 Welcome to New America. Welcome to this webinar book discussion of the new book called Let Them Eat Tweets by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson. And we're also joining, well, I'll introduce Jake and Paul, the authors of the book. Jacob is a professor of political science at Yale, Paul is a professor of political science at Berkeley. You're all on a computer so you can look up more biographical information if you'd like. They've written three books together. It's this is the fourth, I think. And we've had new America events for I think two of them that have been really successful. So, when I when I mentioned this event on Twitter, somebody responded. Those are some of the best people in the understanding America business. So that's a that's a that's a big statement but taking together I think their work has really covered a lot of the sweep of how American politics has worked in the last several decades and particularly the relationship between economic inequality, political power, and the ways those work both through electoral politics and through policy, and tremendously important influential. And we're joined by Camilla Michener who is a professor of political science and actually the Department of Government was trying to remember which schools have called their departments different things. The Department of Government at Cornell, and, and the author of the book Fragmented Democracy, which we also discussed in America a couple years ago, which I think is a powerful way of looking at how the way government operates particularly to Medicaid shapes people's experience of citizenship. And in a way that captures some of this, some of the same dynamics that the Jacob and Paul have captured. So I'm going to turn it over to, we'll do this in the way we often do. I'm going to let the authors talk for a little bit. Camilla will join in and bring her own perspective and then we'll have some conversation then we'll open it up. Before we do that I just want to say I think this is, I'm really kind of in awe of this book because, while it's a relatively short book, I think, 230, 240 pages. It's kind of encyclopedic in the way that it captures all the different, the different kinds of coalitions that have given the, that have, that have enabled the power of the right and I kind of brought it together under under a question, which is the dilemma of conservative power, and a lot of explanations and I think that's, I feel like I see a lot of books that are kind of like okay it's about Citizens United or okay it's about the Koch brothers or okay it's about a particular particular thing and I think you've kind of mapped out the whole landscape. There's a sense in your conclusion where you say American plutocracy wants what majorities can't provide. And I think what you're telling is the story of how plutocracy managed to find its way to power, even when majorities can't provide that level of power. So, I just think it's an incredibly important, important book for its scope and range. So with that, I'll congratulate you on the book. And, you know, it's a real addition to some of the things you've already written and to our understanding of the time and let you, once you kind of take it away and then we'll gradually open it up. Well, thank you mark for those amazingly kind words. It really means a lot to us that you found value in it you're kind of our ideal audience let's hope there's a lot more people who want that kind of that kind of synoptic, but concise view. Thanks Jamila for joining us. I just want to note that Jamila just got tenure at Cornell so congrats on that. We have had a long association with the New America Foundation. As, as Mark said I, in fact, was a part of the New America Foundation from its founding long ago. And it's probably been about that long. I think this was around 2000 that we've been thinking about the transformation of the Republican Party. We've watched as this party that, you know, everyone says it couldn't it couldn't go get more extreme has, you know, treated its, its last sort of step towards extremism just as a base camp for another for a. And, and it's, you know, I just also just very quickly want to thank Elena and the entire team who helped put this together and we're really grateful we can do this online. Before I jump into the content a little more I just want to sit, I'm reminded of an old author's lament that the period before a book comes out is the calm before the calm. And that's certainly not been true for us this has been a really turbulent period and we'd be very happy with some calm, but we really think the book is needed right now to understand what's going on. And to everyone who's watching what's going on is with Donald Trump is pretty clear right he has a one blade Swiss Army knife racial division and cultural distraction, and, and he's pulled it out in response to a crisis that that it's not suited to deal and if it were suited to deal with any crisis and I think there's been this rush to see this is all about Trump all about racial backlash, and to forget that this is not something that began with Donald Trump. You know he turned the dial to 11, but he did so on an existing political machine. One fact that's kind of revealing here that Paul and I have been thinking about is that George W. Bush, who was not like Trump in so many ways, ended his presidency, less popular than Donald Trump is right now and, and for many of the same reasons that Trump is he showed contempt for science expertise and evidence. He wasn't able to change course. His policies excuse you know skewed toward the priorities of business and super rich. And if not his active hostility towards his indifference towards minorities became transparent in the Katrina crisis. He was sort of like his father, though much much more conservative in that he governed. He governed, you know, he campaigned sort of using at water like themes, particularly in South Carolina when he knocked off john McCain but his, but he got he did not govern in the way that Donald Trump does and so I think, I think we need to take the sort of white backlash story and the Trump story and put it into this, this context and I say that fully aware that we've like massively understated race in some of our prior work. So, so in, in, in saying that we need to pay attention to right wing plutocracy. We also in this book really try to draw out how the kind of outrage industry centered on race has formed within the Republican Party and in service of the Republican Party's plutocratic goals. You know, American right wing populism looks really quite different than the right wing populism we see in other nations, not so much in it, you know, because it is, it does have that same kind of ethno nationalist focus, but it's far far aristocratic. And we argue that the, the story of the Republican Party is really similar to the story that was faced by conservative parties. A century ago, when the electorate was expanding they had to figure out how to stay true to their elite economically elite allies, while reaching out to people who are on the losing side of extreme inequality and that, and that's been a kind of strong sort of evolutionary process within the GOP. We don't think it's a conspiracy where the plutocrats like, you know, said, go for a racial backlash, but we do think it's a story in which various themes were tried out candidates, fought each other and eventually this kind of hybrid, which we call plutocratic populism of right wing back right wing racial backlash and policymaking for the very very top emerged and so I'm going to hand things off to Paul, but I want to just note a couple of great things that I think are hard to understand if you don't look at plutocratic populism as a whole. One is the extent to which this intense this racial focus is intensified over time. And so we trace it back to Lee Atwater but it's it's been more and more prevalent even as society has become more tolerant or at least portions of society have become more tolerant and even as the party at repeated points is recognized that it's that it's actually putting itself in peril by embracing just kind of white identity politics too tightly. And the other thing I want to note is that while Trump has sort of perfected the rhetoric a backlash his policies that he pursued an office where the most plutocratic we've seen under Republican president, you know, two policies alone kind of make the case that he tried but failed to take health care away from many of their own supporters Republicans tried and failed to do that. So they could cut taxes for the rich. They barely failed and then they turned around and cut taxes on corporations in the rich and blew up the deficit. And just before that happened, you know, there was fear that it wouldn't happen and the Republicans very candidly said we're doing this because our donors want us to do this. By the 2018 midterm we're saying, don't talk about these issues, economic issues, they're a wasteland, you know, talk about an immigrant invasion and so that's where we are today I think Paul is going to talk more about the kind of infrastructure within the Republican Party that's made a plutocratic populism possible so thanks again for having us. All right, I'll jump in here and I just want to echo Jacob's thanks to everybody who's been involved in this it's been a great privilege to work with new America over the over the years and we're happy to be doing this first first event connected to the book with with the foundation. So I just I do want to talk a little bit about the nature of this machine that Jacob mentioned before I do that I want to just say one other thing by way of background. What the US does in some ways so right wing populism in the US does in some ways look like variance abroad. But what is really distinctive about it is that it operates in this context of extreme economic inequality. And I think Americans still don't fully