 I am very pleased to welcome, at an appropriate social distance, Naomi Klein, Senior Correspondent at the Intercept, Gloria Steinem, Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and critically acclaimed author. So that is a CV that could please even Bengali parents. Naomi, thanks for joining me. Well, tell them I'm a university dropout and they'll be shattered. It's so good to see you and to do this with you. I am absolutely not telling my mum that you're a university dropout. I'm going to say that you were pre-med and that'll be good enough for her. So, you know, there was this little election in a, you know, the backwater that is the American Empire, not even a week since it was called for Biden. And yet there's still all this litigation about whether the Democrats had a good or a bad result. And there's a view amongst some liberals that the historic popular vote win and the Electoral College margin means that it's just unequivocally a good result. You shouldn't talk about Biden having scraped it. And then there's a view amongst some establishment House Democrats that the underperformance down ballot was really the left's fault and Black Lives Matter's fault. And then there's the view that you take, which is the election should have been an absolute sweep for the Democrats, but they cocked it up on every front. So I guess my first question for you is what should Biden have delivered? And why didn't he? So first of all, I don't think it is just on Biden. I think it is, the responsibility is shared by the top of the ticket for sure, but also by the Democratic leadership that is currently in power, right? So this isn't the way Democrats govern. It's not an abstraction to American voters because the Democrats have the majority in the House right now and Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the House. And so when they are making a decision about who to vote for, and I mean, I don't know, I feel like I have to give a million caveats before to analyzing voters. There's so many factors. And we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump has a very large and emboldened base. And when it comes to his sort of fanatical fan, there's absolutely no doubt that a huge factor at play is white supremacy and misogyny and all kinds of things that there's no point sort of being strategic about like it actually needs to be confronted and defeated. There are voters who I do believe would have voted for a different kind of Democratic ticket. We saw, we seen Trump get a much larger share of the Latino vote, for instance. And the most disturbing result I think for the Democrats, and this is true for Biden, but like I said, also true for Pelosi, for Schumer and the Senate, is that the issue that voters in exit polls cited most as being their most important issue was the economy, no big surprise. It wasn't a majority of voters, I think was around 30%, but it more than any other issue, including the pandemic, the economy was said to be the most important issue for voters. And of the voters who said that, 82% of them voted for Trump. So they saw Trump as being a better protector of their economic interests. And that should be very worrying for a party that makes claims to represent working people. A lot of the analysis I've seen in elite media has focused on while Trump is still writing this claim that he was good for the economy before the pandemic, right? I don't think that that is the main issue. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump relentlessly pounded this message that he stood for opening the economy back up, putting jobs first, and Joe Biden was Mr. Lockdown. And the Democrats' messaging was all about we listen to science. Yes, we are the serious people. We are the educated people. If the science says lockdown, we will lock down. And they were counting on the fact that so many people had died and we are in this unprecedented crisis that people would be okay with that. But they didn't talk about what they were going to do for people in that lockdown. I mean, there was no talk of the kind of salary supports you have in the UK, right? I mean, you have a conservative government that I think is covering 80% of people's salaries. In Canada, we have a government that's giving people $2,000 a month. The Democrats have just abandoned people. And that includes Nancy Pelosi. They absolutely criminally went along with the Republican plan to first hand out trillions of dollars to corporations and the rich, and then we'll worry about people after pretty much. I mean, as AOC said, there were crumbs for families in the first bailout packages. But it's just the most basic crime of negotiation. You don't first give it all away and then say, oh, yeah, later on, we're going to make sure that people aren't evicted from their homes, that people have their healthcare taken care of, that gig workers are taking care of, that small businesses are taking care of. They didn't do any of that. And so I think a lot of people, and this is the worrying part, voted for Trump because they associate the Democrats with this sort of self-righteous mask as signifier of virtue, lockdown as lifestyle choice. I mean, it's been encoded in this sort of cultural discourse, whereas if you're just very clear from the beginning, look, you're going to be taken care of if we lock down temporarily while we beat this thing, which is the way every government who has had effective results has done it. Then you drain a lot of the energy away from these debates. So I think that that was one of the biggest, I think that's just emblematic of the ways in which the Democratic Party has systematically failed to understand the depths of economic crisis that people are facing, and they do it on every front, but the pandemic has heightened it. But I mean, there's something interesting there, right, which is Joe Biden has been praised for big tent politics. And one of the things that