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Hey, everybody. Welcome once again to The Weekly Show. My name is Jon Stewart. Once again, joined by our top-notch A-list, elite. I'm going through the thesaurus right now. Brittany Mamedevik and Lauren Walker, producer, team extraordinaire. I can't even remember the last time we talked. I don't know. I think Eisenhower was President at that time. Things are moving quickly. Kamala Harris is now a fraytrain. Did you see any of the footage of the rally in Atlanta that she held?

Yeah, I met her stallion.

Shit. It's the one thing I think that would... I almost think more than any policy or any discrepancy on economics or anything else, the thing that would bother Donald Trump the most is a giant arena filled with enthusiastic supporters having a party. Fun. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I almost think he'd be like, What? Popularity is my thing. I think he doesn't even give a shit about the election anymore. He just wants to be like, My crowd was bigger.

Kamala is getting the good music.

Come on. I mean, they're pulling up people. I don't even know what they... Megan Thee stallion and Quavo is coming on stage, and Trump's backstage with Kid Rock and half of big and rich. Just like, Wow, what are we doing now? But yeah, it's a totally different thing. How did the people feel about last week? Everybody's good, the viewers, the listeners. One thing that did happen this week, John, that we wanted to ask you about was you were back down in DC on Friday with some K-2 veteran stuff. Yes. What's going on? Well, the Pact Act, for those who don't know, the Pact Act changed for veterans, not just of Global War on Terror, but Vietnam and all that. It changed the presumptions for toxic exposures for a lot of veterans, and it does a great job. And they really are working hard to implement it, and they've done a lot of great work. The Biden administration, Secretary McDonald, the VA, they really have worked hard. There are loopholes within it. One particular one is this base K-2, which was the tip of the spear of the global war on terror in 2001. It was this There's this old Soviet base in Uzbekistan that had housed chemical weapons.

There was talk that it was a traffic station for yellow cake smuggling. There's all kinds of shit there. So when the troops first landed, they found radiation levels in the soil 44,000 times higher than what it should be. They found a chemical contamination site. They found PFAS and dioxins, all the general shit that's like this toxic goo. But K2 was a unicorn of toxicity. It was a Superfunds, Superfund site. Almost immediately, people were nauseous, vomiting. That started right away. And then the health problems snowballed and persisted. A lot of them were helped by PACT Act, but there are a few with these what are considered multi-symptom, weird neurological It's less easy to categorize. Much harder to categorize. We went down to DC because the VA secretary has the statutory authority to, with the stroke of a pen, say, along with PACT Act, which only covers certain cancers and certain pulmonary conditions. We will presume your exposure to there's a radiation statute within VA. And there is also, because of gulf-four syndrome, a multi-symptom statute that they could also enact, and it would acknowledge that they had been exposed to those things. I think the holdup is DOD doesn't want to acknowledge that they were exposed to yellow cake.

Dod keeps wanting to say that it's depleted uranium, or they don't want to acknowledge multi-symptom. I think that's where the rub is.

That was the original rub, too, right? Not wanting to recognize.

By the way, always the rub. Like DOD I'm not sure DOD has acknowledged Agent Orange yet. Dod is always like, What? It was a soda fountain. They were exposed to vanilla extract. It was nothing. So all that stuff is, look, those guys are the K2 Group, Stronghold Foundation. Mark Jackson has been on top of this doing that, Matt Epperling. These guys have been working on it for years. We've been trying to get them in to get this resolved. We thought we had it. We went down. They were called back down to DC for a meeting with the secretary. And what he said was, We've looked into it. I do have the authority, but I haven't decided yet whether or not I'm going to use it. I think what the VA secretary said, Well, there may be more data that's coming along. And we're like, It's 23 years. Don't make this group victims of the lack of data that you will never have. So you can imagine everybody walked out of the meeting pretty crestfallen. And now you can't give up. So we keep on. I'm trying to get that group into there is a White House Veterans Task Force, trying to get them in with that group.

Look, I always remained frustrated but hopeful. And the group that's working on it, they're so dedicated and wonderful. And there's this fellow, nick Nichols, who was there and who did the testing. It was his whistleblower testimony, I think a year and a half ago, that reopened all this. Wow. I mean, we've been lucky. The AP has been on it. A reporter named Katherine Harrodge, who did four years of reporting at CBS, and she's been remarkable in terms of dedication to it, but also with getting the reports from DOD. I mean, these foia reports from DOD show that Department of Defense knew that there was enriched uranium there. If you look at the surveillance photos, which Katherine had gotten a hold of, it says there's a giant sign that says, Danger, Radiation. And they had to rope it off. Danger, chemical weapons, and they had to rope it off. The problem was they had Earthmovers that were moving all of that soil into burms that they were all sleeping on. So they've all been exposed to radon coming up through the ground and all kinds of other shit. And they have the pictures. But yet more data is coming, John.

And they're looking for data. A lot of these folks, unfortunately, have already died, and their families are left without the DIC benefits that come through VA. So any support that we can give to the K-2 folks, call your... I don't know who to call. Congress people, white House, VA Secretary, whatever you need to do, let's get it done. But thank you for asking about that because it's- Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's been wild to watch, but we're getting there. But meanwhile, we've got two great guests that are going to talk about this pivot to economic populism that somehow the Republicans have taken on, even though they forgot to tell their judges and their think tanks and their legislators and everybody else. So let's get to them. And so we welcome our guests for this discussion. Stephen Greenhouse, Labor and Workplace Reporter at the New York Times for 19 years, Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, author of the book Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past President and Future of American Labor, and Heather Cox-Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Guys, thank you, first of all, so much for joining us.

