The Realignment: 385 | Wesley Lowery: Backlash Politics from Obama 2008 to the Summer of 2020 and Beyond

Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

Today's episode is with the journalist, Wesley Lowry. We're

talking about racial backlash in America. We're going to cover a

bunch of different topics, everything from the reparations

debate, to the defund the police debate, to everything in

between, especially the Obama presidency to today. So lots of

great stuff here, lots of interesting perspective. We'd

definitely love to know what you think. This is the perfect

follow up to the previous episode I just did of Peter

Turchin. That episode focused on America, the lens of power,

class and education and today's is all focused on the lens of

race. Hope you all enjoy the conversation and have a great

rest of your weekend.

Wesley Lowry, welcome to the Realignment. Thanks for having

me. Yeah, I want to start by going through a bunch of

definitions of terms and concepts that are covered in the book

but also are reflected in your reporting and writing. I'd love

to hear your definition of backlash.

Well, backlash, backlash is anything that is a negative

response, registered to a development or a step, right? And

so in this specific sense, I'm thinking about the backlash to

recent current events and the perception of advances towards

multi-racial democracy, right? So the book's titled American

White Lash. And so you go from backlash to white lash, well,

let's talk about what is white and what is whiteness, right? Now,

we know that race is a biological fiction, that there are

not races, that humans are all the same. And the science tells

us that and if you're a person of faith, then pick your faith,

they all tell us that too. But science is proven. And so what

is whiteness? You know, whiteness is a race, race is why

it's a biological fiction, race is a societal, sociological

reality, right? That we have created a caste system based

on how people are perceived racially. That's a caste system

that is not, that is not inflexible, that people's, the

way they are coded racially can shift and can change both in

specific contexts, as well as over time, whole groups can move

from one thing to being the other. And that in the United

States of America, by law, since the colonial times, we have

codified this type of racial caste system into our laws. We

wrote that white Americans had one set of rights, and then

others had another set of rights, we created the

distinction. And so when we talk about a white lash, right,

what we're talking about is a backlash, a negative response

from the majority of Americans who are codified as white, two

steps, and what they perceive as progress towards a fully

multiracial democracy in a multicultural society.

So this is where my ideological priors must be very curious

about this question. Now, just in my audiology, I mean, just my

frame of the word, I'm pretty centrist in my politics. And

I'm also an interviewer. I'm not an activist, I'm not a

politician. So there are certain things that I think you

would do that I understand an activist wouldn't like to do.

What degree do you think it is the responsibility of an

activist to guard against backlash? So for example, the

reason I'm asking that is, if you were to take me and drop me

into BLM in June of 2020, I'd be the guy who's saying, well,

look, if we say this thing with defund the police, or we do that

thing, it's going to cause center left parts of the

Democratic Party's coalition to get really concerned, like on

and on and on and on. So I have one approach towards guarding

against backlash, but I would admit that activists who have

different roles in our societies, the interviewers or

media people do are going to have a different perspective. So

given your reporting, your writing, how do you think they

should conceive of backlash and whether it should be guarded

against or as a cost of doing business?

I think I really appreciate that question, because I think very

rarely do those of us in the media acknowledge that our job is

fundamentally different than the job of activists, right? No, I

mean, I think we assert that all the time and try to define

ourselves against activists, right? It's interesting, right?

But what I mean by that, rather, though, is that our

sensibility and our kind of status quo bias might be

fundamentally and functionally different, right? In the same

way, and I talked to my attorney friends about whether or not

details of an investigation should leak, they have a

different perspective as people whose the Hippocratic oath is to

their attorney client privilege than me, whose

professional goal is to get information and put it into the

public, right? And so when we think about, and I actually do

think members of the media are at large, we talk all the time

about political bias, and I think some of that's overblown, but

they're members of liberal institutions, and I don't mean

that politically, but I mean kind of in the broad, classically

liberal sense, that broadly believe in a multiracial

democracy and broadly believe in the exchange of ideas and

that's why, right? And so because of that, I think very often

individual members of the media see themselves as theoretical

ideological allies of a lot of activists, even though

tactically, we read from different holy books, right?

Yes. I say all that to say, I think that, I say all that to

say, I think that almost every juncture of almost any

movement that's made significant societal change, you could go

back and argue that things being said went too far, were too

radical, were going to prompt backlash that in most

historical cases, such things were being argued, right? And

that it can be very difficult to suss out what is true and

what is not, in part because when you're a member of an

ideological movement and your opposition are members of an

opposing ideological movement, you cannot pretend as if this

all operates within an intellectual good faith, where

Barack Obama is going to pass Mitt Romney's healthcare plan

because he's scared of backlash if he passes single payer, they're

going to call it socialism. And then what does the conservative

movement do? They argue that Mitt Romney's healthcare plan is

socialized medicine, right? That trying to triangulate this for

like intellectual honesty is actually unhelpful, right? In

that it's limiting in a way that, well, all right, there is an

argument, I'm not making it, but there's an argument that if

you're going to be called a socialist anyway, then do

socialism, right? Then do it, right? And very often what we

see in our politics is a triangulation in that way that

ends up leaving basically no one happy. In this particular

context, right, you have a, there's also a difference between

short-term and long-term backlash. Almost any act of

any act of political activism, social activism is going to

lead by its very nature to blow back. The question is, is the

short-term blowback worth the long-term a potential achievement

or a potential change, right? And so a similar counterfactual

works in the other direction, right? Well, okay, the

desegregation of American public schools led to the rise of a

hyper-conservative homeschool movement, led to the rise of

segregation academies, hyper-private education that

actually zapped a lot of resources from public education,

right? That a step towards creating equality under the

wall could be said to have resulted in a backlash that

furthered a bunch of inequities or at least codified the

moving forward. I think very few civil rights activists would,

and frankly, I think very few legal scholars would agree that

then with the suggestion, then well, then we shouldn't have

done school desegregation, right? Because the country is going

to react in such a racist way to this, we just shouldn't do the

good, we shouldn't do the right thing. I think you end up in a

like a complicated, I'd be interested in like an ethicist

on it or like, you're like, I'm a right, right? But I do think

you find yourself in like a very complicated and potentially

compromised ethical position when you're saying, I know it is

right, but I'm not doing the thing I think is right because

I'm scared that me doing what is right will prop someone else

to do what is wrong. Yeah. And I guess for me, the reason why

I'm asking this question is this leads into 2020 with the

defund the police debate. Yeah. Because from my

perspective, obviously Black Lives Matter, you know, your

reporters, I don't need to tell you this, but became

inherently controversial. But that to me seems like a

category of if you're going to engage in any sort of pushback

against the status quo, like the term Black Lives Matter is

going to offend a certain very specific white suburban voter

who many politicians who are ideologically allied with you

are going to be concerned about. It seems to me, though, that

the defund the police rhetoric specifically edged too far into

this is pushing the status quo, but it kind of upset the

apple cart in a way that wasn't inherently helpful. So I guess

part of like, you know, reading your book and just talking

to you here is just trying to understand how this all fits

together because once again, if we're coming from the media

perspective, I just like don't understand. So help me, I

guess, understand better how you'd think. I think about it

a few different ways. And I think for some of the reasons I

laid out before, I think the jury is still out on it. I think

we're, I think it's far, we're far too close to 2020, right, to

assess anything but the short term. Okay. Yeah. Right. You know,

like that. Wait, could pause then. Could you define what the

long term would be then? Like, let's start with it. Let's start

there. Sure. Well, I think about it. I think about this way.

