Hello, and welcome to the Bullark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'd like to welcome back to the show, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton. He's also an author, public intellectual and contributor to MSNOW. His latest book is out today. It's America, USA, How Race, Shadows, The Nation's Anniversaries. It's Eddie Glaude. How you doing, man? Man, it's good to lay eyes on you. It's good. It's pub day, so I'm happy. I'm excited. All right. Well, thank you for fitting us in on pub day. It's good to see you. We've got to see you down in person in New Orleans. We got to do a Mississippi trip together, one of these days. That would be wonderful. One of these days. Take you over to the Gulf Coast. Yeah, the other side. The other side. I want to do it with you. All right. Well, obviously, we're going to get into a book and there's a lot of relevant issues as it relates to the Voting Rights Act, etc. about what's happening in our politics. But before we do that, I just want to hit on a couple of news items. The latest in Iran, boy, it seems like it's a long way from 95% of the way to a deal to 100% given what we saw last night. US forces carried out attacks on multiple Iranian targets in the Persian Gulf. US SENTCOM called them self-defense strikes. The targets included missile launch sites in Iranian boats that were apparently attempting to place mines in the Strait of Hormuz. That's a little concerning. Iran won this morning or respond to last night's attacks. Trump says the ceasefire is still on. Marcos says the deal is close the next couple of days. Man, it seems like they put the cart before the horse a little bit on this one. That's an understatement. We are in the midst of what it seems to me an escalating quagmire with this war of choice. I don't know what the off-ramp is, Tam, to be honest with you. What we get over and over again are these kind of promises. Trump is the kind of carnival barker of our times, letting us know that this is about to happen or this will happen if it doesn't happen. It just seems that I don't know how we get out of this. At the same time that this is going on, Netanyahu and Israel has decided that it's going to escalate its assault on Lebanon and Hezbollah. We've already seen over 3,100 people killed over there, over 9,000 people injured. These are two sides of this war that don't seem to be in conversation with each other. We just need to buckle up because there's no ending scene. It seems to be clear in sight to me at least. The new Ayatollah Hamanah put out a statement that's relating to Israel, saying the Jewish state will not exist in 15 years last night. This goes to the choice of getting into this and to creating this in the first place. I'm thinking this is going to be easy. Thinking you're going to be able to paper over these really deep rifts in the region, just with some reality TV glitz and glamour. I think that it is clear that Trump wants some kind of deal because he doesn't want to be in an escalated war. He thought he was going to be able to have this be quick. At some level, maybe there's some temporary reprieve. As you point out, it's the incentive structures all over the place go against that. Incentive structure in Israel, incentive structure in Iran. The fact that they're allegedly putting mines in the straight last night, what's the incentive structure for the ships that are supposed to be going through the straight? They've got to be concerned. The insurance companies that pay all this stuff is a lot more complicated. It makes me think about a buddy that's working on the Obama-Iran nuclear deal. And just the amount of work and meticulousness and expertise that went into all that, plenty of things you could say about it that were not perfect. But I do think in this era where a lot of people look down and brush aside that expertise, meticulousness, like we're seeing why it's needed. Absolutely. And their erosion of trust in this whole process. Iran is, to be clear, is rightly suspicious. They've been bombed twice. Sometimes in the midst of negotiations. The implication for the global economy, it hasn't quite touched us beyond high gas prices. But if this continues to go on, we're going to be seeing shortages just as Asia is seeing shortages right now. And it's going to impact us across the board from plastics to fertilizers to food. We're already seeing the impacts of those on our wallets and households having to make determinations and decisions. But the idea that Donald Trump and his folks thought that they could do a Venezuela and Iran makes no sense to me. I mean, how many war games have been played out around the Strait of Amuse? That they're just going to dismiss expertise? And then, I have to say this, Tim, because I'm on the Bulwark podcast. The fact that Netanyahu's talking point has become our own. Remember that Daily Show skit about how many decades Netanyahu has been talking about nuclear, the nuclear threat? Now that's become our talking point. And it seems to me that the last few months or the last year or so has made it such that Iran is positioned in a way that almost thinks that it has to have a nuclear weapon in order to prevent attacks. So I don't know how we get out of this, to be honest with you. It's the last safe harbor talking point, honestly, is where they've come to on the nuclear because they've failed across every other goal. So, okay, we'll continue to monitor that. I'm going to give us a little bit of a palette cleanser before we get into the racial history of America, if that's okay. Thank you, guys. Did you see the New York Times story on the Trump cabinet meeting? This is a little amuse-bouche for us before we get into the deal. The New York Times did an analysis of all of the cabinet meetings. So this happened in Trump Tube Point now. Here's what they found. On average, one of every six sentences, either flattered Mr. Trump or criticized Biden or Obama as compared to Trump, he's described frequently over the course of those meetings as the only person who can do various historic