ezra klein
Im Ezra Klein. This is The Ezra Klein Show.
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Before we begin today, some job creation were looking for a researcher on the show. If this is something you think youd be great at, that you have some experience in, that you can show us the way youve done it before, take a look at the job listing. We have a link in the show description today.
But for todays episode, go back a decade, and socialist is a dirty word in American politics. Today, its a pretty good brand, at least if youre in a pretty blue district. The bulk of the credit there, of course, goes to Bernie Sanders and his two presidential runs. But some of it goes to Jacobin, the socialist journal launched in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara that updated both socialist thinking and, I would say, the socialist aesthetic for a new generation of young leftists looking for ideas, for community, and for identity. But for all the progress, Sunkara, who is now both the founding editor of Jacobin, and the president of The Nation magazine got a lot of power over lefty journals in America is nervous.
The left has gotten enough power to drive narrative, but not enough to win many elections. Biden, not Sanders, won in 2020. Eric Adams, not Dianne Morales, won the 2021 primary for mayor among Democrats in New York City. In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, one of the most visible of the progressive lefty DAs he just got overwhelmingly recalled in the primary. So in a recent edition of Jacobin, titled, The Left in Purgatory, Sunkara warns against, quote, The path to political self-satisfaction, a marginality that is just large enough to sustain itself, but that will never be strong enough to move beyond permanent resistance. And then, he turns his attention and that of his journal to understanding why the left isnt winning, and whether the kind of highly ideological appeals to the highly educated that form the core of Jacobins brand may be part of the problem, may actually be preventing them from developing the working-class base that a successful left needs.
So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about where the left is now and where he thinks it needs to go next. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Bhaskar Sunkara, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
So you recently published an issue of Jacobin, titled, The Left in Purgatory. Tell me about that. How would you describe the state of the left today?
Well, the state of the left is far better than I could have imagined where it would be 10 years ago, in that were actually having a conversation about the state of the left. I feel like for a good chunk of modern American history, at least since the 70s, its been taken for granted that we were a country without a left, where the furthest left you could go in American politics was not even Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, but probably Jon Stewart, maybe, Al Gore.
And I think were in a much better position than we used to be. So even with some of the recent setbacks for the left, electorally, in the U.S., even with two Bernie Sanders defeats, were at a point where we can say that the left is a presence in American life. But the purgatory part comes in, because we are simultaneously too large to be wiped completely off the map by a few setbacks, but were also too small and too I say this as a member of the left, of course too incompetent in our ability to actually carry out our program, so were stuck in the space in between.
You have an interesting way, in the editorial you write in that issue, of describing that space in between. And I want to quote it here. You write, There is something dangerous about being large enough to be a political presence in parts of the country and a subculture for thousands of activists, but far too disorganized and powerless to carry out your political program. Why did you use the word, dangerous? What is dangerous about that in-between state?
I think the part thats dangerous for those of us on the left is the risk of self-satisfaction, or the risk of being able to basically spend the entirety of our lives in the left and around the left. I am a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Ive been less active in the past year, but there has been whole stretches where I could wake up on a Saturday and meet up with a friend from the Democratic Socialists of America, go to a canvas for a candidate we cared about, hang out afterwards, maybe in the evening, write something for a DSA-affiliated publication or for a pamphlet or some piece of literature or whatever else.
I could spend a huge chunk of my life in and around the left and actually doing useful things. But at the same time, we get so obsessed about small, little victories and silver linings and the feeling that things are pushing our direction, we ignore the fact that the right in America is organized and actually achieving huge amounts of victories and rollbacks of even rights that many of us took for granted, like Roe v. Wade, for instance, and doing that through their own mechanisms.
And also, you have, just in general, the center of the country, the political spectrum, feeling more threatened by criticisms from the right rather than from the left. And at the same time, its dangerous, because I think a lot of voters associate the left with power and blame us for things that we have no control of, and blame us for not being able to carry out our program, and feel, in general, more and more disenchanted from politics as usual.
So we are kind of gone from this outsider insurgent force that in 2016, in Sanders campaign, was actually able to win over some people who were disengaged from the political process and might have not even described themselves as liberals, to being, I guess, just a part of the political scene that is not getting much done for ordinary people.
