No One Is Going To Save Us. We Must Save Ourselves
In this episode Jared Yates Sexton flies solo in detailing the overturning of Roe V. Wade, analyzing the response by the political class and the people, and details this new reactionary, oppressive order we find ourselves in. Then, he's joined by Lily Geismer, a professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and the author of the new book Left Behind: The Democrats Failed Attempt To Solve Inequality, to discuss how the modern Democratic Party came into being. You can find Lily Geismer's book at Public Affairs: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/lily-geismer/left-behind/9781541757004/ To support the show and gain access to the weekly bonus episode on Fridays, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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Nick Halsman is out today, so I'll be holding down the fort.
Unfortunately, we have some really awful stuff to discuss today.
Something that we all knew was coming, but it does very little to dampen the effect and the pain of the actual event taking place.
Later, I'll be joined by Lily Geismar, who is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and is the author of Left Behind, The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
Right now, however, we have to talk about the story of the day.
It's no surprise to everybody.
Last Friday, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, overturned the nearly 50 year precedent of Roe v. Wade, sending the legality of abortion and reproductive rights back to the states.
The opinion, which had been leaked earlier in a strategy that now seems very obviously to have been intended to dampen the effect and to Prepare people for the shock was written by Samuel Alito, a really disgusting opinion.
We had talked about previously in the podcast when we were talking about the leaked opinion, how gleefully cruel this opinion was.
It called Roe v. Wade egregiously wrong, a major precedent that of course had existed for nearly 50 years.
With that overturning, abortion as a legal procedure was immediately banned in several states that had already laid the foundation for the outlawing of abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned.
Another handful of states will more than likely ban abortion within the next month, and many more will be taking the issue into consideration in the weeks and months to come.
Again, this wasn't surprising.
We knew after the leaked opinion that that's where this was going.
In fact, many of us had the suspicion that something along these lines would take place, considering the Supreme Court was stolen.
A reminder, and I don't think I have to actually remind anybody of this, but it's important to do so, That Mitch McConnell was able to steal a Supreme Court seat and change the balance of the court, possibly for an entire generation.
It is a A daunting moment.
The way that our institutions are constructed is in order for a small minority of people to overwhelm the greater majority.
That was intentional from the very beginning.
The way that the Founding Fathers constructed things.
Of course, to those ends, we have the Electoral College.
We have the original composition of the Senate and the remaining composition of the Senate.
And the Supreme Court, which now has a group of absolutely radical reactionary justices who have been put there by a political party, the Republican Party, that is not only historically unpopular, but in the past few presidential elections has only managed to win a plurality of the vote once.
In modern elections since 2000.
It is a development that is.
So infuriating.
There is no electoral process for holding these judges accountable.
And they have been put in place.
After a decades long project.
That includes the ideology of originalism that has been funded by a, and tell me if you've heard this one before, a vast network of right wing libertarian minded anti-democratic donors.
It has become a poison that has absolutely coursed through the American judicial system at almost every single level.
And now we are on the other side of an absolutely new era, which we have to talk about in just a moment.
But before we do, much more on what we're actually dealing with at this point, along with Alito's opinion, Clarence Thomas, who, you know, we've been talking about for the past few weeks on this podcast, is not particularly interested in doing his job, except for in this case, Thomas, or maybe one of his clerks, wrote an agreeing opinion.
In which he called other decisions, other precedents, quote unquote, demonstrably erroneous.
This includes the right for legal contraception, the gay marriage decision, and gay rights in general.
This agreement was not for our benefit, but meant as a signal to the other side of this project, which is this right-wing movement to have Supreme Court justices in the Supreme Court and to have right-wing litigators and governments and forces to introduce
cases into the system that can make their way up to the Supreme Court so that they can get a preferential ruling.
This was more or less a big giant neon sign that said, bring us the cases.
We'll get rid of contraception.
We'll get rid of gay marriage.
We'll get rid of gay rights.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the decision, one of the most momentous moments in a very long time.
I'll just put it that way, and we'll speak more about that in a bit.
President Joe Biden gave a speech.
I'll be honest with you, I wasn't expecting much from it.
I was still underwhelmed.
He called it a sad day, said that it was an extremist decision and as anybody who pays any amount of attention could have predicted, his solution was show up to the polls in November.
A multitude of fundraising emails went out from the Democrats almost immediately.
We covered this Already on the Muckrake Podcast that this was the big focus as a reaction.
They wanted to make sure that the moment this decision came down they had those fundraising emails just shot out of a cannon so they can take advantage of the shock and the anger and the fear in order to make as much money as possible.
My contacts within the Democratic Strategist class, they are very tired of this.
They're getting more tired by the day.
I've talked to a few who are considering leaving the profession altogether because they don't understand anymore what they're raising money for.
It feels more like an ongoing grift.
Nancy Pelosi was arguably the first Democratic politician to get in front of a camera and react to Roe v. Wade.
Pelosi gave a really shook presser briefing.
At one point her earring fell off.
She seemed like she was close to tears.
And she read a poem.
And it was a poem that has been read multiple times.
Because a lot of these gestures are just being repeated.
There's not a whole lot of room to say or do much more.
It's sort of the Democratic equivalent of thoughts and prayers at this point.
And in the middle of this presser, because of the timing of the ruling, Pelosi had to turn very quickly from talking about extremist, radical Republicans To start touting the bipartisan gun safety bill that had been passed.
It is, um... You know, I'm searching for a word.
It's not just underwhelming.
It's, um... It's offensive.
Really, really offensive.
I am a critic of a lot of these things, of the political institution, the way the media and the political class treat all of these things.
They had a really long time to prepare for this.
The Democratic Party had been outmaneuvered by the Republican Judicial Project and pretty much every other project for that matter.
They had lost the judiciary.
They had lost the Supreme Court.
The opinion had even leaked.
And the best thing that they had to offer was to come out and say how terrible it was and ask for money and tell people to vote in November.
Meanwhile, I don't know how you can make the argument that the way to deal with this is to vote November when, number one, you have had a majority in Congress and you still are incapable of explaining to people why you can't pass your agenda, why it keeps getting stopped.
You have no interest whatsoever in pointing out the fact that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are absolutely bought by special interests and they're not the only ones.
