 15 seconds to get yourselves settled. Thank you, thank you again for coming. My name is Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of the political reform program here at New America and I'm pleased to welcome you to an event that's really an event of the fellows program here. We're going to discuss a topic of the undemocratic state race and the lessons of American history. And I think this is a conversation that had its origins in I think a conversation on Twitter as many things like this do. Which was a conversation about how some scholars and observers and journalists were kind of felt like the threats to democracy in the US were new and challenging and a surprise to us. And others pointed out that particularly scholars of race and ethnicity have been thinking about these challenges for a long time and think about them in the context of reconstruction and Jim Crow and many other periods where the fundamental promise of democracy has been limited for a great many people. And it's a very timely question. I got an interesting Twitter thing about there was an article proposing that the Democratic party would be better off if it hadn't embraced Hubert Humphrey's call to become the party of civil rights in 1948. And that led to an enormous, I learned a lot actually just from poking that question and people had some interesting viewpoints about that. So we have a real range here of people some affiliated with New America and I'll introduce them fairly quickly and then I'll turn it over and sit down with the rest of you all. Didi Quo is here who is a fellow in the New America Fellows Program right now. An Eric and Wendy Schmidt fellow writing a book about the collapse of political parties across Western democracies and the implications for democratic reform. She manages the program on American democracy and comparative perspective at Stanford's Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law working with Frank Fukuyama, Larry Diamond and other folks. So it's really, she really is deep in the territory of looking at American democracy in a comparative context. And then, I'm about to introduce you, Marcia, so come and join us. Marcia Chatlane has also been a fellow at New America and has been writing a book that is one of those things that as soon as I, not something I'd ever thought about and as soon as you think about it, it's like, whoa, that's super fascinating. Which is really visions of racial and economic justice around the fast food industry and the role of McDonald's and McDonald's ownership and franchising as an instrument of the black middle class over history. It's one of the, you know, we'll, we have to get her to talk about it a little bit because it's super fascinating. Kimberly Johnson is professor of social and she's also, she's also a professor at Georgetown among other things and has been here a few times. Some of you have probably seen her here before. Kimberly Johnson is professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, previously the director of the Barnard Columbia Urban Studies Program. She's working on a new book called The Rise and Fall of Chocolate City, Oakland, Newark and the Future of Metropolitan America and is also written about black suburbanization. And finally, Ted Johnson is also a former New America fellow writing about the variations of black political behavior and attitudes. Also something I've learned a ton from and he is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice which is an organization we're always proud to work closely with and have friends over there. So Ted's also a 20 year veteran of the military as well as also a PhD in political science. So we're thrilled to have this whole group and Ted, you're gonna moderate and I'll let you run with it. Thank you all. All right, thank you. Thank you all for being here. Again, I'm just gonna moderate and let the brilliant sort of run the conversation and I'll get to sit and watch and learn along with the rest of you. So what we hope to do today though is talk a little bit about the current state of our democracy. Seems like our new cycle is filled with how our democratic norms are eroding and our institutions are falling apart and our processes are breaking down and even talk of a constitutional crisis. Depending on who fires whom and what else is happening. And so what comparative politics it does is examines, provides insights into these institutions or politics usually through the lens of how these things compare to other nations and how they've experienced them as well as longitudinally through time of a specific nation. But the question we wanna wrangle with today is what lessons are there to be learned when a nation within a nation experiences a misfiring democracy or a democratic backsliding? Specifically for racial minorities in the United States, we are very familiar with what happens when a democratic state does not do what it's supposed to do, what eroding norms and processes and institutions look like. So what lessons are there to be gleaned from the population within the United States that can perhaps shed insight on to the larger national narrative and be compared against what other nations have experienced. And so that's the goal for today. And so what I'd like to do is just to start with you, Dede, and just to sort of introduce your thoughts on the topic and then we'll go from Dede to Marcia to Kim and then we'll get rolling with the conversation. Great, thank you, Ted, and thank you to all of you for coming and turning out for what we think is a really important conversation. I'm just going to describe sort of the reason for a comparative perspective today and why it's been seen as so necessary. Trump poses sort of uniquely destabilizing threat in the United States against a backdrop of sort of democratic decline or weakness over the past few years or maybe even decades. We've had rising political polarization between our parties such that voters are sorted into these camps that are incredibly antagonistic and the parties, of course, have been negotiating and compromising less. There's also rising income inequality and that income inequality is very much tied to racial inequality but has been discussed both in terms of decline of white working class jobs as well as the worsening off of racial minorities, particularly black and Latinos in the United States. And there's been declining faith in all sorts of democratic institutions. Americans don't trust parties, they don't trust Congress. They really don't believe that their elected leaders are working for them. So this is not true just in the US but around the world and we've seen a rise in far-right parties and in populism even in clenturies that have been long-stable democracies, like the advanced democracies of Western Europe. The problematic things about Trump in particular and his rhetoric is that they follow a sort of illiberal playbook that's been set by people like Viktor Orban of Hungary and to a much worse extent people like Erdogan in Turkey and of course autocrats like Putin and Xi Jinping but you have a typical authoritarian model that's considered totally irrelevant to the United States because autocrats rule with repression and total centralization of the law and arbitrary enforcement of that law and power whereas typically we think that democratic leaders are accountable to their people. Whereas the rise of Viktor Orban and the far-right parties, the way their rhetoric works in Europe is that they can attack long-standing democratic institutions like the media, they can go after the courts, they can centralize a lot of power with economic elites so they erode a potential mechanism of accountability when governments are unstable and Trump has done exactly this. Since his campaign and his candidacy, he has attacked the media, he's decried the press and fake news and we now see him actually going after the merger of AT&T and Time Warner precisely because he dislikes CNN and not because he dislikes Monopoly. He has obviously attacked the FBI, it remains to be seen whether or not he'll fire Rosenstein or Mueller, but either one of those could constitute a huge legitimacy problem for the nation. He has attacked the courts going after Judge Carriel for example for his racial background claiming that he's not able to be fully independent and he's obviously been openly racist so he's engaged in racially hostile rhetoric, he has denounced specific groups for being murderers or rapists and he has gone after any number of black figures for example, a mother of a deceased soldier in various ways that are maybe coded and maybe not coded and he's talked about jailing his