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A
Having MG can make cooking difficult. But over the years, I've found some really helpful tools and tips that I'm excited to share. Hi, I'm Alicia.
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I think cooking should always be fun,
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creative, and of course, delicious.
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These black bean burgers are hearty, full
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of flavor and MG friendly.
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You're gonna love them. Check out Alicia's black Bean burger cooking video and other recipes.
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Full of tips and tricks for managing
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common MG symptoms while cooking only at mg-united.com Ready? Let's cook.
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Get a full body reset anywhere you go with Dr. Teal's magnesium spray. It's a concentrated magnesium blend of pure Epsom and Dead Sea salts all bundled up in a convenient on the go bottle. A few quick sprays will relax your body and mind and keep you feeling recharged all day long. It's wellness you can feel and you can find it in your local bath aisle.
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B
Dr. Teals?
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A
Yep, you needed that.
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B
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. Professor of African American studies at Princeton. He's also an author, public intellectual, and contributor to Ms. Now his latest book is out today. It's America usa How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. It's Eddie Glad. How are you doing, man?
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A
Man, it's good to lay eyes on you. It's good. It's pub day, so I'm happy. I'm excited.
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B
All right, well, thank you for fitting us in on pub day. It's good to see you, get to see you down in person in New Orleans. You know, we got to do a Mississippi trip together one of these days.
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A
That would be wonderful. One of these days. Take you over to the Gulf Coast. Yeah, the other side.
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B
I want to do it with you. All right, well, obviously we're getting to the book and there's a lot of relevant issues as it relates to the Voting Rights act, et cetera, about what's happening in our politics. But before we do that, I just want to hit on a couple news items. The latest in Iran. Boy, it seems like it's a long way from 95% of the way to a deal to 100% given what we saw last night. U.S. forces carried out attacks on multiple Iranian targets in the Persian Gulf. U.S. cENTCOM called them self defense strikes. The targets included missile launch sites and Iranian boats that were apparently attempting to place mines in the Strait of Hormuz. That's a little concerning Iran one this morning. It will respond to last night's attacks Trump says the cease fire is still on. Marco says the deal is close the next couple of days. Man, seems like they put the cart before the horse a little bit on this one.
- [02:36]
A
That's an understatement. We are in the midst of what it seems to me an escalating quagmire with this war of choice. I don't know what the off ramp is, Tim, to be honest with you. And what we get over and over again are these kind of promises. You know, Trump is the kind of carnival barker of our times, letting us know that this is about to happen or this will happen, and then it doesn't happen. And it just seems that I don't know how we get out of this. And at the same time that this is going on, Netanyahu and Israel has decided that it's going to escalate its assault on Lebanon and Hezbollah. We've already seen over 3,100 people killed over there, over 9,000 people injured. So these are two sides of this war that don't seem to be in conversation with each other. So we just need to buckle up, because there's no ending. It seems to be clear in sight to me, at least.
- [03:28]
B
The new Ayatollah Khamenei put out a statement that's relating to Israel saying the Jewish state will not exist in 15 years last night. This goes to the choice of getting into this and to creating this in the first place and thinking this was going to be easy, thinking you're going to be able to paper over these, like, really deep rifts in the region, just with, like, some reality TV glitz and glamour, you know? And, like, I mean, I think that it is clear that Trump wants some kind of deal because he doesn't want to be in an escalated war. Like, he thought he was going to be able to have this be quick. And so at some level, maybe there's some temporary reprieve. But as you point out, it's like the incentive structures all over the place go against that. Right? Incentive structure in Israel, incentive structure in Iran. The fact that they're allegedly putting mines in the strait last night. What's the incentive structure for the ships that are supposed to be going through the strait? They've got to be concerned. The insurance companies that pay all this stuff is a lot more complicated. It makes me think about, I had a buddy that's working on the Obama Iran nuclear deal, and just the amount of work and meticulousness and expertise that went into all that. Plenty of things you could say about it. That were not perfect. Right. But, you know, I do think in this era where a lot of people, you know, look down and brush aside that, you know, expertise, meticulousness, like we're seeing why it's needed.
- [05:00]
A
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, and their erosion of trust in this whole process, I mean, Iran is, you know, to be clear, is rightly suspicious. They've been bombed twice. Right. Sometimes in the midst of negotiations. The implication for the global economy, it hasn't quite touched us beyond high gas prices. But if this continues to go on, we're going to be seeing shortages, just as Asia is seeing shortages right now. And it's going to impact us across the board. From plastics to fertilizers to food, we're already seeing the impacts of those on our wallets and, you know, households to make determinations and decisions. But the idea that Donald Trump and his folk thought that they could do a Venezuela in Iran makes no sense to me. I mean, how many war games have been played out around the Strait of Hormuz that they're just going to dismiss expertise? And then I have to say this, Tim, because I'm on the Bulwark podcast. The fact that Netanyahu's talking point has become our own. Remember that Daily show skit about how many decades Netanyahu has been talking about nuclear. The nuclear threat. Now that's become our talking point. And it seems to me that the last few months or the last year or so has made it such that Iran is positioned in a way that almost thinks that it has to have a nuclear weapon in order to prevent attacks. So I don't know how we get out of this, to be honest with you.
