Progressive Populism Prevails: Charles Derber on How to Fight the Oligarchy

Andrew Keen (0:00): Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody, it’s not just on the right that we have a reaction to traditional liberal democracy. Recently on the show, we had the Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper, who has a new book called Billionaire Backlash, which he argues that the backlash to the billionaires and to neoliberal capitalism actually will strengthen democracy. He has a new book out, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal. Meanwhile, Hélène Landemore from Yale University, another member of the elite with an anti-elitist message, has a new book out called Politics without Politicians: The Case for Citizens' Rule, in which she is arguing more and more unambiguously for direct democracy. So we are seeing many members of the progressive community begin to rethink the value of populism. And my guest today, an old friend, Charles Derber, is very much in that camp. His new book, Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America, takes the position once again that populism isn’t a bad thing. Right-wing populism, of course, is not his thing, but left-wing populism might indeed be the answer. Charles is joining us from Boston; he’s a long-time professor of sociology at Boston College. Charles, is that a fair summary of the new book?

Charles Derber (1:29): Yes, perfect. I really—you know, Andrew, because populism is sort of like—the way you introduced this, Andrew, because populism is a bad word in America to a large degree. You know, people—you hear the word populism—I ask students what they think of when they hear the word populism, and they say it’s people who want mob rule, it’s sort of like angry, kind of crazed people who are not willing to respect the rules of democracy and so forth. And my own reading of history is—I guess the two most relevant things for this conversation is: one, populism almost always is an inevitable political response when the economy becomes really, really difficult. And I think we’re in a bit of a disguised depression. Particularly, you know, the markets have been high, they went down...

Andrew Keen (2:29): Yeah, I’m not sure how disguised it is, Charles, although sometimes with depressions it’s like the old story of being unemployed: if your neighbor’s unemployed it’s a recession; if you’re unemployed it’s a disaster.

Charles Derber (2:41): Right. So Andrew, 60%—six-zero—for the last few years have been saying, these are ordinary Americans who say they feel like they’re in a depression. They feel like they’re one job away—they’re working paycheck to paycheck—and they feel they’re one, you know, one illness or one job away from sinking into oblivion. Poverty, hunger—you know, what is it, 25% of American kids are hungry. There’s—I mean, while we’re just such a divided society today, and the great majority of people are in very hard times. And I think that explains the second point that I found as I was doing this book, Fighting Oligarchy, Andrew, which is that when you look at public opinion, Americans are talking as if they are in a depression. It’s really startling—it was startling to me to see how many Americans say that they really hate big corporations. Corporations are the least—they’re less popular than, you know, city councils, the military, almost any organization in the world.

Andrew Keen (3:55): Well, they’re probably—I’m guessing they’re not any less popular than either political party, especially the Democrats.

Charles Derber (4:01): Well, they actually are, yeah, they’re about in that realm. They’re in the—I mean 72, 73% of people consistently are saying they hate big corporations, which are making their lives terrible and sort of stealing the country. And about another 72—these are supermajorities. And by the way, Andrew, these are big, big numbers among Republicans as well as Democrats, which is important because it has to do with whether, you know, a progressive populism really can take root in America. I mean, large numbers of Republicans are joining these—this kind of populist view that big companies have taken over the country and have made life impossible for them.

Andrew Keen (4:52): Yeah, and this is, of course, Charles, as I don’t need to tell you, an old theme in American history. Landemore—I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her work, but I think you’ll find her argument...

Charles Derber (5:01): Yeah, I don’t know the book, I’m glad to learn about it.

Andrew Keen (5:04): Yeah, I mean, I think you’ll find her argument interesting. She, of course, goes back to antiquity and to the Athenian model of citizens' rule. Your focus, Charles, in this new book on oligarchy—of course, oligarchy was a term invented by the Greeks. Is there value in looking back to antiquity in terms of how to make sense and confront oligarchy?

