Anand Giridharadas | The Persuaders

good evening everyone and welcome to the Free Library my name is Esther wax book a daughter of Ellis wax in whose memory tonight's lecture has been endowed it is a fitting memorial for my father who was a passionate supporter of the Free Library and its renowned author lecture series I know that many of you here tonight have made gifts in support of programs like this if you have not yet we hope you will consider making a gift so that the library can continue to fulfill its mission to advance literature literacy guide learning and Inspire curiosity before we begin I want to remind you to take a moment to silence your cell phones and remember that no flash photography is permitted during tonight's event also there will be a book signing in the library following the lecture and don't forget that most of our author events are also available as podcasts at freelibrary.org and videos at youtube.com author events it is now my great pleasure to introduce our esteemed guest this evening a former long-time columnist and foreign correspondent for the New York Times Anan girded us is a fascinating individual and groundbreaking investigational reporter who has captured the attention of many leading thinkers in this country he is also the best-selling author of winners take all the elite charade of changing the world which was selected by numerous Publications as one of the best books of the year he has a regular on-air analyst for MSNBC has taught journalism at New York University and contributed articles to the New Yorker the Atlantic and Time Magazine in the persuaders Mr girdadas offers enthralling Insider accounts of the dissenting politicians activists and everyday citizens working to heal and Safeguard U.S democracy he notes that democracy will not die by the hand of a single politician like Donald Trump but will occur instead when people at look at those they oppose politically with contempt and disgust only we ourselves can avoid that Grim Fate by recalibrating and believing that we can persuade one another to hold different viewpoints and to collaborate respectfully to forge a better future I know we are all eager to hear his valuable insights into one of the most critical issues we face as a nation now please join me in welcoming Mr gertadas to the Free Library tonight's author will be in conversation with Tam Edwards anchor of six ABC Action News Morning Edition enjoy tonight thank you so much for being with us to talk about your new book The persuaders and there's so many things to get into that I want to talk about tonight but you know first of all the whole concept of changing someone's mind and I think we've all dealt with these feelings sometimes I remember a conversation we were having in The Newsroom around race and we were pitching stories and I pitched a story called go talk to your cousins the idea that white people had to go talk to white people that there's some spaces on this issue that I couldn't go into and I thought about that and as I read your book I thought is that the wrong impulse because we see that over and over again the changing Minds isn't worth it either you're not worth it you're beneath me or it's not going to make a difference so why bother that this impulse is running through a lot of us yeah well first of all it's really an honor to have um people who choose books over baseball here and and an honor to be in Philadelphia I have such respect for the city and the history of it and thank you for doing this conversation um it feels fitting always talk about democracy here I think for me this this inquiry into persuasion and the changing Minds whether with cousins or co-workers or your fellow citizens started with a profound despair that I imagine many of you have felt in the last many years which is we see the country going in this incredibly dangerous Direction not a traditional debate between high taxes and low taxes this kind of Health Care and that kind of health care but a really a debate about whether we are going to be a continued and expanded liberal democracy or not whether we're going to go in a direction of kind of political violence or not whether we're going to go in a direction frankly now of fascism or not and as that trajectory got worse and worse it seemed to me that my side of that argument which is to say people who want more democracy more human rights a habitable planet rather than not habitable um we're not winning the battle for hearts and Minds sure there's a lot of rigging going on there's a lot of tampering going on there's Steve bannon's Army of you know election Fiddlers running for low-level things to you know throw out some of your votes but in addition to that and somewhat more disturbingly I actually think we're not winning objectively the argument for whether these ideas of democracy and and liberty and justice for all are better ideas when I look at opinion polls that suggest you know 4646 on these things I mean it's hard to blame the Electoral College uh it's just a poll they're just calling people at home saying do you want do you support candidates who think the last election you know bogus claims about the last election or do you support people who support a reality based view of what happened in the last election do you are you fine with candidates proposing violence as a legitimate solution to public disagreements or do you prefer people who don't do that and it's neck and neck it's neck and neck I I find it hard to blame you know the outdated Senate structure on that it it we are losing or at least struggling to win the battle for hearts and Minds on whether we are going to continue trying to be the more perfect union we set out to be in this city so the question of persuasion then came to the fore for me of why aren't we winning this conversation right you can deplore Donald Trump all you want you can you know make fun of Steve bannon's appearance all you want um you can criticize these moves that are being made and these schemes and you can have investigative journalism you know courageously calling out these machinations but at the end of the day you have to persuade more people to want the things you want if we're going to beat this thing and so I became curious about why we were not doing that and what it would take to do that and I I didn't have the answers in my own heart if I did I would have written an autobiography um so I did what I do which is report and I went out and I spent time looked for really a bunch of people who I was told were were doing this where most of us are not doing it so well we're able to move people ever able to build bigger coalitions hold together bigger coalitions able to win over different types of people than them able to have hard conversations able to really change Minds to persuade in ways that I think most of us are struggling to whether it's the climate denier Uncle whether it's the neighbors whether it's you know in macro politics and I really spent much of the last few years with with those people those mind changers in activism and elected politics in uh the cognitive scientist was one of the subjects of this book a cult deprogrammer