The Daily Stoic - Former Attorney General Eric Holder on the Value of History

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Ryan talks to former attorney general Eric Holder about his new book Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote, the importance of understanding and learning from history, believing in people's ability to create change, and more. Attorney General Eric Holder is the third longest-serving attorney general and the first African American attorney general in American history, holding the role under President Barack Obama from 2009 until 2015. He currently serves as the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which he founded after he stepped down as attorney general in 2015. The committee focuses on reforming how state legislative maps are drawn to ensure they're fair, not partisan, and ending the practice of gerrymandering.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars.

And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. I got a very nice compliment from today's guest. He said that it was one of the best interviews that he'd ever done and that he didn't think he'd been asked any of the questions that I'd asked him before. I'm not saying that to Braggle though it was very cool and flattering and strange and surreal. But I think it is indicative of the conversation you're about to listen to, which I am very excited to bring you. This is my conversation with Attorney General Eric Holder, the third longest-serving Attorney General, the first African-American Attorney General in American history seems kind of insane that there was a

black judge on the Supreme Court before there was an attorney general and that that first attorney general wasn't until 2009, pretty insane, but that's kind of what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. I had Sammy on recently. They are the collaborators on this book, Our Unfinished March, The Violent Past and Impair Old Future of the Vote. It's a history, a crisis, and a plan. It's about arguably our most important right, our ability to vote, to decide who represents

us and our representative government, which has been under siege not since the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County versus holder, which gutted the 1965 voting rights act. But you could argue that the right to vote has been in peril literally since America founded, it was founded on this idea that we're all equal, we all deserve an equal say. But in practice, took a long time to get there and we're not even where we should be yet. Eric Holder is currently the chairman of the National Democratic Redistripping Committee, which he founded after he stepped down as Attorney General in 2015.

They focus on how to draw fair state legislative maps, so they're fair, not partisan, and they're dedicated to ending the practice of cherry mandering. This was recorded a couple of weeks ago, but as we saw in the most recent tragic and terrible and deeply, I would say, unjust Supreme Court decision at the end of June, we are about to see why these state legislative maps are so important because they are going through decide women's access to what should be a constitutional right and no longer is. I'll leave that for the interview because you might disagree with me, but I think we can all agree that voting is important, that free and fair access to ones in alieable privilege to

vote in these elections is essential. And the implications that come from a system that falls short of that promise or premise. And I really think you like the book, the art unfinished march is great. It pairs with some books I have read recently, not just the Taylor branch series on Martin Luther King, David Halberstrand's book, The Children Among Others. But in the meantime, I'll just get to this conversation with Attorney General Eric Holder, who was nice enough not just to take the time to talk to me, but to say some very nice things afterwards, as I said. and you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at Eric

Holder. But most of all, I hope you participate in this unfinished march towards a more perfect union, towards a more fair union, towards a more representative union, and ideally towards a more just and democratic union. Enjoy! of the credit union, enjoy. Well, I loved the book, and I thought I would start with, not an easy question, but I was struck when Obama left office,

he supposedly spoke to some of his aides about that famous line, which I believe is in the book about how the arc of history is long, but it bends towards truth. And he was saying that it's more complicated than that, that actually it zigs in it, zags. Why do you think that's the case, right? Because science doesn't zig and zag. You know, culture doesn't really zig and zag

in that way. Mathematics don't zig and zag. Why does justice seem to, you call it a march and unfinished march? Why doesn't the march just continue? Why does it zig and zag like that? Because the, the march, the movement towards justice is a function of who we are as a people. And we are imperfect beings subject to a whole variety of different pressures,

prejudices, fears. And it is all those things that keeps us even from getting to the place where we want to be, or when fighting against those concerns propels us in ways that are consistent with our American ideals. And I think it's true that if you look overall, that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but it only bends when people put their hands on that arc and pull it towards justice. And that's really kind of the point of the book. There are crises that we have faced in the past

and we've met those crises because people decided that they were gonna commit themselves, sacrifice, put their lives on the line, and make this country better, protect this democracy. And I think we can do it again. That's an interesting point you made. One of my favorite passages in the great Gatsby. He goes and he meets Mayor Wolfshine, the organized criminal, the gangster, and Gatsby sort of whispers to Nick Caraway that this was the man that had fixed the 1919 World Series.

And Nick Caraway says something like, I knew that had happened, but he said, it just struck me that it had happened as some sort of inexorablerable series of events that it was, that the idea that a singular person had been responsible for a thing that had affected the lives of so many people, it was inconceivable. And I think that kind of summarizes our attitude towards a lot of things, including the Civil Rights Movement, the idea that John Lewis was a guy or that Martin Luther King was a guy, Diane Nash was a woman. And that these people sat down. And as you said, grabbed onto the moral arc and pulled it in a direction, it wasn't going to go otherwise.

It's kind of inconceivable to us today, which probably says something about the world that we live in. Yeah, I mean, I didn't ever think I'd be talking about Arnold Rothstein in the same way that I'm talking about John Lewis and Martin Luther King and Diane Nash, but yet individuals can impact that arc, the direction of that arc. Individuals can impact history. And we have seen that over and over again. That's why in the book, I focus on, you know,

individual stories of so-called ordinary Americans who end up doing fairly extraordinary things. Now, they don't do them by themselves. They have to come up with other people who will aid them in those efforts. But the reality is that, you know, it's one individual, it's two individuals, it exponentially gets bigger. And before you know it, you go beyond a moment to a movement. And that's what I think we need to try to do with our nation today. Yeah, right, right. I realize Arnold Ross date is a strange character to drag into this. But I think for every Lyndon Johnson, there is also a Senator Russell, right? There's, we tend to also think it's only the good guys,

but there is also the person who stands beside history and tries to stop it. Or bend it in the other direction. No, that's absolutely right. This is all about power. It's all about the acquisition and retention of power. And for every good guy that we can name and who is known to us in history, those are the people we tend to glorify.