Charles Derber (5:26): I don’t do it in this book, but I think history is always a wonderful guide to the future. And you know, Athenian democracy was very limited; you know, there was a kind of oligarchy in much of antiquity, you know, in Athens at its—even at the—in the Golden Age. So I do think there’s value. I’d like to look at her book. In my book, I show—I don’t go back to antiquity, but I go back to American antiquity. And I show that right from the beginning, despite the eloquent, you know, democratic rhetoric of the Jeffersons and Washingtons, you know, there’s never been a genuine democratic rule in America. And you know, there’s always been hard times for ordinary people who are not part of the elite. And what I did in this book was I looked at how over the course of American history—always with the eye of trying to figure out what it means for people today—how Americans have come to terms with the fact that their country, despite all the eloquent rhetoric about being an exceptional democracy, most Americans, Andrew, fully understand that the country is ruled by very wealthy people.

Andrew Keen (6:52): Yeah, Charles, let me ask you this question: is liberal democracy compatible with positive populism? In my conversation with Landemore, we talked about the Federalist-Anti-Federalist argument and, of course, the defeat of Anti-Federalists, which was in many ways a kind of progressive populism and maybe a reactionary populism in disguise. Can positive populism exist within the constitutional republic, and when was the best moment for it? Was it in the 1890s? The early 20th century?

Charles Derber (7:24): I mean, you know, if you asked me when did positive populism begin in America, I would say it was with the abolitionists, who were you know, rising to fight—very small number of Americans at first—but realizing that the American Constitution was not very democratic. You know, when the country was founded, about 2% of the country could vote. Blacks, slaves, women, white men who were not propertied had no rights. And in a forthcoming book, I’m arguing the Constitution was written on the basis of the emulating the British Magna Carta, which was really an aristocratic document that militated against a king but not in the service of democratic rule by the people, but rule by the barons, who were the nobility who didn’t feel they were being cut into the profitable wars that King John was waging. And I think that’s a good analogy for what happened in, you know, the American Revolution was—before the Revolution, the country was ruled by guys with funny names like Jefferson and you know...

Andrew Keen (8:39): No, no, I take your point, Charles, but I’m not sure you’re answering my question. I take your point that, of course, it was founded by an elite—white men, all the rest of it, property owners—we know that. But were there moments—I mean, the franchise was extended, eventually women got the vote, eventually even African Americans got a kind of vote, even in Jim Crow, although there wasn’t much of one. Were there moments—we’ve done lots of shows with people in the past like Thomas Frank, who look back to the 1890s and see some positive models where, for example, the white and the black working class marched together and organized together in terms of confronting the capitalist barons.

Charles Derber (9:20): Right. So that, I think, you know, that populist movement of the 1890s, which I think most Americans know very little about, was sort of a model for me. That’s one of the positive populist stellar moments in American history because it did just what you said: it brought together—there was the first Gilded Age, you had Rockefeller, the first billionaire, when most Americans were very poor. And you had a small elite like today of very wealthy corporate people running the country. And you had, you know, a mass of farmers—this was back in the 1880s and 1890s—and immigrant workers, some native workers, who were basically in the kind of very hard times that American workers are in today. And I mean, my friends, my liberal friends tell me, "You’re dreaming to think that these people—you know, they’re culturally conservative, these workers you’re putting your hopes in, and they don’t have any inclination to join in some sort of progressive revolt against rich people running the country." And what I—this book, in a sense, is my effort to read American history and the current American scene to say, "Is that true? Is it really true that because of a lot of very clear culturally conservative forces among non-college American workers, who are about 60% of the country—it’s the majority of Americans—that you can’t really expect to see that kind of a group of people rising up against these elites?" And what I found in doing this study, much to actually my own surprise, was that the level of populist—and by populist, I don’t mean far-right populism of the Trump form, which is pretty much rhetoric in service of billionaires that he claims to be militating against—I’m talking about people who really, they feel it, like you said, in their bones. They’re not looking at their—you know, your neighbor has one thing; they are saying, "I can’t pay my groceries this week" or "I can’t..."

Andrew Keen (11:36): Yeah, Charles, you’ve—the way you’ve presented it so far though, you keep on talking about economic problems, you suggested we’re in some sort of deep recession, maybe even a depression. But it seems to me, and please correct me if I’m wrong—and you’ve also written about this, you wrote an interesting piece on Truthout about 1964 Freedom Summer as a model, a political model to confront some of the injustices in America—but both the white and the black and the brown working classes, and perhaps middle classes in this country—I take your point on economics—but at the moment, they seem to be mostly triggered by what’s happening, for example, on the streets of Minneapolis and the behavior of ICE, which has nothing to do with economics. I mean, implicitly it’s connected with economics, but people are outraged by the behavior of Trump’s secret police, or perhaps not-so-secret police. So coming back to my question, Charles, are you suggesting that really when it comes down to it, the only way to fight oligarchy is on the economic front, that anything else—ethics, politics—doesn't really matter?