- [06:27]
B
It's the last safe harbor. Talking point, honestly, is where they've come to on the nuclear, because they failed across every other goal. So, okay, we'll continue to monitor that. I'm gonna give us a little bit of a palate cleanser before we get into the racial history of America, if that's okay.
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A
Thank you, Matt.
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B
Did you see the New York Times story on the Trump Cabinet meetings? This is a little amuse boosh for us. Before we get into the deal, the New York Times did an analysis of all of the Cabinet meetings that has happened in Trump 2.0. Here's what they found. On average, one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump or criticized Biden or Obama as compared to Trump. He's described frequently over the course of those meetings as the only person who can do various historic things, including save America. So I thought As a precursor to your book talking about the history of America, what does it say that we have this Kim Jong un ass reality TV show star sitting around a cabinet meeting having a bunch of, well, now that all the women are gone, now having a bunch of men tell him he's the only one that can save America.
- [07:34]
A
Yeah, this sausage, festive mediocrity, as it were. And these are the folk who are talking about merit. These are the folk who are beating us over the heads about excellence and talent and earning one's way. Look, we have been faced with an all out assault on the very idea of governance that's been bound up with the kind of cult of personality. You know, you think about Steve Bannon, Tim, talking about deconstructing the administrative state. Well, you deconstruct the administrative state around this cult of personality and then you get the debacle in Iran, you get all the stuff, the grift, all the stuff that we're witnessing in real time. And one wonders, one wonders honestly how we're going to get on the other side of this. But the idea that folk have to say all of this stuff just to appease this man's ego, right? It just makes you just say, oh my God, are these people that small, that insane, insecure that they need this or that? He's that small and that insecure that he needs this kind of worship day in and day out. Yeah, that was a palate cleanser.
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B
Ish. Ish. Yeah. I notice you didn't flatter me when you came on the podcast, so that's okay. That's all right. We may be over the course of time or back and forth, we'll see who's the one that gets the flattery. All right everybody. You're trying to stay sane while prices are going up everywhere at the gas pump, at the grocery store and our liberal democracy as being ripped apart at the seams. That's why we're out here doing what we do. That's why we love going out there for the live shows and being with you guys and doing it together. And that's why we decided this Memorial Day to offer a deal unlike anything we've ever done before. Right now you can access everything we offer at our website. Secret podcast ad free podcasts with 50% off your membership for the next year. So it's a way to help you keep sane and you can join the bulwarks incredible community. It also lets you comment on the substack. Bring some nice comments every once once in a while. You know, I like constructive criticism, but, you know, we can also be cheery and be together as well. Come on in. 50% off. Go to the bulwark.com sanity that's thebullwerk.com sanity. We'll put that link for you in the show notes. Hope you can become a member and we'll see you around. I want to just talk about the book first before and kind of set the precursor of everything that you wrote about since it goes back through the history of America's anniversaries and let that lead us to the challenges that we have today. So obviously it's book day, so I assume that unless some of the listeners got, you know, a goodreads, what they call those tapes that used to go around. Yeah. Bootleg. Thank you. Got it. Thank you. A bootleg. Unless people got a bootleg copy, they haven't read it. I. I have. So give, give them a little. Give them the elevator pitch about. About the book.
- [10:24]
A
You know, I think at every milestone anniversary, whether it's the centennial or the 150th or the bicentennial or now, the country has to tell a story about itself, and it has to tell a story about its founding. And in each of these milestone anniversaries, it confronts the vexing question of what do we do with race? How do we tell a story about who we are as Americans with the reality of race pressing in upon us? So the centennials, 1876, reconstruction is collapsing. The sesquicentennial, the 150th. This is the decade of the Klan, right? This is the period in which the Klan has an outsized influence on our politics. In 1976, this is Vietnam. This is Watergate. This is black power. This is the women's movement. The country seems to be at each other's throat. And then now here we are in 2026, where you hear the language of blood and soil from the likes of J.D. vance and others. And Trump has meld has kind of combined the celebration of the with a celebration of himself and maga ism. And so I want to tell a story about this. Right. That at the heart of these celebrations is the contradiction that the country's divided soul is on full view, that the double consciousness that has often been attributed to black folk, that we see ourselves through the eyes of those who despise us, is actually a consequence of the double consciousness at the heart of the nation. That is to say, America imagines itself at once, Tim, as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And because you can't hold those two things together without contradiction. It deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country that generates these cycles that we see in a telescoped way during these anniversaries. And so here we are just, we're barreling towards July 4th, I think is going to be a shit show. The story that folk are going to tell is going to be a story that demands that people that look like me that we are put in our place, that we play minor bit parts in the history of the country. And I wanted to write a book that would answer back, that would speak back.