recognize how distinct of the American story is how dramatic the rise of inequality and the concentration of economic power and with it political power has been in the United States is not comparable. In these other countries and without recognizing that I don't think we can really understand what's been happening on the right in the United States and how you can end up with this astonishing situation where you get a more and more virulent more and more extreme form of populism. Most of it in the service of the wealthiest Americans and powerful American corporations and that's sort of the puzzle that we try to unpack here and I want to say a little bit about the machinery that makes that possible about how economic inequality and racial inequality have intersected in the trajectory trajectory of the Republican Party and like Jacob I want to start by acknowledging that that working through this book project has been a humbling experience in many ways because I think we have as it's been true I think for many white Americans we have been forced to wrestle with our own woefully inadequate appreciation of the depth of racial divisions and the way in which they permeate everything about American politics and so we we we've tried to approach that and understand that in this project and we try to do it. Though in a way that I that I hope is useful in a couple of couple of ways. One is that we really want to suggest and in trying to understand what's going what's been going on with white working class America, which of course journalists and academics flock to understand after Trump's election in November of 2016 and they invaded the bars and diners of left behind America and and actually I think produced a lot of very valuable insights that we drop on in the book. But, but the two things that I think we have really wanted to emphasize one is that that we need to not see race and economics or racial resentment and economic anxiety as they are sometimes characterized as being two alternative explanations for what is going on instead we need to see them as deeply deeply intertwined right so when White working class Americans in parts of the country that have been falling behind economically and are really struggling socially in important ways when they see their plight as being related to or caused by a distant government that doles out largesse on dark skinned Americans. That's that's a toxic stew right that involves both economic elements and racial elements and so the challenge is to think about, we think the challenge is to think about how those are intertwined. And then the second thing is that we shouldn't just be talking to people in the diners and the bars that we should recognize that much of the evolution of this, this conversation this politics doesn't just bottle up bubble up from the bottom it comes from the top down. And that that's where political and economic and cultural power is. And it's not as if those Americans who are being interviewed all of a sudden woke up and were frightened about antifa. Right, or felt like they weren't going to be able to celebrate Christmas anymore. You know that this is a process that was orchestrated and cultivated and intensified over time. And, as Jacob said, we had to be careful and we think we are careful in the boat not to turn it into some plot hatched in a secret layer like a bond villain and a secret layer and in a volcano. You know it's something that developed through trial and error but involved a lot of powerful groups, right, who saw that this was the best way to mobilize popular support that they needed in a context where they were planning on and continue to deliver economic benefits, essentially exclusively to those in the top 1% And, and so in doing this as we stress in the book a crucial part of what happens is that the Republican Party where these the dilemma of how you provide the goods for the plutocrats. Well the same time winning elections that dilemma runs through the Republican Party, and they respond to it over time by relying increasingly on what we call surrogates. And we discussed three in the book there are probably others that one could talk about, but conservative Christians evangelicals in particular. The, the National Rifle Association and right wing media which becomes over time a kind of social movement element that it's very powerful within the Republican Party and all these surrogates. Play a critical role in shaping a sense of white identity and a sense of threat that's how they mobilize their supporters and we we recount this in the book in the way in which it becomes increasingly central to how the Republican Party works. And critical element of this process is that the surrogate groups are fine with the plutocrats agenda. Right, they're not, they're not interested in those issues they don't. It doesn't bother them that the Republican Party when it's elected just bestows huge tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations and guts, federal regulations that are that are popular and the population as a whole. So the development of these surrogates is an absolutely critical top down part of the way that this politics works over time, but it intensifies that these groups, they mobilize through inculcating a sense of threat. Right, and so it intensifies over time, which is why in the book we refer to this as the kind of opening up Pandora's box. And you can see this happen over time in the Republican Party, to the point where prominent Republicans who were way on the right in the party when they started out, whether you're talking about John Boehner, or Eric Cantor, or Paul Ryan. You know, they were, they were on the right of the party. As they rose to power, but when they came to power power they found that they were eventually undermined by many of the forces that they had helped to create, and that we're also generating the circumstances under which you would get Donald Trump. So John Boehner's Chief of Staff put it in retrospect, you know, we, we were eaten by the beast that we created. And we think that that's a critical part of the dynamic though, even though, when finally you get Donald Trump somebody who thrives on the kind of politics that they created in office. So if the plutocrats lose at that point, no, they actually achieve even greater victories in the first few years that they're that Trump is in office is really quite astonishing. So I really am looking forward to hearing the broader conversation hearing what Jamila has to say in her reactions to the book but I'll just close by saying that that I think critical to what we're trying to argue in the book is that one can get lost in all the tweets and the flood of events. What we're trying to suggest it is that the problems that America faces today, the politics we're experiencing on the right are deeply structural, right, that they emerge out of 30 years, 40 years now of rising inequality. The way in which that intensifies a dilemma for the conservative party and the way in which our conservative party in the United States has chosen to respond to that dilemma. The problems are deep. They're long lasting. They're getting worse. They're not just about Donald Trump. And the central claim of the book is that if we don't deal with the extreme inequality that is taken hold in the United States over the past generation, that inequality is increasingly poisonous to our democracy. And if we want to save our democracy, we need to address, we need to address that structural problem. Thank you, Paul. That's really brilliant. I don't, I want to get to Jamila quickly, but I want to ask a favor, which is to say a little bit more about how you wrote and thought about race in say your book winner take all politics and sort of what you what you kind of got wrong. And where I mean, when you think about that book which when did that book come out when did winner take all politics come out 2011 or so. That's my beauty myself 2010 2010. I mean, you know, at that point you're writing about the Republican Party of, you know, Paul Ryan and Romney and Banner and people who is language about race is more muted. than Trump. It sort of reflects that, you know, that Lee Atwater quote of like, you stop talking about race, you talk about small government, you just talk about shrinking government and all that. So what did, what did the situation change and that was unsustainable? Or did you, you feel like you overlooked subtext? I mean, I'm just, you both sort of said you kind of should have said more and I'm just, I just want you to be a little more specific about that. Yeah, and I would say clearly it's not that this has happened since 2010. It's that we didn't see it clearly when we were writing about it at that time. And so, you know, and I think we just, we would like to just own that. And we look back at that and say, well, we just really, we really got wrong how central that was to the, to the Republican coalition. And I, you know, I think part of it was, it was a little bit more muted or maybe a lot, maybe a lot more muted, but not all that muted. And when you look back at it now, you can see the through line. And, you know, we try in the current book to show that it was there all along, although it becomes significantly more intense and important over time as the party becomes more plutocratic, right, which it, which it really doesn't do until around the 2000s, I would say. I mean, it starts to happen when Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House, but it really intensifies with George W. Bush and the, and the Bush tax cuts and the, you know, really sharp turn against the federal regulatory state, right. So it, you know, it, it, it, it intensifies later. The post-Gingrich party is, is much more extreme than, than the pre-Gingrich party. But I, you know, I think we missed it in part because it was muted, in part because we were really focused on bringing out the extremity of what had happened to inequality