally get that.
This is the last question, and I'm looking forward to people reading your book because we talk a lot about the working class, but we don't usually think about it in a very deep or contextual or historical way with a lot of data.
So I think it's an extremely timely book, even though labor unions aren't quite as dominant in our society, but the whole idea of the working classes and the relationship to unions that you just described.
And I don't even know what I think about this.
There's polling data on it, but it's kind of vague and in conflict.
A little ambivalence in it that a lot of working class voters are now casting their votes not based on traditional concerns of working conditions or what's good for the American worker from an economic perspective, but that they feel very alienated from the Democratic Party primarily because of cultural positions writ large.
And I think a lot of it is not so much that They wake up every day thinking about, you know, whether trans people should get to use a certain bathroom.
It's more that it becomes a proxy for conveying the view that Democrats are focused on issues that really have nothing to do with their lives, and it kind of reinforces this idea that they've become deprioritized.
What do you think has become the role of sort of the culture war and these cultural issues in terms of how working class voters perceive both parties and their voting patterns?
Yeah, it's very hard to separate out resentments around cultural issues from economic issues, because if you listen to what working class people say when they're voting for Trump, whether it's white workers or, frankly, black or even Latino workers, oftentimes they'll say they're against the Democrats because the Democrats are not listening to them, and they might raise questions around too many.
You know, migrants coming or trans issues or whatever.
But that's always, or I would say most of the time, and the data shows this, that's paired with their perception that Democrats care about that and they don't care about actually making people's lives better.
So part of the resonance of this perception of, you know, culture being sort of the...
Achilles heel of the Democrats is that the Democrats haven't delivered on economics, right?
And I think that you see this when you're a union organizer.
You can get people who might disagree on cultural issues to agree to a lot when you say, look, the boss is your common enemy.
We have common economic interests.
You know, an injury to one is an injury at all.
You find that people who might even have, like, you know, conservative ideas on this side or the other are able to come together and overcome some of these issues.
So I think that the...
Way forward, if you actually want to center the question of economic sort of populism, is to, you know...
Is to have a forthright appeal to people, working class people's interests, to help them organize.
And it's going to be in that process of actually organizing and persuading and talking to people and not sort of scolding them and haranguing them.
That people, I think, will change their ideas and they'll see that they have more commonality, you know, than undocumented worker, queer worker than they have with the billionaires.
And just frankly, right now, that doesn't even seem like a viable option in U.S. politics.
You know, so that's not seeming to be like...
Well, then people take the options that exist.
But I think it's up to unions and, you know, left political forces to put that option on the table.
All right.
Just before I go, tell us how people were the best places to find your book.
And we'll put the link as well on the show notes.
For sure.
Thanks again for having me on.
So yeah, the book is called We Are the Union.
If you just Google it, We Are the Union, Eric Blanc, you can buy it basically anywhere.
My writings, the best way to find my writings is on my Substack, Labor Politics.
And yeah, so you can pre-order right now, and I'd love to hear what you all think.
Yeah, I read a good part of the book.
I found it really interesting and provocative and, like I said, timely.
And it was great talking to you.
I really appreciate your coming on.
Yeah, appreciate it.
All right, have a good evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As I said at the top, we have to end the show a little bit early, basically right now, in fact, because I'm going to be the guest at the top of the hour on Jesse Waters' Fox show, which begins at 8 p.m.
Eastern, in other words, in about three minutes.
They get a little neurotic if I'm not on early, so I'm going to skip the usual closing and just say thank you to those of you who've been watching.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
