 I want to go to another quote from your book and from the chapter or the section on the dirty break. We argue for an approach to the Democrats that is willing to use the party's ballot line preventing us from being doomed to complete political irrelevance whilst laying the foundations for an eventual break with the party to create a future workers party. What has been called a dirty break as opposed to a clean break strategy. I've got some questions about how awesome concerns about how I think this potential problems, let's say, but first of all, do you just want to explain why you came to advocate for what you call the dirty break strategy? Yeah, there's a long history in the US of wrestling with this problem, which is that the Democrats are a fundamentally capitalist party, the party in which the working class organized labor, civil rights movement since the 60s, environmentalist feminists, all the other progressive forces in society have operated within the Democratic Party, but fundamentally it's a party that is still in the control of capital and it's a situation that is different from a country like the UK or like Canada that you all have social democratic or working class labor parties and as a professor of mine once said, the only thing worse than having a complete sell out social democratic workers party is not having a complete sell out social democratic party, which is the situation we find ourselves in. And so the left many times over the course of the last century has looked that in the face and said, okay, we got a break from these people, we got to make the clean break. We have to go found that workers party or that left party or whatever. And of course, as your listeners probably know, they haven't heard about a lot of those efforts because they haven't unfortunately amounted to much because the US is so uniquely arrayed in its political rules and regulations against such a party. And so many leftists looking at that situation have gone into the Democratic Party to saying it's the only game in town. So this is where I'm going to engage. And then they have been pulled, you know, further and further right where they've had their progressive politics watered down. And the conservatizing effects of the Democratic Party establishment have been have successfully squashed their attempt to use the party for left politics. And so the dirty break strategy is an effort to try to it's a third way goes between those two ways in which we know we're sober about the what's arrayed against us in terms of being able to find a third party, we're not going to be able to do that any time soon. We recognize the Democratic Party is the only game in town. And so we're going to engage principally through that party where it makes sense. But we are also going to maintain a level of independence from that party because we recognize that these people are trying to destroy us while we try to engage in their party. And so the idea is to have some level of independence from them and do what Bernie Sanders did in his two elections. I mean, he was an independent. Incredibly, he managed to remain an independent throughout his entire political career. He never joined the Democratic Party, but he ran for president on the Democratic Party line. And through his doing so showed over and over again how this party is set up to destroy the candidacy of someone like him. There are millions of people now, especially young people who have looked at what's happened during these two presidential runs in Bernie and seen how the Democratic Party establishment moved heaven and earth to destroy him and are thinking what the hell is up with this party? What kind of a left wing party party of the people is this that tries so hard to destroy someone like Bernie? The hope is that eventually sometime medium term, long term, who knows when that can lead us to creating an actual workers party or a left party of some kind because we desperately need such a party. But it's the barriers towards creating it are so high. And so that's what the dirty break strategy is about is wrestling with the unique challenges that the American context pose while also not losing sight of the fact that the Democrats are not our friends. Well, there's actually an anecdote from Bernie's earlier years that is really resonant on this question, which is that he was actually a member of a small third party in Vermont in the 1970s. And ultimately, he ran for various offices on this party's ballot line, including governor, I think. And ultimately, he didn't win anything. And he eventually left the party and in his resignation letter, I think sometime in the late 70s, mid to late 70s, he said that he wanted to leave because the purpose of a purpose of an independent working class party was to create a political scenario in which the working class itself can rightfully take what belongs to them. And unfortunately, this party was not actually doing any such thing. It was it was fighting to preserve its ability to stay on the ballot. And it was focusing all of its attention into making sure that it was viable and at least partially visible every few years when an election rolled around. It wasn't rooting itself in the working class. So it was really a party in name only he ultimately came to believe. You know, there's a there's a difference between what when we talk about wanting to have an independent electoral expression and independent working class socialist party, we're talking about a party with a mass character, we're talking about a party that serves a particular function, which is to heighten class consciousness and facilitate class struggle, not just as something that you know, plants the flag and you know, it's kind of like around and in people's periphery. So we're working toward that particular goal. And right now, we don't have this