Episode 74: The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America with Adam Serwer

[0:00:07 Speaker 1] Welcome to Race

[0:00:08 Speaker 0] and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. Mhm. Today I am talking with my friend Adam Serwer who has been staff writer for the ideas section of the Atlantic since 2016, focusing on contemporary politics often viewed through the lens of history. He is the recipient of the 2015 Sigma Delta chi Award for commentary, the 2019 salute to Excellence Award for commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists and the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism. He lives in san Antonio texas with his family. Adam Serwer, thank you for joining us for this conversation.

[0:00:54 Speaker 1] Thank you so much for having me.

[0:00:56 Speaker 0] I want to talk about your new york times bestselling book. The cruelty is the point. The past, present and future of trump’s America. Even before this book hit the bestsellers list, you have a coterie of superstars led by Tallahassee coats and K. C. Lehman, heather, Mcghee Jelani, Cobb Rebecca Traister Wes lowery blurb in this book and praising this book. And certainly I followed you even before you started writing for the atlantic, Let’s talk about what was the genesis of this book, because certainly you’ve been one of the key national commentators on race and democracy during the trump era. Um so what was what was the genesis of this book?

[0:01:41 Speaker 1] There’s two answers to this right? When trump got elected. I felt very strongly looking at America’s past as a way that power justifies itself by shaping public memory. And we can see this in the aftermath of Reconstruction with, you know, the loss caused propaganda campaign and the dunning school history gets rewritten to justify the jim crow system. And so my theory was that or my fear was that with trump ascendant there was going to be a tremendous amount of pressure to reshape reality to fit to fit a justification of trump being in office. And I think you saw that pretty much every day he was in office. I think the difference between today or between then and in previous areas of american history is that because of, you know what the, the arguably Obama era phenomenon of newsrooms, recruiting more diverse staff, there were people who were around to dispute the narrative that the trump administration might have preferred of this idea of a forgotten people finally rising up and getting their due and finding a champion in donald trump. Um, and so part of what I was trying to do during this era was just, you know, because I assume that that those forces would get to define this era in public memory. I was just trying to write down the truth as best I saw it so that when the world was less insane, people would have a record of what had actually happened, why it happened and and and that people understood how bad it was at the time.

[0:03:24 Speaker 0] Now I think one of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the way in which you use history, especially the history of of reconstruction to discuss the deep roots of white nationalism and white supremacy and also our inability to acknowledge those deep roots and how they impacted not just the trump presidency, but also the Obama presidency as well. I want to start with the essay that you wrote that gives the book its title, The cruelty is the point. And it’s really a remarkable essay where you talk about the bonding nature of cruelty with the xenophobia, the the anti immigrant rhetoric and policy, the blatant racism, the sexism and misogyny. But you really do a great job of showing how And this reminded me of Derek Bell and faces at the bottom of the, well the essay that he wrote called racism secret bonding. I kept coming back to that in my mind when I was reading the cruelty is the point. So talk to us about that essay and why you chose that essay, which I think was it’s an essay that went viral. And I think you write in the book, it might have been at the time the thing that most people read that you have wrote and you hadn’t expected it to go viral. Why did you write that essay? And why is that the title of um

[0:04:51 Speaker 1] the book? So I think um I wrote it because at the time the president was giving a speech about Christine Blasi Ford, who had recently testified that she had been sexually assaulted by then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and a childhood friend um when they were teenagers. Um And one of the things that she mentioned was uh that she remembered that she recalled most vividly was her was the two of them laughing during the incident. Um and it struck me that donald trump zeroed in on this and held her up for ridicule in front of his audience. They he made them laugh at her um precisely because he had identified that as a weakness. And what struck me was not just that he did this, you know, in the knowledge that you know this was post Me Too. So people are thinking a lot about you know, ensuring that uh you know people who have been victims of sexual assault feel comfortable coming forward that he had sort of you know that this was the thing that was going to shame people. Perhaps even people who, those in that audience cared about, um, from, from coming forward. Um, but they were all laughing, they were all having a good time. And it struck me that this kind of cruelty was a form of community building. Um, and I think, you know, the way that I have described it is like when you, when you’re a child and you know, there’s a, there’s a, the cool, the cool kids are making fun of a nerdy kid. Um, they are engaging in a sort of act of transgression. You know, they’re doing something that I’m not supposed to do and they’re also putting that kid outside of their community and they’re making fun of him. Um, and they’re elevating themselves in the process and they’re also bonding with each other over it. Um, Tallahassee and an event we did, uh, this week, you know, he mentioned street harassment like the men who, who holler obscene things that women on the street. They’re not actually expecting that woman to turn around and be like, you know, give them their number, they’re, they’re performing for the men next to them. Um, and so I think, you know, it took some what donald trump did was take something that’s sort of part of human nature that all people are capable of and use it to, uh, form a community, um, between a bond between him and his supporters that excluded those that they hate and, or fear. Um, and I think that this has a long history in american politics because after all, if you start a country, you found a country on the idea that all people are created equal and then you say that, well, we don’t actually count black people in that or we don’t count white men without property in that, or we don’t count women in that. You have to find justifications for why that principle that you have declared as universal does not apply to other people. And part of the way you do that is by writing them out of that community.