Right. Let's go backwards one cycle. Right. And you noted

this, right, that initially, so Black Lives Matter as a

rallying cry emerges in 2013, following the quiddle of George

Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin's death, the death of Jordan

Davis, and the release of the movie Fruitvale Station about

Oscar Grandston. And, and then gains national prominence the

following year in 2014, following the deaths of Eric

Gardner, Michael Brown, Tamellis. Right. At the time, there

was significant media and political rendering of

garments and debate about whether or not the term Black

Lives Matter was counterproductive, whether it was

going to undermine the greater message, whether it was

needlessly divisive, because all these white people were

offended. And what about white lives matter and all lives

matter? I mean, it was, it was a constant political debate

about the tactic. And then we get to 2020, where George

Floyd's been killed. Now, a lot happens in those six years.

Right. There are, there are many, many other police

killings or many other cases that fall into this. You have

things like Flint, Michigan, or, you know, other arguments

around whether the systemic or structural inequities in

the United States of America as it relates to Black people

and whether or not our society fully values their humanity.

Right. Yeah, lots of things that can fall under this kind of

Black Lives Matter umbrella. And we see the election of

Donald Trump happens in this period of time and the rise

of the MAGA movement and his steps he takes

administratively. We see the rise on the left of a resistance

to combat him. By the time we get to 2020, meanwhile, on the

actual issues that this arises from, we've seen thousands of

police departments actively publishing the data. Almost

every police department in the country is putting body cameras

on. Public opinion has shifted drastically that at the time

in 2014 that you would even ask questions about what a police

officer had done was was you're veering towards

controversial. Now, basically no matter your politics, every

person out there has a video they've watched where they go,

well, that cop shouldn't have done that. I agree that that was,

I mean, it's hard for us to remember how in 2014 the idea

that you would ask any questions meant you were anti cop and

you hated the police and X, Y and Z. Right now, everyone of

every politics agrees that there are cases where this is

happening and it's unacceptable. And in part because of all

these videos that are produced in part by everyone pulling

their cell phone cameras out, in part because of this movement

and this activism, and because of all these body cameras I got

put on everyone everywhere due to this movement and this

activism. By the time you get to 2020, Mitt Romney is marching

in Black Lives Matter protests. So the thing that was like so

counterproductively aggressive about is completely

politically malleable, like is is no longer in any way

considered radical. And what is a very short amount of time

off? Six years is not a billion year, you know, like

On the civil rights timeline, if we were looking at that

six years is nothing. It's nothing, right? Like there's not

any. And so I say all that to say, right? And so I think that

my and I think that's one of the reasons I there's a reason I

go there in talking around defund and these other

questions, right? Is that it's been three years. And and what

has happened, by the way, and I've seen this happen time and

time again, what happens in this very specific space, not

just around civil rights, but I think even specifically in

law enforcement and justice is that what happens is when we

have these inflection point moments, it forces some sets of

people within the institutions, some police departments, some

prosecutors, some academics, some whomever, because we have

this diffused criminal justice system that's a bunch of

systems together. It prompts some people to take aggressive

steps forward. And then what happens is it gives them time

to work out and work through either best practices or what

doesn't work or what does. And then the next time one happens,

everyone is looking for something they can take off the

shelf and do, right? That I want my police that the next time

you have a and so you see in these moments in these

inflection point moments, a bunch of stuff happened very

quickly that it all stopped. That Michael Brown is killed in

Ferguson in around the 2014 moment, you have dozens of

states passed legislation to have independent prosecutors.

You have thousands of police departments put body cameras on.

You have like it all happens, right? Then it stops, but it all

happens. You get to George Floyd and a bunch of stuff

happens really quickly, whether that's these anti racism

trainings or whether it's you do have places that take steps

to say we're going to de police. Let's not do armed traffic

stops. Let's let's expand mental health services. We now

have a national phone number to dial instead of 911 for a

mental health crisis, right? And so that was not true the day

George Floyd was killed. And so you see these massive things

all happen at once. What is also true is there have been

places that have piloted and played around with things that

we can pick whatever lingo or rhetoric we want to, right?

Things that could that in spirit, you would argue are

defunding that others might use the term de policing, right?

But there are places that have explored that and we know

unfortunately there will be another George Floyd moment.

There will be another video. And so part of the question

becomes and we don't know the answer till it plays out and

I'm not of the belief that it's necessarily all going to go

in one direct, but the question becomes did the rhetoric

around defund abolition, any event, did it open a large

enough window for enough people to do work in that spirit that

by the time we hit the next moment those are some of the

solutions being taken off the shelf and applied more broadly.

And if so, I think retroactively there might be an

argument that well actually that's exactly what was needed.

It put the tools in the toolbox for the next step.

And I think that that is part of the kind of non-littier

equation of this, right? That on issues that are so entrenched

and that are so controversial and frankly that are so

embedded in our society and its structures, it's not going to

be that like all right and each there we're going to pass 18

things in a row and they're all going to cut in the same

direction and then we're going to fix racism and then by

February it's not some first hundred days planned to get

rid of, right? Like that the reality is in a civil rights

context there's an understanding of a longness and length of

struggle that I think that again I think there's an

argument. I'm not arguing that it was politically salient.

I'm not arguing that there was not backlash or blowback to it

and I'm not arguing that it is inevitable that it will end up

having paid off. What I would say is I think we're a

reckoning or two from knowing the answer to it.