is one of the subjects of this book because that's where we are in America today but above all organizers this is a book about organizers and kind of organizers method and I think what I found I was not hopeful at the beginning of reporting this book I I come away from reporting the book incredibly hopeful because I found a kind of organizer's way a persuader's way that frankly is fundamentally different than what I was doing maybe than what many of you are doing what many of our politicians are doing what Joe Biden's doing a lot of well-meaning people are doing it wrong right now are are doing it in ways that almost seem designed to make this anti-democratic anti-freedom movement grow even bigger and so I studied this organizer's Playbook and and tried to learn from them what we can all do to to to to beat back this Menace and kind of make make this country become what it has never been but but still can be and we can get into the Playbook tonight but at the heart of it it depends on refusing this culture of the write-off that you mentioned refusing this culture of saying people can't change their minds they can't change their ways they are who they are they think like this because they're that race they think they think like that because they voted for that person once they think like that because they once said this thing about the vaccine that attitude is empirically false people change their minds all the time if you are you know older than 12 if you remember what positions on gay rights were like five minutes ago in the history of this country and you would have never thought we'd be here never thought right so many people have said to me you know get older gay adults like if you had asked me when I was a teenager what year would we have gay marriage in right we over we we got there decades faster than I thought as a gay teenager these people said and so persuasion is possible and believing in it I think is necessary urgently necessary to the work of getting this country back on track and so this is a this is a kind of field manual for how to do that there are a couple different elements of it one that multiple stood out to me in the beginning you talked to a number of people who in essence they're willing to accept imperfection in themselves and in other people Linda sarsource I'm not sure if I'm saying her name correctly says to you the thing about our movement is we're too woke and there becomes this perfectionism that either somebody is getting it completely right or they're out and then they're fighting with each other on social media they have no time to think about the people that they're really arguing with because they're arguing with each other and Loretta Ross another person that you talk to in the book says something interesting this calling out culture isn't new she talks about calling in but she talks about something they were doing when she was young where you'd have these meetings where people would go through things and you'd Rectify it and move on she said we essentially have the calling out without the calling in and why are why are we not able to do that why is it we'd rather fight with people on Twitter and I'm never talking to you again and I think you should leave the face of the Earth versus let's work this out and move on yeah I'm so glad you highlighted both Linda and Loretta um this book first of all I should say and I don't make a big thing about it in the book but it is a book largely about women and large about women of color who at the Forefront of some of these methods of persuasion that I think we all can learn from and this first chapter is Linda Loretta and Elisa Garza one of the progenitors of black lives matter and what all of them say including the two use you cited they express in different ways a concern that the movement for Progress that they belong to for for greater uh inclusion greater Justice greater a bigger we that this movement sometimes often perhaps is in love with smallness as Alicia says you know that there's a that it almost functions in the way of like music fandom where if too many people join liking my album then I'm no longer gonna like my album my album is discredited by too many people liking it now that may work in music that is a really crappy attitude in politics right and so you know Alicia said this very eloquently in the in that same chapter she says you know sometimes those of us who kind of have radical visions of housing for all or health care for all or or a world where police don't hurt and kill people we sometimes look around and say oh gosh there's some non-radical people entering our space and Alicia's like I don't understand what we're doing that's the whole point you're only winning when non-radical people are entering your space that's not the problem and she said a lot of my allies are confused into thinking that that's the problem and so you know when when Linda talks about our movements to woke by the way to be very clear in case you don't know these people this is not some Fox News critique of wokeness these are some of the wokest people in the country talking and there's a reason I started with the three of them right these are people who no one could say are like mushy milk toes moderate you know people who don't want real change these are all people whose real change credentials are Beyond dispute who've gone to jail many times for Real Change who have laid down in traffic for Real Change however Linda says to sometimes it feels like to people and by the way in politics feelings become facts if it feels this way it is this way effectively it feels to many people like getting into the progressive woman is like getting into a prison where you have to get through four doors and like the first doors to close behind you before the second door will open and you know she's referring to do you have to know the right stuff you have to have the right terms you have to just have a level of sophistication to not be called out or just even just feel like you're okay in the space right and one of the questions that she and I discussed I discussed with the others is is there space among the work for the still awaking right um there's a distinct like Loretta says it's so brilliant in the chapter she's like we are not good at recognizing the difference between people who are trying to kill us and people who use the word wrong and and she's very clear again she's like both are problematic right I'm not one of these people saying pronouns don't matter pronouns really really matter however if you can't tell the difference between someone who would prefer you don't exist and a slightly elderly teacher in your college who doesn't always get this new stuff right you're going to be probably killed by that person over there at some point right that it's just bad threat assessment as she calls it so she's calling for a kind of progressive movement that has better threat assessment you know um and then Loretta talks about calling in and calling out and she's actually working on a book that will come out at some point soon I hope about calling in and calling out and she says again not a right-wing critique you know she