Divisions Within Political Movements: The DSA

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Earlier this month, we launched an occasional series that we're calling America 251: Dialogue, N Not Diatribe. America 251 because after the polarized bitterness of the country's 250th birthday year, let's actually listen to each other in year 251. "Dialogue, not diatribe," as a perennial value of the show and of public radio generally, as we will continue to try to be a place where people who disagree with each other in good faith do actually listen to each other and interact in a constructive way.

As it turns out, the divisions in this country are not just Democrat versus Republican, or right versus left, or even insider versus outsider, or rich versus not rich. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll explore, we hope in a smart way, some current divisions within the conservative movement, within the Democratic Party, and within DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, and that's where we'll start.

Even as DSA politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Melat Kiros, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others rise in prominence and influence, the DSA is engaged in determining exactly what it wants to be as it tries to actually win elections, and then to actually govern rather than just be a kind of left-wing think tank or activist group. For example, Axios had an article a couple of weeks ago called The DSA Has Had Unprecedented Success. It Also Has Serious Internal Divisions.

The New York Times this month had a story about the DSA National Summit in Chicago, where members "debated whether socialist candidates should be free to distance themselves from goals like abolishing prisons as they chase more seats this fall," from The Times. Maybe you've heard this 45-second clip of DSA national co-chair Megan Romer being widely shared on social media now after her appearance on Fox.

Shannon Bream: We're going to put up on the screen a few of the things that are part of your platform, and I want to ask you, just give me a true or false on these. Abolish the Senate.

Megan Romer: True.

Shannon Bream: Okay. Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them.

Megan Romer: Yes.

Shannon Bream: Abolish ICE.

Megan Romer: Absolutely.

Shannon Bream: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the US illegally.

Megan Romer: As a long-term plan, yes.

Shannon Bream: Defund the Pentagon.

Megan Romer: Absolutely.

Shannon Bream: Abolish prisons, at least in large part.

Megan Romer: Yes. Again, that is part of a long-term program, yes.

Shannon Bream: Okay, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations.

Megan Romer: Yes, absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Megan Romer, DSA national co-chair with Fox's Shannon Bream. Certainly, you haven't heard words like most of those from Mamdani or Ocasio-Cortez, for example. In fact, and many people don't know this, the national DSA withdrew its endorsement of AOC two years ago. We'll explain why. Let's explore the dialogue taking place within the DSA right now with Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers, author of several books, including We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, published last year, and his 2019 book Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. He writes the Substack newsletter Labor Politics and is a member of the DSA's Bread and Roses caucus. Which caucus of the DSA he is in will be relevant during our conversation. Eric, always good to have you on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Eric Blanc: Yes, thanks so much for having me on. As a disclaimer, I should say that this is me not speaking in the name of Bread and Roses, but in an individual capacity.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough. DSA listeners, you're invited to be an integral part of this segment. How close is your agenda to what Megan Romer laid out in the clip? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text if you consider yourself a democratic socialist. What, if any, litmus tests do you think should apply to a candidate for office if they want to call themselves DSA members? Are you enthusiastic about AOC for president, or maybe less so, like reportedly, according to The New York Times, at least many of the people at that recent DSA summit in Chicago. 212-433-WNYC, or anything else relevant you want to say or ask or have a dialogue about with Eric Blanc, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Again, this is for those of you who consider yourselves democratic socialists. You don't have to be formal DSA members, but you have to at least think of yourself as a democratic socialist. Tomorrow, we'll do something similar for those of you from any wing of the Democratic Party. On Wednesday, for those of you who consider yourselves conservatives, some of the conversations within that movement. For today, democratic socialists with Eric Blanc from Rutgers and The Nation, and sometimes writing for Jacobin and from the Bread and Roses caucus of DSA.

Eric, we'll try to get to the viral Megan Romer clip in just a minute and its implications, and I know you gave us that disclaimer. Can we establish first where you are within the party? I see you are a member of the Bread and Roses caucus. You acknowledged that. Would you describe what that is and its role in DSA as you see it?