What's a reckoning? Define a reckoning. I think it's a moment

where we, I don't love the word but it gets adapted to the

media so we'll use it, right? I think it's a moment where

every one of us, I guess I'm not included in the us in this,

in which the people in our country whose professions and

livelihoods do not involve paying attention to an issue or

forced to pay attention to that issue. Okay, right? That that

2014 or an Eric Gardner Ferguson to me writes creates such a

moment, right? Where it's a thing the populace at large is

just talking about and agitating for something. George

Floyd, 2020, George Floyd Breonna Taylor, right? That there

are these moments where suddenly there is collective

appetite to try to address collective problem and then

they dissipate, right? Because there are people in between

who are actively trying to address all the problems. It's

their job to, they care about them, right? It's that

everyone else is too busy off dealing with whatever

else. There are plenty of people who are very concerned

about pandemics before coronavirus working very

hard trying to do all these, right? Suddenly there's a

moment around health pandemics where there's a collective

appetite for collective action around, you know. So what I

would imagine is, so again, I would, we've got the kind of

2014 to 2016 moment, then we're a little more dormant in

this space. Again, not that people are not doing work and

are not active, but it's, it's just a different space. Then

we hit this 2020 moment where we see a lot of stuff

happening. I would argue, I think we're in one of those

lulls afterwards and we could, we could log off this

conversation, open our phones and see a video and we could

be back in another moment. Yeah. And in the same way that

the day before the George Floyd video, we wouldn't have

been able to predict the extent and the broadness of the

response to it. Not saying that I don't, I don't, that I

don't have critiques of that response or that I think all

of it was, but we couldn't have seen the extent to which

there would be a response. That video we haven't seen yet

that might publish tonight or publish tomorrow, publisher,

it's impossible for us to conceive of what might come

from it. You know, you just gave me an idea that kind of

brought together a bunch of different things I've been

covering on the show. It seems like something early 21st

century America is particularly bad at is not letting

public issues require reckoning points to have them be

addressed. So an example, for example, all the things that

led to the war in Ukraine, you know, there was this like

30 year period where most people just didn't pay any

attention to it until, you know, Russia's three days

outside of Kiev. You have these low periods where we're

not focusing on policing, crime, racial issues, etc, etc,

etc. And then all of a sudden something will happen and

we'll be in a reckoning situation. And it seems like

especially when you're looking at the type of people who

tend to control institutions where once again, I'm sort of

dispositionally focused towards center left to center

right people, they themselves are not particularly talented

at managing reckonings. I think this goes in both directions.

I think, you know, I'm doing this from like Austin, Texas,

I think a lot of, you know, it's kind of funny. I think a lot

of the BLM post 2020 backlash, if you actually talk to

quote unquote normal people don't focus on these issues,

are people are reacting to center left to center right

people, mostly center left in urban regions who found

themselves in the reckoning moments kind of lost their

shit and didn't think it through. So for example, in

Austin, an example would be the Austin City Council kind of

panicked and canceled like the next two classes of incoming

police, which led to downline down the line, some issues

there. So now the kind of rhetoric on the street is,

hey, like all this woke shit got out of control. And because

of BLM, we don't have cops on the street. Now the state of

Texas has to come in, bloody, bloody, bloody blast. So I

guess my question for you is, how do you advise any just

sort of, and once again, in this topic area, we're basically

talking about center left people, how can they actually be

ready for reckoning moments if we know they're coming and

also this is a ramp, but I'll just give the last part of it.

The key thing is because we're in a hyper polarized moment,

reckonings are required to force through change. So it's not

as if you can just show up in Congress and let's say what

20, let's say 2011 and be like, hey, you know what, I'm

going to be the guy who focuses on militarization of police

or, hey, do you guys notice how we're drawing down in Iraq?

Where are those MRAPs going? Are they going to police

forces? Like, maybe we talk about that. That system isn't

going to happen in a polarized country. So I just threw a lot

of stuff in your reaction, how you think we should navigate

it. Sure. I mean, I think it's really astute to observe that

two things. One, I agree completely with your observation

that we do a very poor job. But look, fundamentally, protest,

public discontent, public debate stems from places where our

ruling institutions are not needing an expectation, a need,

a desire of their people. Because otherwise, we would just

call our congressmen and say, hey, do this and they would do

it and then we wouldn't have to do any other stuff. Or we would

vote someone out or vote them in. And I think that there is,

it's actually unsurprising to me that very often we see

ideological movements grow at times when their theoretical

political allies are in power. That the BLM starts during the

Obama administration. Not during the Bush years, not during

the Trump years, right? Now, again, some of that's a

confluence of technology and cameras and all that. A

non-explicit part of it, right? But it's unsurprising to me

that you have- I know the Civil Rights Movement, JFK, LBJ,

same dynamic there. Correct. Because these movements rise to

push their ideological allies further towards what they

believe to be the virtuous or just way of operating. That

it's tactically completely different when you don't control

the levels of power. When you do control the levels of power,

it becomes even incompetence or inaction becomes even more

unacceptable. And so it's like, no, no, why aren't we fixing

this? Why aren't we? Then it's unsurprising that after a

Democratic president, an outsider Democratic president,

Barack Obama is elected and then bails out the banks,

that we see the rise of Occupy Wall Street. Why? Because

people from his own coalition were upset with- and again,

that's not actually an argument against him having done

that. That's not to say it even is a fair one-to-one. But in

these moments where people feel as if their leadership,

the leadership they ally with is failing them, you see

these rises. Secondarily, I think that it builds to because

of the polarization and because our institutions are made

up largely of that moderate middle. It creates an

inability to function. I actually think at times there

can be- and I'm sure there's a body of research on this-

I think there can be a pragmatic paralysis in that what is

difficult is- I was just talking to a writer friend about

this over the weekend- that leadership often requires

doing both difficult and unpopular things. And the

right things are very often unpopular, whatever they are.

And I think that in a world in which we, both in our polarized

society, but also in which the people running most of our

institutions come from that middle set, where they see

themselves as drawing their own support from a world of

people who straddle both sides of these things, where they

care a lot about where the 50 plus 1 percent is and the

polling, I think that can be a set of handcuffs against

doing things that are unquestionably the right thing to

do and what people sent you to and placed you in a

position of leadership to do. You think about many of the-

look, I'm a black man, but I'm biracial. My father's black, my

mom's white. I'm very glad that interracial marriage didn't

rely on a popular vote to become legalized, because it

probably still wouldn't be, right? Like it's just- the

much of what happens, it would be if we voted today, right? But

the polling we see today comes because people have lived in a

world where it was made legal, right? That sometimes you do

the thing and then it becomes popular. That no one likes the

Affordable Care Act until everyone's on it and then they're

like, do not take this away. Yeah. Now, it's so again, it

speaks to a limitation of seeing the world purely through

cyclical partisan politics. Sometimes you gotta take a vote

for the right thing that's gonna cost you your seat, right?