says look our culture has gotten to this place where we see someone who thinks differently from us we just go straight to calling them out and the problem is again it makes it makes the movement hard to join it makes the cause hard to join she says we got to do call-ins not call outs which is not to say we should say nothing right silence is not the opposite of a call out for her is not silent it's not letting it go it's not letting people say awful things at work and and in movement spaces or whatever a call-in is a call out done with love she says you still raise the thing you still explain how you are made to feel by other people that's what makes you know the political left not like the right it's not a cult you know it's okay to have fights families fight movements fight um but let's create a space for us to be able to talk about these things and lastly I would say let us actually build a movement that is self-confident enough to go to your first point that we know we can take people who don't quite get it and teach them inside the tent they don't have to stay in their bedroom fully reform themselves learn all the terminology like do like a full Reckoning as a white person or like a full Reckoning with patriarchy as a man and then ring the doorbell of your movement because then it's gonna be a really small movement right let them come into your movement and have a movement that is self-confident enough to teach people in its own tent you know as I read the book I thought some of this is Primal that it feels as though conservatives are saying you don't have to do anything be afraid of who you want to be afraid of say what you want to say this is easy show up a lot show up a little whereas the other side it feels like work the language can be wonky the ideas can be difficult because part of this just sheer laziness I mean that's really true but I think there's another twist to it I think you're absolutely right so the the part that I think is is very true about that is in many ways that yeah the work of the right the project of the right now is really to cater to a minority of Americans who would rather break the country than share it in a time of demographic change and gender progress and other forms of opening up of liberty and justice for all and so that's a really straightforward project and all you have to do and the the kind of Institutions we have help you don't even need a majority you need something shy of a majority and you can go around and just say like didn't you like it before these people could get so mouthy and didn't you like it before you know didn't you like it before and people can finish the rest of the sentence in their own head that's a relatively easy pitch and you're right that the the job of the political left is to say okay we're gonna have to all live completely differently to save the planet who's ready you know or and that's just one issue you know um and yeah a whole bunch of people uh with colors other than white uh actually didn't feel that great for the first several hundred years of American History uh we know that now because we have Twitter and you know um that has been made clear and so um we have to now build a completely new kind of society that recognizes and treats them well and structures that include them and Empower them the way some people were empowered that feels like homework um you know uh half of society women were you know essentially locked out of most opportunities to fully realize themselves for most of human history last 50 years we realized that's a big problem gotta stop that so let's get on that as quickly as possible China very poor country 34 years ago not really in anyone's way now apparently China is going to make everything in the world and all of you people who used to make things you're that's no longer what you're going to be doing uh sorry your sources of esteem and meaning and everything will be changed in a you know three year period starting in the year 2000 or whatever we started trading with China over and over again like we are pushing people through quite a ringer right now now it's a mix of bad things climate uh you know shocks like China and then very good things racial progress gender progress but people are being asked the political left the pro-democracy side were at large you are right is asking people to endure a lot of change to change themselves change a lot of and it's is that a harder ask than saying would you like to go back to Leave it to Beaver um yes however and here's the twist I actually think there's quite a record in politics of people voters citizens not not just being willing to sacrifice but actually liking being summoned into something hard if they are asked correctly if they are I mean those of you old enough to have lived through Wars like it's so interesting if you read histories of World War II you know the memory that people will testify to is not always just like that was such a pain to live through right there's a subjective experience in many cases of like we were all in this thing and our husbands were over there and we were doing this and like it sucked in some objective sense and we were in this thing and our leaders were calling us to do something right and you think about now I think part of the problem I have the critique I have with some of our well-meaning leaders is they're asking us to go through all of this but not really summoning us into any of it right they're kind of just like doing it piecemeal like do this policy this and that and the right the right actually understands how much of a series of psychological transitions Americans are being asked to go through the right doesn't like those Transitions and has devoted itself to essentially inflaming people's Stress and Anxiety around these transitions and I think whether it's Joe Biden whether it's Democrats in general there's a kind of on the other side a failure to narrate us through this right even inflation there's a reason inflation's happening it sucks right not as bad as living through World War II right but talk us through it explain that there's a epic struggle for democracy in this world that Vladimir Putin did a bunch of things that we can't control he's actually also tried to sabotage our democracy not just Ukraine's that if we can pull together and help get each other through this time of prices people coming together doing Mutual Aid doing all amazing things Americans are going to help each other like we can beat this thing um same with climate same with you know it would be amazing to hear Joe Biden 78 year old white man talking to as you were talking about the cousins thing talking to White America about here's here's why you're going to those trainings at work that might irritate you there's a reason you're actually going through it's a really good reason right here's why your kid is are coming home and saying mommy is America a Bad Country kids are coming home and asking that liberal kids kids of liberals kids of conservatives the new stuff being taught in schools thankfully kids are coming home asking those questions the right is talking people through that the right knows your kids are coming