Eric Blanc: Sure. I think the most useful way to frame the divisions in DSA is there's, broadly speaking, a right wing and a left wing. This is within the context of DSA. It's just very relative terms, right? Overall, I would consider myself mostly sympathetic to the right wing. Bread and Roses is a center current, but I'm on the right wing of Bread and Roses. This gives you a sense of how complicated it is.

Broadly speaking on the right people, they would self-identify more as mass politics trying to reach out as broadly speaking in a way that makes it more legible, maybe to the broader numbers of people. I think on the left, the way they would see it is that they would see themselves as maybe more consistently revolutionary, more consistently socialist, as they would look less prone to cooptation. That's how I think they self-identify. Broadly speaking, I think the big divide is between the left and right. Some of the internal nuances are a little bit secondary to that.

Brian Lehrer: For all your appearances on this show, one thing I never thought I'd hear was you referring to yourself as right-wing. [laughs]

Eric Blanc: That's very relative. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: I understand the context. What did you think of that Megan Romer clip? How much does that represent you, or should people take it as representing DSA candidates in the midterms as a group wants to take the country generally, if you scratch below the surface?

Eric Blanc: Put it this way. I think that DSA has this amazing opportunity at this moment to give a voice and organize literally hundreds of thousands of people, potentially millions. That's the kind of scale that socialist parties in the rest of the world or in the US in the past have aspired to and oftentimes achieved. My criticism of that Megan Romer clip and some of the similar things that have been said from maybe more of the left wing of DSA is that I think that it's falling into a trap, which is being set by the establishment on both the conservative and liberals, which is to try to paint DSA as quite extreme.

We can go into some of the specifics of which of those points I agree with or not. If you're interested, I'm happy to talk about the particulars. I think that the basic point is that when we go on national news, whether it's Fox or The New Yorker or whatever, that's an opportunity to say, actually, democratic socialists are the only political current, in our view, that has a solution to the crisis that ordinary working people are facing: the affordability crisis, the crisis of political democracy, all of these things that are felt immediately.

When we get into the train of distant debates of what this or that could happen down the road, that's the terrain that I think the Democratic establishment wants us to be fighting on. That's the terrain that the Republican establishment wants to be fighting on. What I think we need to do in things like for going on Fox is to pivot very consistently to saying, actually, look at what Zohran has done. That is because we believe in working-class power. We're fighting for the interests of working-class people.

It's very pragmatic. We're winning free expanded childcare. We're winning a rent freeze. I think if you can't pivot to the ways that we're going to make a difference in people's lives, then you're only going to appeal, I think, to the radical activists. Right now, we have an opportunity to speak much more widely. We're seeing that in the votes we're getting for our candidates, but I don't think that we're seeing that articulated as consistently as could be from some of our national leaders.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like you're saying Megan Romer blew it on Fox.

Eric Blanc: I certainly would not have argued in the way that she did. I'm trying to be as nice as possible, but, yes, I don't think that that is an approach that's going to be able to build the type of power we need to win the types of changes that American people and working-class people deserve.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an example, I think, of the position that statements like that put some of the actual candidates for office in. This is an exchange I had with Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi, who represents a swing district in Queens and Long Island. You probably know he's been making a point of calling himself a democratic capitalist. He made his point in an exchange with me partly like this.

Congressman Tom Suozzi: It's important to look at what the democratic socialists include in their platform. What they tell you what they believe in, we should believe them. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: That's the premise of my question. There is a national DSA that has these policies on paper, what you call the platform specifics on paper. Then there's Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, others in real-life politics who, I think it's fair to say, are not advocating the most extreme things that you were just citing.

Congressman Tom Suozzi: I don't think it's fair to say that because they need to be asked those questions. How do they feel about, for example, the Chinese Communist Party? I'm the founder and the co-chair of the Uyghur Caucus. The Uyghurs are Muslim minorities that are held in forced labor camps in China. Why don't we ask Mayor Mamdani? Does he support what the Chinese are doing with the Muslim minority in China? Does he support the idea of abolishing the Senate or abolishing the presidency or defunding the police or getting rid of the Department of Defense or these other really extreme things?

