Explicit

High-Class Fail

Published Nov 9, 2023, 8:01 AM

Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, returns to Woke AF Daily for a timely discussion about the unique nature of the American experiment and the very real risk of failure we are all facing in this moment.

Good morning, keeps, and welcome to ook f Daily with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody recording from the home Bunker. Folks. Oh my fucking god, there is good news to report and it couldn't come soon enough. This week was election week in America and on the ballot our rights as per usual, since the dawn of MAGA in Ohio, in Kentucky, in Virginia, the voters had their voices heard. In Ohio, they have now enshrined abortion protection into the constitution. After the Republicans spent twenty eight million dollars to try and deny this right to Ohioans, they fought back and now abortion and abortion access will be the law of the land. Over in Kentucky, Governor Andy Basheer, Democrat, won handedly against the Trump backed and supported Daniel Cameron. You may remember Daniel Cameron because he was the ag who, you know, just kind of didn't do his job when Breonna Taylor was killed in her fucking sleep because of a no knock warrant that was issued for the wrong address and it cost her her life, Daniel Cameron didn't really give a fuck because you know what, folks, just a reminder not all skin folk are kinfolk. I think most surprisingly and most excitingly is what took place in the state of Virginia. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican in a vest, basically Trump and a vest, thought that he was going to be able to win back the Republican state legislature so that he could push through a fifteen week abortion ban in Virginia. And once again, the voters said hell no. Not only did the Democrats hold on to the state Senate, they also flipped the House blue. So Glenn Younkin can hang his hopes nowhere because the people of Virginia spoke out. So what does this say to us, folks? What can we understand and know from this moment? And I think it's this. It's the fact that when the people understand what is at stake, when the message is clear, when the messengers, the representatives that are voting for, are quality candidates who care about them, who care about democracy, they show out and they show up. Now Republican and now talking head Rick Santorum said the quiet part out loud when he said, oh, first of all, this motherfucker referred to abortion as a quote unquote sexy issue. So make that make sense? But on top of which, he also suggested that this is why what happened in Ohio means that democracy doesn't work, meaning that allowing people to vote right on the issues that affect their day to day life don't work because what Republicans want, and what they are saying very clearly is a theocracy layered with fascism, because nothing that the Republican Party is offering to the American people is popular or wanted by the majority, which is why they want to anoint Donald Trump their king, so that he can weaponize the Department of Justice, he can weaponize the military against the American people, and they can by force have their way. That's what Rick Santorum said. That's what all of the Republican candidates that are vying quote unquote for the presidency when we all know that they're really vying to be Donald Trump's vice president. That's what they are saying right now. We have somebody that is sitting two heartbeats away from the presidency, who believes in a national abortion van, who believes in a national divorce ban, who believes that gay people should be beaten and shocked out of their gatum. They are telling us with each candidate with each vote, with each person who they are, believe them. Coming up next today we welcome back to the show on gidridadis, the author of The Persuaders, to talk to us about democratic messaging, to talk to us about the moment that we are in where we need to find hope in and how we continue to fight for justice and equity. That conversation is coming up next, folks. I am very happy to welcome back to wok F Daily author writer thinker on On Gidatas, who has been on this show before. When your book, which is now out, has been out in paperback, The Persuaders at the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds and democracy. I can think of no better book, no better timing than yours. And I just want to start off with how I've been starting off most conversations, which is asking people how they are and how you are managing through what has become and every day, multiple day alerts on our phones about whether it's a mass shooting, whether it's war, whether it's someone being pushed on a subway. There's just violence, anger and rage everywhere. So how are you managing?

I mean, aside from the state of the world and then great, you know, the world, the world complicates that. Right now, it's just such an awful time, and I think it's you know, we've lived through a lot, not just right now but in the last decade or two. But I think this time feels really heavy.

And kind of.

You know, pushing the limits of like whether we can all live together to the kind of edge, you know. And I use that phrase carefully because that's basically the question of democracy, you know, can we live together? Democracy is a fancy Greek word for can we live together? Or can we not live together? Can we live together and choose things together? And you know, here there, everywhere. I think it is more of an open question right now of whether.

We can.

You know, and that's that is actually a really good question. Can we all live together? Can we and not just live together in a way that ignores each other's differences? Right? Like I think that you and I broke both probably grew up in age where it was about people being quote unquote tolerant, right, and then we watched as that move from tolerance of other people moved into acceptance. Right. We never quite got to the place of celebration. I don't think you know, I think that we we kind of stopped right at that door and then backslid, And so I wonder, you know, if this has all been a project, which it's been, right, a project of figuring out how to live together, how to bring more people to the table, how to open up more conversations, and the place that we find ourselves in. If we're looking at it as in a house that all the doors are slowly shutting one by one, what does it look like then, for for people to put themselves in that doorway to say no, don't close this one, right? You know, what what does that look and what does that feel like?