opponents so he in some ways attacked the legitimacy of democratic elections and finally he has a model of personal business in Richmond in the form of the Trump organization and not disavowing himself from his business interests. This is something that's pretty unprecedented in the United States. There are plenty of leaders across the developing world who merge their personal interests with the state's interests in the form of kleptocracy or plutocracy and it's really testing what the institutional constraints are on a president who wants to do that because we don't really have laws governing the separation of business interests and political interests at the executive level. So when people are worried about a backsliding of democracy in the United States, it's typically with reference to democratic backsliding in established democracies where we see leaders using democratic institutions to come to power but then once they have power, trying to undermine the legitimacy of a lot of other foundational institutions within democratic societies. Very good, Marcia. So I'm a historian and one of the things that is so challenging about my craft is that on one hand, people think it's about the collection of a series of interesting facts and often I think our role as historians is to understand the analytic value of history. And so as I sit here in this current political moment, I have to really kind of, it's a very difficult task as a historian to watch this unfold because we don't want to fall into the lazy impulse and say that this moment is, could be predicted because history's just a cycle, and so we're just in our backlash phase because that's inadequate to a longer history and a longer story and it's also very difficult to rest on this idea of change, progress, triumph as this kind of linear process. So I think for a lot of historians, we just have a lot of stomach aches right now because I often like to say every day we wake up in a new year at a new reference point and increasingly our country is in 1866. I mean, this is the post kind of Civil War moment in which the bad actors of the nation need to be catered to in order to preserve I think this false idea of a democratic nation. And then we're gonna slide into 1877 at the end of Reconstruction, but this idea that we have ever been a unified nation or we need to be a unified nation in order to function I think is one of the dangers of this moment because what it does is it creates these narratives of a golden era of X and what made these eras so golden was that they were built on the exclusion of people of color. And so one of the things that I'm very nervous about is this idea that return is what's going to restore the democracy that never existed. And so perhaps we have to be more radical in our imagination of what's possible instead of using these reference points of the past. But what can history do in terms of helping us think about this moment and our relationship to democratic institutions? I think that what history has shown us is that if we look at every presidency, if we look at the building and sustenance of the nation, this current president is probably the most American president that has ever existed because he's an amalgam I think of more than 200 years of history and impulses kind of brought together in one figure, right? The commitment to white supremacy, the deep desire to close borders in order to give people a sense of security. This idea that institutions are really not about the people but kind of the interests of capitalists. I mean, these are pretty consistent American practices even if we think of them as emphatical to American ideals or values. And I think that this is the discomfort that many people across a wide ideological spectrum are trying to contend with. And in trying to contend with that, I think that there has been a lot of excuse making and a lot of a historical analysis about this president either being an anomaly or the appeal of this president is something that necessitates our compassion or our understanding. I think the line needs to be drawn, there was a need for the line to be drawn a while ago but I think in this present moment if we do not have a strong core of intellectually sound voices that are historically grounded to say, actually this is consistent with the history of the nation and this is what makes it a problem in order for us to have a vision for a newer nation, a nation that actually is able to be consistent with the ideals, we're going to be stuck in these traps and these cycles of history. Very good, Kim. So I started my book, Reforming Jim Crow, Southern Politics and State and Nation. So if you know V.O. Key, it really is kind of a response to in a long conversation with V.O. Key's work. And the book started in a moment where I was trying to think about the American state. So I do political scientists, I'm a political scientist, I do a field called American political development and it's all about how do we understand the growth of the American state in comparison say to other social welfare states like UK or France or et cetera, so it's kind of a comparison perspective. And my thought was how do we understand the growth of the state in our place in which we have these deep entrenched inequalities? And so I started thinking about how do we explain the growth of state capacity? How do we understand the growth of what it means to sort of engage in rulemaking in a place in which there was legal segregation? So if I'm a librarian, for example, and I go to a librarian school and I'm taught the ethics of being a librarian, how do I square that with the fact that I'm going to be working in a segregated library system? So how do we kind of square these kinds of things of professionalization with this reality of segregation? And then that made me start to think about other things. So I'm gonna just show really quickly, did it work? Oh, there it is. So just to pride some context to think about time and cycles. So this is a chart of African-American voting from 1880 to 2004. And you'll notice a huge disruption, right? From 1880 to what is called the nadir of about 1910, and then this kind of long, slow crawl back up to 1965, which is not surprisingly the Voting Rights Act. So what does this tell us? This tells us, I think, a couple of things. One is the sort of triumphalist de-democratization, disenfranchisement, and then the sort of emergence of the modern civil rights movement, and then African-Americans kind of get the vote again. But what I wanna perhaps suggest is that we not only think about this moment or that moment as kind of the end of an era, but also the unfolding of a new era. That is, we talk about the end of reconstruction, but I think we also need to talk about redemption. That redemption wasn't simply, oh, all of a sudden we had segregation overnight, all of a sudden we had defunding of African-American education. What I wanna suggest is that we actually had the creation of a segregated state. And that segregated state was not simply people acting not nicely to each other, i.e. individual prejudice, but it really was an act of state building. And so that moment, if you look at the chart, 1910 is a really important date because that's the last year that Southern states all changed their constitutions to disenfranchise African-Americans. They mostly all included laws that essentially created segregated, living segregated education, segregated boxing. I mean, all sorts of things that we now look back on and say, oh, that's kind of crazy. And so what I think at this moment, what I think about is what are the ways in which these moments of illiberalism, of de-democratization, how do they happen? And then what are the forces that are, even in that moment of illiberalism, working to sort of push back, working for openings to kind of see what can we do to change? So I usually am not an optimistic person, but in these days I'm trying very hard. So what I think I wanna suggest is that even if we might be, at this moment of illiberalism and democratic backsliding, that we can also look to the past to imagine possibilities and opportunities that might not be so obvious to us. Yeah, so I wanna start with Dede and especially given the news this morning that Paul Ryan is retiring from Congress or at least he's retiring, he's not running again. And this is the latest in a wave of retirements. There was Corker, Jeff Flake, Charlie Dent, my favorite was Trey Gowdy who said, I'm leaving because I like jobs where facts matter. Which is a good reason to leave, I think. And so it seems like the crumbling of our institutions, our processes, our inability of