and the income distribution in the United States and making the case that politics and policy in the Republican Party had been central in generating that extreme inequality and protecting and extending that extreme inequality. That was the case that we were trying to make. We were making it right around the time that Occupy was developing. So, but, but we missed it. That's true. Jamila, let's, let me hear your thoughts. Yeah. So first I'll say following directly from the question that you just asked, Mark, and your response to it, Paul, I, I appreciate the question and the answer. And that, that part in the book where, where you both say, we actually have not paid attention to race enough. And we're going to try to, to, you know, sort of reroute in, in this work. That was like a part where I was like, because as someone who, who cares and thinks a lot about inequality and who thinks of myself as a sort of political economy person in my interest and in my orientation, I've long struggled with, but who also thinks a lot about race and racial inequality. I've long struggled with the feeling that I'm like trying to figure out how to reconcile those fields, right? And so to see this move in this direction, I thought that it, I thought it was really generative and, and, and a good thing. So I want to say that up front. So, you know, when, when you all reached out to me and asked if I would be a part of this as a commentator, I kept thinking, but why me? And part of the reason why I thought that is because I am actually not someone who spends too much of my time thinking about political elites, right? A lot of how I understand myself is that I, I want to think about people's lives on the ground and how politics is shaping their lives and what, if any, ability they have to shape politics. And so I think a lot about policy, but often I'm like the one trying to push to think about policy from the perspective of the margins. So because of that, I looked at the title and I thought, how the right rules, that sounds like it's about elites, which is totally not my thing. And I worried that I would not be adequate to the task of thinking about this work. And now, having read the book, I'm so glad that you invited me to be a part of this conversation. And I actually think it's for the good that I'm not someone who's normally spending my time thinking about elites, because that allowed me, first of all, frankly, just to learn a lot, right? And I think it allowed me to have a different perspective than I might have if this was kind of my bread and butter and where I spent all of my time. So from that perspective, I found the narrative crafted in the book, compelling and resonant, but also revelatory, right? There were plenty of things that I read like, okay, we know about inequality. And I felt like, okay, I know about these things. But the way that you were able to bring all of these different patterns and facets of the larger American political economy into conversation and under the banner of a coherent narrative really was revelatory to me, right? And I think that's where the book proves particularly at adept, at taking things that we know or that we think we know, things that we've come to accept as given. And there are plenty of points in the book where, where you all say this, like, well, I know that we probably think we know this already, but let's think about it in this context and in relation to these patterns. And that's often where I found myself really clicking in because I would be thinking, well, I already know this. And then suddenly it would be a landscape opened up to me, right? And so you take those things that we accept as given and you put them into a larger political context, the context that's both historical, but also just has some more depth than what we see in kind of our everyday kind of punditry that, that we might be absorbing. And you really push the reader to query the origins of, of these kinds of patterns and to reconsider the things that we take for granted and the assumptions that we make. And then to connect dots that I think otherwise remain disconnected. So, you know, when we think about things like astoundingly high levels of economic inequality, which is something that, okay, we know that economic inequality is a huge problem, disturbing overlap between political power and economic power, which political scientists have now been charting for quite some time. The consistent ability of the Republican Party to advance an economic agenda that doesn't appear to serve the interest of its core constituents. Also, it's kind of like the, what's the matter about Kansas line of thinking and it's something or with Kansas or whatever. It's something that, you know, we've been thinking about and aware of for some time. And then, of course, profound racial divisions in our, in our politics. And I understand each of these things on their own. And I maybe even understand some of the connections between them. If I take any two dyads, I can think through connections between them. But what you all have done is woven all of those things into one narrative that helps us to make sense of each of them more than we would have been able to either make sense of them together or individually or even in dyads. Right. So altogether, I walked away feeling like I benefited from your ability to integrate in that way. And I was thinking about political and economic patterns in a more coherent way than I had been before. So having said that, I just want to point out three things that struck me and this will be quick. That struck me that I think like struck me because of my particular position as someone who doesn't always think about the same things in the same way that you all do, but who has a lot of the same sort of interest and passion and investments in terms of thinking about our larger political economy here in the U.S. And I will say also, you all bring in a lot of comparative examples along the way, and I actually appreciated that and often found it to be revealing. OK, so there are two words that kept coming to my mind as I was reading the book over and over and over again to the point where and at first I thought I have to push that out. I don't think it's it really is going to fit. And then by the end of the book, I thought I have to at least say these words, right, and the words of racial capitalism, right? I kept thinking about racial capitalism. And if the most kind of succinct way of thinking about what racial capitalism means or how it's been kind of consistently defined is the sort of phenomena of white institutions using non-white people to acquire benefit, value or advantage, right? And one of the things that I kept thinking as I read this is that it's actually an extraordinary example of how racial capitalism works and has worked, at least for the past several decades in the United States of its mechanism, some of its mechanisms and of its consequences. And so I wanted to say that not because I'm saying that you should have framed everything you said in the book in terms of racial capitalism, but because I actually want to open space for dialogue and engagement, for example, between the folks, the scholars who are thinking about things like racial capitalism and you all and the and this book and even your larger body of work, because I think that that's really crucial. I think it's crucial in sort of bridging what what has emerged as a gap between sort of political economy, American political economy and racial politics, right? I think there shouldn't be a gap between those things for precisely the reason that Paul pointed out in response to Mark's question, which is these these phenomena are working in concerts and overlapping and interacting and self-reinforcing and mutually constitutive, right? So why should we think about them separately? Even as scholars, we should be thinking about how they relate. And so I think even engaging folks who are thinking about things like racial capitalism and in part, anyone who might be watching who thinks in those kinds of terms, I want to flag this as a potentially really generative way to see some of the mechanisms. And a lot of times I say racial capitalism, people say, what does that really mean? And now I feel like I'm going to say, go read, let them be tweets when you get to see some of the kind of development of these kinds of patterns. And then I just quickly want to say two things about how I felt about and how I thought about the future of democracy in the United States as I read this book, right? And I thought a lot of things that mostly I don't tend towards optimism and just as a natural inclination. And I will say this did not help, but I don't think that was the purpose. But I will say I thought a lot about two things, which is with respect to the future of democracy. One is the role of organizations and organizing. And the other is the role in the place of ordinary people. So with respect to organizations and organizing, you pulled in a lot and I learned a lot, especially from the vantage point of the right, right? So what are the mechanisms by which you actually get people on board with this plutocratic economic platform that undermines their own economic interest? You do it by stoking racial divisions and tribalism and other and such things, right, but you need an arm for that. And this is where, you know, the NRA and the right wing media and white evangelicals come in as the arm that can do that mobilizing, that can sort of fuel the outrage machine. And I learned a lot from that analysis. And some of it was like frightening, frankly. But then I kept wondering, so what does the future look like for organizations and organizing on the left? It's clear, even from what you present in the book, that what's been happening on the right is distinctive, right? What's been happening on the right is distinctive and it hasn't been happening to the same extent or to the same effect on the