Ep. 30 – Race and the State of American Politics: A Conversation with Dr. Edwin Dorn

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race and Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. We are very pleased this episode to be in conversation with Dr. Ed Dorn, who teaches defense policy and courses about the relationship between race and immigration policy. He is the former dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs from 1997 to 2005. Prior to that, Dr. Dorn has spent decades in Washington, D.C., over 20 years where he worked on civil rights and education policy in the Carter administration and served as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness in the Clinton administration during the 1980s. Dr. Dorn was affiliated with Washington think tanks, including the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Brookings Institution. A native Texan, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, Phi Beta Kappa, one of the precursors, one of the first class of African-Americans who helped integrate the University of Texas. After serving as an officer in the U.S. Army, he completed his Ph.D. at Yale University. Dr. Dorn’s major publications include Rules and Racial Equality from Yale University Press and Who Defends America, which he edited with the Joint Center for Political Studies Press. He was an advisor to the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize America’s Civil Rights Years, really one of the formative documentaries that helped shaped me and my understanding of civil rights and interest in civil rights. He is chairman of the Board of the Kettering Foundation and serves on the boards of the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Seat and Family of Hospitals. He also participates in the Dartmouth conferences, an ongoing series of back-channel meetings between prominent citizens of the United States and Russia. So Ed Dorn, welcome to Race and Democracy.

[0:02:04 Edwin] Thanks a lot, Peniel. Glad to be here.

[0:02:06 Peniel] Ed, I want to talk to you about our present, contemporary domestic and international politics and political situation, especially since you are, you have such great experience at the federal level, but also the global policy level. And really one of the few African-Americans who have had this kind of first bird’s-eye experience both in the Carter administration and the Clinton administration. Your work with the Kettering Foundation, the Dartmouth conferences. I’m surprised as a political observer of the complex relationship with the United States and Russia right now. I grew up during the Cold War. Russia was the evil empire that President Reagan had said an American president seemed to be cozying up to a Russian president would have been anathema. In my time. But it seems as if things have changed. I want to I want you to dive into what is the relationship between the United States and Russia. How has that relationship changed? What is the impact of allegations of Russian tampering in American elections? Facebook, the Hillary Clinton defeat and really the current president, United States. Donald J. Trump, the cozy relationship that he seems to have with with Vladimir Putin, somebody who at least people are pro-democracy advocates don’t hold in high esteem.

[0:03:38 Edwin] It’s complicated, obviously. And I guess I would say that the underlying dynamics of the U.S. Russia relationship are based right now on tension and suspicion. What is really confusing is Donald Trump’s very unusual relationship and attitude toward Vladimir Putin. We do not understand that. My history of that relationship goes back to the spring of 2016 when we were doing this Dartmouth conference that you referred to earlier. A group of 15, 20 Americans meeting with a prominent Russians from the academy, some with connections to Vladimir Putin, some journalists, a mixed group of fairly prominent people. And the, this was in May or June of 2016, just as it became apparent that the contest would be between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And the Russians around the table announced that they were that they liked Trump. And I was at first taken aback by that. Because everyone knew Trump to be a fairly mercurial character. Nevertheless, they said we can deal with him. I also knew that the Russians, particularly Putin and people who support Putin, did not like Hillary Clinton, did not like Bill Clinton, because they felt that Bill Clinton, when he was president in the 1990s, had spent a lot of time spiking the ball. That is, Clinton had expanded NATO to include Poland and other countries that used to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. So I understood that resentment. I assumed that the reason they supported Trump was they knew he was an amature and they figured they could roll him. However, given Trump’s expressions of. Admiration toward Putin, his repeated statements that given a choice between believing Putin and believing his own intelligence agencies, he’d believe Putin. You can’t help but ask what if the Russians got on this guy? So we’re at a very confused state. And one of the effects of the confusion is that it is very difficult for us to make progress on some really essential things like nuclear arms control. We have a START treaty that is going to expire in about a year. There is very little progress toward renegotiating and renewing that very important treaty. Why is that important? Thirty minutes, 30 minutes is the amount of time it takes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to fly from the middle of Russia to someplace in the United States. And unless we get things in order, we’re going to return to the fear of nuclear Armageddon that so many of us live with in the 50s and 60s and 70s.

[0:07:32 Peniel] Now, staying with the contemporary. And since you teach on immigration, I want to talk to you about this current administration and both immigration policy domestically and internationally. The Muslim ban as well. But I want to connect this with immigration, because one of the things that I think we’re seeing is the way in which on some levels race has always historically shaped foreign policy. But I can’t recall when we think about ice detainees, when we think about the way in which this administration and this president has talked, talked about not just Mexico and Mexican undocumented people living in United States, but also about non-Western European countries. He famously called them a slur that I won’t repeat on air, but I want to talk about immigration in the Trump administration and really contrast that if there is a contrast with immigration and the Obama administration, because certainly some people have have criticized President Barack Obama as the deporter in chief. He defended himself, saying he wanted an immigration deal with Republicans, one that the Senate passed by January of 2013, but the House didn’t. In terms of for comprehensive immigration reform. So how is race playing a role in our our immigration policy and really domestically and internationally? And how does that if it does connect with Muslim bands and and terror and and terrorism in terms of policy?