That there are many Democrats who, even if there was a larger majority in the Senate, wouldn't be interested in necessarily moving beyond the filibuster because many of them are bought and sold by this stuff and it isn't necessarily one of their priorities to do it.
Also, number two, there's no plan.
There should have been a plan immediately.
Elect us and we will do X. Here's the plan.
Look at it.
Take a glance at it.
Here's the platform.
And meanwhile, what I am hearing again from the strategist and consultant class is that some people are even thinking, man, this isn't even something that we need to campaign on.
In fact, because all they're worried about is this mythical white swing voter, You know, if we actually make Roe v. Wade and codifying Roe v. Wade into law, that might actually turn off that swing voter.
It's funny, isn't it, that this made-up swing voter, always somehow or another, seems to stand in the way of any sort of a progressive or even tolerant idea.
It's almost like that is a projection of what they actually care about and what their actual priorities are, and that this made-up figure that they can't prove exists, and my God, they wouldn't be able to get them to vote for them anyway, that this person is probably a projection of their actual ideas and what they actually believe in.
On top of that, I want to point out how utterly infuriating it is to tell people That they're going to need to vote in November, and that's going to make all the difference.
And meanwhile, in all of these red states, they've been working overtime to disenfranchise people, to put in election officials who want to overthrow the system, who want to fix elections.
And they haven't put forward a plan, and they haven't particularly made an effort to ensure that that disenfranchising and those election fixings aren't neutralized.
I have been irate about this for days now.
I'm going to go to the next video.
I'm disappointed even though I don't expect very much.
It really takes something at this point for me to be surprised and actually thoroughly disappointed because I have just recalibrated what I expect from these people.
And I gotta tell you, it is, um...
It's really bad.
It's really, really bad for this thing to come down.
For millions of people, millions of women, to be marginalized, to be turned into second class citizens, officially, I mean unofficially, they always have been.
For them to be put in danger and for them to go through the trauma of living in a nation that has just absolutely slapped them and spit in their face.
There are a lot of very terrified people.
In fact, there's a lot of people right now who aren't able to get the reproductive care that they need.
They're being told by the government that they have to carry children that come from abuse, that come from incest, and on top of that, just births that they don't want to have.
And meanwhile, this is just continually turned into a political chess piece.
There are real actual human suffering here.
And the best they have is, well, you should come out in November and vote harder.
I'm not telling you to not vote for Democrats because my God, the Republican Party is an extremist reactionary authoritarian movement that we need to talk more about in just a second.
But it's so offensive and something has to change.
This party is not up to this fight.
These leaders are not up to this fight.
I know that's me being a broken record on this subject, but it's just simply true.
They're not up to this.
Meanwhile, Americans around the country have been coming out in protest.
We've seen incidents in which drivers have mowed them down in their motor vehicles, which is something that we've seen before and come to expect.
And red states have codified into law, basically giving people carte blanche to commit vehicular manslaughter.
We've seen the state react with more aggression and more preparedness to these protests than even what they were doing on January 6th when an insurrection tried to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
In the fight that is to come, and I don't want to mince words here, I don't want to minimize what's getting ready to happen because we have to be honest about this and we have to be prepared for it.
In the fight that's getting ready to come, you're going to have to get used to state-sponsored violence.
It doesn't matter what the rulings are.
It doesn't matter how reactionary it gets.
It doesn't matter how extreme it gets.
They are there in terms of law enforcement and state-sponsored force to ensure order.
People have been arrested.
People have been brutalized.
People have been beaten.
People have been injured.
And that's not going to stop.
I I have been dismayed to a certain extent.
Much along the same lines as what I've spoken about in previous episodes.
There was a time in my life, and I was thinking about that this weekend, where I was part of a feminist group back when I was in college, marching to protect Roe v. Wade and to fight for more equality.
If I could go back in time and tell that younger version of myself, or maybe even a version of myself from just a few years ago, before I started getting deeper and deeper into politics and understanding exactly how things worked, and even observing how this current culture works, because we've been atomized to the point where the unthinkable now is happening.
If I could go back in time and tell myself that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned in 2022, I think my past self would have expected massive protests that brought this country to an absolute standstill.
People are out there putting themselves on the line.
They're putting their well-being and their safety and their health, their economic status, everything.
They're putting all that on the line.
But to a large extent, As I worried about in previous episodes.
The response shows.
That the blue red divide.
This balkanization that has taken place in the United States of America.
It has shown that a lot of people.
And we've seen hints of this.
We've heard it before we fought back against it.
That some of these blue state people who will be quote unquote unaffected because everybody is affected by this because it literally makes the country crueler, more regressive, reactionary and more authoritarian.
Everybody is affected by this, but the people who believe that they're unaffected by this.
Have largely voiced their displeasure.
But also looked at this as a problem for the red states.
Meanwhile.
You have a lot of people in the red states who have absolutely no idea what to do right now.
They're lost and they're scared.
It's awful.
Absolutely awful.
Everything that we have seen over the past few days tells me that the people involved, particularly the tastemakers, the political class, the media class, they are prepared to live with this.
There is no plan right now to codify Roe.
There are certainly people who are fighting for this.
And by the way, bless Elizabeth Warren, who is out there just absolutely tearing up the tracks, screaming about how this is awful.
But the political and media class, to the large extent, are preparing to live with this.
I said last night, Sunday night, during my bourbon talk, I said that we've officially entered a new era.
We had gone from the New Deal consensus, a belief that the government should take a role in people's lives and it should regulate capitalism.
It should have programs that help people and create a better and fairer society.
We moved from that New Deal consensus and order into a neoliberal consensus and a neoliberal order in which austerity was the ideology of the day.
The idea that the government should help you at all is just absolutely repugnant and disgusting.
You should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
And if you're not able to take care of yourself and if you can't afford a better life, well, guess what?
You've got a pretty piss poor life coming your way.
The neoliberal consensus is continuing, but right now, at this moment, it is mutating into a new order.
A regressive, reactionary, authoritarian order.
The one that I have been warning about now for years.
What the court is doing, and we'll get into the socioeconomic reasons for it on another day and get way more in depth.
And if you want to hear about that right now, go and check out the bourbon talk that I did last night, Sunday night, June 26th.