left, right? But I kept wondering how does how, if at all, does that change? Does it change? Will the process and the role of organizations and organizing on the left have to be fundamentally different, right? So, for example, maybe on the left, organizations won't operate in the same sort of elite terms that we see on the right. And there may it may be more about what's happening at the grassroots or it may bubble up more from the bottom than the narrative that you offer in the book. I don't know, but I guess I wanted to, as I was reading, I was thinking what vision might I have for organizing and organizations on the left going forward? And what does that mean for, you know, the possibilities for us having a robust democracy in the United States? And then similarly, when I thought about the place of ordinary people in the book and I'll end here, I have to say I was fighting through this as I read the book partially because of my own orientation. And I think from very early on, you all said, you know, the diners and, you know, the kind of journalists dropping in and talking to, you know, flyover towns in the US. Like we need an analysis that actually also incorporates what's happening among elites, right? And I think my initial response to that was to say, OK, but, you know, I hope this doesn't meet only elites matter. And then as I read, I increasingly became convinced of the benefits of that kind of analysis. And it's not an exclusion. I didn't find it actually to be an exclusionary analysis that says, well, no one except elites matter. But I found it to be an analysis that says elites are doing a lot of the work here, and we should think about the kinds of work they're doing. And that helps us to understand even what's going on with ordinary Americans in a way that is more insightful. So I accepted that. And actually, that was one of the things I learned as I went along. But I kept wondering, and by the end of the book, I really strongly wondered what does all of this mean for ordinary people, whatever that means, right? Non-elites. And so from the vantage point of why the Americans who are non-elites, I thought a lot of this makes them sound essentially like dupes who are manipulated through racial appeals and other kinds of nativistic appeals, xenophobic appeals to support economic relationships and arrangements that are fundamentally at interest with what is best for them or at conflict with their interests, their economic interest in what we might imagine economically is best for them. And even what they believe, right? As far as economic perspectives. And then for ordinary people of color, it seems as though they're harmed by these processes, but have very little agency, right? They don't seem to play a role in being able to push back against or change or confront what's happening, the processes that you describe here. And so I kept finding myself wondering how we can envision a democracy that has a place for non-elites beyond these characterizations. And it's not that these characterizations, perhaps empirically, they're accurate right now, right? But I wanted to be able to think beyond that to a vision of American democracy that allows much more room than that for ordinary people to be robustly involved in and affecting the democratic process. And so I'd be curious to hear what folks think about that, but I'll stop there. Wow, those are wonderful remarks, Jamila. Thank you. Thank you, Jamila. Can I ask two questions? First, Jamila, can you want to make a are there a couple of books or things to read that you recommend that represent the scholars thinking about racial capitalism that would kind of go well in dialogue with with this book? OK, I'm muted. I'm sorry. Well, I mean, I think the kind of foundational work on racial capitalism is the kind of person, the figure who is associated with that is Cedric Robinson. Right. And so, you know, I think that that's someone who I would recommend for sure, even though, yeah, it's I think it's work that's really different, right? But in ways that I think are could be really generative. I think that some of this is outside of political science. It's just thinking about social scientists and historians more broadly, who are thinking critically about some of these ideas. Robin Kelly is one of them. Nancy Leong, there are a few folks and maybe I can I can put some specific suggestions. I don't think people can see the chat, so I won't do that. But yeah, I guess those are names. The hard thing is that many of these folks have are doing multiple like it's in their books. It's in their articles throughout their body of work. So I might say find people more so than there's not really one definitive like read this book. And that is racial capitalism. Although Cedric Robinson is always the place to start. Thank you. I was curious, you know, you mentioned the phrase, what's the matter with Kansas, which was a book that Thomas Frank wrote in the mid 2000s. And I noted in Frank Ford's very nice review of your book yesterday, he mentioned that book also, which is an interest, which is the which is the kind of people are here, they they're not voting in their in their interests. And of course, my reaction to that book has always been like people's own people's interests are not only economic, right? So it's that's always seemed like a, you know, one of those false consciousness arguments that I have an issue with because people have a lot of different interests. But I don't feel like this book falls in that category. I feel like it's making more of an argument that, you know, structures and organizations and the kind of the kind of systems that help people organize their lives of thinking are really important. And I'm just interested in, you know, any of the three of you reflecting on that question of how much this is a kind of people are doing kind of argument or not. Am I am I kind of reading it right? I'll jump in real quickly. I think that chapter that in the book that really tackles that is chapter four, which is really about putocracy, what we call it's titled Putocracy and Identity. And and I really appreciate what Jamila said, because I think, you know, both Paul and I have made an argument in a lot of our work about the need to take seriously organization institutions, larger structural forces alongside, you know, voters and political behavior. But I think what what this book allowed us to do is to think much more about the interaction between the two. And that came from lots of dialogues with Jamila, but also from Daniel Zeblat's work on conservative parties. And and because Zeblat looks at this context when conservative parties emerged. I mentioned this in my opening remarks, where they were facing this fundamentally new context. All these working class folks had the vote all of a sudden and they had to figure out how they could continue to be what they wanted to be, which was defenders of the elite and compete in this new environment. And I think that really cast in stark or that cast in stark relief, the interactive relationship between voters or potential voters and parties. And it's a theme that comes out in some of the recent work on parties and political science. And it really inspired a lot of our thinking in this chapter and more broadly in the book. So when you start to look at it that way, thinking about, OK, you have this, you have these elite behaviors and strategies that are designed to both maximize some set of goals. And in our case, we argue that a lot of those goals are emerging from this more and more powerful and resourceful plutocracy. While also trying to get elected, you really can see then much more clearly, I think, how this process works in a way that I think for all the value of Frank's book isn't as clear, it isn't clearly elucidated in this way. And it's not about false interest. It's about focusing and building up a kind of identity and focus for voters that gets them to decide with the party, despite the fact that it is pursuing these economic-ish goals that are that aren't particularly favorable to the party's own voters. And just two thoughts on that, because I think Jamila kind of limbed them. One is that we don't want to deny in any way the way in which white voters, even white downscale voters, benefit both materially and in terms of status from racial inequality and the rhetoric of it. So that is a good, if you will, that the party is delivering. A bad good that the party is delivering. The other thing I think it's really, Paul talked about it, which is these intermediate organizations that that we had not paid as much attention to in the past, like the NRA and conservative Christian organizations and right wing media, they're really fundamental to this identity formation. And the party is not orchestrating what they are doing. It's working with them and sometimes finding itself, you know, in outsourcing to them, unable to control what it's unleashing. And that really, I think, helps explain, you know, Donald Trump was not the party's choice. Donald Trump, though, mastered the politics of outrage. And by the way, it was really skillful at getting the support of the groups like the NRA that made up this outsourced outrage machine. And so the place where I think you see most clearly what Paul was describing is about judicial nominations. And so in this gets to your point, right? Christian conservative voters really care about who the Supreme Court nominees are. We're not denying that they think it's really important to have a justice who's tries to overturn Roe v. Wade. That is that is a position they hold and they support the party and they support these nominees for that reason. What's striking, though, is that that has become the terms on which they, those voters interact with the party and the party and party elites like Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society have figured out how to construct a coalition that delivers for the plutocrats