But beyond that, what I would suggest is, and I don't even

mean this in a partisan way, what I would also suggest is

that the vast majority of difficult issues require, if not

unpopular solutions, solutions that are- that create some

level of political vulnerability. That's not to say that we

figured the whole world out, but we have problems in our

society where we have pretty clear bodies of evidence of

ways we could go about addressing them. And so the

question becomes, why haven't our institutions addressed

them? And it's because we've built a system that

incentivizes them never doing anything. It's like that

incentivizes, look, we know how guns is an adjacent issue

where we know any number of very specific ways to limit gun

deaths and reduce gun deaths. But our political world

incentivizes bad faith discussion of these things,

people not to acknowledge that body of research. And then

when there finally is a moment to pass legislation that

objectively will not solve the problem, right? That even in

the moment, you know, we- to go back to my actual area of

expertise, the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act,

supported by George Floyd's family, who I know, and many

his activists, and not to weigh in on whether the

legislation itself should be passed or not, but I think it

is noteworthy that there's nothing in that legislation

that would have prevented George Floyd from dying. So even the-

Explain that, like what, so what, yeah, so I'll understand

that. So a ban on, a federal ban on chokeholds would not

have saved George Floyd's life. The requirement, the

creation of a officer misconduct database would not

have changed, would not have saved George Floyd's life.

Qualified immunity, which was the thing that they ended up

fighting about and taking out, but even if included, would

not- it's a bank shot. Theoretically, if Derek Chauvin

believed he might have been able to be held civilly liable,

would he have behaved differently? There's no guarantee

that changes anything about what happens that day, right?

That the actual pass- the ability of the Justice

Department to remove some of its funding from local

police departments that don't comply with training

standards would not necessarily have- the Minneapolis

Police Department is one of the best trained in the

country before this happens, right? So what we end up

seeing are the applications of solutions that come from a

list of things that activists in the area would say are

good, and I'm not even suggesting that they shouldn't

do those things or pass those things, right? But that

fundamentally stops short of solving the underlying

problem of preventing another George Floyd, right?

That we- a different- There's an obvious question though.

What would quote, and let's say we're getting into like a

difficult solutionism discussion, right? The obvious

question is what law, regulation, practice, et cetera

would have saved George Floyd's life or future George Floyd?

Well, I think there are a few things. I think that there are-

and I won't necessarily say that these things guaranteed

would have, but they're the types of questions we have to

grapple with who come to such solutions, right?

Is that we have to grapple with the question of does it

make sense for us to police our country with 18,000

individualized local militias as opposed to say one more

centrally located standardized policing force, right? Does

it make sense that your policing experience might change

so drastically when you cross a municipal boundary in one

direction or the other? And that's not an application for

say one, you know, now many democracies would- would you

operate with a singular nationalized police force? You

could see a world where perhaps you had state-level police

forces that have to have some, but right, but like there's a

major, why can't we fix this problem? Well, part of it is

that we have to fix whatever the problem is in 18,000

individualized places. We can't fix it once because there's

no nationalized, federalized oversight or standards, right?

There are little bits of it, but not in any functional way,

right? A conversation like- so that might suggest that one

thing the federal government could do is it could grant

itself additional oversight or additional review ability,

right? We currently see police departments that undergo

these- they call patterns and practices reviews by the

Department of Justice where they come in and turn over all the

rocks and as- as it turns out this institution is really

bad at doing the things it's supposed to do and perpetuates

all these racial inequities. Well, that power was granted,

Congress granted the power to conduct these investigations

in 1994 following Rodney King. That didn't exist prior to

that, right? And so you could see a world where federal

government granted itself additional oversight,

additional capacity to oversight. Questions about

de-policing. So again, things I think we are seeing in

some local municipalities, right? But okay, well, one way to

have government agents kill fewer people is to dispatch

fewer armed government agents to a variety of different types

of things. That okay, we probably want armed officers

going to the- to the bank robbery. Do we need armed

officers getting your cat out of the tree or to the call

about a drunk guy outside or to a call about your

teenage brother having a mental health crisis, right? And

so what we have seen at a local and state level have been

many steps towards the pursuit of the type of scenario in

which someone maybe on drugs, maybe passing a

counterfeit bill, isn't responded to by 10 guys with

guns and badges and the right to kill you if they get

upset. That is what happens in George Floyd's case, right?

I think this is where this gets difficult though because I-

and this is why policing is so complicated. There's a million

different policy areas and areas of concern, but on the one

hand, I see a federal system when it comes to training

standards makes a lot of sense. But when you're discussing the

doesn't make sense to have the person who's getting the cat of

the tree have a gun or not, that seems to me to be a case of

well, you know what, maybe like Austin is going to have a

different answer on that than San Antonio or a different

than Washington to see a different answer than San Francisco.

So I'd like to hear your understanding of how we should-

and also from a democracy question because that's what

we're talking towards. Yes. Is it inherently more democratic

to let localities decide this versus Donald Trump's DOJ?

