Radio War Nerd EP 633 — Why The US Can't Have Third Parties, feat. Seth Ackerman

0:00Hello and welcome to another episode of Radio Warner. The date today is September 4th, 2026. And this is episode 633. I am the co-host Mark Ames from the tournatic part of New York State, western New York State around Ratchet. We had tornadoes, water spouts. This is a, sometimes we talk about how this might happen, but we actually had it. I was watching even some, while we were going through this, just two nights ago, I was watching some YouTube, like tornado chaser, I don't know meteorology, YouTuber, Guy and he just kept

1:06screaming. This is looks like, it looks like the planes. It looks like, you know, Oklahoma, but it's fucking New York. It was pretty funny. So anyways, you're listening to Radio Warner and help the show out. Subscribe, go to patreon.com forward slash radio Warner and join the Warner Legion. Anyway, today we are going to have a really interesting interview. I've actually wanted to talk about this for a while. This could be, this would sort of go in the kind of subcategory of politics shows we've done. We have done a lot of them. I mean, war is politics by other means. Therefore, politics is war and war is politics. We're going to talk today with Seth Akramin about, to answer the big question, a very big question, which a lot of people constantly ask, which is, why knowing how shitty the

2:11Democratic Party is, why not just start up a third party? That's kind of the general framing for this question. We've had some episodes in the past on the populists and a bit on labor, but we've never actually directly tried to tackle this question. And it has worldwide importance, what happens in this country, as everyone can see all the time, particularly into this president. So first of all, let me introduce our guest and our guest co-host today. Our guest is Seth Akramin. He's editor at large at Jacobin and the author of The Article we're going to discuss today, which is called a blueprint for a new party. It was published in Jacobin Magazine in the fall of 2016. So Seth, thanks for coming on Radio Warner. Thanks, it's great to be here. And we are also joined. We're helped along today by longtime friend of the show, Michael Pollock, filling in for John, is guest co-host today.

3:14Because Michael actually is the one that first sent me Seth's article. Michael and I have had a lot of back and forth on similar topics. And he sent me Seth's article and I thought this is so great because this lays it all out so clearly. Michael also has done a lot of help for Radio Warner and for John Dolan aka Gary Bredcher. In the past, we've mentioned Michael as a key friend of the show many times. In fact, Michael, I think you even set up our, we've only done two live shows and I think you helped set up at least one of them, right? Yeah. Well, first of all, Michael, welcome to the show. Well, it's an honor to finally be here. I know. You've graduated from friend of the show, mentioned to friend of the show, guest co-hosting. So thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. And so yeah, as I said today, we are going to really discuss, it is a very important question

4:21why doesn't, why can't really is the right way to put it. The US have a functioning third party. Why can't the US have an alternative? And it is of world importance. And it's really, it's particularly relevant now because one party, Donald Trump's party, the GOP, you know, is in power and going absolutely batshit or destroying the world, destroying the country, destroying a lot. And the so-called opposition party made a strategic decision to play possums. This is something we keep going back to over and over to not fight back to, to if they do win, if they do get into office to get in by default based on the failures of the other party, which is to say there isn't really an opposition party.

5:21That's bad at any time, but it's dangerous for the entire world right now. And it turns out that, and you see this all the time, you see this on, you know, with kind of left social media influencers, let's start a party, let's get a party going. And they never go anywhere, these third parties. And it turns out that, that the Democratic party, I mean, Seth will, will, may this argument really well and we'll get into this, but people wonder what, you know, the, the Democratic party is not like its European counterparts, we'd say, you know, the left center left parties, because the US party system and, and its election system, its electoral system is nothing like its European counterparts. It turns out structurally, legalistically, but structurally, our electoral system, there's a reason why we don't have these choices.

6:23It's baked in and our system actually has a lot more in common and incredibly enough with authoritarian systems like Belarus or Russia or Singapore. And that may seem like you're just trying to score some, you know, some online lefty points or something, but it's actually structurally true. It's hard to square with the fact because obviously here we have a lot more freedoms than people in Belarus and Russia do, particularly freedom of speech, somewhat freedom, definitely freedom of assembly. And those can give the illusion that therefore you also have the freedom to start up your own political party if you don't like the one, the two that are out there, but it doesn't work that way. And you know, it comes down to sometimes the choice here is, it's better than Belarus where you can only choose Batka and some fake, but it's kind of here, it's Batka 1 versus

7:26Batka 2. But Seth, let's get, let's just dive right into your article and let's start with kind of the larger, let's start kind of, you know, camera far away with the history of how America's party system and electoral system kind of developed. We can maybe talk a bit later about the Constitution itself, which you wrote another really good article, Burn the Constitution once again, about how the Constitution itself was designed to be, to massively circumscribe democracy. It was, it was a reaction against too much democracy that threatened to, that sort of threatened order in the 1770s, 1780s. But let's leave the Constitution aside somewhat for now.

8:26And let's just go into this history that you get into in your article of both kind of the democratic party or what a party is and then how that, how the kind of electoral system was formed along with that. Right. So I think the, I mean, it occurs to me that maybe the first point that would have to be, the first myth, I guess, that it would be important to dispel, try to do this quickly. And it's not something that I discussed actually in the article, but it's something that I think is really part of the conventional wisdom of sort of people who pay attention to politics. It's just, it's just a canard, which is the old idea that in a, a first pass to post electoral system, like the one that we have here in the United States, it's not proportional representation. It's, you know, you have candidates and whoever gets the most number of votes wins the election. And that's how we run virtually all of our elections here. There's a, there's a myth that says that any system like that will automatically be a

9:28two-party system. And that explains why in America we have two parties. There is a sort of a superficial, like attractiveness to this idea. There's an old idea, there's an old idea in political science, a sort of a theory called Duvierre's Law that predicts that, you know, first pass the post electoral systems will have fewer parties. And sometimes that's sort of exaggerated to say a two-party system. But there are many countries that have first pass the post elections, not just the United States, Canada, Britain, you know, mostly the English-speaking countries, historically, have had that. And even the countries that have proportional representation now originally all had first pass the post systems. And you can see that there is something vastly different. Something is really different is going on between the United States and let's say just Canada or the United, or the United Kingdom. I actually made a chart, I wrote a blog post a while ago where I went through the data

10:29and I made a chart looking at what I did was I looked at the most recent congressional or legislative, national legislative elections. So for the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.K. House of Commons, Canadian House of Commons. And I looked at the distribution of the third party vote in all of the different seats, all the different election districts in those national elections. So there's 435 House seats in the U.S., there's 500 something, there's 600 something, and Britain and so on. And I looked at the distribution. So what percentage of the vote did third parties get, meaning anything other than the top two parties in each of those races? And look at the distribution of that. And so if you look at the median legislative seat, national legislative seat, in the U.K., the median seat, there was, third parties got 15% of the vote. In Canada, the median seat, third parties got 24% of the vote.

11:32In the U.S., in the median race, 0% of the vote. And that continues like if you go up through the distribution of seats, you know, the 50th percentile, 55th percentile, 60th percentile, even when you get to the 75th percentile, it's still only like 2%. So like this is really, there's something vastly different about the United States that is not explained simply by the fact that we have a first pass to post-electro system. And this is what I was going through the history of in my article. And what it really has to do with is aspects of the electoral, the mechanics of the electoral system that most people, even people when they, you know, get into really detailed discussions of politics in various countries, they rarely pay that much attention to these kinds of mechanical issues because, and certainly not like a comparative perspective, because most countries that are sort of established democracies, these issues are sort of like secondary or

12:34tertiary to the outcomes of elections. In the sense that you can sort of look at any country's, you know, politics at a given moment, look at their most recent election, maybe look at the calculations and strategies of parties in the next election without having to pay very much attention to these questions of electoral mechanics. But in the United States, these sort of relatively obscure kind of technical, legal, law, basically legal structures have historically been so such enormous outliers in terms of what the rules are for the, for US elections, totally different from any other established democracy in the world, or even in many cases, new democracies, recent democracies. And this is really what accounts for the vastly different outcomes, like what I was just saying about how just even compared to similar first past the post systems, we have virtually no participation by third parties in any meaningful sense.

13:36That's a really great way to start this, to point out just how vastly different everything is. And then, yeah, then the question is, is it because Americans are dumb, or is it because the system actually created it to be this way? And this is where you get into it, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I think that probably, you know, if you go back to until, you know, until the 1890s, 1900s, America's electoral system probably wasn't all that different from the electoral systems of what were then the very few electoral democracies in the world, you know, that had regular elections that really elected to chose the leaders. But in the 1890s and 19th, right around the turn of the 20th century, there were, you know, there was sort of a national crisis in American politics, multi, multi-form crisis on many levels whose most, you know, visible manifestation was this huge, very brief but

14:40massive populist insurgency that took the form of the People's Party. And then also other kind of parties at the state level and elsewhere, and there were challenges to, you know, white supremacy in the south and sort of a whole electoral insurgency on many levels. And in response, part, in large part, in response to that crisis and just sort of in response to a sort of general crisis of the political system, the leaders of the two major parties, the Republicans, the Democrats, in every, in virtually every state, every state really eventually. Over a period of maybe 20, 30 years, completely transformed the rules of electoral, the electoral machinery. Now the sort of premise of these changes was not so different from changes that were going on in almost all democracies around the world. So in other words, right around this time, around the world, there was a reforms that transformed

15:40the old way of doing elections in the past, always historically elections had been very minimal regulation by the government. You didn't go to the polls and have like a series of choices printed out for you on a form or on a screen or anything like that. Instead, literally you just showed up to the polls and you dropped a piece of paper in a, basically in a hat. And you could literally write yourself, you know, here's the candidates I want to vote for. And you know, you know, you're just going to vote for yourself in practice. What people usually did was parties would print tickets in their newspapers and people would cut, clip them out and deposit them or you go to the polls and there were probably, there were party workers who were hanging around handing out, you know, tickets for their party's tickets. And you drop that in the hat. But basically there was, it was sort of like DIY was the mechanics of elections. And there was no secret ballot. So you know, you people, it was considered normal and acceptable that like everybody could see how you were voting around the world right around this time in the late 19th, early

16:4220th centuries, countries started changing that. And then the usual name of this reform was the Australian ballot because Australia was a pioneer in this sense of having a secret ballot. So everybody votes in a private booth and an official ballot, which means that, you know, the candidates and parties that are running are printed out for you by the government and you choose from among those. So it's centralizing the election or the voting process kind of. Yeah, it's regularizing it. Yeah, regularizing. Okay. So, yeah. So that was, you know, that was part of the idea there was, you know, it was regularizing and it was a good government reform. And what happens when you change the election system to one where the ballot is printed for you is that suddenly the question arises of like, who gets to be a candidate? Because now it's the government that's, you know, so the whole question of ballot access for the first time became a question.