Congress to accomplish things is a function of increasing partisanship and partisan ranker. So can you talk to us a little bit about the role of parties in this disintegrating of democracy that seems to be slowly unfolding? Sure, parties are responsible for, I think a lot of the current rise and disaffection towards democracy in general because parties have gone from being more sort of embedded in local communities and networks which are in a secular decline. Unions are in decline, religious organizations, a lot of different types of communities that used to sustain local groups as, I mean, we now hear a lot about this because of the opioid crisis, but you had these places that were dense and had economic opportunities and are now in decline. And parties used to be tied to those and now as they've become more nationalized, more reliant on activists and campaign donations and stuff they're beholden to different kinds of groups. And I think that there's a representation gap where the average voter does not feel as if their needs are really met by either of the two parties. But regarding race, it's been a little different because Southern Democrats used to be composed of both sort of liberal, left-leaning, different types of political officials, but also the Southern Democrats who were the holdover, I mean, they were the architects of this entire system of Jim Crow. And then Republicans also used to be more of a mishmash of different factions. As you got more sorting of Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, you saw a rightward shift in the Republican Party and much more reliance on white identity politics, an active mobilization of dog-wistled politics, but now sort of like bullhorn racialized politics. And Democrats, on the other hand, very much champions since FDR of racial minorities have also embraced a lot of elements of neoliberalism and center-right policies that since the 1980s and 1990s have done very little for different kinds of urban communities, very many working class voters of all racial stripes, but the point is that even though Democrats claim to be the parties of different racial groups, in fact, there are many liberals who say they rely too much on identity politics in 2016, it's unclear what legacy they have economically or policy-wise in terms of diffusing racism or being able to solve problems that are heavily racialized in the United States. So I think that in terms of parties, we have a mixed history of parties being able to be responsive to voters in an adequate way and especially regarding race, the parties have, I think, been very attentive to the needs of white voters, particularly the Republican Party, and it's unclear how much they respond to voters who are racial minorities. Yeah, it's so interesting because, I mean, parties, our democracy almost can't function without them, but then they don't respond to the very folks that put them in office, but they appeal to them on social issues, economic issues, and so, Marsha, I wanted to ask, for example, in the Republican Party, there's this sense that the free market can sort of cure some of the ills that face America. Gary Becker, a noted economist, essentially said the market will correct racial discrimination because it's bad for business. He didn't say it would eliminate it, he just said it's bad business and so it would reduce the incidence of it. Bless his heart. Well, and I think he underestimated the commitment of some folks to a racial discriminatory society. So you're writing about black capitalism, essentially, and the role, and you know, within black America, there's a pretty strong strain of a belief that the government's never coming, the Calvary's never coming, and so we have to help ourself. So can you talk about the interplay of economics, the black community, and the role it plays in governance? Yeah, I mean, I think, to kind of think about the two points that were made previously, I think that we need to understand that white supremacy has a kind of volume button. I think that the, or a knob, rather, like I think that there is something in the kind of historical imagination of this nation that white supremacy is either burning crosses or, and then its opposite is racial, like reconciliation and harmony. And if we don't understand the gradations of how white supremacy operates, we start to think that there can be a political party that has divested itself from white supremacy and then there's a party that's committed to it. Rather than imagining a framework, and this goes into kind of my book, I talk about African-Americans in economics and I'm critical of some choices, but what I'm most critical of are the fact that people are existing within a context of such constrained choices. That there's never an opportunity to actually test out the free market because no such thing exists. That there is no ability to kind of fully articulate yourself as a citizen because no such thing exists. And that the power comes in the ingenuity and the creativity and the complicated and wrought decisions that have to be made within that framework. And I think for our political institutions, they do not see those survival strategies as something of value. They see this as something that is either naturalized and normalized of, it becomes this kind of biological character instead of something that is both structurally bound. And so all of this is to say, the reason why I write about African-Americans and fast food was I was tired of people judging the choices that people made about what they fed their kids or what they put in their bodies. Eating a hamburger isn't the problem. The problem is if your only choice is a hamburger and if you made that hamburger, you're not making a living wage. And if you have a business that sells that hamburger, that you can be a millionaire that's still racially redlined out of selling hamburgers in the suburbs and that the police will still stop you and they don't care if you own the place where the hamburgers are made. And all of these things are kind of locked together. And this is the space in which people are making choices. And so all of this is to say that when we look at what parties are saying to people, I think that there's a misunderstanding that the resistance on the part of people of color to the Republican Party is because they're not invested in the big social safety net. Neither a lot of black voters either. I mean, and this is why your work is so important to complicate this idea of who the black voter is. And to think about the fact that there is a critical mass of people who want to participate as citizens without white supremacy guiding all their moves, that's the only ask that's really being made. Do you know what I mean? And that's what's so sick about our current state that you can't even meet that demand so that the Republican Party can't even have a coherent message that say, you know what, we don't think racialized violence is okay. And starting from that point and then realizing that they can get black voters on some of these free market ideas and some of this bootstraps nonsense, right? Like you can actually get people on that, but you have to say, you know what, racism is not cool. And the inability for both parties to make that clear and be consistent shows us where we are. And so, I mean, listen folks, not to sound the alarm, but this is really bad. And I think it's really bad because all of the kind of political gymnastics that are being done right now to make any of this okay is so appalling to me that it's not the fact that it's just appalling and wrong and shameful, but the fact that it is so effective, that it works so well and that's why it's being done is the part that I think that we are stuck with that we have to grapple with. Wow. Yeah, and so in thinking about, you know, you go from the white supremacy framework nationally to a more temporal consideration, which is where your book comes in and thinking about the constraints of Jim Crow. And you write about how when actors black and white were bound in this framework, they actually tried to make it work as best as they could for themselves. Understanding that if this is the lot we're given, you know, and so I think the way I read it in one of the reviews of your book said, you know, to basically perfect separate but equal, to make it separate, but more equal. It's actually be the doctrine that it says it was that it never, never got to. So can you talk a little bit about the politics of operating within constrained frameworks where democracy is the mechanism but has not really been delivered and then how actors sort of, you know, work within it, but