Vivek Chibber

“Attention” is a polite word. It’s more like one hit job after another, right?

Vivek Chibber

Yeah, and we should say right at the outset that it doesn’t matter if Graham Platner is a worker or not. What matters is his program, and we’ll come back to this. But it is important for the Left to have clarity on what constitutes the working class, and when we can identify somebody’s class position as being that of a worker or not, because you have to know who to organize. And if you are not clear on what it means to be a worker, that’s going to lead to confused politics.

Now, it’s not at all surprising that Bloomberg has a headline that says, “Nobody knows what a worker is.” What they ought to have said is: “We don’t know what a worker is.” And that, of course, makes perfect sense.

But although it’s a foundational pillar of socialist politics, and you assume people will know what they’re talking about when they talk about workers, I don’t think that’s an accurate assumption. And so I think this is a good occasion for us to take a hard look at that category, and what it means, and then maybe come back to what its implications are for Platner and his campaign, and how we view that.

Vivek Chibber

Well, there’s a commonsensical way of looking at people’s class position, and then there’s the less commonsensical but more accurate — and certainly more in line with socialist strategies and interests — way of understanding what a worker is. The commonsensical way is just to say, “Well, what’s your income?” And here, a worker is identified as somebody who is poor.

Vivek Chibber

In this thinking, workers are people who don’t have a college education and are poor, and nonworkers are people who have a college education and are rich. That’s what you see in polling. That’s what you see in news conversations, in op-ed pieces in the newspaper and things like that.

Vivek Chibber

Yes. That tells you your constituency. If you think your constituency is constituted along economic lines, that’s going to be a class line. And how you identify classes will then determine who you think you should be speaking to and who you think you ought to be organizing.

Vivek Chibber

The biggest issue is that if you define it incorrectly, you’re going to end up going to some of the wrong people, people who you should not be going to for organizing, and you’re going to be missing out on a lot of people who you ought to be directing your attention to and trying to bring into your organizing drive. That’s what’s at stake here.

Now, what’s wrong with this income-based definition of class? We started at the outset by saying it’s not catastrophically wrong. That is to say, if you just went by income, you will find, of course, that the overwhelming majority of workers are poor.

If you just go by income, and you define “poor” as somebody who’s maybe one and a half times the level of the poverty rate, or something like that, you’re going to get a lot of workers. That’s fine.

But then, who do you not get who should be a worker?

Suppose there’s a unionized worker who’s got a great contract, who makes, say, above the median family income in the United States — and you will if you’ve got a good union job. Say they own a home, have cars, and they might even, because they’re a skilled technician, have had at least two years of college. By the income-based definition, this guy isn’t a worker anymore.

So, who are you leaving out? Well, you’re leaving out the backbone of the American labor movement from being workers because they might have a college education, they might have a high income, and they might even own a home, have an asset, right? Imagine what that leaves you in politics.

Similarly, there are a lot of people in the middle class, like owner-operators, shopkeepers, ma-and-pa store owners, who are middle class, but who don’t have a college education. They just have a high school education. Well, now you will have wrongly put them into the working class.

Why do these things matter? What does it matter if you put the store owners into the working class and you put workers into the middle class? It’s that they don’t have the same interests.

What do we mean by interests? It’s that when they want to improve their situation, when they see what kinds of policies will help them, when they see what kinds of measures they should be pursuing, they will have very different views about it.

You take a worker who is college educated: What’s his interest with respect to trade unions? Well, he’s going to like one, he’s going to want one. You take a shop owner who’s only high school educated, and you say they’re a worker: What’s their attitude to unions? They’re very likely going to hate them, because the shop owner might be employing two, three, or four people, and giving substantial raises to those people means, for them, a huge loss of profits and perhaps even the shop.

Why do we worry about that particular issue? Well, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish — building a labor movement, building trade unions.

We define class in terms of how the concept of class that we’re deploying enables us to identify the people who have the same interests as we would like to pursue as well as people who would be opposed to those interests.

In that sense, one’s definition of class is interest driven. “Interest” in that it’s perspective driven. Our perspective is the working class has an interest in social democracy, in trade unionism, in socialism. So we want to find the people out there who align with those interests.

And the fact of the matter is, if you deploy a concept of workers that is not an income-based one, it much more accurately lands on those people in the occupational labor force who will align with our long-term strategy than an income-based one. And that’s why you do it.