with these justices at the same time as it stands up for that one set of interests among those voters. So I'll stop there, but I just think that's the kind of thinking that we didn't really have in our prior work because I think we thought that an organizational perspective really needed to start and end at the organizational level and the voters were not nearly as as important in that story. And and that that led us, I think, to both not pay as much attention to this interaction and also to understate the role of race in it. And then, of course, a legal observer would point out that the court they've got is almost more consistently supportive on the economic interests than it is on the on the on the other side. Can I can I just say a couple of really quick things? I want to make sure we open this up, but I can't totally resist. So so on this question, now, of course, do do's is a pretty loaded word. Of course, we can't be saying that voters are do's. But we do think that there's a strong case to be made for thinking really hard at the way in which, you know, prominent people in the culture and when you're talking about political culture, that includes political leaders, express themselves and encourage other people to see the world that they live in, especially around these kinds of issues that most Americans don't spend all that much time thinking about, right? And so when we look around and we see millions of Americans who react with fury when they are asked to wear a mask. You know, I I think we need to take really seriously the kind of elite messaging that they're exposed to and the way that they they feed that into their understandings. So so that's one. And then the more broadly, I just want to thank Jamila for her comments. And I will say I think anybody who's in this Zoom meeting will understand why having heard your comments will understand why we wanted you to be a commentator on the book because your remarks are just fall of insight. And I and I really appreciate them. And so and I'll just say I would love to talk a little bit more about the race, racial capitalism thing. If we have time, I have a few thoughts about that. Right. Well, I'm going to open it up, although continue exactly from what you're talking about on the organizational question, because one of the one of the questions from the audience is about whether the killing of of the organization Acorn in 2019 is an is an example of the right recognizing and attacking left organizers. I want to talk about like what's the organizational infrastructure on the other side, on behalf of ordinary people and how much that's been eroded over the years. We often think of them as as almost different domains when we think about like right wing trying to expand the role of money and politics or whatever, but also at the same time, you know, stripping out right to work laws, defunding Acorn, things like that. What's and and then at the same time, it's, you know, so an article the other day that tried to argue that Black Lives Matter may actually be one of the largest like organization without a without much of an organizational infrastructure, not a, you know, a headquarters in Arlington or anything like that, but nonetheless, one of the largest movements in our history and in many ways, a majoritarian one, just the Women's March was a majoritarian one. What's the, you know, what do you see as the organizational infrastructure on the other side and the attack? So that it's a great question. And I'm only going to give a really partial answer because and say one thing, which is we say very, very little in this book about the Democrats and about the left. And that and I will say that was a very conscious choice because you guys are very nice about saying how, how wide ranging and synoptic the book is, but we very much wanted to produce a book that was of a manageable size, covered a manageable terrain so that we could really focus in on some of these dynamics that we see as fundamental to understanding what's going on. And those, those are, yeah, this came in for us. This is a very pithy book and, you know, and so we really wanted to focus on the conservative dilemma and the relationship between the rise of plutocracy and the rise of right wing populism. And so that meant that many important subjects. We just decided that's a topic for, that's a topic for another day. Well, this is that day. Well, this is part of that. So, so I will say, so I think Acorn is a great example. The one we talk about more in the book, though, though it's very related and I think it's very telling has been the response of the right towards, towards organized labor and organized labor really matters. We discuss this briefly, briefly in the book, but there, there's quite striking political science research on this now that, you know, if you're a white working class voter and you're a member of a union or you, or a member of your family is in a union, you are much more likely to vote for Democrats. You're much more likely to vote for Barack Obama. Right. And so there are, there are organizations on the other side, right, that also structure influenced the way that people think about their social, economic and political realities. And Republicans, when they've been in a position to do it have been merciless at going after those organizations. Right. So Alex Sertel Fernandez's wonderful book, State Capture, right, talks about how when the right was able to obtain power in relatively balanced states like Wisconsin or Ohio, the first thing that they do without any kind of popular call for it is to go after public sector unions. And it has a big effect, right? So yes, these organizations on the left, they do matter and they have been a target, you know, so could conservatives understand this and have made it central to the way that they waged political battles? There's sort of an inevitable question here that actually, Jamila, do you want to comment on that? Do you want to say anything about sort of organizational infrastructure and how it affects ordinary peoples? No, I really appreciated hearing Paul's response to that. And I think your comment mark on Black Lives Matter certainly provokes some thought and just makes me think about the important differences between what organizational structure on the right and left look like right now and may continue to look like. And, you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it just has implications that I think can inform this conversation and these issues more broadly. But I'll stop. I want to hear other people's questions. Well, there's a sort of inevitable and tough question which is you've done a good job of analyzing and stating the problem. However, as with most discussions of this type, if you really don't offer concrete steps to deal with it, the answer can't be just to elect more Democrats or getting more voters to turn out. That just ends up with a two and four year fix and what happens next. And I guess I'd add to that because one of the things that I'm really interested in in the relationship between policy and politics is the kind of cycle of backlash and the backlash that we saw in 2010 that had a norm. I mean, that's the world we're living in now is a combination of the 2010 backlash and the 2014 election where fears of Ebola basically gave the Republicans the Senate. How do you, is there a solution that gets us to a better place that isn't as vulnerable to another cycle of backlash? And that's sort of my addendum to the question. Yeah, it's a tough and fair question. The last chapter problem is the central issue for all book authors who've analyzed really complex and self-reinforcing processes. That said, we do try to lay out a kind of Broadway of thinking about how we should tackle the problem. And I just starting with the very basic point that plutocracy, runaway inequality, as Paul said, is at the heart of this. And that it's been manifested through this vicious cycle within the Republican Party, that helps. I think we start with, and we say with the obvious point that if we face a kind of race between the Republicans declining demographic position, which is declining faster in a lot of ways than they had expected, Trump is in a very weak position. On the one hand, and the fact that they've obviously been attacking democracy in a variety of very serious ways, most notably by really trying to rig the electoral process through extreme partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression to try to maximize this way of their declining base. And so this race against time is also a real race for our democracy. And so if we can kind of hold majoritarian democracy together, we're relatively optimistic, but we really think it's more than about defeating Trump as important as that is. And so just two quick thoughts on that. In the conclusion, we point out that the flip side of how concentrated these economic rewards has been have become is that it would be possible to produce really popular policies that are based on taxation of a very small share of the population, right? And this is the fear of the plutocrats from the beginning of democracy. Well, I think it's actually a fear that carries with an important prescription, right? I mean, given how massively unequal our economy is it makes total sense for us to provide some broad and popular benefits, particularly in the wake of the COVID crisis based on highly progressive taxation. The second thing is, and this maybe gets more to some of what Jamila is saying, and Jamila was part of a project that Paul and I did on sort of thinking about how to build power through policy. And I'll just say that the flip, what Paul said about how Republicans respond when they come into power, well, if there is an opportunity for serious policymaking, I think front and center for Democrats has to be how to strengthen our democracy and how to strengthen organizations that represent the broad middle. And we're seeing