17:44And every country that adopted these reforms, which eventually was every country, you know, had to come up with some set of rules about who could get on the ballot. It was at this point that the US started vastly diverging from every other democracy. Because the obstacles that the two parties who had, you know, a duopoly on the political system pretty much up to that point, their duopoly had been largely the product of, you could say loosely speaking sort of organic, it was an organic result of the system. And we could talk about how much looser it was then, but there was, you know, already a duopoly in same thing in Britain, by the way, you know, you had the Tories and you had the Liberals and that were the Wigs before that. So that wasn't so unusual. But in the United States, the two dominant parties used their dominant position in the political system where, you know, those two parties had vast majority of the representatives in virtually every state legislature.

18:45And here in the US, it's the states that could make these rules. They used them to make it extremely difficult for any other party to get on the ballot. And the, and it was, that was the way it was from the very beginning for, you know, when these, when states first implemented these reforms in the 1890s, 1900s, it was already much, much more stringent than in other countries, other democracies. And then it got far more divergent after, in the decades after World War I, as left-wing political parties started, like the socialist party and the communist party, started trying to participate in American politics. And that sort of was the impetus for these state legislatures to implement ballot access requirements that were really totally off the charts of anything that existed in other countries. So the end result of this was that, you know, the normal, what was in other countries,

19:52a normal process whereby, for example, you know, during this period, the late 19th, early 20th centuries, the working class is growing and becoming more politically active, more politically conscious, as capitalism develops, you know, societies get more urban. All of this in every democracy had major political effects, obviously, and you start to see working class parties be organized, trade union based parties be organized. And in the United States, that process, in terms of at least its political facet, was totally suppressed by the existence of these ballot obstacles. So that's the first point to remember. And the story of exactly, you know, the levels of ballot obstacles and ballot access requirements, it's a very complicated story to tell and to track because number one, you've got 50 different states, each with their own set of requirements. Number two, there's a whole set of different dimensions by which ballot access requirements

20:54can be more stringent. The most simple sort of straightforward indicator is like how many signatures are required, you have to get on a petition to get your candidate or your party on the ballot. But there are a lot of other dimensions that are also important. And then, you know, this data is very obscure. I mean, I had to get these data, I had to like get in touch with this kind of interesting oddball character named Richard Winger, who for many years has, he's like, I think like a libertarian, it's his own politics, but he has a newsletter called ballot access news. And he's sort of like a weirdo auto-diedact expert who's become really one of the leading experts following this stuff. But anyway, he tracked historically how these things evolved. And that's virtually the only systematic source of information on this. But you can see it's not like secret information. This is common knowledge among experts on comparative political systems and comparative electoral

21:54law. But everyone knows that the United States is a total outlier here. And so this is not the only element that I would point to just the pure difficulty of getting on the ballot. There are other important aspects. But this is definitely the single most important reason why the US, we have such, it's virtually impossible to have a viable third party. And that's sort of like the ground level basis for pretty much everything else that's happened. Right. I mean, I just want to quote a little bit from here just to put some, you know, put some numbers on this. When Australia adopted these ballot laws that you talked about, the law required a would-be parliamentary candidate to submit a total of two endorsement signatures to get on the ballot. This is in the 1850s. And then when Britain adopted the reform in 1872, it required 10 endorsement signatures. But when Massachusetts passed its first Australian ballot law in 1888, it required 1000 signatures

23:02for statewide office and signatures numbering at least 1% of the total votes. And district level race is signatures numbering at least 1% of the total votes from the preceding election. And these are the good days, you know, before things got really crazy. And it just goes up and up from there, you know, Florida, when they had a socialist communist threat in the polls and the Great Depression in the early 30s, responded by banning any parties in 1931 from the ballot, unless it had won 30% of the vote in two consecutive elections. And, you know, I comparison when Britain and Britain getting on the ballot was never a major concern for the for the new labor party, it only needed a 150 pound deposit. And that was first instituted in 1918 to be refunded if the candidates won at least 12 and a half percent of the vote. So I mean, it's interesting that it's interesting that let's take Britain, for example, I guess

24:09in the very beginning, the British didn't take the threat as seriously. I mean, what was happening also in the around the 1890s and the early 1900s was this was a period of mass enfranchisement in the West, in a lot of countries, let's say, in the West. That is to say people, you know, the vote was extended on a kind of fast and large scale, whereas it had been pretty restricted before then. And yet, I don't know why we don't have to discuss it. I don't know why the Europeans didn't respond the way the Americans did. I perhaps didn't feel as threatened. I think that what you just said is a clue to this. I've also tried to sort of understand this. This is one of those things in history where it's often the question you want to ask is about why something didn't happen. And that's always hard to get a good answer for it. Right. But my sense is that really what you just said about how this was a period of democratization,

25:11then that's true. And I think that that is in and of itself a big issue here. Because remember, America was obviously, the United States was, the early pioneer was perceived as this pioneer of democracy and democratization. And we were definitely one of the first countries that had not just a representative system, but a system in which there was universal mail suffrage already by the 1830s, 1840s and most states. And so America was seen as, this was the rhetoric around the time of the Civil War by people like Abraham Lincoln. But this really was how people perceived it at the time. That America was the sort of experiment in democracy. And people who didn't like democracy wanted it to see it fail and say, ha ha. This is, told you so basically. And people who wanted it to succeed wanted America to succeed. And what happened is that by the time you get to the late 19th or early 20th centuries,

26:13in other, in European countries, there is this insurgent movement of democratization where people are demanding greater political rights, demanding the right to vote, the extension of the franchise. This was one of the central issues in these societies at that time. In the United States, we had already had universal mail suffrage going back 50s to 70 years to Jackson's time. And the problem was that at that time in the late 19th, 20th centuries, it was extremely discredited in the US, not just in the US, but around the world. The US in like 18, 1890, 1900 was like a synonymous with misgovernment. It was an embarrassment for the advocates of democracy in Europe. Because of the corruption and everything. The corruption, exactly. The massive corruption. I mean, American politics was just seen as synonymous with incredible feats of corruption that, that, you know, was amazing to people in other countries. They couldn't understand how Americans put up with it.

27:13And, and it was, as I said, it was an embarrassment to advocates of democracy. So by the time, so there was a very like very contrasting set of attitudes at that time. In Europe, there was this insurgent movement to demand greater democracy. And in the United States, there was this enormous disillusion with democracy. And I think that that, with democracy in general, and with political parties in particular, because the two dominant parties were so corrupt. So I think that there was this sort of, I think in Europe, at that time, it would not have been accepted if the dominant, you know, rulers had tried to impose this kind of system, precisely for the same reason, that, you know, that they were extending the suffrage at that time. It's because they couldn't get away with it, because people were demanding greater, you know, enfranchisement. And in the US, I guess just by having these sort of relatively obscure rules, be the things that were responsible. And also by having the primary system, which was instituted at the same time,

28:15where you have the government, and this is another thing that's totally unique in the United States. It doesn't exist in any other country. We can talk about this later. But the fact that there was then opened up this much greater degree of competition, open competition within quote unquote parties, I hesitate to really call them political parties. But, you know, the primary system was presented as, well, here's your democracy. Okay, you don't like that you can't get on the ballot as a third party. Okay, but you can compete in these primaries. And that, I think, was another reason why it was accepted in the United States. Well, let's talk about, first of all, the American, at least, conception of a political party. And what a party should be, I guess. But I thought this was also really interesting. I mean, at least in this country, again, people kind of take for granted what a party is. And actually, I'm not even sure people really understand what it means. I guess it means you identify with a set of general values.

29:18It's like, it's almost like a culture, but it's not an actual disciplined organization or something. But, and you kind of get into that, can you discuss sort of also, particularly with the Democrats, I guess, the evolution of what the party even meant? So there's two aspects to this. One is the legal structural aspect. And the other aspect is sort of all of the other things that evolve in the political system that helps to determine what the nature of the parties are. In a legal sense, this is, the America is really, again, there are no other countries that fall into this category like the United States. In democracies, generally, political parties are treated by the law and generally speaking, sort of people expect and demand this, with that even really having to think about it very much, that political parties be considered voluntary organizations. A political party is like the ACLU or the NWACP or a religious organization or a veterans

30:27organization. In other words, in a democracy, people expect when you have just a basic level of freedom that is part of the freedom of assembly. People have a right to form an organization, advocate for their cause. And the government can't step in like they do in authoritarian systems and say to the ACLU or to say to a veterans group or a church group or a labor union for that matter, they can't step in and say, the government can't say, okay, well, no, we're going to tell you how you are going to operate your organization internally. And what you're going to say and not say and what you're allowed to do and not do, because voluntary organizations are considered to be an essential aspect of democracy. So political parties in normal democracies are considered voluntary organizations. In the United States, at a legal level, and this is even reflected in the actual explicit judicial case law and constitutional law, political parties are treated as regulated public utilities.