You know what I mean? Because that would be federal if there

was unitary control in 2017. So how should we understand the

federal- because the federalism question goes a

budgetive direction here. Yeah, so when I- and I truly I do

think at its heart, this is a federalism question, right? And

I think that there are a lot of ways and so the question I

actually think is how should the scales be balanced on

something like, again, state agents who are empowered to

take lives, what is the balance between how much of that is

federalized versus how much of that is local and what's the

interplay between those things, right? That's the central

question. I think that's yes, right? Secondarily, I think

that's a central question to policing. Secondarily, one B is

what do you do with an armed populace? That the answers to

these questions are a lot easier for Britain, right? Like it's

like night and day difference. It's one of the reasons we

can't do- we try to do these comparisons while the UK

police is in this way and they don't have any guns. It's a

totally different scenario, right? And so at the heart of

understanding our possible remedies as well as thinking

about what- it's very hard to divorce the conversation about

firearms from the conversation about the people charged with

ensuring public safety because they expect their

encountering people with firearms even when they are not,

but that expectation is not unreasonable for them, right? And

so, and so, but so again, I think first you got that

federalism issue, which again, I think is a fascinating-

because there's any number of different ways you could try to

do it, right? Do you say, all right, we have a certain

accreditation process, like that it's run locally, but you

have to pass a certain federal accreditation. And so federally

we can ding you on X, Y and Z, but on these questions these

are your local municipalities, right? And again, one might

note, an ability for a suburb that deals with no gun

violence to operate with no armed officers might look

different than a place that is awash with weapons, right? And

they might want to have that flexibility and the ability to

do different things, right? It cuts at all types of

different ways and so I do think that there's a- you have

that on the one hand. The problem is you also have

equal protection though, right? So my- so what happens if in

one state my right to not- to not be unreasonably searched and

seized means one thing or not face discriminatory traffic

stops means one thing and then I cross into Missouri and

suddenly it's a different, well, shouldn't my right in one

state be- and we see there's any number of issues here

this on abortion, on guns, right? There is a- now with

policing there's not quite a commerce clause claim here,

right? Yeah. But like, so it's this question of, well, if in

New York City and Boston the judge says that stop and frisk,

stop question and frisk in its application is clearly

racially discriminatory, why is it okay for me to now

experience that when I cross the state lines into Missouri,

right? They actually do think there's an interesting from

like a legal federal constitutional perspective

this sense of what- because police by their nature are people

empowered to deny people their rights, even just by handcuffing

them, by stopping them, by detaining someone, you are

denying them their freedom and their liberty. I don't mean

that like a traumatic way, I just mean like literally that's

what it is, right? It's good to- it's good to actually- I

also by the way, I like- I liked your use earlier of

you know, state empowered agents. It's actually helpful to

describe what's actually happening here and not to engage in

euphemism. Yeah, like it's the government, like the- the

people who the gov- who the government employs and gives

guns and says, keep everyone safe, do basically what you

want to do, right? Like it's this question of how- what role

does the federal government play in ensuring that there is

some level of equality and equity to how that's meted out

across 50 states, right? And obviously people with

different politics are going to draw that line in different

places, but I think everyone would agree there is a line to

be drawn, right? That there's some role- there's some role

for federal oversight. And I think that one thing that's a

question of our democracy, just by the nature of our history,

is we're a system where much of our bureaucracy was built

from the ground up. It was localized and then state- and then

right? And so what happens at what- and so the question for a

lot of our institutions, from schools to hospitals and- and

access to medical care to policing to is- to the media, at

what point as a massive functioning democracy do some

things get ascended up to a federal level? And where are

those lines and how does it operate, right? At what point

does the- the union have an obligation to guarantee a

certain- a certain floor of the quality of rights of

experience and what happens as over time that floor shifts

and changes and rises, hopefully, right? Like that- and I- and

again, I think on any number of issues from minimum wage to how

we handle unhoused people and homelessness to mental health

services, there's a big tension between people who would say

that to be the richest nation in the history of the world, our

floor is just way too low in too many places. And- but that

but to require- to fix that fundamentally would require some

type of collective decision to raise that floor. And at some

point, you've got to overrule someone to do that.

I think this gets to the difficulty of the reckoning

reality we discussed earlier, just because if you're thinking

about why does the federal system look the way it looks like,

why does the defense department look the way it looks? Well,

because World War II happened. That's the- that's the

definition of a reckoning period. You know, the early Cold War

happens, you know, the National Security Council, etc, etc, etc.

9-11 happens when we get DHS, right? Exactly. We have a system

that's not- this is for, you know, younger people who are

listening. A real generational task, it seems across all of

these categories, is finding a way to do things without

requiring things to be pushed to the limit. Another- as we're

nearing the end here, I want to get to this big topic because

this is where I'm very curious about and I'm very, very

concerned when I'm speaking to folks who are more in the

activism part of the direction. I'm interested in your usage

of the term multiracial democracy because- I don't want to

say obviously because this is just not true, but I think most

people- actually, you know, the broad, broad, broad majority

of the country, except a couple weirdos, would say at a

superficial level, obviously we're in favor of like a

multiracial democracy, like status quo. You are alleging by

the nature and framing of this book that there is, you know,

backlash towards efforts to make us a fully functioning

multiracial democracy. So here's what I'd like to understand. On

the one hand, I understand there are like voting rights

controversies where a bunch of folks up to the right of me

would say like, no, like the federal government's gone too

far, this isn't fair, but I would just say like that from- even

for debating, I can really see voting rights as being like,

no, like that's a part of that issue. I'm concerned though

that debates around reparations and specific policing

orientations have transcended away from- are actually policy

debates and they're not values debates. And I wouldn't want to

have a situation because I've seen it happen where someone who

doesn't support reparations, which is super complicated on

50 different levels, is categorized as opposing taking

America to its most multiracial democratic extent, because

I can obviously see how if you're an activist, you could

argue, actually, no, like people have to be made whole,

if they're not made whole, they're not fully participating

members in democratic. So I can understand how an activist gets

there, but I think for me, how do we solve policy questions

perspective? Voting rights is in a different category than

reparations. So how do you understand the taking us to our

most multiracial democratic context when using the term?

How do you think of this?

Sure. I think that's a really thoughtful question too. And I

have to think about it as I initially think about it. I

don't think I'm someone who would put support for

reparations, say, in that bucket, right? As if you do not

support, then therefore you are oppositional to X, Y, and Z,

right? But what I will say is, so I think a few things, right?

And I agree with you that the vast majority of our country

supports in polling, and I think actually in sincerely held

belief, would purport to support multiracial democracy.

Yeah, right. Now granted, there's space very often with what

people say their values are and what their lived values are,

right? And so just because you say you support a thing or

want to believe you support a thing does not necessarily

actually mean that in function you do, right? I think that if

you are, if you are someone who supports state legislators,

who purposely draw maps to delude the power of minority

voters in your state, I think it's very hard then to argue

that you are a full proponent of multiracial democracy. You

are supporting actions to create an inequitable voting system.

And that's why I put voting in its own bucket, because like the

way you just articulated it, like the reason my voting is so

interesting and bad for people, obviously in this case is it's

actually, you can kind of get empirical with it, right? In a

way, like once you agree to the whole thing like, hey, dude,

are we one person, one vote in this country? It's pretty

straightforward to your point about like we know certain

answers to certain questions, to like catalog, okay, well, this

person cannot exercise their rights in the same way. It gets

screwy when you get into releasing reparations,

educational debates, but yeah, sorry, go on. I think it's important.

Of course. Well, but even a build off of that point though. So

have we achieved our multiracial democracy? Have we achieved our

multiracial democracy? If our institutions are still structured

in ways that counteract one person, one vote, is it possible

for America to have a truly equal, when I'm asking the

question, because I don't even know exactly how to answer it,

if you asked me, right? In a world where me sitting here in

Washington DC, do you have no say in the United States Senate?

In a majority black city in the South, where slaves are once

held, right, where my vote is literally not the same as yours

in Texas, right, is that, and that's not exclusively racialized,

although there are, this is a, you know, there's a plurality

black city in, you know, in the South, right, is

what happens when a black person's vote in Los Angeles or New

York City functionally counts for less than a white person's

vote in Wyoming or Idaho, right? That we've, by the nature

of the system we have set up, we have embedded things that in

some cases were explicitly intended to, but not all of them,

not all of them. DC's one of those like, it didn't, yeah,

like DC's actually the perfect example of what you're getting at.