Vivek Chibber

What fundamentally makes somebody a worker is basically two things. The foundational one is that they have to work for someone else for a living. Notice, not that they choose to work for someone else, but that they have to. If Kim Kardashian chooses to take a job at McDonald’s it won’t make her a worker — because she could quit tomorrow and it wouldn’t harm her. It isn’t her main source of income.

Typically you’ll call this kind of work “wage labor,” but we should be careful. Salaried people also work for someone else, and you don’t want to leave all of them out. Some members of what we would call the professional class, certain members of the highly skilled working class, get a salary instead of a wage.

Why not rule out salaried workers? Well, what is a salary? It’s just a kind of wage. Instead of paying you by the hour, you are paid by the month. It’s still time-based. The difference between a salary and a wage is, if somebody is given a salary, they can be told, “We’re giving you this money for a month, and you will, in that month, work an undefined number of hours.” But it’s still time-based, which is the essence of a wage. So that’s the number one quality. You work for someone else, most likely for a wage, but in some cases also for a salary.

But here’s the second thing: Workers are not only lacking means of production, they are people who work for a boss. They are people who, in addition to working for a wage or salary, have little or no power in the workplace.

Managers get a salary. Well, why aren’t managers considered workers? Because the salary that they get performs a certain function, and that function is simply the same function that the owner performs, which is directing other people’s labor.

The way you should think about it is this:

Imagine a capitalist and a worker. The worker works for a wage. The capitalist gets the profits. In order to get the worker to perform his work, the capitalist also has to exercise authority over him — supervise him, manage him, make sure that the worker is doing the work at the pace and at the quality the capitalist needs. There’s no ambiguity there over who is in what class. But now suppose that the capitalist expands his operations so he doesn’t just have three, four, five people, but one hundred people working under him. Now he has to supervise them. He has to manage them. But the work it takes on his part to supervise and manage these hundred people, so that they’re actually doing the work at the right level, is really beyond his ability. So what does he do? He hires managers, and he has to pay those managers.

Now look at what’s happening here. On paper, he’s hired people called managers, so they look like workers . . . 

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. But what he’s done is he’s simply externalized or outsourced a part of his own functions.

A manager is somebody who looks like a worker, but he’s actually an extension of some of the functions of a capitalist. What’s been outsourced? The authority.

Vivek Chibber

Right. Now look at the workers who he’s managing. They share with the manager one characteristic: They all get paid by the capitalist.

Vivek Chibber

Why don’t we say they’re all part of the working class? Because the managers make their money by aiding and abetting the exploitation of the worker, and that’s what makes them, therefore, not a worker.

Now, they’re not exactly capitalists either, because they can be fired. They are somewhere in the middle, and that’s why most managers are considered middle class. They have one attribute of each of the two classes. Like the worker, they’re paid by the capitalist. But unlike the worker, they are in the function of managing the exploitation of other workers.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. So for a lot of managers, how do they get their money? They get a salary, but their payment is tied to the company’s profits. It’s in their direct interest to help the owners or the CEOs increase the profitability of the firm, which, more often than not, will come at the expense of the well-being of the workers who are underneath them.

Therefore, simply saying that you have to work for someone else is an insufficient criterion for saying that somebody is a worker. You need two criteria: You work for somebody else, and you don’t have the power of management and supervision that the capitalist has.

If you do have that power of management and supervision, odds are you are somewhere in the middle, and that’s why there’s a third class in capitalism that we call the middle class. Because it has one element of each of the two classes. Like workers, it doesn’t own the means of production. It has to work for somebody else. But like capitalists, it has power over workers, and therefore shares some of its interests with capital.

Vivek Chibber

The middle class, in Marxian terms, is a class that has an attribute of the other two classes without being exclusively in either of them. So we just talked about these managers. Like workers, they have to work for someone else. But like capitalists, they aid in the supervision and exploitation of workers.

The other element of the middle class is what you call an owner-operator. Now, by an “owner-operator,” what do we mean? You own your own means of production. That’s like a capitalist. Capitalists own the means of production.

Vivek Chibber

But you differ from capitalists in one very important respect. A capitalist owns the means of production but hires in other people’s labor. That’s why we say he’s an exploiter, right? It means his income comes from the labor of other people.

An owner-operator is somebody who owns the means of production but operates them himself. He’s not hiring in anybody. And, as you said, he’s paying himself. So the managerial class and owner-operators are different in many respects. A manager is getting paid by a capitalist. A shop owner is not getting paid by anyone. But they are alike in one important respect. They are not workers. Neither of them is a worker per se, but nor are they capitalists per se. They have elements of both.