But for every Martin Luther King, yeah, there's a Richard Russell, you know, for every person who was fighting for women's suffrage, there is going to be a person who, I talked about in the book, who was against the right of women to vote. If you get some of the founding fathers who fought against the notion that white men, I mean, think about this, white men without property should not have the right to vote. And we're very vocal about why they didn't think that white guys who didn't have property shouldn't be allowed to vote. But so their names are not as known to us as Jefferson, as Elizabeth Cady stand and as Martin Luther King. But for every one of those, there is a counterpoint. There is somebody who they had to beat. There was somebody

who they had to beat, somebody they had to vanquish in order to be the successes that they became. And that is something you talk a lot about in the book and I'm glad you did because I loved that book, The Women's Hour, about the passing of the of the amendment that gives women the right to vote. I think you assume, and again, we don't teach these things so explicitly in school, but I guess I just assumed that the suffragettes were battling indifference, right? They were against, well, women don't have the right to vote. Why do they need the right to vote? And they were fighting for a recognition of wanting this thing. And in fact, there was, as she points out in her book, and you point out in this book,

there were people who were vehemently opposed to women having the right to vote. And a good chunk of those people were women, which is kind of the mind-blowing thing that as you really dig into it. So we often again assume that, you know, that it's the battle against maybe indifference or not caring, and then if more people knew they would care, but often these movements are fighting against real entrenched interests or opposition to the very idea or premise that the people are fighting for. And this is why it's not just enough to be right. You have to be good at what, you have to be good at arguing and fighting and politics.

Yeah, right. And I think the point you make is a really good one that we don't know our history as well as we should. And this notion of, well, it was in difference to women's rights. No, in fact, there was organized opposition to it. And given where the culture was at the time, some substantial numbers of women thought, well, that would involve us in politics and our primary function, or maybe our soul function, should be running the house and things outside the house.

That's for men to decide. And I think what we see throughout our history is not in difference to the ability of African- Americans to vote, women to vote, at the beginning, you know, white men without property to vote. It was active opposition to giving those groups the ability to vote again out of concern that this would lessen the power of those people who had it at the time. You know, the status quo does all that it can to hold on to the power that

it has. And that's what we're seeing now in this changing America. We see changing demographics. We see young people who are, I think, are fundamentally well in different ways. I look at my kids. They don't carry the same racial baggage, you know, that my generation did. And so the people in the status quo now, the Mitch McConnell's Republicans, they see this new multiracial America as a threat to their retention of power and they do it all that they can to try to make sure that they suppress the votes

of these people that they attack the electoral infrastructure of the nation so that even when it comes to things accounting the boats, it will be done in a way that favors those who have power. So, you must have an unusual perspective given the cases that you've been a part of all sort of different sides. Like, to me as just an ordinary citizen or a student of history, I sort of see these sort of two forces clashing with each other, maybe one's the government and then one is a privately funded group or it's a non-profit or it's some plaintiff.

What is draw, like again, to go back to the anti-Suffer jets? Like, what is drawing someone into the breach to be the person who says, no, I want to stop this from jets. Like, what is drawing someone into the breach to be the person who says, no, I want to stop this from happening. No, I don't, I want less of this. I want more exclusion, et cetera. You actually being in the courtroom speaking to them and their lawyers,

what do you find about them as human beings? I imagine it's not usually the face of sort of irredeemable, unreachable evil. There's usually probably a logic or a story they're telling themselves, just like the women who oppose the right to vote. They're not like we think women are dumb. They're telling themselves a story in which it actually makes logical sense that they wouldn't want this thing.

What do you find about the human beings that are on the other side of these conflicts? Yeah, I think it functions right on a bunch of levels of consciousness. There are some people who are irredeemably eaten, but they are probably in the minority. There are other people who, as Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time. And there are those. I mean, the folks who continue to believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, there's probably a vend diagram that shows a lot of them also believe that the moon landing

never get a car. Sure. And so you're not going to, but for others, there is this belief in myths that have been perpetuated and that for whatever reason they buy into. You know, again, this notion, women, that, you know, we shouldn't be doing things outside the home. Our primary responsibility is the maintenance of the home and the raising of children, which is not, you know, when you think about it, all right, that's, you know, I don't

obviously don't agree with that, but there's a certain, a certain kind of twisted logic to it. Oh, what you can say is, oh, yeah, if that's what you choose to do, that is to be the primary person to maintain the house and to raise the kids, you can also find time to go outside and, and vote, you know, I mean, and, and, and they don't kids, you can also find time to go outside and vote. You know, I mean, and they don't think that you can add on to whatever they think their role is. So yeah, it's, and then people who have those views get exploited by people who are, if

not evil, certainly opportunists and are taking advantage of those people who are not thinking, who are not fully thinking and enlist them and put them in their armies against positive change. And fear is a real driver. It is, all right, so if we give this other group power, boy, you don't, I mean, you know, you know, you don't, this is how, this is how this is the impact it's going to have on your day to day life. You know, these brown hordes are going to make your streets less safe.