then also use that as an incremental approach to achieve a better solution than the one that the framework to operating within. So I mean, I actually want to maybe pick up on that, that nice kind of knob and tube. I mean, I don't think people under the age of 20 just talk. There's a number of young people are like, what are they talking about? It's a slider. Yeah, slide, left, right. But I mean, I think that that's some of the thing I was really fascinated by is that, again, in this context of we think of Jim Crow and, you know, we immediately go rightly so to lynching and to mass the sort of incarceration and all those sort of really visible and awful things about it. And as opposed to, or in addition to I should say, thinking about if you are an African-American educator in that moment, what do you do? How do you sort of get education to your children, to your students, to the fellow community members? And you have to sort of figure this out, right? You have to sort of, you can A, try to bootstrap it, but you can also say, well, let me see what kinds of resources can I tap? And then you sort of try to figure out what are these sort of allies that I can get? And what you end up getting is sort of a strange set, a sort of strange set of bedfellows in which Southern reformers, and again, these are not Kumbaya people, these are people who are very much, would not be in tune with what racial egalitarianism of today, but they in some ways were moderate because they really were ones who saw it, that kind of high number 11 knob ranking of white supremacy as being kind of rude and unpleasant. And so it was almost this kind of genteel racism. So how can we sort of have this sort of segregated world but not have these sort of awful, tacky people and white robes kind of running around? And so it ends up being this kind of very strange alliance where these white reformers who prided themselves on being sort of the reform wing, working with African Americans who are trying to sort of figure out how do we deliver public services? Because I think one of the things I really want to emphasize about that chart behind me is that when African Americans lose the boat, they actually literally lose access to public services, that you can actually look in a number of cities and look at school funding and segregated black and white schools in 1880 and then that same school in 1900 and per capita funding has gone from say $3 per African American student to 50 cents per African American student. So it really is an important thing to sort of recognize that the loss of the boat is not simply the loss of the ability to sort of influence political parties, it literally is the loss of the ability to get access to public resources. So I think that what I look at in my book is I look at the ways in which anti-lynching efforts not only came from the courageous and amazing work of folks like Ida B. Wells, but also from the American Southern Association of Women Against Lynching who basically tried to engage in a shaming campaign to get their white husbands and brothers to sort of sign pledges to stop lynching. I look at the ways in which educators basically opened the door to the beginning of Brown by saying, well, okay, if you really want separate then you really have to make it equal. And what state and local educational systems found is that they literally couldn't afford it. You can't afford separate and equal systems, you can't do it. And then I think the other thing that's also really interesting is again thinking about that long climb back up towards voting participation is that it became actually kind of attractive for some white politicians, not in the deep South but certainly on the outer South, Virginia and North Carolina, places like that to kind of tentatively seek out black votes. It turned out that black votes could actually swing an election if you had a thousand here or a thousand there. So I think that the story about how do we get to sort of 1965 from the nadir of 1910 is actually kind of a much more complicated story about difficult and strange alliances that have to be made. So I guess in some ways that Becker thesis works out, it's too expensive to support too, like the black high school and the white one, you reduce, you know, it eventually works its way towards integration along with some other things. But the road's not, the path's not that straight. Oh man, I don't get it for a through that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. So D, I wanna, and then sort of just open up for the group for conversation to talk a bit about how economic inequality impacts our society. There was a couple of years ago, there was a paper from Gailen's and Page, talk testing theories of democracy, where they basically say what we all kind of know in our hearts that our public policy apparatus is responsive to economic elites and business, organized business interests and the average citizen and the mass-based movement basically has no influence on what public policy eventually emerges from our government. So, and so when you compound that with the economic equality in our society, what, you know, where do we go from here if, you know, for the average Americans like us that just wanna function in government? So that is not at all a big question. Yeah, that's right. That's a great question. And so one weird thing about America in general is that American voters think differently about economic inequality than say in Europe where typically when you have rising inequality, you get more calls on the left for redistribution of some sort, some way of equalizing the playing field and taking power back from, you know, economic or political elites, whereas in the United States, inequality is something that's considered sort of natural because we have this sort of laissez-faire market and the bootstrap narrative and all of these things. And so, and given the history also of race in this country, today economic inequality, again, is very racialized, but this is something that most politicians just totally neglect to talk about or care about or highlight in that way. So economic inequality is both, you know, it's sort of, it was political scientists, we would say it's endogenous to the political system meaning you ought to have, if you look at the distribution of preferences of what Americans want in terms of, say, taxation, redistribution, the welfare state, various kinds of economic policy, Americans are way to the left of where both of the political parties are. They are the parties that their policy preferences on redistribution tend to really favor just the affluent and that's who has a lot of say in policy making in the United States. And it's the kind of thing where it just fosters more of a feeling of distrust and a feeling of marginalization from politics. The poor in America are much less likely to vote than someone who's affluent in the first place, not to talk, when you go up the chain of political involvement of more ways to be involved, that becomes more and more true. So the question is how do we convince political leaders that you ought to mobilize and be responsive to voters who are not incredibly affluent, who form the mass constituency base that you lead. And I think that this is really hard to do and this is where the question of alliances and leadership both come into play because the Republicans have been very effective at reducing the electorate. They have, since Jim Crow, where they actively just disenfranchised part of the population, they now have been very effective at passing voter ID and fell in disenfranchisement as in both states. There are various policies that Democrats are just not responsive to. I mean, Democrats cared much more in the 2016 platform of rolling back Citizens United or these kinds of sort of pie in the sky ideas about campaign finance rather than being responsive to voter disenfranchisement, for example. So I think it's difficult to say what will motivate leaders to be more responsive to both issues of economic inequality and issues of race, but that's really my question for Marcia and Kimberly are periods in history where these things happened. So I think the national addiction to forgetting has imperiled the political parties. Because I'm listening to kind of what the parties are, they reinvent something every four years as this will be the thing that compels people as if we live on a four year cycle. So if you were poor four years ago, you're probably poor today and you probably were poor eight years ago and 12 years ago, right? So it just makes me, I mean, I think that the forgetting causes us to underestimate the power of rhetoric