Give me some examples of things that you feel the left might get blamed for wrongly.
Well, I think that there are certainly a host of policy ideas that the left has pushed for, that are sometimes wrongheaded. But I think one example you could look at the discourse and debate around Defund the Police. You can look at the discourse around critical race theory.
You would think that the left had control over policing policies in major cities in America. You would think that the left had control of our nations curriculum. You would think that the left had this overarching control of a lot of the things you could put into the bucket of the, quote unquote, culture war in the United States, when I think that the left is largely a weak outsider opposition force that has a few well-known figures.
We have our A.O.C.s, we have our Bernies. But in general, weve been locked out of power, and locked out, not just by the establishment in some kind of secret way, but locked out in part because we just dont have a social base attached to our project.
Thats the reason why Im saying the word, the left, instead of saying something like, the workers movement, like you would in certain other countries of the world where the political left and the broad organization of working-class people were one and the same for decades and decades in the 20th century. You just dont have that association in the United States today.
I want to put a pin in that question of the social base and who composes it, but I want to ask you one more question about that quote. Because I was thinking about what it might mean and came to a thought similar to, I think, what you just gestured at, which is that theres maybe an asymmetry in the power the left wields, which is to say that the left that is arisen around Bernie Sanders, around Jacobin, has a lot of narrative-setting power, a lot of media power, a lot of power to push ideas out into the ether, but then, as you say, not a lot of power to actually accomplish, execute, improve, modify the lived realities people are in.
Is that right? And is that part of the dangers? Is there something dangerous about having a lot of power over what people are talking about, but not a lot of power over what theyre actually experiencing?
I think thats exactly right, Ezra. And I would say that theres also a lot of danger in considering yourself just a rhetorical force. Because what do you do when youre not responsible to a constituency but you have this influence in the cultural sphere?
Well, you end up just maximalizing your rhetoric. If Joe Biden wants $4 trillion of spending, youll say you want $10 trillion. Theres a kind of rhetorical maximalism that comes from having a political worldview that, I think, for many people on the left, is too focused on expanding the Overton window the window of whats possible through our rhetoric and through our demands, instead of figuring out how to connect with and build a base and move them along to more progressive policies and rhetoric, and eventually, a very different, more humane world.
You wrote something else that relates to that, in this editorial, that I thought was interesting. You wrote, quote, The question we may have to ask ourselves in the years to come is whether some of our actions could be hastening, rather than reversing, the process of class dealignment. So beginning with the question of, what is class dealignment, can you unpack that for me?
Yeah, I think class dealignment is just simply the fact that we used to associate being poor, being working-class, having less in society, with the politics of redistribution, of these people get the franchise in many countries, the late-19th century, in the U.S., obviously, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, until people got the true franchise.
And the thinking was, OK, the people with less in a capitalist society are going to use this power to demand that the state redistribute wealth from the rich to the not-so-rich. And that redistribution could be in very direct forms. More often than not, itd be through the creation of a welfare state.
So the left-of-center parties around the world that were advocating for the creation of welfare states and redistribution tended to have the support of people with less not just less education, but less education, less wealth, less power, more generally. They used their collective power to overcome what they didnt have as individuals. There was kind of a common sense to that. But all around the world, what youre seeing now is that a lot of working-class people are either dropping out of the political process entirely. They feel like they cant get anything from politics, so theyre not bothering.
And some of them are actually voting for the political right, voting for parties that might be trying to reach them through cultural appeals, through enticing, sometimes even populist rhetoric, which fundamentally dont alter the distribution of resources in a society. And thats the danger of dealignment.
In the United States, we have had this problem for many, many years on the left. Education is one simple proxy for it. Obviously, its a little bit more complex than that, but we could see that voters without college degrees used to be a very, very strong part of the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party.
Now, voters without college degrees, especially white voters, are drifting towards the Republican Party. And as a result, the Democrats are not modulating their appeals to those people.
So I want to key in on something important you said there, which is that this is happening all around the world. And certainly in peer countries you look at Europe, you look at Canada Thomas Piketty, who was just on the show, along with coauthors, has done work looking at what they call the rise of a Brahmin left, right, this highly educated left.
