This is Democracy – Episode 130: We Survived 2020!

[0:00:03 Speaker 1] This

[0:00:05 Speaker 0] Is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial

[0:00:09 Speaker 1] inter generational and inter

[0:00:11 Speaker 0] sectional unheard voices

[0:00:12 Speaker 1] living in the world’s most influential democracy. Mhm.

[0:00:20 Speaker 0] Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week’s episode is the last episode of 2020. So today we are going to discuss the year in review. What have we learned from our many discussions on this wonderful podcast and from our many extraordinary guests? What has 2020 which has been a long, difficult year for so many people? What has it taught us, and why do we have hope for 2021? We will discuss those topics today. Zachary and I will reflect on our podcast and learning about democracy. That has been a part of our discussions that we’ve been so privileged to be a part of for this year to get us started. As always, we have a scene setting poem from Zachary Serie Today we we have a very special poem. This is a poem from Zachary that really puts the whole year in perspective. Zachary. What is the title of your year ending poem for us? The year of collisions. Well, let’s hear it. It is December. In the year of allusions, the vowels of feeling have been lost to fit the metric poverty. The 300,000 lost in the leaps across the lines of this absurdly obtuse ek Francis that only seems to be buying time for the entrance of a goddess floating on seafoam or an excuse for a thunderstorm or a blizzard and a snow day. But it is study here, mocking Lee Warm like someone is trying to make the syllables rhyme with the pain in a cruel joke of digesting Poltergeist chasing me over and over around the pond, we all lose something to the meter, an adjective, a cautious hope or an expected verb. They lie like all the Sox lost to the washing machine and a pile just beyond our sense of reason. We can only smell for them from where we stand and put on the abandoned sock and walk the wooden floors into a new year, leading with the decent one, the lagging bareness of the other. Yeah, very moving, Uh, and before we actually talk about the poem, you use the term ek Francis, which I’m not sure everyone recognizes. What does the term mean And why did you use it? Uh, Francis is a classical, Um, is a classical, uh, lengthy description of a in great detail and imagery of of some very specific and small event in incredible detail and with a ton of imagery. And you’re saying that this year has brought that out for us? Yeah. Anyway, so what is your poem about Zachary? My poem is really about the ways in which this year has has lost so much, and it almost feels as if, um, we’re trying to We’re being forced to lose all these important things in our lives and all these important people to fit some sort of. As I said, like, uh, some metric poverty write a sort of meter of of loss, a meter of a meter of hate. And I think that in many ways, that’s the best way to capture this year, right? To stare it in the face and see the the loss and hate. And first of all, grieve. But then hopefully learn, right? Yeah, for sure. So, um, you wanted to ask me questions to lead our discussion, and I think that’s appropriate today. Since you are the person who in many ways on our podcast, speaks for our young listeners and gives them a voice in our discussions. So So, Zachary, you take it away. So I’d like to ask. Start with a question that might seem a little little trivial at first. But I think it’s actually important when we’re thinking about this year in 30 years or so, when, when you and your colleagues are teaching the history of 2020 how will you teach it? What will stand out as significant to you? It’s a great question. Historical perspective often changes what we think is most important and least important. There’s no doubt that 30 years from now we will focus on the pandemic, the ways in which the covid virus transformed everyone’s life. It has been global, truly global. We say that word all the time, right? But this really was a global pandemic. Every society was touched by it. Virtually every community in every family touched by this and the ways it changed school. It changed work. It changed life. It changed family experiences and holidays for all of us. And 30 years from now it will be difficult unless we have another pandemic like this, which we hope we won’t. It will be difficult for future generations to imagine the change We went through, how our society stopped in March, how we all transform the way we communicate. Have we changed the way we do our podcast moving from studio to online interviews. So the pandemic and its social effects, as well as its medical effects, will be at the center of the way we look at this period. And so will Donald Trump the day to day scandals, the day to day tweets. Those will, thankfully be forgotten. But the fact that we had a president who quite clearly did not address the covid pandemic and in many ways violated some of the basic assumptions of democratic norms and empowered attacks upon our democracy. Um, that will be a central part of the way we remember this period. If Donald Trump’s presidency is followed by a set of political reforms that we’ve talked about on this podcast that lead to a more resilient, stronger democracy in the United States and elsewhere in a more peaceful international community, we’ll see Trump as a moment as a turning point toward democratic renewal, which is what we hope to see if we see crumbling and deterioration and democratic institutions and more international conflict more hate more racism. We’ll see Donald Trump as an opening two more of those attributes. It’s probably a mix that we will see, and we, as historians will debate that mix in the same way we debate the mix of consequences from the Civil War or the mix of consequences from the New Deal. We will discuss the mix of consequences from this, this terrible, difficult trump moment in our politics. What do you think? Exactly What do you think will remember? I think we will remember the pandemic, but I think we’ll also be talking a lot in future years about the racial justice movements that we saw this summer. I think that they will become a part of the larger story of the pandemic and of this year, a sort of reflection of the anger and pain that communities of color are continue to feel and continue to suffer to this day and in many ways were exacerbated by the pandemic. That makes a lot of sense to me. That makes a lot of sense. So there have been a lot of comparisons between 2020 and very turbulent years. Like 1968. Um, do you think that this this particular comparison between 2020 and 1968 is a fair comparison? You’ve done a lot of work in 1968. What do you think makes this moment different and similar? It’s a great question. 