D.D. Guttenplan’s new book, The Next Republic, says that we could be on the verge of the 4th Republic. He looks at the Whisky, Lincoln & Roosevelt republics, and interviews activists for a compelling narrative
Story Transcript
MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network. Good to have you all with us once again, folks. I’m Marc Steiner. Always a pleasure to talk with you. And one of the things I like doing more than anything else is talking to people who write and think, and think about what they write before they write it.
There’s a book that came through the pipe that I really liked. It’s called The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Political Majority by DD Guttenplan, who is the editor at large at The Nation. This is the book. And it’s really a fascinating historical analysis, along with stories about what’s happening in today’s world, and how they connect. And DD has been writing for the Nation for a long time; before that for the New Yorker; his voice in many other places; produced audio documentaries; is an all-around media man on the left. Good to have you in the studio.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Great to be here, Marc.
MARC STEINER: The Next Republic. So as far as you see, we’ve had in America three republics before.
DON GUTTENPLAN: That’s right. This is always a little bit arbitrary, but I suppose … So the book is partly about what would it be like if we had a government that felt like it really belonged to us? That acted for our interests as a people? And that was not the tool of corporations, or the rich, or special economic interests? And has this ever happened, or has it come close to happening?
And so in thinking about it, you think, well, what was it that the people in 1776 thought they were fighting for? Were they just fighting to get rid of the King? Or were they were fighting for a whole different political order? And if they were fighting for a different political order, what would that have looked like? And so that’s one republic which, for the purposes of the book, I call the Whisky Republic. And we’ll, we’ll get into why I call it the Whisky Republic, but it doesn’t- it’s not because you could drink it. Although perhaps you could say it’s because they could almost taste the freedom that they ended up not quite getting.
The next republic I call the Lincoln Republic. And that for me is a little more, almost a little more personal, because I live part of the year in Vermont. And Vermont’s the only state where slavery was never legal. And it also is the state that had the highest percentage of enlistment in the Civil War as volunteers. And so part of what I was thinking about is what is it that motivated a Vermont farm boy, who’d probably never seen a slave, to enlist and stay and fight in the Union Army? What did, what did those people think they were fighting for? I mean, yes, they were fighting for the Union. And yes, eventually they came to realize that they were fighting to destroy slavery. But it wasn’t so much actual slavery, because they, as I said, they never met a slave. They were fighting to destroy the slave power. So this this vast economic interest that had its hands on the American government, and that they came to feel had its hands around their necks, even though, again, you know, they were very far removed from racial slavery.
So it’s about that, which I call the Lincoln Republic. And in a way, that’s the republic that, if Reconstruction had been fully carried out, would have come into being. But it wasn’t carried out, because reconstruction was thwarted, and eventually sold out or abandoned, depending on how critical you want to be about it. I guess I would say sold out.
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And then the third republic I write about is the Roosevelt Republic, and that came to me during the course of my reporting on the 2016 presidential campaign, where I’d be- I spent a lot of time in Ohio, as you do if you’re covering a political campaign, because Ohio is such a crucial state. And as I would be reporting in Ohio I’d be, for example, in Cincinnati. And I’d see these fantastic columns, like classical Greek columns, standing alone in a park. And I said, what is that? Those are the pieces of Daniel Burnham’s design for Union Station. The rest of the station’s been demolished, but we kept the columns. Or I’d be in Akron, and I’d see this incredible federal office building taking up a whole block. And you go inside, and there are these great WPA murals. Or I’d be in Cleveland, and you go to the Cleveland Public Library, and there are these murals depicting the building of the bridge across the Ohio River.
And as I was traveling around Ohio I realized that these were coming to feel like the scene in Planet Of The Apes, where the Statue of Liberty is on a beach, and you see, and you think what was this great alien civilization whose relics I keep tripping over in Ohio? And this great, this great alien civilization was the New Deal. It was the WPA. It was the belief that government had an obligation to put people to work in productive ways and to look after the American people. It was the, you know, it was the civilization that gave us Social Security. And it was the civilization that gave us the Civilian Conservation Corps. And the civilization that gave us unemployment insurance. And it was the civilization that in a sense started to unravel in the 1960s, and was destroyed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
But you know, part of what I was trying to understand in Ohio, and why I kept returning to the state after the election to places like Youngstown and Warren, where, you know, we used to make things and we don’t make things anymore, and where there are lots of people who used to make things and don’t make things anymore, is that you meet a lot of people who feel that something was taken from them. And in a sense that was, to me, part of Trump’s appeal to these people, is he would, he would tell people somebody took something from you. Of course, he’d lie to them. It was a con. You know, he would pretend that what was taken from you was the privilege of being a white man in a white man’s world. But these people were not wrong to feel that something had been taken from them. And what had been taken from them, in my view, was the Roosevelt Republic. And that’s the thing that we lost.