things, including Save America. So I thought as a precursor to your book talking about the history of America, what does it say that we have this like Kim Jong-un ass reality TV show star sitting around a cabinet meeting having a bunch of, well, now that all the women are gone, now having a bunch of men tell them he's the only one that can save America. Yeah, this sausage fest of mediocrity as it were. And these are the folk who are talking about merit. These are the folk who are beating us over the heads about excellence and talent and earning one's way. Look, we have been faced with an all out assault on the very idea of governance that's been bound up with the kind of cult of personality. You know, you think about Steve Bannon, Tim talking about deconstructing the administrative state. Well, you deconstruct the administrative state around this cult of personality. And then you get the debacle in Iran, you get all the stuff, the grift, all the stuff that we're witnessing in real time and one wonders, one wonders, honestly, how we're going to get on the other side of this. But the idea that folk have to say all of this stuff just to appease this man's ego, right? It just makes you just say, oh my God, are these people that small, that insecure, that they need this or that he's that small and that insecure, that he needs this kind of worship day in and day out. That was a palate cleanser a little bit. Yeah, ish. Ish. Yeah. I know she didn't flatter me when you came on the podcast, so that's okay. That's all right. We may be over the course of time or back and forth. We'll see who's the one that gets the flatter. All right, everybody, you're trying to stay sane while prices are going up everywhere at the gas pump at the grocery store and our liberal democracy is being ripped apart at the seams. That's why we're out here doing what we do. That's why we love going out there for the live shows and being with you guys and doing it together. And that's why we decided this Memorial Day to offer a deal. I'm not going to think we've ever done before. Right now you can access everything we offer at our website, secret podcast, ad free podcasts with 50% off your membership for the next year. So it's a way to help you keep sane and you can join the Bull Works incredible community. It also lets you comment on the sub stack. It brings some nice comments every once in a while. I like constructive criticism, but we can also be cheery and be together as well. Come on in 50% off, go to thebullwork.com slash sanity. That's thebullwork.com slash sanity. We'll put that link for you in the show notes. Hope you can become a member and we'll see you around. I want to just talk about the book first before and kind of set the precursor of everything that you wrote about since it goes back through the history of America's anniversaries and let that lead us to the challenges that we have today. So obviously it's book day. So I assume that unless some of the listeners got good reads, what do they call those tapes that used to go around? A bootleg. Thank you. Thank you. A bootleg. Unless people got a bootleg copy, they haven't read it. I have. So give them a little, give them the elevator pitch about the book. Sure. You know, I think at every milestone anniversary, whether it's Centennial or the 150th or the bicentennial or now, the country has to tell a story about itself and it has to tell a story about its founding. And in each of these milestone anniversaries, it confronts the vexing question of what do we do with race? How do we tell a story about who we are as Americans with the reality of race pressing in upon us? So the Centennials, 1876, reconstruction is collapsing. The sesquicentennial, the 150th. This is the decade of the Klan, right? This is the period in which the Klan has had an outsized influence on our politics. In 1976, this is Vietnam. This is Watergate. This is Black Power. This is the women's movement, right? The country seems to be at its throat at each other's throat. And then now here we are in 2026, where you hear the language of blood and soil from the likes of J.D. Vance and others. And Trump has meld, has kind of combined the celebration of the country with the celebration of himself and magaism. And so I want to tell a story about this, right? That at the heart of these celebrations is the contradiction, right? That the country's divided soul is on full view. That the double consciousness that has often been attributed to Black folk, that we see ourselves through the eyes of those who despise us, is actually a consequence of the double consciousness at the heart of the nation. That is to say, America imagines itself at once to him as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And because you can't hold those two things together without contradiction, it deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country that generates these cycles that we see in a telescoped way during these anniversaries. And so here we are just, we're barreling towards July 4th, I think is going to be a shit show. The story that folk are going to tell is going to be a story that demands that people that look like me, that we are put in our place, that we play minor bit parts in the history of the country. And I wanted to write a book that answer back, that would speak back. Yeah, I thought that the 1876, that 100-year anniversary section was so interesting. There are a couple of things you're talking about. One was, Frederick Douglass was talking about this, feeling that the 100-year anniversary, like white America and the North and South would come back together and find a common truce, which they end up doing by basically gutting reconstruction. Just as a little interesting history note, because I didn't realize this, because I don't know about you, sometimes it feels like the Cowboys and Indians are on a different historical timeline than the rest of America. I don't know, I get my brain, it's hard to sometimes put that all together. But Custer's Last And It's Happening during the 100-year anniversary of the country. So