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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, December 29th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. On March 31, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington.
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C
D.C. and it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people sit around and say, wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.
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B
Jelani Cobb joins me to discuss the political upheaval we've been seeing in the rise of Donald Trump and how the millions who oppose his agenda intend to Thwart him. Hi, Jelani. Good to have you back.
- [02:47]
D
Thank you. It's good to be back.
- [02:49]
B
Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden compared 2016 to 1968, and he found cause for hope even in that terrible year of riots and assassinations and the election of another law and order president who had barely eked out his own victory, Richard Nixon. Do you think Biden's comparison holds up?
- [03:09]
D
I do. I mean, I think in some there are no perfect analogies, of course, but one of the things I thought was notable about it was the fact that 1968 was such a flashpoint in terms of how people saw the importance of social organizing and protest. You know, of course, in the 1960s had been these important moments prior to that, Selma and, you know, the anti war movement and, you know, all these things that had culminated in that. You could really see in the election of 1968, a kind of inflection when people recognized that they had to make their voices heard and that these were kind of crucial issues in American democracy. And not only were elected officials responsible and accountable for this, but there had to be a kind of grassroots, what Tom Hayden called participatory democracy. And I think that that may well be what we're looking at, you know, at the outset of the Trump era.
- [04:05]
B
I don't know if you've had this reaction, but when I talk to young people, liberal young people who are thrown by this election, they've had no experience of grassroots democracy. They just have kind of grown, taking it for granted that the agenda they endorse would always in some way be with us. So talk a little bit more about why they shouldn't be deeply alarmed that all the progress that has been made over the last couple of generations could be completely undercut by Scott Pruitt at epa, by Jeff Sessions, you know, a strenuous opponent of the Voting Rights act, by Trump's promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. How do you speak to them?
- [04:48]
D
One of the even bigger elephants in the room here is that when you kind of go back and look at the radicalism of the 1960s, one of the elements that people say, you know, was responsible for it was the fact that this was the first generation of Americans that had been born and raised under the specter of possible nuclear annihilation. And we're actually having these kinds of conversations again in terms of the deliberate use of a nuclear arm. We could say after the Cold War that the possibility of that or the probability of that had decreased. Now we're looking at that same sort of dynamic, creating an existential threat and young people coming of age and having to grapple with that. But just in terms of things being able to move backward, it is crucially important when we look at what happens with social movements that, you know, people be keenly aware that no progress is permanent. When we saw the tremendous, you know, achievements of labor in the 1930s with the Wagner act, and then it's followed by the Taft Hartley act, and then there are these kinds of ways in which the movements of the 1960s, the Voting Rights act being the culmination of it, and now the Voting Rights act being essentially gutted by the Supreme Court decision. And this is not atypical in American history. We've seen these sort of ebb and flow relationship with progress almost as long as this country has existed. And so, yeah, I think that this is something that young people who have never known any president other than Barack Obama might be shocked by. But certainly a reading of American history would suggest that we could have anticipated this almost from the moment that Barack Obama was inaugurated.
- [06:28]
B
So this is what you mean when you've got a comment coming out in the magazine this coming week, when you say that movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns. So it takes a shock like nuclear proliferation, like most recently, Trump's tweet, that the United States should expand its nuclear capability. It takes something like that for a social movement to spark.
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D
Yeah, it does. And I think that we've seen that with the two most notable social movements of the last five years, one being Black Lives Matter and the other being the Occupy movement. Of course, we believe in a kind of reasonable financial system and reasonable regulation and an equitable share of the economy for people who work hard. Those are kind of ideals that no one would challenge. But it means something very different when you see the calamitous housing market and you see there being very little consequence for the people who have orchestrated this state of affairs, or the idea that we should have reasonable checks on police authority. But it's very different when you see video of people being shot. And so I think that in another sense, we might see the Trump era providing a kind of multiplicity of those moments. Certainly during the campaign, we saw that the ideas of religious freedom and religious tolerance are one thing, but being able to stereotype Muslims as a threat to national security and have millions of people echo that sentiment is something that is alarming. These are points that have shocked people into providing that kind of concrete recognition of what the abstract principle was really always about.
- [08:12]
B
One of the things I've been thinking about is the other populist movement we saw throughout 2016, and that was the economic populism of the Occupy movement, which gave rise to Bernie Sanders insurgency. What can Sanders do? One thing that's different today than when Richard Nixon was elected is that the Democrats do not have a majority in the Senate or the House. And Bernie has promised to continue his political revolution. Can you do that from the Senate? Does he mobilize this small army that he has created of supporters? And if so, how?