The socioeconomic reasons and the agenda of the Republican Party mixed with what's happening in this captured, corrupted Supreme Court and judicial system is currently enjoying incredible momentum in rolling back the progress of the 20th century.
A reminder that these people who are part of this movement literally believe that multiculturalism, pluralism, Human rights.
Human liberty.
Individual rights.
That these are weaknesses.
That representative democracy is a weakness.
Liberal democracy is a weakness.
That these were just conspiracies to hurt the nation.
And what's needed, of course, is a group of white, wealthy, evangelical men to tell us how we should live and to dictate our morals and how we live our lives.
Before I recorded this, the Supreme Court just sided with a football coach who wasn't allowed to make a public display of praying with his players.
We're looking at a ruling that's coming up that will basically cripple the EPA and the federal government's ability to combat climate change or do anything on a state level to try and stave off that crisis.
We're now looking, of course, at getting rid of contraception, gay marriage, gay rights.
You're going to see even the last vestiges of the support state, the so-called welfare state, that is going to go away.
The social safety net is just hanging by a thread and they are going to cut that thread if nobody does anything about it.
They have the momentum right now, which is what I've warned about in the past, that things are starting to break down.
The explanation that they give, of course, is a mystification.
The idea that evil and satanic powers have held sway over America.
After all, that's what abortion was about, right?
It wasn't about individual autonomy or women having equal rights or the ability to make their own choices.
It was satanic evil.
And all this satanic evil, both in the form of abortion and gay rights and individualism and the culture that we live in, that these things are affronts to the Christian God.
And the Christian God has been offended and that is the reason we are in decline.
That is what the authoritarian movement tells you because they don't want to actually get into the actual reason why this country is in decline.
And that is because, following the New Deal order, neoliberalism took the brakes off of capitalism and supercharged it, creating a vast inequality that has corrupted our government and has led to one terrible decision after another.
They obfuscate that.
They create this mythology, this narrative, this fairy tale.
And what they're going to do is they're going to roll back all of the progress of the 20th century and try and deal a final death blow to liberalism.
The idea that everybody should be able to worship however they want and that religion shouldn't be the main control of society.
The founders, even though they created an absolutely hierarchical society that benefited white wealthy men, they created this country because they saw what damage that religion could do and what hierarchical hereditary rule could do.
They're going to roll back that as much as humanly possible.
Meanwhile, The response outside of the political class and outside of the citizenry, and we'll talk more about that in a second.
The response has centered around what else in the neoliberal era people looking to corporations to take the lead because that's what neoliberalism is promoted.
We want corporations to take up our fight for us.
We want them to be the champions, right?
Because all they do is constantly sell themselves as virtuous and tolerant and progressive.
Well, I'm here to tell you, number one, that these corporations are not opposing this.
I mean, they'll gesture towards opposing this.
But it's not like they're trying to put any pressure on the system because what they actually care about is profit.
Everything else is public relations.
They're not on your side.
They're not your friends.
Right now, corporations are lining up not to say that they're not going to do business in states that ban abortion.
Oh my God, could you imagine?
That might actually make a difference, particularly in this neoliberal environment.
Instead, they are lining up to say, hey, guess what?
If you are an employee of ours and you live in one of these reactionary oppressive states, we'll help pay for you to travel to get an abortion elsewhere.
First of all, who in the hell wants to tell their employer what they want to do with their bodies?
It's disgusting.
It's offensive.
And in fact, it's so awful and intrusive that it'll probably, even if they do offer this money, people probably won't take advantage of it because of how disgusting it is.
But on top of that, like, they probably had an actuary sit down and figure out, man, we're getting a ton of free publicity by saying this, or we'll take a hit if we don't say this.
And on top of that, it also helps if they go ahead and pay for these things, because it means they don't have to pay for things like maternity leave.
Because I have to tell you, in all of these situations, they are looking for a way to increase profit.
That's it.
They're not your friends.
They're not on your side.
This speaks to me as to what this new order is going to look like.
I always use the example of the premium lane in an interstate or a parkway, you name it.
You pay extra, you don't have to sit in traffic with everybody else.
If you think of America as a standard, the same way that a streaming company has standards in which you try and watch your shows, but every couple of minutes it gets broken up by minutes and minutes of advertising.
But you could pay extra and get rid of that advertising and not have to deal with it.
We're now looking at a situation where if you live in blue states, if you have the money to do so, because many of them are so overpriced that you can barely afford an apartment or a house, Well, you're not going to have to worry about this.
So, don't even worry about what's happening down in the red states.
If you are a person with wealth in the red states, you're going to be able to go get an abortion.
You're going to know where to go.
You're going to be able to travel to other states.
In fact, there will probably be premium services that help you find out-of-state clinics for yourself, your children, the people you know.
If you're able to pay for it, you'll be fine.
Meanwhile, we have a new and developing underclass of people who are going to be damned to have children that they can't afford or they're not interested in having or are a result of abuse or incest.
That underclass is going to be exploited over and over and over again and the standard living in the United States of America is going to grow more and more oppressive.
Meanwhile, to go ahead and throw another log on this fire, tech companies have already been completely and obviously silent as people are asking them, hey, are you going to share internet and tracking data and metadata with authorities who want to punish providers or women seeking reproductive care?
They have an answer because they don't want you to know the answer.
Every one of these tech companies has been more than happy to work with authoritarian, oppressive regimes around the world.
They're desperate for it.
What do you need?
Do you need censorship?
Do you need a great firewall?
Do you need information on dissidents?
Just tell us what you need because we need to get into that market.
Of course these big tech companies are going to work with authoritarianism.
In fact, they'll probably power the oppression.
It's disgusting that this is becoming an employment perk.
That this is becoming a premium service because that's exactly how neoliberalism handles everything.
Give yourself opportunities for new markets.
Give yourselves opportunities for new profits.
We're in a new era.
I said this last night, this new era means the tactics have to change.
We've been building solidarity, we've been talking with others, we've been building communities that are on the same page, that can trust one another, that can take care of one another.
We've been building that and we have to keep continuing to build solidarity.
But I have to tell you, we are in for a hell of a battle.
No one's going to save us.
We have to save ourselves.
And the only means of saving ourselves is to continue building solidarity and finding an opportunity for a people-led grassroots movement.
This would take a lot of different forms.
It would involve a lot of different people and a lot of different causes that would come together.
