 Hi folks. Welcome to the future of democracy. My name is Sam Gill. And in this show, what we try to do is take a look at some of the big ideas, big trends, big controversies that are really animating our democracy, our national conversation, and take you a little deeper than you might be able to get just hearing a debate on cable news or reading one article. And this month, we are teaming up with the Miami Book Fair to host an amazing set of conversations with authors, with artists, focused on different topics about what they think about the future of democracy. And this is all leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair from November 15 to 22nd. The Book Fair is an incredible collection of authors, an incredible collection of books, a really vital conversation about ideas. If you're interested, please go to MiamiBookFair online.com or follow them at Miami Book Fair. If you're not interested, then you're not paying attention to the incredible authors they're going to have. This year, Natalie Portman, the actress is going to be a part of the Miami Book Fair. Bill Nye, the science guy, is going to be part of the Miami Book Fair. And you can hear every single presentation, every single talk for free, but only if you tune in from November 15 to 22nd. One of the featured authors is the New York Times economic columnist Eduardo Porter. He's been a member of the New York Times for almost two decades, a journalist for many more years than that. And he has written a riveting new book, American Poison, How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise. Had a chance to sit down with Eduardo, understand the book, the idea of the book, and what it means for our democracy today. I hope you enjoy the conversation. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. You know, thank you for having me. So the basic thesis of the book is that racial antipathy has effectively undermined our opportunity for a truly effective social safety net and really to be the kind of opportunity society that we talk about. Can you explain this? Yeah, I would start by saying that it's broader than just the safety net. I mean, my kind of proposition is more ambitious than that. It's that racial antipathy, racial animus, has pretty much worked its way into all of our institutions and our social norms. That includes kind of like the labor movement. It includes our criminal justice policy. And of course, it includes the social safety net. Now, there's several parts to my analysis. One part is looking at the social science literature, the economics literature, which has their substantial research on the impact of what economists like to call ethnic divisions on generosity and the provision of public goods and the willingness to redistribute in groups. And the finding in paper after paper is that more heterogeneous groups are more reluctant to spend on public goods and redistribution. And there's really interesting instances, very specific instances in the American experience of this. And then the other component is like looking at our history. And I start with the New Deal because that's really when we start building a real government. I mean, up until the New Deal, government revenue is kind of like a fairly small share of the economy. And it's not really until the New Deal that that starts ramping up. By 1945, when FDR dies, the share of government revenue as a share of GDP is roughly the same as it is today, at the federal level. But when FDR arrives into office, the government is relatively small. But so anyway, so I start looking at what happens with the, you know, how we spend this money, you know, the program starting with the New Deal and how kind of like racial antipathy, racial hostility kind of works its way into our decisions, into the programs. And from the New Deal to this day, you know, program after program initiative after initiative, you can see the role that this antipathy is playing. So I mean, to put you like the greatest examples of New Deal times is, you know, while social security in its first inception happened to exclude both household work and farm work, which happened to employ two thirds of African American workers at the time. Also the Fair Labor Standards Act included these occupations. And there's also other sorts of instances. I mean, the FHA contributed to the redlining of America. You know, the FHA is one of our, you know, these cherished institutions that help, you know, provide credit for, for and expand home ownership people of lesser means. Well, you know, they also contributed to the segregation of this country that still persists to this day. So that's kind of like my starting point. And I bring it up to the president. So something I'm, I thought it was it, it, it, there's a lot of sort of myths that get exploded in the book. And I think starting with the New Deal is especially, was especially powerful for me as a reader, because I think to a lot of, a lot of, a lot of folks who kind of believe in sort of the myth of progressivism in this country from really, from sort of Roosevelt onward, the New Deal certainly to me is the moment where the technology of the administrative state, be it's oriented towards social policy in a pretty profound way. And I think creates the idea of a modern social policy, not only in the United States, but I think in a lot of the developed world, a lot of the architecture of what a social policy should do for a country to your point, social policy construed much more broadly than social safety net. And I guess I'm interested in, as you documented the history, how does, how does the sort of logic of racial antipathy crystallize? Because what's interesting about that history is that you document moments where there's sort of obvious racial animus, you document a lot of moments of compromise, where sort of the politics of compromise enable the sort of codification of racial antipathy. And then you also document that moments of omission, you know, moments when the orientation of the administrative state toward these social problems just isn't taking realistically, taking on realistically what racial antipathy looks like on the ground, what it should be undoing effectively, and its mechanics. What is it that is there, is racial antipathy sort