home and asking that is Joe Biden talking us through and I'm not just putting on Joe Biden like is the political left generally talking Americans through these larger things telling a galvanizing thrilling story of why we have to go through what we're going through and summoning us to sacrifice to struggle but also see the world they're trying to deliver on the far side of change I want to talk about my favorite chapter was the one about a notch shinker or sorio who he describes as being the Frank Lutz of the left because this is exactly what she talks about that it's not just what you say it's how you say it this is all critically important and I want to get into a couple of the things that she she talks about one of the things that you know you're seeing right now in the political season you know everybody's now all of a sudden in between calling each other the worst ever and snakes and the whole bit running these Dr Oz has an ad saying I want us to compromise I want us to come together moderates are always being told or politicians are told Camp towards the middle and anat says that is the wrong way to think about it that she describes it as somebody wants a pizza or a burger you've got to figure out whether to sell them on let's get pizza or burger if you offer them a pizza burger that's not really what they want and that's what Democrats are doing they keep trying to come up with the pizza burger rather than truly energizing the base of people who would go out there and say oh my God I found the best pizza I'm so happy you brought up the pizza burger um sorry I have a book to her throat um a notch anchor Osorio is as I described in the book The Frank Luntz at the left if the left listen to its Frank luntzes um which is a major difference she is the most brilliant messaging kind of language expert uh on the political left she works she's the leading person for movement spaces activist spaces um a lot of the kind of progressive advocacy groups outside groups the only place she doesn't quite have a foothold in is the very core of the democratic party power because she's probably a little threatening to them and she is in many ways running a one-woman Insurgency against their method of persuasion their method of persuasion their reigning Democratic party method in our lifetimes um is persuasion through dilution persuasion through dilution is like I generally take at face value that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden like doesn't want to take away your health care or doesn't want to you know like they generally start with I think Noble goals philosophical goals health care for everyone right um and then what happens is there's this fear and this is like in Pennsylvania this is like such a resonant thing there's this fear of the working class white voter right like no one's interested in like Philadelphia voters right it's like you got it's like all these voters just a little bit to the west of you and north of you it's like oh what do they feel what do they feel you must always feel so snubbed the whole country talking about these like all the voters in Pennsylvania except the ones who live in Philly um and it's because they're this like working class white voter fetish like there's actually a lot of persuadable Voters a lot of Voters who move around like Hispanic men are moving all over the place politically right now right but no one ever talks about any of these other swing voters it is always working class white voters preferably in Pennsylvania um and the fear is that you know those working classified voters often like feel like Democrats or communists and so what you take this Noble goal healthcare for everyone you add a lot of water to it it becomes this very thin gruel and then you go to Western Pennsylvania and you offer this really watery gruel to these supposed moderates working-class white voters and you're like here I really water down the gruel like it I swear it's not communism and they just look at you and they're like still communism you know they always still think you're a communist this is the problem like there's no amount of water that you can add to the gruel that makes those people think you're not a communist but now what has happened is your base maybe back in Philadelphia or elsewhere is just really sad they're really sad because you're not really doing meaningful Health Care anymore right I'm on Obamacare like I've gone to the doctor so many times and like I didn't quite check if the if the person coming in to give me a test was on the same insurance as the doctor I visited and this is like a random six thousand dollar bill it's like like that's that's like that's our big I mean no offense a lot of people worked hard on that but like random six thousand dollar bills because you didn't like verify the test person and the doctor's visit doesn't feel to me like a major moral Revolution um and we get that because we're fetishizing this moderate and not Shankar asorio essentially says we are all wrong about the moderate the moderate this idea of the moderate is based on the idea this fantasy that there are that that people who are undecided all sit at the exact midpoint between the two extremes they're these two poles liberal conservative right left government Market whatever and moderates the people you're still trying to still in play they're all just sitting right in that line and they all want the average the pizza burger of these two things it's just not true empirically not true as a knot and many other people have shown what people who are a better term for them is persuadables people who move around people vote for Trump and then vote for Obama or people who you know love a strong border but think we should have Universal Health Care right I mean there's there's those are people who don't fit neatly into the camps they're defining property is not their middleness or their desire for something average it's their tornness it's their lack of a clear grounding in a totalizing world view they basically don't know what they think about everything yet and they can be as anat says toggled into very Progressive moral frames and very conservative moral frames right to give you practical examples this is a group of people where if they see images after images of Asylum Seekers flooding the border and images of a seemingly out of control border this group can easily be toggled into a very right wing kind of view of you don't have a country if you don't have a border right like we have to have people on horses at the border now like get some horses there um and if that same group of people sees images of the Trump Administration separating mothers from babies at the border and that is elevated into the Scandal it deserves to be those same people can completely toggle into a progressive understanding and vote for people who are vowing to shut that down calling that out for what it is right issue after issue these are people who when you ask do we need to talk less about race in this country so we can move forward 75 say yes got it gotta move forward we gotta leave that stuff in the past if you ask do we need to talk more about race because