There's so much to talk about. The Republicans, not He is nominated as their vice President, a populist hero. He has a beard and a mama. So clearly, he is for the working man. And he has said, I'm going to read you a quick quote, We're done, ladies and gentlemen. Catering the Wall Street will commit to the working man. That was the Republicans at their convention. I want to ask you, first, Stephen, and then we'll go to Heather. Have the Republicans told their judges or legislatures or think tanks of this new switch to economic populism? Because it doesn't seem that the policies and court decisions that have been rendered these past, I'm going to go with 50 years, have gone along with the populist route. So, Steven, what are your thoughts?

First, great to be here, John. So Donald Trump and JD Vents talk a good ball game. They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. Republican Party doesn't walk the walk. The judges they've appointed to the Supreme Court and other courts are quite anti-worker, very anti-union. And the Supreme Court, there's a recent study saying that the three Trump appointments to the Supreme Court are the most pro-business justices over the last century of 57 judges surveyed. And Donald Trump- When we say pro-business, we would assume the counter factual, which is anti-labor. Yes, anti-labor. There was this crazy It's an anti-decision where Amazon workers have to wait 15, 20, 25 minutes at the end of their shift to have their bags checked to see whether they've taken anything improperly. The Supreme Court ruled that they're not to be paid for that 15, 20, 25 minutes. That's not part of their workday, which I think is just one of many anti-worker decisions that comes out of Supreme Court.

At Amazon, you got that half hour cool off period where they're scanning you at the airport, like a TSA person, but you're If you're not paid for that, you just have to wait till they discover. That's it.

Some of the warehouses where the contractor, subcontractors play that game. Donald Trump says, I'm for the nation's forgotten men and women, but he didn't raise a finger to increase the minimum wage. He says he's all for coal miners, but his administration actually weakened standards for safety. Keeping them safe. He said, I'm fighting hard for coal miners, yet the number of coal mining jobs dropped by 25% when he was President. He to kill Obamacare, which would be a major, major drag for many working families, throw them off of health coverage, raise prices.

The rhetoric is not matching the reality. Heather, what's your feeling about this disconnect?

Well, I would love to talk about what populism actually means. But one of the things that I would love to hear Steven talk about is the links between those mom and pop organizations in Silicon Valley and JD Vance, because that seems to me to be flying largely under the radar in a lot of places. It's very hard to call yourself a populist when your major backer is, well, two major backers are both billionaires.

Right. Heather, you're very kind to ask me.

Now we're on Heather's podcast. What the hell happened here?

I got to be honest. It's so much more interesting to hear what other people have to say than it is to hear what I have. No, Heather. Go ahead, Steven.

He wrote this supposedly populist book, also popular, Hillbilly Elegy, where he really I hate to say, craps on the working class saying, The reason you haven't gone to Yale law school like me, the reason you're not billionaires like my friend Peter Thiel, is that you're lazy, you're shiftless. It's really ugly in terms of showing so little solidarity for the people he grew up with. So as you said, Heather, Van says, I'm a friend of workers, yet he's backed by billionaires. Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal. Now all these cryptocurrency billionaires are backing Vance. Donald Trump says he's a friend of the working man, and yes, he's doing everything he can to kiss the behind of Elon Musk, and Musk will contribute $45 million a month, supposedly over $100 million.

He says that's not true. But I get it. But look, in politics, everybody's got their billionaires. It's not like the Republicans are the only one that are backed by billionaires. I think I'm more interested in this idea of, well, what are the policies? What are the things? Everybody is talking about Project 2025, and what that's going to mean to the country, and what are the things that the Republicans might institute. I want to talk about Project 1980. 1980 to 1984. Reagan comes in. We had a labor economy. Reagan came in and deregulate regulated, Wall Street and many of the other corporate entities. And we have since shifted to an investment economy. The labor economy is now an investment economy. And people that invested, people that are in finance, people that are in equities, did really well over these last 50 years, but labor has been left behind. So I want to ask Heather, that switchover of the Republican Party from more labor with the Democrats to a more investment economy. And Trump has vowed to continue that. He wants to cut corporate tax rates to 15 % from 20 %. He had already cut it.

So what direction are we going in here, Heather?

Well, there's a couple of really interesting different questions in all this. And one of them is, of course, yes, it was very deliberate under the Reagan administration to switch away from the economy that had propped up the ability of people who were starting out or ordinary Americans to work hard and to prosper and have a decent standard of living. To switch from that to the idea that if you put all the money at the top of the economy, what you would get is better. They call it supply-side economics. One of the things that is really dramatic about that is, of course, it transferred about 50 to 53 trillion dollars from the bottom 90 % to the top about one-tenth of one %. So it was pretty clear that that was never really intended to help individuals. But that's actually something a little different, I think, than both labor, which is what Steven does so well, and populism, which is something a little bit different in the sense that if you have labor having a seat at the table, what you have is everybody having a stake in the political economy that is going shape the country.

But what populism does, I think, and of course, I'm a specialist only in the United States, but in the United States, populism seems to me to be the moment when a number of people recognize, usually for economic reasons, that they are not being served in any way by the leading political classes. When that happens, they begin to talk about what they would like to see in American society. What I think is so interesting when you bring up the 1980s is that if you have this disaffected group of people, how do you know which way they're going to jump? That is, in the 1890s, they jumped in part to anti-Semitism, but also in part to economic reform. I think one of the things that's really important about the 1980s and the period since then is the control of the rhetoric and the language around which politicians steer that populist disaffection. And what the Republicans have done so enormously effectively is to say, Hey, you might have a problem, but it's not us rich guys. It's the minority taking your job.