[0:07:48 Speaker 0] You know, I want to talk. I think one of the really potent arguments that you make in this book is this idea of the calamity thesis where you push back, but you also give them space pushback against arguments that said made the claim that whites voted for trump because of economic misery because of liberal elitism, because they felt they had been given a raw deal. Any other reason except for racism and the white nationalism and white supremacy. That was very obvious in that campaign from the start. I want to I want to talk about that and the way in which you also have a critique of the news media and the fact that so much of the media tried to you site chris Cillizza and others who tried to say after the 2016 election, this was not racism. This was because democrats don’t want to reach out to the white working class. This was because um globalization had punished hard working white people. This was because the real americans that sarah Palin defined as exclusively white have been left behind by a series of um civil rights laws, affirmative action, racial grievances against them that made white’s the new victims. Let’s talk about that calamity thesis. What’s wrong with it, but why really up until very, very recently it was mainstreamed and normalized. I would have to say that there are still aspects of the Democratic Party that try to normalize that thesis and republicans of course. But certainly the year of racial and political reckoning and George Floyd have made that thesis untenable in certain areas as well.

[0:09:33 Speaker 1] I think it’s important to distinguish between legitimate grievances and legitimate responses. It is certainly the case that the Obama administration’s response to the great recession was not as good as it should have been. The stimulus was not big enough. They didn’t work hard enough to keep enough americans in their homes and the recovery was slow. And so a lot of people experienced a great deal more misery than they should have um in the time between 2009 and you know, when the economy really started to recover, that said, you know, the fact that you have a legitimate grievance doesn’t mean that your response to that grievance is going to be appropriate. In this case, Donald trump, offered a narrative in which, you know, the economic misery of those white americans who have been left behind was the fault of people outside their community. Um and they could be easily demonised by trump as an explanation for their problems. Um and you know, black and latino americans, homeowners in particular, who lost, whose wealth was wiped out by the great recession, did not respond to this. Um To Donald Trump’s entreaties precisely because he was blaming in 2016 precisely because he was blaming them for the country’s problems. So what’s really contingent here is the ideological lens through which you view your misfortune, it’s not sufficient to say, you know, when you struggle economically, uh you become racist because after all, we know that capital uses racism um to consolidate its power all the time. You know, the the in this book, in fact, I talked a lot about the way that american, intellectual and financial elites have used racism um to pursue their own interests. So it’s not a question of material deprivation, it’s a question of ideology at the same time, There’s something, I mean, that process that you’re talking about when people in 2016 were trying to say racism, didn’t have anything to do with this. That’s the process that I’m talking about about power justifying itself, because it would have suggested that Trump’s presidency was tainted by racism. People wanted to say, Oh, well, that didn’t really have anything to do with. It was really about economic struggle when obviously there has to be more than just that. It’s not that economics plays no role, It’s that there’s there needs to be um there’s more factors than that involved. Um and after all, you know, this is a guy who in 2011, he um rocketed to the top of the republican primary field. Not because he was addressing economic anxiety of any kind, but because he had embraced the slander that the first black president was not born in the United States. That’s what brought him to the top of that field.