So the book is partly about where were the periods in American history where it felt like, to use Lincoln’s phrase that you really can’t improve on, we had a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? And where might that be- you know, if this thing kind of submerges and rises, and submerges and rises in the way that the people submerge and rise, when might it be rising again, how might it rise again? And I suppose the thing that gave me an intimation that it might be rising again- because you don’t always … success Is not always its own harbinger. Sometimes failure is the harbinger of success.
And so for me the harbinger of a next republic was the Sanders campaign, and this, both this incredible outpouring of radical energy, but also the sense of astonishment that I first noticed in a high school gym in New Hampshire, on the night that Bernie won the New Hampshire primary looking around the gym and seeing all these people looking around at each other, and realizing that for us the surprise wasn’t that Bernie won New Hampshire. The surprise was that there were so many of us. Because we had been told for so long, so relentlessly by all of the mainstream media that we were marginal; that, you know, that people who were liberal were kind of odious and to be ashamed. And those of us who are to the left of liberals, we were completely marginal and written out of the American story. And yet here we were. We filled this high school gym. We’d carried a state. And at that- on that night, at least, it looked like anything was possible. And although it turned out that anything wasn’t possible at that moment, I thought, wow, what would it be like to imagine what all of these people are actually fighting for could happen?
MARC STEINER: So I want to talk a bit about the republics, and then kind of talk about some of the people that you wrote about here, and how- what they may be harbingers of, and also what those periods tell us that we need to watch out for. But let me start here. I said two republics, because we’re three- you wrote about the Whisky Rebellion earlier in the book. I never thought of the Whisky Rebellion as being a republic, because it seemed to me to be such a short-lived rebellion against the new American government over taxation and other things that they were fighting for. But you include that in the Republics.
DON GUTTENPLAN: I’ll tell you why. For two reasons. First, because we in high school, we learn that the American Revolution was about taxation without representation, and getting rid of the King. But it turned out that when they were making the revolution, it was also about economic inequality and economic equality. That you had the Pennsylvania constitution, which was written in 1776, and was the most radical constitution of all the colonial constitutions. And it had a one house legislature, because in every legislature that exists where there’s an upper house, the upper house very quickly becomes the house of privilege and financial privilege.
But also there was a, there was a lot of debate then. I mean, they were overturning a social order. So they didn’t- nobody told them you have to stop here. You know, they were, they were experimenting with things like a limit on how much land anybody could own, or whether you could be an absentee landlord and collect rent on land that you didn’t cultivate. And there was a lot of sentiment against that. And the force that eventually dominated was the force represented, ironically, by Alexander Hamilton, who has now become, thanks to Lin Manuel Miranda, a folk hero. But he was the- he was the voice of privilege. He said we have to, we have to have a country where the rich can get richer in order to have a secure foundation. And he won out.
But, see- and this is the thing about success and failure and harbingers in history. The Whisky Rebellion happened in western Pennsylvania, because they had no way of getting the grain they grew to market. There was no Erie Canal, there were no roads. So what they would do is they would distill the grain into whisky, which A, wouldn’t spoil, and B, instead of needing six mules to get over the Alleghenies you could get over in casks on one mule. Hamilton imposed this tax on whisky which was rigged in favor of the big producers, who could pay and get a discount by paying in advance, because they were rich enough to pay in advance. And if you did big volume you got discounts for that.
So the whole thing was was rigged to favor the 1 percent of the 1780s. And these farmers assembled in this field to fight it. Now, a couple of things that were interesting about that. One is that the field that they assembled in is literally across the street from where John Fetterman, this guy who was then running for for Senate in Pennsylvania is now running for-.