Undocumented immigrants coming in here taking your job. That's really fascinating. All right, we'll be right back. This show is supported by ZipRecruiter. If you're hiring for new roles, have you wondered how to find top talent before the competition gets to them? Ziprecruiter. And it's summertime, man. That's seasonal work. You're looking for your lifeguards, your ice cream parlor, your mosquito swatters. I don't know if that's an actual job, but if it was, maybe only ZipRecruiter could find those types of people. You can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter. Com/zipweekly. Visit ziprecruiter. Com/zipweekly. Set up your profile for free. You're going to have instant access to ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology, which identifies the top talent. Check out ZipRecruiter's high-speed hiring tools. See why four out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now, ziprecruiter. Com/zipweekly. Again, that's ziprecruiter. Com/zipweekly. Build your business with ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Let's get back into it. You're suggesting that the difficulty here, and Steven will get to you in terms of separating populism from economic populism is that it seems like the lever of populism is oftentimes nationalism.

This fervor of, all right, we're going to draw the wagons in America first. You had that in the 1920s as well, where you look for scapegoats that allow maybe the ruling class to avoid any suspicion, find a scapegoat at the lower end of the table, put all the problems on them, and still get away with it. So, Stephen, are we making a mistake when we talk about populism to not focus on really economic populism? And how do we separate what is best for workers? Because even when you think about unionizing, you also have to recognize unions can become corrupt, too, and sometimes they can be anti-workers. So how do we draw those distinctions, Stephen?

Great question, John. So Heather put very well what populism is. And generally, why do American What do American families want? They want stability in their lives. If they get laid off, God forbid, they want a good safety net. They want to be able to afford housing, they want to be able to afford to send their kids to college, they want work-family balance so they're not working 80 hours a week. One of the crazy things about the United States is we are the only wealthy country in the world that doesn't have laws guaranteeing every worker paid family and medical leave. So if some people, if they give birth, they don't get six weeks or 10 weeks of paid leave. So Trump says, I'm a great populist. I'm a friend of the worker. I hear your grievances. But he doesn't deliver the things that will really help workers or help American families. He says, blame the immigrants. He bashes the Chinese. He bashes elitists like you, Heather, and me. And it makes people feel good like, Oh, I like that. I could blame all my problems on those bad guys, the Chinese, the immigrants. But it's really doing nothing to help workers.

It ticks me off that Trump poses as a friend of workers. I remember when he was running for President in 2016, he would tell auto workers in Michigan and Ohio, Don't worry, if I'm elected, no plants will close on my watch. Then this huge General Motors plant closed in Lordstown in 2019 when he was President on his watch. What does he do? He doesn't blame General Motors. He blames the United Order Workers Union and Dave Green, the President of the Local, who fought his behind off to try to save the plant. So part of that shows that Trump is very anti-union. Time and again, he kicks unions.

Well, not just kicks unions. I mean, he lowers the amount of money that you need to earn to get overtime so that workers have a tougher time getting overtime. He strips the National Labor Relations Board. I mean, there are so many different different things that he's done. But it's clearly a very effective message to the working class, I think to Heather's point, where you combine this Nationalist zeal, this protectionist zeal. And I want to ask you, Heather, because when you think about... So when he goes into tariff mode and protection mode, and Mexico is stealing our factories, and China is stealing our IP, and all these different things, but they never address the This idea of right to work states. So this idea that Mexico is to the United States as Texas is to New York. New York has a lot more worker protections in line. It's a lot easier to form unions. It has a lot more of those safety nets in place for people. Why isn't right to work seen as anti-worker? Because if you look at the data, I think if you work the same job in a right to work state, you earn three to three and a half % less than a worker would in a state that's not right to work.

Well, the right to work states really took off in the 1950s and the 1960s, but that has a much longer history in the country of the idea that, by God, you can do it all on your own. Any government intervention in the way that you interact with your workplace is socialism. That actually comes in the United States from the 1870s, not from after the Bolshev revolution in 1917.

Really? Why so early in the 1870s? I would have thought that would be a 1917 post-revolution in Russia.

Everybody thinks that. But you know what? It's really cool, actually. What happens is that after the Civil War, when the United States, under the Republicans for the first time had federal taxation. Taxes are very much in the news in a way that they had not been before. You also get first a government that is protecting Black rights in the American South, and then the right of Black men to vote in the American South. At the same time, you get- So this is pre-Reconstruction Reconstruction, Jim Crow. This is pre- Well, middle of Reconstruction. In 1870, in 1868, you get the 14th Amendment saying, You can't mess with people based on race. In 1870, you get the 15th Amendment saying, Black men can vote. You also, in 1870, get the establishment of the Department of Justice, which goes after the KKK. It goes after people who are attacking their Black neighbors based on issues of race. In 1871, white Southerners, white unreconstructed Southerners, there are a number of white Southerners who are like, We just want to get rid of the rich guys. This is cool with us. But the unreconstructed ones say, Hey, we never had a problem with race.

That was never an issue. Really? Same people, by the way. But they say, This was never a problem. What we don't want is these poor, uneducated people voting because the poor, uneducated black men will vote for leaders. At this point, they weren't really concerned about black people sitting in legislatures, although that's going to come by the early 1870s. They're going to use their political power to get leaders elected who are going to vote for things like roads and schools and hospitals. The only way you can pay for that is through taxes. Who has all the money in the American South? It's white guys. You can see this thread through American history. Think of the way that the Republicans turned against Brown versus Board of Education and Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock. They said they didn't say... There was plenty of racist stuff, too, but there arguments in places like the National Review, where this is your tax dollars that are there trying to get these undeserving black people into these schools.