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B
Yeah, I thought that the 1876, that 100 year anniversary section was so interesting. There are a couple of things you're talking about. One was what Frederick Douglass was talking about. This, you know, feeling that the 100 year anniversary, like white America and the north and south would kind of come back together and find a kind of common truce, which they end up doing by basically gutting Reconstruction. Just as a little kind of interesting history note, because I didn't realize this because I don't know about you, sometimes it feels like the cowboys and Indians are on a different historical timeline than the rest of America. I don't know, I get my brain. It's hard to sometimes to put that all together. But Custer's Last Stand is happening during the 100 year anniversary of the country. So anyway, talk a little bit more about that anniversary.
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A
Yeah, I mean, you know, you got over 600,000 people have been killed on land and sea as a result of the carnage of the Civil War. You get radical Reconstruction after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And Andrew Johnson just wants to bring the south in without any consequence. Congress takes over. You get radical reconstruction between 1866 and 1876. Right. And what you see is this kind of big, this pushback in interesting sorts of ways. And the pushback has taken place in the south even as your Union soldiers are occupying the south and West. But you see Democrats, and we gotta be clear, this is not the same Democratic party of today. But you see Democrats in so many ways organizing through violence as well as coercion, as well as law, trying to seize power in southern states. You get Colfax in Louisiana, you get Vicksburg in Mississippi. Violent overthrows. The Mississippi plan, right. Lays out a blueprint of how the south will return to power. How southern plantation owners would. So 1876 is the first time we're going to tell a story about the nation in the aftermath of the war that almost destroyed the nation and this is also during the period of the Gilded Age. Right. And so what they're going to do is they're going to engage in this massive act of forgetting. Frederick Douglass calls these folk the apostles of forgetfulness. They're going to erase what happened and what drove or caused the Civil War. They're going to talk about America's ingenuity, its economic power. It finally is, on its own, is not beholden to Europe any longer. But at the heart of it, though, is this violence that's happening across the south as Reconstruction collapses. Frederick Douglass is perhaps the most famous black man. He is the most famous black person in the country, the most photographed black person in the country. He's scheduled to be on the dais with President Grant. He tries to get in. A Philadelphia police officer says, no, you're not on the dais. He shows him his ticket. He says, there's no way this N word can be on the daisy. If it wasn't for a politician, a white politician who saw him, Douglass would never have been admitted to the Exposition.
- [15:38]
B
Wow.
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A
And then he was just. He had to sit on stage silent. They would not allow him to speak. Right. So 1876 is this extraordinary moment of forgetfulness in a way, shadowed by violence and the collapse of Reconstruction. And what makes it possible, this is the key. What makes reunion possible between the south and the north is that they see themselves as white, and that whiteness can then overcome regional differences. And we see that evidence itself more clearly in the turn of the century and the first two decades as we grapple with, as a nation, with European immigration and with Jim Crow and the violence around it.
- [16:22]
B
Right. You Fast forward to 1926. There's a strike in the Times review of your book. There's the striking vote that you included as well, of the. Of the Ku Klux Klan marching in front of the Capitol. The 1926, whatever that's called, 150th anniversary. And there's always fun words like sesquintennial or something, something to that effect. And you have that in the moment, that. And kind of in the spirit of, you know, nothing is new. You know, everything that's new is old and brought back. You also have this push for Nordic, you know, immigration and making America Nordic during that. That time, the 1926. So, yeah, just talk about that anniversary as well.
- [17:07]
A
Yeah, you know, we. We usually talk about the decade of the 20s as, you know, the Jazz Age. This is the period of the Charleston and the like. Right. But it's really the decade of the Klan, 1915. The Klan is reborn. It has outsized power. It claims, you know, hundreds of thousands of members on its roles. Its most important piece of legislation that it sponsored, Johnson. Representative Johnson was a member of the Klan who helped pass, along with Senator Reid from Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania, by the way, had over 250,000 Klan members. They helped pass the Immigration Act, Immigration and Nationality act of 1924, which established the kind of immigration regime that many of the folk today want to return to. They want to return to a piece of legislation that was basically written by the Klan. 1925, 26, the Klan, you know, in D.C. you see rows of rows, thousands, mostly from the north, right, and the Midwest, thousands of clan members in their sheets and hoods. They were initially approved, Tim, to hold their annual convention, what they call the Clonvocation. They were initially approved to hold an annual.
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B
That's really what it was called, the Clonvocation.
- [18:19]
A
The Clonvocation.
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B
Jesus Christ.
- [18:21]
A
It was initially approved because the 150th anniversary was held in Philly, just like the. The centennial. So you had the exposition. They were approved to have their annual convention at the exposition in Philadelphia. So the country was going to celebrate his flag and burn a cross at the same time. Now, what's interesting, in 1926, in the North American Review, the grand wizard of the Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans, published a piece defending the Klan's fight for Americanism. This is as they kind of are speaking against this. These, shall we say, shithole countries from the wrong part of Europe that are sending folk over. Italians, Irish, Jews and the like, they're really, really, really going after Catholics in this moment. Right? And he sits there and lays out in that piece, right? How can I put this, Tim? It's so freaking scary because it maps onto the very ways in which MAGA talks today. Talking about they can't teach what they want to teach in school, talking about these foreigners polluting the country, talking about America first. All of this is evidenced right in that moment. So 1926 is this extraordinary period. But guess what happens also in 1926. It's also the moment in which Negro History Week is founded. So black folk are speaking back, trying to tell a different story in this moment of racist erasure.