MARC STEINER: The mayor.
DON GUTTENPLAN: He’s the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, which is a kind of deeply distressed, former- to call it a suburb completely paints the wrong picture.
MARC STEINER: Majority African-American community.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Exactly. Just outside of Pittsburgh.
MARC STEINER: And to describe him, for people who don’t know John Fetterman, and we can see his picture-
DON GUTTENPLAN: He’s 6’8”. And as he says, he looks more like like a wrestler than a politician. He’s got tattoos on both arms, and a goatee and a shaved head.
MARC STEINER: Who’s running for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, which I love.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Yeah, exactly. In the summer of 2016, I went to see John and he took me on a tour of the Mon Valley, to hollowed-out town after hollowed-out town. And he had just found out that day that Barack Obama was going to endorse his opponent running for the Democratic nomination for senator in Pennsylvania. So he was very bummed out. But we would go to these towns where there had once been thriving industry, and where now there was nothing but essentially OxyContin. And at the end of the day, John explained to me why Hillary Clinton was going to lose Pennsylvania. And I thought he was, it was just sour grapes, you know. But it turned out that he called it exactly right, that she lost the state by 68,000 votes. And that in these two counties, Westmoreland County and Washington County, which were the center of the Whisky Rebellion, she lost by 80,000 votes. In other words, more than her margin in the whole state.
So I guess one way I would put it is you can’t screw people and expect it to just go away. It sticks around.
MARC STEINER: So I want to come back to that point, because I think it’s a really important point. I was thinking about some of what you said in parts of the book, talking about what happened in Nebraska, and what happened in Pennsylvania. But then also when you wrote about Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, and how he put these ideas together, and how they fit. You also write a lot about how blacks and whites came together in different portions of our struggle in America for this country, whether it was the Civil War or the union movement in the ’30s. Coming to that in a moment. But let me just talk about these republics you really focus in on, and how they relate some of the people in the book and where they take it.
Part of what you write about, it’s interesting about both republics, the Lincoln Republic and the Roosevelt Republic you write about, as part of what they both did they increase taxes, and they paid for things they wouldn’t ordinarily be paid for. Especially the Roosevelt Republic. But the first real taxes in America came under Lincoln for the war.
DON GUTTENPLAN: To pay for the Civil War. And they printed money.
MARC STEINER: And they printed money.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Greenbacks.
MARC STEINER: Right? Greenbacks. So this is an interesting dynamic to me that makes the republics attached, in some ways, about these were periods of taxation that hadn’t happened before, and Roosevelt comes in and taxes the rich, and taxes wealth after that, in ways that are not just income.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Exactly, wealth.
MARC STEINER: Right? So talk about those connections, about what these, how that fits into the definition of the republics, as you see them. And what that might mean for now.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Well, I mean, so we’ve had periods in our history where the federal government has had to step up and do things. You know, they had to fight the Civil War. And that meant paying for the war, paying for the army, paying for things like building railroads. And that meant massive appropriation and taxes and expropriation of wealth. And the other thing that’s interesting to consider if you’re looking at the Lincoln Republic is that the biggest asset class in the country in the 19th century- in other words, the largest single area of wealth in the country- was represented by the bodies of slaves, of enslaved people. In 1860 dollars that was over $3 billion. And in England, for example, where they had slavery, when they abolished slavery, they compensated the slave owners. David Cameron, who was recently Conservative prime minister, his ancestors got millions and millions of dollars in compensation for their slaves.
What Lincoln did in freeing the slaves was expropriate the largest asset class in American history, and then liquidate it, without any compensation. So it’s the single most radical economic act in American history. If you could imagine in today’s terms, if the government- the Sanders-Warren, whatever administration you want to call it- took over the 10 biggest oil companies because they’re poisoning our air and our water, and they said, well, we can’t let this happen anymore, so we’re going to take over these companies and we’re going to liquidate them, and we’re not going to pay the shareholders anything, that’s almost as radical as what happened in the Civil War.
So part of the reason that the history is in my book is because when people say it can’t be done, that’s much too radical, it’s only because we’ve forgotten what we’ve already done. And so the history that in my book is to remind people what we Americans have been capable of in the past.