So they're always tying it into the money that you're going to pay back into the government. This is so interesting, is going to go to projects that are going to undercut you, your hard earned money. It's the exact same argument they're making right now. Your hard earned money is actually going to the social safety net for undocumented people people and homeless and people that haven't earned it. Steven, is there a vulnerability there for Democrats? Because what do the Democrats say? We got to tax the billionaires. We got to make people pay their fair share. But if you can't connect the tax dollars that are being raised to value for taxpayers, right? So if you do have a bunch of working class people that are paying into the tax system, but they're not realizing, to your point earlier, Steven, about the things that that they would need in their lives, childcare, healthcare, elder care, those types of things. If they don't see the value coming back from their dollars, then what good is raising taxes on corporations? What good is raising taxes on billionaires if you don't think the return on that is going to be any good?

And is that a place where the Democrats have to shore up their position?

John, I think that if you look at surveys, majority of Republicans want to increase taxes on corporations of the rich, and they agree with the Democrats on that. They feel that the ultra-rich, the 1%, these huge corporations that pay no income taxes are getting away with murder. And they say it's unfair, and Americans always feel they're paying too much in taxes. They figured, let the rich, let the corporations pay far more, and maybe I can pay less. But when Trump and the Republicans say, We want to have tax cuts, and we're going to help you, the tax cuts that were enacted by Trump, they gave the average American household less than $500, yet the top one % get a $60,000 tax cut as if they needed all that money.

And exploded the deficit at the same time.

And exploded the deficit by over a trillion dollars. And the top one-tenth of 1% got $175,000. I guess those people making $100 million a year really needed that extra $175,000. Getting to right to work for a second, John, when Joe Biden says, The middle class built America and unions built the middle class That is correct. The national right to work was an effort by right-wing ideologs and corporations to weaken unions. Right to work means that if you are in a unionized workplace, you could opt out of paying one penny. You don't have to pay a cent to the union that's-But you still get the benefits of whatever is collectively bargaining. Yeah, it's winning the raises for you and one health coverage for you. Donald Trump, when he was running for President in 2016, said, If Congress passes a national right to work, I will happily sign it. Many worker advocates say, It's only fair that people who receive the benefits of unions pay something to it. It says, All for one and one for all. You shouldn't be receiving labor's benefits and being a free rider. Talking about changes, right-wing changes in the Supreme Court, John, back in 1977, there was a case where some teachers in Detroit, Michigan, said, We don't want to pay any dues to our union because it violates our First Amendment rights, and we want to be free riders.

We want to get union benefits without paying. And the Supreme Court voted unanimously with many conservative members.So that shows howUnanimously against them.Unanimously saying union members, public sector union members, could be required to pay union dues. Fast forward, after Samuel Alida was appointed to the Supreme Court, he really had a bug up his ass to really go...

He's got a few of them up there. Yeah, vigorously after union.

It was a Supreme Court decision in 2017, five to four, ruling that a public sector work in California could opt out of paying dues to his union. That created right to work for all government employees across the nation. Sometimes I think it's crazy that a five, four vote can overturn a nine, nothing vote. That shows how conservative the Supreme Court has. Since Alito has arrived on the court, it's gone far more conservative, far more anti-union, far more pro-business. It's not a business.

But it... Heather, this points to, so we're approaching it in a different way because it does seem that the parties define economic populism in different ways. Does the left view pro-worker policies differently than the right does? And are they sincerely believing that as long as big corporations do well, that will trickle down, even though there doesn't appear to be any conceivable evidence that that does. And the example I'll give you is this, and then you can go. In 2008, the housing crisis, we saved the economy through trickle down. We gave billions back to the banks to make them whole again. People got foreclosed on. Our economy tank, we went into a huge recession. In the pandemic, we chose demand-side stimulus. We gave everybody money. We recovered better than any other country did. The economy snapped back Doesn't it show that demand-side stimulus is, at the very least, more efficient?

Well, this is one of the reasons I think that there has been such fury among the right about President Joe Biden, because he has proved that, in fact, the system that we had in place between 1933 and 1981 works. I mean, one of the things that the radical right has been able to do is rise on the idea that, in fact, the way you stimulated the economy was to cut taxes. That's what they always go back to, is cutting taxes. We know it doesn't work. It for his money upward and not downward. People want services. People demand certain things. People actually like the government that Biden has put in place. I think Tim Walsh, the governor of Minnesota, has been really articulate about this in the last couple of weeks on his round of the talk shows. But I think there's a really important piece here that is different than what you two are talking about and which I agree with, which is the way the parties are talking about economic populism, which tends to focus in the Democratic side on economics and on the Republican side on culture. There are two different things going on there.

But the thing that fascinates me is why do people follow certain parties when they talk about populism? That is not so much what are the leaders talking about, but what do the followers accept? This, I think, is central to a much larger conversation about the United States, because, of course, for right to work laws, although they really take off in the 1950s, they tap into the idea that if, in fact, you want wage protections and our protections and all the things that really were being decimated in states like Arizona, they tapped into this longer history of Americans wanting to believe that, by God, they were doing it all on their own, even though they never have. So one of the things that- Everybody needs roads, for God's sakes. Yes, and schools and hospitals, right? But one of the things that is, I think, so interesting about the moment we're in is that the The three of us can sit here and argue at great length about different economic programs and different approaches of the different parties based on either economics or in culture. But the people who really, it seems to me, hold the power when we talk about populism, are the people who are telling the stories about why those people have been held back.