You know, you see it in, in the birth of a nation, you know, you give black men the ability to, it's a political freedom. And next thing, you know, they're going to be raping white women. And so they draw these connections in all kinds of strange ways. But the army that is against change has a variety of people in it, and they're motivated by a variety of different things. Yeah, when I was talking to your co-writer, Sammy Cobbleman, we were sort of talking about, it feels like when you look at history,

specifically the history of America, just for constrain the argument, there's kind of this like dark energy, right? The energy that first opposes abolition, the energy that opposes, you know, let's say unionization that opposes the right to vote for women, that opposes then desegregation, then the civil rights movement.

It's kind of, it's weird how it's, it's like they're fighting this rear guard movement where they're always finding a thing that they're like, well, it's got to stop here. I don't want this to happen, right? It's kind of this dark energy that's always resisting something. It's conservative in the small C sense of like, I don't want this, I'm afraid of that. And it's just weird how this dark energy seems to, it never fully gets routed. It's never beaten. And, you know, you have the triumph of the civil rights movement, but it just works its way over here and over here and over here.

And then maybe even people told themselves that the success of the gay rights movement was the final triumph. And now we're sort of looking at, oh no, they've regrouped. And now we're having to relitigate that. How do you think about that energy? What is the source of that? Is it fear? Is it control?

Like, what is why? I just come back to this idea of why. Yeah, I think it's all the things you just talked about. I think it's fear, it's control. It's, you know, people, we are like institutions. You know, we like the familiar, you know, we're afraid of change. Our greatest leaders have taken us

and told us about the change that we were about to confront. We embraced that change and then we turned that change to our advantage, you know, as a nation. That's why the 20th century was the American century. I mean, Roosevelt saw change and so the possibility of change didn't run from it, wasn't a conservative to try to maintain the status quo. All right, let's embrace this change. Let's remake our economic system and we will be a better people for it.

But put that analogy that you use about dark energy. I think dark energy, dark matter. I think it is that kind of unseen thing in the universe that has an impact on the path of planets, of stars. I mean, a whole variety of things that we don't totally understand, and nevertheless, it's there, and it has an impact on the universe. And in some ways, I can attempt to explain why people act the way they do, and from my perspective, a negative, a negative, anti-progress way, when, in fact, the reality is this progress will probably benefit them as well, and yet they

resist. So that maybe it is going to take another century to understand dark matter and to understand what motivates people to do things that at the end of the day might be against their self-interest. I think you look at Joe Manchin and voting against things that would be of great assistance to the people in his state. This, you know, he's probably not going to suffer any negative political consequence because that because people there are not necessarily in favor of things that were contained in bills that would have made their lives on a day-to-day basis better. But they were against them for dark matter reasons.

I can't totally explain it, but it nevertheless is there. We have to recognize that it's there and plan our actions accordingly. What's remarkable about Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson is sort of from two very different ends of the spectrum and different sets of experiences, they both managed to effectively communicate

why the changes they were seeking needed to happen, right? And one was very good at activating people. The other was very good at activating people. The other was very good at activating Congress or political figures to act. And you sort of need both of those. Kennedy being an interesting figure in the middle that was pretty good at both, but not sufficient at either, you might argue.

Do you think that part of it is that we do a bad job communicating about these things? Like if you would like, one criticism of liberals in office today would be on those bills, for instance, that mansion votes against, is that they've packaged a whole bunch of things together and it allows him to find opportunities

to throw the sort of baby out with the bath water. Is it a matter of political strategy and communication? Is it that the people's will is not fully there? Like, what do you think has has stalled the march? Can you totally blame it on the resistors? Or is it something else? No, I don't think you can blame it totally on the resistors. I think you can primarily blame it on the resistors. But you know But there's a whole variety of things that those of us on the progressive side have not done necessarily well, messaging.

We have not come up with great messengers or with great messages. And we have that capacity. When you think about Hollywood, it's a largely liberal, progressive place. Let's tap into them and come up with ways in which we tell our stories better. I was watching the January 6th presentation, that initial presentation where they were putting one that slides you. And I thought, well, that was done extremely well. And I was thinking to myself, I bet, you know, if I asked Steven Spielberg to give me the best cinematographer,

you know, you film artists, I could make that even better, which does not say it wasn't good, but I bet I could make it even better and I could apply that, you know, in other places. So messaging, there are problems there. We had a moment in time when in the 60s, with those two significant people, Johnson, the insider, King, the man of the streets

who came together and brought about, changed the likes of which this country had not seen since the Civil War. I'm not sure that we can hope for that kind of moment again. The hope that I have is that we can get significant numbers of just regular people. King and Johnson were not regular people. Those were extraordinary individuals. Sure. But I think we can get sufficient numbers of regular people to do extraordinary things and have the necessary impact. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the

world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges,

and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early, Well, isn't that something that King said that one of the amazing things about nonviolence is that when an ordinary person commits to it, it makes them extraordinary, right? And so, like, those movements, like when I read David Halberstrems book, The Children Recently, and it was like, these were just, this is just a collection of relatively ordinary college students. I mean, it was remarkable to be an African American college student in, you know, the 1950s and 60s. So I don't mean to undermine their accomplishments, but they were ordinary people who decided to, again, as we were saying

earlier, sort of grab the arc of history and became extraordinary in the process of getting involved in trying to do something about it. Yeah, you see, there is within us ordinary Americans the capacity for extraordinary things. I think about my late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone, grew up in the segregated south in Mobile, Alabama, and she was one of the two black students who integrated the University of Alabama with Nick Katzenbach at her side, Robert Kennedy, planning the strategy. She becomes the first African-American to graduate from the University of Alabama. I knew Vivian until she died, married her sister.