31:31And that's a natural phrase that's used by the courts. Political parties are considered to be essentially part of the state, partly of the state. They have this hybrid nature. And that's considered that, I mean, usually think of this as something that you associate this with like the democratic centralist Marxist, Leninist model of politics. But this is really what makes one of the things that makes the United States unique among democracies. And the way I like to think of it is that there are other countries that have had, so you think of it this way. There have been democratic, there have been countries that have had dominant one-party systems that we think of as democracies, like Sweden, for example, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. Japan. Or Japan, a great example. I actually don't know enough about Japanese case, but yes, that's definitely a very sort of an extreme example. Or Israel, for Israel from the founding in the late 40s until the late 70s, there was one party only that had ever led

32:36a government. It was the center left party. And people understand that that was just the outcome. That's how democratic politics shook out in those countries. It's not because there was anything authoritarian about them, right? On the other hand, there was a dominant single-party system in East Germany, in the Soviet Union. And that's not just because that's how things shook out democratically. That's because it was essentially written into the law and the constitutions of those countries that there would be one party that would have a, quote unquote, leading role, you know, in the political system. And the way I would put it is that in there are other countries and other democracies in the world today that have sort of dominant two-party systems. And there have always been such countries. But in the United States, we have a dominant two-party system, not because that's just the way things shook out democratically, but we have a dominant two-party system in the same way that like North Korea has a dominant one-party system. And that's, in other words, it's written into the law, essentially. And that's one of the things that is totally distinctive about the United States. The US is the only democracy in the world

33:39where different parties have different ballot access requirements imposed on them. Because in most states, the Democratic and Republican parties are exempted from the ballot access laws. That's just so incredible. That just, I mean, that gives them obviously just a massive advantage because the obstacles, the impediments to getting on the ballot are huge as we talk about. We'll talk about some more. It's funny because there's a lot of states and there always have been, and this is even more the case now than it used to be, but there's a lot of states tend to be politically very much leading towards one party or the other for normal, organic democratic reasons. But what that means is that in many states, one of the two parties is sort of like a total shell, like in red states, the Democratic party often is virtually non-existent. And has very little money, has very few people involved in it, I mean, even less so than in other states. And same thing on the other side. And so, I think it's quite possible that in many states, and this is probably why we

34:43have these laws like that. There are many states where if you try to impose the same requirements on the two major parties that are imposed on the third parties, then you would frequently end up with one of the two major parties not making it on the ballot because they couldn't, you know, they couldn't raise enough signatures, they couldn't do all those things. So this doesn't exist in any other country. So the two party system in the United States, we have a two party system in the same sense that the Soviet Union had a one party system. Not a two party system in the sense that like Britain has had a two party system in the past. Julius Nayero once said that the US had a one party system, but with its usual extravagance that had two of them. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, but I mean, this explains again, phenomenon, which is so earth shattering from an American point of view, like Italy. Parties, you know, Italy seemed to have a somewhat stable center left versus center right with this kind of communist party always just outside the ruling and anything ruling system throughout the

35:49Cold War. But then it fell apart and it's, they're just constantly new parties being formed and new parties ruling. And that is, that is actually more of a more democratic system. I mean, I guess that's because the Christian Democrats and the socialist those used to be, I guess, the two kind of their Republicans and Democrats. I mean, they weren't they weren't fused with the state and on that level, like literally fused at the balloting election level. And in this country and maybe all tomorrow, all, you know, what we call democracies, elections. I mean, so much of politics and democracy and elect so much of democratic politics revolves just around elections. It's, it's definitely the mobilizing force. It's of course, just where power is ultimately decided. But if you're controlling ballot access, you know, you are this, what Putin called when he took power,

36:50I mean, Russia, Russia and the, at the very end of the Soviet days, I mean, I think the Soviet Union was at its most democratic or Russia even probably like sort of 89 to 92 or so, maybe 93. When Putin came to power and then it started getting constricted by Yeltsin beginning with him bombing his own parliament and affecting Kuh and then imposing a new more American style, somewhat more American style or French style system. And Putin comes to power and he, he circumscribed that democracy much more, you know, what you would call democracy and described it as they were trying to come up with a new word to describe Russian democracy in the 2000s, isn't there earlier Putin era? They call that managed democracy or sovereign democracy. I think managed democracy, managed democracy is a really good way of putting it and in that way, you can kind of visualize

37:54on some level, certainly at the ballot level, you know, some of these similarities. If you don't mind, I want to read off some of these changes that happen in this period from the sort of the 1890s through the 1930s, these crisis moments. And again, all of this in the sort of background or foreground or substructure of all of this is the industrial revolution in America, the industrial ization, industrial capitalism, which, you know, which is such a part of our lives now, we take, like it's hard for us to think outside of it. It wasn't, we didn't experience a revolution in the whole society the way, you know, industrial capitalism massively revolutionized people's lives at that time and reorganized their lives. So to us, I think we, it's harder for us to see through

39:01things maybe a bit harder for us than they did then. It's harder, our assumptions are deeper and stronger, perhaps harder to break. Whereas sort of the early socialists and the populists and these other movements, I think they were, I mean, they were really kind of rebelling against the order, the political order that industrial capitalism was imposing on them at that time. But anyway, I want to read some of these, this timeline that you have here. So you have, you know, 1892, 1893. And this is when the populist movement is really getting really big and the labor movement and the strikes are really spreading. In many states, including Oregon and Minnesota, Republicans use the Australian ballot to undercut third parties, inhibiting fusion voting by preventing candidates from appearing twice in the ballot. Fusion voting was a big thing with the populist as well and the people's party where, let's say, you know, in a, in the south, they were

40:03very big in the south in the Midwest. It was very hard to get people to not vote for the Democrat because of the Civil War and the waving of the bloody shirt as they called it. And so it was hard for them, let's say, to vote for Republican, but they were not able to get enough people for the people's party or the farmers alliance or whatever it was called. So they would do the fusion vote. They would vote for, you know, their candidate would appear twice on the ballot, right? So it would appear both as a farmers alliance candidate, whatever, and as a Republican, let's say in the south. So they started to ban this. 1893 South Dakota becomes the first state to pass explicit restrictions on fusion voting. Now again, people might think, well, these are just Midwestern states. They're all reactionary and one party, but that's just not how it was because farmers were, farmers and, were, and, you know, industrial workers were the first people to get just

41:07creamed by this industrial revolution wave. Farmers largely fell into, you know, debt pnage by the millions. 1895 Republican controlled legislators in Michigan, Oregon, and watched and passed anti fusion laws. 1896 Ohio passes the anti fusion Dana law after coalition of populists, socialists, and dissident Republicans. Nearly unseats the Republican mayor of Cincinnati. And by the way, in 1890, it was, I'm Britishers because of fusion. Yeah, it was because of fusion that in Nebraska, which was Republican in Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, ran as sort of the fusion candidate and got a kind of a weaker populist movement to join with the Democratic Party. And that's how the Democratic Party first became big. There in South Williams Jennings Bryan became this big Democratic Party guy because he, it was because of fusionism

42:11that he, his whole sort of candidacy was launched and he became one of the most kind of at least well-known figures. I think a lot of people think he sort of buried populism as well, but he, you know, he was one of the big political figures from the 1890s and sort of the, through let's say, 1916 or so. Again, more and more 1897 Republican majority successfully banned fusion voting in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, North Dakota. So all of this is our different ways of restricting what you can do when you vote on the ballot 1899 to 1907, California to Nebraska. South Dakota is such a banned fusion voting. Another thing that's happening at this time because the populists were so successful in mobilizing African-American farmers and sharecroppers as well. This is also when a lot of the Jim Crow laws were passed to divide blacks from whites at the sort of

43:17you know, at the kind of working class or poor level. And then circa 1920 right here, state level fusion voting bans effectively end the practice in the United States, forcing third parties to turn to gathering signatures to run candidates on their own ballot lines. Today in New York is the only state in the country where fusion voting is still commonly practiced. Is that why we have, what is it the conservative party or and working families party, right? Yeah. And the liberal party. And the liberal party. Yeah. The working families party and I know you discuss this here and we may talk about it as has had some influence. I mean, it's come with a price and they backed Andrew Cuomo, which is just amazing. But it did have influence in a way, you know, I'm from California, I know you're there now. Like you just never saw this anywhere else. That's interesting that New York did evade that. And then you have some bullet points here or some timeline here on also how the requirements to

44:20just get on the ballot anyway were stiffened in the next crisis in the Great Depression crisis. So, you know, here you have a 1931 Illinois raises its signature requirement for third party or independent candidates from 1000 to 25,000. Same year, 1931, I don't, is this one up to Sinclair ran or did you do it later? I can't remember now. For governor, but anyway, California raises its signature requirement from 1% of the last group in editorial vote to 10%. That's just so insane, you know, Florida we mentioned the 1931 Pennsylvania limits perspective candidate signature collection period to just three weeks. But meanwhile, the Republicans and the Democrats are without having to do anything are automatically put on the ballot. And what this does is it defines the kind of people then who get involved in third party politics. These impediments basically decide ultimately the kind of people that will