a lot of promising signs there, but the idea would be to create a kind of virtuous cycle that could replace the vicious cycle in which greater pressure from voters is basically creating a situation in which it's not tenable for the Republican party to continue to be a white ethno-nationalist party. And the last thing we'll say on this is just, like we really believe you have to have two vibrant parties to have a well-functioning democracy. We just need a different vibrant party than the contemporary Republican party, which is outside the mainstream, not just of where it was in the past, but of conservative parties in other rich democracies. My colleague, Lee Droppman would argue that you might need three, four, or five parties to actually have that more vibrant democracy. We should just say, Lee is great, and he actually, we use the table, the figure from him that we love. We can have that debate, but working within the system we have now for now, I think we really have to think about how do you bring the Republican party to a better place. And I think one thing that's important to note in what you're saying is like, I think a lot of the conversations about what it means to create a more vibrant democracy has just been about voting or they've been about limiting money and politics. They don't tend to be about strengthening organization. And I think that's a really important step we really have to take, like what helps people organize to have their ways heard. Well, and I do want to underscore this point that Jake had made in part because because I think it may be an unexpected position that we take at the end of the book, but I think it follows from the argument that we make over the course of the book. You can read the concluding chapter, you can see whether you find it convincing or not, but we do not believe that in a capitalist democracy that, and particularly one that's designed the way the American system is, which is to have a two-party system, that the system will work without a viable, a pro-system conservative party. You can't just rule over them. They have to be ongoing participants. And so the question is whether or not, how you bring that about, we see that as a central, it doesn't necessarily have to be called the Republican party, it could be something else, but there's gonna be a conservative party. And we actually think that that's a good thing. As long as it's a party that actually, meaningfully has to reach out to try to make the lives better of ordinary citizens and hasn't just been captured by the wealthy. So how you bring that about is a difficult question, which we try to address in the book, but we think that is, that's usually not on the list that reformers talk about, and we think it should be on the list. Right, but what are, obviously, what are we going to do about it? I mean, I feel like that the sort of never Trump, it's the never Trumpers dilemma too. I mean, they have a vision of a viable pro-system conservative party and no has to making it happen. Well, you can see a path at the state level in some states, right? And so, the national level is more difficult where they are now, but the argument that we make in the book is they are in a race against time. And it doesn't mean that, because the demographics within a system in which you have to win elections that are reasonably open and fair are not gonna allow it over the medium run, right? But that doesn't mean it will be resolved by having free and fair elections, right? We talk about the other ways in which it might be resolved that are a lot darker to think about. I think we actually had a couple of questions here that went to that, the issue of racial capitalism, and I know you wanted to talk about that a little more, Paul. So I guess I'll just to take a short version of one of those, one question basically, basically says, is conceiving of capitalism as a white institution helpful? One of the suggestions in the anti-racist literature today is for white people to support black businesses. Of black entrepreneurs, somehow by definition will relinquish their identity by selling commodities. I'm not sure I fully understand that question, but I guess maybe starting with you, Jamila, like what's that relationship between black capitalism and racial capitalism, I guess, in a way, is it helpful to try to support black businesses or integrate black, or incorporate black capitalism into capitalism? Is that even related to the racial capitalism? Yeah, you know, so I will just say that I'll try not to delve too deeply into this because there's a whole kind of enormous literature and history of scholars sort of trying to think through the relationship between race and class in the context of capitalism, and trying to think through, for example, whether there's an exceptional relationship in the context of the U.S., where capitalism itself might not be kind of constitutive racist in a constitutive kind of way, but in the U.S., race and capitalism, I mean, there's a lot of different, I guess the point is to say there's a lot of different avenues that this can go down, and I don't want it to sort of completely hijack the conversation. I think, and some of it is really dependent on what may, my perspective is likely idiosyncratic in this realm, right? So I tend to be cynical towards instantiations of black capitalism as some sort of an aim that's going to support or improve the kind of black communities. I mean, I think you can look at examples of, banking in black communities. I mean, it would be hard to pick an economic realm and really not be able to find an example of calls for advancing black people's interests through further investment in, you know, through further investment in various institutions that we might think of as kind of being foundational for capitalism. Often those are, they just don't hold much weight and they don't ultimately end up improving black communities. So I'm cynical of them. And I think it's a related but distinct part of the conversation as far as, you know, in relationship to the book. And so when I brought up racial capitalism, really what I wanted to point out was the ways in which the book shows us how, you know, race and racial identity can be used to produce on the one hand, produce material goods for white elites, by helping them to kind of manage and mitigate white non-elites, right? And so that's a form of racial capitalism because you're using race to produce material goods for white people at the expense of non-white people. You just feel like, what's kind of an example of that? I mean, the book is an example of that, right? So when, for example, the kinds of elites that Jacob and Paul talk about in the book, whether it is the, you know, the religious right realizing that of all the things it could focus on and of all the kind of, all the fodder for the outrage machine, right? Of all the fodder you can select for the outrage machine, it turns out selecting the fodder that stokes racial tensions tends to be the most effective, right? And elites, economic elites utilize that reality, that advantage that they can gain by stoking racial tensions to expand their own coffers through advancing policies that are beneficial to the wealthy. And so, you know, they're expanding their coffers through these policies that are at most economically, you know, not doing anything good even for their white constituents, but are often actively doing harm to the, to non-white people. And then are also creating more racial divisions that are gonna actively harm black and brown people. And so, you extract economic benefits by supporting a policy regime that is going to harm non-white people. So, to me, that's like a classic example of what- Is it something that happens outside of politics as well? I mean, is it something that happens in culture or is it largely in the political realm? I think of it as largely in the political realm because economic institutions are fundamentally political. So, and racial capitalism is about, in part, or in large part, it's about how economic institutions are operating and to whose benefit. And so, because economic institutions are fundamentally political, racial capitalism is also, now, racism can happen, you know, in non-political realms, whatever a non-political realm looks like these days. Right, right, right. I mean, baby, there's no such thing. The clearest example, I think, in recent politics of what Jamila is talking about was the refusal of states to accept the expansion of Medicaid with Obamacare with the Affordable Care Act, which, in a case that Jamila knows a ton about, right? But, you know, here's a case that both working class and impoverished whites and blacks would have benefited from enormously, that would have been paid for, almost entirely by the federal government, mostly by taxes from more affluent states, right? And, you know, their local politicians, egged on by the kinds of groups that we've talked about, refused to accept these enormous benefits that were on offer and they did, and they were able to defend that position in part by racializing it, right? And, you know, it's a striking case that I think actually when people were talking about the efforts to roll back Obamacare, you know, I don't think this was fully appreciated. The reason why Republicans were so focused on doing that, I mean, powerful Republicans were so focused on doing that, was because they wanted to free up the money in this hugely redistributed piece of legislation so that they could give yet bigger, high-end tax cuts. And in fact, when they actually talked about designing, when they were legislating to design a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, what they came up with was gonna be devastating for working-class whites and for older working-class whites in red states. I mean, devastating, right? Even beyond what it was gonna do to Medicaid, right? It was going to really increase the cost and really decrease