- [08:46]
D
Unfortunately, the kind of massive resistance that the Republican Party orchestrated for eight years under Barack Obama really was politically beneficial to them. I think in this instance, it would benefit Democrats to actually take a page from that playbook along issues of principle. We could very well say that if we are talking about matters of protecting civil liberties, or we're talking about matters of whether or not the country should be engaged in building a wall on the southern border, which is something they've moved away from, or more directly, what will happen in the confirmation process for many of these very questionable nominations that the President elect has made. I think those are all points at which the obstructionism that we saw in the previous eight might actually not be a bad approach. One of the things I think has been notable to me is that, you know, when Chuck Schumer, of course, talked about the areas that the Democrats could.
- [09:44]
B
Work with, Trump and Sanders, too, has indicated this to the rage of many of his followers.
- [09:50]
D
Yeah, I think it was a little bit alarming because in the kind of ethic of saying, oh, everyone should be given a chance, that seems to function as if this is a normal political situation, and I think it's anything but that, and finding areas in which you can work with the Trump administration, it seems almost as if you would reward bad behavior and thereby make it possibly more entrenched.
- [10:11]
B
Democrats were outraged by Senator Mitch McConnell's successful plot to thwart Obama's legislative agenda from 2009 on. It just worked in the House and the Senate. Should Democrats become the party of no?
- [10:24]
D
Well, I don't think it's so much a party of no, because I don't think that Barack Obama and Donald Trump are analogous. I think we're looking at something that is of its own kind, and there's a real kind of concern. Do you work with someone who has flouted the norms of releasing your tax returns, Someone who has politically mainstreamed white nationalism, Someone who has spoken in really troublesome and problematic ways about women and has a Slate of really questionable views. I don't think that that winds up being the same thing as obstructionism.
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E
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
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D
I want a shark that.
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E
That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
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C
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the.
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D
Unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability.
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E
Every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:15]
B
So let's talk about a recent successful protest, at least successful so far. The protest at Standing Rock. Several groups came together in the fall, beginning in the fall, to protest with the Sioux tribe against the completion of an oil pipeline that was going to be running through their land. They launched a petition, a lawsuit. It was successful. The Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would find another route. But Rick Perry has just been appointed Trump's energy secretary. So it's likely this is now going to continue. What can now be done?
- [12:48]
D
One of the main hopes, I think, for democracy is the willingness of people to resist incursions that violate their freedoms. The issue of Standing Rock that made it appealing for people to be involved with was recognizing that not only was this a concern about indigenous lands, but also the fact that this was a pipeline that had been rerouted from other areas at the request of people who live there. And so you then raise the question of, well, why would you take the consideration, the views of these people into consideration, but not this indigenous population, which has already suffered so much. I don't know that this will be a sympathetic ear, but I certainly think that the only hope people have is to continue to resist.
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B
What about the coming Women's March on Washington? It started out as a Facebook group, and now they're expectinglast count that I saw 200,000 people or more. What do you think will be accomplished by this? It's a kind of massive consciousness raising exercise. What do they expect to gain?
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D
Well, so here's the interesting thing. During the kind of horrible aftermath of the shootings in Charleston, I was talking with Mark Morial, who's the former mayor of New Orleans, and I got into a conversation with him about the removal of the Confederate flag. And I said to him, kind of skeptically, don't you think that this is just a kind of weak symbolic gesture? Ash certainly is symbolic, but the value of symbolic gestures is that they strengthen people's resolve to work for the substantive changes. And so if you can get a symbolic recognition of your cause, it makes it that much closer to actually getting the real change that you want to affect. And so for 200,000 people, they will have likely zero impact on the policy direction that this administration pursues. But there's a great deal to be said for people recognizing that they are not alone in their sentiments, and that is the nucleus that movements can grow out of. When we saw people in cities across the country protesting after the election, on the one hand, people thought that it was daft because they weren't protesting power, they weren't protesting a particular policy, and on some sense, they were actually protesting their fellow citizens. But it was also a kind of necessary throat clearing for people to say that I'm not simply alone in my apartment having this perspective. There are hundreds of people or thousands of people who feel the way that I do. And out of that, you kind of know that you have a particular wind at your back.