But the main purpose would be to fight authoritarianism, to fight corruption, to fight money in politics, to break this oppressive grip that this movement and its donors and the wealthy have over the state of our lives.
It sounds overwhelming and it sounds frightening because it is overwhelming and it is frightening.
But I'm here to tell you that we don't have a choice and it is achievable.
If you look around the country and the world right now, there are ascendant labor movements, there are ascending leftist movements that are challenging the neoliberal order.
We have been taught that this is a spectator sport, something that we watch when we're looking to be entertained, or when we're looking to find heroes who we think are going to take care of it.
A Biden, a Pelosi, a Schumer, a Mueller.
We're going to have to get in the game.
We don't have any choice.
And time's running out for us to do something about it.
Because the oppressive authoritarian regime that we've been talking about, that we've been warning about, it's settling in.
And the momentum is on their side.
We don't have much of a choice.
So the game is changing.
It's time to get educated about what is what to understand history, how these things were put together and how they've been defeated or troubled in the past.
And on that note, let's go talk to Lily Geismar.
All right, everybody, as promised, we are here with Lily Geismar, who is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College.
And the author of the excellent new book, Left Behind, The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
I just want to tell everybody that this is a really, really important book and it does what I'm always looking for in a book and what I'm always looking for in terms of educating myself, which is taking a story that many of us know and really getting into the nuts and bolts of the thing.
And I got to tell you, Lily, I think you absolutely did it with this book.
Oh, well, thank you so much.
That's really, really kind of you to say.
And as a fellow author, you know how hard it is to often translate things or what people are going to get from it.
So it's really rewarding to hear that.
So the topic, to give everybody the introduction, I don't think I don't think it could be more relevant to the modern moment and really starting to explain this political environment that we're in.
That, you know, on first glance, if you're going through conventional history or conventional narratives, it seems very strange.
Like, why is the Democratic Party the way that it is?
And, you know, why do they go in certain ways?
I was wondering if you could go ahead and start before we get into the stuff that's actually in the book.
What is it that led to you wanting to document this major, major change within the Democratic Party, both politically but also ideologically?
I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.
No, I am.
You know, I've been throughout my academic career and have been really interested in questions around sort of the changes of the Democratic Party.
And there's often a story that gets told about the kind of the Democrat story, which is the story of kind of a rise and fall narrative of the of kind of their rise in during the New Deal and then sort of the 1950s and 60s and the story of like rapid decline.
That then leads to the Democrats being kind of just defensive and weak in the kind of in the era since 1970s, really in response to the sort of dominance of the rise of the right.
And my first, the first book I wrote, which was based on my dissertation, and so I was working on this for a long time, is about the suburban liberals and the Democratic Party's transformation, sort of the transformation of its base from kind of union workers in the north to suburban sort of the transformation of its base from kind of union workers And it was a study of Boston.
And working on that part, and it sort of ends the 1970s, 1980s.
And I was interested in the kind of next era of that story.
And while I was working on it, and so I was in, it was focusing on Massachusetts, I became really interested in the career of Michael Dukakis, which sounds to most people like super boring and like the biggest loser in American politics.
But he, the thing that fascinated me, and sort of Mike Dukakis often gets told is this kind of Massachusetts liberal, and that's why he lost.
But the real story of Dukakis was actually the ways in which he became elected and and then also gained the nomination.
The Democratic Party in 1988, based on the idea of the Massachusetts Miracle, which was this idea of kind of rebounding, sort of galvanizing and putting a lot of investment in the tech industry, but also using a lot of these kind of market-based solutions to solve problems.
And so I became really fascinated in understanding that transformation of the Democratic Party, of how it sort of turns to the private sector.
both in terms of ways of kind of building growth, economic growth, but also in terms of using market solutions to solve problems.
And so that was the kind of the questions that drove me to studying this book, to work on this book.
The other thing that really, I would say, sort of animated my thinking about it was the fact that I noticed, especially amongst my own students and other people, this idea of kind of this growing mainstream faith in the market and the private sector to do good.
And thinking about how the Democratic Party itself started to sell, was selling that message and where the history of that came from.
So those are the kinds of things I was.
interested.
And I started working in 2014.
So that at the kind of apex of the Obama years.
So that was so central to kind of Obama's message.
So I want to think about the longer history of that.
Yeah.
So I want to go ahead and try and listen, we're going to be all over the place in this thing, but let's try and do a little bit chronologically to tell this story.
Going back into the late 1970s during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, of course, you have a stagflation, you start having sort of the collapse of the New Deal consensus.
Going back into the late 1970s during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, of course, you have a stagflation.
You start having sort of the collapse of the New Deal consensus.
And you start looking at the beginning of neoliberalism and austerity politics starting to sort of seep into basically creating this new consensus.
And that is definitely driven home, of course, in the 1980s with the success of Ronald Reagan, who obviously not only defeated Jimmy Carter handedly, but in the 1984 election just blew everybody away, a total landslide.
And it leads to this shift, not necessarily in terms of ideology within the Democratic Party, but sort of a changing of the guard in terms of tactics and priorities, candidates.
Can you talk a little bit about that moment and sort of the Democrats who are waiting on deck, who are starting to make an appeal to move the party, to move away from these traditional sort of bases and concerns?
Yeah, so there's this series of Democrats who emerge Coming into kind of national prominence in the 1970s, who use a sort of series of different names.
They're first called the Watergate Babies because they arrive in the aftermath of, or they win in 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate.
And then they get called the Atari Democrats, the neoliberals, and then finally the New Democrats.
And all of those names signal a kind of rejection of the old Democratic Party, both in terms of its kind of electoral strategy and coalition, the base of its coalitions in terms of the kind of New Deal coalition, but also in terms of its approach to political economy and sort of the relationship between government and politics.
And one of their real beliefs, and so as you as you pointed out, the 1970s were a time of of tremendous economic recession, actually very much paralleling some of the problems that were the economy's facing today.
And one of the biggest issues was this kind of the question of what was happening in the mass unemployment in manufacturing and this kind of traditional industries.
And the new Democrats, or the Atari Democrats as they were then called, believe that Basically, the party's future and the economy's future was not on trying to kind of shore up older industry.
So, turning to like steel and cars, electronics and those kinds of things.