So the Republicans have a story that says it's the undocumented immigrant. The people like me have a story that says, No, no, no, no, it's the rich guys. But if you look right now, you're seeing the rise of people like Sean Fayne of the UAW, the President of the UAW, who is both incorporating the idea of Christian-ness, if you will. He talks about Christian values, almost a social Christian value and the need to protect the ability of workers to have the economic security that Steve's talking about, and also says, wait a minute, we've skewed this entire system. So I think one of the things we're seeing, you asked where we were going, is we are definitely seeing the breaking apart of the Republican project from between 1980 until 2021. But we're also seeing a new language. And it's taken a while for people like Biden to get to the point where they're not just saying, Hey, we're going to help the little guy, but also saying, And we're going to tax those people at the very top. You saw FDR do a similar shift, and you're seeing a lot of Americans, I think, who were in the group of people who were in trouble in the 1980s and forward, getting to find their own voices, in part thanks to the rise of the Internet and the ability to go around the gatekeepers that really managed to highlight the Republican story about America for 40 years and to silence the populace story.

Now you're seeing the populace story, and on the one hand, some people have become virulently sexist and racist, and that's the story that they're clinging to. And some people are saying, No, we can rebuild this country in a new exciting way.

Now that speaks to, Steven, in terms of rebuilding it in a new exciting way. So what are the ways that labor can, in some ways, reinvent itself, not just through unions, unions being an important tent pole of it, but in terms of getting a seat at the table? Now, we talked earlier about the tech billionaires that are funding a lot of this Republican resurgence. One thing the tech has done really well is, in general, they've given their workers shares. Is that a model that can be taken on through these other corporations?

Yes or no, John. It's good. Steven. On one hand, yes, it's good when workers get a share of corporate profits and that all the profits don't go to management. On the other hand, the no is, which is not enough because workers don't have a voice. It's so important over history in the United States and elsewhere to assure greater economic justice for workers not to be stepped on, for workers to have a voice at work. That's why laws that encourage the formation of unions, that laws that encourage collective bargaining have made such a difference. Heather is the historian. I'm not, but after World War II, American companies were going like gangbusters. Europe was flying us back, Japanese industry was flying us back, and the United States deal, and General Motors, and Ford, and Christ. They were doing doing amazingly well. We didn't have a middle class yet. Workers were really doing poorly. Workers unionized and went on strike and treasured the capitalists and said, It ain't fair. You're making so much money and we're struggling, and we're the folks who make your profits, who make your cars, who make your steal. And they won these amazing contracts that created the middle class.

And unions now, Sean Fane is basically saying the same thing what the Union leaders were saying after World War II, that we're not getting our fair share. Companies are making record profits, the stock market is at record levels, productivity has risen to record levels, yet wages are flat. And labor is really standing up again more than it has in a long time. Sean Fane led this historic Victoria's strike last fall by the United order workers against GM Ford and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler. Labor is saying, not only do we need a seat at the table, not only do more workers need a seat at the table, whether it's Starbucks or Amazon or Trader Joe's or Apple, but this old idea that all we deserve is a 2% a year raise is BS. Inflation is 10%, we deserve our fair share. And what are the crazy things?

And we don't have the social safety net. I mean, you have people that... We have a working class economy of people that still have to avail themselves of the social safety net. It's a part of the story that is never talked about. All right, We've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Running a business is not easy. You got to keep track all the different systems or platforms, help you get the job done. You got a lot of passwords there, and they all end with exclamation point. Anyway, efficiency is one of the many reasons businesses choose NetSuite by Oracle. Netsuite is the number one financial system bringing together accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one unified business management suite. I'm assuming in that suite is also some buffet because why else would you be in a suite? It's all in the cloud accessible from anywhere. No hardware required. Reduce the login headaches, bring all your major business processes into one proven platform, along with cutting down on IT costs, maintenance costs, and manual errors. Yeah, manual errors. I'm looking at you, Craig, with your manual errors. Plus, the less your business spends, the more margin you keep.

Over 37,000 companies have already made the move to NetSuite. Back by popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite. Com/weekly. Netsuite. Com/weekly. We're back. I mean, these are pendulum swings, right? You have the robber barons, and then you have the new deal that creates a safety net, and then you have this post-World War II boom, and now you've got this Reagan era deregulation and all these things. It's It swings back and forth in terms of workers, and then it goes more pro-business. What brings it back to the... How does the pendulum swing back now, Heather?

Well, Can I just add to what Steven said? Please. That is in the 1950s and the 1960s. One of the things that really helped workers was the recognition that people in the United States were very concerned about the rise, both of fascism and of communism, and of the idea of countries being taken over by religious leaders. One of the things that you see with the construction of a strong middle class in the United States and the support of a strong middle class in European countries and other countries as well, is a determination to protect democracy, that they recognize that if they don't do that, if they don't give workers something, they're going to turn. In that case, they're really worried about communism. But there are plenty of people who are also concerned about fascism, people like Eisenhower, for example. So once You got the fall of the Berlin Wall and you got the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was this sense that you no longer had to worry about that, that as long as you spread capitalism, you would also be spreading democracy. And of course, where that's ended us up is a place where authoritarians are on the rise all over the country.

So one of the things that I think- And all over the world. Yes. I'm sorry, I meant that. All over the world.

And the right is cozy up to... I mean, to think that the right would be admiring of Putin and Orban would be- Crazy. Utterly unrecognizable to anybody or on the left. I mean, it's a bizarre... And it makes me think that maybe the fight now around the world isn't capitalism versus communism or democracy versus authoritarianism. They found it to be woke versus unwoke. They've just found a different axis by which to cleave everybody. Maybe capitalism requires that entrenched poor working class to function the way they want it to function. Maybe that's the thing we have to address.