MARC STEINER: So one of the great quotes of the book has to do with labor, some labor coming together around fighting slavery. And they refer to the lords of the loom and the lords of the lash, that we’re going after both of them. And so there have been attempts like that in the Civil War. You write about attempts like that during the period of the Depression and where unions were really picking up steam.
DON GUTTENPLAN: The Popular Front period of the 1930s.
MARC STEINER: The Popular Front period, where blacks and whites and a broad spectrum of people were coming together to fight for something.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Well, that’s- so that’s right. And I guess for me there are two things that are essential about that. One is that we’ve done it before, so it’s clearly possible. And the other is to notice that after the Civil War … In the Civil War you had all these northern industrialists who were Republicans. They were the economic backbone of the Republican Party. And they were opposed to slavery. But they were not the leaders in the abolitionist movement. The leaders in the abolitionist movement were free blacks. Free blacks and religious whites who objected to slavery on religious grounds, but mainly free blacks. They were the, they were the militants of the abolitionist movement. And you know, gradually they began to attract other kinds of support, and they created a coalition, and they founded the Republican Party, and they changed American politics. And then the slave power attacked them, and that started in an open civil war.
But after the Civil War, the question was do you have this newly enfranchised proletariat in the South, former slaves, and in the North you have all of these working men who had picked up a gun and fought for a republic, and now they had this taste of an egalitarian society. And one of the things that happened right after the Civil War was that the state of Illinois passed a limit on working hours; an eight hour day law. And the New York- sorry. When the state of Illinois passed an eight hour day law, the foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune, a German writer named Karl Marx, said that the eight hour day law represented the first fruits of the Civil War. There were suddenly all this agitation on the part of working people.
That terrified the industrialists who had bankrolled the Republican Party, and they backed away from the sort of radical agitation that was represented by Reconstruction, and essentially made a deal to stop Reconstruction. But I suppose- and then in the ’30s you had black and white unionists fighting and striking alongside each other. But you also had a coalition, Roosevelt’s political coalition, that was dependent on white supremacy, because the Southern Democrats were committed to white supremacy. And that both limited what Roosevelt could do, and eventually that was the wedge that broke the New Deal coalition.
MARC STEINER: So if you look at those periods- and we’re going to come back to talking about these folks that you talk about now, and how this fits into all this- if you look at those periods and you realize that what you call liberal Republicans then, and Southern Democrats, coming together to kill Reconstruction, which they did. Put Hayes in power as president, even though he didn’t win a majority of the vote. And then you look at what happened after Roosevelt’s death when it continued. But then coming together through the loyalty-.
DON GUTTENPLAN: The loyalty oaths, and red-baiting, and Taft-Hartly, all those things.
MARC STEINER: And all those things that- Taft-Hartly was defeated because Southern senators defeated it, and to try to kill labor and take labor’s power away. So what does that say about where we are now? We’re clearly not in a Fourth Republic. We’re not there. People are fighting for it. We don’t even know we’re fighting for it in some ways, but we are.
And we also have this opposition, because you have- you know, one of the things you- Chokwe Lumumba, who you interview in Jackson, Mississippi, talks about the power of race. And this is a great quote. Let me just read this in the context where we are now and what happened in the past. So if you, if you look at this- and this is incredible stuff that I think Chokwe said in your book that really needs to be shared. He writes, after he talks about the election of Trump, and he says, “On Wednesday afternoon after the election, I woke up in Mississippi. No matter whether Donald Trump is president or Barack Obama was the president, we’ve always been at the bottom” And then writes, “The United States is infected with a disease called racism. The anti-racism movement has some seminal victories, but you have a racist movement that is fighting at the same time. We win something, they don’t go home and say, oh, we lost, go to sleep. So we can’t rest.”
So in some ways, he describes where we are. The contradictions we’re facing.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Well, this is why I wanted to go to Mississippi. Because you know, you can tell yourself fairy stories all the time.
MARC STEINER: And very clearly, at the beginning of the book, you were not, did not want to write about a fairy tale. You had to deal with the reality.
DON GUTTENPLAN: No, my mantra in writing this book is no more wishful thinking.
MARC STEINER: Exactly, right.