[0:09:08 Edwin] Well, let’s talk first about Trump and then talk about President Obama. Trump’s tagline. Make America great again. Was an obvious dog whistle. What he really meant was make America white again. And so one of the first things he did was implement a series of immigration restrictions, the Muslim ban being the most prominent that would reduce the numbers of people coming into the country. And it was very clear that he was aiming at brown folks.

[0:09:49 Peniel] How was it clear?

[0:09:52 Edwin] It was clear by the Muslim ban. It was clear by campaign talk. And then later, action about building a wall to keep Mexicans and other people from Latin America from crossing illegally into the United States. And all of this was part of Trump’s appeal to the racists in the United States. There is no other way to put it. Now. Trump and Obama do have one thing in common, and that is that they both set out to deport people who were in the country illegally. The big difference is that Obama tried to find a humane way to do that. While Trump is determined to make the process of deportation as inhumane as possible.

[0:11:02 Peniel] And why is that Ed?

[0:11:04 Edwin] First, because he is not a nice guy. That’s fundamentally it. Second, he believes that by demonstrating cruelty and cruelty is the policy, by demonstrating cruelty. He will send a very clear message both to the people who want to immigrate into the country illegally and to the countries from which they come.

[0:11:31 Peniel] And is he also sending a message to his own supporters?

[0:11:33 Edwin] Oh, apps-absolutely. His supporters want somebody who will be tough to the point of being cruel. So his supporters do not have problems, as far as I can tell, with putting thousands of kids in cages and separating them from their parents. That they view is an essential part of the message.

[0:11:58 Peniel] And as somebody who’s worked in policy, you’ve worked for Department of Defense. What are the policy implications for this in terms of not only our own moral standing domestically, but our our international standing? Like, are there any implications for this policy of what you’re calling cruelty?

[0:12:17 Edwin] Yeah. Look, Trump has driven this nation’s moral standing down the tubes. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. If you look at international surveys that compare. Regard for Trump in different countries with regard for President Obama. What you will see is a very dramatic decline of 30, 40, 50 percent decline in regard for the occupant of the Oval Office. Except in Israel, where Trump is more popular than Obama. Virtually every place else, Trump is much less highly regarded. And that’s that’s not particularly surprising because Trump has made it a point. To offend our allies, our NATO allies. He also has made it a point to defend much of the third world. You referred earlier to this vulgarity. He he uttered in the Oval Office while describing immigration and saying why he would prefer to have immigrants from Norway than from these other countries.

[0:13:50 Peniel] And I want to add I want to shift right now to our domestic politics and really the normalization of what we might call Trumpism and how that has affect. And want to talk about the Congress. I want to talk about the House of Representatives and the Senate. And these are places you know very well. Historically, we had what some people call horse trading. Sometimes we call it bipartisanship. Very famously, Tip O’Neill tipped his cap to Ronald Reagan when Reagan was able to cleave 87 Democrats as part of this major tax reform in the 1980s, tax reform that Democrats who were liberal Democrats criticized as wealth redistribution from the bottom up. All right. We don’t see that kind of bipartisanship anymore, even when you think about the Clinton administration, the welfare reform bill, the crime bill. These are bills that now, in retrospect, liberals and progressives critique. But there was bipartisan support for this, including crime bills that that Ronald Reagan passed in the 1980s. There were even members of the Congressional Black Caucus voting for three strikes in and out. Not all members, but some would. Well, you know, I’m very interested in the way in which this kind of rhetoric of of of race, this kind of boogey man of anti-Muslim, anti-immigration politics has really cleaved the nation in two. And we see people voting strictly mostly along party lines, especially in the context of impeachment. You know, and what does that mean for the policy process? Because before we really did have a policy process of compromise. Even even if we were unhappy with the compromise, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a compromise, the Voting Rights Act of 1964. These are compromises. What is this doing to our policy process domestically? And can we can we recover? Because certainly this is a shift from our previous norm. It seems like a consensus has been completely obliterated.