the access to healthcare for core Republican constituencies, right? And they did that because they wanted the money to make bigger corporate tax cuts and bigger tax cuts for the wealthy. Although we should note that in the end, that was not, it may have been good politics in a moment, but it was not majoritarian politics. And every time it's going to a vote, every time it's going to a referendum, like in Oklahoma last week, there's public support for expanding them. It's super unpopular, right? So, you know, but that to us is what is so revealing is that you have these elected officials who are hell bent on pursuing extremely unpopular policies. Yeah, we have a figure in the book that comes from Chris Warshaw, which looks at the popularity of the major initiatives pursued and or passed over the past quarter century. And the two least popular initiatives, Bar Nun, like not Bar, the troubled asset relief program, you know, i.e. the bailout, the two most unpopular initiatives, Bar Nun, are the tax cuts and the almost passed repeal and replace bill for Republicans. So, I mean, one thing I want to say is like we, there is, we're not making the argument that these are always majoritarian strategies. And one of the big arguments we make in the book is that because of our distinctive political institutions, particularly the malapportionment of the Senate, the fact that election administration is controlled by the states, which is in turn allowed these very ruthless voter suppression and gerrymandering measures by Republicans, that because of that, Republicans get rewarded for holding territory as well as for winning over voters. And so they're, and they're trying to entrench their power in a lot of these countermajoritarian institutions from the, not just the Senate, but also of course the Supreme Court. And so a big argument we make is that because of Trump's clear autocratic impulses that are on display every day, people have paid, and because of great books like Daniel Z Blatt and Daniel Z Blatt's book on, it was Steven Levitsky on how democracies die, people are really focused on the authoritarian threat, but there's also this countermajoritarian threat in the US, and that's why even though we think there's reasons to be optimistic, we think it's gonna be a long hard road. And another way to think about this is that if countermajoritarianism and plutocracy are kind of melded together, it's not just a matter of a figure out a strategy that will capitalize on the demographic shifts, but also thinking about ways in which you can transform those institutions and the power of economic elites, reduce the power of economic elites over time. Well, since we were talking about Medicaid here and many other things in it, we rang for you if you wanna add anything. I was looking at the questions in the Q&A, so which is gonna make me go quick because I wanna make sure we get a chance to get to some of those. I mean, I have to add very little because Paul did such a great job of really kind of concisely explaining as an example the ways that Medicaid cuts have been advanced in spite of a huge lack of public support. And there's also some interesting research that suggests that those decisions about whether to expand Medicaid and about funding Medicaid, about whether or not to cut Medicaid, et cetera, are very much racialized in the sense that political elites are aware of the fact that they can use race as a wedge to separate people even from things as crucial as their own health benefits. So I thought that that was a well-placed example, Paul, and I should have thought of it really, but I'm glad you did when I didn't. A question from the audience. Can you explain your confidence in demography saving us as long as we can defend democracy long enough? Isn't there a near infinite possibility to turn people against one another to support plutocracy or maybe some communities of culture, of color get welcomed into the real America as Irish, Italian, et cetera, were in the past? I think that's an interesting question. I mean, I do think there's a divergence when we think about race. I mean, there will always be profoundly different black and non-black experiences, but the Latino is a much more complicated category, for example, how do you see that question? Well, so it's a huge question and our crystal ball is foggy. So I think everybody needs to approach this with some humility and recognizing that there's a lot of uncertainty. The way that we talk about it in the inclusion, we pointed to the example of California and a number of other observers have pointed to this as well, where California kind of went through a demographic, political demographic tunnel, like the one that the nation as a whole is going through now. And in the short run, it generated a kind of white backlash anti-immigrant politics that Pete Wilson and others in the Republican Party were able to exploit for a period of time. But in the long run, that strategy, the strategy of becoming a white backlash party was catastrophic for the Republican Party, which has been virtually wiped out in the largest state in the country. It's really quite astonishing to see what has happened to the Republican Party. And some of that is because they haven't been able to adapt because their powerful groups are linked to the national party, right? So they've had, used to be that a state party would adjust to those kinds of changing situations, but the California state Republican Party has found it hard to do that. The result has been that it's been virtually wiped out. And so if we're going through a similar process nationally, then you could say, well, the Republican Party at a certain point could reach a situation where they're just not gonna be able to win elections with this kind of strategy. And you can see that, I mean, you can see that playing out right now. You can see that the reaction to Black Lives Matter is very, very different, right? From the way that the country reacted to social unrest in the 1960s, right? Just as one example, right? So, and what we argue in the book, the reason why one might be encouraged by this is we say, look, once this strategy starts to go south for a party, no pun intended, once you try to detach yourself from the strategy, you've gotta go a long way, right? I mean, if you're gonna actually reach out and turn the Republican Party into a multiracial party, you're gonna have to change the way you talk about a lot of things. And hopefully you also change the way that you do some things, like what you actually do for different groups when you're in office. So that would be the optimistic story. And it doesn't mean it wouldn't be the end of racial division, right? It wouldn't be, it's not as if, oh, if you dealt with this problem, you know, all of a sudden American politics would be tranquil and we would have a stable and successful multiracial democracy. We're not saying that. But you would at least be in an environment where that would be imaginable, right? And where a kind of more constructive politics would be possible and where both parties would be more encouraged, would face incentives to engage in a more constructive politics. Let me just piggyback really quickly on that to say, we have, I think, a discussion that's novel of the way in which the Republicans lost the 40 to 44% high point they had in presidential support from Hispanics and presidential elections in 2004. And I think right now everyone focuses on the party's, you know, exploitation of racial backlash and racism, but forgets that what happened in the 2000s was a combination of a big part of the party moving in that direction and ginned up by the outrage-soaking groups. And the fact that Hispanic voters just didn't really like the economic policies that Republicans were putting forth. And so a big claim that we're making is that if you can't use racial backlash as much, you're gonna have to moderate because these are not majoritarian policies. And if you moderate on economic policies, you know, you're still a center-right party. You become, you're not still, because they are not, but you become a center-right, more center-right party. And that sort of historical example that we discussed in the book is, you know, the British Tories, right? Who figured out how to survive as a conservative party, but had to figure out a set of themes, not all of them very salutary, that would bring working class voters into the fold without destabilizing the society, right? Which is the big problem that you get when conservative parties take this route. So the Pandora's Box doesn't have to be fully opened, right? Republicans opened it, and now the only way out of this is really significant defeats for Republicans and a reorientation to make them both more moderate on economics and more moderate on race. Villa? No, I'm happy to answer the next question, although I'm just gonna warn everyone that because it came up enough in the conversation, I am gonna paste some things in the chat for people who might be interested in reading more about racial capitalism. Okay, that'd be great, that'd be great. Maybe we can put that on the event page too, so that people can see it when the chat's over. One of the questions was about, are there things that can be done to go after food or crap populist institutions in the way that the right has gone after Acorn, Land Parenthood and so forth? And I think one thing that's particularly interesting about that is that the NRA seems to be kind of consuming itself at the moment, without anybody particularly going after that. So I'm like, in some ways maybe update the way you're thinking about institutions for some of the problems that some of these institutions have faced, particularly the NRA, which is a, you know, NRA is a big chunk of your chapter three. Paul, you wanna jump in there? You'll have to worry about that. Yeah, I mean, again, it's not something that we focused on the book. And in some ways it comes