anyway, talk a little bit more about that anniversary. Yeah, I mean, you got over 600,000 people have been killed on land and sea as a result of the carnage of the Civil War. You get radical reconstruction after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson just wants to bring this out then without any consequence. Congress takes over, you get radical reconstruction between 1866 and 1876, right? And what you see is this kind of big, this pushback in interesting sorts of ways. And the pushback has taken place in the South, even as your Union soldiers are occupying this out in ways. But you see Democrats and we got to be clear, this is not the same Democratic Party of today. But you see Democrats in so many ways organizing through violence, as well as coercion, as well as law, trying to seize power in Southern states. You get Colfax in Louisiana, you get Vicksburg in Mississippi, violent overthrows the Mississippi plan, right? Lays out a blueprint of how the South will return to power, how Southern plantation on this one. So 1876 is the first time we're going to tell a story about the nation in the aftermath of the war that almost destroyed the nation. And this is also during the period of the Gilded Age, right? So the, and so what they're going to do is they're going to engage in this massive act of forgetting. Frederick Douglass calls it, calls these folk the apostles of forgetfulness. They're going to erase what happened and what drove or caused the civil war. They're going to talk about America's ingenuity, its economic power. It finally is on its own. It's not beholden to Europe any longer. But at the heart of it, though, is this violence that's happening across the South as reconstruction collapses. Frederick Douglass is perhaps the most famous black man. He is the most famous black person in the country, the most photographed black person in the country. He's scheduled to be on the dais with President Grant. He tries to get in. A Philadelphia police officer says, no, you're not on the dais. He shows him his ticket. He says, there's no way this inward can be on the dais. If it wasn't for a politician who, a white politician who saw him, Douglass would never have been admitted to the exposition. And then he was just, he had to sit on stage silent. They would not allow him to speak. Right. So 1876 is this extraordinary moment of forgetfulness in a way, shadowed by violence and the collapse of reconstruction. And what makes it possible, this is the key. What makes reunion possible between the South and the North is that they see themselves as white. And that whiteness can then overcome regional differences. And we see that evidence itself more clearly in the turn of the century and the first two decades as they're grabbed, as we grapple with it as a nation with European immigration and with Jim Crow and the violence around it. Right. You fast forward to 1926. There's a strike in the Times review of your book. There's this striking about it. You included it as well of the Klu Klux Klan marching in front of the Capitol in 1926, whatever that's called, 150th anniversary. And there's always fun words like, sesquintennial or something of that effect. And you have that in the moment that, and kind of in the spirit of, you know, nothing is new, you know, everything that's new is old and brought back. You also have this push for Nordic, you know, immigration and making America Nordic during that time in the 1926. So just talk about that anniversary as well. Yeah, you know, we usually talk about the decade of the twenties as, you know, the jazz age. This is the period of the Charleston and the like, right? But it's really the decade of the Klan. 1915, the Klan is reborn. It has outsized power. It claims, you know, hundreds of thousands of members on its roles. It's most important piece of legislation that it sponsored. John's representative Johnson was a member of the Klan who helped pass along with Senator Reed from Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania, by the way, had over 250,000 Klan members. They helped pass the immigration act, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, which established the kind of immigration regime that many of the folk today want to return to. They want to return to a piece of legislation that was basically written by the Klan. 1925, 26, the Klan marches, you know, in DC, you see rows of rows, thousands, mostly from the north, right? And the Midwest, thousands of Klan members in their sheets and hoods. They were initially approved to hold their annual convention, what they call the Klan vacation. They were initially approved to hold that's really what it was called the Klan vacation. The Klan vacation. Jesus Christ. It was initially approved because the 150th anniversary was held in Philly, just like the Centennial. So you have the exposition. They were approved to have their annual convention at the exposition in Philadelphia. So the country was going to celebrate its flag and burn across at the same time. Now what's interesting in 1926 in the North American Review, the Grand Wizard of the Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans published a piece defending the Klan's fight for Americanism. This is as they kind of are speaking against this, these, shall we say, shithole countries from the wrong part of Europe that are sending folk over, Italians, Irish, Jews and the like. They're really, really, really going after Catholics in this moment, right? And he sits there and lays out in that piece, right? How can I put this, Tim? It's so freaking scary because it maps on to the very ways in which MAGA talks today. Talking about they can't teach what they want to teach in school. Talking about these foreigners polluting the country. Talking about America first. All of this is evidenced right in that moment. So 1926 is this extraordinary period. But I guess what happens also in 1926, it's also the moment in which Negro History Week is founded. So Black folk are speaking back, trying to tell a different story in this moment of racist