[0:15:47 Edwin] One of the things that makes me saddest. And angriest is the. Drift of the Republican Party over the past 30 or 40 years. Trump and Trumpism. Are a combination of that drift. But you say you did very well early on. Republicans strongly supported the Civil Rights Act. But today, the Republican Party essentially is a party of. Older white folks. It is a party that. Is afraid. Of immigration. It appears I recall a few years ago during the Bush administration, when members of the Bush administration boasted about never having had a passport, because why would they ever want to go abroad? And some of them were appointed to significant jobs and they had to get passports because their jobs required them to leave the country. The Trump administration is merely an extension of that dramatic narrowing or homogenization of the of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is able to expand because it’s more accepting of folks in Texas, for example. Way, way back that when lots of African-Americans join the Republican Party because the Democratic Party excluded them, refused, let them vote. That was my parents generation that has changed dramatically. The Republican Party in Texas is pretty much lily white with just a smattering of Hispanics and a very small number of African-Americans. And that’s what the Republican Party looks like all over. And that is, I think, a sad state of affairs. But Trump merely has taken advantage of that.

[0:18:20 Peniel] So he’s not he’s not the the causal root of this?

[0:18:24 Edwin] Trump learned that. Race is a motivating factor. For large numbers of white Americans, and that’s what has driven his candidacy, that. Is still what motivates his term of office. Look, if I had to summarize where the GOP is right now with respect to policy. I would put it in just four simple phrases. Keep black folks down. Keep brown folks out. Keep women or put women back in their place and make rich folks richer. That’s the Republican Party platform.

[0:19:17 Peniel] Now, are you surprised at this? And I want to talk about your own backgrounds and your deep roots in Texas and being part of the first really generation who helped racially integrate coattail Haynes. We call them the precursors. There’s a great book as we saw it, you know, co-edited by Virginia Cumberbatch and and Greg Vincent and Leslie Leslie Blair. You know, you grew up in segregated in the segregated,

[0:19:45 Edwin] -segregated Houston, yes.

[0:19:46 Peniel] in segregated Houston. And so are you thinking back about the arc of not just your life, but your life as a conduit for the unfolding of American democracy in the post war era? Because you’ve lived it. Are you one, were you surprised that the changes then you think about getting into the University of Texas, getting into the armed forces, being able to get a Ph.D. from Yale in a century? And are you surprised now and then? Where do you think we’re gonna go from here? Because you’ve seen just extraordinary changes over the course of your lifetime.

[0:20:26 Edwin] Yeah, I’ve been very fortunate. Came along in a generation where there was constructive change. And I think when. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. Many of us looked to a very optimistic future. Lots of things happened, including, of course, the the assassinations of Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy. The war in Vietnam, lots of things began to tear the country apart, caused us to lose confidence in a lot of our institutions. And it associated with that loss of confidence in institutions was an opportunity for a resurgence of the. To put it simply, the racism. That has has bubbled up partly at the encouragement of of Donald Trump. A lot of us are are very disappointed at what appears to be the arc, and we hope that enough people will turn out in 2020 and in other elections to get this country back on course, because as you mentioned earlier, we seem to be having big problems internationally because we are doing things that not only hurt our adversaries, but offend our allies, our longstanding allies. And we see some of our political leaders in this country doing things that continue to pit to tear at the body politic.

[0:22:27 Peniel] Well, I want to ask you about race and policy in this 2020 Democratic primary field, too, because when I look at history where I’m astounded by that, when I think about the last almost 100 years of American history, we’ve gone from Franklin Delano Roosevelt talking about a new deal and four freedoms of a second world war where we did save democracy. Even as African-American soldiers were fighting a two front battle, they called the double v victory over fascism abroad. Victory against racism at home. We did have Lyndon Baines Johnson. We both are at the LBJ School who talked, I think, quite admirably about a great society, not just America being a good and just society, but being a great site. I think still think that is that phrase is is brilliant and really forces us to aspire to our best selves. What has happened especially since Watergate? Certainly there was an Obama moment. But what has happened to us in the sense of when I think about American democracy in the 20th century, at our best, we think about tackling big problems. Kennedy sending a man to the moon, but also talking about civil rights. June 11th, 63, LBJ talking about a war on poverty and a great society, really saying that we can be liberty. Sure. As guardian around the world and at home. And at times I really believe we meant it. We meant it. What happened? And when we think about this twenty field, is anybody giving us hope for a new resurgent vision of American democracy?

[0:24:18 Edwin] That’s probably the most important issue or question, Peniel. And I think you used the right word vision. You study the Bible. And so you probably a half dozen times a day recite this phrase without vision, the people perish. And you mentioned some phrases, some visions from the past. The New Deal, the Great Society are putting a man on the moon. Those were great ideas. And a lot of those ideas, a lot of those ideas originated with political leaders, but a lot of those ideas also came out of the academy. There were serious thought leaders who. We remember we. When I was growing up. I knew who some of the college presidents were and I knew who the president of Texas Southern University was. I knew who the president of Harvard University was. I knew that these were places that generated ideas. And these were real leaders, not just in a narrow academy, but they were thought leaders in the community and in the world. Part of the blame, I think, for our lack of vision lies in the tendency of many academics to run an ever narrowing concentric circles are. Testing and retesting and retesting ideas. Those are the keys to success. Unfortunately, in the Academy today, historians such as yourself may be fortunate to be able to break out of that. But if you’re in political science or if you’re an add in in economics, you’re running an ever narrowing concentric circles. It is very difficult to develop a real clear, broad vision of where we ought to be going. So part of the blame, I think, lies with the way universities. Operate today.