45:26bother with this and the kind of people that will just say forget it and ain't worth it. And I really like how you describe this here. When third party activists seek ballot status, they're often seeking to grant far reaching control over their own internal affairs to hostile two party sit to a hostile two party dominated legislature. So another is when you're trying to get on the ballot, you're trying to work within the rules and under the power of a system that is set up and under people and a system, a two party system whose whole purpose or at least part of their purpose certainly during elections is to keep you off the ballot. What this is really about is is another additional and maybe, you know, sometimes even more important aspect of this whole story, which I don't think we've really talked about so far, which is besides the obstacles that they place on third parties getting on the ballot in the first place, once you do get on the ballot, once you have qualified for the ballot, the United States has the most comprehensively and

46:27intrusively regulated parties in the world. So like I said, most democracies regard political parties as voluntary organizations. So any kind of government regulation of how they operate normally is considered to be at the very least sort of a touchy thing. You want to minimize for like just the basic democratic freedom considerations, minimize the extent to which the government intrudes or dictates how these organizations run. The United States is totally different. I mean, the US comprehensively regulates the internal affairs of ballot qualified political parties and most importantly, and again, this is the US is the only country, the only democracy in the world that does this. The US is the only country in the world that where the government runs, decides, essentially the government decides for a political party who their candidates are. I know that's going to sound crazy to people. But in the United States, the government decides who, which candidates

47:28a political party will run, not the party. How is that possible? Because in the United States, we have totally unique system of state run, government run primaries. There are no other countries that do this. And so what that means is that this is the case, you know, for the vast majority of states, the vast majority of the time, there are exceptions, but this is the general rule. That if you qualify for the ballot as a party, you are required at least if you, this is certainly the case if a party becomes at all like politically relevant because that actually manages to get any significant number of votes. And in many states, it's automatic for all parties. Once you get on the ballot, then the government will run a primary election for you, where in which the government holds an election, in which your party is on the ballot, and there's a set of rules about how a candidate can, any candidate, can choose to run in your primary. You have no control over who runs in your primary.

48:34So, you know, you start a political party, you get it on the ballot. Some, any, any schmo can come along regardless of what their political views are, their opinions, they could, they could be against everything that you stand for. And they can come along and run in your, in your primary. And you have no control over the political party does not control who, who is their candidate in the United States. So, you can see that like even if, even putting aside the obstacles to getting on the ballot, the kind of control over one, over a party's internal affairs that a new, insurgent political party would absolutely need. It's, I mean, more than any other party, it's like a, it's the most vulnerable, it's the most sort of the weakest, it has to fight for its existence in the political system. It has no control. And I mean, as you, as you can imagine, this opens up, as we were talking about this earlier, it opens up the prospect of all kinds of manipulation of the political system. Anytime third parties or independent candidacies emerge

49:37with any kind of momentum behind them, the fact that the, that parties don't have control over who runs in their, who are their candidates. And it's all done by the, the government, according to a set of rules, this opens the field for a huge amount of manipulation. Do you know much about how, to take an opposite example, a more democratic example, which was ultimately crushed? But let's take the labor party and how Jeremy Corbyn became its leader. I know Michael and I were talking about this a little earlier. Can you, it's just so that people maybe have a, a different point of reference here. Why was the labor party able to get, to make Jeremy Corbyn its leader? And then of course, ultimately, there were machinations in which that was crushed. We all watch that. But do you know, like that party ran very differently from the democratic party? Well, I mean, there's two, there's like two levels of an answer to that. The most fundamental reason

50:39why Jeremy Corbyn was able to do that is simply that the labor party, like any other political party in a normal democracy, could decide for itself how it would choose its candidates. You know, I mean, again, that's just the same way the ACLU gets to decide who is going to be on its board and who's going to be the head of the organization. The labor party and any other political party and any other democracy can just make it, so it can choose what rules it's going to use to, to, to choose its candidates. And then the second level of the explanation is that, that the labor party leadership made what it almost immediately regretted a decision that immediately regretted to, I think the original idea was that they wanted to sort of kind of generate more excitement about the process of selecting their next leader. And so they changed the rules to make it sort of anybody who is a member of the labor party can just vote in a direct direct vote for who the leader was, which is not how the

51:41rules had been in that party previously. I mean, I don't know the whole history of all the different types of rules that the party had used in the past. I know that certainly as given that it was from the beginning a labor party, it was a party created by the trade union movement and it was institutionally tied to the trade union movement. It always had a very strong sort of like institutional block vote for the unions where they had a lot of control directly as organizations. But the, I think that right before Corbin for many years, the selection had been done by the members, by the members of parliament of the labor party. They were the ones who ultimately got to choose. I think that's the case for the party leader. But then when they had to choose their next leader, they decided to just, well, we'll try to get people excited in this process. We'll just anybody who is a member, paid up member of the labor party. And then next vote, we'll get to vote. And what happened, of course, was that the stimulated a huge wave of leftists, left wing sort of

52:43minded people saying, that's great. Let's join the party, pay our dues, become a member, and vote for Jeremy Corbin, who was, you know, he had a lot of support in those precincts. So that's pretty much how it happened. Except for the impossible, except from the leaders of the party leaders. But I mean, that would have been, the Democratic party couldn't even do that if it wanted to. Yes. Is what I'm saying, because the law prescribes how candidates are selected in the United States irrespective of what the quote unquote party wants. That's really incredible. If I could just step in for a second, you're talking about all the things we can't do here. But could you elaborate in a positive sense of what a party should have in terms of members platform electing the leaders, et cetera? Because I think this is very central to people, the impossibility of setting up a third party by getting a ballot line is that we have a sort of intuitive idea of a party controls itself. But we don't pay the idea of paid members, for example, electing their own leaders is something we

53:50don't have anywhere. It's kind of illegal. And it's what we want. And understanding that is necessary to understand why the only way to organize the kind of party we want is paradoxically not to organize as a party. Yes. Yeah. I think there's a, I have a line in that article where I quote one of these, you know, academic election comparative election law books that says, you know, the United States is unique in that whereas in any other democracy, party membership, people become a member of a party by applying to the party to become a member, you know, submitting a membership application. In the US, a party membership is described as a fiction that is a figment of the voter registration laws, the party registration laws for primaries. This is also, by the way, yet another detail of our system

54:50that doesn't exist anywhere else. There's no other country where you go to register to vote. And it says, what is your political party? And you select that, you know, that would be, that is, I think anybody in any normal democracy who went to like register to vote and was asking them about their party would like immediately trigger some national crisis of like, oh my God, we're, you know, slipping into authoritarianism. But in the United States, this has been how we, how we, how we do things. So the, I think what Michael's asking what Michael's talking about is, you know, what is a normal democratic in a small, desense political party. And that is, that's why I use the term voluntary organization because that's always how in democracies, people have traditionally considered political parties. It's a group of people, a group of citizens who have some common set of ideas or a cause or a common interests who want to generate political change through a democratic process. So they get together, they form an organization, you know, and in, um,

55:53EP Thompson's famous making of the English work in class, you know, he has a whole chapter that's called something like members unlimited because that was the, that was a phrase used by some of these earliest working class sort of clubs and organizations that, you know, evolved later into political parties or trade unions or whatever. And, and the idea of members unlimited, in other words, anybody can become a member if we, if they, or can apply to be a member, you know, and we can, you know, if you, if that person shares our ideas, then we'll accept them, they'll become a member. And now we are a sort of a corporate body who can then number one, we can advocate for our view of politics, for our ideals and our principles and our policies. We can educate people around those ideas, around that platform. And then finally, we can choose candidates to run for office and put them up for election and try to convince people to vote for them on the, on the basis that, you know, we, this is what we stand for. And these candidates are there to,

56:58are standard bearers for our program, for our ideas. That's, you know, these are, this is like, sort of the, the 101 sort of like, you know, junior high civics kind of idea of, of democracy, as, as most people have certainly in other countries. And I think even in a paradoxical way, in the United States, even though this isn't, isn't how our system actually works, I think there's part of the reason why there's so much confusion that people have is because, because all of the, the ways that in which our system is such an outlier have to do with aspects of the system that are quite technical and obscure, people sort of by default assume that our system is a normal democracy. And so when they talk about a political party, they talk about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, they treat them or they, they, and they mentally categorize them as the way that normal democracies categorize political parties. And so, they, and then it leads to a lot of confusion because they're like, well, why, you know, the

58:02Democratic Party stands for this or the Republican Party stands for that. And, you know, without, without any understanding of how the mechanics of our system make it so that parties don't do that in the way that they do in other countries. It's not a group of citizens with common ideas who get together and sort of force, try to force their way into the political system by getting convincing people to vote for their candidates. That's not how it works here. The political parties are an arm of the state. That's what they are in the United States. I want to harp on that point because this article that Seth wrote, which is just of such importance, it started in the US. It basically got us off the snide, we just tried a hundred times to start a third party and failed every single time until he, Seth explained the problem. It's kind of like a mathematical proof where it's just completely counterintuitive. And then once you've read it, you go, oh, that's the only way. Exactly. Which is what DSA followed. But everyone that isn't in NYC DSA hasn't read this

59:03article. So I want to emphasize the things you guys have been saying so far. If you get a ballot line and you will allow your political organization to be defined by that ballot line, you are delivering yourself into your enemy's hands. Their laws run your organization. They mean you can't have dues paying members, select your leaders. They judge whether you are obeying their laws. They can find and dissolve your party. And if you have any success, they can change the laws that govern you and you can't stop them. Right. So the paradoxical thing is the only way you can have a party in the sense that Seth just described is to form something that is not legally a party. Under US law. Seth keeps calling it a voluntary organization. And in his article, he suggests of a 501 C4, which is what all voluntary NGOs, etc. are. And now you have sort of an underground party. It's not secret, but it's organized as a voluntary organization, not as a public utility.