you can't move forward if you don't confront your past 75 of people say yes any mathematicians uh in the in in the room um and so what anat says is that winning over moderates is not about moderating what you believe it is about toggling them into your understanding instead of having the other side and what does that is not moderating it is making them perceive your moral frame your world view as more normal around them as what people think as the thing people do as what people around them and they do people in their town do are people of their class do or people of their race to whatever just normal right this is now my spin on it not anats and I don't know if this would embarrass her but I I think in some ways a moderate again a persuadable is a better term comes to a position on something like immigration more in the way people choose pants than the way people like answer an essay question right you choose pants not based on like an analysis of like okay my legs are this big this shape these are the prices right now right you're kind of like looking like are we doing skinny jeans anymore is that over is that only gen Z for whom it's over like are we doing loose now are we doing belt like what do we do right like you buy pants with some kind of very incoate sense of like what are we doing now right and I don't think it actually demeans people to say like that's kind of how a lot of us actually arrive at our ideas in life certainly people who are less politically engaged people who do not live and breathe this stuff people who maybe today would be choosing a baseball game over a book event and no shade to that if that's the case what you got to do for those voters in Western Pennsylvania but then all the other moderate voters of all the other colors is actually just to encircle them encircle them with people who cannot shut up about how great the thing you want is which is why for example the student debt policy will have way more political power than the inflation reduction act even though that was so important no no one's life was transformed by the inflation reduction act this year no one's like maybe transformed by it in the next 10 years the whole planet may be saved by it eventually different thing but a lot of people the most important thing that happened in their life happened this year and when they go home for Thanksgiving later this month a lot of people are just going around the table saying what they're thankful for are going to talk about 20 grand just disappearing from a debt website that they used to nervously check for the last 20 years right and a lot of uncles who don't like Joe Biden otherwise but love their niece are going to feel something maybe when their niece talks about the best moment the most stress relieving moment the moment that he finally got her out of her Funk at the Thanksgiving table so I think this notion of rethinking the moderate is so crucial to to winning in this age we have to get over this idea of the thin girl the water in the soup and in fact make people excited to come on board and you do that by actually doing some of the things your most passionate supporters would go sing from the rooftops about if you made them happy she has some other great ideas like getting into arguments with the other side does you no good because you're on their playing field and if somebody's evaluating you they're going to always be Choice a you're going to a b Choice B and I actually wanted to read an example from the book quickly um because it's something that affected us here you give the example of Joe Biden going to Kenosha after all the things that went on there and he ran an ad and I'll give you a quick reading of what the ad said versus what she would have said to say because I think for people it really brings it home um I want to make it absolutely clear the app begins rioting is not protesting looting is not protesting it's lawlessness plain and simple and all those who do it should be prosecuted and their Grim images fires are burning and we have a president who fans the Flames he can't stop the violence because for years he's vomited it violence will not bring change it'll only bring destruction it's wrong in every way and it's Armageddon in this commercial and here's an example of what she said and because they're also in the aftermath of Jacob Blake being shot there had been a birthday party there have been all these things where the community came together and she said the Democrats lost a moment to talk about it what if the added said no matter what we look like or where we're from we want our families to be safe our voices to be heard and rights to be respected but Trump is trying to divide and scare us into Silence by sending Federal forces into our communities stopping people from protesting and provoking aggression with the election coming up he hopes to distract us from his corruption and failure to ensure that we have that to ensure that we have the care services and support that we need during this pandemic by joining together black white and brown to demand liberty and justice today and to vote in record numbers in the selection weakens where in a government of by and for the people and you would have seen a multi-racial group of people coming together happiness yes you've seen these terrible things some of which we saw in Philadelphia but this is a reality out there and I thought she really made it plain this is and she could have said that she could have written that out in a minute if they just asked her totally um and the two I want to just he's out two very quick lessons from that that we can all learn from and even if you're not a democratic you know ad maker um number one do not have the other side's conversation have the conversation you want to be having right so if I say if someone says immigrants are animals and I respond immigrants are not animals well first of all I'm correct I won that argument uh however I'm I have consented through my reply to have a really terrible conversation I'm now ha I've gotten into a conversation whose topic is the animalness of immigrants it doesn't matter that I'm against that idea that's now the pool that we're in that's the pool I'm swimming into and those words just like think about keywords on the internet like immigrant animal like I'm elevating the linkage of those keywords in the public mind right so when Joe Biden again because of that anxiety about the white working class but like I know where it comes from he's not trying to do a bad thing right riotism is not protesting Law and Order Law and Order right he is elevated there's a lot of things you could say in that moment right he is elevating the notion that America is unsafe that he's putting his own spin on it he's blaming Trump for it but he's elevating just the notion that America's unsafe right now which is a highly disputable notion in that moment there's a few things in a few places the country was not unsafe in that moment and as anat says when you activate that notion that the country is unsafe they're never going to go for Joe Biden if safety is the most Salient issue for them they're not going to go for what she calls