The modern middle class is composed of people like managers or people who work for capitalists but aid in the exploitation process, or people who own their own means of production, operated by themselves. This can be hairdressers, shopkeepers, plumbers, janitors. These are all what we call owner-operators.

And in agrarian society, you call them middle peasants. Middle peasants are also peasants who own their land but who don’t hire in labor. Technically speaking, a small farmer, a small peasant, and a shopkeeper belong in the same class. They’re all owner-operators.

The working class, therefore, is those people who work for a wage or a salary, but who have little or no supervisory authority over other workers.

Vivek Chibber

If you looked at the purest, narrowest definition of the working class, people who work without any supervisory authority whatsoever, there are about 40 to 45 percent of the occupational labor force that we would call workers. But that’s excessively narrow. There are also workers who work for a firm, who have some degree of autonomy, who have some degree of skills, and who might even be the lowest level of supervisor.

Now let me be clear as to what that means. Managers supervise, but not all supervisors are managers. Sometimes what employers do is they’ll give a worker some degree of supervisory authority on a temporary basis over other workers. This doesn’t remove them from doing the grunt work, from doing the shop-floor work, but they’re given some degree of supervision to try to divide the people on the shop floor and to try to save on the cost of hiring in new managers. But they’re really just exalted workers.

Excluding this population from the working class makes you miss out on a lot of people simply because they have some degree of freedom. They might have some small supervisory power, but they’re still workers. And traditionally, the labor movement never saw them as managers. They always brought in these temporary supervisors. They always brought in more skilled workers. They always brought in workers with some degree of autonomy.

Now if you include them within this definition of the working class, it takes it to about 65 to 68 percent of the labor force, which is in line with our intuitions that the working class is the majority.

So if we define workers this way — people who don’t have consistent managerial authority over other people and who work for a wage — what we can say is that the working class constitutes close to two-thirds of the labor force now. Some of them are going to be high-skilled. Some of them are going to be low-skilled. A lot of them are unionized. A lot of them are not. And now notice, some of them are going to have really good, high incomes, such as people who work as engineers, people who work in aeronautics, and union workers in the auto industry.

Vivek Chibber

I think that’s a huge mistake. If you looked at just blue-collar workers as the working class, you would not even have a majority of the labor force in the United States. But Marxists have never said that.

So you might find these opinions among the online left, but it’s illiterate to say that. And there’s nothing in the history of Marxism that would lead you to believe that the only people who count as workers for Marxists, or even for the broader socialist movement — which has had many ideological currents in it — they never whittled down the working class to just the blue-collar workers. Because by the definition I’ve just given, by that definition alone, the class extends outside the blue-collar workforce into more skilled workers, into workers with a fair amount of autonomy from supervision, which means that it’s got to be blue-collar plus.

And what’s the plus? We’ve given the criteria. You work for somebody else and you don’t have managerial authority over other people. That means you include very highly skilled workers, very highly paid workers, and workers with a salary instead of a wage.

That doesn’t mean that anybody with a salary who’s working for somebody else is a worker. There are two ways to look at a salary, right? One is that you’re getting a salary, but you’re pretty much a gig worker, meaning you’re paid by the month, you’re taking a job for, say, a year,, but that’s pretty much it. You don’t have any chances to advance up a ladder of promotions.

But suppose you start working at a firm. You might be even getting a wage. You might be getting a salary. But it’s the first step in what you call a career ladder. So if you just play by the rules, you’re going to work for eight or ten years, you start at the lowest level, like at a financial firm, you work your way up the promotion ladder, and then you’ll end up at some kind of managerial position. That person, you could make an argument, is starting out as a worker. But because they also know that they won’t always be a worker, they have an interest in not rocking the boat.

Vivek Chibber

They will ascend out of the working class, not into the bourgeoisie but into what’s called a “respectable middle-class position.”

When they look at what’s in their interest, what’s good for them, what’s desirable for them, there are elements of both. While they’re at the bottom level of the hierarchy, they might sympathize with the workers in their firm, the grunts, and even the janitors, in that they think a solid union in that firm might be in their interest.

But they also know that this might actually put them at the bottom of the promotion hierarchy because they made the wrong decisions. And now they have an interest in siding with management. That’s the essence of a middle-class person. The middle-class person is somebody who can get pulled in either direction because they have elements of both classes.