- [19:47]
B
I guess the 26 is before Lindbergh and kind of.
- [19:50]
A
Right, but the sets the stage, Father Coughlin and all of these folks.
- [19:53]
B
Yeah, it does. Yeah.
- [19:56]
A
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B
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- [21:21]
A
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- [21:27]
B
Fast forward to today in the Echoes of Maga. There are just these kind of clownish, almost absurdist representations of the jingoism back at those celebrations as well. I don't know what could possibly stand up to the MMA fight that we're going to have at the White House. And I just kind of wonder when you look at that and think about that, how an AI Eddie Gloud would cover that in an update to this book 50 years from now on the Tri Centennial and whether that how that fits in the timeline that you're writing about.
- [22:05]
A
We have to begin to think about how the decline of seriousness in the country, how the country gets overrun by surface, by shadows as opposed to depth. And it makes sense that you would get a caricatured version of Ronald Reagan at this stage. A B list actor to a B list reality show first, do you see the line drawn and how that then becomes an assault, assault on the political imagination of the country where we are not capable in so many ways to be serious enough to engage in self governance such that, you know, an MMA fight is is held on the White House lawn or Hunger Games version of competition for high school athletes or something
- [22:51]
B
like that, you know And FBI agents. We're doing it for FBI agents.
- [22:54]
A
Can you imagine? And so, you know, I think, though, what's really important, though, is in 1926, this is something Calvin Coolidge spoke at the exposition. President Coolidge spoke. And what President Coolidge did in that moment is that he talked about the founding as not being reducible to the American Revolution. He says we only need one revolution. That revolution gave voice to enduring principles, what he would say, metaphysical principles that weren't reducible to the country. And he says we don't need another revolution. All we need to do is to remember and restore. So Calvin Coolidge is not interested in more perfect union talk. In other words, our salvation was secured at the founding because of these principles. MAGA gives that an evangelical twist. These folk are not interested in the progress of the nation or more perfect union talk. It's not about whether or not we are a multiracial democracy, whether or not we're treating black folk right, whether or not we're treating our minorities right. No, they don't give a damn. Only thing they want us to do is to understand that we are already saved. That's all we need to do, is to remember, and to remember in a way that aligns the country's purpose with Donald Trump's ends and aims.
- [24:11]
B
Yeah, it's interesting you say that my producer flagged for me when we were writing this, that we had a big all staff meeting in D.C. last week. She saw somebody in the mall, was walking around the mall, somebody wearing this America 250 years of freedom shirt. You see this a lot, right? And so, like, I'm curious how you kind of process that. Right? On the one hand, I guess you could look at it three ways. You could look at it out of hopefulness, like, this is freedom. We're aspiring to freedom. Like, you know, you can kind of in the way that Obama kind of talked about, you know, the founding. You can think about it like that. You can think of it out of just ignorance, right, that this didn't happen. Or you can think about it in the way that kind of you're laying out there, the Coolidge is laying out, right? That it's like, no, what was achieved there was, was enough. And we need to kind of return to that mindset. You know, how do you. How do you navigate that sort of.
- [24:59]
A
All three versions of what you just laid out to my mind, Tim, are features of what might I call a storybook version of American democracy.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Right. So the notion of freedom exists apart from history, and America becomes Its manifestation. That's one version, right. The other version is that we're still a sacred project. We failed, we've fallen short, but we're always already on the road to a more perfect union. Right? There's that story, right? And then, of course, the founding did, you know, did everything for us. So those three versions, right? But what I want to suggest is that from the very beginning, the divided soul of the country has it that, you know, we imagine ourselves as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and that the notion of freedom was articulated from the very beginning, voiced from the very beginning, as the possession of white Americans to give and to take away and as long as freedom. Because think about. There's an apocryphal story that says that John Adams says to King George, in the moment in which he's articulating a notion of liberty, he says to him, we will not be your Negroes. So at the very moment in which he's giving voice to an idea of freedom, it's based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom, or you read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, he talks about all of this stuff about American civil society and the importance of democracy. And then he starts the chapter on the three races. He says, now that I've dealt with all of that, I'm going to turn to this. And when he starts talking about the three races, he talks about the challenges to everything. He just talked about about American democracy, moving before that. So what I want to suggest is that instead of telling a storybook version of freedom in the country, we need to tell a more tragic story, one that takes seriously our failings, our shortcomings, that will allow us to grow up as a nation, right? So that we can be true to who we are and imagine ourselves differently, instead of finding comfort and security in the myth that tells us that we're always good, even when we're not.