But those could all be kind of that manufacturing could all be sent overseas, but instead to kind of focus on what gets to be known as the new economic sectors of tech.
finance and trade.
And so that that was really the heart of the future.
And the party should sort of focus itself on kind of trying to create those sectors.
And that also aligns with the kind of electoral strategy of focusing on those voters.
And so moving away from the kind of focus on labor as the heart of the party, and instead on more kind of upper middle class, knowledge based workers, and especially kind of suburban moderates who'd been kind of drifting towards the Republican Party.
So the combination of those two strategies really sort of come to converge in In the early 1980s.
And as you mentioned, and kind of, it's not just in react, it's not sort of this defensive reaction to Reagan.
And one of the things I really try to argue in the book is that there's often this idea that kind of the Democrats embrace of market oriented approaches, and the private sector was all in kind of response to the Republicans, so that it was like sort of taking what the Republicans were doing and trying to sort of reclaim it to claim it in some capacity.
They really believed in this.
And they really believed that kind of you could if you if you If you sort of stimulated economic growth and also another kind of key piece of this was that they felt that the federal government had gotten become too bloated and especially the kind of social welfare state had become too bloated.
But if you kind of retool those you could you could use the private sector and private sector tools to solve traditional Um, to sort of address traditional, um, democratic or liberal ideals of equality and opportunity.
Um, and so that was really at the heart of this kind of vision and who comes to first embody it is actually, um, Gary Hart in the 1984 election.
And those are very much sort of what he ran on.
Um, he came, he came in second and then 1984, um, democratic primary.
And then the ideas are become to really coalesce in the formation of the democratic leadership council, which, which was founded directly after.
Yeah, so when I was writing my last book, I was getting into the DLC formation and there was this push that Al Fromm was making basically in this idea of quote unquote reality therapy.
The idea that Democrats were completely delusional about the idea that they could continue business as usual.
And you have this basically a pushback against other Democrats who might even start to sort of trouble that that building momentum.
And one of the characters who and it's strange because before I started looking into deeper politics, the Jesse Jackson was always sort of around politics and it was always treated, you know, reverentially.
But people really, I don't think, have a real understanding of how Jesse Jackson's personality.
Political project and run for the presidency was a massive, massive thing.
But on top of that, you also see a pushback and the idea that something like the Rainbow Coalition with Jesse Jackson or his political run is actually not just wrongheaded, but sort of delusional, right?
It's almost an insane prospect.
And you actually start to see a little bit of jostling or civil war within the Democrats over Where they're going to go, whether or not they're going to, like you were saying, almost, you know, adopt Reaganism with the human face, or if there's going to be a reinvigoration of these old constituencies and base, right?
Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right.
I think it's a really interesting question because so often the story of the kind of 1980s, especially the Democratic side, is told as the story of complete failure.
And so you have these two presidential races where the Democrats lose pretty decisively.
And so Clinton sort of comes as the kind of reaction to that.
What I found really fascinating relooking at those moments is the fact that they actually were show a party really at a crossroads and these kind of tensions emerging where it wasn't a foregone conclusion as to which direction it would go.
And there were certain possibilities.
And I think absolutely the Jesse Jackson campaign really symbolizes this kind of moment of an alternative pathway for the Democratic Party and sort of in especially in this idea of kind of Both galvanizing underrepresented constituencies, but also creating almost like a sort of social democratic platform to speak to their vision.
But I think the really interesting piece of the idea of the Rainbow Coalition is the fact that it brought together so many different groups.
And there's and so Jackson Jackson himself is a really interesting figure.
But what is also comes from this is that he becomes kind of the foe or foil to the Democratic Leadership Council.
And they have all these kind of famous these these big moments that happen at one of them.
He and he always he sort of like to poke the bear to he arrives at all of the DLC conventions and stuff like that.
And they get these fights.
But in those fights, I think, is this bigger question about kind of what what direct what What strategy the Democratic Party should take and kind of who and who should be its coalition.
And so the reality therapy ideas that the Alfram approach, which gets which is in many ways comes from.
This memo, this famous memo that the DLC and Alfrom commissioned William Galston and Elaine K. Mark to write, that's called The Politics of Evasion.
And basically, they felt this idea that the Democrats were delusional in the Jesse Jackson approach of trying to kind of reach out to underrepresented voters.
And instead, what the party should do is try to go after people they know are sort of sure thing voters.
And that's primarily It's somewhat working class white voters but it's primarily upper middle class moderate suburbanites in kind of sunbelt states who've been drifting towards who had been drifting towards the
Republican Party and that's very much I mean, I think that that idea this that pathway that that has been this fight that the Democrats are having right now, but in many ways since the 1980s, the Democratic Party has taken the approach the approach of the DLC and with a few exceptions, but of trying to go after who they see as kind of as sort of sure thing voters as opposed to trying to kind of reach out to.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And one of the reasons I love this book so much is, again, you know, there's sort of this just absolutely smooth, time-life, CNN documentary storytelling that always becomes sort of conventional wisdom.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And one of the reasons I love this book so much is, again, it, you know, there's sort of this just absolutely smooth time life CNN documentary storytelling that always becomes sort of conventional wisdom.
And in this story, there is this idea.
Bill Clinton, of course, comes up in the 1990s, wins the presidency.
And, you know, basically the Republicans had painted him as a socialist leftist who's just absolutely going to change the entire system.
And within that conventional history, eventually he loses a midterm and Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, there's so much pressure on him.
And then Dick Morris knocks on the door and makes a deal with the devil.
And suddenly he becomes a centrist.
But one of the things that I think you did an incredible job of nailing down is that that idea of Bill Clinton as being a neoliberal or being a centrist or being a market person, this isn't about reacting to the Republican pressure.
It's actually his ideology.
It's who he was before he was president, who he was as president, and who he was post-presidency, correct?
Absolutely.
And that's that's really what one of the main goals of the book was to show that this is something that Bill Clinton absolutely believed in.
So it wasn't just the kind of triangulation story of like in like I think there's this idea, too, that in at the heart of the secret part of Bill Clinton that's like goes back to his McGovern days is this like Radical socialist, and that was going to come out somehow.
And instead, he was someone who firmly believed in the idea that the private sector and markets could help could help people in poverty.