1:00:09And that's the only way you can make a party in America. And then once you've done that, you have a completely different relation to the ballot line. It's something that is of pragmatic sense. But what DSA said when they sort of learn this is, oh, you have to make a proto party. And we can then make our own laws. And we can say, oh, only members who pay dues can vote in our election. And we won't endorse someone unless they get 60% of the vote. And if anyone doesn't follow our platform, then we'll kick them out. You can then use somebody else's line, or you could make up your own mind if you want to. And we can talk about that perhaps elsewhere. But the whole key is you can't have a party you control unless it's not organized as a party. I just can't emphasize that. I mean, for people who may want DSA, a lot of people may know,

1:01:12and something may not. This refers to the Democratic Socialists of America. This is a Zorn Mamdani's party, AOC's maybe party. But this has been one of the big story in the primary season so far and in some elections so far this year. And your article, the blueprint for a new party, you know, you're kind of let's say DSA adjacent, I guess, Seth. But your article nevertheless was definitely picked up by the DSA as like, oh, okay, this is why for the previous 30 years, we and nobody else ever got anywhere, we need to change. Because a party, an actual political party is essentially a state structure. But a voluntary organization that can influence this state structure is where you can actually set up what in other countries would be a political

1:02:15party, which is a party that has, you know, that has members that has discipline that fights for cause that has unity and so on. I guess one question is, well, first of all, so who does it serve this system, not just the Republicans and the Democrats, but I mean, you know, but who does this serve and how does it serve them to keep it this way where our managed democracy and especially managed election system is so has so much state regulation and interference in it. Well, this is a complicated question. I mean, I tend to to think, I tend to believe that this system has really largely outlived its usefulness for, you know, the powers that be, however you want to

1:03:16define that. And, you know, they've inherited this system from the past. It certainly was very functional for the powers that be when it was first set up and for many years. But I think that because, you know, this is when you look at the sort of evolution of political systems over time, it's always this interaction between the like the legal and constitutional structure and the rules on the one hand. And then, you know, the sociological composition of society, the nature of technology and media, I mean, all kinds of all the things that affect politics and are constantly changing, they're going on separately and they're interacting with the like the legal constitutional sort of substrate all the time and often producing unpredictable sort of compound results, you know, like in a chemistry experiment, you combine to and and that's been really the sort of history of our political system. So our party system in this country has undergone a number of historically

1:04:19a number of, you know, major evolutions that were not planned and could not have been planned because they were the outcome of just large scale sociological changes. And all of those changes have have been sort of forced through the kind of the filter or the, you know, the greater of our of our existing legal party structure system. And today, my sense is that is that this, I think that the system is becoming increasingly dysfunctional for anybody. I mean, it's not, it's not really for the ruling classes, even for the ruling class, it's less and less serving the interest of anybody in particular and just to sort of chaos. It's a little bit like Trump, you know, it's like at first it was like, oh, he's going to be the tool of whoever, but he's really just the tool of himself and he's, you know, it's like a chaos agent, not, which does not say he doesn't benefit various people, but like that's that's I think really what's happened here. One of the big things is that, you know, I mean, the major change, the major shift in the party system that's happened

1:05:24over the past 50 years or so, 40, 50 years is this is sort of polypsi, you know, 101, the literature of American political parties is sort of conventional wisdom is that, you know, we had a vast transformation of our party system, which until basically the mid 90s, we've never had a two party system that was actually ideological, where the divide between the parties was pretty purely ideological. You know, on the left, we've always, you know, said so old, the oldest line, you know, about for in left wing sort of conventional wisdom about the party system is that the Democrats are not really a left wing party. Of course, that's true, but it is nevertheless today the case in a way that it was not 50 or 60 years ago, and even less so 100 years ago, but today it is the case that, you know, pretty much everywhere you go, every Democrat is to the left of every Republican. I mean,

1:06:25only a slight exaggeration. That was not the case before, and that was another thing that was, that's not, I wouldn't say, completely unique in the United States. There have been other countries that have had these kinds of very heterogeneous and non-ideological party systems for various reasons. Usually it happens because you have a country that has a lot of different political, sociological cleavages that are cross-cutting. And as a result of that, you know, you don't get a sort of a straight, pure, like, let's say, class-based system where, sort of, urban versus rural, or, you know, that manifests itself as sort of like socially conservative versus sort of, like, liberal and progressive and working class oriented. The US for all of its history, until the 1930s, we didn't have, we didn't even have a left-right concept in national politics. We really didn't. Then the new deal introduced the sort of, like, embryo, this germ of left-right politics into the

1:07:28system, but it didn't actually restructure the parties. So what you got with the new deal was, there was now a sort of labor social democratic politics, and then it generated a reaction of a sort of, familiar, what we would now be, find familiar as a sort of, like, right-wing anti-social democratic anti-status, but in a sort of conservative authoritarian kind of way that we were used to that as being conservative politics. And that polarity between a convention, what we now think of as a conventional sort of social democratic left and a right and an anti-social democratic right, inserted itself into a pre-existing two-party system, but not in a coherent way where the democratic party became the party of the social democratic left and the Republican party became the, because we had this very geographically heterogeneous and complicated system where, depending on what region you were in, for reasons that were often historical, sometimes they were about the ethnic, particular, ethnic makeup of a particular state because of their particular history of immigration.

1:08:33Massachusetts is a great example where, you know, if you look at the party system in Massachusetts in the 1950s, it was the Irish Catholic Democrats versus the Yankee Republicans, and the Democrats were to the right of the Republicans because the Irish Catholics were conservative and anti-communist and pro McCarthy, you know, Joe McCarthy. And so everything was very locally based and heterogeneous and as a result, it was not a straight left Democrats to the left Republicans to the right system. But what happened was for a series of reasons having to do with the civil rights movement and the infringement of blacks and the movement of blacks out of the South and into northern cities and a lot of different factors, what you got was by the mid-90s, late-90s system where, and certainly by the 2000s, where the parties had, as they say in political science, there was the great sort, the big sort, the sorting out of the parties where everybody who was to the left of center ended up in the Democrats and everybody to the right of center ended up in Republicans. And now, so for the first time, this is quite new, you know, just in the last 30 years or so,

1:09:35that we've had a left-right party system. And this has really transformed everything because once you have an ideologically coherent party system, then, and then when you add to that, the transformation of the media landscape, where the barriers to entry of communicating a message have drastically fallen, then this, for the first time, just in the last few decades, you have a system in which Americans have been opened, their eyes have been opened to what it means to look at a party system in ideological terms and to, they have started to come to expect that their parties adhere to some kind of relatively consistent ideologically consistent program. They sort of expected that is the norm. And the party leaders, party leaders have had to sort of either sincerely or insincerely pretend like they're doing that, like they're going through the motions of standing for an ideologically coherent program. And then the more they do that, the more it reinforces the perception among ordinary voters that this is what parties are supposed to be.

1:10:39And for one thing, if you have a rigid two-party system, where, like I said, you know, the median district in the House of Representatives, third parties get 0% of the vote versus 15% or 25% in the UK and Canada. If you have that kind of incredibly rigid two-party system, then you're going to, and you try to filter, you try to force all of the politics, the political heterogeneity of the country into this rigid two-party system. That's virtually unheard of, I mean, it is unheard of in any democracy. And so you start to get these really more symptoms, which you can see today in American politics. And one of those symptoms, which is, I think, is a healthy symptom, of course, is that this phenomenon of DSA sort of taking up my suggestion with this model, because you had a critical mass of people who said, we need, we want to have an actual ideologically consistent alternative, but we can't do it through

1:11:45the legal conventional party system because of the way our ballot system and party system is legally structured. Right. I want to get back to getting to an example you talk about, which is the attempt to create a labor party, like a bit more on the European, maybe all the European model, in the US. And also, if we can, too, and I hope I know I'm taking a lot of your time, but if we could also discuss what's happening in Nebraska. But again, I want to re-emphasize this, because I think for a lot of, like everything we're talking about here and everything you write about in your article, a blueprint for a new party, it's once you've read it, it's like, oh, yeah, that's obvious. But you still have to, you really got to absorb it first. And I think, again, you do a really good job of providing examples. Your language is very clear, which it needs to be, I think, for something like this to open people's eyes. So it's really well written. But

1:12:51I want to read a little part here again about what happens when you do try to put a third party on the ballot. The parties, because of everything we're talking about here, the parties, third parties, are frequently forced to devote the bulk of their resources, not to educating voters, which is definitely a huge part of trying to create a new democratic movement, not to educating voters or knocking on doors on Election Day, but to waging petition drives and ballot access lawsuits. And you see this all the time if you ever follow a third party politics. The constant legal harassment in turn ends up exerting a subtle but powerful effect on the kinds of people attracted to independent politics. Through a process of natural selection, such obstacles tend to repel serious and experience local politicians and organizers while disproportionately attracting activists with a certain mentality, disdainful of practical politics or concrete results, less interested in organizing or even winning