I've seen identified in elite media is that they've said, well, he's ignored and sidestepped and evaded culture war issues. He's not gotten into that kind of values driven micro event, brouhaha. But I think that he's actually tilted almost entirely into culture wars. His pitch was about the soul of the nation. It was about listening to science. As you said, it was about lockdown as a signifier of your own regard for expertise and very little in the way of the material support and the economics. So you end up in a position where pandemic management becomes polarized and congeals kind of around these two culture war kind of positions, unlock, prioritize the economy, don't wear a mask because you love freedom. Also, by the way, I did give you a stimulus check. And then on the other hand, Nancy Pelosi can quite happily lock down with her double fridge ice cream. The amount of damage she did with that ice cream I think is yet to be calculated. I don't know if we'll ever truly understand it, but I do think that it's very important to understand how divisive she personally is because right out of the gate, we heard this push to blame AOC and blame Elhan Omar and blame the squad and moderate Democrats who lost their races turned around and said, never talk about socialism again, never talk about Medicare for all again, never talk about the Green New Deal again. This hurt us. And now Justice Democrats I think are the ones who did this, but pulled together a lot of the attack ads from regional media markets and found that it's not AOC and all the ads. It's Nancy Pelosi and all the ads, right? So we are in the grips of this sort of frantic narrative war. And the stakes of it are really, really high because in those moments, as you know, right after the election loss or scraped by, the narrative gets set in stone. And I think that the corporatists, Democrats have been, were the first out of the gate, right? And so it's been a bit of a heartbreak actually to watch the people who worked their butts off in this campaign, who didn't do virtual campaigning, who actually knocked on doors to incredible organizing like AOC, like Elhan Omar, like Rashida Taleb, having to spend what should have been a moment of just like, okay, you get to like take a day off, frantically fighting these messaging wars on Twitter and in the media because they see the potential of having these issues be sacrificed, right? Like never talk about the Green New Deal again. And the other thing I think, where I do think we are in a better position is I think we've got better research right now. And groups like Data for Progress, and as I said, you know, Justice Democrats, different fairly new organizations have been ready with the data, you know, to show that actually voters who endorsed, had endorsed the Green New Deal overwhelmingly won their seats. Voters who had endorsed Medicare for all had overwhelmingly won their seats. So it was just bullshit, right? It was just opportunistic bullshit. And an attempt to go on the offensive so that you yourself are not under scrutiny. But I mean, just because it's bullshit doesn't mean it won't gain purchase, right? So there's not a lot of evidence to back up these claims that if you supported the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, that it was a turnoff that would mean that you would lose your seat and what have you. There's actually evidence for the contrary. But it's a useful pretext to punch left and to marginalize the party's progressives. So what leverage do progressives and socialists have in a Biden presidency to pursue policy goals? I think that remains to be seen. I think we're going to have to see a much higher level of organization and coordination among. So here's the way I see it. This is all very familiar terrain. And Joe Biden ran a nostalgic campaign as Barack Obama's vice president. Let's turn back the clock. Let's go back to the pre-Trump, sort of utopia, quote. But of course, Joe Biden is not Obama. Joe Biden was put on Obama's ticket to reassure elites that they didn't have to be afraid of Obama, right? Obama shows Joe Biden precisely because he is seen as this very centrist, bipartisan, loving, non-threatening. So we know the kinds of decisions that Barack Obama made surrounding himself with Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and all of these Wall Street figures in the middle of a crisis that they themselves had created. And basically after that, everything was downhill. But that said, we are in a different situation. Even though this is a familiar dynamic here with Biden, movements are not in the same position that they were when Biden and Obama came to power. DSA barely existed. I mean, I think they had a few thousand members. They were not a political force. Justice Democrats didn't exist when Obama came to power. The Working Families Party existed, but nothing to the extent that it has political power now. The squad didn't exist during the Obama years, right? And that is a result of those political organizations. Occupy happened during Obama's presidency. The first Black Lives Matter uprisings happened during Obama's presidency. Standing Rock. The Keystone XL protests. The Apostle Field Divestment Movement. Sunrise. These are all products of that era, right? So that's why I've been sort of trying to remind people, because I think we all have PTSD a little bit, that they may be the same, but we are different, right? And so your question of like, okay, what's our leverage? I don't think we know because I don't think we've actually organized ourselves in a way to summon the full power represented by all of these forces, right? So I think that our movements are still too siloed on issues, as opposed to coalesced around a coherent vision. And even the squad itself is largely an ad hoc group of like-minded colleagues. It isn't an organized political bloc yet. So now you have, you know, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Taleb all fought fierce primaries, right? Where they had- they had- they were primary by politicians who had a lot of money. They'd come back with a really powerful mandate. So it wasn't just that they were re-elected. Because people tried to dismiss a lot of this as a bit of a fluke. They didn't see them coming. They didn't really prepare. Now they prepared and they actually have a bigger mandate. So they're coming back more powerful and they're bigger. So you've got people like Cory Bush who I campaigned with on the Sanders campaign. I mean, DC doesn't know what's coming when it comes to Cory Bush, you know? She is a nurse. She was a street medic during the Ferguson uprisings. She is a very, very, very powerful activist, extremely accountable to those communities. Jamal Bowman and Educator. So you have like, you know, people from the care economy, from the care sectors who understand the brokenness. So we need more coordination from them. We need more coordination, I think, between Justice Democrats, DSA, working families, parties. And I think at the social movement level, we also need more coordination. What kind of leverage we can muster remains to be seen because we haven't done that yet. But I think people understand that and we'll see. But I think we need to replicate and grow exponentially. Is that moment when the Democrats won back Congress, they were expecting a parade and instead they got the sunrise movement occupying Nancy Pelosi's office before she'd even been elected as speaker. But everyone knew she was going to be the new speaker. And AOC who herself hadn't been sworn in going to the office occupation, high-fiving them, promising to bring in a green new deal, right? That sort of inside-outside pincer, right? Of the squad on the inside and the movement, you know, doing direct action on the outside. And targeting establishment Democrats, if we can replicate that dynamic and grow it, I think we could have a significant amount of leverage. But I think it's a moment of real danger because Biden's appeals to working class voters did not work nearly as well as his appeals to suburban voters, right? So if we're just looking electorally who he may feel accountable to, thankfully, he doesn't feel accountable to the, she shouldn't feel accountable to the Republicans because they overwhelmingly stayed with Trump, right? But he did make some gains with wealthy suburbanites more so than with working class voters. And that's not a good recipe when you're dealing with somebody like Joe Biden. So we have our work cut out for us. I mean, it's also all about how you define unity. So Biden is claiming that his mandate is a mandate for bipartisan corporation and for unity. And one of the things that I was asking myself is, well, what does this even mean when your opponent hasn't even acknowledged your win yet? When, you know, the Republicans aren't interested in unity or consensus. In fact, when, you know, Barack Obama comes in, there is a absolutely, you know, died in the wall of resistance to him at every single level. He was, you know, intended to break his presidency and break him as a man. That was where they were at. So what do you make of these calls for unity? Are they nearly misguided political strategy? You know, the kind of lovey-dovey instincts of, you know, peace and love, leading people in the wrong direction? Or is it a reflection of a vested set of elite interests and trying to restore those to, you know, 2016, pre-2016 normality? Yeah, I think it's the latter, actually, as I think you know. Yeah, I mean, what this is an elite unity that they're talking about. It is not unifying working class people across divides of race and religion and gender. I mean, this is the kind of unity work that we really need to do if we're serious about healing and about repairing deep, deep rifts. It's a papering over in the interests of those elites because, yeah, the United States has two ruling class parties and Joe Biden is a representative of one. I take solace from the fact that he is extremely out of step from the base of his party, that there continues to be a huge amount of support for the policies that Bernie Sanders represented and, you know, having campaigned for Bernie and, you know, acted as a surrogate for him. I went to five states during the primaries with the campaign and talked to a lot of voters and met a lot of people who, you know, frankly, who were very clear. I love Bernie. I agree with Bernie. I think he's totally right about Medicare for all the great new deal, but and the but was interesting. The but was was was was sometimes it was about just fatigue, you know, we need a transition period, you know, and that was one of Joe's pitches, right? Like I'm a placeholder. I'm just gonna like you'll be able to take a breath and just relax, you know. And I think people are are so beaten down by the Trump years. And here I'm talking about, you know, working class African American voters who I met in in the Nevada caucuses who who just said like, can we just have a break? You know, like I love Bernie, but can we just have this kind of in between break period? But then there was also the but of of a deep understanding of the depths of of anti communism of red baiting of of, you know, particularly for older voters who who felt that they knew the country, right? Better than these young Bernie kids, right? And who said out of hard won wisdom. And this is where I think that, you know, we can't just like attribute this all to, you know, the centrist we love to beat up on, right? It was it was out of hard won life wisdom, having survived, you know, the civil rights movement and seeing their leaders assassinated and and seeing how the McCarthy era had destroyed, you know, working class movements and divided the civil rights movement. They said this country will never elect a democratic socialist, right? You are underestimating