[0:12:17 Speaker 0] I want to I want to really read what you write in the essay. The nationalist delusion about birtherism say birtherism is a synthesis of the prejudice toward black people, immigrants and Muslims that swelled on the right during the Obama era. Obama was not merely black, but also a foreigner, not just black and foreign, but also a secret muslim. Birtherism was not simply racism, but nationalism, A statement of values and definition of who belongs in America. By embracing the conspiracy theory of Obama’s faith in foreign birth trump was also endorsing a definition of being american that excluded the first black president. Birtherism, and then trumpism united all three rising strains of prejudice on the right and opposition to the man who had become the sum of their fears. I want us to unpack that because I think that’s a brilliant definition. And you connect, I mean, this book is just chock full of ideas on every single page mesmerizing. But let’s unpack that because you’re saying Birtherism is racism. But I think you argue here it’s more than just racism. It’s nationalism.

[0:13:27 Speaker 1] Mhm. It’s an expression of ideology. It says, you know, these people, these people are american and these people aren’t. And that was part of the reason why donald trump seemed incorruptible uh, to those people who were so devoted to him. And you know, I think there’s a distinction that needs to be made between like the marginal trump voter and the person who shows up at the trump rallies and wears the hats and you know, the t shirts and the memorabilia. Um, you know, for those people donald trump was incorruptible precisely because he said these things that other republican politicians might have feared to say these overt expressions of prejudice towards people who were different. Um, and in doing so as well. You know, as we discussed earlier, he was elevating his base above this. You know, unworthy, massive americans whose participation in the polity is, you know, somewhat corrupting because they are not truly american in the way that donald trump’s bases.

[0:14:27 Speaker 0] And in what way did Obama represent? The sum of all the fears? Because you talk about the three strains of prejudice towards black people, immigrants and Muslims, and in one swell one fell swoop in 2008, that person was elected, the symbol of all those fears. Uh, why was Obama? Why did he become the literal Betty noir of 10s of millions of white people? Not just sort of republican, elected officials and even trump, But, but let’s connect that. What’s the history behind that?

[0:15:01 Speaker 1] I mean, I think, you know, some of this is structural. You can see like one of the, one of the things I cite in that survey is a, sorry, I cite in that piece is um a book called White Backlash by two political scientists to identify how immigration is making white americans more republican. And they published this before donald trump was elected. So it’s not a retroactive explanation of trump’s victory. But there are, you know, you can see, you know, the biggest rebellion against George W Bush’s presidency came in 2000 and six when he attempted to legalize the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States in pursuit of a latino vote that after all, had supported him pretty strongly, um, and they rebelled against him because that was a huge talk radio rebellion. I mean, you Barack Obama, you know, his, his liberalism was very much standard ted Kennedy liberalism, um, but it got reframed as, you know, Kenyan anti colonialism, they called the health care bill reparations. You saw this wave of anti muslim legislation all on the state’s supposedly attempting to prevent the imposition of taliban style Sharia law in the United States, which is just a complete absurdity. Um, and then, you know, that the rising nativism in the Republican Party, that, you know, in 2012 mitt Romney was, you know, after having been the moderate governor of massachusetts was saying things like, you know, we need to make life so miserable for immigrants. So they self deport, he was going to michigan making birther jokes about how, you know, no one ever questioned where he was born, you know, and he was seeking donald trump’s endorsement. I mean, Romney was attempting, he was unconvincingly attempting to be what he believed the republican party wanted, which was donald trump. Now, you know, mitt Romney is one of the few senators who has shown himself he’s very conservative, but he has shown himself to continue to retain civic obligations to american citizens who are not republicans, which is significant, but it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a reflection of the constituency that he was seeking to serve in 2012, that he was, you know, in some sense, doing a donald trump impression or attempting to be like the candidate that donald trump would become and something that happened during the Obama presidency. Um, and I, you know, I say Michael Tesler was a political scientist on this is opinions became racially polarized on like everything like they became racially polarized on Portuguese water dogs because of Obama’s choice of pets. Um, and this is this is the environment, this environment of racial polarization. This is what donald trump took advantage of and because of the structure of our political system, um, you know, donald trump’s coalition was geographically optimized for the Electoral College. So even though he lost the popular vote twice, he won the electoral College the first time and he came within a hair’s breath of uh, you know, winning the electoral college the second time despite being many millions of votes behind joe biden. And that, you know, that that sort of gets to, you know, part of the heart of the problem, which is that the Republican Party can hold power without winning a majority of the votes because of Senate uh mala apportionment, because of how scary man in january, sorry, because of house gerrymandering because of the Electoral College. And that incentivizes trump style politics. It incentivizes the sort of white identity politics because they don’t need to reach outside of their base to hold power when you look at the Democratic Party, which after all, You know, until the 1930s or at least that it began to change in the 1930s, it was, you know, the most white supremacist institution, major institution in American life, it was the party of Jim Crow. Um and what changed that was its reliance on black voters in the north. Once they had a different the Democratic Party had to rely on on the black vote to win power, they had to change their stripes. Um, and so the only way that this sort of trumpian politics is going to change is if the Republican Party can no longer rely on this kind of white identity politics, the whole power