over substance. And I think about this in terms of the period that you study in terms of rumors of someone making eyes at someone ends in the murder, the public murder of an African-American woman or child or man, right? That the rumor of school integration causes someone to burn down an entire school building, right? So I think that what has happened over the past few decades is that the thing that Ted, you're hinting at is progress for some people of color has come at the expense of a lot of people of color, but that little bit of progress, I think it quickens the forgetting that what was at stake, what was trying to be preserved by the racialized violence and about some of the behavior. And so I think where we are right now is that we can't imagine an electorate voting against its own interests. Or we can't imagine that people would believe that this president cares about anyone in West Virginia, let alone anyone who's suffering from opioid addiction. I was in conversation with Keonga Yamada Taylor who wrote from Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation and she said, you know, one of the things that she thinks is interesting is that people have rightly critiqued concerns about the opioid addiction crisis and saying, you know, it's incredibly racist because when there was a crack addiction, no one wanted sympathy or support. But she says, few people go to the next level of analysis to show that the government really hasn't put any money into this crisis. They are not regulating the pharmaceutical firms. They're not prosecuting the doctors. The President of the United States says, drug dealers are gonna get the death penalty. Like, so all of this is to say the artifice is actually quite effective when the interests and what's being preserved is this kind of race-based access to power. And like, we forget that, right? We forget that all of those people who were burning down that school building or who were out in front of Little Rock, they were getting unhinged because nine Black students were gonna enter those schools. One of those people, they weren't going to Little Rock Central either but that wasn't the point. And so I think that what makes me nervous is that we both overestimate and underestimate what is at stake and why this message, why the empty, disgusting and like base message that has allowed for this President to win the White House, why it's also not seductive, incredibly intoxicating when we look at what it is imagining it can preserve. Any thoughts? So, so many thoughts. I mean, I think that one of the interesting things, as I dipped into Southern history, you sort of get caught up a little bit into sort of the debates from Southern historiographers. And so just the other day, I was looking at C. Van Woodward's origin, actually, you're militarizing, origins of the South. And I think one of the things that really is the puzzle at that moment, right? Looking at that kind of late 19th century moment is that you have this sort of populace, right? And it's this sort of possibility of a grand white working class African-American coalition that will sweep into power and sort of dislodge the sort of urban Democrats, right? And it fails. And then what you end up getting is you end up getting these previous populace, like Ben Tillman, who end up being these incredible racial reactionaries. And I think that's sort of the haunting moment of Southern history is there was this possibility of kind of putting to the side or at least acknowledging yet confronting economic inequality. And I think that, again, I think this potency of white supremacy, it is, as many people have said, including Malcolm X, it's an incredible drug. And I think that one of the things that Democrats, the sort of FDR Democrats were able to do is that they were able to sort of capitalize on this spectacular economic growth and dampen down that sort of white supremacy because they were able to deliver the economic goods. And I think, so in that sense, do I become a Gary Becker? I don't know. But I mean, I do think that that is what is remarkable about this kind of moment of kind of post-World War II exceptionalism is that economic growth did help facilitate this kind of move away from illiberalism and greater democracy. And can I add though, the cost, right? When we think about the cost of post-War Economic Boon, boom, it was the cost of the sacrifice of the war, but it wasn't gonna cost you in terms of school integration, housing integration. It wasn't going to cost you, right? And so I think that what has happened now, which has been quite disappointing with a lot of the Democrats and people on the left who say, well, identity politics sunk us. This is an old narrative, but BTWs, like identity politics is what we call it now, but it was the negro vote. It was Eleanor Roosevelt meeting with Black women's clubs, right? It's not too much of this, because this group of people are going to imperil the entire ship, right? It's the family that stays in the neighborhood when it integrates versus leaves. It's the two white families that stay in the school instead of leave. And those people pay a cost, and that cost is broadcast to a lot of people. Like this will harm you if you do this, and I think that this is one of the great lessons that is passed down to every generation of whites, how you consolidate your power. And it can be done in very soft ways or very hard ways, but you are taught by this country how to keep your power. And I think this is what we're seeing played out in the political parties. And I think it's a real fear. I mean, the Atlantic article that Mark hinted at, essentially said when the Democrats decided that civil rights would become an issue, they threw away a certain segment of their voting. And whether or not, you know, being pro-civil rights, like taking the morality out of the issue, the argument is it was bad politics for a party. And in your book, you write how even as incremental progress occurred within the Jim Crow construct, it actually crumbled Jim Crow because as people got a taste of it, they wanted more and it got the wheels of motion for more. So I guess, but my question, my next question kind of is, despite all of these imperfections in our society and inequalities, democracy has proved pretty resilient for our very young history through a civil war, a huge social transformation during the civil rights movement and like the three or four decades worth of civil rights movement that happened in the culminating moment of the mid-60s. So is our democracy really in trouble or is this just the next thing we have to surmount to keep the country intact or is this one different from the past? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I think one thing, I really wanted to make a big thing about today is, so one of the things that happens as a result of the new state constitutions in the South is the imposition of the poll tax. The poll tax not only basically helps to wipe out the African-American vote, it actually helps to wipe out the white working class vote. So if you imagine a place like Virginia or Alabama where it's cumulative and you have to pay over three years, it actually turned out to be like $20. If you're a Southern farmer at that moment, your average income is about $500. So you actually don't have enough money to pay the poll tax and if you have enough money to pay the poll tax, it's for one person in your family and it's gonna be the head of the family, the male. And so what happens particularly after the World War II is that white women start saying, hey, wait a minute, I'd like to vote, I should vote. And the League of Women Voters actually takes on the poll tax and poll tax reform as one of its signature issues and it's the movement and the push of these white women voters or would-be voters to dismantle the poll tax that helps to kind of present the idea that, oh, wait a minute, we have a restricted democracy. And that delegitimizes in some ways the notion that, oh, only some people should have the right to vote. So it's a long-term process, but I think that I don't wanna lose sight of possibilities. I know I'm being way too optimistic. My friends and family are probably looking at this going, oh my God, who's that for? Well, I don't wanna be more pessimistic. I mean, I want to be optimistic, but the US was able to be democratic during the entire period of Jim Crow. I mean, anyone would have looked at the US and said, oh, what a great democracy and nationally that was sort of our thinking about it. And so there's this Professor Robert Mickey who's written this book called Path out of Dixie where he said we had