1:13:54elections than in bearing witness to the injustice of the two party system through the symbolic ritual of inscribing a third party's name on the ballot. The official parties are happy to have such people as their opposition and even happy to grant them this safe channel for their discontent. It's really brutal, but it's right on the nose. Let's talk about the labor party in this attempt to create this third party. So Seth, why don't you start and Michael could also fill in maybe with a particular? Yeah, so I started the article with that story of the labor party, which is not very well known because it never really got off the ground in the way that the people involved in it had hoped. But in the early 90s, there was a kind of a groundswell late 80s, early 90s, hard to remember, hard to believe, but at the time we still in this country had pretty substantial industrial unions,

1:14:56you know, manufacturing sector and industrial unions. And they were going through a serious deep crisis in the 80s and 90s. And you look at the history of labor parties throughout the world, generally they end up sort of a truism of the comparative history of this stuff that they'll make the decision to go into politics and to become a political force only in response to some major crisis. And that's what was going on in the 80s and 90s. And when the Democrats and under Clinton went and supported NAFTA at a time when the industrial unions were already under all of this pressure, it was seen as such a betrayal that even these unions that are, you know, traditionally in America, our unions were always quite very conservative anti-communist. They were totally, they tended to be, you know, sort of docile within the two party system. There was a real ferment in the industrial unions to do something about this. And that's what produced this sort of

1:15:57ferment for to create a labor party. And it was spearheaded by Tony Mizokie, who is the head of the oil chemical atomic workers, I think is what it was called. A real great, he's no longer with us, but, you know, sort of a really one of those great figures in labor history, who is like a true man of the left and a genuine working class activist from, you know, his whole career. And so he helped, you know, sort of organize this movement, but they ran up into the problem of our party system. And, you know, immediately when they started going around to local unions and talking to people, everybody was all fired up about it, you know, he said, Mizokie said, or somebody involved in that effort said, you know, I've never talked to anybody. When I talk to people in the unions, they're always like, yeah, we'd love to have a labor party. And it was just a question of the practicalities of it. And, you know, so the first the first obstacle was the spoiler problem, you know, so most of these unions, they've been around for a long time, they have substantial

1:16:59sort of political resources available to them. And so they've always had relationships with incumbent office holders, you know, usually Democrats. And for a labor party to be organized to come and run a candidate against, you know, in a three three cornered race would inevitably split the the pro labor vote and and have a very high chance of throwing the race to the Republican. And these union leaders didn't want to do that. Or they were very they were hesitant to do that. And so this sort of put them in a holding pattern in this party where they at first were like, well, let's just make this the start out by having this be sort of an educational project and sort of build build support for the for the project until we reach the point where we're we're able to sort of take the plunge and and feel strong enough to overcome that spoiler problem. But, you know, the the longer they went on, the more people were like, well, what what exactly is this, you know, supposedly it's a party, but we're not running candidates. So what exactly is this? And then,

1:18:05you know, ultimately sort of kind of almost as a footnote to the whole thing when it was about to collapse, they ran one, I think one candidate in South Carolina, which is a state that had very low ballot access obstacles. And by the way, that is the historical pattern is that the most conservative states are the ones that were getting on the ballot is the easiest because the ballot obstacles were put there in response to the threat, you know, of insurgent candidates. So, so yeah, so that's what happened with the labor party. But, you know, I have to say that having looked at this greater greater depth in sort of the history of this, you know, generally like political sociologists will say that, you know, one of the great factors that has created this sort of American exceptionalist pattern where, you know, we have this incredibly anti-status political economy and, you know, weak unions and all the rest of it was that the US never had a labor party, whereas most other democracies ended up sooner or later having one kind of a labor or social democratic party or

1:19:09another. And so the question of why was there never a labor party in the United States is all or a socialist party, which is pretty much the same thing. A social party is a kind of labor party, has always been a great question of comparative sociology. And if you look at the, if you look at the the history of this question, this is relatively little known, but really the closest we ever came to the unions, you know, really throwing, throwing their lot in wholeheartedly to create a labor party was actually this is an episode that people forget, but it was 1946 when the unions were near the peak of their strength. They were a huge strike way of 1946, yeah. And they were furious at Harry Truman for various reasons for, you know, things that they considered betrayals. And there was a lot of ferment to create to build a labor party and like Walter Ruther, you know, was who's

1:20:10the head of the UAW was very strong in those days. He was one of the most initially one of the most enthusiastic. And there were ultimately I think that the probably the most important reason why it didn't happen had to do with intra union politics regarding the communists. People were afraid that the labor party would be taken over by the communists, which were very strong within labor movement. But that didn't even end up being, they didn't even really get to that point in a sense because they, they initially were like, well, what would we need to do to get on the ballot? And, you know, it wouldn't have been inconceivable for them despite these very, because the labor movement was huge. And if they'd really put all the resources into it, it would have been a huge fight, but they probably could have done it. Henry Wallace got on on about it in a lot of states. And that was because there was a real communist party in this country where there were like people, thousands and thousands of people for whom their whole life was being an activist in this party. That was their whole life. And so it was possible. But, you know, precisely for that reason, a lot of the non communists,

1:21:15even the left wing non-communist people within the labor movement were like, well, do we really want to then end up depending on the communists and so on. But the point is that like they started when people started talking about this within the labor movement in 1946, the first thing they did was have the lawyers look into what would be necessary to get on the ballot. And they were coming back with reports about like, this is going to be a really tough to get on the ballot, you know. And we're going to have to throw a huge amount of money and effort behind it and probably have to rely on the communists. So there's a history to this that's even before the labor party of the 90s. Right. No, that's that's a great point. That's really amazing. I mean, I want to say about at least a quarter or a third maybe of the US workforce was unionized at that time. That was kind of at its peak period. Yeah. When the labor party formed in the one of the founders in the 90s, Chris Townsend says that, you know, there's a reason we do this every 50 years because everyone who was around

1:22:16last time has to have died. That's totally true. That is super true. And that's, you know, that's really what got what finally made me write this article, what you started thinking about this stuff and writing the article is because like I said, when we were talking about this earlier, you know, I had been on left wing forums, actually me and Michael were on the same left wing email discussion forum for many, many years going back to the 90s. And, you know, and so you had people on there, many of them had been on the left, the American left for decades and decades and and, and, you know, after many years of watching these debates, it was amazing how the same debates would repeat themselves over and over again every election year, you know, and I would feel like I was rolling my eyes because every election year, every four years, you would have the people screaming at each other on these email lists about this question. Why, you know, you're a sell out for the Democratic Party because you're not for a third party and then, you know, well, what do third parties never work? And then well, they would work if we all got behind them, you know, and

1:23:18that is, and those are every goddamn four years of my life, yes. Yes. And, and, you know, I felt like, you know, surely you have to, you both sides, you have to realize like these kinds of pointless arguments are exactly what like the powers that be you want us to be doing right now, you know. You don't you see that like you're not going to like succeed by like winning this argument, you're going to succeed by ending this argument somehow, finding a way out of the argument, you know. And that's that's what got me started, you know, thinking about this, this whole subject. And your article totally did that. I mean, the last time we had socialists in the legislature in New York State was in 1920 because we had a socialist party that was organized as a voluntary organization, which as your article lays out, they eventually made it legal to do. And we had like five. And when we reorganize something along the lines of this blueprint in January, this coming January, we'll have 14. We'll have more socialists in the legislature than we ever had before,

1:24:20because this is the solution for now for what they used to do then. Yeah, it's incredible. I was looking at there's a report in the Brookings Institute. So I'm sure they weren't cheering this on necessarily, but sort of adding up what the DSA has been able to do. And so over half of Democratic Socialist American endorsed candidates ran for local or state legislative offices. So the party is much more, which I think is the right thing is much more focused on local elections, state elections. I mean, even the populist kind of went through this as well, like the populist began organizing because they were all deep in debt and had no power and couldn't get credit and couldn't get their crops out because the railroads on them and the banks on them. So they started first by sort of banding together trying to figure out how they could cooperate and maybe lend each other or create a separate money system. And then that got quashed.

1:25:22It's like, okay, we need to have some local power. And then the local power got quashed. It's like we need state power. You know, anyway, so here's the table that they have here. And I mean, personally, I think this sounds very impressive for the DSA, which really just kind of burst out of the gate nationally. I mean, really just in the last couple of years. So local elections, so they, this is up through sort of early mid-August, I believe. They had participated in 99, I think most or all of these might be primaries here, but anyway, 99 total, they won 33 and lost 34. And then there was no primary for 31. So they were 50, you know, batting 500 there. State legislative elections, total of 104, they won 66 and lost 24. So that's a really good outcome. State wide elections, there were 15 that they participated in, they won five, lost 10. Now it gets harder, of course, when you go and statewide congressional elections,

1:26:25total 64, they participated, I guess these are all primaries. They won 19 and lost 42. I mean, I think these are really good numbers, if you ask me, because you're talking about a new model, a model of being and a voluntary organization, 501C4, that works within a state, you know, a state mandated party system. I don't know what you guys think, but to me, those are really good numbers. Yeah, I totally agree. But one thing that occurred to me when I was re-rebooting this article after 10 years, I mean, you know, I read it a ton when it came out, I've been living it since, but this is the first time I've sat down and read it line by line again. Is it so far ahead of its time that it couldn't imagine it actually happening? And so it talks about a DSA in terms of like a national organization. And what has actually happened is, of course, we have our 50 state problem that he talks about, that Seth talks about in his constitution article,