what is going to what is going to be thrown at Bernie. And and so, yeah, so I guess there's some hope in it in the sense that it wasn't like an affirmative vote for the policies that Biden represented. It had to do with a fear of of the power of that of anti communism in the as an American tradition. And I don't feel the Sanders campaign ever did enough to sort of frontally address that, right? I mean, I was arguing that we should have had ads like that were kind of funny and like, you know, reds under the bed and red scale that sort of put what Bernie was facing within the history of red bathing and McCarthyism do it with a light touch. But actually, don't just say, don't worry about it, it's going to be fine. But actually talk about what that what is the plan? Because this is a fierce force. And I think, you know, speaking with you, Ash, like, you know, the truth is that it what we had to fear was not like, I think Bernie could have survived Trump's attacks, because the Republicans attack every Democrat as they did it to Obama, as you said, and threw in black nationalist on top of it and said it was part of a vast plot to bring reparations to Kenya. I mean, everybody gets full backlash. The problem is they've been running candidates who don't offer the benefits, right? So you get backlash against socialism, but you don't get the socialism. So, you know, this is why during the Obama years, I would argue like, you're gonna get, you're gonna get treated as if you're giving people reparations anyway. So why not do it? Fox is acting like you're doing it. So why don't you do it? But the real issue is that it isn't the Republicans that Bernie had to worry about. It was the liberals, right? So they would have done what they did to Corbyn, right? Like that rolling coup that Corbyn faced, that is what would have happened within the Democratic Party had Bernie won the primary, and that's the thing I'm puzzling over. Like, how do we deal with that? But I mean, one of the things, and I think that this is particularly the case for voters of color, and it's something which I've heard again and again in the UK, and I think it's also something which has a resonance in the United States context as well, which is you do have these voters of color who go, well, I want these policies, but white Britain, white America, I'm never gonna go for them. So there's this element of ventriloquism. You're deciding what's electable based on what you think is going to allay the fears of voters who've historically been best treated by this democracy. And that's not something I know how you break through. I don't know how you get to the point of going, well, maybe you should just do what you want and let's see what happens. Right. Yeah, I don't know either. And I think, you know, I saw some of that within the like, you know, Bernie did not do everything perfectly by any means, and he didn't have a great operation reaching out to African American voters, particularly older voters, where he had a fearsome organizing machine that I saw myself was in reaching out to Latinos. And watching the Unidos Converning campaign in Nevada, I started to see what that could look like. And it travels through the kids. It was quite interesting. You know, there was this strategy of reaching the children of the sort of more cautious parents. And it seemed to really work. I mean, Latinos voted for Bernie overwhelmingly in Nevada. And so I think it is possible to do, but I think we still have this problem of even so, so Corbyn did win the leadership, right. And he faced a sort of, from what I can tell on this side of the Atlantic, a rolling, never ending coup from the party establishment, right, which succeeded in making him seem, you know, just, I don't know. I mean, you know better than me, but it gradually wore down the support, right. And I think a lot of what I heard from voters around Bernie was, were tired, right. And they knew that best case scenario, if Bernie won, it would just be a nonstop war, right. And so people are looking for some kind of a break, right. Like some kind of a being allowed to exhale. And so I think we need a way to communicate with people that acknowledges it is a war. Like we don't get a break, right. And there's no way you actually get to a better place without having the actual conflicts with entrenched interests. And they are going to fight because they have a ton on the line, right. And so, yeah. But I think we need better messaging on the unity question because people do want unity. So we have to talk about the kind of unity that we want, right. Because if we don't really, really name that and give people a taste of it, then that sort of paper unity seems very appealing, or as a sort of a second choice, right. So like that moment in the campaign where after Biden won his first primary, right, you have the whole balance of losing candidates surrounding him, right. That moment, right, where all, like not everyone, but a lot of them were all on stage with him. And it was this performance of elite unity against Bernie, right. And people looked at that and said, okay, this looks like, this looks more appealing than fighting forever. Whereas what I would wish had happened in that moment, and this is what sticks with me. And I think why, you know, you talk to Bernie people and we're all a little bit, you know, we carry some grudges, is, well, who was, like, where was Elizabeth Warren in that moment? She was giving interviews to Rachel Maddow about how Bernie Bros were mean on Twitter, you know. Like Andrew Yang, who said he wanted universal basic income and has been critiquing the Democrats for not speaking to working class voters. He was one of the first to endorse Biden, right. So, you know, or none of the candidates who sort of position themselves as being more in the Bernie side, sided with Bernie in that moment. We needed more cultural figures who maybe could, but