Well, certainly, I think unregulated capitalism does. Capitalism itself is another discussion. You got to love a historian, right? I'm going to split hairs on all these words. But here's a big piece that I think I would love to hear what Steven has to say about this. I mean, one of the things that you're seeing in the United States is the first generation of American women who have had jobs, professional jobs outside the home. We've always worked outside the home, but professional jobs outside the home. They have good educations. They have skills. Many of them have money. They also have, for the first time in our history, 20 to 30 years after their children have left or they've gotten as far as they want to in their careers to get involved in the public sphere. At the same time that they're recognizing that their daughters and granddaughters have fewer rights than they did. I think that throws a monkey wrench into both populism and also into how we will reconstruct a future. Because I don't think, at least in the United States, and I know other country is jumping to mind, I think that changes the entire way we're going to be looking at the issues of the American story, for example, or the issue of who should have a say, or the issue of equal rights going forward.

And I think it's one of the things driving the extraordinary fury on the American right right now against things like childless cat ladies.

Steven, what do you make of that? That idea that this generation of women is really, as Heather was saying, they were professionals, and now they're seeing those gains slip.

Heather is absolutely right, and it is terrible, worse and terrifying. I'm in my early '70s.

You're in your early '70s? I've got to start your regimen, whatever you're doing. I got to start juicing.

What's happening? I have children, I have grandchildren, and I speak to friends, and they're horrified that things are moving backwards for their daughters and for their granddaughters. I think that's one reason why women have become so active in politics and so active in unions. That's one of the reasons they're so much enthusiastic about Kamala Harris. She's been leading the fight. One of the things that really gets me is when I really have to wrap my I need to think of what exactly did Trump do for workers, and I could think of one and a half things. Yes, the North American Free Trade Agreement was way too friendly to corporations and didn't do enough to protect workers. People blame Bill Clinton for all this, blamed the Democrats. It was negotiated by a Republican, first President Bush. Bill Clinton wanted to be a good bipartisan guy, and he got it passed through the Senate. Overwhelmingly, it was Republicans who voted for it in Congress, not Democrats, but the Democrats got all the blame. But Trump, the one thing I will most place in for is that he renegotiated NAFTA, so it's much friendlier to unions, much friendlier to workers.

And the half a thing where I say Trump has… Trump did absolutely nothing to raise the minimum wage. I think he's such a chicken because he's worried, If I call for a higher minimum wage, I'm going to piss off my business supporters. And if I oppose a higher minimum wage, then I'm going to… He's been mummed. The great courageous Donald Trump is just too scared. But he was campaigning in Nevada the other day, right? And he said, I have this great idea.No taxes on tips. Yeah, no taxes on tips. Where did that come from? He says he got it from speaking to a waiter. No, I'm sure someone in the Brain Trust said, this would be a great way to win votes of the tens of thousands of hotel housekeepers and waiters in Nevada. But I say it's only half a pro-worker thing because so many waiters and housekeepers, they don't earn enough of money to even pay income taxes.

And still have to have a social safety net behind them.

So if Trump really wanted them to earn more money, he should support them I'm unionizing, and he should raise them in on wage, but he's too pro-corporate and corporate to do that.

I will give them credit, though, for this. And Heather, I want to ask you about this. Globalization and automation decimated, I think, the American middle class, the factory workers. It really did have a terribly corrosive effect on people's ability to have stable manufacturing jobs or stable and all the support jobs that go along with those sorts of things. So the changes in, whether it was Amazon or factories being able to go overseas and all those other things, was devastating. And I don't think the Democrats recognized the devast fast enough or with enough empathy because they would always say things like, We'll send you back to school and you could be a coder. We'll teach you how to be a coder. And they'd be like, Well, I dug what I was doing, and I don't think I want to be a coder. And I think that was a real weakness and one that they've had a really tough time overcoming. Heather?

Yeah, I think that's right. Except I would say that one of the things that always jumps out to me, I am from a rural area. I am from a place where there are an awful lot of Republican voters and a lot of Trump voters. And we always do this thing where we examine rural people like their zoo animals, like what's wrong with the rural Americans. I'm telling you, there's nothing wrong with the rural Americans, except you can see the line between those people who are Trumpers and those who are not Trumpers, because one group watches the Fox News channel, and one does not. The fact that the Democrats felt that they were unable to make the sorts of protections for the workers, but also, it sounds like we're just talking about unionized workers. Of course, that's not at all what we're talking about. We're talking about people who have been left behind.

The gig economy. The gig economy. All these workers are unprotective.

Which, by the way, is much more reflective of the way American history has always been. The idea that you have a single job and it's going to carry you through for your entire career is very post-World War II. The Democrats, I think, wanted to protect those people, but they seemed to have this idea that they had to go along at the top level with the market-based reforms or market-based legislation that was blanketing our media space. There weren't the options to talk about other ideas because those people didn't get returned to office, and they didn't get time on the talk shows and so on. That locking up, I think, of the public conversation looks very much like the locking up of the public conversation in the 1880s and the 1890s, when it was just like, Andrew Carnegie is the best thing since slice bread. Anybody who stands against him is an anarchist.

This mirrors the robber baron era in your mind?

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. And that's in many interesting ways. But part of what has been a problem for the Democrats is the fact that if you didn't go along with the market-based economy, the the idea that neoliberalism was going to be the answer to everything. You simply got purged out of the lawmakers, the lawmakers, so that you didn't get to say, Hey, wait a minute here. And you can see in some universities, there will be a holdover from the 1960s or the 1970s in the economics department. The guy is back behind his desk with long hair going, That's not how the world works. Every time something goes wrong, you can watch this, they pull them out and they're like, Hey, look, we found one from the past. She's going to tell us what? But so I think that that has limited options. And again, the breakdown of Fox News because of the lawsuit against it, the fact that Rush Limbaugh died in 2021 and didn't give those talking points to everybody on the right and the rest of the media didn't follow suit with those talking points, I think has opened up the ability for us to have a larger conversation.