Yeah, you know, but there are some, so there are cases where,

this kind of played out this way, there are other cases where when

they wrote it at the time, they were like, and this is to keep

the black people from being like, I mean, yeah, more of them

than I think sometimes we're comfortable grappling with,

where it's like, where did this come from, and even pull the

string far enough, it's someone saying something abhorrent,

right? Like, but the, but what happens, like, how do we, what

does it look like for us to pursue a fully fledged

multiracial democracy if what we believe that means is that no

matter your race, you have an equal, you have an equal claim

to the promises of American freedom, right? And I think that

so one, I think that's one whole bucket where I think there is

actual that like, to create a multiracial democracy in its ideal,

you would never create the system as it exists currently.

You would never say, all right, we've got this country of X

hundred million people, these are the broad racial and ethnic

breakdowns, let's cluster these people here, give them access

to these things, make their system of petitioning that we

would never create America as it exists right now.

Well, actually, to build one on your point, it's not even a

question of would we cluster black people in DC, you would say

there are always black people who live in DC, would we not give

that a Senate seat? Correct. Would the people who live here

have no say in the Supreme Court? No, we would never create it

that way. You wouldn't do that, right? But then beyond that,

though, you have a beyond that, though, you have this question

of, as the country shifts and changes in the demographics of

the people who occupy it, what does it look like? How are the

people who are arriving being treated? And how are they, are

they being given the full benefits of the promises of our

finding documents or not? Right. And so, so for example, and

I think this is an interesting one, right, where I think you

could probably argue it either way. I mean, I've got a sense,

but you know, but you know, Ron DeSantis, the governor of

Florida came out a few weeks ago and said that he, if he was

elected president, he would get rid of birthright citizenship.

Which, first of all, it's worth noting, he could not do as

president, that would require a constitutional amendment, right?

So let's be clear, this is someone who is choosing to

campaign on political rhetoric that is in no way possible to

play to something, right? The constituency of people who, and

I think that's where we have to start trying to figure out is

this a values issue or is this a policy debate, right? There's a

world in which one could argue having reviewed the numbers

this moment in time, the policy of birthright citizenship no

longer serves our democracy for x, y, and z reasons and this

is why I would propose doing it and x, y and z. And this is how

we would functionally change it and this is what we should do.

And it's something much different at a time when historically

unprecedented in our country, immigration from Central and

South America is changing the ethnic demographics of the

country to come out and declare people who arrive here

tomorrow will not receive the same rights as the people who

arrived here when my grandparents got here, right?

That there is a fundamentally racialized component to it

because reality is racialized. We're not having a conversation in

an academic debate club and you're saying this not in a

policy context, in a political context. You're making this

claim not because you are making some staid policy

argument for what's best for us, you're saying it because you

believe it will motivate people to vote for you, right?

Because you couldn't even do it. And so that's where, to me, a

world, someone who would deny an immigrant who arrives in

the United States tomorrow, who happens to be a person of

color, who's more likely to be a person of color than at

previous points in history, would deny them the same

constitutional rights as my white mother's grandparents had

when they arrived from England. I think there's a real

argument there about whether or not this is someone who

supports, who is attempting to push back on

multiracial democracy, right? That's all on top of the voting

right stuff, right? That's all on top of all that, that which

all exist, right? It's this question of who is really

and truly American because a multiracial democracy is one

in which there is a true equality under the law, equity

of opportunity and there's debates about equity and what it

means and how you apply it and there's a ton to that, right?

But in our ideal, the world is at base that no matter what our

history has been, anyone born tomorrow has a relatively level

playing field, right? It's relatively similar access to

opportunity, you know, and so what does it mean for us?

What does that mean and what does that look like? And there

are policy debates about things that functionally create, make

that not be the case, but then secondarily, and this is a lot

where we're talking on the book, is there is political

rhetoric that whether you take it literally or not, literally

or seriously, is not the rhetoric of someone who takes

multiracial democracy seriously, right? And I think that, I

think we encountered that. I mean, the last thing I'll notice

is that, you know, there are any number of reasons to

contribute to the election of someone like Donald Trump with

the rise of his movement, but even with just a little bit of

hindsight, we look back and it's like, look, a black man was

elected president, and someone was be able to become such a

powerful political figure that they were the next personal

elected president on a platform that was largely at their

political rise, that black guy is not really one of us.

Yeah, and quick thing, I think that's a, this is actually

why you and I are the same age, so you rooting the book in

back when we were in high school in, you know, 2008 with

Obama's election is really key because I think it's actually

most helpful to judge Donald Trump not by 2015, not even by

like build the wall, but like by 2011, because once again, and

this is why I guess, and this is, I love your point about like

values versus policy debate, like end of the day, like there

is an entirely good faith construction of getting to like

build the wall, like there just is, like that's a debate about

how, like Stephen Miller, I think this is actually useful,

like debating tactic, but he just says, okay, I'm a, you know,

I'm a Lazarus, like let people in, like what's the number?

Like, probably whatever the point is, we don't actually

know the number, therefore it's a policy debate.

But birtherism is actually just pure racialized hatred.

There's no debate there. That is the way to understand that

rooting there.

Well, it's that, it's, and then you have issues that sit in

between that. So another one early from the Donald Trump

playbook is the quote unquote, ground zero mass, which was

not a mass, not based at ground zero. Right. And so you have

a few, we're in the last few questions. If you please

could texturize for people because this is, this is the

long time ago, this is the most TBT thing you've said the

entire, uh, yeah, it's a deep cut. And so, so when you, and

it's actually, it's very interesting because Jeremy

Peters of the New York times, right, to wrote a book a year

or two ago, I'm not going to remember the title right now,

but he looks. Oh, ins, insurgency. I had him on the show.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the things he notes in the polling

and in the rise is how, how the quote unquote ground zero

mass was an important turning point. Right. I think

sometimes we forget it because it's because of what it was.

And it feels like kind of a 9 11 stuff, all kind of feels

bush era. And so then when we pivot to Obama, we kind of

forget all of it. But like, but what happens with Obama

doesn't all start the day Obama announces stuff. So, you know,

so there was a, if I recall this fully correctly, and I'm

sure, uh, folks will backtrack beyond it. There was a, a

community center, an Islamic community center that had

purchased space in New York City, not far from the site of

the World Trade Center. Now, this is in the years

following 9 11, the World Trade Center is currently going

through its reconstruction, the creation of Memorial X, Y, and

Z, but a few blocks away, if I recall correctly, some

Muslims put together a community center. And in part,

part of their initial rationale was that they thought it was

important to show some kind of solidarity. It's like, but the

point was this became something that was extensively

demagogued in the conservative media and among

right wing politicians. It was called the ground zero

mosque. And were you to watch below Riley or Sean Hannity

or listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, you were under the

impression that they were building a mosque at the site

of the, of the deadliest Islamic act of terror in American

history. Well, you understand how that is a far more

inflammatory framing where people of all types of

background might have just some practical, is that wise, is

it not? Back, right? But the problem was you could take

something that might be a good faith, like, but that's not

what it was. That's not actually what the underlying fact

showed was happening, that it was all founded in a lie, that

something was happening that was not happening, but that

played to people's prejudice about Muslims and

they're there. And I don't even mean prejudice in some

like, because when we use prejudice, it's important

always note, we all have prejudice, like we all have

like prejudice is in not not in love itself a bad thing.