- [27:09]
B
I want to push back. I agree with that. Oh, yeah, I agree with that. But I have a little bit of an argument inside of me, even on that front, that I've been thinking. I was thinking about as I was reading the book, and I want to kind of make an analogy which is, like, at some moments, moments of celebration, at anniversaries, like, isn't there a case for forgetting? You know, I'm trying to think about, like, this is a silly example, kind of. But, like, my high school graduation, about a month before my high school graduation, I was a very bad young man at a Regis Jesuit high school. Lacrosse game. And I did some things that are regrettable. And I was suspended from school for a couple days. And they like, threatened to not let me walk. And, you know, eventually I made up for it and, you know, atoned for my sins. And I was able to walk at graduation and at the graduation celebration, my parents didn't, like, spend the time talking about my various sins. You know, like, we spent a day saying, look, you know, you did eight. You had 18 years of. And some bad days, some good days, but the good days, you know, are worth remembering and acknowledging, right? And obviously this is like not a perfect comparison to an anniversary, but, you know, maybe it could be. You could think about it as a marriage anniversary, right? Like where you've had a rocky moments in the marriage and you know, there's been a betrayal between one of the spouses. And it's like, you're at your 40th wedding anniversary and it's like, should the toast mention the time 22 years ago, one of you guys did something bad? You know what I mean? And so I guess that is my pushback, right? Like, is it really so wrong to have a day or a week or a year of acknowledging goodness and triumph?
- [28:51]
A
That's a great point. And it reminds me of. I'm going to be an egghead for a moment, A nerd.
- [28:55]
B
Let's do it.
- [28:56]
A
It reminds me of a moment, a line in Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche's the Uses and Abuses of History, where he says, we have to cultivate our ability to forg. Right? We can't live a completely historical life. Right. Otherwise we would be paralyzed.
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B
You would have no friends if you remembered everything that every person ever did.
- [29:14]
A
But I think what's important, though, is during these milestone anniversaries. How can I put this? What we choose not to remember often exposes the limits of our conception of justice. What we choose to forget often shines a glaring light on the gaping holes in our ideas of justice. So what am I saying? In these milestone anniversaries, every last one of them happens in the midst of extraordinary kind of flaring up of the contradiction. 1876 is the collapse of freaking Reconstruction. By the end of the 19th century, over 53,000 black people will be dead. 1926 is the decade of the Klan. In the midst of that, you have the red summer of 1919. You have all sorts of violence that's happening across the south and in the Midwest and in the Northeast, right? So the moment in which we're trying to tell a story about our shared sense of Value. There's this amazingly violent effort to discipline the roiling chaos underneath. The appeal to consensus. And certain people are bearing the brunt of it. Certain people are taking it on the chin and having to bury their dead because of it. So part of what I'm trying to suggest here, unlike you, remember how you framed it, you said I had atoned for my sins, right? And I had tried to do. Right. And so they let me walk. We're in the midst of the fever dream, suffering. The country is engaged in an all out assault on black life, an all out assault on the idea that we're a multiracial democracy. What does it mean to forget? In this moment, it seems to me that forgetfulness makes us accomplices in the ongoing horror of those who believe that the country must be white or the country shouldn't be at all.
- [31:21]
B
I'm wondering what that looks like. One thing that comes to mind is when Obama first comes in, I think it was in 2009, he goes to Egypt and he travels and the Fox News kind of brands us the apology tour where he goes around the world and does. I'm curious what your memory is of that, but to my memory, kind of this, like a fully actualized conversation about what America is and was and should be, that it wasn't just like, like, God damn America. It wasn't that. Right. It was a speech that talked a lot about what America had offered and what the opportunity of America was, but also acknowledging the flaws and the mistakes. How did that sit with you at the time? And is that the type of thing that you're talking about, or is it something different?
- [32:08]
A
Well, I would want it to be more substantive. I think Obama was doing that. And then of course, you juxtapose that with his drone policy. You just pose that to the way in which I still got the Canadian Prime Minister in my head as he's describing the world in which America is the hegemon and how the rules were bent to benefit us and the world had to look elsewhere. So, you know, I'm committed to a world in which everybody, no matter their birthplace, no matter their color, no matter who they love or their gender or their class position, have the ability to actualize their dreams. And I don't mind symbolic gestures to that. I want substantive policy with regards to that. So what I'm calling for is something much more fundamental, if that makes sense. You know, the end of the book, the arc of the book is right here. Usually when you write a book like this, people want you to say, so what do we do? Give me a damn blueprint, Eddie. You. Since you're the egghead in here. And I said, well, you know, I've written two other books that, you know, because this is the third in the trilogy that have tried to address the moment. And I said, you know, I don't want to offer policies because that's what we do in order to make ourselves feel good, to make ourselves think that we're actually trying. Tim, we have to make a choice. Either you're gonna be the knucklehead that did what you did, that almost got you kicked out of school, or you're gonna be a different kind of person. Either we're gonna be a beacon of freedom, and we can debate that. We can debate what that means, or you're gonna be a white republic. J.D. vance wants us to be a white republic. His stuff is all blood and soil. He rejects the creedal notion of America, of American identity. He did it on July 5, 2025.