the flabby b-minus alternative on safety they're going to go for who's the best Avatar of safety and the right is going to always own that issue right the second thing so have have your conversation not that and by this is for all of us who you know I just look at my tweets my tweets all day long are like well-meaning people on the left quote tweeting awful things said by the right and just putting their little three-word spin on it well I'm sorry your three-word spin isn't compensating for the fact that you're just amplifying these talking points all day long we all do it I do it um have your conversation not theirs and second paint the beautiful tomorrow right what she wanted the ad she wanted was the script you read overlaying images of black activists in Kenosha grilling doing a bouncy castle doing voter registration hugging each other in celebration of Jacob Blake's life several days after they also marched and paint the beautiful tomorrow tell people the world you want and then tell people who is obstructing getting that world why they are the why is very important crimes need motives why they are obstructing getting that world what's in it for them how they work but but tell people what the world looks like if you win if I reflect honestly on the people in politics today who I respect who are fighting for the world I most want I struggle to think as a writer and Storyteller of any Vivid description I have heard from any of them of what it would look like to have Medicare for all not just telling me Medicare for all is good what would like life be like if none of you had to think about your health insurance ever again what would your marriages be like would that kind of stress reduction What would what would you what businesses would you start that you've been tossing around in your head for a decade if you wouldn't lose health coverage by starting a company the way people in Europe can go start companies all that we think we're the capitalists they can go start a company anytime in Europe and they still just have health care most of us can't start the businesses we think of just can't to responsible to our children what would what would happen What would the world look like if we win that question I think is at the center of what a invigorated uh pro-democracy pro-freedom movement needs to do to to win and just Pro tip she says when you talk about Donald Trump talk about him as a sore loser who wants to flip over the table when you say things like coup and all authoritarian it sounds like a strong guy and he likes that and again it's playing on his field um we're going to go to your questions in just a moment we have an election coming up next Tuesday And if you've watched TV for five minutes here you know the Democrats are really getting mauled on crime and the economy and you name it and what people are going to say if indeed John fetterman loses will be that or other people lose is that the Democrats did not figure out a way to talk about crime did not figure out a way to talk about the economy or the other things the Republicans used to go after that moderate what would you say instead that they should have done and do you disagree with that assessment no I think it's very true and one of the I think mantras I wrote a you know the book is really stories of people doing this work but I I wouldn't opt at the New York Times called the new playbook for saving democracy that was trying to mine like six things Democrats and their allies need to do you know kind of a new playbook for for dealing with this and one of them one of the six items was meet people where they are and something organizers in particular talk about a lot it sounds kind of vanilla but in the context of this year of voter anxieties about crime and and prices it's very specific thing which is I think Democrats have you know anak calls it a responsibility complex um to tell people what they really should be caring about um I would call it Dem splaining it's it's it's sort of like a so voter is like standing in front of you it's like my street feels unsafe and I can't afford anything and there's this tendency that I see on TV five times a day on Twitter 150 times a day which is basically goes as follows totally get that you think crime is high right now but actually if you look at this regression um it's it's adjusted for blueberry blah it's uh not in fact you're not your street is fine uh second totally hear you on the prices it must suck to be a normal person like you but but if there's no democracy there is no prices so here's this other issue that is actually I got my I got my my Wares here uh I got my democracy I'm selling I'm also selling climate fixing climate change please buy this and like I hear you on the prices but but like who cares about prices if the climate makes the planet right and it totally comes from a good place right because at some level it is true that if there's no democracy like gas prices May recede in one's imagination if one is living in like a really you know dystopian tyrannical future and it is true that climate hovers over all these things but you can't say that to voters you can't talk to voters like that you can't Dem spleen what you have to do is connect the agenda you have into and back it into the fears and anxieties that people have and take them as Loretta Ross says take people's fears seriously take people's fears seriously do not tell them they're wrong about their fears do not explain to them why a regression disproves their fears people's fears are going to be very real to them by the way that's true about completely irrational fears and it's true about rational fears like inflation um and then in a way that frankly has not been done enough explain how if Republicans win it's easier for monop corporate monopolies to raise prices further they love Vladimir Putin so that's going to not be helpful um so on and so forth all the way they're going to do tax cuts for wealthy people instead of actually you know regulate companies properly and prevent them from price gouging so on and so forth but there we have to stop this thing of the thing you are telling me you're concerned about is in fact not as important as the thing in my jacket and I really really in the next few days that's going to just be really really crucial to be able to land that message and the last last thing I'll say there's a lot of different formulations of it Justice Democrats great group helped elect AOC actually put out a statement tonight ahead of Biden's democracy speech which was really good I caught a lot of it backstage in which Justice Democrats said you got to find a way to connect the Democracy to pocketbook issues and Justice Democrats offered some interesting helpful language but for those of you who saw Barack Obama's campaign appearances over the weekend he did first of all obviously he's just quite talented but it wasn't just his generic talent and it wasn't just his oratorical ability which is always good there was something in the structure of the argument that was actually unusual and Powerful which I think he framed he took he turned the temperature down a little bit on the fascism