Yeah? And first of all, let me say this, and this may I don't know sound people may disagree with this, but you know, we all casually, many of us kind of revere our ancestors and speak well of our ancestors in all communities. But the truth is around the world, if you go back far enough into your ancestry, wherever you're from, I'm going to bet that your ancestors were pretty intolerant people. Right, if you go back beyond the twentieth century, I don't care what community or what place it was not great to be gay in basically anywhere. It was not great to be trands in a whole bunch of places. Right, Most of our ancestors had not met people in their lifetimes who didn't look like them, who didn't participate in the same religion, go to the same sub denomination of the same religion, didn't eat the same kind of you know, cast food in India, who didn't you know, farm this, do the same kind of work. So our ancestors were able to live together because they didn't very often. I mean, there's some exceptions, there's places Istanbul where people have been living together and you know, for a very long time. But for most of our ancestors everywhere, they were able to live together because they live with people who were exactly like them, and small numbers of people controlled everything. Right, That was like some level one video game of living together.

Right.

If you look at what we are trying to do in the United States now, in much of the modern world today, we are trying to do something completely running.

Laps around what our ancestors try to do.

We're trying to live with all kinds of different people who share no basic code of how to be, who were raised differently, who have all kinds of historical beefs and conflicts with each other, who have different religions, who have a different idea of what freedom means, of what safety means, of what love means, of what having each other's back means. Particularly in America, we're trying to do something that is gravity defying, That is law of physics defying, you know. And I always like to set the table with that because I think it's important to remember that the that the like seeming disaster of our politics right now is occurring in a context.

It is a very high class.

Fail, right, Like we are failing at doing something super super hard, you know, which is really different than failing at doing something super easy. Right, We're actually engaged in a very worthy project to see if you look at the United States and focus on that if three million, three fifty million people who look really really different from each other and don't share a lot of foundational things can live together and do so through everybody participating in the conversation about how they should live, instead of like giving it to a king. And so I think I, you know, at the heart of the persuaders' idea of like, let's start with a little mercy for ourselves about how hard the project is, right, and remember what the project is, because it's really easy to just ask one guy to decide everything. We're not doing that. It's really easy to be Norway and just have like a bunch of blonde people you know, who look alike redistributing resources to each other. Congratulations on your strong safety net, right, but kind of easy, kind of easy. Yeah, we're trying to do something hard, and the persuaders is in many ways about I think, starting from that recognition and then thinking about people who I profound the book, who are figuring out ways of doing that hard thing and enlarging people sense of willingness to live together, you know.

And I love the fact that what you are, how you were setting this table is honestly from a place of grace. Right to give ourselves some grace in this idea that what we're trying to do has never been done right, and it is this exceptional feat to say that I'm going to look past whatever has come up for me epigenetically, whatever traumas have plagued our histories, whatever issues, and are working to try and live side by side, to try and live with one another in a way that has never been done, and I do I think that maybe to that point, we haven't talked about how difficult it is. We've just kind of pushed past and said, why isn't it happening and why isn't it happening fast enough when we have these extraordinary backslides, because where we are in is in an extraordinary backslide. But I think that we weren't moving forward with the intentionality that you just laid out, which is that we're doing something that no one else in the world is doing because everywhere else that you look, the people still majority look like each other, pray like each other. You know, what have you? The United States is really this hodgepodge.

And I travel a bunch. I travel around the world for my work, and it's a really meaningful difference that we should that we should own and be proud of. You know, China fantastic country. China is not a country made of people from around the world. China is a country of Chinese people. India is not a country made of people from all around the world, country of Indian people. Right Europe, they have, you know, minority populations, but it's it's not the size and level of ours. It's very carefully managed. It's a lot of guest workers. You don't even have natural birth citizenship in a lot of those countries. Right. We make a million or so citizens a year in this country. Even when Trump was president, that didn't stop. Right, So we are engaged in a project of attempting to build a kind of country that is an awesome pursuit, a country made of the world. And this is not just something happening in a handful of elite spaces in Brooklyn and Berkeley. Right, I travel to the length and breadth of this country. I'm just in North Carolina. I'm not like rural North Carolina. You go to rooms, you go to companies, you go to restaurants. Look around. This is where our ancestors would have been, like what are all these people doing in a restaurant together?

Right?