And I think the part that's important about it, I mean, and what I wanted to try to disentangle in the other piece of this book, it tries to do is kind of show that there's a oftentimes Bill Clinton, when it gets described as a neoliberal, it gets he gets sort of lumped in with Reagan and Milton Friedman.
And his ideas, his and the sort of DLC more broadly, these ideas of the market and what the market could do were different than Reagan and Friedman.
I think in some ways the outcomes were somewhat similar, but the intent was actually different.
They really saw it as a pathway to do these kind of traditional liberal things of helping people in need.
And I think one of the things the book tries to track is the consequences of that thinking.
But I think you're absolutely right.
I think what you see Playing out through Clinton's entire career is this thinking, and actually I find his post-presidency, which the book only touches on briefly, but is really illustrative of the work of the Clinton Foundation, which very much uses that same model of kind of using the private sector to help poor people or people defined as being in need.
So very much is sort of a continuation of those ideas.
Yeah, and on that subject, I want to talk about the intent and the operation of it.
Of course, in the 1990s, we see the development of this new economy and we start moving beyond industrialization, of course, free trade.
and global capitalism erupts.
We have, you know, all of these industries that start going to other countries in order to take advantage of lower wages and non-existent regulations.
Meanwhile, America is sort of expected within the Clinton sphere to sort of become, you know, almost the information hub or the consumer hub, and is supposed to sort of grow beyond that.
I was wondering if you could talk about a little bit of where the difference is between, like you were saying, the original neoliberals and, you know, this idea of free trade or these deals was originally cooked up even back before Ronald Reagan even ran for the presidency.
I mean, I mean, these things were being bandied about for a while.
Of course, NAFTA gets negotiated during the Bush presidency.
Clinton is, of course, the one to sign it.
But if you go back and I don't know, I have to assume you've looked at these two.
I have spent way, way too many hours of my life reading pre-NAFTA speeches from Bill Clinton.
And the literal idea is that this is going to be an opportunity that is hopefully going to lift a bunch of people up.
It's going to lead to more prosperity.
It's going to make people's lives better.
And it sort of unleashes, I would go ahead and say, a monster that we're still dealing with the consequences of.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that there's a piece, I mean, it is interesting that kind of the, that a lot of the language around and how Clinton thought about or framed NAFTA is this idea it was going to help people.
And what's interesting, actually, I found is initially it's actually this idea it's going to help people in the United States.
Like this is going to kind of, it's going to be, it's going to help consumers because you're going to have access to better goods.
There's this whole, the relentless, the other thing I find, the relentless, Democratic selling of the idea of worker retraining so all of these workers who were once producing goods can now kind of go to get a job and they can work in the tech industry where they'll they'll have their, you know, they'll they'll have access to a higher, um, higher paid job and more chance for advancement.
But then I mean what you start to see in them by the time Clinton's president after enough is past the way that trade and globalization gets talked about is this is sort of helping the rest of the world too.
And this is going to be the mechanism through which we sell we sort of through free markets we can sell democracy.
But I think that that idea that it'll kind of there's a there's always this kind of social welfare dimension connected to these ideas of the kind of promotion of trade and that I mean, I do think Bush, George W. Bush does take on some of some of that law.
I mean, it pushes that logic in some ways to an ultimate extreme.
But it's it is distinctive from the kind of Reagan or Friedman approach, which is kind of the free market for the sake of the free market.
This is this there's this constant idea that this is going to help.
This is going to help people.
And I do, I do, you know, as, as I, and I, I look, I am well aware of all the kind of devastating consequences of this.
And I think they, and I, the book tracks them, but I do think it's really important that he, like that Clinton really believed in it and really didn't think that this would be the kind of the solution.
And another kind of critical example of the book looks at this with his welfare and the, with welfare reform, there's a place where the idea of it is like the jobs will help that get, get putting people in jobs will actually help them.
And that's another thing that sort of throughout Clinton's career, he believed in.
And so those are those things, this long, these long tradition.
So similarly to the kind of welfare to work with something that Clinton was experimenting with in the early 1980s in Arkansas.
In the book, I look at how he brought Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, to Arkansas to do microenterprise programs.
But similarly, Clinton was doing, was actually sort of a pro free trade advocate as early as the 1980s.
So these are long parts of his kind of thinking.
And the presidency gives a chance for Clinton and the people around him to implement a lot of these ideas. - Yeah, and the difference in these sort of philosophies, I mean, you know, if you go with the Friedman or even Hayek, I mean, they literally believed, as neoliberals, they believed in this old Adam Smith invisible hand idea, as neoliberals, they believed in this old Adam Smith invisible hand idea, which means you should You don't have to worry about other people.
You don't have to worry about the good of other people.
The market will automatically take care of that.
In fact, I mean, even Hayek was totally fine with authoritarian regimes and believed it was in people's best interest.
There is a belief, and I think that this is important, and I'd love to hear what you have to say about this.
There is something important about that sort of liberal ideology that within this system, you can let the market go free.
You can let people get immense profits.
You can even go ahead and, you know, sort of make an economy or make a government that prioritizes the accumulation of wealth in a few hands.
But you still want to believe, and it seems like Bill Clinton still, as he talks about this and as he still, you know, engages in all of his activities, seems to want to believe that there will be some sort of an empathy or a drive for good that will sort of make this market, which is actually uncaring, actually start to help people.
Does that sound right?
Like there's some sort of a hope or an aspiration for the market to actually show some sort of empathy or care?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's this idea that and this is the kind of the book looks at instead of in some ways calling instead of neoliberalism, doing well by doing good, which is this idea, this is the core thinking and kind of that we think of this as like that idea is timeless, but it actually it was very much an idea codified in the 1990s.
And this idea that you could do the same sort of things going together.
So the market, so using them, unleashing the market to do good and that it can be if directed in the right ways.
And so I think that's another difference, like the the sort of New Democrat kind of neoliberal idea is that there's still it's still an idea of government as catalyst.
So government kind of directs the market in various different directions, unlike the kind of full free hand of the kind of invisible hand of the kind of Adam Smith approach.
You still need government to kind of do that, those ideas, but that you can kind of motivate market actors to do things that will help people that they can both kind of make a profit and same idea of kind of win-win.