Why do you think that is happening? What is behind this shift from a coalition of those who have less cultural and economic capital making up the foundation of the left, to it becoming a coalition of people who have more little capital, but particularly more educational and cultural capital?
Well, in the 20th century, the types of parties that captivated the attention of working-class people were deeply rooted parties. They were rooted in civil society. They were rooted in trade unions.
They were tied so closely with working-class life, that in some countries, every single tenement building might have had a representative from the labor party, a local resident who would knock on doors and whip the vote, and who would take problems their neighbors would have to their local MP or their local city councilor. So there was this deep connection between working-class people and their politicians.
To some degree, we had this in the United States in certain areas with political machines. And when we hear political machines, we think that its an entirely negative thing. And we hear the word, patronage, and we think its just a synonym for corruption.
But there was a sense of rootedness in a lot of areas where people felt like the Democratic party, for instance, was close to their needs, close to them, and an avenue that they could use to even up the odds, and navigate bureaucracy, and to figure things out. There was a deep sense of association. A union endorsement actually meant something back then. If your union told you, this is the list of candidates were supporting in this election, youd be more apt to help that. So thats gone now.
But also, once in power, those politicians were offering a model of growth tied to redistribution. So in the post-war period, up through the 70s, not just in the United States, but across Europe, you have Social Democratic parties, and you have the New Deal Democratic Party, overseeing high-growth rates and overseeing expansions of the welfare state going along with those growth rates.
It wasnt just an ideological quest of convincing people, one by one, that their interest was voting for the left, so they had more things, or they had representatives who, quote unquote, look like them, or spoke like them, or whatever else. It was tied to a real concrete program. And I think since the 70s, youve had a decline in that kind of either growth liberalism in the United States or social democracy in Europe, and as a result, politics has lost some of its material force.
So Im always a little skeptical of explanations that track an international trend but that seem like they have a lot of counterexamples. And so the story that left parties, kind of, across the Western world became to summarize it very quickly more neoliberal, right? They moved away from that kind of post-New Deal, mid-1950s consensus, common good politics, and towards this more market-oriented somewhat redistributive politics.
Its true in a bunch of individual cases, but politics, it seems to me, is competitive enough across a multi-country sample, that youd expect to see if that was a really bad way of doing politics, thered be a bunch of countries where left parties didnt do that, and really thrived.
But whats so striking to me about the turn of the left in many countries to being a much more highly educated coalition is, it really happens in virtually every country in the samples that I know of.
And that implies to me that its reacting to something or building on something that is more common, right? If it was just strategic mistakes by this party or that party, it seems very unlikely they would all be making the same strategic mistake at once, unless there was something that theyre commonly responding to.
So what do you see is the common force? If its that they stopped offering the agenda they should have offered, why did they all kind of do that at the same time?
Well, it wasnt rooted primarily in politics. I think it was rooted in an economic problem. It was rooted in the fact that the growth rates of the post-war period slowed down. Theres a variety of reasons. Why it slowed down in the 70s is up for debate. Part of it was just contingent factors like the OPEC oil shock, and the growth in globalization, which kind of made some of these models less feasible to continue. Some of it was the fact that labor was demanding really high wages and demanding lots of benefits.
And that was great when things were growing, but when things slowed down, it became harder for capitalists to keep up with, and they looked for a way to restore growth and restore profitability. And I think a lot of center-left leaders made a calculation.
And they said, were going to give capital the flexibility to restructure. Were going to allow them to attack unions. Were going to allow them to deregulate certain things, to restore growth rates, but then were going to continue to tax this unleashed capital to maintain the bedrock of our social programs.
So to some extent, this kind of political shift of center-left parties worked. And of course, as they undermined their social base, their traditional base in the working class, they had to find more and more voters from elsewhere to reach out to. So more of their voting bloc became professionals.
It shifted to certain other segments of capital that might be willing to support them, so they broadened their social base at a time when the old model wasnt working. And when it seemed like you really couldnt get far enough in politics with just a working-class base, then that obviously became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because youve now weakened trade unions. Youve now weaken some of the most powerful vehicles for actually getting your party into office to begin with.
So lets go back then to the more recent history of the American left. So Bernie 2016 is a genuine watershed moment. It does, as a campaign, I think, change American politics profoundly.