of driving policy, or is it just like it's just a sort of a series of small cuts that lead, that results in a sort of a deeply racist logic in the way that these programs manifest in the sort of the society that we're left with? Yeah, I think that racial antipathy is, is anterior to everything else. It's before economic policy. It's before left-right ideological positioning. It's before culture war type dynamics over sexual orientation or guns. It's a very, very, very old of kind of psychological trait. And I would, I would want to clarify that it's not just Americans that suffer this. I mean, I think racial antipathy is present all over the place, and it has been present all over the place for a very, very long time. It's just the specificity of our history and how we start, you know, how this, this nation emerges as a modern nation from, from slavery and how its identity is construed out of many different peoples that makes this kind of like racial antipathy front and center at every step of the way. But I would, I, you know, that's, it's one of the, I think it's complicated for progressives to, to read it in this way because, you know, there's this thought of, you know, all the, the, the downtrodden people or all the, the more vulnerable people coming together to, to fight against, against corporate power that is kind of exploded by this nation. Well, that in fact, no, some of these dividing lines, in fact, all of these dividing lines, all of this animus also exists on the, on, you know, across the ideological spectrum. I would note, though, that today and present day United States, there has been a selection of, so like, kind of like white, identitarian politics, white grievance and, you know, and a lot of racial animus has selected itself into the Republican party. And the Democratic party, you know, so rural white voters have moved more towards a Republican party and the sense of grievance that they carry has kind of like informed the, the ideology of the Republican. Whereas, you know, the, the Democrats have become more a party of urban America, which is a much more multi, multi polar, multi ethnic mix. And so they are more, you know, so they have come to represent this kind of new, more inclusive place. And so, and their politics and their propositions have, you know, have kind of like moved in the respected directions. But in throughout our history, it's not at all true that, you know, Democrats were the party that, you know, protected the right of people of color against Republican onslaught. In fact, in the New Deal, the reason that so many of these, you know, programs are limited for whites and exclude blacks and other people of color is because FDR had to get them through the Senate. And the Senate was dominated with Southern white Democrats who would not pass any kind of legislation that sort of like emancipated, gave more freedoms or invited blacks into kind of like the bounty of citizenship. So what, you know, the, the, let's spend a moment on this question of sort of the anteriority of, of racial animus and racial antipathy, because, you know, one of the, one of the, the right. So one form of depression reading the book is if you've got this progressive myth making, it gets exploded pretty quickly within a few pages. And then sort of another form of depression is there's a fatalism that sort of sets in for the reader, which is that it's hard to imagine whites going along, you know, with the social, with the social policy, with a political economy that could possibly be equitable on racial grounds. Do you, is that fatalism warranted or do you, are there seeds of hope in, in after, after having documented this? You know, yeah, though, that's a really key question. It's a question that I hate though. And, you know, it's been asked of me often, in fact, when I was writing the book, my publisher said, you know, it's always good to put some reason of hope for hope at the end, you know, like, you know, give the reader an opportunity to see what, you know, she or he could do, you know, what are, what are our handles to change these things. And, and yeah, I'm kind of a pessimist by nature. And also, as I looked out there at the data and what I look at as the evolution of our, of our politics, I found very, very little reasons for optimism. But, but I do think, I do think that there are, you know, signs out there that we could, in fact, move in a different direction. And, and it's the reason is that we have in the past, as you pointed out a moment ago, we have in the past had these moments of kind of like enlightened policy. And we see them when, you know, there's Brown versus Board of Education. There is the passage of all the civil rights legislation following, you know, the civil rights movement. There are, there have been, it's the Fair Housing Act. There have been efforts to desegregate education. And there have been efforts to desegregate our urban landscape. Even today, you see, you know, small, you know, initiatives taking place at the municipal level or at the state level. So I do see, I think that the problem is that we've never given these initiatives a real shot at succeeding. So my best example of that is probably education, where I think is perhaps the most powerful tool we have of building a country in which we're all equally Americans, which I think that's ultimately the main problem. It's a country in where we see where, you know, these racial barriers kind of like separate us into like boxes of otherness that we can therefore, you know, exclude from our thinking, exclude from any sense of empathy or solidarity that then translate into our political positions. I think at the moment that we can see each other as people, just like any other person outside of, you know, this kind of box of attributes, I think is an initial step. And I think education is the first place that comes to mind is where we could change this. And slowly and begrudgingly, there were a bunch, you know, not only not only Brown, but because Brown actually really didn't do anything, but a series of Supreme Court decisions after Brown that then translated into lower court actions, forcing states, forcing municipalities to desegregate their education, you know, which forcing them to experiment with things