these brown areas of governance where we had a very effective and strong repressive state that was totally authoritarian in the South against this backdrop nationally of a democratic state. And I think that democracy will probably survive Trump. I mean, we have this conference over the next few days asking if it will, I think it will. But the question is democracy, we still have economic inequality. We still have police brutality, like all of these things that no political leaders want to really bring to light or do anything about in a substantive way. And so we can have democracy with ongoing racial hierarchy and white supremacy. What will it take for Marsha, it's called, for us to think creatively about really meeting American ideals and values through trying to dismantle these institutionalized and systematic power structures. That I don't know. I mean, I think the fantasy of democracy continues because it's a hell of a drug, right? But what I do think, what concerns me the most if we accept that the democracy is imperfect, but some institutions do rise and people rise and communities rise. And I don't wanna lose sight of the incredible work that we see with people on the ground building and moving and creating in the face of so much repression. I don't wanna lose sight of that. But what I fear is that this moment has now allowed the kind of extra state, I don't know how to say it, the kind of non-state actors to be even more powerful and maintaining the inequality. So if the free market could allegedly correct racial inequality, the free market does a really good job of exacerbating it as well. And so when we have this type of presidency, when we have this type of shift in kind of what is discursively acceptable, then we have more opportunities for the free market for extensions of the state like the police to do its extraordinary violence on others. And so I think that when we think about undoing this era because the impulse to forget the Trump years will be strong and we will rewrite the narrative. No matter what Bozo becomes president next, it'll be like this was just a moment where the U.S. had lost his way but now Bozo is going to get us out of the depths. But what we will lose sight of is that there are things that have already unfolded to undo that damage requires a really deep reckoning of how that damage was allowed to happen and the way that the markets will exacerbate and capitalize on that type of damage. I'm just gonna, my last comment, I'm gonna stop. I just, you know, Richard Spencer was on my campus this week. He showed up at an event. Richard Spencer showed up at an event at my university. It wasn't his event but he was a member of the audience like he could be here right now and he asked a question. It was a conversation about the alt-right. And that experience really kind of illuminated for me what happens when the discourse shifts just a little bit and it's incredible chilling effect on people. That a period of time as a professor I would have never imagined that a white supremacist who had organized a terrorist attack at a place where my colleagues work and live would be so emboldened and free to show up at an event and even had dared to speak and that I would have to contend with someone saying, well, you know, ideas, he's talking about a group of people we ignored. This is why I've kind of had it because this is the small scale, I guess no big deal, consequence of when there is not clarity about where the line is and what is at stake. I just wanted to tell a bunch of people that it was just so infuriating but this is where we are. And if everyone doesn't have a collective sense of shame about it, I don't know what the impulse will be to really kind of be clear about what is happening in this country. Right, and if incrementalism can help undo non-democratic things, it can also help build a wall to protect those non-democratic things. And so to your point, this is just another incremental march towards what we say we don't wanna be. So I'm gonna open it up to questions. There will be folks walking around with microphones. So raise your hand if you have a question. Say your name, where you're from and keep it short and succinct. And I do wanna sort of roll into the question session with a question about partisan and racial identities and the way that those are almost in contest with one another now to where people feel the loyalty's going. The popular stat that gets thrown around a lot now is that in 1960, 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be upset if their child married someone of the other party. At the same time, 4% of Americans thought it was okay, thought interracial marriage was okay. So it was like, you can't marry that black dude but I don't care if you marry a Republican. Now it's flipped. It's like 50% of Republicans would be upset if their child married someone from the other party, a third of Democrats. But something like upwards of 80% of Americans, 86, 87%, they are okay with interracial marriage. So yeah, is that progress or not? But as these identities compete, I mean we have more minority Republicans in the last few years than we haven't otherwise. How does that reshape or refashion our democracy or is this just the latest adaptation of our citizenry to a very unfair, non-democratic system? Hi, my name's Jamal, I know some of you. I guess, you know, longtime listener, first time caller. My question's for the group. So the point earlier about how Jim Crow doesn't just like immediately happen after 1877, there's a kind of a long overhang from Reconstruction. And within that long overhang, there is sort of like things can go many different ways. Doesn't have to end Jim Crow, doesn't have, could have ended in a very different place. And so my question is if like, if the present period is sort of this long overhang from the Civil Rights Movement that we're kind of like working through a series of different sort of reactions and actions and actions and reactions, what, you know, beyond the optimistic path, what negative paths do you see coming out of this moment? What things are percolating that are very bad that are happening in this moment that could end up, you know, becoming monstrous 20 or 30 years down the road? That's great questions. So, I mean, I think that one of the things, I mean, so I think what I wanna say is that we shouldn't say it's the overhang of Reconstruction. Reconstruction ends and something different begins and really recognize that moment as being distinct in and of itself. And I think the second thing is that not only is it, you can call it redemption, but it's also the first skill to date. So many ways I think, you know, is this the neo redemption era, which is an article I just wrote, a title of an article I just wrote, or is it the second gilded age, right? That it's not only racial, massive racial and ethnic inequalities, but it's also massive economic inequalities, that it's the sort of precarious nature of labor against capital. All sorts of things that are going on both then and now. I mean, I think we're gonna see another housing, some more housing shenanigans. I think that the kind of, I mean, there's never regulation really in this country, but the little bit of regulation that was kind of in place, kind of sort of, I think we just, I think, I think when you blow the lid on the idea that you have to regulate anything in the market, any type of appeal to regulation for safety reasons, to kind of keep the health of the kind of, the so-called middle class, I think that is gone. I think that now that we have a Department of Justice that doesn't really believe in civil rights, the quarter of an inch that we made on police brutality, these consent decrees were all ripped up, the second that sessions came in, that kind of stuff that was the outgrowth of people's power, I think people are watching that school burn in front of them. And my concern is that the kind of heavy lift to get to that point, it will take us a decade before people can reconstitute themselves to do that lifting again. And that I find heartbreaking. Yeah, I think that trying to disentangle how people's attitudes can be, can shift so much depending on framing and political expediency. We live in a time where I guess it's not okay, theoretically, according to all these public opinion polls, to be openly racist, but it is totally okay to be very hostile towards members of the opposite party. And people who study affective polarization don't really know what to do with this because this is a form of bias, they now see it in employment applications and all sorts of different things that it plays itself out, this