When you look back from now, post-Bernie 2020, post all that weve seen, what were the lessons you think the left learned from that campaign? And for that matter, what lesson do you think Bernie learned from that campaign? And were they the right ones?
Well, I think the initial lesson the left learned from Bernie 2016 was the fact that there are people out there that are hungry for a message that more or less tells them its not their fault, that the day-to-day miseries and the problems that theyre encountering are things that are not the product of not working hard enough, not getting the right certificate or training, but the result of social problems and that social problems demand a collective solution.
And Bernie was able to reach these people through the mass media, through the bully pulpit of a presidential campaign, and just through very simple common-sense rhetoric. You might say it was oversimplified, how he was describing the world. But I think it was a simplification that tapped into and resonated with people, because it was rooted in something real.
They felt that they were working hard, and they felt that millionaires and billionaires were not allowing them their fair share. And that was basically the core of left-wing politics, of egalitarian politics, for decades and decades and decades. And Bernie, I think, just helped us remember some of it.
And even though our trade unions were hollowed out, even though our civic associations in working-class areas were hollowed out, even though the American left was minuscule at the time, Bernie, I think, through this kind of left-wing populist rhetoric, tapped into something really special, and it became associated with just Medicare For All.
And with the same set of slogans, it became just a parody, right? Everyone knew what Bernie was going to say, every single line of his speech, because he just never deviated from his message. I think some of the wrong lessons that were learned from 2016 was that Bernie was too repetitive, that Bernie didnt incorporate gender and race into his worldview and into his rhetoric.
And I think that ignored the fact that the simplicity and clarity is what attracted people to Bernie Sanders, and that people basically want the same things. Black voters, white voters, Latino voters, Asian voters our concerns are really not all that different.
How we phrase our concerns, how we order our priorities might be different, but there was a simplicity to Bernies universalism that I think, to some extent, he moved away from to try to be more competitive in a Democratic Party primary where identity really does matter more and how you frame things and how you reach voters.
Something I notice around people who like Joe Biden, who think there was a genius to the way he ran the 2020 campaign, but are now frustrated by him I often notice a view that Bidens best instincts are older, that he had an advantage for being rooted in an older period of politics, and that gave him some standing, some intuitions, that let him resist some of the trends buffeting Democratic politicians today, particularly very online ones.
But I also detected, in this edition of Jacobin, a kind of similar view of Bernie and the left a view that Bernie was rooted in an older left, Bernie was rooted in other periods of American politics, and that, particularly in 2016, gave him a kind of difference, gave him an aesthetic that was different, gave him a set of concerns that were different that he lost a bit of that in 2020, and that the people coming after him there are some pieces in there critical of A.O.C. and others have really lost it.
And I think its interesting that both the moderates and the lefties, or at least some lefties at Jacobin, have a kind of nostalgia for what the more veteran politicians know, that they worry the younger politicians dont. Do you think Im reading this right, or does that ring falsely to you?
I think youre reading this right. But I would say that Bernies politics were a learned politics. Yes, when you hear Bernie, it sounds like hes harkening not to the old left, necessarily, of the 1930s in the U.S., but to the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement, which always aimed at majoritarian support.
Martin Luther Kings last campaign was, of course, a campaign for economic justice. Hes famous for having lines saying, yes, its important that we desegregated the lunch counter, but we also need to make sure that everyone could afford to buy hamburger there, too. These are kind of the common-sense rhetoric of people trying to build majorities.
But Sanders came out of a new left that was at times more fringe and more radical in its rhetoric. He spent a lot of the 1970s kind of going back to the land and pursuing kind of minor third-party politics in Vermont up until his election as mayor of Burlington. So I think Bernie found the rhetoric that worked through trial and error. He found the way to reach ordinary people.
And it wasnt just that he was reading from the same book as older leftists. I think he and a lot of his generation around the new left figured out how to reach people. So I dont think that A.O.C. is locked into sounding less like a Bernie Sanders-style Democratic Socialist at time and more like a hyper-liberal or a more hyperbolic version of the same liberalism offered by other wings of the party.
But I think that theres something can be learned. At her best, A.O.C. offers this kind of soaring, really inspiring rhetoric. Its just about getting to that core and avoiding language that I think the left has borrowed too much from academia, in part because thats where we existed in the 80s, 90s, and beginning of 2000s. We were really much just cloistered to the universities.