It's the application of it and the living out of it. That is

the bad thing, right? We all walk down the street and go, is

that man, cute or is he ugly or that person seems friendly

or scary? That's a prejudice. We don't know anything about

them, right? It's based on our blood. And so people had a

prejudice against people who are different than them, people

who might be associated with someone who had done harm to

the but cynically playing on it for these political

purposes in ways that specifically riles an anxious

group of people. One, like I said, I would argue in these

racialized contexts, right? Clearly results in movements

that you know, we're a country that we're trying to get to

equal and get to even that this is energy in the other

direction because it drives those wedges and creates that

suspicion between people groups. But secondarily, what we

know is it leads that type of dehumanization can lead to

violence against people, right? And so I just say I like to

say that we we see time and time again, this application of a

cynical racialized politics as you noted, there's a we can have

a border debate all we want about what the exact right

policy way is to address. This came up, Sean Hannity and Gavin

Newsom did an interview recently. And there's this moment

where Hannity starts talking about the border wall and

Gavin Newsom goes, I support reinforcing the structure and

I'm a governor of a state with the border of Mexico and with

one of the longest that that even as we talk about these

issues and I think this is particularly hard for the media

to navigate some time, we're very often not actually talking

about the issue that it is. In fact, people overuse dog

whistle or what I don't even need to get into the intent of

the speaker. The reality is the impact is not people vote

based on vibes, not on facts, right? And so when you have a

rhetoric or a set of proposed policies that cut in a specific

direction in this way, it's very hard to unintertwine exactly

where I said that values and policy cuts it and you and you

can understand why people who have a very literal skin in the

game for the future of multiracial democracy and is it

safe for me to exist the way I exist? Don't always have the

biggest like attention span for debates about exactly where

the line is because, you know. So here's the last question

and you kind of get this at the start of the book discussing

how Italian Americans were considered different from a,

you know, racial social construct perspective in the 19th

century and early 20th century. To what degree do you see

little, you know, green shoots of this entire racialized

context changing? Listeners are going to know the kind of

talking points on this one. Hispanic men, not overwhelmingly,

but like, you know, we could see the future of a different

style of politics move a little more towards Trump than you

would have expected. Obviously, you have precedents in a

state like Texas of like Hispanics gradually whitening or

merging more into the white majority, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera. If you and I are looking back as once again,

we're the same age at an America of 2050, to what degrees

our imagination hampered by us imagining this issue in

context in the 1990s sense versus a, hey, like, we're going

to totally or we could figure out this in a different context.

I think that that's, I think that's all really good context.

I think that there's a real question about the immigration

of refugee groups and Hispanic American groups.

And as we, as it relates to, to whiteness, however it's

defined, right? I think, I think you're right in that

there's definitely a, well, it cuts both ways because you

had a, you had a kind of, again, I actually think the Obama

years in media and in politics were a blinding and

intoxicating exercise, at least at the very beginning,

in like white liberal delusion, right? There was this deep

desire for this to have meant that we weren't racist anymore.

And we were the generation that fixed it and we solved

everything and it's post-racial America and our friend

Barack Obama's, the president, but now we're going to do a

women woman, then we're going to do a gay guy, then we're

going to like, and there was just this kind of like, and,

and then it was all going to like everything was just going

to keep getting like better from their perspective year

over year and there wasn't going to be and, and, and

demographics were going to be destiny, right? And so it's

going to be this Obama multiracial coalition that the

Democrats were going to be able to have this party with all

these white people and the Hispanics and the black people

and the, and that very quickly dissipated, right? For any

number of reasons, right? One, because it has to be said

Barack Obama's uniquely generationally talented

politician, right? People can't founding very opposed

that. Yeah, you know, but the, the two, what we know is

that there's something about one is two, we know that

people's views are malleable, right? And so for example, in

conversations about to what extent did racial animus

play into Trump's election, people would like to talk

about Obama and Trump voters as if one could not vote for

a black guy for a powerful position, then consume eight

years of racist propaganda about them and not come out the

other side, not so happy with him, right? Or that could not

become, could not have a racial animus that's based and

founded an immigration or an Islamic terror or any number

of other things that might be racial animus that might not

have prevented you from voting for a black guy and then

voting for Donald Trump. But then three, there's the, there

was this expectation that Hispanic Americans who came

to this country would racial, would racialize themselves

differently than every other immigrant group that has ever

arrived in the United States of America, right? The in mass,

that what we see is at best immigrant groups that arrive

in the United States of America end up splitting about 50,

50 across the political spectrum, right? That you'd look

at African immigrants and you will see conservative voters

and you'll see hyper liberal voters. You look at Asian

American immigrants, you can't, and that's such a broad

category, but if you look at Filipino immigrants, you

look at Vietnamese immigrants, you look at Korean immigrants,

you're going to see a spectrum, right? If you look at, and then

when you racialize that, when you look at groups of people

who've arrived in the United States and have been racialized

as non-white, to a group, what they have sought to do is

assimilate into whiteness, to be seen as closer to whiteness

than blackness, right? The Irish are now white, the Italians

are now white, the Jews are primarily now white, the Jews

are not a racial group, they're a racial ethnic group, but

they were conceptualized as a racial group at the time, right?

The Asian American groups that have arrived, you have the rise

of this concept and this conceptualization of a

model minority and how they are used, that's a crudgel between

black appearing groups and white appearing groups, right?

There has been no racialized group that has arrived and

writ large said, yeah, we're with the black people.

Well, why? Well, why would you do that? You arrive in a country

where the plague field disadvantages one group and

advantages the other, common sense is going to tell you

what group you are incentivized to take common cause with,

to assimilate into, to build yourself into, and so I think

that- One quick pushback, I think the pushback would just be

it's, I'm not sure it's that, like what, so you, you could

tell us if you're listening, you know my last name, my last

name is Kozloff, adopted Ukrainian Jewish family.

If I'm imagining my adoptive great, great grandparents,

you know, Ellis Island, early 1900s, it's not that they would

say, ah man, like sucks that we're like with the blacks here,

I think they would say that we are not part of the American

norm, and the American norm is white. That's just like the,

like little- Well, 100%, no, no, that's correct, right?