- [33:49]
B
Right.
- [33:49]
A
He was explicit. That declaration is not enough.
- [33:53]
B
It's the essential speech, actually, of the next decade. I think, honestly, it's the essential text. And I talked about it a lot a couple weeks ago.
- [34:01]
A
And you know what, Tim? That text comes out of, you would think it's just J.D. vance, but it comes out of an intellectual subculture that is thick, that is deep. Right. It's Claremont Institute folk. It's all of these Straussian folk that are informing and shaping the way in which Vance has rendered that argument, these nationalist, conservative folk. So, I mean, that's a different story. But the point I'm making is that we have to make a choice and then to act accordingly. We can't be both, and otherwise we'll find ourselves in this position over and over again, and my grandchildren will end up having to deal with this just like my son is having to deal with it now.
- [34:45]
B
All right, so now I'm going to do the thing that you just said you can't fully answer, which is, what do we do? But in the micro. In the micro, I'm talking about in the micro. I don't know. I've been thinking about the 250th anniversary and the Fourth of July kind of. Not a lot, but a little bit. I have this sense of dread about it, kind of in the same way that I had, like, that feeling around Trump's inauguration. And this time I had to work during Trump's inauguration. And I'm embittered to our bosses at Ms. Now for making me do that, actually. But Eight years ago, when I was not gainfully employed, I just checked out, I just turned my phone off and I went and saw my godson and I took him to the park and whatever. And I kind of have that instinct about this time. And I guess that is a cousin to my other question about isn't there some value about forgetting? Is there not some value to that? Is that the right. What is your instinct about how to handle it this year? Is it a moment for action or is it a moment for this too shall pass and we'll get them back in November?
- [35:52]
A
Well, no, I think it's not that because we're on the precipice. I don't know if we're going to survive. I don't know what we're going to look like on the other side of this. And so all hands are on deck, you know, and what I tell, the story I tell in the book is that in each of these moments, 1876, 1926, 1976, black folk are speaking back. Even though we're trying to be, people are trying to disappear us, right? There's been always been a kind of alternative celebratory calendar. While the country was lying to itself about freedom, we were celebrating the end of the transatlantic slave trade on January 1st. While the country was lying about itself on July 4th, we were celebrating July 5th, New York Abolition Day, right? This was before Juneteenth. We had this kind of ongoing signifying on the country. What I think we need to do come July 4th is show our asses. I mean, the full diversity of the country has to speak back to this narrowing vision of who we are. These folk are engaged in an all out assault on the America that has made our lives possible. And as a father, both of us, you're raising your baby in New Orleans of all places, right? That diversity is in our language, it's in our taste buds, it's in our food. It makes America swing, right? It's what makes us distinctive. And I think in response to, you know, what Trump and MAGA will try to represent as the country, we need to speak back at the highest volume with the diversity of the nation, right? And drown them out as best we can. I don't know what that will look like or how we will do it, but we need to do it, it seems to me.
- [37:44]
B
Well, you were to that point following the Calais decision, you were at the day of action in Mississippi Times, the Flat Circle, whenever that was last week, two weeks ago, we had Justin Jones on as well, who was there who was talking about that? Talk about kind of what the spirit was there. And also if there were any elements of that day that you felt like were productive or useful or augured for positive progress. Yeah.
- [38:11]
A
Mississippi is the metaphor of America. I like to think of Mississippi as at once, mystery metaphor. And me, you know, because I'm from the coast of Mississippi, but it was 82 counties in the state. 52 of them showed up, and they were pissed. The state is 38.5% black, 40% black, and they were pissed. And so you had this energy of celebration. It wasn't a kind of nostalgia for the Mississippi movement of the mid 20th century. It was really a sense of. Of this is where we are really. This is where we're doing. This is what we're doing. And then it was organizing and mobilizing. So there was this conversation that was being had. Tim, in the midst of it, okay, they want to redraw the maps in light of a set of assumptions about turnout. This is the numbers. So they were saying. I remember hearing Derek Johnson, basically president and CEO of naacp, he said, this is a math problem, right? So what do we need to do? How many do we need to get registered to vote? And per each county, in each county, what should be our turnout numbers to just simply undermine the assumptions of their redrawing? And so I kept hearing in my head something I had said before. You know, they thought we turned out for Obama, which transformed the map. Just wait till they see us turn out for us. And what I saw in the churches and what I saw across, because it was a rainy day on a Wednesday, folk work, and it was about 5,000 people right in the convention center. And so I came away on fire, right, hopeful, because the organizing was just beginning. And if there's any state in the south that you can awaken the beast, it would be a state where the population is 40% black.