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Imagine Biden didnt get his Super Tuesday surge or that he bobbled it somehow, and Bernie had won the primary, and then had won the presidency. And I think we should expect it kind of would have been a sort of similar-sized win to Joe Biden, given how he performed.
What do you think looks differently today if Bernie Sanders was president, but also had a 50-50 Democratic Senate Majority and a relatively slim House Majority? How does the counterfactual play out?
Well, governing the United States is extremely hard nowadays. Obviously, you covered a lot of this in your book, but theres so many choke points. Theres so many veto points in American politics, that it is very hard to govern.
I think the difference is, Sanders had a sense of what mass politics was. He had a sense that in order to break the gridlock, sometimes you had to just tell people, speak to them earnestly, tell them why things are stalled, tell them to go rally and organize and call their neighbors. In other words, try to inject this new force into American politics, so that when Washington was stuck, we were calling upon the outsiders to unstick Washington.
And I think thats something that Bernie Im cautious saying this but Bernie had in common with Donald Trump, in that Trump was not a very successful politician, as far as instituting new policies for his cause and for that, Im grateful but he did try to mobilize his supporters to do things. He did try to have mass rallies.
He was constantly in the media talking to the American people. Thankfully, in my mind, he did not convince too many of them to support his causes. But I do think Bernie would have tried similar tactics to reach ordinary people, try to talk to them, try to tell them, youre an agent and policies.
Theres a joke about Biden, but I think its really true that sometimes when you hear him complaining about things wrong in the country, you kind of just feel like hes the leader of Canada or something. Hes just looking at the United States and being like, whos in charge of this thing? You know? So many things are not working. Its a disaster. And I feel like with Bernie, at least there would have been this attempt to repoliticize American politics.
Oh, its really funny, that last point, because I almost see it exactly differently. And it gets to the piece in that issue by Natalie Shure, on The End of the A.O.C. Honeymoon. So it always seems to me that because the US is so difficult to govern, and because even when you win, you win so little power, compared to what it would mean if you won in Canada or you won in the U.K., a very central problem for politicians is, how do you explain what you cant do?
How do you lead a government that you dont actually control, particularly if, say, Republicans have the House or the Senate, or I guess if youre Donald Trump, if Democrats have the House or the Senate. And I think a problem for many liberals for Joe Biden, for Barack Obama is that they often kind of own the failures of government, right?
Its their government, their party, and they try to convince you that whats happening is still pretty good, even though its not what they promised and maybe not what you wanted.
I think something Donald Trump was always very good at was, even though he didnt get much done, he never really acted to his own side like the guy in charge. To the extent that running against deep state had a kind of genius to it, the genius was that it severed Trump for some responsibility for what wasnt happening.
He was trying to fight the government he ran. You couldnt really hold him fully responsible for what it did. I think Bernie has always been actually quite good, as somebody who has worked very coalitionally with the Democratic Party and has been involved in passing a lot of bills that from the Bernie Sanders perspective are very compromised.
I think Sanders has always been very good at saying, hey, look, that was progress, but it is still unacceptable progress. Like, it isnt something we should really be proud of. Its just a step on the path. He always seems still pretty mad about how government works.
And that A.O.C. piece is interesting to me, because it talks about A.O.C. having to navigate some of these exact same tensions, now being part of a House Majority at the moment that cannot do everything she wants it to do, that cannot do everything it wants to do and some of the left becoming alienated from her as she tries to operate more pragmatically in that context, rather than symbolically.
But this always seems to me to be the very deep problem. And I think also it would have been very difficult for Sanders if hed become president, that what do you do when youre the person in charge, youre in power, but you cant wield nearly as much power as the people who put you there thought you would or hoped you could?
The left has always been thinking about what we can do with the balance of forces on the ground, what we are going to be able to accomplish or not. I think when youre in Congress, a lot of your mentality is going to be more coalitional, because youre in youre one piece of a much larger body, and youre trying not to get locked out.
And I think A.O.C. has made the strategic choice to be, one, a registered Democrat, unlike Bernie, because that makes her more competitive in a deep blue district. And also, she made a decision that she was going to try to get onto committees and to play ball with the Democratic Party leadership on certain key issues than pick her spots otherwise.