Brian Lehrer: Well, he's in office governing now for six months, and I don't think I've heard him talk about any of those things.

Congressman Tom Suozzi: Well, why don't you ask him specifically the next time you have him on your show? Does he want to get rid of prisons altogether? That's part of the platform. I've been in politics for a long time. I've been on your show many times. I'm held accountable for the things that I stand for. I'm held accountable for the platform of the party that I represent.

Brian Lehrer: Well, does it say something to you that he just declined to defund the police? In fact, he ran on keeping the numbers steady in NYPD headcount. That went on for a while more with Congressman Suozzi and me last month. I was drawing the distinction between what Mamdani ever talks about or has been doing as mayor in the DSA platform positions Suozzi was spotlighting more like some of the things in the Megan Romer clip and some other things that he raised there.

You see his argument, Eric, right, that every DSA candidate has to have a position on those positions because they're on paper in the platform? Now, that was before Megan Romer went on Fox. Now, we have that, too. Are purity tests taking place within the party, or just abstract debates about how socialist is socialist enough in 2026 America?

Eric Blanc: The first thing I would say is that in the chapters of DSA that are electing people across the country or electing mayors in New York City DSA, there's actually not so much division. Some of this is really, I think, quite bad faith because there's not a lot of light in between the politics of Zohran Mamdani and New York City DSA, for instance, leadership. These types of divisions that we're talking about, in many ways, are between the chapters that I would consider to have proven themselves to be able to do mass politics by electing large numbers of people, but also by growing.

Those tend to be the chapters that you have electing these prominent politicians. The debates tend to be on a national level with chapters that just frankly haven't been achieving those forms of success and, in part, because of that, tend to have more extreme positions. I don't think that there's so much division actually between the politicians and the chapters that they're accountable to. DSA is not a very centralized organization. That's an understatement. It's a very decentralized organization.

The national DSA is actually quite weak. The real power is in the chapters. If you look on a chapter-by-chapter basis, this discrepancy is a lot less. I would say, though, that I think the concern that you flag is a very real one. I think that, frankly, is just a mistake and bad that national DSA took certain positions that I think are both marginalizing for us and just wrong.

Just to give a concrete example, I don't think it's plausible to say that we're, even for the long term, abolishing the police or prisons. I don't think that even as a socialist, in the distant socialist future, I think you can imagine there'll be some sort of apparatus for that. Particularly at this moment, though, when you know that taking a position on that is going to provide so much fuel to all of those trying to discredit our elected officials and our candidates, why do that?

In what world would it make sense? If your goal is to organize millions of people and to speak to millions and to overcome the Democratic Party establishment, why take a position that you know is just going to give fuel to your opponents for which there's no practical upshot right now? There's not a mass movement right now to defund the police or abolish prisons. The idea of taking an ideological position for the sake of it seems, to me, a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.

I think, basically, you're right. I think your concern is a correct one. The nuance, though, is that those aren't positions being taken by the actual chapters, for the most part, that are electing these candidates, right? It's a national DSA. Oftentimes, self-selecting activists against the will oftentimes of the chapters that are actually electing these candidates. Again, I do think that the way to look at DSA and these debates is that there's a high degree of unevenness between those who are electing prominent politicians and doing this type of mass growth, and those who are newer to politics.

I would say it's a positive in this sense. I want to say a defense of DSA, including with people on the left of DSA who I have serious disagreements, there's very few spaces in national or local politics today where people can debate. It's good to your show that this is one of the places where people can debate, but where else can you join an organization which can have real substantive differences on that?

I think that's to DSA's credit that if you're a new person, oftentimes people were liberals a week ago, and then they get radicalized because they're like, "Oh, my goodness, Obama didn't do what he was going to do. Hillary Clinton lost," and then they flip their position. They go too far in the other extreme. I had those positions when I was 18 or 19. It's understandable that sometimes people exaggerate in the opposite direction. There is a learning curve. I think that it's disingenuous, frankly, for the opponents of DSA to try to pick and choose this or that position when, in fact, it's not actually the reality of what our candidates and what our most important chapters are doing.

Brian Lehrer: Sally in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Eric Blanc.