I mean, and she was a great person. Would I consider her to be an extraordinary person? Well, yeah, she was extraordinary for certainly for what she did, but she was just a down-home, good woman from mobile Alabama who did that, you know, extraordinary thing. And we have within ourselves, you know, I think about one of the young women we talked about in the book, Love Caesar, you know, a college student at North

Carolina A&T, largest historically black college and university in the country that was gerrymandered by the Republicans in North Carolina. And she took a piece of chalk and drew a line right down the middle of the campus to demonstrate to the kids there. You know, if you live on this side of the line, you're in congressional district six. On this side, you're in congressional district five. It dilutes our political power. She mobilized, you know, that the kids on that campus, that historically black campus, got in touch with us at the NDRC, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, we want to lawsuit, and they changed. They had to change all of the district lines in North Carolina because that one student loves Caesar and a piece of chalk did something extraordinary.

Now, yeah, she's an extraordinary, that was an extraordinary feat. I've gotten to know her and I expect great things from her. But you know, she was, by a whole bunch of measures, an ordinary person with that extraordinary capacity that she ultimately decided to tap into. Yeah, well, and what I think when you tell that story, that's a great one in the book, is like, that is the power of clear and effective communication also. Right. That, that, it's so stark and it's so powerful and it's so simple. And I can trust that, you know, the pandemic being a great example of just preposterously bad communication throughout, you know, you have your, you're a graph from the CDC with

60 boxes and you don't know. And you're like, people are busy. They don't, they, they want to care. But you're not making it easy for them to care or they care, but they don't understand and they can't effectively communicate what they're being told to other people. The chalk is so stark and so clear and it makes the point in such a way that a person cannot look away from it or deny its implications.

Yeah, and that communication component is extremely important. You know, Kennedy's greatness cut short was, I think, largely a function of his verbal skills, you know, the eloquence that you saw in that inaugural address and other speeches that he gave, fireside chats, you know, by Roosevelt. I mean, we don't understand the impact now in our much more fractured media landscape. The power of those when people would run to the radios to hear the president talk about and explain, you know, I mean, that's the use that I can get your map out. I'm going to show you what Europe looks like. Exactly. Or when he's explaining the economic

system, you know, and why he's closing the banks. I mean, you know, these are, you know, finding ways to do those kinds of things in the 21st century, when there's going to be, you know, at least, you know, on the other side, on Newsmax Fox, who are going to be saying exactly the opposite and not necessarily it's not necessarily going to be, you know, fact or reality based, it is more difficult, but it's not impossible. I think that too often we forget the power of the word or the power of communication or the need for communication in addition to having good policies. You know, yeah, yeah, that's, you got to have the good policies, that's the foundation, but how do you sell those policies? How do you make people care about those policies? I think, again, that's one of the reasons why Barack was so successful.

I mean, that speech for John Kerry, which is the thing that ignited his presidential political career, and then throughout his term in office, he met the moment with eloquence and with clarity. Well, I think the pandemic in the last couple years have also illustrated this probably timeless thing, but certainly heightened in our modern age, which is if you have a group of people who are motivated by something irrational or fear based or emotional,

whether it's the denial of vaccines or masks or it's some sort of fear-based hatred of immigration or a minority group, that group is going to be profoundly motivated and driven and not bound by the constraints of reality as they seek to communicate what they feel and think, right? And it's like their super spreaders of ideas because it's extra potent. And it's like they have a heavy dose of whatever it is that they have. Whereas the ordinary person walking down a college campus goes, yeah, redistricting

is unfair. I don't really like it, but they're not, they don't feel like they're in the middle of a race war or something, right? And so it's kind of this inherently mismatched fight where the other side is seething with a kind of intensity and clarity, we're, it's a confusing clarity, but a clarity about their purpose because it's coming from a deeper place. I mean fear and hate are powerful, powerful, powerful things, and they are difficult to defeat. They can be defeated, and it requires hope, it requires commitment, it requires idealism, it requires organization. It's hard. Fear and hate can be expressed simply.

You need to be afraid of black people. They're going to kill you. You should be afraid of Jews. They've exploited you. Full stop. You know, that's it. And so, you know, you've got to fight what it is that they are saying in ways that are understandable. There are nuances, you know, that too often I think we get hung up in and coming

up with those strong messages. I mean, I don't know. The Democrats would simply say, we're on your side. I don't know, Democrats would simply say, we're on your side. I don't know, maybe that's a phrase. We're on your side. And then you build out from that. But the point you make is a really important one.

That notion of fear, that notion of hate and the exploitation of those emotions are real triggers for people. I mean, it probably, I mean, I'm not a doctor, but this is part of the brain. I don't know what motivates the flight mechanism and all of that stuff. I mean, that's what it taps into. You know, it gets us at some basic level.

Like, you're telling me that I'm going to be at risk because of these people, this policy, and it takes a lot to overcome that basic thing that we have of self-preservation. Because that's kind of what they're almost tapping into. You're putting your life, the life of those near and dear to you, the systems that are near and dear to you at risk, that are near and dear to you at risk. And you are personally going to be harmed. And so from a legal basis, it's probably interesting because then one hand you're having to

argue the law, but you're also having to make this appeal to public opinion as well, to the hearts and minds and consciences of people. How do you think about that? Because, yeah, you can't go, well, it's more complicated than that. Let me tell you all the legal reasons that's incorrect or whatever, right? You also have to sell the sort of competing vision. You can't just say, hey, that's unjust. You have to sell why voting rights are better for everyone, right?