DON GUTTENPLAN: You know, a lot of us floated through the Obama years thinking that, you know, America’s racial struggles were over. And that was clearly baloney.
MARC STEINER: It was baloney. I never floated on that boat.
DON GUTTENPLAN: I’m not fessing up one way or another on that question. All I’m saying is that a lot of people did.
MARC STEINER: Right.
DON GUTTENPLAN: And you know- and as Antar- Chokwe Antar Lumumba, because his father was also Chokwe Lumumba, so his friends call him Antar to distinguish him from his father. Anyway, as he says, you know, I woke up in Mississippi, so for me it didn’t make any difference. Or it didn’t make, didn’t make the kind of difference that the rest of you all thought it did.
But it’s also important for another reason, which is, you know, if you spend time on the left in America, there are a lot of guys who look like me and, frankly, you, who are always saying-
MARC STEINER: What do you mean by that?
DON GUTTENPLAN: White men of a certain age.
MARC STEINER: Yeah, I got you.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Who are saying, you know, enough with race, enough with gender. You know, stop talking about your identity politics. You guys are distracting from the only thing that really matters, which is class. And if you would just stop banging on about race and gender and whatever else, we could put together a class politics that would, that would be a formula for victory.
And you know, that’s just- pardon my French- bullshit. And you know what? It’s only old white men who ever have that illusion, because women and black people and gay people know better.
MARC STEINER: And we should also- let me add to that group that one of the differences now from before is that never before in history, I think, have we had the percentage of white Americans who see race and racism as a bottom line issue in America that is part of what’s tearing us apart and killing us.
DON GUTTENPLAN: I think that’s right.
MARC STEINER: And that’s the difference between today and 1960 and 1860.
DON GUTTENPLAN: That’s right, and between today in 1930. And so, so in a way the structure of the book is that you have these historical episodes to show that there is this rhythm in American life, and there are these possibilities of things that we’ve achieved before, and tried to do, and could still do. But the present tense chapters, the profiles of people like Antar Lumumba, like Jane McAlevey, the labor organizer, like Jane Kleeb, the environmental campaigner and now head of Democratic Party in Nebraska, like Carlos Ramirez Rosa, the alderman from Chicago. It’s to say that- well, there’s something that Jane MacAlevey says that I just think is great, which is, she said if you, if you don’t fight for a majority, then you surrender the only real weapon that working people have ever had, which is our numbers.
You know, in England, the slogan of the Labour Party now is ‘For the many, not the few.’ And in a sense, that’s at the root of the politics of this book is about; that you have to assemble a majority. And if you’re committed to democracy with a small d, as I am- the big D Democracy, the party is a whole other question. But coming to democracy with a small d, then the only way you can change things is through assembling a majority. And you cannot assemble a majority and ignore race. You cannot assemble a majority and ignore the rights of immigrants. You cannot assemble a majority and ignore the struggles of workers. So that we, we have to find a way for all of these movements which are in revolt to speak to each other, work together, and recognise and be in solidarity with each other. And in a sense, that’s the plea of the book.
MARC STEINER: So I’m curious, when you look at the people you talked about in this book; Kleeb, who organized, who came out of this Republican family, anti-choice Republican family, built the Cowboy Indian Coalition to fight the Keystone Pipeline, became the head of the Democratic Party in Nebraska. And in Chicago, a gay Puerto Rican-Mexican man who is one of the leaders of the progressive movement in Chicago now, the Latino community. Chokwe Lumumba, MacAlevey, the incredible union organizer. So what do we learn from them in terms of where this movement is going? We don’t have a party that encompasses everybody. There’s no popular front that brings everybody together in one place like the ’30s had for a while, until the Communist Party and the Soviet Union killed it. We don’t have that. So what do we have? What is this lesson from history telling us that you write about, in the context of the people you write about, who are very much at the forefront of the struggle in their states?