stuff even like compared to what I'm saying now and you know different people are gonna have different approaches he didn't frame it so much as like this like looming awful tyranny so maybe he didn't do that thing of like making them sound more big and powerful than they are we can disagree about that but what that allowed him to do was then say he kind of cast all the stuff under the fascism rubric as kind of like nuttiness they're doing all this nutty stuff instead of solving your problems right and it was it was really different from what I've heard from most like he was just treating everything from disinformation Q Anon to election denial to just like they just like have this whole other bunch of stuff that like it's really important to them to do and like they just like probably are not devoting a lot of hours to thinking about your gas price because they can't because they're just like so busy doing this other crazy stuff right and I thought it was a really it was a sort of like turning down the temperature way of warning of this stuff without getting into the flares of fascism democracy this and that and just like can these people really help you if they're like so so busy doing this other weird stuff and I thought it was very very effective what would you have told them to do on crime because the obvious thing to do would be to say the do the Joe Biden we're gonna shut it down we're going to stop the crime but you're saying that's playing to their argument what should they have said this season on crime I mean it's very hard but like part of it is like part of why there's you know these these crime statistics like very complicated to prove what causes what but we all know there's like measures of desperation and um and uh poverty and insecurity and lack of housing that are strongly corrected people living harder lives and being driven to desperate situations and you can talk about how you have an agenda to reduce the root causes of suffering that that may be responsible for some of that you can talk about how you know the kind of policing that you would Advocate is really different from a kind of policing that is based on you know shooting people in the back as they run away without weapons doesn't make anyone safer I think you can talk about a kind of education programs and other things that would provide a more comprehensive notion of well-being in communities from the Cradle to the Grave for everyone and not singly fixate on criminals as this kind of Boogeyman that the right loves to elevate it's not an easy issue and both both prices and crime just like historically around the world are very very tough and I think it's very important as Obama did in some of those appearances to to say like the other side has literally no interest in making this problem better right these are hard problems but the other side has zero interest in making them better and we are the the we are the the side that is that is trying to to fix these things and we need authority to fix them um if we're going to be able to make your life better loved your previous book um winner take law and um I wish I could be as optimistic as you are but the problem I see and you being part of the media this is not to bash the media but there have been I don't know in the last election 30 40 articles on the guy in Western Pennsylvania in the diner right no one ever interviews people in West Philadelphia nobody ever interviews people in North Philadelphia to see how crime affects them how these Republican policies so and then if you go into any kind of tire place gas station there's Fox News on you're captive you can't get away from that so how can the media sort of help get that message out there's never follow-up questions asked they have Republican people on Meet the Press there's never a follow-up question when somebody says something outrageous nobody ever holds anybody accountable so part of the democratic messaging is because the media feels they have to both sides everything when sometimes there isn't both sides sometimes there's just right and wrong and so yeah what's the answer to that I I share your concern as a long time card carrying member of the media um I work for the New York Times for 11 years I still write for it occasionally I I look I think a lot of our media a lot of media that I have written for and believe in generally and was my training and formation are unwittingly helping to kind of Sleepwalk us toward fascism I don't think that's their goal I don't think it's their project I think what I just said would you know I know it would horrify them I have these conversations with people I I think it's a it's easy for me to also say that on the outside it's a very hard problem that they're in which is basically American journalists were not trained for the situation we are now in they were not trained for two things I would say they're not trained for basically disinformation at this scale velocity and with this level of institutional backing we're basically one of the two major parties is now a conspiracy theorist party um whose major ideas are fictional right the Republican party is like a novelist now you know um no American journalist unless you were like in the Soviet Union in the eight like this wasn't the training it just wasn't what happened at Columbia journalism school or University of Missouri journalism that's just what right maybe it should have been like it just wasn't the training um second and I'm super critical of this both sides thing but again it helps me to understand like where it comes from these papers I mean you know I have a newsletter like it's lasted two and a half years like we'll see you know there's a reason the New York Times lasted 150 years there's a kind of sobriety there's a kind of like not getting jumpy at each thing there's a kind of like right like taking a Long View you know it's easy you can squander the legitimacy of an institution like that in two sentences right to keep something like that for 150 years that has that level of influence and credibility requires like never messing up or messing up as seldom as possible and so there's this profound caution in these newsrooms to not ever be perceived as on a side or and I think in that caution they have basically accidentally become handmaidens of an increasingly mendacious and autocratic right because they won't called lies lies until they agree to do so or because it's a hard to get them to I mean I wasn't allowed to use the word demagogue in an article in 2016 about Trump I mean I just think that's a word with an objective meaning it either means something or it doesn't mean something I don't think there's any dispute that Trump was a demagogue you know um and so I'm very clear that this is a huge problem but I don't think it's an easy problem because I think if the New York Times were to be perceived it's already quite badly perceived but people on the right still fundamentally respect it in a way that they may not say on Fox News still take the calls they still respond to the reporting they still want their books on the New York Times bestseller list if the times were just to be universally perceived