back to a point that Jamila raised earlier when we were talking about comparing the left and the right. And a major theme in our work is that we should not see the left and the right as being sort of mirror images of each other. They're actually quite different in the way that they're put together. And it's one of the reasons why, even though we've written stuff about polarization, we sort of fundamentally don't like polarization as a description of American politics because it really quickly leads into this idea that somehow it's a mirror image and both sides is them and so on, right? So the left, we think, is, a lot of the core positions on the left are popular. And certainly in the economic domain, but increasingly also in the social domain because the right has tied itself, the NRA is a good example of this and evangelical, the policy agenda of evangelicals is another good example of it. These are not popular positions that they want a voice on the government, right? So I actually think it's less about breaking down those organizations and they do have a tendency to kind of implode on themselves anyway, because we don't go into a lot of depth about this in the book, but there's an enormous amount of grift and graft on the right in which the people who are mobilizing outrage are getting rich off of it, but that also tends to make their organizations implode periodically, which has been true of the NRA and it's also been true of a lot of the leading evangelical organizations. So we think the challenge for the left is less a matter of kind of breaking down those organizations than it is empowering democracy and empowering ordinary citizens with positions that are broadly popular. Yeah, let me just add one area that I think is sort of obvious once you start to think about it, which is really seriously reforming the role of money in politics could have a positive effect. I mean, the fact that it's unthinkable is partly reflection of those counter-majoritarian tendencies I was talking about with the Supreme Court and it's not possible to any significant reform, but we were recently asked to comment on a report by the Center for Corporate Political Accountability, which was looking at the spending of large corporations through hidden sources, particularly 527s and these are political spending organizations that don't have to report a lot of information that corporations do when they spend through tax and corporations just behave really differently when nobody knows they're spending the money and we write a lot in the book about how the largest organizations have become the pursuers of these really narrow agendas. That's obvious with the Koch network, but it's also clear with the Chamber of Commerce and with these kind of money in politics organizations. So I do think that's a kind of obvious area where you're both empowering democracy and you would be really putting significant hurdles in the way of a lot of the translation of these outsized resources into political power. I think one of the things that a few years ago, I think that same organization when they started putting questions on shareholder balance about disclosing corporate political spending, a lot of corporations as soon as they saw that said, we're like, we're not going to do the corporate. If we have to disclose it, we're not even going to do it and didn't want to deal with that controversy. And interesting. I've said, I'm a little, as somebody who's been working on money in politics for a super long time, I'm a little more skeptical of that just because I feel like the zone of how money shapes thinking about policy and people's attitudes and organizations is now so far outside of the kind of regulated space of campaign spending that I don't know that will ever get that under control. And then of course there are things like the Cokes are privately held corporations that don't have a ton of accountability. Yeah. And just to be clear, like I think Paul and I are really in the no magic bullet camp, right? There's just a series of reforms that will push us, it will help a bit and that's worth a lot. And you kind of read, you do them, you'll hopefully get more better outcomes and then you do it again, right? Because of that. And then reforms that actually help people run and be heard who don't have that access to that kind of money, are at least as important as trying to limit things. I'll just add one thing, I'll be back peddling from what I said before about how democracy will set us free. But Jacob reminded me the courts are a big, big issue here and we actually end up paying more attention in this book to the courts than we have in our previous work. And because it is, it's not an accident that Mitch McConnell who is a super friend of the plutocrats, as far as I can tell, not interested really at all in the social conservative agenda, right? But there's a reason why he's so concerned about court nominations, right? And we spend a good amount of time talking about this. There is front and center in the public display of what's going on with those court fights are the social issues and the social groups, but behind them are mountains of money, right? That is being provided through hidden conduits, right? That pay for those campaigns, right? And that's coming from, we don't know exactly who that's coming from, but when you get a single donation that's north of $20 million, right? I got a feeling that's probably not coming from somebody who's like a second amendment person, right? And there's a reason why those donations are being made, because it's been a hundred years since we've had a court that was so friendly to the interests of the rich and corporations as the one we have right now. Of course, that spending is not necessarily spending on political campaigns. It's not a spending plan. Overall, the sort of murky confirmation campaigns, although the same people are also political donors and you see them contributing. Absolutely, it's the same people. You can speculate and there's a wonderful long Washington Post report that we cite in the book about the judicial crisis network, which has been a funnel for a lot of this, but they channel money to groups like the NRA to run Supreme Court PR campaigns in favor or against a candidate, but they're financed by dark money that arrives in very, very large packages. All right, well, I think we're getting to two o'clock and should probably wrap up here a little bit. Jamila, was there anything that you saw on the quest? You've referred a couple of times to the questions. Was there anything that we didn't really answer that you were interested in talking more about or either of you guys? No, I thought the questions were fascinating, but I think we've also covered a lot of that ground. I will just quickly add to the conversation about sort of thinking about going forward and what are the potential levers for change? I agree that it's really difficult and I think the kind of one shot solution or the kind of panacea approach is really unrealistic. So I'm glad that even though I imagine it's tempting to end books that way, I was actually glad that you did not. But I will just say with respect to the money and politics angle, acknowledging that this isn't something that I study, right? But recently there's some research that has taken a kind of intersectional look at this and this is, I'm thinking about a paper by Jake Grumbach and some colleagues about gender and race in campaign finance that actually shows that women of color are underrepresented in campaign finance and it's a really interesting paper. I'm happy to also put a link in the chat, but the reason I bring it up is because I wanna underscore that it's easy when we shift to talking about one arena of this larger constellation of problems, like when we think about the kind of conservative dilemma and the different ways of potentially addressing the ways that things are going off the rails as Republicans are attempting to respond to that dilemma, it's easy to see one piece of the puzzle and sort of disconnecting it from the other. So you see the dark money or the campaign finance issues and you disconnect that from the other issues around race or identity. And I think one of the things that the book is really good at is constantly integrating things for us and making the reader think about all these things together and acknowledge the ways that they're operating in conjunction in our larger politics. And I think that paper is a perfect example, right? We think about campaign finance, we don't stop thinking about race and gender and we can still think about those things together. And in fact, we learn a lot when we understand the ways that they're operating in conjunction. Well, thank you, Jamila. I mean, just let me say that this book is really part of a conversation that we've had with scholars, both of our vintage and much younger, like Jamila and Jake, who's also a great colleague and co-author of ours. And it's that process. I just think we wanna write for a broad audience, but we also really wanna think about how political science can illuminate the challenges we're facing. And we don't have enough, I think, political science that really speaks to those kind of public problems. And it is very much an effort that's collective. And I just wanna thank Jamila for being part of it and for being part of this great conversation. Yeah, I think all three of you have been really important in making political science more kind of useful to the broader conversation and engage. So- Thank you so much, everyone. Tremendous admiration for all of you. And lots of thank yous coming in from participants on the chat. Well, thanks to everybody who participated in, especially Jamila and Mark and everybody at New America for keeping this conversation moving. We love doing it. Write another book and we'll do it again. I second that. We need a little recovery period first, everyone. All right, thank you all.