And so there's so In the book, I look at programs like the kind of corporate social responsibility as a sort of solution to sweatshop abuse, or this program that Clinton ran at the end, the Clinton administration ran at the end of the administration called the New Markets Program, which was this idea that kind of the thinking about impoverished, distressed places in the United States, like rural and urban communities as kind of treat them the same way that the United States was treating parts of the global south as a kind of space for investment.
And so you could kind of bring investments, you could bring Walgreens or other kind of big companies to rural or highly distressed communities like East St. Louis and Illinois.
And that would, they would sort of make a profit, but they could also do good by giving people jobs and opportunities to spend money.
And so that's a lot of the kind of, I think, the thinking of kind of the market being doing good.
And I argue in the book, I actually think this Clinton, this sort of Clinton era idea has done more to kind of this notion of the market as a force for good than Milton Friedman did in some capacity.
It's and that can be seen through this kind of the selling of things like corporate social responsibility that you sort of see emerging in the in the 2000s and beyond in various different other various different other the rise of kind of all of these kind of social responsibility programs.
I think there's been backlash to it now, but I think it's also seen in the kind of tech utopia that came to dominate the kind of the 2000s and around there.
Well, and you know that the Milton Friedman thing, and I would invite anybody who's listening to this to go and look up a video of Milton Friedman who taped unbelievable amounts of episodes and lectures And it is it's bloodless.
It's absolutely cold ideology.
You know, who am I to take care of another person?
And if a person can't take care of themselves, well, then they deserve what they get.
And meanwhile, and I want to go and put this in the current context for people who are listening and start connecting these dots.
There is this new veneer that Clinton is absolutely essential in ushering in, which is the idea that you espouse empathy, you espouse care, you espouse concern about other people, and in a way that almost sort of obfuscates the cruelty of the system that's necessary to make this type of a system work in the first place.
Well, there's another kind of key piece of it, too.
And I think this goes to the kind of the poverty, the components of it is about addressing poverty and inequality, which is this idea of kind of celebrating particular kinds of poor people.
So throughout the Clinton era in particular, there was this kind of all and I think this this this goes on to today, but there's this kind of constant celebration of certain kinds of like that sort of the poor entrepreneur.
So I argue like instead of kind of treating poor women is really using the welfare queen metaphor.
There's a celebration of particular kinds of poor people like the poor woman who is able to start her own business or the kind of the charter school student who does really well.
And what that does is a kind of it.
It kind of creates a new separation between like the good and bad poor person.
So it says like those that were providing opportunities to these programs like in our in our other efforts to kind of slash the traditional social welfare programs.
There's new opportunities for that for the kinds of people who can succeed under a kind of meritocratic market based system.
But for other people who purportedly can't play by the rules, you're stuck with kind of strict austerity and also or like very punitive programs, because at the same time that things like the 1994 Crime Bill are being passed.
So that's the kind of new system under which this is thinking.
So it's like sort of empathy, but for a particular kind of person who's worthy of that kind of empathy, because they can play by the systems, they can play with the rules of market capitalism, basically.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the disturbing parts of all of this.
I mean, you know, I was just recording this episode talking about the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
And I think to go along with this, it's really important to draw the line to, you know, there are all these reactions to this oppressive, reactionary, authoritarian ruling by the Supreme Court.
And what you're seeing is a bunch of corporations that are absolutely crawling over each other to try and announce that they're willing to pay for travel for employees to go get abortions in other states.
It's actually become sort of a competition in terms of employee perks, but also a public relations bonanza to say, hey, I know we can't do anything about this, but, you know, we feel bad about it.
And meanwhile, instead of saying we oppose this, we're against it, which is sort of what this economy has created, it is now turned into, well, if we can't solve this thing, we'll offer premiums over here for certain people who can afford it or can get these jobs or train for these jobs.
That will now become part of the employee perks, almost like, you know, putting your health insurance and tethering it to your job.
Yeah, I mean, I think, and there's an interesting question about too, because it's like only people who work in certain kinds of industries and certain kinds of jobs.
And so if you, I haven't actually looked at that, but one of the things that I argue in the book is the ways in which the kind of Clinton system, what it sort of anticipates are things like promoting micro enterprise as a solution to welfare.
It never worked, but what it actually does is anticipates the gig economy.
So the places that are not in, I have not seen that like Lyft or Uber are saying like, we're going to give all of our drivers Access because they don't actually even really consider them employees.
And so there's like in all the ways that those kinds of things and maybe I will be proven wrong.
I didn't look that up that Uber and Lyft maybe have done that, but I don't think they have so.
I think there's a way that this that those ideas sort of only map on to the kinds of of intensive precarity and some of the problems of when you turn to the private sector to do the work that was once that is the responsibility of government.
And so if you think about the idea of sort of securing.
Reproductive rights and justice and access for people as a responsibility of government.
This idea that the private sector could sort of serve that role is where you create enormous gaps and create further hardship for people.
But I think the same thing goes for all the other times of kind of relying on the private sector to sort of fill in these kinds of roles, sort of leave people in an incredibly vulnerable and precarious position.
And in the book, what I look at is the ways in which sort of what that a lot of these programs like in the 1990s, it wasn't entirely clear because the economy was doing so well.
And so you really see it sort of starting to emerge in the 2000s and beyond as this that how unstable sort of focusing on the private sector to do to to serve a social welfare role can be when it cannot provide that kind of security and stability.
By the way, I checked on the Uber and Lyft thing.
It looks like they're saying they will for employees, but there's a real concern over what they mean by employees, because that is such an absolutely insidious invention, this idea of, you know, the contracted worker as opposed to the employer.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder.
No, it is.
And maybe so, but I'm here.
I mean, I should look it up.
I'm going to look it up after too, because I wonder if that's like the people, the people in the corporate offices of, um, of those companies, but as opposed to the kind of who they, and then their drivers, they don't see as, um, as, um, all the kind of, I was thinking like all the kind of various different places that precariat, which often do are often connected to these bigger corporate entities.
Yeah, and you know the the the motivators in all of this and you know I keep talking about the the premium lane on like a parkway or an interstate right like you pay an extra fee and as a result you don't have to deal with the traffic and this new economy creates in America this state where You have a lot of people who don't even have the means of necessarily paying for the roof over their head or their food.