like busing to integrate schools and stuff like that. I think was a really great movement there. And in fact, there is some evidence that this movement produced really great results. There's a book called Children of Opportunity by UC Berkeley economist called Worker Johnson. And his book finds really great proof that kids, African American kids who were educated in the kind of like the more in the integrated era, had much better outcomes, not only in education, but in income later in life and family formation that were less likely to end up in prison. I mean, really substantial gains in outcomes for black kids. And with absolutely no deleterious impact on white kids, by the way. And nonetheless, the politics of these efforts were so fraught that they didn't hold a line. And so, you know, Vice President Joe Biden was one of the forces against busing to put an end to busing to just go back to the bipartisanship of these kinds of policies. And suburban white America could not really, you know, accept this. And so if you fast forward to the present, a lot of the court orders that led to integrated teaching experiments and busing and others, a lot of these court orders were kind of like dismantled in the from the 1990s. And the places where they that had been that have been forced to integrate by court order started resegregating pretty much as soon as they could. And right now one of the really one pretty pervasive tendency is for affluent suburban neighborhoods, which are often mostly white, segregating from urban school districts, which are bigger, have a lot more people of color, have a lot more poverty. And so, because there's a Supreme Court decision that says that you do not need to integrate schools across the borders of school districts, well, the solution has been let's form our own school district. And that's been happening all over the country. So, you know, it's we stopped trying is kind of like my my thought, but we know some of the tools we've actually put them in place. But I've wondered too, like, do we do we have do we have culturally antecedents that could be an advantage for us? I remember I was I was young once and when I was young, I, I was a research assistant for a political theorist I was studying in the UK, but this is, you know, early 2000s. So, well, well before Brexit, but what he was studying was, you know, whether growing heterogeneity in the UK would undermine support for the social safety net drawing on the same social science that you pointed to. And in particular, you know, as you know, and our listeners know, you know, a lot of the social safety net in social policy in the UK is sort of inspired by the continental model, which is really focused on kind of formal equality, like that equality is about treating everything the same. And the US really does have a longer tradition of thinking about equality is kind of treating relevant difference differently, not uniformly throughout our history, but it's an idea that we can draw in, you know, even our discourse of equity, which admittedly is a morally discourse, sort of unimaginable in a continental context, you would not be having discussions about equity in race in a continental context. And so I, you know, I used to, I've derot, your book made me feel naive, but I've sort of derived hope in the idea that we do have some, some, some rhetorical elements at our disposal to your point, like if we could commit to some of the interventions, if we could commit to some of the facts on the ground about, about how society is being experienced about the real material outcomes that it delivers, we're not sort of bereft of philosophical tools in which we can see an American story that actually is about, about, about recognizing these differences and then addressing them to become the kind of society that we want to be. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure that I am interpreting your question properly, but let me take, there's a thought that comes to mind, I would push back a little bit. I mean, you probably heard the, the quip that programs for the poor are poor programs. And so I think that the, the, the broader concept around this idea is that these programs that are designed for some population that we consider more vulnerable, that is not us, will tend to be kind of like more, will be seen under the guise of charity and will be, you know, will be more vulnerable than programs that we consider universal for all of us for, we need these programs for a functioning society, not to help those poor people or people of color or disenfranchised people over there. And so I'm not quite sure how this language that you're referring to, I'm not really sure it helps or hinders, because I do think that universality tends to make programs much more resilient. I mean, again, think of social security. Now you hear, there's talk about defunding, Medicaid, food stamps, the AFDC, which was our, you know, the only entitlement to federally for the poor. Well, that was done away long ago. I mean, all those things have proven really easy, a lot really easy, but at least dismantleable, they've proven vulnerable. And social security, on the other hand, that that's hung on there. And I think it's because of its universality. But doesn't that leave us with a paradox, though? I mean, because it seems to me, the thesis of the book is, you know, language of universality ultimately masks racial disparity in effect, like how do you, how do you, so I, except about the real politics. It kind of constrains the solution set, because I do think that the solutions that go through universality, but it has to be universal understood as we are all, I think that right now we live in a country where we do not value the American-ness of the other, like we value our own. So my thought is that that's how racial animus operates. It's, you know, those guys are Latinos. That's not my America. In fact, that's an America that sort of threatens me. And we can get into that if you want. Same with, you know, Black America or Asian America. And so that, so what I think is that that is a hurdle. The hurdle is getting over that. But it's, there's not, it's not like these, this African America, African American America or Latino America, it's, you know, we're all