as like an organ of the DNC it would be very very bad for this country also and so how that is resolved is to me it's one of the great great questions of this country for all these papers all these media Outlets it's just it's very challenging and the last thing I'll say is I have a whole chapter in the book about disinformation and what we need to do there and I think there actually what I advocate in the book based on two people I I spent a lot of time with is actually worrying less about shutting it all down the disinformation down I don't know that we're going to be able to do that instead treating it as endemic and um having a real program of basically a public health approach to it where we educate people to be resistant to disinformation this is the kind of next great educational Revolution the same way we you know we added sex ed to education we used to think you know you got it from your family or you didn't get it at all or you figured it out you know behind the shed um and then we realized it's actually better that everybody gets a certain basic minimum knowledge and schools are going to do that because who knows what your parents are going to tell you right um I think being able to resist not just critical thinking that's like one like being able to resist organized manipulation by people like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk and others um needs to basically become a core part of any human educational Journey um and the people I write about in the book who are developing a program to basically make that a Core curriculum for The Human Experience hey Don my name is Raj I really appreciated your book um I'm also the the son of Indian immigrants and I wanted to ask a question about how interviewing and doing the research for this book has influenced you as a father relative to how your immigrant parents raised you interesting I mean it's so interesting like my I've tried to explain my previous books to my I have a seven and a half year old and a four and a half year old um at partly Aid and partly nature like the four and a half year old doesn't care she also may not care when she's seven but the the the seven-year-old is like really interested like what are you worried about and I was like you know first book like social change in India is kind of like okay um second one like hate crime in Texas it's like okay um third one like billion he's like what's a billionaire you know I was like let me tell you um and then this one I was like it's a book about how you convince people he's like oh oh I I do that a lot with Zora um and so I actually asked him what are your methods of persuasion with Zora he's like for example like I she wants to to Uno after school and I want to do art in our room and I gotta I gotta persuade her I said how do you do it he said I have two methods sometimes I use one sometimes I use the other sometimes he's both together I was like what are they he says attract and distract I was like I think that's really similar to what I'm arguing in the book can you say more about that um he was like attract is like I'll I'll just go over to where she's playing Uno and I'll be like oh Zora it's so interesting there's such great art in my room and then I'll run down the hallway to my room and I'll just wait there and hope that she'll be so interested in what I'm doing then if that doesn't work I'll go back to what she's doing and I'll just point to different things and distract her from the Uno and then hope that when she's ready for the next activity she'll come and do art in the room so attract distract attract distract um so I I always learn a ton from my kids um I think you know I mean I was thinking a lot about my children as I wrote this book because over the last you know the period of the pandemic the period of such existential fear for the country and frankly like whether they're going to be safe in their bodies in this country in the future like you know this is the period where you know 2015 we started talking about could Natural Born U.S citizens be stripped of their citizenship for certain like crimes of dissent which is a you know policy Trump advocated in 2015. um I think it they just give me a tremendous amount of motivation I I understand the people who are just like I'm getting off Twitter or I'm getting Portuguese citizenship which apparently they're just handing out over there um I get it and people have to do them but like I'm not like I'm not leaving America like I'm not quitting on America I'm not I don't have any other country even though I'm often told to go back to it online um I I am all in on America and I'm all in America not only because of them but partly because of them and I if it hasn't already been clear like I think we can win the future like I think we can seize the age I think these people are the same tired minority faction that has been against every advance of progress in American history there was always a it was a some group that didn't want to end slavery there was some group that didn't want women to vote there was some group that you know didn't want civil rights it was some group that didn't want to open immigration to a wider array of non-white countries in 1965 there's always been this group of people who would rather break the country than share it and although we all feel a lot of Despair right now presumably we have beaten those people every single time in the long run every time every time you know it's it's worth remembering that like these people their record sucks in the long run it really does it really does like they have only lost right and I think they're going to lose again I think they're going to lose decisive and I think in many ways this is a real last gasp movement because it's actually all the things at once right it's a last gasp of a kind of pre-gender equality a patriarchal thing precisely because of how much progress we've made right it's a last gasp of people who want white to mean American and American to mean white and everybody else to be a guest right but it's a last guest because of all the progress we've made on that the way the country is different look at this room it's a last gasp of a kind of um Nostalgia for when things were easy because you know in your town everybody looked like a cousin of yours well that world is gone and it's gone because we actually fought over a very long time to achieve something different and more people consistently have fought for and supported that expansion that more perfect union dream and so all I want to do is is to give that Minority faction what they are most comfortable with which is another stinging defeat um and I think we can do it I think we will do it I think we need to change our ways if we're going to do it um but thanks not least to my children I have tremendous tremendous hope well Anan thank you for being with us and you're going to be signing books as well I will be okay so hopefully some of you will come out and buy and thank you [Applause]

Channel: Author Events

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Id: nIjNDHvmW_0

Length: 64min 10sec (3850 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022