1:27:28and we basically have a 50 state DSA. And they're voluntary organizations that don't have we have a nominal national organization, but we haven't actually, we're still drifting toward that. Right. Why, so is that why? Because I've seen, I'm not a DSA member, but you know, obviously, know a lot of people and so on. And I do see at times, spats between different chapters and people say, oh yeah, well, that chapter sucks, you know, they're always like that. Whatever that is, you know, tankies or, you know, fake fake leftists or whatever. But is that, is that the main reason why? I mean, they can't create, they cannot do a national 501 C4 with discipline like that or we do say can actually you can. Yes, of course. Yeah, but the thing is that once you start winning things, you deal with new problems. We have to deal with the part of meant, like in each

1:28:31state, you have to deal with the parliamentary party problem we never had it before. We never had anybody in power. So you have to develop, you have to evolve democratic forms. And the same thing is true nationally. I mean, there's there's so many, we just haven't before, we haven't yet evolved the form that will work. We're working on it, but we have something to work on because we've elected people. Right. I think that, you know, the basic reality is that different localities have different potentials for different potential strength for an organization like this. New work for obvious, I think obvious reasons, you know, has a lot of potential for this sort of thing. Certainly New York City, especially, I think that the density of New York, certainly the concentration of a sort of an initial like critical mass of kind of critical intellectual left wing intellectuals who were able to spearhead this sort of thing. There were a lot of reasons why New York had a kind of an advantage in getting something like this started. And then once they

1:29:34were able to do it and sort of get electoral success, it created its own momentum. And I think it created a kind of organizational people had a stake in the success of the organization in part because it was successful as an electoral project. And that tended to have that, you know, I said in the article about there's this process of natural selection where certain people are repelled from you know, from involvement and certain people are attracted to it. And you know, in New York from a very early point, the success of the party attracted people who were really interested in getting things done and actually being successful and being pragmatic and not being doctrinaire. And then, but in other places that had, you know, that have for various local reasons, just less of a natural potential network of natural advantages for a project like this, the people who were attracted to this tend to be, I don't want to be unfair, but you know, I think they're on average. They will tend to be more like the sort of the profile of your old-fashioned, your old-line kind of third-party activist, you know, people who, because they're in a place where the prospects

1:30:38of success seem much less for actual like practical electoral success. So there are, you know, other motives that out of which people might join an organization like this, which might have to more to do with sort of like pursuing a kind of abstract ideological project. And the result of that, my perception, I'm not involved in all these debates, but my perception is that the heterogeneity of DSA has a lot, this is what it's about for a large, to a large extent. And so as a national organization, it's in some ways, I guess you could say maybe less, but possibly less than the some of its parts, I don't know, but that certainly I think accounts for the heterogeneity. Right. This might be a good time to talk about Nebraska. Yeah, so it's just going to try. It's being something that the anti-New York and what possibilities are there. Yeah, so Nebraska, fascinating. I think that this is my sense, I've been wanting to write something about this for a while. I guess it probably makes sense to just wait to see what's going to happen this November, but so what's happened, you know, and this is what related to the point that I was

1:31:40making about how the rules and laws and constitutional and legal structure of a party system, co-evolves with the like the evolution that's happening for reasons that have nothing to do with laws, but you know, sociologically and the media landscape and so on. And having had this evolution of an ideologically coherent party system, one consequence of that is that you have a lot of one party states, basically. In fact, states are increasingly one party in, out of organically, just because the sort of ideological profile of the state happens to be very liberal or very conservative. And this is, you know, it's obviously to the advantage of Democrats in more liberal states, to Republicans in more conservative states. On net, it's certainly to the disadvantage of the Democrats, where the disadvantage of liberals were progressives, or the left. It gives a huge advantage to Republicans because of our constitutional structure, because for a number of reasons,

1:32:44but maybe the most consequential is the fact that we have this Senate, where every state gets an equal to seats, regardless of what their size is. And so that vastly over represents these small, relatively sparsely populated states that are very conservative, or very Republican, I should say. And so you have a bunch of these states that tend to be overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly rural, and they vote for Republicans at a certain level, but generally at every level, state-wide, by margins over the Democrats, by margins of huge double-digit margins. Like Democrats just have no possibility of being elected in these states. Nebraska is certainly one of them. So the margins at the presidential level are usually like 30 points, 40 points, things like that. And so why is this? Well, the Democratic Party is a brand. I mean, that's all

1:33:44political parties are brands. It's a way of facilitating Democratic politics by simplifying the enormous complexity of politics, where there's a million different issues, and there's way more details than any one person can master. And parties help sort of distill all that complexity into a brand. So the people feel like, well, I do understand, I feel like I have a sense of what this party is, or that party is, and they can make a decision on that basis. The Democratic Party brand in this country is, for a host of reasons, probably both good and bad, but the Democratic Party brand is just totally unallatable to a large number of people. If you want to summarize in one word, yeah, absolutely. There's just a lot of places in this country where, again, for a combination of better and less good reasons, people are just never going to vote for a Democrat. And what that means is that you have these one-party states that are, they are red states where the American

1:34:45Republican Party, I'm sure you're listeners, even the ones who are not in the United States, they must realize that even before Trump and separate from Trump, the American Republican Party is an extremely right-wing party. And it is also an extremely, and this is sort of historically unusual for the United States, and extremely ideologically, comparatively speaking, ideologically rigid party, in the sense that there's a high degree of purism, ideological purism, that the party is sort of able to maintain, even though all of the rules and constitutional structure and legal structure, militate against any kind of ideological consistency within our parties. But the Republican Party over the last 30 years or so has managed to sort of largely overcome those obstacles, having a lot to do with money, basically, partly about money and partly about the particular organizational strength of the evangelical movement and how it functions internally. And that's a large part of the party base for the Republicans. But anyway,

1:35:48I think people have these surprised to learn that there used to be so-called progressive Republicans. I mean, there were a lot of them, actually. But yeah, certainly with Reagan, Reagan is the one who really first imposed ideological conformity in the party. Yeah, and part of it was the great sort that I talked about earlier, whereas just like everybody's left of Sen. Goz in the Democrats, everybody's right. Sen. Goz for the Republicans. But then it's even beyond that, because the Democratic Party as a party is more, still is more heterogeneous and has less of a sort of, it's more heterogeneous party sociologically. And so, but anyway, the Republican Party is very, very right wing, but to an extent that is more, it's, you would expect it to be more difficult for the Republican Party to maintain its strength given how extreme it is, even in conservative places, because the party is doctrinarily pro-business in ways that are often alienating to everybody except the most, you know, doctrinarily libertarians or right-wingers. And even on social issues, even in a conservative

1:36:53state like Nebraska, there's a lot of pro-life people, for example, in Nebraska. But even in Nebraska, even in those conservative states, they found since, since Roe versus Wade was overturned, they found that actually, you know, rigid anti-abortion politics are very unpopular. And majority is even in very conservative states or we want to maintain at least some right to an abortion. The Republican Party, that is absolute, I mean, there's an absolute litmus test imposed on those kinds of issues that make it an outlier and extreme inner what should be an electrally very disadvantaged, disadvantageous way for the Republicans, even in red states. But because they're, they're only opposition. Their only viable opposition is this brand, this big giant flashing neon logo that basically is the Democratic Party that's basically just, you know, the wokery of the most, you know, whatever, whatever people's worst stereotypes of wokery is, that's what the Democratic Party looks like to people in those states. And so because of that, the Republican Party's especially in

1:37:55those states are able to get away with a degree of extremism that really they shouldn't in Democratic politics. And so in 2024 by as a result, an outcome of a series of events that were really not sort of semi-cool incidental, this remarkable phenomenon happened where this guy named Dan Osborne ran as an independent. Now, I should say that in the system, in our electoral system, it's always the case that it's much, much easier to get on the ballot as an independent without a party than it is to get a party on the ballot. And the main reason for that is because a party is a much greater threat to the existing parties than just an individual candidate. But Osborne, he was like a rank and file worker who ended up sort of being sort of, could jolt sort of encouraged to take a leadership role in his local union. And then there was a big strike, I think. So he ended up taking kind of, it really is genuinely, he was not really even like a bread, like a deeply experienced. I'm sorry, real quick, he became president of the Bakery Confectionary,

1:39:00Tobacco Workers and Green Millers Union and led the strike. He ended up leading the strike. I think the strike was pretty popular, relatively popular in Nebraska, or there was a general sense that the corporation was the bad guy. And I think that the head of his local union, the head of his union, the political director, they really developed like a serious grudge against, I think Deb Fisher, who was the Republican Senator, Republican Senator, Senate candidate. And they were like, we need to get back at this asshole. Let's get Dan Osborne to run as an independent and run against Deb Fisher because there was no way that a Democrat would be able to beat her. But maybe running is sort of like a populist, a populist sort of Bernie Sanders-ish, labor pro-labor populist. But in a way where because he was not going to be running in a Democratic primary,

1:40:04he would be free to take the kinds of positions that Democrats could not take. So for example, he, like in 2024, obviously a big issue was immigration. And whereas any Democrat running in a state-wide office would have to take a do-regor, it would just have to take a position on immigration. That was much more pro-immigration than was palatable for this sort of median voter in a state like Nebraska. He was free to basically take a kind of a moderately pro-Trump line. This is before Trump actually implemented some of the most extreme and appalling aspects of his policy. But just just sort of like, yeah, you know, you had an ad where he was like, build the wall, sure, you know, build an immigration wall or whatever. This is not what he really wanted to focus on. And he didn't mainly focus on it. But he freed him by not being a Democrat, by not running a Democratic primary, to sort of liberate himself from some of the positions that normally will alienate. And you know, he just had, he was just very authentic. Like he really, that's his, he's not a great speaker. He's not like charismatic really. He's just, he just radiates