like, if they were all going to unify behind their centrist, we needed our own kind of unity that represented by the kind of movements that I was talking about earlier, these organizations that I was talking about. We have to be able to show people what a different kind of unity represents, I guess is what I'm saying. And I don't think we did that. It just kind of looked like they're all united against Bernie. I mean, I get you on the exhaustion. I mean, I think after the five years of Corbinism, where I kind of went into it being a, you know, austerity motivated anarchist, and then suddenly I'm shilling for social democracy. And it really was one of those record scratch freeze frame moments of, you know, you're in some marginal scene, you're like, yep, that's me. How did I get here after, you know, being at the top of Milbank Tower 10 years ago, while Tory party HQ was getting smashed in. That was you. I saw that video. I mean, that was, I was 18 years old and I thought it was the most exciting thing that ever happened in my entire life and probably was the most exciting thing that happened in my entire life. But seeing the arc of what happened with Jeremy Corbin and seeing how he was produced, first as he's too nice to hold the office of Prime Minister to by the end of it, there was the sense of he's a wrong in, right? He's a wrong in in every way. He's an anti-Semite, which is worse than a racist because it's got its own special name. He's too close to the Muslims for comfort. One of the things that I heard on the doorstep in 2019 in a constituency which was 97% white is that Jeremy Corbin wanted all the Muslims to come and take over. And I was like, bro, have you seen a single Muslim in this town apart from me? And I've just come here. But the way in which like one's perception of your neighborhood is completely distorted through media coverage. You know, Corbin moved from being seen as, you know, too pacifist to being in league with the country's enemies, you know, him and Osama, Bin Laden were playing bridge together, you know, that kind of thing. And one of the things that stuck with me through that process is that the left didn't have strategy for combating that other than appealing to values, ones of solidarity and kindness and wanting a better life, which just weren't hegemonic in the electorate. Much more powerful was the feeling of negative solidarity of I'll do without better as long as someone who I deem unworthy doesn't get something they don't deserve. And I wonder from across the Atlantic, what you made of watching that, and if you could have advised Corbin and his team, what would have been the thing that you would have said, do this differently or fight back in this way? That's a huge question. I have to cast my mind back to it a little bit. I do feel that there were ways that he could have addressed. I think there was a lot of cynicism in the claims of anti-Semitism, but cynical or not, it resonated with people. People felt it, right? And I think that there was an important moment that was lost where there was a video that came out where it was sort of taken out of context. You'd remember it better than me where it was something like, there was a discourse around it was not really English. Do you remember? So what that was was he was trying to make a comment about a Palestinian man saying almost more English than the English because he understand irony, which Zionists didn't. And that was then a huge moment because I think a lot of people in the Jewish community felt that that wasn't a limited comment on these specific individuals anymore, that it was saying that if you're a Zionist, you don't participate in English culture. You're not a part of it. Yeah. And so I remember watching that and what I felt could have happened. This is just one example. I felt like rather than just talk about how that was taken out of context and it wasn't right. I thought it was a moment where Jeremy could have given a great speech about the exclusive idea of Englishness and who patrols the boundaries of Englishness that really spoke to the many, many, many people who have felt themselves on the outside of that because it was a feeling. It's not, at a certain point, it's not about the facts. It's about the fact that people have experienced anti-Semitism in the UK. When I was there at Labour Party Conference a few years ago and I was doing media and people were saying, well, what about the anti-Semitism? I was saying, yes, there's anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. There's anti-Semitism in the Tory Party. There's anti-Semitism in British society. So it's everywhere, right? And I think that you have to be able to speak to that and define another kind of Britishness that feels much more inclusive to people. And so I think, I wish he could have done that. But this points to a broader issue, right? And I'm probably going to say some things that I regret. But I would love to hear your thoughts. That's exactly what we want. Come on. So correct, Miss Naomi. All right. I'm not, look, I, as you know, like I supported Jeremy's campaign and, you know, not uncritically and I don't vote there. So, you know, who cares what I think. But I did get involved in Bernie's campaign in a way that I've never gotten involved in electoral politics. I've never, you know, as I mentioned, I was a surrogate. I've never done anything remotely like that. The most I had ever done was like write a newspaper column about which candidate I thought was better than the other. I have never gotten involved in electoral politics the way I did for Bernie. And I did because for the same reason I spoke at Labor Party Conference because of climate change, because I think we need transformational politics a decade ago. But even though we didn't get it then or two decades ago, we damn well need it now. And so I've gotten out of my comfort zone in order to do this work. Corbin and