individuals sharing this common experience of this, this civilization, this citizenship. And then I think universality works. Then universality has worked in, you're in, you know, in Sweden because they're all tall, blonde, blue-eyed people. And so, you know, I'm paying for the healthcare of somebody that looks just like- It's not working as well lately for the- Well, that's true because also because they're not that tall and blonde and blue-eyed, all of them and me more. It's a lot it has to do with immigration, right? Yeah. Um, yeah. No, I think so, but so then let me ask you another question about that, which is we're living in a moment where one argument, one version of the argument that we're all American and all in this together is an argument about macroeconomic and social policy, about policies that will undo endemic conditions like inequality or persistent poverty or sort of pick your, pick your issue around places where we see the social contract failing people in America and disproportionately failing Americans of color. And then there's another argument that, that is, that especially this summer has become more pronounced, but is it new, which is that we need reconciliation, right? And that really talking about difference and really talking about the impact of the history that you described is, is important. Your, your employer, I, you know, made waves with a really important project about retelling the story of the American history in this way. How do you, now having documented this and thinking through these really difficult questions about marrying what makes a difference with how to get it to happen given these psychological effects, where, where are you in this debate? Yeah, that is a super tough question. And, and you know, when I see what's been going on in the last few months following the killing of George Floyd and also the kind of the, the, the, the conversation that emanated from the 1619 project at the times and all that, I, one thought that comes to mind is whether one question that comes to mind is whether these demands for atonement and reparations and compensation for, you know, years, decades, centuries long inequities and abuse, how that affects my proposed solution set, which goes through building this sense of common, of common purpose, common destiny. And the way that I think about it sometimes I find it might be that there's tension between these things is when I think about, say, the argument for, for reparations and how that would land in the American political system and how that could affect this, you know, what I believe to be a necessary condition for us to ultimately, you know, build a more, you know, empathetic, functional society. And I think it's, it'd be a problem. A problem. So the, the, you know, there's been some research suggesting that, you know, the equivalent of the 40 acres in a mule today would be $80,000 for every, you know, for the descendants of, of slaves at the moment of emancipation. And, and two thoughts come to mind. $80,000 to each person is not going to solve decades long segregation and discrimination. You know, the day after that check is written, it's, I don't really see that we're in the society that I think we need to build. And two, I'm thinking, what do the 50 million voters who are, you know, in fact, diehard voters for Donald Trump, who have really embraced the argument of quite grievance, who feel themselves to be under siege by demographic change, who totally rejects the idea that this sort of atonement, that this sort of compensation is just, what does, what happens then? And what does that do to our politics? Because whatever this country becomes, those 50 million people are going to be in it, and they hold political power, and I don't think it makes any sense to start thinking of a country without, I mean, it's nonsensical. So I do find tension there between kind of like the, the demands of the moment and what I think is the, you know, the ultimate goal. Well, and that's, I mean, in this, and in some ways, right, those 50 million Americans, they're right about a lot of things and wrong about a big thing, right? They're, they're, they're, they're right about the wage stagnation that they've suffered at the hands of economic dislocation. They're right, the demographic change is going to appropriately share who gets to make the big decisions in this country. What they're really wrong about is the racial animus that drives their views, not only about why that's happening, but what ought to be done. And, and, and I think a question I think that your book does put at the forefront is, you know, whether, whether you have a common purpose narrative, or you have a reconciliation repairatory narrative, you kind of can't dodge some of these questions about economic dislocation and who it's visited on the social science sort of makes clear that that's reinforcing in a pretty determining way for people's sense of why their reasons are right or wrong. Is that the right reading of the book? I mean, I don't think I really go there with any kind of umph, but I think that ultimately you're right. If we were living in a much more, you know, horizontal society, if we didn't live the vast gaping inequality that we do, my guess is that some of these problems would be, some of these tensions would be less salient. You know, if we were living in the great middle class society that we managed to build for white Americans up to, you know, say the 1970s, but shared for all Americans, I'm sure that this these kind of arguments would be much more tractable. The problems would be much less salient. And we would be closer to where we got to be. The thing is that I mean, I think, I think, I mean, part of the reason that we are not there, only part, I mean, this isn't the entire story, is I think that we decided that once civil rights invited people of color into the bounty of American citizenship to share in it, we decided that we didn't want a safety net anyway. At least, you know, white voters decided, no, we actually don't need any of this. And so we let the bottom fall out. If you look at kind of like public spending to GDP, you know, 50 years ago, we're roughly on par with where the average of industrial countries are in the OECD, we're right there, you know, and you just see it as time moves on all these other countries, you see a vast increase, robust increase in spending as the needs for the society become greater, you know, to to sterilize incomes, to provide childcare, you know, a variety of things that the society starts demanding, and we just don't do it. We get stuck. And so I do think that part of how, why we allowed such an unequal society to develop was precisely because of this racial addicts. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, I mean, I think that's, you know, really an under discussed aspect of polarization, which we treat as as a as a significant problem in our democracy for a lot of good reasons. But I think we sort of under discuss the extent to which the lack of elite polarization mid century is holding hands on racism, and the extent to which popular polarization heightens when when black Americans are voting, and white Americans migrate out of a set of ideologies for exactly the reasons that you that you document. I've got it. So I do have to ask a practical question, you know, which is, which is, you know, there's a possibility, obviously, of profound regime change sometime in late November, early December, depending. What's what would what would it's sort of hard to imagine, just to be totally candid, the ideas of your book having a lot of currency without some level of regime change. But if that were to obtain what where's the place to start with a problem that in some ways is so profound. Okay. First of all, I'm not sure that regime change actually brings about a vastly different set of policies on this particular issue. So absolutely. I'm not sure where the median of the liberal consensus is right now. I'm sure it's not in Queens. And so, you know, the idea that the new radical left of the Democratic Party is going to be driving this conversation is I think is wrong. And so where the median of the Democratic Party puts these issues is is unclear to me. But if the question about the question about where do we start here? I think that we I think that the solutions are in a way all local, but I because I do think that the solutions are about bringing people in to get people's experience into, into, into relation with each other. I think it's about urban integration. I think it's massively about about educational integration. And so I do think that I mean, there are housing policies that are that are promising. There's this whole idea of, you know, there was an experiment in the 1970s called moving to opportunity, which was about moving folks of, you know, kind of like low income neighborhoods into better neighborhoods and turns out that that had also immense impact on the outcomes for kids. And so I think there's a lot of tools. But and they're about the lived experience of this country. So I think it's about, you know, about schools and about homes. I think that's a really, really good place to start. I'm not saying that I have that this is a complete set. I'm sure it's not. I think there is a very big job to do on the acquisition of wealth and the wealth gap. I find that amazing. I just came across a paper the other day that showed that two really crazy results. One was like the average wealth of an African American family in the 1960s was about 5% of that of a white family, 5%. Then fast forward to the present, you know, civil rights movement, you know, all this stuff, it's 10%. Unbelievable. And that's, you know, 50 years of what we used to call progress. And so I think that's a huge, a huge challenge. I think that policies around housing and housing finance are probably going to be very helpful here. You know, I mean, it's kind of like the undo the decades long scar of redlining and, you know, and federally enforced urban housing segregation. It's not clear to me how that works, you know, how you do that with the existing housing stock and gentrification going. It's, I don't really know, but I do think that there's a part for that. But again, I'm not sure that that's where we're going. I think that it's in these things are going to be treated first in urban America, because I think urban America is going to welcome them more. Urban America is future America. Urban America is where, you know, Asian Americans and Latinos and blacks and whites are living together. The kids are going to the same schools. That's where you're building that kind of substrate of multiple identities of shared identity that I think is important. I think these programs are going to happen in urban America. And I'm not sure that the next administration, even if it is a democratic administration, is going to have that focus. Because I think a lot of the narrative that we've had that emerged from the last election, and that is still with us to some extent, is a lot about the decline of rural America, small town America, you know, opioid Christ end of manufacturing that leads to stagnant lives and leads to, you know, mental health issues. I mean, and so I think that a lot of the attention is going to be focused there, which I mean, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you know, I again, I'm not sure of how much emphasis is going to be placed on these issues. The author is Eduardo Porter. The book is American Poison, How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise. You can follow him at EduardoPorter.com and on Twitter at Porter Eduardo. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me. All right, folks, every single one of these conversations is going to be released leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair. It runs from November 15 to 22. Every conversation is free during that period. Check out MiamiBookFair.com or go to Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And remember, the future of democracy runs every Thursday live at 1 p.m. Eastern. You can learn more at kf.org slash fdshow. You can also follow the FD podcast at Spotify, Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you follow podcasts. That's also where we'll be releasing every single one of these exclusive conversations in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. And of course, feel free to send a question at any time to me on Twitter at the Sam Gill. Thanks so much for listening.