And then, of course, with Biden and Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, saying very upfront that the loss of our supply chains to other countries is a national security issue. The loss of our manufacturing to other countries is a national security issue. The fact that we've had a very few people, a very few corporations being able to monopolize baby formula, for example, but ever so many other things, is a national security issue. That's made them able to reshore manufacturing and to reshore supply chains, which Buttage has done really, really well. Also to launch lawsuits against people like Amazon to say, The idea that as long as prices are getting lower, it's good for the American people, is not the case. We got to make sure it's good for workers and good for national security and good for consumers as well. It seems like there's a lot of things breaking apart right now. One of the things I'm really interested in is trying to make sure that the conversation that we engage going forward is much fairer and that doesn't have this cookie cutter smashed down onto it so that for 40 years, we're locked into something.

Conventional wisdom that pushes things away. That's an excellent summation.

Can I jump in? Oh, please. I agree with everything Heather said. One of the craziest things is like, jobs were leaving Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and heading to China, and Taiwan, and Bangladesh for years, not just under democratic administrations, but somehow, Republicans are great at blaming the Democrats for everything. You're right, John, that the Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, were saying, Yeah, these jobs are disappearing, but go to college. Everyone should go to college, and then you live happily ever after. Only one-third, 40% of Americans go to college. A lot of working-class families said, I can't afford to send my kids to college. Barack Obama is really aloof, and I think that was one of Obama's biggest mistakes. The Democrats did try very hard to provide much more money for retraining, much more money for unemployment insurance for people who lost a job to foreign trade, and the Republicans kept blocking it, but the Democrats get blamed for not doing enough. Now, as Heather said, Joe Biden got the message.

He wants-Right, these Infrastructure Act, Chips Act, all these things.

For people who aren't going to college, he's emphasized manufacturing. The Infrastructure Act is going to create hundreds of thousands of great construction jobs, many of them for people who don't go to college. Plus, he has really tried very hard to make it easier for people to go to college. Canceling student debt, he wants community colleges to be free. He borrowed Bernie Sanders' idea for a while to make the first two years of college free. Biden gets that there isn't enough economic opportunity for the typical American family.

Maybe this is the inflection point, maybe, and I'll give you both a chance to sum up, but we'll end it there. Maybe the inflection point is the recognition that the globalization and the ill effects that it had on so many of these workers must be addressed with a real urgency, and there has to be a great deal of money and intention behind it to try and rebuild the things that were hollowed out during that time. And obviously, it gives us a portent to what AI may offer the country and how devastating that might be as well. But in your guys' mind, is the pendulum swinging back? And do both of these parties offer anything positive to labor and the working people in the country at this point, Heather?

I don't think that the Republicans, dominated as they currently are by the Magas offer anything to anybody who is not extraordinarily rich, except those undereducated evangelical Christians who simply want to be able to impose their Christian nationalism on the rest of us. Who want the culture. It's the culture for them. It's only about 6% of Americans who actually want Christian nationalism. The Democrats US right now under Biden and soon to be under Harris, I think, have recognized not only what you were talking about with the offshoring of manufacturing, for example, but one of the key parts that Biden went forward with and has not really succeeded to the degree he would like, is the shoring up of the service economy. The service economy for childcare, elder care, and so on, really, again, speaks to women being involved in the economy, as they always have been, but they've always done it on their own hook and at their own peril. That, I think, is a reshaping of the entire issue of populism. As I say, what really matters, I think to me, is watching how those conversations take shape and who gets to drive the conversations to say, Hey, wait a minute.

We really need a country that's based on the good of everybody, especially those people who are hardworking and trying just to put food on the table and have their kids safe and educated, rather than saying, We can turn it all over the Silicon Valley billionaires, and they will treat us, little people, well.

They will design it, and they'll put us in a crisper and change the genetic. But you're right, the economic system cannot, by its definition, rely on an entrenched underclass and entrenched poverty. Stephen, for you, what's the one hopeful thought that you hold in your head moving this forward?

So young people are much more concerned about how hard it is for them to rise up. They're told that they're the first generation in American history that might not do as well as their parents. A lot of young people have taken to the streets for the B2 movement, for the Black Lives Matter movement, and so much of the energy in the Union movement to raise wages is younger people. I agree with Heather that when you look at the Republican Party, they're really not doing anything to help workers. If you try to pass a paid leave bill, which so many of us, American family support 80 % to 20 %. Overwhelmingly, the billionaires, the corporations will block it. They'll say it's a horrible employer mandate. It's going to get in the way of the free market. We can't have that. We can't raise the minimum wage. That will gum up the works for corporations which already have maximum profit.

And just the simple act of if we removed health care from your job, if we just gave that to people, that would free up everybody to be able to take more chances in their lives. Corporations would no longer be on the hook for it. There's so many different things that we could do, but I appreciate you both coming on and having the conversation. Stephen Greenhouse, Labor and Workplace supporter at New York Times for 19 years, Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, author of the book Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, and Heather Cox-Richerts, author of Democracy Awakening, notes on the State of America. Really interesting stuff, so I appreciate it.

Thanks, John.

Thank you.

I got to tell you guys something. I think there should be a historian. Can we use historians as like, Mods, as moderators? Just in every conversation that occurs, because there's so much history that echoes the current state of affairs cares, and it gives you so much context and so much knowledge into it. When Heather started bringing up, well, in the 1870s, before these movements, and it goes back to Jim Crow South and the way that economically, nobody wanted to grant. And then Black people, they didn't want them to vote. It so brings into focus how we get to this current moment and how we can get out of it.