partisan bias, is sort of a stand-in for former forms of discrimination. It's now totally okay. But I think the problem, as you point out of different negative pathways and what Marcia was saying is that as we open the field of sort of permissible discourse, or not permissible, but legitimate, everything is permissible, obviously. But when there are things that people say that in the past, I grew up in Georgia, I was there when the Confederate flag was removed from the Georgia flag, it used to be part of it, these debates and stuff that we thought were settled, for them to be reopened and to have to resurrect Confederate history is a thing that we legitimately talk about. I mean, it's crazy, it's not something I really thought I would see in my lifetime. And you, especially with the rise of different forms of technology, the spread of different kinds of rhetoric and discourse and combined with a distrust of facts or news or whatever, means that a lot of the space for ideas is really up for grabs. And I think that we know people still have biases, whether they're implicit or explicit and what they overlay on top of them changes, but we're in a weird inflection point where things that were not okay or were previously settled seem to be sort of okay again. Yeah, perfect example of that is this recent debate about the intellectual inferiority of black people, based on DNA. That one just, that one dies, it won't die. It has been around since forever. But now it's like, well, but if we have this, all this great data and science, maybe we can craft better policy that can address the needs, and this is recycled history all over again. Question, yes in the back. Christian was next I think? Yeah, let's go to the back and then we'll come for it. Hi, Jeremy Young, I'm an investigative journalist with Al Jazeera. You guys talked a little bit about voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement, but I'm wondering if you can talk about it a little bit more. The idea that there's a trope nowadays, that there's voter fraud, which is a totally non-existent thing and this effort to keep people of color from casting ballots by restricting early voting, not allowing voting on Sundays, things that are very straightforward efforts to keep people of color from voting. Can you talk a little bit about it and your thoughts on it and whether there's any reason to think that our country will progress on this issue? Thanks. Yeah, I think the question of who gets to vote has long been a question the nation has wrestled with since its inception. And so we're just sort of in the next iteration. Can I push the voter disenfranchisement thing? I think that is important, but I sometimes wonder if, I love that that issue has been able to surface to a level of kind of public conversation, but I think we need to ask what people are offered, like what are people voting for and the vote is both so powerful and then sometimes so cosmetic because when I think about post-1965 and the election of black mayor, something that I write about in my book, it's also the very moment where aid to the cities is also kind of crumbling. So it's this idea that the vote is a way to amplify your voice and your interests, but then there's an entire mechanism that strips the power from those choices. And so I think that we should be concerned about access to the vote, but when we look at kind of local level control and power, we have to also think about what are the things that are not on the ballot? What are the things that are not in the hands of the voters that are also dictating their lives? The opening or the closing of a factory or of industry, of a prison that's being located or a wastewater treatment that's being placed, you know, planned. Voters in Flint could mobilize, but do they have the power to vote on how they will receive their settlements if they receive their settlements? Like they're just doing kind of neurological testing on kids in Flint. And so I think that there's a way where the vote and all of its possibilities can be stripped away even if we had perfect voting systems available to everyone equally. That said, I mean, I mean, the vote is key. I mean, it's just key. I mean, whether or not there's substantive sort of heft behind that actual vote, I mean, in terms of policy outcomes, you know, that's true, but you have to have the vote. I mean, it's just, it's key. Yeah, and this is one of those projects to go back to incrementalism. Like Alberto Gonzalez was first tasked with, you know, under the Bush, first Bush administration, no, sorry, not HW, but Baby Bush, but his first administration. So anyway, was tasked with trying to find these claims of voter fraud and go after them. He wasn't very successful, but I just mean, this has been, and then so then activists went to the states and that's where they started getting voter ID laws past their state legislators. And fortunately, this Chris Cobock election commission thing didn't work, didn't get off the ground. And so I'm hoping that this is sort of, at least on the federal level, dead in the water, but yeah, there's just these efforts that are really long running, that on the right, they're very well organized in, you know, these right to work laws in the state, so that Alec, the American legislative executive, an exchange council, sorry, to get various kinds of pro-industry laws passed by state legislators, you know, there's this nice grassroots organization they have to get through some long held ideological commitments of theirs, including disenfranchisement or voterite, cleaning up the vote, but disenfranchisement. Can I just jump in that it's voter suppression of people of color, but it's also voter suppression of urban places. That this has been going on since the turn of the 20th century, that basically rural places and many states rural places don't really like urban spaces. And that if we talk about a group like Alec, right, that they are working with the sort of rural interests to kind of push forward a certain kind of agenda which works against those people who live in metropolitan areas. So it's, yes, it's voter suppression of people of color, but it's also the minimization of the political power of metropolitan places as well. Yes, Christian. Hi, thank you very much for your talk. It was so wonderful. You know, the spirit of the conversation seemed to be kind of talking about the distinction between comparative approaches and domestic approaches. And something that I'm thinking about is kind of how, or what that says to me is that there is a moment in which racial discrimination kind of bleeds over into our foreign policy interests as well. So could you all spend a little bit of time talking about how democratic backsliding affects people of color at home, but also affects their interests abroad, and maybe kind of tease that out a little bit. I think that would be really helpful. Well, I'll tell you, one of the examples that I love the most as a descriptive of this is during JFK's administration when newly free African nations were sending their first ambassadors to the United States. And those ambassadors would have to sort of get their papers blessed in Washington, but then go to the UN in New York. This was before a lot of air travel, so they would drive from Washington to New York, and there's a strip in Northern Maryland. About 40. Yeah, that's just, it's just a different part of Maryland. And so highly segregated along there, and when these African delegations would stop off for restaurants or for hotels, they would be told you can't be served. And so the Kennedy administration after being told so many times that these delegations have been disrespected talked to the governor of Maryland, and they eventually desegregated that strip of highway, the restaurants and the hotels, for the African delegations. But if you are a black student at Coppen State or Morgan State driving to New York or wherever, you still cannot be served. And so this is, it was in the nation's interest, especially during the Cold War, where you have the United States telling the world that we are a place of freedom, land of the free home of the brave, democracy, liberty, et cetera, and the Russians poking at the sore, open sore saying that you are not actually free, where the nation basically desegregated a section of itself specifically for its international interests, while maintaining domestic segregation because of its domestic interests, for lack of a better term. So that's an example of how even in the international space where there's progress, the nation doesn't always follow suit immediately. I argue that eventually the Cold War