Sally: Hi there. I can't hear you anymore. I just turned off my radio. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, you can hear me down the phone, right?

Sally: Okay. Yes, perfect. Yes. Yes, I think it's naive to say that what's happening now with Megan Romer, there are definitely two sides to the democratic socialists group. I have always been a Bernie Sanders supporter, AOC. They go for FDR. They go for Scandinavian socialism, which includes capitalism and socialism together. Whole different group. Megan Romer is an avowed Marxist, which is why Trump is now saying that communists are in the left side. She wants production to be in the hands of the people.

She wants to get rid of capitalism. I think she's actually trying to split the social democrats. That's her purpose is to minimize the movement. I think we have to not be naive about this and call her out and call out her and the group that is doing this as opposed to the Bernie Sanders, AOC kind of social democrats. I think this is a very serious thing. Thank God, you're bringing up this issue because they're not all the same people, and it's not all one movement. Right now, she is seriously trying to split the movement.

Brian Lehrer: Sally, thank you very much. Eric, do you agree with our analysis that Megan Romer is intentionally trying to split the movement?

Eric Blanc: No, I don't think it's intentional. I think that, in practice, it does undermine the movement. It does, in practice, lead to all sorts of divisions. The left of DSA, one of the things that I've seen that I've found to be particularly productive is it spends a huge amount of time or has a disproportionate amount of time attacking the stances or positions of our candidates. Our elected officials are pushing back on it. I do think that there's some level of factionalism that is driven by that. Their goal isn't to divide things per se.

The way they look at it is, look, people are disenchanted with politics as usual, what we have as socialists. The reason they think people are coming to DSA, which I think there's a kernel of truth to this, is that we stand for something different than what's been on offer for decades, and that we don't make the same compromises that the Democratic establishment constantly does. If we start going down that slippery slope, then we're just going to be like any other Democrat.

Now, I think that the conclusions they draw from that analysis are wrong. I think they go too far, but there's a kernel of truth to that. I don't think that you have to assume that people are acting in bad faith or trying to split to say that, in practice, the politics and the way they're going about it is undermining and making it harder for democratic socialism, which, to my mind, means fighting centrally for social democracy in the mid-range. We're never going to get to an economic democracy or socialism. Something like Scandinavia.

Brian Lehrer: The caller also cited that term, "social democrats." In fact, I want to play a clip of DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier from an appearance on this show. This is after she won her primary. I asked her what country, if any, she sees as a model of democratic socialism that the US could emulate if DSA gains enough influence. Here's 30 seconds of her answer.

Darializa Avila Chevalier: There's a lot we can learn from many parts of the world. I think places in Europe like Sweden and Norway, for example, but I think looking specifically at the programs themselves, like what are the models of the programs and how can we implement them here, are how I envision this, right? I think the other thing that gets lost is a democratic part of this phrase, "democratic socialism," is that we are making decisions in a democratic way about how we use the wealth that we have produced in the society, because the people who are producing the wealth are the people who produce the labor, the workers.

Brian Lehrer: Darializa Avila Chevalier here. Are you surprised she cited the Scandinavian model? We know that in her old tweets that she mostly has disavowed now, she says she's grown. She sounded more like Megan Romer on some points. My understanding is DSA says there's a difference between social democracy, you and the caller, and Ms. Chevalier all use that term "social democracy," and democratic socialism, that democratic socialism goes further than European-style social democracy. Can you explain how true that is and how much you think it should matter in the current context?

Eric Blanc: Yes, I think it doesn't matter so much in the current context, like what words you use. For what it's worth, the parties that won the most robust welfare states, so if we want to call that social democracy, Sweden, Norway, et cetera, a lot of Western Europe, they were, for the most part, socialists. They were what we call democratic socialists today, which is that their horizon was not limited to just making capitalism less bad. They did do that. They did that very effectively.

In part, they were able to do that so effectively because they had a vision to say we believe in democracy in all spheres of life. I do think that that is a difference between democratic socialism and somebody who just believes that the most human beings can aspire to, as long as human civilizations exist, is some sort of capitalism. I don't think that there's any reason, if you believe in democracy, to say that we should preclude the possibility of democracy expanding to the economic sphere. Even just unions are stepping in that direction.