There’s a degree of complexity even in the issue of salaries. When we say somebody with a salary can be a worker, it’s with the proviso that the salary should not be the first step in a career ladder. If you’re on a career ladder that’s going to take you up the authority chain, to where you actually have the authority that’s delegated to aid and abet in the exploitation process, you won’t have the same interest as a worker. You can think of them as being upwardly mobile workers who you have to catch while they’re still on your side, but they won’t be for long.

So there is a degree of fluidity in reality, but that fluidity should not be in your definition of the class. Notice what I’ve said. The definition of the class stays the same. What you’re seeing is that there are certain positions or locations inside the class structure that have a dynamic quality to them. But it doesn’t mean that the definition itself is wrong. The definition actually enables you to make sense of certain dynamic processes inside the class structure that otherwise would be nonsensical.

Vivek Chibber

It is a classic bourgeois class structure. So, what do Marxists think capitalism is? Again, out there, there is this exceedingly simple and completely wrongheaded view that Marxists predict a two-class structure of capitalists and workers. In a previous episode, I had said there are zero grounds for thinking that Karl Marx, Marxists, or Marxism ever predicted this. Zero. But people somehow insist on it, largely because they have, I think, bought into certain Cold-War caricatures of what Marxism was. And it’s ironic that the contemporary left is kind of giving lip service to these Cold-War caricatures.

The classic Marxist account of capitalism is that it has three classes: a working class, a bourgeoisie, and a middle class. And the middle class is a class that has elements of both classes but doesn’t exhaustively constitute either one of them. That’s the three-class structure.

Marxists also have predicted that the working class will always be in the majority. Is that true today in the United States? Absolutely. As I said, the working class is anywhere from about 65 to 68 percent of the labor force.

The reason I give a range rather than a precise number is that there are legitimate debates within Marxism and within class theory more generally about how you measure and operationalize these concepts. That’s a legitimate debate. But interestingly, regardless of how you operationalize the concepts, researchers keep coming up with the same basic numbers. And there’s now more than ten or a dozen such characterizations. And they always come up with the same numbers. Somewhere around two-thirds of the population is working class. Somewhere around 3 percent of the population is capitalist. And then anywhere from a quarter to a third are middle-class people.

That’s the class structure. And that means that the job of socialists is to go out and organize that two-thirds, make that the backbone of your movement and figure out a way of bringing in enough elements of the middle class so that you can have a viable, large coalition pushing for a social democratic or a socialist program.

And let me be clear: You’re not ever going to get a successful political movement for social democracy by exclusively focusing on the working class, even if you define it generously like I have. You will have to bring in elements of the middle class. And you’re going to have to do it by figuring out what their material interests are so that they become a durable ally in your movement. That’s the conceptual task. The political task then is to come up with a program that actually attracts them.

Vivek Chibber

Political competition did cleave to class lines for a long time. If you look at the data on who voted for what parties from the onset of modern democracy, which is the early twentieth century, all the way into the 1980s and ’90s, it’s amazing. The best predictor of how anybody would vote in the capitalist world — by which I mean Europe, the antipodes, and North America, even in the United States from about 1925 to 1985 — was their class position.

Now, the voting data doesn’t always give you their class position in strictly Marxian terms. So you have to use proxies. And that’s why I said it’s important to realize that the income and education-based proxies are imperfect, but they’re not crazy. So if you look at them, the best predictor was class.

Blue-collar workers, non-college-educated people, the people of low incomes, all these things overlap tremendously. Who did they vote for from the 1930s to the 1980s? Always labor parties, social democratic parties, always. The fluidity was in the middle class. Sometimes elements of it would vote one way, sometimes the other. If you looked at capitalists, who did they vote for? They always voted for conservative and right-wing parties. That’s still true today.

Vivek Chibber

There are the Friedrich Engelses of the world. There are capitalists who vote the other way, but they’re crazy. They’re not representative of anything. And this way of analyzing things where you come up with one example and you say, “What about this guy over here?,” it’s just infantile. What you have to look at is what is generally true. Otherwise you couldn’t do any kind of social analysis or social theory at all.

So the first point is, if you just look at the expanse of the twentieth century, if you were a worker, you voted socialist, you voted social democrat, you voted labor. That’s how it was.

But what you’re really asking is, why in the recent past does political competition not cleave to the class structure? Now, once we put it that way, it means that something happened in the past thirty to thirty-five years that loosened the connection between working-class voters and the parties that they were traditionally aligned with.