Charles Derber (12:44): No, not at all. In fact, what I mean by positive—if you look at the history of positive populism, it is economic, but it’s, you know, look at those people you mentioned, Andrew, the populists of the 1890s. I mean, they were going after Wall Street; they wanted, you know, an economy more controlled by ordinary people, but they really wanted a more democratic administration. You know, the corporations were taking over the government. This link between political authoritarianism and economic authoritarianism is very strong. I mean, who’s making out like bandits from these immigrant wars that Trump is waging? Who’s making billions off the detention camps that are going in? The—you know, Palantir and the analytic, you know, Silicon Valley oligarchs who are deeply part of this authoritarian thing. I think it’s very hard to separate the political authoritarian forces and the economic forces. In fact, part of this book is to try to challenge your question and to say that this oligarchy is a mixture of—you know, this is what far-right populism does: it brings together an oligarchy which is economically dominant with a political campaign or agenda which divides workers—white workers against black workers and immigrants. And I think, what I like about the Gilded Age populists is it was an economic revolution, but it was also—you know, the main historian of that period, Lawrence Goodwyn, wrote the book called The Democratic Moment. He said this was the most politically democratic movement in American history. So when you say it was just economically driven, that’s not correct.

Andrew Keen (14:55): Yeah, and I think that one of the interesting things always seems to me about that populism—of course, the figure who’s most associated with it was William Jennings Bryan...

Charles Derber (15:06): But he sold it out, you know.

Andrew Keen (15:08): Yeah, I mean, he ran four times for President, lost every time. But he was, in some ways, a more complex figure than some people would like to think, especially liberals. Of course, he was on—from a liberal point of view or an enlightenment point of view—on the wrong side of the Scopes trial of the 1920s. Are you suggesting that some of these cultural forces—I know you’re not a big fan of identity politics—that progressives need to distance themselves from some of the cultural concerns of the last few decades, that they actually haven’t benefited ordinary people?

Charles Derber (15:44): Well, I take race, racism, very, very seriously. Again, you know, racism is at the heart of fascism. I mean, Hitler ran a racist regime and turned it into extreme authoritarianism. Race has always been used in America by capitalist elites to divide the working class, and it’s right at the heart of white Christian nationalism and far-right populism, which is the politics of Trump today. So I’m not trying to argue that progressives should forget about race and gender and identity issues, but that the politics of kind of siloed identity movements, which sort of disassociate racial civil rights or gender rights from economics issues, historically don’t tend to work. I mean, look at Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement that you referenced earlier. He argued that, "How can I possibly organize against violence against blacks in the American South?" And I was there at the time in the '60s when there was an effort to desegregate, you know, Jim Crow South. He was—Martin Luther King said, "I can’t be a civil rights activist without being an anti-war activist." And he was saying more broadly that these forces of repression and violence that, you know, black people are dealing with in America are so intimately related to broader forms of economic violence and military violence that they can’t really be—you know, he was sort of essentially saying—he took a lot of heat from this. You know, a lot of the people in the civil rights movement went after King for saying that he was selling out the civil rights movement, but he was saying, "I just don’t think there’s any genuine possibility of a successful civil rights movement without being an anti-"—this was a question of how to relate to the anti-Vietnam War movement at the time. And he realized that there could be, at least he came to believe there could be, no successful civil rights movement without the civil rights movement being totally intertwined with the anti-war movement. He felt the same thing about capitalism and democracy.

Andrew Keen (18:24): It’s funny how in some ways so little has actually changed in the last 50 or 60 years. The Democrats are still debating these issues. There was a headline on CNBC recently about a group of Democrats who aren’t ready to jettison big business. I don’t think you would be particularly sympathetic to them; they certainly haven’t read your new book, Fighting Oligarchy. How optimistic are you that the Democratic Party is able to embrace a positive populism? Of course, this has been an ongoing intellectual civil war within the Democratic Party: Clinton, Obama, etc. Is there still hope from your point of view?