Like what happens? Is this the beginning of a joke? Like like why? Like why is this happening? Right? I just start from that. I'm still amazed by it, even though it's the only thing I've ever known in a deep way, like this country is trying a hard thing and an unintuitive thing. And then the second point, which relates to what you were just saying about. The backsliding is when we have this attitude of like, ah, everything is so terrible, Why is it all so terrible? Why is this happening? It's often asked in this way of like this shouldn't be happening. There's no there's no logical reason that we're having, you know, a kind of handmaid's tail political backlash, or there's no logical reason why, you know, white people are gravitating to authoritarian movements. And I actually think this is a very dangerous logic, Like it's an emotional reaction, right, It's it's just an anger. I mean, everybody who I ever meet, who's watched me in MSNBC, like this is why they're watching MSNBC eight hours day. They just want to have this like therapeutic thing of like it's so outrageous that anybody would be behaving like this. And I kind of have a different view, which is when I look at most of what I see happening to me, these are very logical, predictable, almost inevitable results of the kinds of conditions we are living through. So if you are as we are have been in the last fifty sixty years. I would say changing the status of women more in the last fifty sixty years than we probably did in the previous five thousand. Is it so weird that a significant fraction of men who were raised in the old way and who have anxiety status, anxiety about who they're going to be and how they're going to fit and what their sources of esteem are going to be, and whether their wife will still respect them, whether their kids all of that. Is it really that weird that that would become a constituency that can be weaponized to try to put women in their place. None of this is saying it's right. On the other hand, if someone hold you in nineteen fifty, all right, here's what we're going to do to the status of women, and we're gonna do it at like one hundred x the pace of normal human change, and we're gonna see what happens. And then you were to ask follow up questions like and do we have a plan for like managing men down.

From privileged psychologically?

Like do we have a plan for helping men see who they're going to be on the other side of change? Like what happens when men like no longer are breadwinners in families, like do they will there be replacement sources of value and esteem for them that we will help teach them. And you're like, now, we'll just we'll just see, like we'll play it by ear. You know, if you told me that in nineteen fifty, I'd be like, Okay, cool, you can get some backsliding around like twenty twenty three, like you're gonna you know, you know, you're gonna have some demagogic movements. And by the way, it's not even necessarily a majority of men. It's just like enough men have no idea. It's pain, right that that fame phrase, I forget who said it. Anger is what pain looks like in public, right, It's they're just like people who honestly don't know who they're going to be on the far side of change. I'm focusing on men for a second, but you can then make the same one about white people. Right again, A lot of folks that you and I know probably are more focused on how much more we need to change. But let's be honest, we have changed a ton, a ton, and we disrespect the people who achieve those victories by kind of minimizing the fact that like they achieved a lot over the next over the last thirty forty fifty sixty seventy years, a lot, right, a lot in making this country truer to what it promised it would be on race and other things. And if you were to look at that and say, and by the way, do we've planned for white people like it's it's a pretty different psychological experience to have completely unearned privilege that guides and un or girds your life and then to kind of slowly have that not be the thing anymore in one institution after another and start to try to have a more fair society. Do we have a plan for that? Are going to help educate people to like, not good with that, to actually realize now we're just gonna it's less a fair we have done. I am so obsessed with this topic. You can tell my passion. Like we have. You know, we talk about less a fair economics, just like let people do like good luck, We have done less a fair psychology on all of the kind of social transitions involved in moving towards justice, greater justice right, in moving towards a gender equal future, and moving towards rethinking what gender even means it's happening right now, in moving towards racial progress, in moving towards giving immigrants, to the right state, all these things that I support one hundred and eighty five percent, we've kind of just been like, hope everybody are yeah, right. And to me, I say all that to say that, I look at everything happening now, all the backlashes, the things that make me as mad as anybody listening to this, and I think not weird, not random, not outrageous, logical, predictable symptoms erupting over our body politic given what we've been doing, what we've been putting in our body, what we have been going through, And that, to me actually opens up the conversation about how should we be guiding people through this era. What kinds of meaning making and organizing and storytelling could there be, Because if you just say, like there are some outrageous people doing outrageous things in our politics, there's nothing you can do.

You just have to think, right, because you've just it's just a statement, right, It's not a solution. It's not oriented and really in understanding. My question though for you, is that if there were to be and you are one of those guides, with the books, conversations, and work that you put out into the universe to try and alter how people think and how they examine this moment. On one side, you would say that progressives and folks on the left would say, well, why do we have to handhold them? We've been handholding them, We've been catering to men, we've been handholding white people and telling them that their tears are okay and collectively holding them right like, I'm done, I'm exhausted, I'm over it, so honestly, because those are more so likely the people that are listening to this show right now, what's your response to that versus we know what the opposition, we know where the true opposition to that is. But what about those folks that are just like I'm tired, I don't want to hold your hand.