Vivek Chibber

It was the right-wing turn of these parties themselves and their capture by the professional classes and by elites.

Vivek Chibber

Absolutely. Labor parties and social democratic parties everywhere have been hemorrhaging working-class votes. And they have become the parties of the middle classes and especially the college-educated wing. Remember, being college educated doesn’t make you middle class. You overlap with the middle class a lot. But when we look at who these parties are now getting their support from, it’s — of course, a lot of workers still vote for them.

And let me just make one point. When you’re two thirds of the population, every party is going to get some working-class vote. So of course if you look at the data, you can say, “Ah, look, these erstwhile social democratic parties still get a lot of working-class votes.” And that’s true. They still get a lot. And that’s good. Thank God. Otherwise, we’d have to start from scratch.

You can still rescue some of these parties by urging them to go back to their roots and recapture that vote, some of which has gone to, as you said, right-wing parties, and some of it is just people having dropped out. You can still get them back. If it was zero, you would now have to move mountains to get things going.

So, they still get working-class votes. But if you look at the most dynamic gains that they’ve made over the past forty years, it’s in the middle class. That’s what they’re getting. And that’s what explains their obsession with culture wars, their denigration of workers, and their obsession with a very narrow, elite version of race and gender politics.

As these social democratic parties moved to the right, they became the parties that the workers saw literally taking things away from them. Not fighting for them, but taking things away from them and then telling them to shut up and eat their gruel.

Vivek Chibber

Not only is there clear data showing that the Democrats lost working-class votes after NAFTA, there’s also a lot of material showing they knew they would hemorrhage working-class votes, and they did it anyway. And that’s the Chuck Schumer principle, which is, “If we lose those votes, we’ll gain votes in the suburbs.” And they were perfectly fine with that.

That’s why the Democrats can never be a left-wing party, because a left-wing party is not in the business of aggregating votes. It’s in the business of aggregating working-class votes.

Vivek Chibber

If a politician originated in the working class, grew up in those conditions, and is running for office, everything else being equal, they’re going to be preferable to somebody who grew up as a trust-fund baby, somebody who went to elite colleges and only hangs out in country clubs. Everything else being equal, because their experiences are different, their understanding of the world will have been influenced by those experiences, and their loyalties will also therefore tend to be different.

That’s only with everything else being equal. Everything else is never equal. Suppose we really believed that what makes somebody a good working-class politician is that they were born a worker. Well, what would be our political program? It would just be to get more poor people elected into office. And that’s a kind of weird identity politics.

Vivek Chibber

There’s a slight difference. Not a huge one, but a slight one. When you say, “Let’s get a woman into office” and “Let’s get a black person into office,” you haven’t said a single thing about their class position. When you say “Let’s get workers into office,” you’re talking directly about their class position. So, let’s call this a kind of class-identity politics.

If you had to choose, that class-identity politics is still going to be better than the race or gender one, because at least they know what it means to be poor, as opposed to a woman or a black person who went to an Ivy League institution, and all they’ve ever experienced is a glass ceiling or microaggressions. That’s all they know. And that’s their vision of justice, removing a glass ceiling. This is not true for people who were born into poverty.

That’s a small difference. It cannot be the anchor of your politics. The anchor of your politics is this: We’ve seen from experience that regardless of where a person is born, regardless of their intentions, once they get into office, they’re subject to all sorts of pressures. The pressures that come from the wealthy, from the state itself being beholden to profitability, to investment, etc. And regardless of this person’s origins, they’re going to have to cater to the interests and the preferences of the capitalist class.

How do you become a true representative of workers? Two ways.

One is that you have to express policy preferences and commitments that are in line with what workers want. Well, how are you going to know that? It’ll help if you were born a worker, sure. You have some idea of what workers want. You were born a worker. But it’s very, very imperfect.

The best way to do it is that you have a very deep anchor inside working-class communities. Not in order to poll them the way consultants do. Or even to hold these ridiculous town halls where you are asking them to shout out what they think. Rather, you are in daily connection with them through some kind of organizational link. Parties are the best way to do that.

You organize them at the grassroots. They have regular meetings. Through those meetings, they themselves throw up candidates. Those candidates now help articulate a program based on their meetings. And that program is what you are now committed to as a politician.

The second thing that makes you a working-class candidate is not only knowing what they want but also in some way being bound by what they want. And that’s what parties give you. Parties give you an institutional mechanism to hold candidates accountable.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah, because they are going to buck the agenda. That’s just a fact. That’s what it means to be in a bourgeois state. There are too many pressures on you.