Charles Derber (19:07): I mean, go back to the populist period. William Jennings Bryan—there was, in 1892, the Populists formed a new party, the People’s Party. It lost. Bryan went over and joined the Democratic Party to run against McKinley in 1896. McKinley is one of Trump’s heroes. And he sold out the Populist—I mean, he really abandoned, he ran on a narrow monetary kind of policy that abandoned the thrust of the anti-corporate and democratic, the genuinely democratic revolution that the Populists really wanted to see. So I think the—but on the other hand, go up to the '30s and the New Deal, where you had a Democratic Party that was encouraging millions of workers for the first time to occupy their factories and to form unions and to, you know—I mean, I would say the '30s reflected a form of positive populism which the Democratic Party helped lead and frame. Johnson, during when he signed the civil rights movement and the Voting Act, was still in the Democratic Party and was in some ways enabling the civil rights movement even when he was going to war in Vietnam. So the Democratic Party is, you know, complicated; the history is very complicated. But you know, I think I’m encouraged today by people like, say—I mean, there are people like Bernie Sanders and AOC and Jamaal Bowman who are clearly, you know, positive populists in the way that I talk about in the book, and I pay a lot of attention to them in the book. In fact, this book, Fighting Oligarchy, is often confused with Bernie’s book, Fight Oligarchy. I didn’t—when I titled this book, I didn’t know about his.

Andrew Keen (21:14): Did you steal the title from Bernie? Did he forgive you?

Charles Derber (21:17): No, I didn’t know about it. I when—when my book was already in press, I think Bernie’s book was already out, I had not seen it. Anyway, I’m encouraged by a host of other Democrats like, say, Senator Murphy from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, or Van Hollen. These are people who are seen as sort of more mainstream Democrats, but they’re running—well, they’re running in a way that you sort of thought was a little bit contradictory. They’re running against Trump’s immigration war and what’s happening in Minneapolis, but they’re also running against the corporate oligarchy. And they view—they’re arguing, people like Van Hollen and Murphy are correctly connecting the whole Trump far-right regime as a melding together of corporate power and, you know, sort of racist, you know, authoritarian state power.

Andrew Keen (22:24): Can they borrow some of Trump’s agenda though? Should positive, what you call positive populism—should it, for example, borrow from Trump’s trade policy, his defense of American workers? Are there things that Trump has done that you think that the left can emulate?

Charles Derber (22:42): Well, you know, what I feel is Trump sort of understood that when he ran in, say, 2024, but even earlier, against both Hillary and then against Kamala Harris, he understood people were really, really pissed off, both about the economic status and generally just feeling that ordinary people didn’t have much of a shot of any kind, whether economically or politically or morally status-wise in the country. And he—so if you ask me, should people take some—should Democrats or positive populists take something from Trump, I would say absolutely yes. They should take something from Trump: the idea that this system needs to be shaken up deeply and that lots of evidence exists that ordinary people feel that way. This is not just a radical left point of view or a radical right point of view; it’s a mainstream public view of ordinary people. They feel the system is breaking down. And I know that sounds like rhetoric, but there’s just endless polling data, including among Republicans, which suggest people really think the system is broken. And I by that I mean the economic system, the political system, the cultural system, the military system. Even my students say their personal communication systems are being broken by the stranglehold they see—you focused on a lot of these issues—they see the Silicon Valley elites as drug peddlers, and they bought the drugs and they don’t know how to sort of break the addiction.

Andrew Keen (24:26): Charles, you’ve referred to the 1890s, to the New Deal, to Johnson’s Great Society. Is there a 21st-century twist to positive populism? Could, for example, AI be used more effectively, more democratically, to give more power to the people? We can't just go back. Are you just a nostalgist for a positive populist day?