It seems, it's a sad state of affairs, of course, that you have to argue this fundamental premise of what America is that it's better when more people have the right to vote. But it feels like when you have one of the sides sort of either deliberately or covertly chipping away at the foundations of certain people having the right to vote or trying to mitigate or minimize the effects of those votes You have to sort of fight that on a case-by-case legal basis But you also have to make this compelling like an FDR or Kennedy or Martin Luther King Cause for why voting rights matter to people

Yeah, you do and you have to explain to people Why the nations better why they are better? Yeah, you need to appeal to people's, you do. And you have to explain to people why the nation's better, why they are better. You need to appeal to people's higher angels. Again, we talk about messaging, we tend to forget that 2008 campaign of Barack Obama. Simple, hope and change. Iconic poster says hope or just as change on it. Sarah Pail and Made, you know, iconic poster says his hope or just his change on it. And you know, Sarah Pail and made fun of how's your hope he changed you guy doing now? Yeah, but that really drew to his cause, you know, countless numbers of Americans, black Americans, white Americans, young people, you know, the Obama coalition is really kind of the

future of American why he was so feared and why as we say in the book, there was that backlash. And so coming up with ways in which you explain the need for, you know, for hope, the need for change, how it is going to be beneficial. You've got to explain it, but you've got to think about ways in which you're talking to the ordinary guy. I'm not arguing this to the United States Supreme Court every time. You're talking to Joe Sixpack and you're trying to convince him or her why this policy position, this notion of everybody voting is a good thing. But you should not, this is something that's important. You should not think that these judges and justices are living a monastery. They're impacted

as well by that messaging. And they are, they won't say it, but they're reading the newspapers, they're looking online and seeing kind of where America is. And that at some level has an impact on the decisions that they render as well. Yeah, one of my favorite headlines, this was in like 2017. I think it was in the Huffington Post, but put it, put the outlet aside. But the headline was that I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people, right? And that seems like the fundamental divide that we're struggling with politically and culturally.

And you could even argue globally, right? As we always have, but particularly now, it seems people struggle with the idea that other people's rights or obligations or the way that they're treated, that it should matter to you at all, right? I feel like some people get that. And then it seems like we are in the same battle.

If we go back to the idea of dark energy, we're still in this battle to try to get people to understand that you should care about what happens to some guy running down the street who gets gunned down by like hillbillies because he looks suspicious. So we're that you should care about whether this district in this county, in this state that you don't live in, has been gerrymandered to such a degree that it's undermines, you know, people's right to decide who represents them. You should care about that. But people, I think, struggle with that idea. Yeah, that's the tension in America, you know, this notion that we are a nation that values, enhances, tries to enhance the individual as opposed to a nation that cares about the community.

And people see that as those being in tension, that, you know, I should care only about And people see that as those being in tension. That, you know, I should care only about what affects me, the individual, and that's right. It's my second amendment right to possess a gun. It's my right, the hallowed decision by the way is wrongly decided, but let's leave that alone. Yeah, that's my individual right, regardless of what the impact of the exercise of that individual right as defined wrongly by the Supreme Court will have on the larger community.

And so that struggle between individual rights and community obligations or community rights is one that we wrestle with and have wrestle with almost since the beginning of the republic. And it really manifests itself, I think, maybe most acutely when it comes to who we decide will have the right to vote. Because then you're giving up, that's the way in which people decide the direction of the nation. And I don't necessarily, if I'm a med defender of the status quo, I don't necessarily, if I'm a mid-defender of the status quo, I don't want to necessarily hand out power cards to these other people who might decide that they want to do things in a way different than I do.

They might have a negative impact on what I perceive to be my individual rights. Yeah, that's what I live in Texas and one of the things. I say the best part about Texas is you can do whatever you want. The problem with Texas is that other people can do whatever they want. And if this constant tension between, man, I really don't like what my neighbor is doing. It's driving me nuts, but that's what a democracy is supposed to be or that's what a country that protects individual rights is supposed to allow to happen. We have to agree.

Individual rights, yeah, should be exalted. And you know, we favor the individual at the end of the day over the interests of the state. And yet, you know, there are individual rights that if simply seen as, you know, un- uncappened can take us to really negative places and guns, I think, is maybe chief among them. I think the interpretation of the Second Amendment is all wrong, but if you just bind to the notion that it is, in fact, an individual right. And therefore, it's constantly protected individual right. And therefore, little or no regulation is possible. Well, we have seen, and we have seen on a day-to-day basis,

there have been more mass shootings now this year than there have been days in the year. And how can we not, as a nation, react to that and say, yeah, all right, even if I say it's an individual right, I don't agree with you, but I'm going to, for purpose of this argument, I'm going to conceive that, but that individual right can be restrained, restricted, regulated in such a way that you still enjoy the ability to have that individual right while protecting the interests of the larger community.

They're not necessarily, not necessarily intention, except that people on the extremes, certainly on the extremes of the individual rights side don't want any kind of regulation, you know, whether it's environmental regulation, gun regulation, a whole range of things that they don't want to have regulated, even when it means that you're, you're, you're an electricity grid in Texas is going to fail. You know, they don't want to be part of the larger grid in the United States. We want to be, we just want a Texas kind of thing, even though it doesn't damn work, you know. Yeah. Now, no, it's, it's a great point. I'm a gun owner. I live in a rural part of the country, I hunt, I have to have them because

there's like wild dogs that terrorize, you know, where I live. It's a reality of the life that I happen to live in. But it's a go back to the idea of one of those things at Roosevelt, so eloquently expressed. We not only have all our constitutional rights, but he defines those four freedoms that we're entitled to as individual citizens. And a freedom from fear is a huge part of something we're entitled to as Americans. I think about that. I have this small bookstore here in Texas and people go, oh, it must be so great to live