And meanwhile, if you have the means, if you do win in the new economy, if you do get that education and you manage to get those jobs, even though those jobs are being weeded out by the same corporations that have been absolutely supercharged by this idea, you can pay to get away from those things.
You can pay to live a better, I guess, you know, decent kind of life.
But that right there is in place and has been in place since this changeover in order to motivate people to do better or to play by the rules.
Right.
Like this, this new economy basically creates a scenario where you have to motivate people to engage in it as opposed to maybe the old things that they used to do or the traditional things that their families used to do.
And one thing, I mean, I use the example from the book, but it has really stuck with me, is that the program that the Clintons instituted in Arkansas, of trying to bring microenterprise in, in the 80s, is actually illustrative of this larger thinking.
And it was brought into communities that had been devastated as factories had been Uh, uh, various different factories had been moved overseas and people were losing their jobs and this idea that like kind of their own welfare, but we could bring in, they could start their own businesses.
And so turn your, your business into your sort of hobby into a business was the kind of the mantra.
Um, and what they found that the program is not successful in Arkansas.
And one of the things they found is that most people actually didn't, we have this, this idea in the United States of being kind of an entrepreneurial society.
But what most people wanted actually was not to be an entrepreneur, but was to have the stability and security of a job at a factory.
So as kind of monotonous as that might be or sound terrible to some people, there's security in knowing that you're going to get a paycheck every day and have health benefits.
And so much of that has been taken away by this kind of focus on new economic sectors, which the Clinton administration Um, unleashed in very different ways, and I think did create absolute winners and losers, but created a system of kind of profound, um, both inequality, but also precarity and vulnerability, um, for, for the vast majority of people, um, who, um, who could not sort of succeed under these kinds of new rules.
Yeah, and just to finish this out, I just want to get your opinion on this.
You know, before we have this revolution or counter-revolution, whatever you want to call it, within the Democratic Party, the original base, of course, was organized labor.
It was underrepresented communities.
There was always a push to sort of reframe assistance from the government, whether that's redistribution of wealth or strengthening these programs that are leftovers from the New Deal coalition.
Of course, we move into this, which is, of course, market-based, which is where the Democratic Party still is.
And a lot of people still don't know that, and they still don't understand why the Democratic Party pushes the things it does, why it doesn't do the things it doesn't do.
I was wondering if you could just go ahead and just to wrap a bow on this, what do you think is the final legacy of the Clinton presidency now that we're seeing the consequences of all this, obviously, Obviously, we're living in the wake of it.
What would you say is the definitive legacy of this experiment and this change within the Democratic Party?
Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about it is that we now have this moment where you don't have, in many ways, like the sort of Clinton moment has passed.
And so you don't have Joe Biden out sort of selling charter schools and microenterprise as the kind of future.
Obama did do that to some, I mean, to even in some ways more than Clinton did, or as much as Clinton did.
But I do think the impact has been in policy.
Um, has been one, one kind of critical place and all of the ways that we've kind of seen this kind of evisceration of the social welfare state.
And it's not to say it's only the Democrats that did this.
I mean, I think that this has been a, this has been a real bipartisan effort, but that is, that is a sort of fundamental legacy of the Clinton, the Clinton era.
This notion that that can kind of be the solution to social welfare, that you can kind of bring in, you need to make government more efficient.
more.
And that all of that kind of logic and thinking, I think, has become really, really deeply embedded, both in terms of kind of policy.
And I do think also in the kind of Democratic Party's ethos.
I think the other kind of key piece is this notion of kind of going after safer voters to win elections and the kind of Clinton moment as being really important.
I think for the last 30 years, the Democratic Party has been wedded to the idea of this kind of Clinton success.
And I will say, I mean, one thing of going back and everyone should do this, because I think there's a way that we've sort of seen the sort of Clinton past his prime.
If you watch the kind of the videos from the 90s, he was a profoundly charismatic politician.
I mean, an incredibly effective politician.
So he the the the kind of model that he produced is not really a replicable model.
And I think that's been a huge, huge problem for the Democratic Party.
That's another thing I see as a kind of critical legacy is this notion of kind of of kind of investing in one particular candidate to win the presidency, as opposed to kind of thinking about a much more stable and and progressive coalition.
Yeah, it's more advantageous when you have a salesperson.
I mean, Obama was really good at this, of course, and was able to sort of reinvigorate that idea of what was possible in America and what you could do with a free market.
But it doesn't feel like it's being sold right now, so it becomes a pretty putrid product, right?
Yeah, I think that's the issue.
Like you need someone to sell it, sell it well, and to sell a kind of particular vision of kind of bringing people together that both of these, both of those candidates were effective in doing.
But I don't think that, that doesn't, that leads to maybe winning some elections, but I don't think it leads to either a stable, a stable sort of party coalition, nor does it lead to kind of policies that actually help those people, many of the people who voted for them.
So I think the other, I mean the other kind of key piece, now you're, now I'm just ranting, But the other kind of, or my listing off, I will say not ranting.
But I think the other key piece of this, and this goes to the book's title of Left Behind, I think one of the things is that the Clinton years and sort of relentlessly sold these kind of market-oriented solutions or sold the kind of Democrats would solve people's problems as the economy itself was like sort of rapidly shifting. I think one of the things is that the Clinton And I think that for many people, it became profoundly alienated with the Democratic Party.
And so either just didn't vote at all or turned to the Republicans and people like Trump.
So I think that's another actually legacy of this moment, which was, which is to kind of create sort of profound alienation from many sectors, which I think we, which I think in by 2016 became sort of unbelievably clear as both the left, people on the left and the right, were turning against this kind of vision of the Democratic Party, that that is the kind of legacy of Clinton.
Well, we've been talking to Lily Geismar, a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Left Behind the Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
I can't recommend this book enough.
If you want to understand how we've arrived at this moment and how we have this Democratic Party and consensus that we do now, you absolutely should pick this up.
Lily, where can the good people find you?
Anywhere you buy books, bookshop, or I'm told I've gotten some pictures that it's in bookstores, so I would go out and find the books there.
So wherever you like to purchase books, you should be able to find it.
Well, fantastic.
So we've been talking with Lily Geismar again.
Pick up Left Behind the Democrats' failed attempt to solve inequality.
We will be back on Friday with our Weekender episode.
If you want access to that, go over to patreon.com slash Montclair podcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