Charles Derber (24:49): Oh my goodness, no. In fact, my main concern about the resistance to Trump, which I view as a form of positive populism, is that too much of it just wants to go back to immediately before Trump, which is disaster in my view, Andrew. If you go back to what happened, what it was with Bush and Obama and Clinton before Trump, you’re almost certain to get another Trump; you’re going to get more authoritarianism, it’s built into the fabric of America. So going back to pre-Trump era is unacceptable and defeatist. But I would say the resistance on the streets you referred to—the people who, you know, are rallying about the murder of, you know, Nicole Good and James Prete—these people are part of a—they’re also flowing out on the streets in these huge anti-oligarchic, anti-corporate rallies. When you separated the immigration issue from the economic issue, it’s not—that separation does not exist in the minds of this resistance. The people out on the streets, the people in the Indivisible movements and so many of the labor people, the students that I know and so forth, they view the economic issues and the authoritarian, you know, far-right authoritarian issues—the anti-immigrant war—they’re correct to view these issues as totally intertwined. The system of power we have is simultaneously, you know, a system of power of extremely wealthy people dividing the country to—and ruling as capitalists always have, but with more overtly authoritarian...

Andrew Keen (26:42): Well, let’s talk about capitalism. You were on the show a couple of years ago arguing that capitalism is driving extinction. If this was a Fox News show, Charles, I probably would say to you, "Well, you sound to me a little bit like a socialist. Are you just against capitalism? Are you against America? Do you see positive populism being able to coexist within a market system?"

Charles Derber (27:07): So, you know, this is a complicated question and I deal with it...

Andrew Keen (27:12): Which means you don’t like the answer.

Charles Derber (27:14): No, I actually like the answer a lot, which is that capitalism—American capitalism—I see it as not consistent. Positive populism cannot exist with American capitalism. American capitalism is the most oligarchic, you know, individualistic, anti-collective identity of any system of capitalism in the developed world. If you go, for example, to Europe...

Andrew Keen (27:44): Well, I remember in that famous debate with Hillary, and Hillary after Bernie was talking endlessly about Denmark, Hillary said, "Well, it’s all very well, I love Denmark, but America could never be like Denmark."

Charles Derber (27:57): Yeah, I think that’s why she lost. Remember, you know, Bernie won 23 primaries against Hillary in 2016. And Americans working—people, ordinary people, students, people I deal with—they are aware that American capitalism is unique. That there’s something very different about it. Yes, it’s produced a lot of wealth for a small number of very rich people and a good standard of living for a larger number of people. But when you ask me, can positive populism coexist with American capitalism, I would say absolutely not. I mean, in the New Deal you got closest to a kind of positive populism that wanted to see significant government intervention in the markets, right? It wasn't—and you know, it was moving sort of in the direction of a European social...

Andrew Keen (29:00): So what you're saying is if we get positive populism, if your positive populists come to power, the only way to maintain the market is to create a sort of Danish or Northern European-style market capitalism?

Charles Derber (29:15): Yeah, I mean, you need—I don’t think anybody is talking about eliminating markets altogether. The question is, does market power and market logic dominate the entire society? I mean, the thing about the American market is that it has created a form of culture—a highly, I call it sociocidal in my recent book on Bonfire that we talked about—it is breaking apart social connections. It is breaking down...

Andrew Keen (29:45): Yeah, the book you were on last year was called Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relationships, and the Quest for Democracy.

Charles Derber (29:54): Right. So that kind of capitalism, if I’m right that it’s contributing to the breakdown of community and social relations, if I’m correct that it’s very central to the breakdown of democratic life—which has always been very limited in the United States in any case—which is very connected to the capitalism that is promoting militarism and war, the capitalism that’s promoting environmental extinction—that kind of capitalism is not only not coexist—you know, compatible with positive populism, it’s not compatible with survival. It’s a system that’s going to self-destruct one way or the other. I’d rather see us help it sort of be transformed before it destroys everything. Does that mean the end of markets? No. Does that mean the end of business? No. Does that mean the end of all kinds of private enterprise? No. But it does mean a very different kind of role of government and collective identity and community exercising itself in politics and in people’s everyday lives and in the workplace. Just a very simple example: American companies, you know, as you know, Bezos and Musk have been joined by Trump in a legal suit to end the constitutionality of unions. Since the New Deal, when unions were—unions, I like unions because they partly give workers somewhat of a fair shake in a pretty raw system, and they help build social relations and connection in a culture where people are feeling very disconnected. The people with the lowest level of social capital, or you know, the sort of power that comes with social—strong social relationships—are working-class people. Unions combat that. Today, as you know, Andrew, the percentage of workers in unions has fallen from 40% to 6% in the private sector labor force. I mean, we’re just—this kind of market is...