in a place that's pro business, right? And there is aspects that are nice about the extra rights that I have that maybe I wouldn't have living in California. But is it really pro business when your government fails to keep up the electrical grid and you have to close business or so mismanages the pandemic that all your employees get sick and you have to close, right? So I think that when you think about the individual and the individual's rights at the expense of the impact on the collective, not only are you being selfish and callous, but you are ultimately the long way around threatening your own freedoms. Like now, the same person that thinks so much about guns

now has to think about as they drop their kid off to school, what could happen? And that's, is that freedom? I don't think so, it's insane. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, in our founding documents talk about the notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Well, that doesn't just apply, we're in the gun phase, not just to gun owners, but also I have the right as an American citizen to life. That is something that the founding documents say that I am entitled to. And this unregulated, this free for all that we have with regard to guns is a direct threat. I mean, this can with regard to guns. It is a direct threat, I mean, this can be empirically shown. It's a direct threat to the lives of the American citizenry and therefore that calls for some reasonable measures

to be put into place. That don't, at the end of the day, affect your ability to own a gun, to use a gun, to use a gun, to have a gun for protection. And why we can't get to a good place on that, it is hard to understand on, unless you understand a bit of our political system where, you know, as we talk about in the book, we got to do it with Jerry Mandarin, because the reality is vast numbers of Americans would agree with the conversation you and I are having here about individual rights and,

you know, having some, some regulation of those rights, 80, 90 percent of the people think that you ought to have background checks, like 60 percent of the American people, close to 60 percent of the American people believe you should ban the possession of AR-15s. And yet, we have politicians who will do things inconsistent with the desires of their constituents and get reelected because they're in these safe, gerrymandered seats. And same thing is true with choice and women's reproductive rights. If you look at every state, poll that has been done, every state has said we don't want Roe versus Wade overturned.

Now, the margins are bigger in New York than they are in Texas and Oklahoma. Don't want Roe versus Wade overturned. And yet we see some of these bills, these unbelievably extreme bills that are passed by politicians again, inconsistent with the desires of their constituents, but they suffer no electoral consequence because of Jury Mandry. Well, yeah, it's the Stoics spoke about the virtue of temperance, obviously Aristotle, the golden mean, the idea of the middle ground between the two extremes. I think nowhere is that captured, the tension of that captured more perfectly than in the

second amendment, which says both shall not be infringed and well regulated in the text, right? That's what the job of politicians are supposed to do is to manage that tension, right? And that's what that that's what we're after. And I think you're right, as a system becomes less accountable to its people or the checks and balances or the norms fail, it gets harder to exert the necessary pressure to get to those outcomes. That's what to me is struck me as so strange about the Alito opinion on, on Roe v. Wade, putting aside the right or wrong of abortion, his view that this is a

matter better left to Congress and the states to pass law, you know, to, it strikes me as, give me a good example of where we've recently passed transformative legislation on a controversial issue. Like that capacity has diminished and diminished over the years as exactly the trends you're talking about in the book have struggled, right? As you live in a gerrymandered society as, you know, political contributions flood the system, it becomes harder and harder for the other arms of the system to work properly. Yes, it'd be wonderful if there was a constitutional amendment that addresses a woman's right to choose or not, but I don't

think that's happening any time soon. Well, yeah, I mean, the Alita opinion, I'm not sure how much of that language survives in the ultimate opinion, but the Alita opinion says, essentially, this will be something that the states decide. This is for the American people to decide through their legislatures. Okay, but we're also going to allow huge amounts of dark money into that legislative and political process. We're going to, in the Shelby County case, erase any kind of justice department or federal supervision that will allow the states to put in place all these anti-democracy measures,

voter suppression things. Oh yeah, and we're also not going to open up the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims. It's kind of like, well, wait a minute, you've crippled the political system. You've kind of put your thumb on the scale of the special interest when it comes to our political system. And that's the system to which you want to give the right to decide something as personal as a reproductive choice that a woman has.

And again, I don't know, there are moral, ethical, religious things about abortion. That I'm not sure there's a right side, there's a wrong side. But I certainly know that because of my inability to say, this is the absolute right answer, that the state should not be about taking away from women, their consciences, their ability to decide what is, what they see as an appropriate moral choice.

The state simply doesn't have the greater capacity to decide that than individuals who are most affected by this. And so it's interesting. In this conversation, I'm talking about protecting the rights of individuals, whereas the other side, they're focused on when it comes to individual rights, they're focused on the possession of guns, you know, it's like they're kind of subject matter specific when it comes to the promotion of, you know, of individual rights.

Well, it's kind of, it's just a bad faith argument, right? And it goes back, putting abortion aside. This is a similar claim that people made when Brown, the Board of Education happened, which is this isn't a matter for the courts to decide. This is a matter for the states or the communities to decide, which is to say, kick it back to the places

where we have fundamentally undermined democracy, right? And so it's kind of a moving the ball. It's like, hey, go ask your mom, even though you already have the agreement with your spouse that she's going to say, no, you know what I mean? It's a way of not addressing the fundamental right or wrong issue of that decision, right? And yeah, it's frustrating. And I guess this goes to communication. How do you communicate when someone is able to not have to own? You think about some of the arguments that are made against some of these voter rights things. It's like they're not

having to own it. They argue these little side, like who would be opposed to having more identification when you register to vote? And it's like, sure, if that's actually what you cared about, or it's like, I talk about this with people who are really concerned about trans women in women's sports. And it's like, but you don't actually care about women's sports. And it's like, you don't actually care about women's sports. What you, you know, you're just, you're arguing about aside things, you don't have to own the reality of your actual beliefs,

which are pretty repugnant if we had to put them out there. Right. I think that's absolutely right. You know, you use trans athletes as the cover for what is really your prejudice. And so, and we do that in a variety of ways. And we say, well, you know, we just want to make sure that our systems, our electoral systems are free from fraud.