was one of the main reasons the civil rights movement, Great Society of Legislation was successful because the soft power, we were bleeding it at a pretty profuse rate. I mean, I think today the connections that come to mind is the composition of the military and what does it mean to have a military that is indicative of the diversity of the country and then having these people going overseas with all this nonsense rhetoric happening, right? Like who's in most harm's way? And I think that one of the many things that's happened over the past two years that it's easy to forget, Maisha Johnson as a black woman war widow and this kind of back and forth with the president, I think that will be the opening anecdote for the book in 15 to 20 years about this very connection that kind of long kind of story from Route 40 desegregation to the point of what does it mean when we have an active military of color under this kind of presidency? And I think about it in terms also about some of the concerns about racial discrimination at the military academies. And I remember going to the Air Force Academy and they're saying, we really wanted to diversify this academy and it made us think that maybe we need to train people a little bit differently to have some of these white officers getting in the faces of these black guys. It has a different tone. And so there's this way in which I think the kind of the racial baggage of the nation then spills out into the one area that I think you can get the most work on civil rights and that's the military. And I think some of those dynamics are being reproduced today. Okay, this will be our, we'll get this question and we'll take these two at the same time and then sort of answer and sort of roll up your last thoughts together. Hi, Stephen Schafferman with the Basic Income Guarantee Network. Martin Luther King in his last book suggested that the problems of housing, education, racism could be resolved if we had a guaranteed income. And I'd just like to hear your thoughts going forward in the positive direction on the idea of a universal basic income and what impacts that could have on democracy and race and so on. Very good. And that question back there. Good afternoon, thanks for being here. I'm Maria, I work at Independent Sector. It's an infrastructure organization for the charitable sector. So I kind of want to ask a question related to the charitable sector. Within the past year, especially post-2016 elections, the charitable sector has a variety of organizations in it. We have foundations, nonprofits, but also a lot of faith-based organizations. So the reaction post-2016 has been very varied. We have a lot of members that are struggling to understand how they can facilitate programs that are reacting in the moment and allowing people to have conversations and increase democracy within their community because it is difficult for people on both sides to come together and have a discourse. But how can we get organizations within the charitable sector not only to mobilize discussions and understanding, but move towards action that is going to help us strengthen or revitalize our democracy? Yeah. Yeah, so the role of universal basic income and non-government organizations in preserving or making our democracy more equal, our nation more equal, but also preserving the democracy itself. I don't have much specific to say on those questions, except if we think about a democratic consolidation framework. You know, a lot of people are talking about democratic backsliding. But political science has thought a lot about after a moment of democratic transition, it takes a long time, and it's arguable as to whether or not we ever reached a state of full democratic consolidation in the U.S. But things that you definitely need are, first of all, constant generation of new policy ideas. And second of all, you do need important intermediary organizations like a dense network of civil society groups, not only because they help to prop up institutions like parties or elected officials, but also because they are laboratories of democracy themselves. They help orient citizens towards politics and to act little de-democratically within their own various kinds of spheres. And we have seen the decline of both of those things in the United States in the past few decades. So a lot of the work of new policy is being done by social movements, protest politics, return to the kinds of, you know, sort of outside of mainstream politics that allows citizens to think much more aggressively and creatively about what needs to be done to provide economic solutions in this, you know, globalized time in which we live, and also how organizations that are outside of politics can be most effective. And I think that placing loud demands on political leaders to be responsive is sort of the first and most important step because that's sort of the critically missing nexus right now. I think at the heart of both of these questions is this idea of paternalism that can grow out of both kind of ideas. A universal basic income that trusts the recipients of that income to make choices that are effective for themselves and the community that they're responsible for I think can be an incredibly powerful tool, but I don't know if we're quite there yet to imagine trust in the poor, trust in the economically unstable and precarious to make the right choices. Because if they don't conform to our ideas of what investing in the future looks like, I think there can be some real disconnects. And I think about this in terms of conversations about reparations that we're having with Georgetown and thinking about slavery and universities. Everyone wants to create a trust fund. No one wants to give direct cash payments to anyone. I like to have my money in direct cash payment and so should other people. So I think that there's a kind of paternalism that is embedded sometimes into these ideas that we have to really think about. And in the charitable sector I think that there has to be a conversation about are we desiring collaboration or coalition building? Because those are two things. And some problems necessitate one strategy over the other because of the efficiency of it. But I think that what we're seeing is some real strained coalitions because there's varied interests. But if we can move into the collaborative space we can kind of work out the tensions before the problems come. I think in this climate that's a lot to ask for because there's so many things to react to. But I think our organizations really need a balance between collaboration and coalition building. So Megan Francis wrote this really great book about the NWCP. And I think one of the important points that she makes about the early founding of the NWCP is that it's a brand new organization and it really just doesn't know what it's doing. It's experimenting. It's trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work. And I think that in this moment of change we have to be willing to recognize and nurture new organizations that are really speaking to and responding to what is needed today. That older organizations still are important. But I think that each moment demands its own responses. And so I think in terms of that sort of NGO third sector that you have to be sort of open and be sort of willing to say, you know what? Maybe there's something that we're not seeing and we need to nurture it in this new organization. I think the other question, so my son is a senior in AP government and he just texted me a question, does poverty cause racism or racism cause poverty? I'm like, oh, I think you're trying to like answer an essay question, I'm not sure about it. And so I think that it would be great if everyone had a basic income. Would that less necessarily lead to an end of racial inequality or racism? Which you weren't asking, but I just want to sort of say that that's not the case, that there are again many sort of psychic benefits, it's a hell of a drug, bigotry, prejudice, racism, whatever you want to call it. So yes, I would be in favor of a basic income but I don't think it leads to the sort of promised land that a number of different kinds of advocates are saying that it would lead to. Yeah, I think that these suggestions here are ways to manage inequality, ways to manage the discrimination people experience. But the problem of racism in the United States is it's a character flaw. And until we decide that the American promise should be extended equally to everyone, solutions that we come up with are just ways of managing the pain instead of curing the disease. Yeah, so thank you all for coming on in. Thank you, Gene.