Vivek Chibber

He’s extraordinary. And if your political strategy is “let’s find incorruptible human beings,” what you’re saying is that you are starting a church, not a party. Because you’re saying we want to find saints.

Vivek Chibber

It’s wonderful that Sanders exists. Perhaps Zohran Mamdani will also turn out to be an incorruptible human being. And that’s wonderful. But that cannot be a political strategy.

There’s one final element I’ll add. You asked what makes somebody a working-class candidate, right? I said there are these two elements: You have to be able to articulate a program, and then you also have to have the program come from an organization that holds you accountable.

That combination will atrophy and degenerate unless the party is a mobilized party that can actually get people moving on the ground in order to activate them, and to really put some kind of energy into the political sphere. Some of it will come from putting fear in the hearts of employers so that they give concessions. Some of it will come from just generating a culture of togetherness, of decency, of mutual respect in society as a whole. Why? Because it’s not enough to articulate a program. You actually have to win.

If you do win real gains, if you make actual improvements in people’s lives instead of fiddling around with words, then people stick with you. Otherwise, they see it’s just a talking shop and they get the hell out of there and vote for the other party, right?

Why for those eighty years did the workers keep voting for social democratic parties? That was the eighty years in which you saw for the first time, not just steady gains, but explosive gains in their lives. Workers for the first time saw that they could afford to buy houses; they could have pensions and unemployment insurance; they were given national health care; and they knew all of this came from these parties. They stuck with them through thick and thin.

But if you have these parties like we have today, where you have all this social-justice virtue signaling and shoving austerity down your throats at the same time, what do you expect will happen?

So if the Platners of the world end up being linked to and help build actual parties, now you’ve got a durable case for generating working-class candidates who will actually fight for the class. But the state we’re in right now is this: We are constantly looking for incorruptible and decent people. And we’re mostly disappointed, because such people rarely exist. When you find such people, you defend them.

Vivek Chibber

The stuff that’s being slung at Platner is crazy. I think Sanders’s response has been exactly right: The stuff that’s being said about him is between him and his family. They’re working it out. Nothing in his public performance or his public statements is like that.

Vivek Chibber

Let me put it this way: If people found all kinds of dirt on Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg, the New York Times would be contemptuous of anybody trying to hold it against them.

Vivek Chibber

It’s not that they want to stop Trump. It’s that they want to stop Trump in the right sort of way. And what the Democrats in 2016 and 2020 showed you is that they were less worried about Trump than they were worried about Sanders. And they were more willing to lose to Trump than win with Sanders. That is not quite so bad today, but it’s still their instinct.

The New York Times is the epicenter of this sort of thinking. We shouldn’t be surprised at all. Calling them journalists is disgraceful. There are very few journalists who actually work there. And the people who do their op-eds are even worse. This is their function in life, is to be the gatekeepers against any kind of left. Not just the socialist left, they’re contemptuous of any kind of social democratic left. This is their job in life. So it’s clear why they are going after Platner.

Why is there a wider resonance of this? Well, I don’t know how wide that resonance is. But we should say this: The United States is a deeply depoliticized culture in which people constantly confuse personal morality with public morality.

There will hopefully come a point, if things get going again, where people come back to understanding that there’s a difference between these two things. If you held the contemporary standards of personal morality to every major political figure who we admire today, across the twentieth century and before, nobody would pass muster.

At some point, hopefully, people will understand that the issue is not electing perfect people. It’s electing good candidates. And their personal life is their business, short of criminal acts for which we have a legal system. Why the Times, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg are all going after him is pretty clear. This is their job. This is why they exist.

Vivek Chibber

It’s what we keep talking about in every episode. There’s no shortcut to this. You build it by bringing together working people into viable organizations — not just random political activists, working people — and then figuring out ways to actually show them that politics matters. It’s not just performance. It’s not just grandstanding. It’s not virtue signaling. It’s not figuring out the right language to relate to each other. It’s about winning things for them.

And when you do that, you get two things. They become politically activated, and they become the energized part of your political organization. And now you’re less dependent on finding perfect human beings.

Right now we’re still at the stage where we look for the right candidate who will do the right things. You have to assume most candidates won’t, and you have to come up with mechanisms that will A) try to hold them accountable, and B) will create more such candidates that you can replace them with in the event that they fail.