Sanders are very, very different types of politicians. But I do think that they share something in common. And it's part of I think the appeal that they had for younger people was that they were, there was something about them that was, was like a kind of a lovable cluelessness that allowed them to survive the 80s and 90s, relatively unscathed. Precisely because they didn't have the kind of media sabbiness and because they had that sort of singular focus. I wrote a little bit about Corbin as the kind of anti-brand where if you had Tony Blair as like the politician who understood corporate marketing, applied the principles of corporate branding to a political party for the first time, rebranded labor, new labor, this utterly meaningless trade, labor-scented as opposed to actually representing people. And so Corbin represented this return to the pre-branding era, the pre-media savvy era of just like, we're just gonna, we're gonna be the labor party as in people who labor, you know. And I think that for young people who are so seeped in branding and marketing and self-referential communications, there was something really trustworthy about the fact, that sort of media cluelessness. And we saw something very similar with the Corbin, Sanders campaign, particularly in 2016 where Bernie had that very same thing he's been saying forever. This is why I think after so many sort of test tube marketed politicians, these figures were more trustworthy because they have been saying the same thing for so many decades and that sort of message discipline. And yeah, Bernie's been talking about the millionaires and the billionaires for a very, very long time and he continued to do that. And then all of his sophisticated comms work grew up around him, much of it volunteer, right? And I guess what I'm wondering is maybe we've gone as far as we can go down that particular route. I think it brought a whole new generation into politics, actually brought in a couple of new generation into politics because Sanders and Corbin were a different kind of politician and were able to earn that trust. But their strength has also proven their weakness, right? That sort of intellectual rigidity or that sort of messaging rigidity. I mean, I think it's good to be consistent, right? But you also have to be nimble. You also have to change with events. And so I wonder now whether perhaps we can say to Corbin and to Sanders, thank you for bringing these new generations into politics, including a new generation of politicians in the squad who would not have done this work if it weren't for their example. But if we are going to weather these tumultuous waters that you and I have been talking about, we need leaders who are profoundly literate when talking about race, when talking about gender can seamlessly tell a story about the interrelationships between class and race and gender. And not just make a list of issues to tick off, but actually tell the story, right? Tell the story. And pivot and weave and use social media and be responsive. And I want to stress that when I say pivot and weave, I don't mean change your position, but respond to events as they're happening, right? Because I think that there's a frustration with that rigidity, which is also what we love about them, right? Where dramatic things change and we're still sticking with the same message. And I don't think that that works well enough. So I don't think these are insurmountable problems, but I just don't think that we maybe had the leaders who could lead us through them. And I'm not throwing them under the bus, but I just think that we need leaders who have the whole package maybe. So apologies to our viewers who have noticed a real shift in lighting, but the deep state hacked my camera, so I had to switch to a different one. But I want to talk about this thing that you identify, which is being able to talk about talking the registers of race and gender and doing so convincingly, and not just because it's a long list of injustices which you rattle off and say you're going to fix. Because it seems to me that particularly in America every four years praises heaped on black people for saving democracy from white nationalists. And then straight afterwards, liberals, the elites, the establishment gets right back to arguing that the demands and the material interests of those exact same black voters are completely untenable, unelectable, it's kryptonite the suburbs, and there's this enduring sense of we want your vote, but on no account do we want to have to represent your interests. And then you've got white politicians like Jeremy Corbyn who did try and represent more the interests of voters of color, particularly working class, Muslim votes of color in the UK, and it was absolutely hammered for it. So one of the questions that I've been wanting to ask, you know, quite a few of the big hitters, you know, the other side of Atlantic is when, if ever, will America actually be a multiracial democracy? And how do you achieve that sense of inequality of legitimate political interests on the part of white voters, black voters, Latino voters, voters of color more generally? Right. I mean, if this would be a good moment to try. And, you know, and I said, like, they're the same, but we are different. I think you're seeing an immediate pushback, right, in a way that maybe we haven't seen after elections. And that pivot that you're talking about is it's not it's not it's not happening without a fight. I think the danger is that Joe Biden seems to believe that he can appease people with representation, right. So he said, I owe I owe black people for my primary win. And I promise to elect a to select a woman and eventually he selected a black woman as his running mate. And he sees that as like, like that is him paying back those voters, right. And now he's talking about if he gets to appoint a Supreme Court justice, he will support a people appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court. And that's great. But it is not the same as ensuring that every black person in America has health care. And in fact, he is supporting policies that will actively prevent that, right. So I think that this is the danger is, is whether or not there is going to be pushback against just the kind of representational response, because I think that we can expect the Biden administration to be very intersectional. A friend of mine tweeted, welcome to the age of intersectional empire, the other day, which was pretty harrowing and probably quite true. I mean, there was a meme from the Clinton campaign in 2016. And it was near the blonde lady maths meme of all of the like geometry and stuff. And it's when you're trying to think of how to make drones intersectional. I think that this comes back to what we were talking about earlier about what the leverage is, what the power is, because people are naming this in a way that they haven't, and pushing back, including against the kind of tokenistic appeasement, right. Like it isn't just no, it's not enough just to appoint people to the highest levels of your administration. You actually need the policies that are going to materially transform the lives of working people and the people getting the raw steel in the United States are overwhelmingly black and brown. So this is about race. And I think that this will, you know, as Ilhan Omar said, we get what we organize for, right. So we have a lot of work to do on that front. But it's Joe Biden. It is not going to be, as he keeps reminding us, he's not Bernie Sanders. He's not. He beat Bernie Sanders. So I think it's, when is that moment going to be? I don't think it is going to be this moment. I don't think it's going to be this administration. But I think that what we can do at the movement level is come together around that vision much more forcefully than we have in the past. And a lot of that has started to happen during the Trump era, but not enough of it. And there's still, I think, a feeling of kind of scarcity in movement politics of like, you know, and a lot of that has to do with the way movements are funded, you know, people are competing over scarce resources. And so it almost mitigates against collaboration because you want to claim that your movement won this and you get money from foundations for it. And so, you know, we just need to talk openly about what are the systems that we're all locked in that are keeping us from organizing together. This is what was powerful about being part of the Sanders campaign, is you caught a glimpse, right, in the way that Bernie brought together working class voters. You know, if you look at who donated to his campaign, overwhelmingly it was nurses, Amazon workers, Walmart workers. And, you know, the tragedy of it is these ended up being of the quote unquote, you know, essential workers, the frontline workers. They were already Bernie voters, right? And they weren't trusted. I mean, this to me is the biggest heartbreak of what happened during the primaries is that Bernie did bring together a multi-racial coalition. It didn't go deep enough, but it was there and you saw it. You saw it at rallies and you saw it in who was donating to the campaign. But a lot of the people who speak on behalf of those groups didn't trust their own members, like whether it was union leadership, you know, or whether it was NGO leadership, there was a sense of like, I actually kind of like a classism in that, like you couldn't trust that those workers at Walmart, that those workers at Amazon, that those nurses actually knew it was best for them, you know? And that goes, I think, very deep in the kind of left or progressive movement that we have, which is actually not a left. I mean, do you think that in part because the reactionary right have been very good at absorbing and capitalizing on the way in which 40 years of neoliberalism has transformed class composition? Because even just being able to say a multi-racial working class coalition is something which not everyone or even the left accepts exists. So one of the things, the other thing is that, you know, 40 years of attacks on trade union organizing, the demise of heavy industry and former industrial heartlands is that one's perception of class identity is decoupled from the economic base. So you've got this tilt towards thinking of the real working class being a small business owner who might own multiple properties, but doesn't have a college degree, therefore is more working class authentically than a temp doing data entry who rents a box room which costs half of their salary and they're never going to own a house as long as they shall live. And the right has acknowledged that change and has leapt upon it, but the left and progressives more generally struggles with that. Yeah, and a lot of it has to do with trade union membership. And so, you know, who makes up trade union membership does not represent who the working class actually is. It is much wider and it is much better off, much more middle class. And this is where I think COVID and the response to COVID presents a really powerful organizing opportunity that a lot of people have been stepping into, right? Because COVID made the actual working class visible in a way that it is systematically invisibilized in our culture, right? And the whole discourse around essential workers is quite interesting, right? Because it was really just a rebranding of working class people who never were able to shelter in place and people keeping the lights on, cleaning up the trash, taking care of people in hospitals. And obviously teachers on Zoom, I mean, but it was and supermarkets and Amazon warehouses. And all the gig workers and delivery drivers and so on. So that's the current working class, but people who weren't able to lock down. And they were treated and are still being treated so