- [40:05]
B
The candidate there, Scott Colum, who's running for U.S. senate, it's a little kind of under. It's for good reason. It's under notice because it's Mississippi, after all. But I guess I'm going to give you the optimistic and then hear my concerns. But the optimistic case is that turnout combined with some level of backlash, combined with potentially a depressed MAGA base, which is unhappy about the war, unhappy about costs. You can imagine a path for surprises. And the showing up part, even putting a scare into them in Mississippi, there's some value, too. So I don't know. Anyway, was Scott there? And was the focus there about Mississippi itself.
- [40:54]
A
Or.
- [40:54]
B
Or was this kind of a. This is a staging ground for maybe more fertile turf. Other places.
- [41:00]
A
It was both. And Mississippi, because it's the metaphor for the country. What happens in Mississippi, of course, plays itself out across the South. Remember, in the context of the collapse of Reconstruction, it's the Mississippi plan that provided the blueprint for the rest of the south to do what it did in order to engage in redemption. So I think, think Scott understands the numbers game. Remember, Espy didn't lose by much. Everybody's talking about Texas flipping, but in that environment.
- [41:30]
B
And Presley also.
- [41:32]
A
Exactly. So given the numbers and given the number of folk that you can turn out who are white, liberal and the like, and a suppressed vote on the other side, you can have. There's a chance here. But I think what's important, though, is that folk weren't just simply focused on electoral politics. They understood it as a critical component, but they were talking about it in a much more expansive way. But again, my cynical self will kick in. Yes, all of these elements are in place, but then these folk will damn cheat.
- [42:05]
B
That's one part of the cynical. Here's another element of it, and I try to be precise when I'm talking about this, because obviously black voters voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats, and Trump won a majority of white America, like that. So granted. But across every demographic group, we saw the same trend, which is people that have higher education attainment, people that have higher trust, people that are reading the news. Kamala did disproportionately better with them. And that was true among black Americans, too, and particularly black men. And what you saw in 2024 was a lot of particularly younger black men that aren't as engaged with everything that's happening that may and probably still aren't. Like, just to be honest, like, probably still aren't familiar with the details of the Kalai case. They're not listening to podcasts, right? Like, they're working. They're living their lives. They're not, you know, whatever. And there was like, an appeal to what Trump was offering on an economic level, and I think a feeling of disconnect from a Democratic elite that was, you know, serving the interests of whatever coastal, you know, elites or college educated elites. And. And I get excited about this, too, like this engagement and that day of action and what you were talking about when Justin was talking about. I get excited about it, but there's this little thing in the back of my head which is like, are they engaging still the same people that care about the news and are passionate about this, and maybe they're more engaged now. But how do you reach that next layer of black and brown folks that don't feel like they've really felt fully connected with, you know, the anti Trump movement, the Democratic Party, whatever you want to call it, pro democracy movement.
- [43:48]
A
That's the million dollar question. Or in this. In this context, the billion dollar question. Right. So one of the things I saw on Wednesday is a generational cross section of folks. There's one point. I was taking a podcast with Angela Rye and Andrew Gillum and Betty Thompson and folk, and in the middle of it, it was interrupted by these young folk with bullhorns coming. They were all young, and they changed the energy of the room almost immediately. And they had just been marching in the streets, and so they seemed to be engaged in a very interesting way. Folk weren't talking about just simply salvaging the seats of the CBC or keeping District 2 intact. They were talking about power and policy that could address specifically the circumstances of black Mississippi. And I thought that was really important because I think you're right. The Democratic messaging, whatever you think of the autopsy report for the Democratic Party and the shit show that that has been, what we do know is that there has been a disconnect between the symbolic gestures and the policies that could actually impact working people and working poor people. And in Mississippi, those two things index black folk in a very clear way. And so there are folks who are really, really, at least from what I saw and the energy I saw, are really kind of looking to push the political entities in a direction that could actually address their lives. They're not looking to the Democratic Party for salvation. They just know they got to get the fascist out of all office. But they're not, in doing that, they're not looking to the Democratic Party as the salvation. But they know that they're going to vote for, but they're not looking for that to be the panacea for the problems they face.
- [45:40]
B
Do you think that that notion has sunk in like when you were there with the Benny Thompsons of the world? Sometimes I worry that the Democratic establishment kind of feels like, hey, all we got to do is register more black voters and turn out more voters, and that'll work out for us. And like we learned in 24, that isn't like. Right. Quite true.
- [46:00]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [46:00]
B
When you talk about persuasion, a lot of times people are talking about my people, you know, the moderate Republicans in the suburbs. Independent.
- [46:07]
A
Independent.
- [46:08]
B
There is some persuasion that needs to be done, you know, within the black within every community. But, but in particular, we saw in, in 2024, within the black community, young black men and younger men that, that were kind of, you know, drawn at greater percentages towards, towards Trump. Do they get that, do you think?
- [46:27]
A
Some days they sound like some of them get it and then other days it sounds like they're just, they're just following the same, same blueprint. I mean, you know, you and I know that American politics will not change until there's a massive shift in the political consulting class.
- [46:43]
B
Yeah.
- [46:44]
A
There are these folk who make millions of dollars given the same damn advice every election cycle, and particularly with regards to black voters. Right.
- [46:54]
B
Yeah.