[0:26:33 Peniel] So we’re just talking to ourselves at times in silos instead of talking to a larger public. We’re just we’re just talking to ourselves. The LBJ School is is an exception because we believe that part of our job is to engage the larger public. Absolutely. But if you’re in an academic department, you don’t get credit for that. You get credit for writing journals and articles and articles and journals that very few people ever read. Absolutely. That’s a problem with today’s today’s academy. But there’s another thing going on in the real world. And it began in the 1960s with immigration reform. And that has to do with a big change. In the complexion of this country. We used to think of this country as existing pretty much in black and white. A huge white majority at a small up. Oppressed black minority. That was hard trying to secure a foothold in this society. And finally, as a result of the leadership of people like King and Lyndon Johnson and huge numbers of other people, Fannie Lou Hamer and the like, we began making progress. But we also passed an immigration reform act, which over a period of generations has helped to change this nation’s complexion from black and white to color. Now, many of us think that’s a good thing. Yes, but. If you grew up, if you’re young. If you are a middle class white person who grew up thinking that. This was a white person’s country. Yes. And that white folks would always be in the majority. If you thought that way, you might say, oh, OK. These these black folks, they only represent a small percentage of the country. Maybe it’s OK to let them vote because what harm can they do? But if you were confronting the possibility of a much more diverse society, that’s the kind of thing that makes you anxious and sometimes angry. And while many of us were just. Elated. At President Obama’s election, for a whole bunch of folks, that election was like a bucket of cold water. Right in the face it, call their attention to the fact that, you know, this ain’t your daddy’s country anymore.

[0:29:45 Peniel] Yes. And I want to I want to close by asking about the 2020 Democratic primary contests. Some of these folks, you know, and have met. What do you think? I mean, does anybody have a vision? And when I say vision, I mean, really a vision that’s not based on ideology, a vision that is very practical. But that is very forward looking. That gets us out of this morass and builds a new consensus so that democracy can work. Small D democracy can work.

[0:30:22 Edwin] If they have it, we haven’t heard it. And that’s the sad thing. Joe Biden, whom I like a lot, is running on, I’m Joe Biden. You know me and you know that I am a friend of Barack Obama’s. Bernie Sanders is pretty much are a one trick pony. Elizabeth Warren is extraordinarily smart, but she has a manner, a kind of hectoring manner that’s likely to turn people off. I frankly have a great deal of affection for Julian Castro, who dropped out earlier, but I hope will resurface on the right ticket as perhaps a vise presidential candidate. I like Kamala Harris, who didn’t quite catch on. And Cory Booker, who I think came closest to articulating not so much a vision, but a kind of soul. And an attitude. He was a kind of happy warrior. He conveyed this the sense of something that we, I think all could be could feel comfortable with. But I have not seen that that great vision that you’re talking about. Not yet.

[0:31:57 Peniel] All right. We’re gonna we’re gonna end our conversation there with this idea that we haven’t seen the the vision. But are we are we are we hopeful that that that vision can come into being.

[0:32:10 Edwin] We are very hopeful and and in fairness, I know we’ve been watching this, it seems like forever, but we’re just entering the primary season. And my guess is that some place between the Iowa caucuses as we go through, ah, South Carolina and when we get to Super Tuesday. Several of the candidates will have found their voice.

[0:32:42 Peniel] We’re ending on an optimistic note that the Democratic primary presidential contenders will find that voice in that vision to really provide leadership at a time in the country that I actually have never experienced before this. There’s a kind of vertigo to being an American right now where the usual norms, the kind of flawed consensus, however imperfect, but was a consensus about what democracy, citizenship, morality, political ethics and personal ethics, meant, have really been turned upside down in the context of the current presidential administration and the way in which that’s reverberated domestically and globally around the world. And so we had this great conversation with Dr. Ed Dorn about race, international affairs, the Russia Trump connection and which way forward in 2020. Ed, thank you for being a guest.

[0:33:44] Peniel, thank you.

[0:33:46 Peniel] Ed Dorn teaches defense policy and courses about the relationship between race and immigration policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where he is the former dean from 1997 to 2005. Scott, decades of policy experience at the domestic and international level. And he is the chairman of the Board of the Kettering Foundation and serves on the boards of the Institute for Defense Analysis and Seton Family Hospitals and also participates in the annual Dartmouth conferences. It’s an ongoing series of of very important meetings between prominent citizens of the United States and Russia.

Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.