And so we're going to put a bunch of measures in place to ensure that they are fraud-free when there's actually little or no evidence that there's any fraud in the first place. And the impact of what it is that you're putting in place is to disproportionately disenfranchise or make more difficult to engage in the electoral process, people of color, people who are urban dwellers, young people, people who are perceived to be progressives, Democrats. And so, yeah, they don't actually own the thing that they really stand for, that they are really most concerned about. No, in the same way that, well, me, I was going to say in the same way that segregationist

didn't own it, but they actually have to know maybe not true, because some segregationist did own it and said that he's almost more straightforward than what we're dealing with today. And back in the day, Negroes are inferior or something like that. I mean, yet some said that, others would say, well, it's a matter of choice for us to decide.

And I remember seeing Jim Clark somebody talking about, well, no, Negroes and whites don't want to be together. That's the reality. They don't want them. They don't want to mix. They don't want to go to school together. They don't want to eat next to next to one another. So it's a mix. Nowadays, I think there's not a lot of truth when it comes to the opposition to a great many things. Or a lot of truth to what really serves as a foundation for a lot of these policy positions that I've been fighting against. When it's quite eye-opening and appalling, when you sort of trace the ideological roots of different positions on different issues and how they're sort of, if I understand

kind of a through line from Brown v. Board of Education into like the sort of private Christian school movement into the abortion rights movement, you know, into the pro-life movement. And so sometimes people think, hey, my party, and this is true of both parties, of course, but my party thinks X, my church thinks X. So I generally trust them. If you actually kind of peel back the layers of the onion and you go, well, where did this, where it, what's the etymology of this belief? You realize it's actually kind of a longer version

of a darker, less politically correct belief or it's a reaction to some change from a generation or two ago that has very little to do with the issue at hand. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I would be interesting thing now to look at. Break down what are the John Birch society stand for, you know? Republicans, you know, distance themselves from John Birch beliefs back in, I guess, the 60s, 50s, whenever it was. It would be interesting to see what, give me all the things that the John Birch society stood for.

And compare those beliefs to where, at least some members of the Republican Party, some parts of the conservative movement, have they moved towards some, or do they now accept it of some of those beliefs. My guess would be, yes, or if they don't accept, you know, wholesale or in a surface way that which the John Birch society said, they have policies in place that are supportive of, you know, John Birch, John Birch ideals or John Birch beliefs. Now, that's a hard thing to say. And maybe I'm being unfair and I will admit,

I don't know as much about the John Birch society of the intricacies of the John Birch society. But my instinct tells me that you would find a disturbing connection between where they were then and where many on the right are now. Yeah, that's the insidious part of that dark energy is that it gets laundered and dressed up and changed into being about, oh, I'm just concerned about political correctness or I'm just anti-woke

or whatever. And really, you've picked up a set of beliefs that are actually rooted in something that have very little to do with the thing that you're screaming about at a school board meeting. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And when you see these pictures of people who are on, you know, serving a school board member is going to their cars and people yelling and screaming at them as they close their doors. And it's kind of like, what do we find about here now? I mean, you're concerned about books or, you know, critical race theory. I mean, is that really what's driving, you know, that level of iron, that

level of anger, or is it a larger set of beliefs? And I think it is that larger set of beliefs, it really pushes those folks to that level, you know, to that level of anger. Yeah, there was a big thing at the high school down the street from where I live and this woman was protesting the inclusion of this book called Lawn Boy

in the school library, which, you know, she believed contained all this sort of gay or homosexual themes. And the school librarian gets up and she goes, are you talking about this book, Lawn Boy? Because it's literally about a boy who mose lawns. You've got it confused with another book right and what it happened to she obviously just been told by someone on the internet about a different lawn boy book and looked at the list of books in her school so so oftentimes people are upset and they're they're really they but they don't even really realize that they have been activated and used as a pawn by somebody else.

Right. Yeah. But, you know, it's interesting too. There's a more substantive and insidious opposition to a lot of this stuff. I mean, when you think about the opposition to critical race theory, which again, terrible messaging. I mean, why are we calling it critical race theory as opposed to, wait a minute, you're against a complete and accurate history of the United States.

Look, put it that way. It sounds bad. And deliberately so, I mean, you can trace it back to a white one guy who decided I'm going to label all this stuff that I don't like critical race theory and force you to defend it. Right. Right. We have become, you know, expert at avoiding dealing with some of the uglier parts of American history,

especially around race. And it's in some ways that's understandable. We have a painful history around race. The conversations are awkward or can be awkward. in rather than deal with that, which is difficult, that which is awkward, we tried to ignore it or to paint over it. And so, you know, that opposition to critical race theory, to a full understanding of our racial history is, in a lot of ways, understandable. But, boy, if you want to make progress on racial issues, you're going to have to understand that history, the impact of that history on the present. If you want to get to a future that is going to be, you know, racially, racially better. And we have demographic changes happening in this nation, the likes of which we have

not seen ever seen before. So unless we make peace with and understand our racial past, we're never going to get to the place where we need to be with our racial future. Yeah. What's that James Baldwin quote, not everything that's faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. That strikes me as a good encapsulation of where we are. Now, you never, never go against Baldwin, you know?