1968 is a natural analogue, in part because many of the middle aged individuals in our society is living through this moment. Remember certain elements of 1968. It’s also received a lot of attention from the movie industry for music, Uh, and their first or two similarities. We should point to 1968 was another global moment. It was a moment when societies across the world this is something I’ve written about, of course, as have others really felt themselves disrupted. There was a new generation across societies coming into educational institutions, business institutions, political institutions and that generation questioned and challenged authority in all kinds of ways. In the United States was the civil rights and antiwar movement in the Soviet Union. It was a movement that challenged communist established communist authorities in China. The cultural revolution. So it was a global moment. And like today, it was a moment of disruption. Uh, 1968 school classes were disrupted on a daily basis. Business was disrupted. Just as our lives have all been disrupted today, it was also very violent, a very violent period. Now the difference is, I think, are even more significant than than the similarities. Um 1968 was a period when leaders came under attack. But the leaders in societies, even though many times they had strong opponents, uh, they were advocates of democracy, for the most part, especially in the West, the challenge was what kind of democracy? And, uh, we didn’t deal with the same health issues. In fact, 1968 was a period filled with activism in the streets. We’ve had that in 2020 but it’s been much more difficult to bring people together. 1968 as many of us have written about, was a period when groups came together. It was a period of rich physical interactions. We’ve been living through a period of rich or really deserted physical separations, alienation, which is which is very different. 1968 was also dominated by young people. Uh, young actors are 2020 has been dominated by older figures, the two presidential candidates in 2020 and president elect Biden as well as president, outgoing President Trump, both being in their seventies, Um, and a lot of a lot of older figures dominating the political scene. One final 10.1968 was dominated by media images, but it was still a world of a very limited set of media channels for people to communicate their information. We live in a world today. This is one of the most dominant features of our world, with a multiplicity of media channels, social media, various online forms, right wing news organizations, Um, and these organizations, uh, spread far more images and, quite frankly, far more lies than anything we saw in 68. It’s not that there wasn’t misinformation in 1968 but there’s much more of it today. It’s much more pervasive in our lives than it was then. And that’s one of the real challenge is when people are saying things that are clearly wrong, clearly factually incorrect, such as denying the existence of the covid virus or denying the results of an election. It’s much harder to edit that it’s much harder to control the spread of that information. It’s much harder to get the truth out. In 68 it was actually a lot easier. One of the things that student activists did was they showed pictures from Vietnam. They revealed the statistics from Vietnam. They showed the imagery of Jim Crow in the South today, there’s too much conflict in and imagery and were pulled in. Too many directions were too distracted. And and it’s the distraction from facts rather than the debate about facts, which in many ways characterizes 2020 rather than 1968. I think, too, it’s important to realize that in many ways 2020 is a political opposite of 1968 in the sense that at least in the November election, we’ve we’ve been pulled back towards at least some degree of normalcy politically and away from a sort of push for radicalism or or change, Uh, and I think in 1968 we saw in many ways the opposite movement, and I think that’s an important, an important thing to recognize what we’re comparing. It’s a great point just to elaborate on your excellent point in 19 in the 1968 election in the United States and in other societies, at least in Europe. Um, the law and order argument one people elected figures who promised to stop the violence to stop the disruption. Uh, the opposite has in some ways been true in the United States. Even the Republicans who won in state races in the United States were not really running on law and order. The law and order argument did not work in 2000 20. Uh, the argument that worked better was an argument of stability. But stability was not law and order. Stability was really about bringing back integrity, bringing back representativeness, bringing back responsiveness in our institutions, not law and order not cracking down in the ways in which the 68 election emphasis those issues. So we’ve covered a lot of topics on our podcast that in many ways have been lost by the headlines. Of all the fascinating topics we’ve covered small and large, local and global. Uh, in the past 52 weeks or so, what has stood out to you as the most important? What do you hope our listeners have learned a great question. Zachary. There’s so many issues I want to pick up to. One