DON GUTTENPLAN: Well, there is a person who I’ve mentioned who is also, I think, critical of this. And she’s the last chapter in the book, Zephyr Teachout, who just lost her race for attorney general for New York State, but who is definitely not going away. She’s the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit about the emoluments clause, saying that Trump has been taking corrupt payments from foreign governments. And the reason that that matters is because if you ignore corruption, as anybody who’s ever lived in a city run by a Democratic machine can tell you, if you ignore corruption-
MARC STEINER: Chicago, Baltimore, New York, pick your city.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Then you’re ignoring a crucial piece of this. So part of it is- and the other thing is that I quote Dan Cantor, who is one of the founders of the Working Families Party in New York, who says if you try to occupy the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party ends up occupying you. Now, Dan is not someone who has ever turned his back on the Democratic Party. He’s not someone who says, oh, we should all go, you know, leave and vote Green. It’s not that. But it’s that don’t think that the Democratic Party is going to solve it for you. Don’t think you can turn your back on the Democratic Party in a tight corner and expect it to do the right thing, because it won’t unless we make it.
And I suppose that’s where we are now. Where we are now is we have this potential vehicle. And I think, you know, it’s interesting that in Nebraska the anti-Keystone people have taken over the Democratic Party.
MARC STEINER: That’s really fascinating, right.
DON GUTTENPLAN: And in New York, suddenly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you know, is becoming somebody who people are coalescing around. I mean, there’s a lot of grassroots stuff. I guess my, the thing I learned in reporting the book is you’ve got to pay attention to the grassroots. You can’t look at it- you know, even though it was great to see Bernie running, it’s not going to happen from the top down. It’s going to happen from the ground up.
MARC STEINER: So my other question was after you finished writing this book, and you interviewed Zephyr Teachout after she had lost the election for governor in the primary to Cuomo … And now she’s lost again, but she’s still in there fighting and being part of this. But if you look at what happened in the- which is not necessarily in your book, but you look at what happened ’68-’72 in the United States. And a lot of the people who were active in the anti-war movement, in the black liberation movement, other places-women’s movement- ended up inside the Democratic Party. This is a kind of radical wing in 1972, McGovern running for president, all the rest. And so they ended up actually becoming in many ways the establishment of the party run by the corporate Democrats, and got sucked into the machine; willingly or unwillingly, sucked into the machine.
And I look at what’s going on now and seeing the revolt taking place in America, a lot of it taking place inside the Democratic Party, people running in this election. We’ll see what happens in a few weeks in November. But a really powerful group of people from the left of every race in America, all genders, running for a different kind of America. Running for a different kind of republic. So there are real danger signs, though, in terms of what that could mean. It could mean a new republic. It could mean people getting sucked back into it, as well.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Well, you know, it’s … So I guess one of the things you learn if you spend any time in politics is you have to always pay attention to who’s zooming who. You know, so if you- and I think part of what happened in the ’70s is people got elected. They got invited to the party, and they thought, oh, you know, I’m invited the party. I’m a guest. Now it’s all, it’s our party. And it was never their party. And I think that’s, in a sense, that’s why the Zephyr Teachout piece is so crucial, because as long as it’s corporate money funding the Democratic Party, then it’s always going to be the corporations’ party and not ours. And you know, that’s why suddenly suddenly you see all these candidates running and saying, I don’t take corporate money, and that’s a thing. I think that’s great that that’s a thing, we need more of that.
But you know, it’s also not just about elections. And that’s, again, that’s why I begin with Jane MacAlevey, you know, it’s about unions. It’s about organizing where you work. It’s about making sure that the people you do business with belong to unions. It’s about, you know, when you- if you’re in a position to be a buyer from a company saying, you know, are your workers unionized? You know, it’s about solidarity at a very basic level. You know, not passing by if somebody’s on a picket line. So you know- and for that matter, you know, where you buy your books. So I don’t want to say more on that right now. But you know, if you’ve got ears, hear.
MARC STEINER: This has been great. Don Guttenplan, thank you so much for coming by.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Great to talk to you.
MARC STEINER: Don Guttenplan is an editor at large for the Nation magazine, between Vermont and London. The book is The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority. It’s really a good book. I must say, it’s always a pleasure to read a book that is well written; somebody who knows how to write, and brings us that history and present together, to wrestle with where the future is going. And Don, great to have you in town here in Baltimore, and thanks for the book.
DON GUTTENPLAN: Great to be here. Thanks, Marc.
MARC STEINER: Catch the book, folks. The Next Republic by DD Guttenplan. Well worth the read; history and life together and our present struggle. So pick it up at a store, if you can. That would be the best. I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care.