[0:19:16 Speaker 0] now you talk about nationalism as a hustle Akane and a fraud that cannot deliver the broad based prosperity it promises. Not even to most white people. I want us to talk about the roots of that nationalism. You have this uh really long essay white nationalisms, deep american roots and really in the cruelty of the nativists. You you in the short press E to that April 2019, let’s say you talk about basically how the nazis were inspired by aspects of white supremacy in the United States. I know Isabel Wilkerson does something akin to that in cast as well. But let’s talk about the deep roots of white nationalism and why that ideology that you call a hustle icon and a fraud is so resilient in terms of american history.

[0:20:10 Speaker 1] Yeah, I mean, I think that that identification of trumpism is a con has um age pretty well. When you look at his, you know, the coronavirus pandemic and all these, you know, all the americans who died as a result of that, all the jobs that were lost because the president didn’t want to contain the virus before getting the economy rolling again. You know, but this this idea of white nationalism again, it goes back to this idea, this confounding contradiction of saying all people are created equal. But you know, we’re still going to exclude certain people from the blessings of American democracy. And in this case in the early 20th century, in response to large scale immigration from Europe, there was a group of elites who had come to believe in the prevailing race science of their day that, and this is, you know, this is something that nell Painter talks about at length in her book, the History of white people, which is that, you know, there’s a belief in multiple white races at the time. So the argument is that all of civilizations accomplishments come from northern Europeans. And so if you allow Italians, jews Greeks, Armenians into the United States, they’re going to dilute the pure genetic stock of northern Europeans and therefore destroy everything that makes America great. And we designed our immigration policy according to these beliefs in the 1920s. I mean, if you look at the, you know what the architects of those laws said, they said that they were trying to preserve the racial composition of the country as they understood. It, and you know this is sort of like pioneering legal devices to deny americans basic constitutional rights was inspiring to the nazis. Now look, the nazis actively tried to say that they were inspired by America because they were very confused by the unwillingness of americans to uh see their cause is the same even in the south. You know, the, the jim Crow south was among the most anti Nazi parts of the country because they believed in hair invoked democracy, not fascism, That was an important ideological distinction. Uh, but the nazis did draw, I mean, we have a lot of history about this in his book by James Q. Whitman. Uh that is specifically about this. Nazi legal jurists were inspired by the laws that americans had written to create new categories, subcategories of citizenship in order to justify. Um you know, the color line in America. Now, you know, that doesn’t mean that we are responsible for all everything that happened in europe, europe has its own history of anti Semitism and on freedom that contributed to what the nazis did. Um But it’s significant because we have basically erased that history um from you know, from from public memory uh in part because of the necessity of World War Two, we fought the nazis, the nazis were bad um and therefore we’ve erased our intellectual contribution as a country to their legacy. Um But I think when you look at, you know what I said in that last paragraph, this sort of attempt to elevate um you know, white people as a class above all other classes of America or all other types of american citizens, regardless of background. Um It never actually ends up making things prosperous for white people. It is, it is an elite strategy um to preserve their power and wealth, um, but ultimately does not meet its promises of broad based prosperity for all americans, not even the white americans who subscribe to end up subscribing to it.

[0:24:00 Speaker 0] Let’s talk about this idea of reconstruction, both in the way you talk about it at the beginning of the book, but also you have a chapter on the new reconstruction. Um I know I’ve called this period of third reconstruction. So as well, Reverend William Barber, yourself and others. I’m working on something now in the third Reconstruction. What what do you mean by a new reconstruction? And how does the really the last 18 months or so 15 months since the coronavirus Brianna Taylor? The massive George Floyd protests after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Uh, the most racially divisive presidential election in history and then the white supremacist riot um at the capital, January six of this year. How does it all connect with this idea of of a new reconstruction? And you also talk about you’re right adam about is this you had an essay, is this the second redemption as well?