has to do with refugees and, uh, the forced removal, the brutalization of refugees by our government in the last year. We did an episode on this, of course, and we’ve talked about it. It’s come up in various other discussions of race, uh, and politics in our podcast. This is a topic that received attention early on in the Trump presidency, but it has received less attention in this last year not because people don’t care, but because we’ve been focused on so many other issues on covid on a presidential election on Russian hacking of American cyber infrastructure. And we have forgotten that on a daily basis hundreds and thousands of people coming to the United States and coming to other countries seeking refuge from political intolerance, seeking opportunity for their families and others that they have been brutalized by Democratic governments, in particular by the United States. And as we discussed on a recent podcast episode, the Trump administration has been deporting deporting these immigrants at larger numbers than ever before, and it’s been doing it with rapidity toward the end of its presidency. We need to focus on this. We need to focus on the long term damage we’re doing to human beings on our borders. Uh, and we need as a society and as a country and as a world of democracies, we need to talk about immigration much, much more. What other appropriate laws we should have. We cannot obviously just allow everyone to go wherever they want around the world. That would be nice, but there are practical reasons why there have to be some sorts of limitations. But what are the appropriate humane limitations? What should laws look like to allow people to seek asylum and move freely, but yet also allow governments to manage that process? We need to do much more work on these issues. The Democratic Party is not necessarily better than the Republican Party on this. Both parties have a long tradition of being unfair and restrictive toward immigration. The Trump administration has probably been the worst in recent American history, but it’s not the only one that has been responsible for the brutalization of people at the border. The second issue I’d raise and and the one that I think is getting some attention, but not enough attention. It’s an issue you brought out so many times, Zachary and many of our guests. The ways in which Covid and the many other difficulties we’ve had in 2020 have exacerbated inequalities in our society. Most of us listening to this podcast have suffered during this year, but we’ve been able to live with some relative comfort. Most of us have been able to get online. Most of us have been able to conduct some element of our work, some element of our schooling. Many people have not, and we were a terribly unequal society. Many democracies were unequal. The United States is one of the most unequal democracies in the world, and we’ve become even more unequal and educational access, access to work, access to resources that’s known. But what we’re going to do about it has not been discussed very much. It has come up repeatedly in our podcast, and what I’ve learned Zachary is that this topic needs more attention. Questions of equality, questions of equity are as fundamental to democracy today as any other issue. Yeah, I would say that my the two that stood out most to me, other than the two that you that you mentioned were the one first of all, that we did with Susan Neiman on historical memory and the nature of, of, of historical and in the national Guilt comparing Germany Post World War Two to the United States Post 18 65. Um, I think that was a really important exploration of the ways in which, um of the ways in which our society has not really come to terms with our own historical guilt and with our own, um, with the with the atrocities in our past and the complex nature of our history. And I think it gave us a very important lesson about embracing that complexity, not trying to see ourselves as heroes or villains, but embracing the complex nature of our history and the history of every society in the world. Um, the second one is the podcast we did recently with Vanessa Cook on the Port Huron statement connecting back to the activism of the 19 sixties. I think that that podcast was a very important exploration of the ways in which young people can make a huge difference difference today and how how activism behind the scenes and off and away from the political centers can have a huge impact on American politics and American society. Well said, Well said, I think those were those were two incredibly powerful podcast. And what’s really striking Zachary to me is how so many of these issues regarding demographics, memory, race, equality, how these issues interact with one another how they overlap. And I think one of the real insights to me in our podcast and I hope this is true for our listeners is to see how these issues that we often separate out need to be connected better that we need to have a more holistic understanding of these issues. We have to be willing to talk about them, and partisanship and ideology actually oversimplify these issues. They don’t help us to get much leverage on them. History gives us the leverage. I’m sure you’re surprised to hear me talk about history, Zachary. Yeah. So, speaking of of history and your your interpretation of history, we’ve often disagreed about the possibilities for hope in a moment like this, Um, you’re hopeful that I am so first, I’d like to ask, uh what what do you think the things are the things that we need to be most vigilant in protecting as we go into the new year? It’s a great question. I never thought in my lifetime that we would have to worry about being able to have elections. I never thought in my lifetime that we would have leaders, not just the president, but others who seemed to not care about democracy and seemed willing to try to use force and lies not simply to try to win through a democratic process but to explicitly violate any reasonable understanding of democracy. I never thought we’d have people