vis-va-oi, right? And this is where it comes back to where we started in a way, which is, you know, and I'm really worried about it already with Biden. You know, the first thing he's done is he has struck this high powered scientific committee, right? To develop their pandemic response. And it's filled with amazing public health experts and different scientists. But those people will tell you that you need a lockdown, but they will not tell you how to do it without sparking a massive backlash and causing mass starvation. You need social policy for that, right? And so I think we need to be, because we are still in this pandemic. We are still in a moment of a mass death. And that is the working class, the people who are keeping us alive. And so that's who we need to be organizing. And, you know, we did a little video with Molly Crabapple, which was a sequel to the one we did with AOC. We've done a couple of these videos that are sort of set in the future. And trying to tell the story of how do we get out of this terrible place we're in, right? When we did the first one with AOC, it was a little bit more straightforward, right? Because it was pre-election and the idea was, well, basically, you know, we're going to take power and we're going to do this thing. And now, whoever the we is, we're not taking, we are not in power. We are not Biden. And so we are still going to have to fight for this. So what are our points of leverage? And in the second video, we kind of explored what an essential worker general strike would look like, right? And I think that that's where we need to be investing a lot of our energy. And I guess just to bring this around a little bit more and thinking about the lessons of the Corbyn and Sanders movements, right? And your leap, right? From being that 18-year-old anarchist and shutting down Tory headquarters to suddenly campaigning for social democracy for Jeremy Corbyn. You know, maybe that's too big a leap. And I say, like, in a sense that I sometimes wonder, and I felt this when I was on the campaign with Sanders of like, okay, did we skip some stages here? Right? Like, we went straight for the top, right? Like, campaigning for, in your case, for the prime ministership, in our case, for the U.S. presidency. And we knew that we hadn't done that sort of base organizing work to earn it. And we got a taste of what it would look like to all be kind of rowing in the same direction and this sort of, this multi-racial working class coalition that you caught a glimpse of in the Sanders campaign and in the Corbyn campaign. But the communities themselves weren't organized yet. And the Sanders campaign responds to that by saying, okay, he's going to be the organizer in chief, they're organizing as they go. But a presidential campaign is not the same as actually organizing in workplaces, in neighborhoods and building up that power that then can stay cohesive no matter what happens. Because I think that the heartbreak, and I don't know if you felt this in the U.K. as well, is that when the Sanders campaign was over, with some exceptions, we all just scattered back into our silos, right? And I don't think you should ever be reliant on a presidential campaign or a prime ministerial campaign to hold your movement together, right? There's that's much too precarious. And so maybe these years are about building up what that represented in a way that isn't reliant on any one politician's political fortunes. And I think that's a really beautiful place to wrap up. It's hopeful with just enough amount of bittersweet, almost remorse to see people through on a Tuesday evening. Naomi, thank you so much for joining us. And I swear it's not just because I mixed you up for a lockdown skeptic Naomi Wolfe. I'm sure she would be happy to talk with you. That's not that. Do you know that when I met with Alexis Tsipras about six years ago? Oh, God, I won't even tell you what he how he mixed me up. So he let's just say he was more disappointed than you. Oh, really? Was it Naomi Campbell? He had mistakenly said that at a public forum that he he'd said, you know, what we're living through here in Greece is Naomi Campbell's the shock doctor. And he was in conversation with Slavoj Zizek who just sat there and went it's one of my favorite moments in left history. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like a huge promotion to both of you. So suddenly it's Naomi Klein, supermodel of the world, shot by Mario Testino and Naomi Campbell. When I show up, you know, I just show up and it's just like, sorry. Well, you know what? Actually, I lied. My final question wasn't my final question because I did outsource to Twitter. What would you ask Naomi Klein if you had the chance to? And somebody did ask what is the skincare routine? And seeing as I pulled you into, you know, trivial waters with the Naomi Campbell thing, I've got to put it to you. But, oh, Jesus. Oh, what is the skincare routine? That is very kind. I guess that means that they think I have a good skincare routine. I don't, I'm not going to do this. I guess. It may tell her, I'll say good genes that you have absolutely decimated whatever good will you put full top over the interview. You know, if you just go out, I've got fantastic genes. That's it. Oh, no, no, no, no. There are ridiculous numbers of creams involved. But you don't want a $12 ice cream moment. I see what's going on here. Exactly, exactly. No, I'm not there. Naomi, thank you so much for joining us. I will let you get back to your busy regimen of exfoliating, moisturizing and whatever. Exactly. Some serums, some serums. So lovely. I can't believe this is the first time we met. It was such a pleasure. You're such a hero. Keep up the great work. Lovely. And you know, hopefully when all this is over, I can come raid your moisturiser cabinet in person. Absolutely. We'll do sheet masks. No product is safe when I'm in the house. Sticky food. Take care out.