[0:24:54 Speaker 1] Yeah, I mean look, I think it makes sense to look at the trump presidency as a backlash to the Obama presidency. And one of the things that trump did was that he made his white identity politics, his racism is so overt that I think a lot of americans who had sort of during the Obama presidency during the Ferguson uprising, I think sparked a reevaluation of american history. Because we had a lot of americans were asking themselves, how do we have a black president? But we um we’re still struggling with racial discrimination and these extreme racial disparities. How is it possible that we could have a black president still have all these problems? Um And then I think donald trump accelerated uh that process in part because he was such an overt manifestation of the forces that had created those disparities in the first place. Um And you know, I think that that um yeah, recognition that that new understanding of american history really sort of manifested in the George Floyd protests, which you know after, that’s all we have to remember Floyd was the third person murdered by the police. Um you know, in or the third black person who had been killed under color of law uh in recent months. There was Brianna taylor, there was a mod are very in Georgia in Georgia. Um and this was in the midst of pandemic where everybody was, you know, understandably scared and worried about getting sick and dying a terrible death alone in a hospital bed on a respirator. And so I think all these factors contributed to that. And there was a kind of enlightenment that came from the George Floyd protests, where people sort of, you know, because of the accumulation of evidence from cell phone cameras, um, of individual, compelling examples. And people started to realize, I think the validity of the criticisms that black lives matter was making in the system, that doesn’t mean that they necessarily agreed with some of the more radical solutions that were being proposed. After all, it is the job of activists to uh, you know, try to enlarge in people’s enlarge people’s moral imaginations, which means that they’re not always on board at first, but they agreed with the diagnosis, which was that there is a very serious problem in american policing, which is reflective of the larger problem with how racism has shaped american life and continues to in the first, you know, in the first Reconstruction republicans, you know, they were not in favor of social equality, most of them, you had a couple like Charles Sumner and thaddeus stevens who were very rat, they were the radicals of the radicals and they obviously believed um in racial equality. But for the most part, you know, the the radical changes to the constitution that enshrined nonracial citizenship um were forced on them and black suffrage were forced on them by uh the radicalism of their opponents. That is the insistence on the former confederates and their allies on reducing black people to a state of near slavery, forced their hand and made them go farther on on racial justice than they wanted to. And what I was suggesting in that essay was that this, you know, these moments of enlightenment which happened, you know, they’re few and far between their moments of great possibility um where, you know, the country can take great strides towards justice. I think, unfortunately, we’re sort of past the moment of possibility. Um and the democrats have not shown themselves as willing as their predecessors to act in, you know, to act with the same sense of purpose to ensure that their constituencies are protected from what is fundamentally an anti democratic backlash. I mean, the capital riot was sort of redemption as farce, where it didn’t have any chance of actually succeeding at its objective to overturn the 2020 election. It was nevertheless dangerous because it was an act of political violence that was designed um to keep Donald trump in power and to invalidate um uh the majority of the country, the majority of voters in the country on the basis that they were uh illegitimate, in part because of the support of that multiracial coalition. I mean, Donald trump said himself, you know, we can’t let philadelphia and Detroit decide an election. I think everybody knows what that means.

[0:29:24 Speaker 0] And adam for listeners who may not know what that word is, what what was redemption? What is what was the redeemer South and how does it impact the politics of trumpism?

[0:29:33 Speaker 1] So I think uh you know, everybody knows the reconstruction is redemption is what historians generally refer to as superior during which democrats and their paramilitary allies reimposed. White supremacists rule in the south through violence and intimidation. So that was known as redemption to them because they believed they were redeeming their states. Remember in America, the tradition of un freedom always presents itself as a defense of democracy rather than its undertaker. Um and in this case, you know, and that is also true of the capital, right? I mean donald trump was saying the election was stolen, he wasn’t saying you know install me as dictator for life, He was saying the democrats stole the election and therefore disenfranchised the true americans who were entitled to have their champion donald trump in the White house. Um and so you know, redemption is I think uh an important frame because it allows us to see how uh someone can frame um an attempt to overturn democracy to invalidate democracy as an argument for democracy, namely by saying this group of people are the legitimate representatives of the american people and therefore they deserve to govern. And this other group of people are illegitimate regardless of their popular support and must be prevented from power. And I think that that ideological strain which runs from you know redemption to the president um is one that helps explain the reaction of the Republican party to donald trump’s loss. I mean, even to this day, if you look at opinion polling republicans are, you know, something like a majority of republicans, I will say that, you know, state legislatures are justified in overturning the result the results of elections, if you know, they don’t go their way. So, I mean, we’re I think we’re in a very dangerous place.