1:41:08genuine authenticity. I mean, he ran against corporate power, right? I mean, that was his ivory call. He ran against the power of corporations. He was, didn't he say like to put, I don't know, the, the labels of every corporation that, that supported Deb Fisher like, as stickers all over her jacket or something like that or something like that. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what, that was 100 percent what he ran. He ran as he's just straight and, and quite, you know, strident, you know, kind of labor populist. And, you know, very pro Bernie Sanders. And I mean, you know, if you look at, if you tried to sort of quantify somehow his, his, the positions and the rhetoric that he embraced in that campaign and sort of map it onto the norm of Nebraska politics, he was in fact running like way to the left of what, how Democrats usually run. And of course, not on some of those issues on, like immigration or whatever. But, you know, even on those issues, it was clear that

1:42:10that was not his main priority. And so like for even on, like, for example, he was, he was like totally against aid to Israel, you know, in a way that I can guarantee you that like normally in those, especially in states like that, the Democrats who do get nominated, they always lose. But even with some vacation, they'll win either way, they're, they tend to be quite, very, quite pro Israel. Yeah. And, you know, it's, you know, it's sort of like they get money for it. And it's easy. And so, but he, you know, he was against that. He took a sort of like a populist stand also sort of like, why are we giving money to Israel? So anyway, that was Osborne. So he, but he ended up, he lost the race, but he ended up losing by a much, much smaller margin than, then Democrats normally do that. Right. Trump won the 2024 by 21 points and Osborne only lost to the Republican by seven points. So he, yeah, did much better. And I actually, at one point, I, one of my hobbies is I like to play around with like a precinct level data, you know, the really granular election data. And I'm

1:43:13mapped all of the Senate candidates in 2024, according to the presidential margin in the precincts. So you just put all the precincts into bins, you know, the ones where Trump's margin was like negative 30 and negative 25, you know, negative 10 all the way up to positive 20, 25, Nebraska, as you might expect, has a lot of precincts, you know, where Trump won by very large margins. If you compare how Osborne performed in each of those bins with how all of the other, I won't say Democrat because he wasn't a Democrat, but all of the other like anti-Republican challengers in 2024 in Senate races ran, he ran way better than any other Democrat, including the ones that are always touted as, you know, having sort of crossover appeal, like Amy Klobuchar or whatever. You know, he ran better than all of those people in, in those high Trump voting places. And not because he ran to the center, he didn't run to the center. He ran as a, as a staunch pro Bernie Sanders populist. But it just by, just merely by freeing himself from

1:44:18that Democratic Party label, he was able to massively increase his performance. He's running again this year in the other Senate, for the other Senate seat against Ricketts. It sounds like a really, like, yeah, he's like, he's like a really, from a really rich family that sort of controls Nebraska, Republican politics. And it's not clear exactly, there's not a lot of polling, so it's not exactly, there, he seems to be, you know, holding up and doing well, he's at it, he has less of an advantage than he did last time because the sort of, he caught them by surprise last time, that he's coming, that he was going to be so successful, relatively successful. But, you know, I'm not the only person who has noticed that this is really a potential major new model for politics, because for transforming politics, and I think it's another indication of the kind of the decrepit state that the party system in this country is in, that on the one hand, you have DSA with the success

1:45:22that it's had. And I think on the other hand, you're going to see whatever happens with Osborne in this election, you're going to see more, more attempts to replicate his model in these red states of just by saying, you know what, we're going to dispense with the Democratic label and just run as an independent. And so you can see already that there's like the system is already kind of straining at the, you know, the boundaries of it are being, are being, for broken down, by the pressure of, you know, really it's sort of non-viability of trying to, can't, can't, and all of the politics of the country into these two parties that are not even real parties. And so I have some hope that that will be a model. In fact, if I end up writing an article, you know, what I'm going to argue is that to take it a little bit more radically is to say that the people should start pushing for the Democratic Party by various means to basically implement a rule that would say any state where, that where the Democratic candidate has lost by at least, you know, a margin of like 30

1:46:24percentage points in let's say two Senate elections in a row. It's like two strikes in your out. The Democratic, then you, you petition to get the Democratic Party taken off the ballot and then just have no Democratic Party in that state. That's my proposal. I can't, but that's great, but can they do that? Because aren't there laws? In fact, there are lawsuits going on in Nebraska. Where, I mean, first of all, you need a cooperative Democratic Party. And secondly, you need the system, which is dominated by the two parties. So if I'm not mistaken in Nebraska, there are lawsuits going on where they say by law, the Democrats must put a candidate on the ballot in November, which is just insane. Talk about state interference, you know. The Democratic, the Democratic candidate says she's withdrawing and I don't know if she's officially supporting Osborne, but definitely that does de facto support Osborne. And the state, the government is saying you must be on the ballot against your will or somebody else.

1:47:29Is that, is that an issue in a lot of states or how much is that an issue? I don't know how much you've looked into it in Nebraska. Oh, yeah. I mean, I've looked into it a fair amount. I mean, I don't think that Nebraska's laws are very unusual. I think that it's pretty, pretty standard. I mean, they tried to, they haven't tested the legal, all their legal options. The, the of course, it's a Republican who's the official in charge of running elections. The secretary state is it's called. And, you know, he wanted to make sure that there was a Democrat on the ballot to draw votes away from Osborne. So he, he tried one legal gambit and he, he screwed that up by, he tried a legal gambit of saying exactly what you said to say, this is an insincere Democratic candidate, which it was. She was, the candidate was running in a Democratic primary for the, because simply for the purpose of winning the primary and then dropping out so that Osborne would be the, and he said correctly, you know, this is an insincere candidacy, but then he was claiming that though he was permitted by law, this state official permitted by law to force,

1:48:30to prevent her from dropping out of the race and forcer to be on the ballot. And the only reason why that bid failed was because, for as honor technicality, he like missed a deadline. The state official missed a deadline to like get, you know, forced this person on the ballot, were to make his objections known. And now he's trying some other legal avenue. But definitely, these kinds of, you know, this idea that like the state has the right to sort of, any, on the rare occasions when this ridged, this totally rigged system is challenged in this way. And it's, it is rare. But when it happens, then, you know, the party scrambled to like do all these bizarre legal, you know, acrobatics that you would never imagine could be possible. And they often get pretty far with them because the, the courts are, you know, tend to be pretty sympathetic. I mean, they, they set some limits, the courts do, but, you know, every judge is appointed by a Democrat or a Republican. So, yeah, the, the, the shenanigans that are going on in Nebraska right now are insane. Because like there's one of these minor parties,

1:49:34which is a classic example of the kind of party I was talking about that tends to attract these kinds of activists is like the marijuana legalization party. And of course, immediately the Dan Osborne faction was like, well, we want to make sure that there's no candidate running on that party. So they tried to, they, they, I think that they, I think there was some accusation that that the Osborne forces had, had put a straw candidate into the primary for that, that marijuana party. Now it's clear that the Republicans have, have, were behind these two fake parties that are now on the ballot. And you can see exactly where they're going with this. One of them is called like something like the America work, the working, working people's party. And the other one is like the America first party. So in other words, you know, names that are deliberately designed to try to like draw the kinds of voters who might support Dan Osborne to vote for these fake parties. So the Republicans are putting these on the ballot. But on your question about what is it, would it be possible to disaffiliate, you know, to get the Democratic party off the ballot? Yes, it would be

1:50:34possible. I mean, every state, for every state to like, if you ask the question of an ex, you know, a lawyer or something, they really would be like, gee, I'm going to have to like open, crack the books on that one because nobody's ever like talked about that as a possibility. But I've looked a little bit into this stuff and it's always possible. There's always a mechanism in theory to, to do that. But it would require, usually in most states, it requires that the party machinery, the actual party machinery, which in this country, because the machinery has no power, it's virtually, it's like virtually non-existent and anonymous. Nobody cares who the people who run the parties are because they have no power. But precisely for that reason, I think it could be possible to take for people who want to take over the Democratic party, basically as we say in the, on the far left, at the term for this is liquidationist, to be a Democratic party liquidationist, you know, take over the party machinery for the purpose of just abolishing the Democratic party in that state. And then from then on, the Republicans have to face the reality that they can't run on this, simply on being the

1:51:37opposition to the Democratic party, the woke Democratic party anymore. They're actually going to have to defend their positions, which is very difficult for them to do. The Harlem Globetrotters can no longer play against the Washington generals. They have to play a real basketball team. Yeah. Well, this has been great. I mean, I'm going to post a link to your article so that I really strongly urge everyone to read it. It's great. And it answers this question, which is constantly vexed us. And we'll continue to. So just remember, the reason why there isn't a third party is because the system is set up such that you can't have a third party, but you can have a voluntary organization. And this explains the strategy of the DSA, which is having success, but it does have to start locally and work its way up. And it's not easy. But momentum in politics is so important. And I mean, you do need wins. It's one thing to sort of organize one way or

1:52:41another around ideas and sharing those ideas and doing activism. But you do need wins. You do need that momentum to grow and to kind of coalesce as a movement. And so I anyway, congratulations for your great piece. And I hope everybody has learned from it and this discussion the way I've learned from it. So thank you again so much, Seth. Thank you. I just realized that in a couple of months, it's going to be the 10 year anniversary of that article being published. So yeah, exactly. Time to discussion. Yes. Yes. And thank you to Michael Pollock, friend of the show, for joining us. And all right, thank you again, everybody. Thanks to John. We'll be talking with him soon. And talk to everybody soon. Bye-bye. Take care.