Andrew Keen (32:20): Now, in most of Europe, that figure is somewhere between 45 and 75%. And they have—I don’t agree with that—I mean look at healthcare, look at...

Charles Derber (32:32): Right. But there is—there are economic...

Andrew Keen (32:37): Right. But there is—there are economic data that suggest wages are much higher, average wages are much higher in Europe than in the United States. The United States has fallen to, I think, number nine in wages. Most of the Central European societies have higher wages, and I’m not even counting in their wages the benefits they get from universal healthcare and free public higher education, childcare—all those other—those are the social wage that comes on top. But listen, I’m not arguing for Europe. Europe, as you say, has lots of its own problems as immigrants have come in and as German central banks have gone back to austerity and kind of neoliberal financial policy. So I’m not arguing for Europe per se. I’m just—you asked me the question, is positive populism, can it coexist with American capitalism? And my answer to that is no. Does that mean the elimination of markets? It doesn’t. There are many ways to—I mean, let’s go back to the New Deal. Would you say, Andrew, that the New Deal was capitalist?

Andrew Keen (33:48): Well, it worked, as you said, as you’re suggesting, it worked within the market, so...

Charles Derber (33:53): So I think—I think—when I think about what a positive pop—I think the '30s were one model of an American positive populism. The New Deal was pretty limited in its reforms, but it made a big difference. It—I mean, for one thing, for the first time, ordinary Americans felt that they had a place in the government and the society and that somebody really cared enough to help them organize themselves and get some sort of decent living conditions.

Andrew Keen (34:30): You are again though—you’re falling into the nostalgia trap here of going back to the 1930s, almost 100 years ago, in an entirely different historical situation.

Charles Derber (34:41): No, no, no. I think we’re in a different Gilded Age, and I think actually what’s going on—I’m taking my guide a lot, Andrew, from the people out on the streets today in whether it’s in Minneapolis or San Francisco or L.A. or wherever. I—I make the argument, this book is a lot about not just economic democracy, but the kind of political democracy that can ward off the kind of American fascism that has a long history in American life. I’m taking my guide a lot, Andrew, from the people out on the streets today. I think—I think—I’m not being nostalgic for the history. I’m just saying you can learn a few lessons from the past. But this is a kind of power on the street that I think is very real today and very intense. And I don’t think it’s purely economic, even though I argue in this book that economics is a big part of why it’s rising. But I think...

Andrew Keen (35:55): Well, let’s talk about capitalism. You were on the show a couple of years ago...

Charles Derber (35:59): Oh, I completely agree. And the oligarchy is, you know, and the power of the people who run—is cultural, it’s political as you know, it’s military as well as economic. So when I talk about corporate oligarchy, I’m talking about a form of power, and it’s particularly distinctive now in, for example, the Silicon Valley, the biggest companies in the world historically are the Magnificent Seven, and these guys who you know very well are—what is their power? You know, they’re heavily militarized, they’re at the heart of the national security state, they’re heavily cultural—I call it a kind of algorithmic wiring. It’s a new wiring of power that...

Andrew Keen (36:50): They’re watching everything, Charles. They know what we’re doing even now. They know what you and I are saying right now, yes. And it’s political. So when I talk about positive populism, I’m talking about a kind of power, a kind of movement. And I think it exists. I’m not being nostalgic for the past. I’m just saying you can learn a few lessons from the past. But this is a kind of power on the street that I think is very real today and very intense. And I don’t think it’s purely economic, even though I argue in this book that economics is a big part of why it’s rising. But I think...

Andrew Keen (37:34): Well, there you have it: Fighting Oligarchy—sounds like a rap song—by our old friend of the show Charles Derber, How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America. Charles, keep your good work up. We need troublemakers like you. Thank you so much.

Charles Derber (37:51): Thank you very much, Andrew. Appreciate it.

Andrew Keen (37:54): Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I’d be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kind of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in the future. Thank you again.