[0:31:29 Speaker 0] You have an essay on abolished police unions. I’d love for us to talk about Black Lives Matter. And you really get into the complexity of this time period because you’ve got Black Lives Matter activists talking about defunding the police, abolishing prisons, criticizing police unions, saying that the criminal justice system is a gateway to many full systems of oppression. But at the same time, you also look at Republican and conservative attacks on the so called squad A O C E. N. And different different Congress, representatives of color rashid to leave and others who are who are very critical of both white supremacy, United States, but also at times american domestic policy. Uh and then you have an essay on Tamika Mallory and why Tamika Mallory refuses to condemn louis Farrakhan. So in a lot of ways you show what a panoramic sort of coalition the Democratic Party actually is with its own infighting. And you have another really important essay on um uh philo Semitism and and the the idea of a left and white right wing within within jewish America and globally and what Netanyahu has done, aligning himself with right wing gentiles who accused left wing jews of anti Semitism

[0:32:54 Speaker 1] very

[0:32:55 Speaker 0] effectively. This is extraordinary. This is mind blowing stuff. So I want us to talk about this era of reconstruction in the politics of broadly speaking, the left or racial justice or human rights politics, but also some of the fissures in there too. And let’s start with policy in terms of you have the essay abolished police unions, what do we think about what, what what do you think about this time with these radical notions of again, ending policing as we know it, when we think about reimagine public safety or defund the police, abolish prisons, health care for all, education for all, uh, progressive taxes, redistribution of wealth. It’s such a radical time. But at the same time, like you said, the danger lies with the suppression of voting rights. If the danger lies with the assault on history, including I connect you and the work you’ve done with Nicole Hannah jones and Tallahassee coats and uh, so many different others who have done this wonderful, extraordinary work. And there’s all these bills now that have passed, attacking this as critical race theory and, and shockingly they’ve worked not. And I put shockingly in quote shockingly only for the uninitiated for those of us who are students of history. We see why it’s going to work. But um, I want to you unpack all of that.

[0:34:17 Speaker 1] So I think, you know, I think they are,

[0:34:20 Speaker 0] these are these

[0:34:20 Speaker 1] bills attacking Critical Race theory are a rational, um, uh, which is not to say, um, morally praiseworthy, but a rational response to the reckoning to the re to be reckoning with american history that has been occurring since the Ferguson protests to that sort of re evaluation of american history. And what these laws are trying to do our is essentially prevent that renewed look at american history from altering public memory any further. I think that the Republican Party understands that the way that you understand your past defines whether or not you consider the present to be just so on some level. What we’re really arguing about when we argue about critical race theory and all these things. And I want to distinguish between Critical race theory is like the study of how race neutral laws and policies can perpetuate racial inequality and quote unquote critical race theory, which is essentially a boogeyman, that stands in for any discussion of how racism affects american life whatsoever. And I think fundamentally this argument is about, you know, to what extent is the state responsible for ongoing racial disparities? Um, and to what extent are do these disparities reflect what conservatives might argue our natural differences in ability? And I think that, you know, you can look, I think historical fact shows how much of modern racial inequities are the results, the conscious deliberate results of american public policy, which creates a certain sense of obligation to fix that to right that wrong. Um, and if you do, if you think that state interference on behalf of people who have been wronged in that way is itself a kind of fun freedom and infringement on liberty. You are naturally going to not just oppose that, but you’re going to oppose an understanding of history that suggests that obligation exists. And so I think that’s what’s really happening here with these sort of critical race laws, which I think, you know, Nicole Hannah jones and others have accurately critiqued as memory loss. This is a battle over american public memory. And as I said, you know, in the beginning of this conversation, those battles over public memory are important because they are often used to justify unjust arrangements of power. And I think, you know, it’s quite possible that this is, you know, that if if this campaign to censor american history succeeds, that it will be used for that purpose again as well.

