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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Jacobin Show. I'm Jen Pan. I have a very special guest with me today to open the show. That's right. It is Paul Prescott, former State Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, former public school teacher, new employee of Teamsters for Democratic Union, and of course, former co-host of this very show, which actually come to think of it, makes you a not very special guest at all.

So I take back that part. Hi Paul, how are you? Good. I love to be not special. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your new gig over at Teamsters for Democratic Union. What's the Teamster news? What should we be looking out for? Your Labour Paul? Give us the details.

Yeah, so I mean, briefly, Teamsters for Democratic Union is a national caucus in the international brotherhood of Teamsters, you know, essentially just fighting to make the union stronger. This is an interesting moment where we have a new reform slate that is in power at the Teamsters at the national level and TVU was a big part of that coalition.

So, you know, it's an interesting moment. I think there's a lot of opportunities. The big thing coming this next year, August 1, 2023, the contract at UPS expires. UPS is the largest private sector employer in this country. They're over 3,000 Teamsters. I don't think I have to tell listeners, you know, how strategic of a sector this is. So that is, you know, going to be a big priority over this next year.

And I think, you know, a big victory at UPS could really set the tone, not just for workers in this company, but really across the whole country.

Paul, I think when you were on the Jack Finchow, when you were co-hosting, you had already sprinkled sort of these crumbs of watching out for the UPS contract. So everybody, obviously, keep an eye on it. We'll have Paul back to discuss those developments when they, when they roll around.

But Paul, obviously had to have you back today because number one, you have a new article in Jack Finch about the rise and fall of the manufacturing sector and specifically how that connects to the black middle class.

And we're going to get into that in a second, but I also wanted you to open the show with me today because we haven't gotten a chance to sit down and talk about news and politics for a while.

There was an article that Kale actually sent to me last week and I thought of you immediately. It is in 538 and it's titled Why Democratic Appeals to the Working Class are unlikely to work.

All right. So obviously, I know you're going to have thoughts about this. The reason why I wanted to bring you on is not just because you're somebody who studies labor and studies the working class.

But as I think lots of our viewers know you yourself ran for office on a working class platform. And there's, we have an entire video about that on the channel. So if people are interested in the kind of post-mortem of your campaign, definitely go check that out.

You can get into a little bit of that later. But, but I want to dive into this article, right? So obviously, there's been a lot of talk going on about the Democrats kind of losing working class voters.

We've talked about this on the show before. This is basically a decades long process that I think is really starting to intensify. And as a result, you now have not just people on the left, but Democratic mainstream Democratic strategists and commentators.

Also now, starting to say, what can we do about this? The Democratic Party is losing its working class base. This is having a huge toll on elections nationwide. We need to do something to reverse this trend.

So along comes this 538 article. And the author basically argues two pieces, two, two things. And I'll just lay that out quickly for people who haven't seen the article yet.

So she argues that number one, when these strategists and when people basically say that Democrats should really try to make economic bread and butter appeals to working class people to try to win these voters back, this author says, when you say that, you're actually just talking about white working class voters.

So that's the first part of her argument. The second part, and I know you're already getting excited. The second part is that she then says that this is a fool's errand trying to appeal to the white working class is a fool's errand because she doesn't say this as explicitly as like some liberal commentators do, but she basically says the white working class is too racist or too attached to kind of cultural values and, you know, racial resentments to vote for Democrats ever again, basically.

So, so, you know, the gist is that she's saying it's it's not a worthwhile project to try to put forth a strong economic bread and butter platform. She writes in her piece, these messages are unlikely to work on their own because the dividing line in the American electorate is not economics, it's race and culture.

All right, so I have a few thoughts, of course, but I'm going to open it up to you, Paul, because like I said, not only are you somebody who, you know, follows this issue, who knows a lot about labor and about, you know, economics and the working class, but you are a former politician yourself.

So, Paul is the dividing line in America culture and race and is economics to fail.

Well, where to start? I guess I'll start by saying, you know, these appeals are not likely to work. It would be nice if we tried, how about we try them first.

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