If he says something and you don't agree with it at first, it means you probably haven't thought well enough, you'll probably ought to read it a second or a third time, you know. He's a same age. Yes, and I think about his other quote, and I thought about it when I was reading your book about, he's writing to his nephew and he says, you know, you're a descendant from Sturdy peasant stock, people who built the railroads and went over the mountains and did all these things. I do try to remind myself when I get hopeless about things, that we are descendants of people who did terrible things, but also by the same token, the descendants of the people who face

those terrible things and change them and address them and try to make things a little bit better. And you talk a lot about in the book about the debt that we owe those people. And I think that's an interesting way to think about it. How are you going to repay the debt that John Lewis took out in your name on Edmund Pettis Bridge? Right? Yeah. I mean, you know, the reality is, I mean, I think at the end of the day, it's a good read, but it's a hopeful

book. And what I hope people will understand, and we actually talk about it in the book, is that this is, I think in some ways, it's from my perspective, it's the ultimate expression of love for my country, a belief that my country can be better. And those people who sacrificed so much committed themselves, perhaps lost their lives, they were the ones who were the real patriots, not the ones who were in opposition to them. They fought for what this country has said. It's always been about, who believed that this country could be about the things it said that defined it at the beginning.

And I still think that that America is possible. We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. I truly, truly believe that. We're made up of immigrants. Unless you are a Native American, you're an immigrant star. You know, I mean, you say, oh, I can trace my heritage back to the Mayflower. Really? Okay. Well, those were kind of religious immigrants who came here. He got you might be as wasp as hell, but you're of immigrant star. But the reality is the people who leave their

homelands thousands of miles away come across oceans, whatever. They bring with them, you know, a spirit, a capacity for, you know, challenges that make this nation, make this nation great. So that makes this nation great, our immigrant past. And then we have to understand that as many negative things as we've done as a nation, we've done, I think, more positive things. And yeah, we should focus on those

and we should acknowledge those, but we should not ignore the negatives because we have the capacity for greatness, the capacity for change. I believe in this country, you know, I believe in this nation. It's funny, people who sort of push back on critical race theory is, how is this going to seem to a white six-year-old? Like when you tell me the history of the 20th century or the civil rights movement, I don't

relate to George Wallace because he's white. I relate to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Diane Net. Like I relate to the people who were, the idea that we would choose to identify with the awful, with the evil doers or the awful people strikes me as such a strange interpretation. Like there are plenty of heroes in American history and world history let people choose who they're gonna,

who they're gonna celebrate. And I think they'll, I think they're gonna choose the right people. Yeah, this knows to good guys and bad guys. I think that kids are inherently good, and then they get socialized in a whole bunch of different ways. But if you give them choices, and I don't mean in kindergarten, you have to have a huge course on the eagles and economics of sleepers. You don't mean in kindergarten, you have to have a, you know, a huge course on

the eagles and economics of slavery. You don't even have to do that. But at an appropriate time to share with young people a true history of this nation. What Black people have been forced to endure, what women have been forced to endure. And how they overcame that. With allies, you know, the civil rights movement is not just a struggle or a tale of black victory. It's a tale of black and white coalitions having great victories. So there's a lot of positive things that come out of a full examination of our history and the capacity of our young people. You know, you think they talk about these kids

as if they're like hot house flowers and they can't hear this stuff. Well, their psyches are gonna be crushed. They're gonna hate themselves. No, they're not. No, they're not. They can handle a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, if you look at the stuff,

they look at it on the internet. And you know, that's transforming, unfortunately, some of them, I suppose, but the vast majority of them understand what it is that they're watching. Again, they are basically good people wanting to be good people, and they're more likely to identify with Diane Nash as opposed to the share of Jim Clark or George Wallace. Give him that choice and trust them, have the ability to trust and have some trust in them. So last question as we wrap up,

I was very much struck by the scene you talk about in the book here at your parents' house in Queens as a 12 or 13 year old and you're watching these events happen on television. And they were obviously tragic events, but they were also choreographed events. Like, I think about the, what you witnessed and what it struck in you and how it opened you up and it changed the course of your life was in many ways exactly what leaders like Martin Luther King

wanted to have happened, right? Like he wanted that scene to happen on television, not just to bring about civil rights legislation in the near term, but to set in motion 60 years later, who you are today, right? And what do you hope people who watched you on television, who read your book or listening to this? Do you ever think about where we might be in 60 years?

Like it's so easy to get wrapped up in what's happening right now, who's voting for who? That maybe we sort of underestimate the positive arc that's happening over a longer period of time. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I think you're right that what Dr. King was doing in those leaders in the civil rights movement was not only to fight that, which they had to confront in the present, they were also planting seeds.

The notion being that their generation would knock down a whole bunch of things, but that the seeds they planted, people like me, would not only enjoy the benefits of their labors, but would also plant seeds. And so that's, I think, the obligation that I have to confront the ugly realities, the unfair realities of my time, but also to plant seeds, so that there will be generations after me who will have opportunities that I have been denied. And I can't say that I've been denied and awful lot certainly compared to my parents, but there are still inequities out there.

There are still people who don't have all the benefits that every American citizen should have. And so I think what you said is a good way to put it. You know, that notion of choreographing things. I hope through my work, through this book, that I'm doing a bit of choreographing here as well, fighting in the present and trying to choreograph a better, you know, more hopeful future.

Now, I think planting seeds is a better way of expressing it and I do think that's what you're doing. So sir, thank you very much for your work. Thank you for writing this book and for taking the time to talk with me. All right. It's been great speaking with you. I didn't think I'd be talking about Arnold Rothstein, Dark Matter and Martin Luther King. This has been a pretty interesting conversation.

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