is what a friend of mine, Robbie Nelson always says, it's not a party until there's a crowd, you we you can create a party. But if you don't have people following you into this party, it's really a party in name only. So what we want to do is use the Democratic Party outline where necessary, and it's not going to be necessary in every place, there are different rules in different places, and there are different opportunities in different places to run as an independent or a third party candidacy, but to run open Democratic socialists who are antagonistic to capital in general, and that means they're going to be antagonistic to elements of the Democratic Party, and to use that opportunity to build build general consciousness and sort of affiliation with a new political tendency through that process. And that's the only hope that I can see for creating a constituency that we could conceivably break with, right? Because if we don't do that, then all we're doing is taking our ball and going and playing somewhere else to the great relief of the Democratic Party establishment figures who we've been successfully antagonizing for five years now very much like to continue doing that. I mean, if I was to make a break, it would definitely be dirty, not clean. My doubt is more about the break altogether. I suppose a couple of things. So one, given that you admit the barriers are so high to a third party, like I just find it quite inconceivable that you could have a socialist party that would displace the Democratic Party as the major opposition to the Republicans in the next three decades or something. So it just seems so unlikely that I feel like why don't you just throw your lot in with the Democratic Party? Because also, if what you want is to achieve electoral success, not just that, but if what you want is to have your candidates win Democratic presidential primaries, get into Congress, then does not this idea that we're actually within the party to destroy it potentially lose you some some allies. And finally, I mean, you said, Micah, that, you know, Bernie's candidacy proved once and for all not necessary. I mean, I'm maybe ramping up what you said slightly, but demonstrated to supporters of socialism that, you know, there's a limit to what you can achieve in the Democratic Party because the Democratic establishment won't tolerate sort of egalitarian policies that challenge established elites. But for me, I'm not sure that's the lesson I've learned from at least the 2020 campaign, because the problem in the 2020 campaign, it didn't really look like a fix to me. It looked like there was a problem that Bernie Sanders coalition wasn't big enough. And if you get rid of the DNC, that problem is still there. Oh, well, on that latter point, I'm not sure that's true. I mean, we saw in this primary and unprecedented coalescing of all of the other candidates who were in the race besides Bernie and besides Elizabeth Warren, behind Joe Biden in a way that was clearly orchestrated by the Democratic Party establishment. I mean, Biden was doing worse off than some of the candidates who all of a sudden at the same time decided to drop out and get behind Biden to consolidate a single candidate against Bernie Sanders to to defeat him. You know, there's a the party apparatus has done everything that it can, you know, through the media, through all kinds of ways to try to destroy Bernie's campaign. And I mean, it's impossible to know what his his candidacy would have looked like without that party apparatus there. But we can certainly point to numerous examples over and over and over again of how that that party establishment worked to destroy his to destroy his campaign. I mean, there are certainly things that we could talk about, about how we could have made that coalition bigger and the one that actually would have been successful in this primary. But I don't think that we can write off the role of that that party establishment and to the your your previous question about about sort of the break part of the of the dirty break. I mean, I think that Bernie did it perfectly and Bernie did not, you know, Bernie had this level of independence from the Democratic Party, but he also was not saying that he was trying to engineer a dirty break. But in the way that he ran that had this level of independence from the party establishment, but yet was operating, you know, within the confines of the Democratic Party, he he, as I said before, he exposed all of the ways that this party establishment mobilizes to destroy candidates like him. If he had succeeded and won, then who knows what situation we would have been in. Maybe the, you know, the third way centrist neoliberal types would have been so disgusted with Bernie at the head of their party that they would have gone off and created something like the Lib Dems that, you know, a kind of a romp pro corporate, you know, socially progressive party, you know, that's where, I don't know, Chuck Schumer would have gone or something. And then maybe the party could have been remade that way. Maybe we would have seen a massive political realignment in this country by huge numbers of Democrats who would say that they just couldn't stomach being in the same party or being in a party that was led by a Democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders. Obviously, it's impossible for us to know that now, but that was on the table. And I know I'm I'm open to that possibility in the future. You know, if president if AOC runs for president in, you know, the next election or in eight years or something, and and she manages to make her way to the top of the candidacy in the way that Bernie didn't, maybe we'll get to have that experiment about whether or not we can force out all of the sort of pro corporate right wing elements of the Democratic Party. We'll see.