I think you just as you always do, Like you just perfectly encounterated I think the idea that is behind why we don't do the thing I was describing earlier, And I think you perfectly encapsulated what I think is in some ways the biggest progressive mistake of the era. Right, And so let me start with like a mantra of mine, which is that I think the burden of citizenship is accepting that what is not your fault is sometimes your problem. Whooh, Okay, a lot of things are not any of our fault, but they are our problem. Okay, if you're nineteen, climate change is definitely not your fault. It's unfortunately your problem. You can't just say it's a problem with people who were like, lived longest and polluted the longest. Right part of citizenship, it is not your fault, is your problem. I think the real I one hundred percent get the emotion behind what you just said.

And I hear it a lot.

But I think we have to separate the fact that the opposition to some of these changes is not correct.

It's wrong.

Wanting to cling to white privilege and supremacy is wrong. It's substantively a wrong position. It's a wrong thing to cling to. It's a thing that can't be abolished fast enough. Wanting to cling to patriarchy and the ability to slap your secretary on the butt at work with impunity is wrong. And like, as fast as we can dismantle that, the better. Okay, So that's like point number one, point number two is that, and it's a more morally neutral point. Managing human beings from one state of being to another is very hard, okay, and people can seldom do it alone. And doing one hundred million people at the same time is like a social tsunami. Right, And someone I talked to for the persuader has made this very clear, Like people get a heart attack, okay, and you and that doctor will say to them, okay, like you can't eat this anymore, You can't eat that anymore, Like it will die within a year if you don't listen to these four rules of what you can and can I eat, right, and I forget the number, but like the overwhelming majority of people cannot comply with it. Don't compete, okay, I need you to change what you eat to stay alive. Yes, welcome to who we are. Most of us are like, ah, it's a lot, okay. So now think about an entire country built on certain ideas of race, white domination. Who gets to decide getting to be mediocre but still run the company, et cetera. On the gender side, like an entire elaborate structure of respect, esteem rewards for men for women, different ideas, roles. You want to get all rid of all of that rightfully in a five to six seven decade period, right, And you think it'd be easier than just like people have so much less motivation to make those changes than they do to stop eating bacon to stay alive. If people cannot stop eating bacon to stay alive, if people often, through their choices, choose death over diet alteration, how are we expecting large numbers of white people, of men, of whoever to change unilaterally themselves, change how they are to live in this different way? Right? Like, this is hard. I am not saying this to say to slow walk to I am as in favor of doing these changes as fast and as in as far going away as anybody. But I think there's this huge blind spot around thinking that people are not going to need help getting there. Yeah, and so this is not about holding people's hands. And I understand like you're saying, we've got to fuss over these people, Like the whole last four hundred years was fussing over these people. Is this just the replacement of like one fussing with another. I think this leads us to a very dark place because those people will get fussed over. Okay, the people who feel kind of homeless between the old ways and the new ways, between the old ideas of gender and the new ones, between the old ideas of privilege and power and race and the new ones. Like they will get catered to, but they're a market that they're like a hungry market that will be fed. Okay, that is not optional. What is the choice is who feeds them? Okay? Do you want Donald Trump talking them through? So if you are a man who feels like you can't be like your daddy was, and then your son's coming home acting in all these new ways that seem to you effeminate and weird and or just makes you feel like you don't understand the world, and you're caught literally between your daddy and your son, which I think you know a lot of fifty year old men in this country would feel. Donald Trump's very happy to talk you through those feelings. And if you actually look at what Donald Trump's saying, it's not a policy and this and that he's actually trying in many ways to talk you through those feelings. They don't want you to being a man anymore or just the way he performs, right, He's actually he actually recognizes that that's a feel you have and he's trying to resolve that.

Sense of homelessness or alienation. Right.

I would much rather Joe Biden help talk that man through the era, or AOC talk that man through the era, or activists or organizers. I'd rather door knockers are going and talking to them. Like I think, if we get into this notion that people don't need to be helped with their psychological transitions in an era of extraordinary power shifts, we're not like righteously avoiding emotional labor that we shouldn't have to do. We're just handing people to fascists who are very happy to talk people through psychological displacement.

I mean, god, damn, yeah, you have just once again convinced me that that you know, it isn't about the emotion labor of the thing. It is who who do we want them to be educated through and educated by? Because they will be right? And I think that that, to me, that's the perfect place for us to land today. But that is that is the question. And I think that your book and every everything is about that people are stuck and you just you just this was so succinct, and thank you so much. It was so succinct because people are stuck, and it's like, how do we want to get them unstuck? Is is truly the question, folks, if you have not gotten it yet, the book is the persuaders at the front lines of the fight for hearts and minds, hearts, minds and democracy, which is everything of where we are. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you for talking to you. I mean I could talk to you for like literally, I need you to talk me through life. We'll do a series, but thank you. That is it for me today, dear friends, on woke a app as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.

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