No, definitely. I think that his story really add to this, and it does all come back to slavery.

That's what it has to be. It all comes back to slavery. You're like, Oh, right. There was a group of people in the country that got labor for free, and that was the default. And so anything off of that is going to be seen as a concession. And it just informs everything moving forward. And I really feel like sometimes I wish I had a pocket historian. That's what they should do. A pocket Doris Kearns-Goodwin, a pocket Heather Cox-Ritchison, like Siri. And whenever you're talking about something, it can be like, they used to say the same thing about Andrew Maggie. They said he couldn't be stopped. He was the bad guy. You're like, Who? You're like, The Robber Barons. Then they bring that. Just adding context. The news organizations should have a pocket historian at all times so they It could just a context theory. I'd pay for it. Right?

Totally. Along with fact-checking, maybe.

Well, let's not get crazy. Context and fact-checking. But it can be done in real... If these historians It can do it in real-time, it can be done. Anyway, I thought it was a very fascinating conversation there. And boy, do they know their shit. When Steven starts throwing out Supreme Court cases and quote the thing, I was just like, I'm just going to go get a drink of water. This guy's killing it. He's killing it. The news keeps coming fast and furious. Yeah, so that's that. Brittany, the socials are going? Oh, yeah, we are there. We're getting some really good responses, John. Actually, do you want to hear some of the questions we've got? Sure.

Yeah, I'll pull up the first one. What do you got? This question is, how do you keep your composure when debating someone with drastically different views on politics?

It's an excellent question. I think if you've watched me do that, you would see, I don't. I don't keep my composure. I often lose my shit, which is why I make... People always say, You should get into politics. I'm like, I really think that would be... I'd last 20 minutes, and then All of a sudden, I'd be like, You're fucked up. You don't know what you're talking about. Shut up. It's so hard. Contrary to what it may look like, I'm not a huge fan of conflict. I think you guys know me probably in a different context, so you would be like, Yeah, I get that. But so when you're doing those things, I find it very discomforting. I don't care for it, but I do it Because I think I should suffer. I think I've earned that. I think we've both seen you do it. Is it uncomfortable for you guys to watch? Brittany, you've seen it a lot. You've seen me do it a lot. I've personally hid behind poles as it was happening because I'm like, I don't want to make eye contact with anybody.

I'm definitely the grimace emoji during some of the moments where I know you're dying inside but not really showing it.

Here's what's so terrible, too, because Brittany, so in order to book guests, there's a process that is somewhat of a sales job. Come on the show. It'll be great. You'll have a robust discussion, but always friendly, always professional, always doing that. Like with Larry Somers. And Larry Somers, he did a little research on me. It was like, in 2011, Jon Stewart called me the devil incarnate. Is he going to do that on the show? And Brittany has to be like, I don't think so. Probably not. He may call you that, but ingest. So Brittany had to put me on the phone with Larry Somers before he came on the show to allay his concerns. And I generally do the Kistanza in those situations, which is what is the opposite of what you're supposed to do? So he said, Are those your feelings? And I was like, Yeah, they are. But I don't mind having the conversation. I really disagree with you on almost everything, but certainly I'd be open to talking about it. And he was like, Okay, that's all I wanted to know. And then he was like, Great, let's do it. Yeah. My favorite part is you've had to do those calls a couple of times throughout our time working together.

The best is when John calls after and we'll be like, I don't know if I just helped or hurt the situation. I don't think they're coming. But for Larry Summer, that conversation was unfortunately very uncomfortable. Comfortable, but I thought pretty great. Yeah, I think a lot of people did. Well, not Apple. Not the people we were working for, but the other people who were not. They didn't think it was particularly great, but that's fantastic. Okay, next question. Yes. How can I start performing stand-up comedy if I have terrible social anxiety? Oh, I don't know. So I don't know enough about social anxiety to know if stand-up comedy would trigger that, because in truth, stand-up is not that social. I'm very introverted. So one of the reasons I like doing stand-up was that. It's one of the reasons I like bartending. It's like you can be out-ish, but you're not actually out. You have a job to do, and you can focus on that, and you don't really have to talk to anybody other than taking orders Thanksgiving order. So it's not... And stand-up is, broadly enough, very similar. Like Friday and Saturday night, what are you doing?

You're going to that party, you're doing those things. I got to go do a gig. I got to work. You're social with the other comics, but you don't really have much to do with the audience other than in a performative way. So I actually think for social anxiety, standup is not a terrible business to be in, even though it may seem like a paradox. Does that make sense?

No, I think totally. I think there's a difference between in having a one-on-one conversation with someone and being amongst it or putting on a show in a way. And it's a character, even if it is you.

And a performance. Yeah. And you're not like... Okay, you remember how at the show we would have parties? Yes. Remember how you guys would go? Yes. You guys would drink and have a great time? Yeah. Then you guys would be like, John, are you coming? I'd be like, Sure. But then I wouldn't. Yeah. Sure. That's social anxiety. That's me. But all done. Tell people to keep going with the social. What are the socials? What are the things? Definitely. We are Twitter @ WeeklyShowPod, Instagram and threads. We are WeeklyShowPodcast, TikTok, we are WeeklyShowPodcast, and the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on YouTube. Come on. As always, thank you so much. This has been the Weekly Show. Thanks to lead producer Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mamedevik, video editor and engineer, Rob Vittola, who, by the way, is just kicking crazy as everything is so locked in when we jump in. Same with audio editor and engineer, Nicole Guys, you guys are killing it. Research and associate producer, Gillian Speer, as always, arming me with the best information known to man. Our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie gray, couldn't do it without all you guys. So thank you again, and we will see you next week.

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