I think that the way to look at it is, yes, in the immediate and in the mid-range, we are fighting for something like Sweden in the 1970s, a very robust universal welfare state. That would be so much better than what we have. It would alleviate so much suffering. I think part of the problem I have with the way that Megan Romer articulated it, particularly on The New Yorker interview, was to counterpose like we're not for gentler capitalism or for economic democracy, whereas, actually, you don't have to counterpose those things.

You're never going to be able to get to economic democracy if you can't win a welfare state, if you can't rebuild the mass workers' movement, and, in fact, and I think this is the crucial point, is the reason so many people think that transformative change is impossible today, including just social democracy. It's like we have to fight hard. It sounds radical to say you're for Medicare for All, even though this is something that most of the rest of the industrialized world has. The reason that sounds so "pie in the sky" to many people, it's just they don't have lived experience of that working.

The government has been underfunded. They haven't witnessed collective action working. Unless we can start getting people confidence that the government can work better, that's what Zohran-- what he's doing is so important. Unless we can give them confidence in their strength and in the strength of solidarity and working-class struggle, if you can't do that, you're never going to be able to get to the long-term future. I think that anything that we do that counterposes that long-term goal to the immediate fights is very, very detrimental to the cause, both in the short term and long term.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in just a minute till the end of the hour with Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers, a contributor to The Nation and Jacobin, author of several books, including We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, published last year. We'll get to AOC in the context of what we've been talking about because, these days, she has the backing of the New York City DSA, but lost the endorsement of the national DSA. Brian Lehrer Show continues.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, in this portion of the show, we're exploring, we hope in a smart way, some current divisions within the conservative movement. That'll be Wednesday. Within the Democratic Party, that'll be tomorrow. Within the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, that's what we're talking about now with Eric Blanc from Rutgers and The Nation and author of several books. I want to ask you about AOC in this context. I see she has the backing of the New York City DSA, but no longer the national.

Reading from New York Times reporting on this, it says, "Concerning in the eyes of some activists are candidates perceived to have drifted away from the movement on important policies. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, who has made inroads with mainstream Democrats and is seen as a potential presidential candidate, remains a contentious topic among left-wing members of DSA, who said they still resented some of her past positions over the war in Gaza. Though the congresswoman is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in Congress, some on the left argue that she has not been strong enough in voicing support for Palestinians. In 2024, the national DSA withdrew its conditional endorsement of her." Eric, with your journalist hat on, can you describe any further what happened there in 2024?

Eric Blanc: Sure. It's just worth flagging again, the context here, which is that AOC was elected with a strong amount of help and is very close to New York City DSA, which has consistently been on the right wing of DSA and mass politics wing. Again, some of these divisions really seem bigger than they are. On the ground in New York City, it's a moot point. People overwhelmingly, in DSA, love AOC.

They're very excited about her running for president, hopefully. We haven't had this type of conflict with AOC in the places where it matters. The difference is, again, in places outside of New York, the leadership is led mostly by caucuses like the Socialist Majority caucus and Groundwork. It's a Democratic organization. There's caucuses on the left all across the country.

I think if you can remember this moment, 2024, October 7th, had been a year prior, I remember the moment. I'm Jewish and a longstanding supporter of Palestinian freedom. I would wake up every morning, seeing little kids killed in Gaza. It was horrifying. In that context, I think a lot of people's powerlessness got channeled not towards a productive place, which would be trying to push the government and the Democratic Party as a whole to put real pressure through, for instance, an arms embargo on Israel.

Instead, it seemed, "Well, if we can't do that, why not focus on somebody who might actually listen to us, like AOC?" So much of the anger, which I think is mostly justified, got put towards AOC in a way that I think was totally unjustified insofar as AOC is, as you mentioned earlier, one of the most consistent advocates for Palestinian rights and freedom. That led to unendorsement on a national level of AOC, which I think was a mistake. I do think that what changed--

Brian Lehrer: Was it largely because she continued to support funding for what's described as defensive military funding for Israel, the Iron Dome missile defense shield in particular, and that distinction did not fly with that wing of the party?