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B
I want to ask you about all this in the context of Obama's eight years in office. He had a really interesting conversation with his former aide David Axelrod a few days ago on Axelrod's podcast, the Axe Files. And Obama said that if he had run for a third term, he would have beaten Trump, saying that voters were not rejecting his vision of tolerance and this vision of our best selves that he's always talked about. And he went back and he discussed the Constitution and the fight for abolition and the civil rights era and the women's movement, and says he doesn't think that, at least as I was reading what he was saying, he does not think that this election represented a rejection of that America. Let's just listen to a little bit from that conversation.
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F
What I think we also saw is that the resistance to that vision of.
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D
America.
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F
Which has always been there, was always powerful, mobilized, and asserted itself powerfully Now, I would argue that in part, very cynically, somebody like Mitch McConnell or Roger Ailes at Fox News, I think, specifically mobilized a backlash to this vision in order to accomplish pretty routine commercial or power.
- [17:13]
B
So what about that, Jelani? Do you agree with Obama, or has there been a cultural shift with this election?
- [17:21]
D
I think we're still parsing out, you know, what the constituent elements of this is. I mean, we're still having this interminable debate about how racist, whether there was any racism at all as a motivating factor in Trump's electorate. The extent to which that was a motive force in the election, I think that, you know, political scientists and historians would be trying to figure that out for some time to come. There is one thing that I think can be said, but the extent to which that was a motive force in the election, I think that, you know, political scientists and historians will be trying to figure that out for some time to come. There is one thing that I think can be said. Barack Obama is a congenital optimist. In some ways, that's part of the job description for, you know, being the president. And we haven't seen anyone who is as pessimistic as the president Elect since probably going back to Nixon. That said, Obama's optimism has, at various points in his presidency looked like naivete. They certainly did not see the backlash of the Tea Party coming. And, you know, we've seen this time and time again where he thought that by perhaps trading on Gulf oil drilling, he would get something back on climate change. And, you know, he got nothing. He thought by trading on rigorous enforcement and deportation and immigration policy, he'd get something. On immigration reform, he got nothing. He thought that on kind of issue after issue, he would be able to negotiate some kind of bargain. And the modus operandi of the GOP for the past eight years has been to deny him any legitimacy. And so I think that had a particular kind of appeal to people who were opposed to the idea of Barack Obama, whether it was because he represented the culmination of the civil rights experience, or him as a black president, or him as a kind of standard bearer of a particular kind of liberalism. There was a way in which it appeared that Obama's optimism about the best of America blinded him from the realities of the worst of America.
- [19:37]
B
So maybe we won't know what Obama's legacy will be until we see whether all of the things that he stood for can come to be through some of these protest movements against what Donald Trump's administration seems to want to perpetrate.
- [19:52]
D
I think that's true. And I also think that one other interesting question will be how much of a leash the Republican Party gives Donald Trump. Even though people buckled down and he wound up winning over 90% of Republican voters, we did see more tumult and suspicion directed at this nominee than we had in previous years. And those stress fractures become more prominent as you actually try to do things legislatively and politically on Capitol Hill. The other thing that I think is interesting is that, you know, people have made the comparison of Donald Trump and Joseph McCarthy. I know I've written about that myself, and other people have kind of seen the ways in which McCarthy and Trump seem to share particular political DNA. And it's also worth noting that the Republican Party itself was responsible for bringing down Joseph McCarthy. At some point, he became quite a political liability. And even though it took six years for that to happen, it eventually did happen. And, you know, there's some question about Trump saying that he would drain the swamp and then appointing all these people who appear to be compromised in many kinds in many different ways. But I think there's another element of this, which is that these are not people who have a great deal of political experience. They're not familiar with the ways that things get done in Washington, D.C. that may wind up becoming a source of friction, not just politically in general, but even within the Republican Party. It can't be presumed that there's an infinite amount of leeway, political leeway and mandate that Donald Trump has, even within the Republican Party.
- [21:37]
B
Good. Let's end on that mildly hopeful note.
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D
Mildly, yes.
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B
Thank you so much, Jelani. Jelani Cobb, a staff writer, is the author of the Substance of Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. You can find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com or or on the New Yorker Today app. A great way to read the New Yorker on your mobile device. Available at no extra charge from the App store or@newyorker.com today. Tell us what you thought of this podcast. Rate and review the political scene on itunes. This podcast is produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden. America is changing and so is the world.
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D
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
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E
I'm asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
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D
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story.
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E
From this intersection where the world and America meet.
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D
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts from. PRX.