trying to throw away millions of votes, not trying to just prevent people from voting. That’s bad enough voter suppression. This is actually the efforts at voter elimination, and I never thought never that we have a president who would even talk about martial law. He cannot do that, but the fact that he even talked about it, we have a president of the United States and President Trump who would undertake a coup if he could. He has not been able to do that, but he is actually considered doing that. And if he had the opportunity. There’s every reason to believe he would. And there’s every reason to believe that he would have some supporters within the Republican Party. If you hear my anger, you are correct. Our podcast is not partisan. I’m making a historical statement. We have never had a president to think that way. We need to protect our democratic institutions. We need to reform them. This is probably the overriding theme of our podcast. It’s what we inspired. What inspired us from Franklin Roosevelt. The belief that every generation has to write a new chapter, as FDR put it in the book of Democracy are new Chapter has to be about strengthening and renewing our democratic institutions and practices. That means we need to stick to them. But we also need to update them. We need better ways of voting, We need more representation. Our system does not represent people and we need to educate ourselves to reinforce that every vote counts. Everyone deserves to be represented and everyone deserves to be treated fairly and our institutions and we can talk in detail about this. We have on prior podcasts that don’t meet. Those standards need to be reformed and those who are unwilling to enter into that dialogue enter into a dialogue about how to make our democracy truly representative. They do not deserve to be in elected office or appointed office. We are a democracy. We can differ about how to improve representation. But we must believe in representation. We must believe in the fairness of the vote. We must believe that everyone deserves equal treatment under the law. If we are unwilling to say that, then we are not living up to our democracy. We have to protect that dialogue. We have to educate people about it and we have to make that central to who we are. We cannot take our democracy for granted any longer. We must renew it in every single way. I would say I would agree wholeheartedly, but I also think that it’s been astounding to me, uh, the the violence with which the social democratic basis of our society, our social safety net, basic protections for working families in the middle of a pandemic have come under attack from politicians who claim to represent the very people they’re they’re hurting. Um and I think as a part of that it is a distortion of our history that has has really resulted, I think, from the past few years of political dialogue, this idea that that that the biggest menace throughout American history has been communism, that that the Confederacy right was not bad. Like all these historical narratives that have been completely, completely distorted by politicians and and and by political actors, I think that’s something we need to protect. We need to protect, uh, a realization of the complexity of our history. We need to be comfortable with the with the with the good elements and the bad elements of our history. We can’t simply we can’t simply whitewash everything. I think that’s absolutely right. This is a key element of our podcast. One doesn’t study history to get symbol answers, and it’s inappropriate to politicize history in any way. But there are politics in history that are unavoidable, and we suffer, I think, from two elements in our historical imagination in the United States, and this connects to many of our podcast episodes. First, people have a flawed view of the past. It doesn’t mean that what they think from the past is untrue. But it’s so narrow. Uh, and the whole point of studying history is to actually see how many different groups of people have experienced our history over time and to recognize not just the good and the bad, but to recognize how multiple things have happened at the same time. The 19th century in the United States was a century that marked the end of slavery, but it also marked other forms of repression that replaced slavery. Both happened at the same time both happened at the same time immigrants came to our society, We became a more diverse society and more things were done to make our society more restrictive to diversity. We must, as a society, recognize that as we love our country and believe our country is great, it is also along with its greatness. It has done many horrible things that doesn’t make us worse than other societies. That doesn’t make us better. We have to grapple with that and we have to recognize how that history carries forward to the present. Slavery is still with us in the ways in which racism and inequality in the allocation of resources and assumptions still dominates so much of our society. No one is pro slave, but the legacy of slavery lives on the same is true for many, many other issues. And so the point is to understand that history not to take a good or bad normative position, but to see how that complexity carries forward. It’s sort of like all of our families what the grandparents and great grandparents did. It was usually a mix of good and bad, and it’s still influences who we are today, and we become a better family by acknowledging that building on that and improving from that are point in this podcast and in this difficult year is not to find the easy answers. It’s to force us to see the complexity around us and to navigate that with better attention to those who have suffered and benefited to the elements of achievement and the shortcomings, and to try to address both at the same time. And that’s why this is democracy. Thank you to our listeners for joining us for this week of This is democracy, and we hope to see you in the New Year.

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