Eric Blanc: I do think that that was one of the trigger points to go into the actual voting record. There were some exaggerations made about what AOC did or did not vote in on, which I think were unfair to her. Yes, that was certainly part of it. AOC, I think, my opinion, correctly has moved away from that and moved towards actually what I think is a totally plausible and important position, which is, at this point, the United States government should not be funding the Israeli state doing what it's doing.

These nuances between defensive and offensive in practice doesn't actually amount to much. Both because of the urgency of ending what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and just, frankly, the legibility to the American people of why is our money going towards killing people instead of towards social services home. It makes more sense just to have a clear-cut stance on that.

Brian Lehrer: Still, The Times said in Chicago at the recent DSA national summit, "Strong support for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was mostly confined to a party at a nearby bar hosted by the Groundwork caucus where members chanted her nickname AOC and vowed to convert skeptics to support her for president." It sounds like, at least at the national summit, unless that's over-reported, not all that much enthusiasm. Were you there?

Eric Blanc: I was not there in part because I have a toddler, and so I declined. This is what I was going to get to before. I don't think that there's much division on AOC these days. Even much of the left, I think, would endorse and support AOC running for president. The level of enthusiasm is certainly higher with Groundwork caucus and Socialist Majority. Frankly, I think my overall impression, and this is where you get into impressions; it's a little tough, is that the overwhelming majority of DSA members nationally, and not just in New York City, are extremely enthusiastic about AOC, both in general and her possibilities of running.

Part of the difficulty you have with these national meetings is sometimes it self-selects to the most active people and not to the people who maybe have kids and who are involved in their unions, involved in their community. There's a tricky thing about being in a Democratic organization, which sometimes, people have most time, can have a disproportionate voice. That's part of any democratic process in which some people-- there's always a balance between breadth of democracy and the intensity of it. On the whole, the big story, I think, is actually the extent to which AOC and DSA are aligned these days, and the extent to which there's real enthusiasm about her.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Judith in Saugerties, you're on WNYC. Hi, Judith.

Judith: Hi. Hi. Wow. I've tried so often to get on and finally succeeded. Anyway, so I have a number of points that I'd like to make. One is that--

Brian Lehrer: Make your best one because we're very close to the end of the show.

Judith: Okay. Well, I'll start with this. Why doesn't DSA ever explain its positions? For example, defund the police, which is a really bad statement, but it really was not defunding the police, but taking part of the money that is going to police departments, to other services like mental health. That's what I understood it to be, but I haven't heard a single person, and especially Megan Romer, by the way. I agree with you. She is not a good spokesperson. I haven't heard anyone say that, or end the Senate. The Senate is like the least democratic, small-D, governing body probably in the Western world.

Brian Lehrer: We definitely could do a whole segment on, of all the things on that list, looking at the Senate as a violation of the one-person, one-vote principle when people in Wyoming or somewhere that has a few hundred thousand people get the same number of representatives as people in California with 40 million. On defunding the police, Eric, and this will be your last comment, we have 30 seconds, there are differences of opinion within DSA on this, too, right? Some people do talk about police abolition. They use that word. Whereas others, like Judith is saying, mean defund the police some, and just reweight where public money goes, right? 20 seconds.

Eric Blanc: Yes. I think that the slogan "Defund the Police" is very confusing. It's good that DSA candidates and most DSA chapters, I think, aren't using it because it makes it sound like you don't think any money should go towards the police in the short term. I think it's entirely the case that, yes, we should be funding social services and public services much more than we're funding incarceration and repression. Yes, that message we have to make, and we are making, and I think it's possible to do that without using a slogan that gives our opponents an ability to marginalize us.

Brian Lehrer: Eric Blanc from Rutgers and The Nation, and sometimes Jacobin, and his book We Are the Union. Thank you so much for having this conversation with us.

Eric Blanc: Yes, thanks so much for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Tomorrow, a similar one on conversation within the Democratic Party. Stay tuned for Alison.

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