[0:36:51 Speaker 0] My my final question is about where do we go from here? You’ve got a really brilliant conclusion um, where you you you tie all these different forces together. But I’m going to read a paragraph. Um, the last paragraph here that says the legacy of the trump era, then may linger with us for some time. Even if the man himself does not as much as he may have appeared to be the driver of the forces tearing the country apart. He was more a consequence of them, of our failure as a nation to live up to our founding promises. The cruelty was the point, but it was also always a part of us. You know when I read those times, I was like, man, this is really good. But also

[0:37:37 Speaker 1] it made me think um

[0:37:39 Speaker 0] of you know, where you know, where, where do we go from from here? Because it’s such an expert. Uh, this book and we’re talking about Adam Serwer. The cruelty is the point. The past, present and future of trump’s America, which is a deservedly in new york times bestseller really, uh, in a, in a pointillist way, um, uh analyzes uh, you know, trump’s America, it’s past, its present, its future, which is really looking at America’s past, present and future. I was left both exhilarated but certainly um, uh huh understood the depth and breadth of the challenges, sobered reading the book as well. Um, where do we go from here adam in terms of, I just want to

[0:38:20 Speaker 1] say that that complement means a lot to me because waiting till the midnight hour and Stokely were awesome books and, and I feel very honored to um receive that compliment from you because I’m a big admirer of your work as a historian. But I think ultimately, you know, the thing that I’ve tried to argue is that this is not a question, simply a question of human virtue. And I think sometimes journalism has a tendency to put things as you know, if only we had politicians who are braver who are more virtuous, who are more honorable than the situation would be solved. But it is a structural problem and democrats have a brief window of time to make the system that incentivizes this kind of politics more fair and therefore diminish the politics of cruelty. And if they choose not to do that, they’re going to find themselves competing for a more conservative and unrepresentative slice of the electorate, One that does not have the interests of their more vulnerable constituencies in mind.

[0:39:22 Speaker 0] One thing here, because you’ve written extensively about this, I agree with you, it’s a structural problem. What can democrats do when you have senators like joe Manchin of west Virginia, kristen cinema of Arizona who refused to transform the filibuster?

[0:39:38 Speaker 1] It’s a real problem. I mean, it’s extraordinary for Joe Manchin to say voting rights legislation has to be partisan. If that was the case, the 14th and 15th amendment wouldn’t exist.

[0:39:48 Speaker 0] No, they wouldn’t.

[0:39:49 Speaker 1] The Republican Party at the time was acting in its partisan interest. It was, it was an idealistic thing. You know, they’re they’re extension of, of suffrage to black men was an idealistic gesture. It was incredibly praiseworthy. It was, but it was also a matter of partisan interest. The Republican Party was not viable in the south without black votes. Um and so, you know, for joe Manchin and say I will allow the Republican Party to disenfranchise democratic constituencies unless they agree to help us not do that. I mean that’s that’s that’s insane. If if if if, I mean in the rest of american history, like if if if a party acquiesced to that disenfranchisement in that way, they’re simply surrendering. And I do I do not know what democrats can do in terms of getting cinema and mansion to agree to get rid of the filibuster. But the fact is if they don’t admit new states, if they don’t pass federal legislation to protect voting rights to diminish the ability of republican legislatures to rig elections to their advantage or to engineer them. To a point where it’s basically impossible for even a Democratic majority to win a majority of seats in a given state legislature. This is going to warp democracy much in the way that it did post reconstruction. It may not be as violent as bloody. But what’s going to end up happening is that a smaller and more unrepresentative swath of the country is going to have tremendous political influence and disproportionate their numbers. And you know, part of the point of democracy is that politicians are responsive to the public and if politicians can insulate their power from the public by passing laws that prevent the public from expressing their displeasure by removing them from office, then democracy is not functioning properly.

[0:41:40 Speaker 0] All right. So we will close it right there. We’ve been talking with Adam Serwer uh the author of the new york times, Bestselling the cruelty is the point. The past, present and future of trump’s America. Uh He’s been a writer at the atlantic since 2016 and winner of numerous awards for commentary, including the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism. Um I think this is the book where most people are gonna nationally uh know who you are adam. Um you know, you’ve always been a brilliant journalist, but this is um you know, this is a brilliant book and and this is this is a masterpiece. And for those of us who’ve been following your career and your writings, I think this is a great point of pride that your journalism has really met this crucial historical moment. And this is a book that we’re going to teach and talk about. It is going to be around as a legacy, analytical legacy of this period for for a long time. So I really appreciate you joining us.

[0:42:41 Speaker 1] Thank you so much for saying that. It’s a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

[0:42:47 Speaker 0] 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

[0:43:00 Speaker 1] and our

[0:43:00 Speaker 0] website CSR D dot LBJ dot utexas dot e d u. 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.

[0:43:19 Speaker 1] Thank you

[0:43:22 Speaker 0] mm mm