- [46:55]
A
So I think you're absolutely right that there has to be a different kind of messaging. It has to be a messaging that kind of bridges AOC kind of stuff with a traditional kind of attentiveness to the realities of race and how race over determines those working class issues in interesting sorts of ways. You're gonna have to appeal to young folk in a very different way. But you know, you think about Kamala Harris's campaign or even Clinton, Hillary Clinton's campaign, they think that they can just trot out a whole bunch of celebrities and that will be enough to turn black folk out.
- [47:33]
B
Yeah.
- [47:34]
A
And it's just not true. Or you just say people died for the vote, that's enough to turn them out. That's just not true. And what we saw with Hillary Clinton's campaign to go back to 2016 is that the numbers just simply returned to 2004. She was expecting to get the historic turnout of the Obama years and they just reverted back to normal. So the short answer, Tim, is that
- [48:00]
B
yeah, I would even like to see people try things totally different and throw things off the wall. I think it's so crazy how conventional the thinking is. It's like Barack Hussein Obama and Donald Trump are our last two, two term presidents. For some reason, everybody still is stuck in this very conventional mindset. And I'm hearing, and I talked to Van Lathan last week out in la and he's great. And his politics are also very AOC ish, broadly speaking. I'm sure they have differences. But he also is very acknowledging of he's from Louisiana, he's from Baton Rouge and he's like, there are elements of the community that is conservative or that is out of step with maybe what an elite, you know, Ivy League college progressive would want. And there needs to be like some kind of combination of these sorts of things, like where you have this AOC ish Talk to working class concerns, but also, you know, who knows, maybe some different type of messaging on. On social concerns and different types of language, you know, than what you might see from an Elizabeth Warren platform. Like it's. People are complicated.
- [49:05]
A
We are complicated. You're absolutely right. You know what we say are progressive issues. The folk don't want to go broke because they're sick.
- [49:14]
B
No.
- [49:15]
A
That folk want to work 40 hours a week and be able to put a roof over their head, put food on the table. That they want to be able to send their kids to affordable schools and the like so that they can have a better life than them. The stuff that we think of as far right. And, you know, there was a whole Pew Research data point that said if you control for race, black folk is as conservative as moral Mormons. Yeah, but that conservatism. Because I'm conservative in a certain way. I got a TS Eliot streak in me, but it doesn't map onto political ideological behavior. But it's just certain ways in which I was raised. I'm raised Catholic on the coast of Mississippi. Damn right. So part of what I think, you can't use no labels because you know how that goes. But part of what you're suggesting to me. Right. Is that people are complicated. That one day they sound like a conservative Republican, the next day they sound like a progressive Democrat. Because what they're trying to do is to live the best lives that they can for the people they love, Period.
- [50:22]
B
I want to end with Baldwin because I'm with you. I'm with you on all that. There's a spirit of Baldwin as one. He wrote this letter to Faulkner. Remember that? One that I really liked. Like the American South. Peers should read that. There's this quote in your book that is kind of an echo of the same message that he was offering in that. And I want to read it. To be an American black is to be, in this situation, intolerably exaggerated. Of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no ways honorably defend, which they were compelled indeed to endlessly attack and condemn, and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life.
- [51:03]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Democracy at its best. Democracy at its best is a disinterested form of love. You don't have to be a member of my family. You don't have to be a member of someone that I love deeply. It's just. I want. Good for you. Right. So I want to take love of country out of the abstract and bring it down to the ground. I love the folk here, the folk who make this place possible. And it seems to me in this moment, we have to dare to imagine the country anew based upon that love. And I got something from my student in my Baldwin seminar. She says maybe it's not hope that we need. Maybe what we need to do is just simply tell the truth with love lit by rage. And maybe that will open the door for a new way of us being together.
- [51:52]
B
I really like that. So we'll just leave it there. Eddie, Glad. I appreciate you very much, man. It's good to see you. America, usa How Race Shadows, the nation's anniversary is out today. Go get it. Good luck on the book tour. We'll see you soon, man.
- [52:04]
A
Thank you, man. Appreciate you so much. I love that. Holla.
- [52:07]
B
All right. Oh, yeah. That's my guy. All right, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show. We'll see y' all then. Peace stick all the communists the one
- [52:15]
A
neighborhood terrorize their children.
- [52:19]
B
We'll feel real good. Say goodbye.
- [52:25]
A
Thank you.
- [52:25]
B
Down on the corner of the 6th Main street the Bork podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. I'm Elizabeth Darico from Chicago, Illinois. I'm a Bulwark subscriber because I believe in truth, I believe in honesty, and I believe in integrity. The Bulwark has been a beacon for me in very troubled times to uphold the values of liberal democracy that I hold dear. And it helps me fight, and it helps me understand the present moment and take action to ensure the future. Join because the Bulwark is not run by a bunch of oligarchs. You are supporting people who are dedicated to the notion of a free press as a bulwark against tyranny.
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Head over to thebullwork.com sanity that's thebullwerk.com sanity.