I think thats a rational choice. But then, the question is, what is distinct about what youre offering? Like, whats the difference between an A.O.C. and a, lets say, Nancy Pelosi? Well, I certainly think that theres a difference, and I support A.O.C., and Im very critical of Nancy Pelosi.
But is it just that Nancy Pelosi wants to go 50 percent towards a goal, and A.O.C. wants to go 70 percent or 80 percent towards the goal? Or is there a qualitative difference between Democratic Socialist politicians and liberal politicians? So I think there should be a qualitative difference in terms of our rhetoric, our worldview and the type of even welfare state were trying to construct.
So I think thats really what the critique of A.O.C. should be about. It shouldnt be, oh, she wasnt intense enough about pushing through this. She wasnt disruptive enough when she was in power. Its more just like, is there something actually different in the worldviews that separates the squad from the rest of the Democratic party, or are they just a part of a Democratic party continuum that always has existed?
I think that brings us back to the question of the left social base. Because how different the politicians are is also going to reflect what constituencies they are responsive to, where the support comes from, who theyre listening to, who theyre around.
And Jacobin commissioned and wrote up in this issue a pretty interesting survey of working-class voters and their political preferences, both substantively and aesthetically, in a bunch of key states. So can you tell me a bit about that surveys findings? What you learned from it?
I think what we learned from that survey was that working-class voters are attracted to a bread-and-butter economic messaging, but that doesnt mean we have to ignore issues of race and racism. We could even use words like structural racism, but it does make sense to foreground material, economic concerns, and that also, there is a certain type of Democratic party rhetoric, I think, that has written off whole swaths of the country as being deep red states, Trump country, in which theres a lot of voters in these areas that I think can be won over to the party if it seems like the party is actually offering them something.
And I think part of the goal is to say that theres multiple roads to building a welfare state, and the one that is probably the easiest one comes from actually building a base across all races and backgrounds of working-class people. That doesnt mean that you dont want any votes in the suburbs, or youre just going to ignore every single electoral calculus.
Its just, if youre going to say, like Chuck Schumer did infamously a few years ago, that for every vote you lose in Pittsburgh or in the rust belt, youre going to pick up a couple of votes in the suburbs of Philadelphia, from more middle-class voters I think thats an extremely defeatist way to go about politics. So I think a lot of what were looking for is proof that working-class voters have a distinct profile and are very much open to redistributionist candidates.
I thought the survey, at least as I read it, posed some real challenges to the way a lot of left politics has evolved. And so I saw three. So one, as you say, working-class voters are very responsive to bread-and-butter issues, to economic messaging.
But theyre not wildly more redistributive, certainly, than the more highly educated voters. And I think actually, in a lot of respects, we see evidence that theyre somewhat less so. And then, the non-voters are somewhat less liberal even still. The view that non-voters are this unbelievably left mass that simply needs to be mobilized by a sufficiently socialist or radical message that doesnt really come out.
And then, third and I think this is a really genuinely interesting thing you all did in the survey as you began testing different ways of phrasing the same appeal that there is very much a preference for what you might call a more working-class aesthetic, a preference for less academic language, a preference for candidates who talk and present in a certain way, that I think is kind of not the way a lot of left candidates, particularly when they come out of the more educated segments of the movement, do. Do you want to talk through how you understood those pieces of the survey?
Yeah, I think that the real challenge to the Bernie worldview is that there was a massive bloc of non-voters willing to just come out, and all you needed was an outsider candidate, and you would re-engage these people. And I think that Bernies strategy did not really bring a new voting block to fore in the last election cycle.
And I think this survey kind of confirms that its really complicated to get people who are out of the political process into the political process. And having a candidate say the right things isnt a magic solution to it. I think the real way in which you get people into the political process is through a lot of organizing, a lot of really expensive, time-consuming organizing. Its not a rhetorical trick.
The working-class aesthetic thing is kind of common sense to me, at least. But it makes sense that people want their candidates to be teachers. They want their candidates to speak in a way thats familiar with them. They want their candidates to be postal workers.
The rest is here:
Opinion | Socialism Is Supposed to Be a Working-Class Movement. Why Isnt It? - The New York Times