It's an assimilation into whiteness, right? Now, among

the ways that that is done in a group sense, not an

individualized sense, can become the definition against,

right? And against, this is interesting, you guys, and you

know this in Texas, right? It's why immigrants and

Hispanic Americans very often, among the reasons, why

they very often support among the most punitive immigration

policies, is that there is a, there's a line of political

thinking around Hispanic Americans where part of their

acceptance and their safety requires them to be defined

against those other ones. No, no, no, we came here the right

way, we do this this way, yeah, build a wall, yes, lock them

up, because that's not us, that's them, right? That there's

a creation of a definition and a separatism there, right? And

so it, you know, I think it's a very, as we look forward

though, to actually answer your question, I think that what

happens to one, one, what happens when geopolitics changes

who is showing up at our borders, right? That there's a

belief that immigration and our refugee crises around the

country will work exactly the way they're working now. Well,

what happens if there's another massive ground war in

Europe that involves a bunch of countries and creates millions

of people who would be socialized as white refugees?

What happens if, what happens if the quote unquote browning

of America, what if something happens in Asia that creates

a massive demographic shift where now people from China

or Japan are coming at the numbers that we're now seeing

in Central South America, right? That what happens if

something implodes in Brazil and suddenly we have a bunch of

South Americans who are in appearance much more white than

Central, than the may the Central and South Americans

showing up currently, they start showing up, right? That

that our understanding of what is to come and our

projection of what is to come is so fatally limited by

what's happening exactly right now and our complete

inability to guess what will happen around the corner, what

will happen tomorrow. I mean, this brings us full circle to

what we are talking about with legacy of the fund and some of

these other kind of moments of reckoning is that we are often

so limited by a presentism, what's happening in this exact

moment must continue to happen exactly the way that's

happening forever. And what we've seen is that there are

just too many inputs across the world. There could be a coup

in a country we've never heard of tomorrow that fundamentally

changes American history, right? And we don't know what that

will look like and how it will operate there. Look, there

could be an action by elected officials in the United States

of America, right? We're a union of 50 states. What happens

if that changes? It expands or contracts or and I don't want

to get predictive about any of those things. I'm just going

to say it. It could happen. You know, we don't know. And I

think that and I think that because of that, it's I'm

sure that there's plenty of stuff I'm saying right now that

2050, our kids are going to be doing a podcast together,

talking about their dumb parents and what they all the wrong

things that they said, because you know, because we are there's

a there's a quote that historians are historical,

that they write in the moment in which they are writing questions

they ask are based on their preconceptions and the in the

moment that in this moment, this is a smart question to ask,

right? And and that there's something both

revelatory and revealing about that, right? And so the fact

that we are having these conversations right now says

something about the moment we are in, whether or not anything

we say is true or not.

100% true. Well, Wesley, this has been really fun, despite

how like heady and serious the topic is. Could you just

shout the name of the book out so folks who want to pick up

where this conversation left off can go next?

Sure, it's American White Lash, changing nation and the cost

of progress. It's available wherever you get your books.

And, you know, and I and I truly, you know, I love this

conversation. This is really thoughtful. I think that there's

not enough conversation at this level very often, in part

because I think so much of our public dialogue is so partisan.

It's so in the like Republicans, Democrats framing that it

gets it gets rid of our ability to have both values,

conversations and policy conversations, all we can have

is political conversations. Yes. And and and so I say that

to say that anyone's listening who wants to, you know, email

me and tell me I'm full of shit, I will read it and respond.

Like, you know, I enjoy the back and forth. I enjoy the

sharpening of my thought process and ideas through feedback,

right? Because I think as a journalist, it's my job to ask

questions is my job to analyze evidence as it comes, right?

And it's my job to say what I think the evidence means,

but not ever to be foreclosed on receiving new information and

receiving new perspectives, if only so that I can be a more

compelling communicator by anticipating what the robot will

be. And so I say I'll have to say I love the conversation and,

you know, happy to have similar ones with anyone who's listening.

And real quick, let me yes and that because you've you've

given me a soapbox opportunity. I really appreciate what you

said about the, you know, Democrat, Republican politics,

and they're like, I, there are definitely some listeners who

will want me to have turned this into a debate, but I was

really, and this is what I was trying to get at with the start

of the episode, like I am interested in understanding your

viewpoint, you're coming at this from a different perspective

than I am. And I think there's just like way, this isn't just

the like dunking on the debate me bro and saying it's just

sort of like, I'm not interested when I'm talking to a guy

like you. And like debating, which is really helpful to

understand how you're thinking about things. So thanks for

being a great guest for that.

Of course, and vice versa, right? Because I think that I

steal that line from there's a media critic, James Fallows,

who wrote that the partisan nature and the conflict nature

of the media gets us away from discussion of common

solutions to common problems. And I think about that so often

as what is what should be the foundation of things functioning

as a public square and as members of the media in so much as

we help facilitate the public square, we're not gatekeepers,

right, anyone can. But to the extent to which our job is to

try to make it be a productive conversation, right, and

informed conversation rounded and shared reality and facts,

right, that is in so much as that is our desire, I feel like

the point of our public square is to the point of debate, the

point of dialogue is to find common solutions to common

problems, right, that no matter what our politics is, none of

us that that we all are lesser than even if just like a

theoretical moral level, if we occupy a country that is in

is in unequal, right, that we are all better off, I believe,

for a country that is equal or that is better, that is better

functioning that and so the reason we want to create such a

world is is for all of us, right, and that and so therefore

the places where we go to work that out, we've got to, you

know, what does it look like to have a conversation that's

less ends justify the means, I'm owning this person so that

but and rather that is like no no no the point of us sitting

here so that we can find a common solution to a common

problem, which means I've got to understand where you're

coming from, you've got to understand where I'm coming

from, and as we all know from our interpersonal

relationships, we can know someone very well and still

say something to them and they take it totally differently

than we intended it, right, my girlfriend would let me

know that and my mother would my brothers, right, right, so

now imagine someone who we don't know that well, whose

politics are different, whose experiences are different,

and we're like, all right, let's talk about the hardest

things in the history of humanity in 42 seconds on cable

TV, right, or in sentence fragments on the internet,

like the more we can create space to actually interrogate,

to ask those follow up questions, to be active and engage

good faith listeners where we're not looking for the oh well

you tripped up and said the thing so now I'm but we're

actually trying to hear each other, it creates a space where

look, I don't think we've solved any any of the world's

great problems here, but I would speak to yourself, I think

we've I think you've entirely solved policing federalism

and but I would like to suggest that the amount of time

we spent today is a step closer to it than a lot of ways

we might have spent, you know, X number of minutes talking

about these things. For sure. Well said, Wesley, thanks again

for joining me on The Realignment. Of course, appreciate you.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you learned something like the

sort of mission or want to access our subscriber exclusive Q&A,

bonus episodes and more, go to realignment.supercast.com

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race. See you all next time.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.