erasure. I guess the 26 is before Lindbergh and kind of that formalization of that. Right, but this is the stage also for Father Kaufman and all of these folk, yeah. It does, yeah. Fast point to today in the echoes of MAGA, there are just these kind of clownish, almost absurdist representations of the jingoism back at those celebrations as well. I don't know what could possibly stand up to the MMA fight that we're going to have at the White House. And I just kind of wonder when you look at that and think about that, how an AI at E-Cloud would cover that and then update to this book 50 years from now on the tri-centennial. And whether that, how that fits in the timeline that you're writing about. We have to begin to think about how the decline of seriousness in the country, how the country gets overrun by surface, by shadows, as opposed to depth. And it makes sense that you would get a caricatured version of Ronald Reagan at this stage, a B-list actor to a B-list reality show first. You see the line drawn and how that then becomes an assault on the political imagination of the country where we are not capable in so many ways to be serious enough to engage in self-governance, such that an MMA fight is held on the White House lawn or hunger games version of competition for high school athletes or something like that. And FBI agents. We're doing it for FBI agents as well. Can you imagine? And so, you know, I think though what's really important though is in 1926, this is something Calvin Coolidge spoke at the exposition, President Coolidge spoke. And what President Coolidge did in that moment is that he talked about the founding as not being reducible to the American Revolution. He says, we only need one revolution. That revolution gave voice to enduring principles, what he would say, metaphysical principles that weren't reducible to the country. And he says, we don't need another revolution. All we need to do is to remember and restore. So Calvin Coolidge is not interested in more perfect union talk. In other words, our salvation was secured at the founding because of these principles. MAGA gives that an evangelical twist. These folk are not interested in the progress of the nation or more perfect union talk. It's not about whether or not we are a multiracial democracy, whether or not we're treating Black folk right, whether or not we're treating our minorities right. No, they don't give a damn. Only thing they want us to do is to understand that we are already saved. That's all we need to do is to remember and to remember in a way that aligns the country's purpose with Donald Trump's ins and aims. Yeah, it's interesting to say that my producer flagged me when we were writing this. We had a big all staff meeting in D.C. last week. She saw somebody in the mall. I was walking around the mall. Somebody wearing this America 250 years of freedom shirt. You see this a lot. And so I'm curious how you kind of process that, right? Because on the one hand, I guess you could look at it three ways. You could look at it out of hopefulness. This is freedom. We're aspiring to freedom. You can kind of send the way that Obama kind of talked about, the founding. You can think about it like that. You can think about it out of just ignorance, right, that this didn't happen. Or you can think about it in the way that kind of you're laying out there, the cooler just laying out, right? That it's like, no, what was achieved there was enough. And we need to kind of return to that mindset. How do you navigate that? So all three versions of what you just laid out to my mind, Tim, are features of what I call a storybook version of American democracy. So the notion of freedom exists apart from history and America becomes its manifestation. That's one version. The other version is that we're still a sacred project. We've failed. We've fallen short, but we're always already on the road to a more perfect union, right? There's that story, right? And then of course, the founding did everything for us. So those three versions, right? But what I want to suggest is that from the very beginning, the divided soul of the country has it that we imagine ourselves as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And that the notion of freedom was articulated from the very beginning, voiced from the very beginning as the possession of white Americans to give and to take away. And as long as freedom, because you think about, there's an apocryphal story that says that John Adams says to King George in the moment in which he's articulating a notion of liberty, he says to him, we will not be your Negroes. So at the very moment in which he's giving voice to an idea of freedom, it's based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom. Or you read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. He talks about all of this stuff about American civil society and the importance of democracy. And then he starts the chapter on the three races. He says, now that I've dealt with all of that, I'm going to turn to this. And when he starts talking about the three races, he talks about the challenges to everything he just talked about, about American democracy moving forward before that. So what I want to suggest is that instead of telling a storybook version of freedom in the country, we need to tell a more tragic story, right? One that takes seriously our failings, our shortcomings that will allow us to grow up as a nation, right? So that we can be true to who we are and imagine ourselves differently instead of finding comfort and security in the myth that tells us that we're always good, even when we're not. I agree with that, but I have a little bit of an argument inside of me, even on that front that I've been thinking about as I was reading the book. And I want to kind of make an analogy, which is at some moments of celebration at anniversaries, isn't there a case for forgetting? I'm trying to think about, this is a silly example, kind of like my high school graduation. About a month before my high school graduation, I was a very bad young man at a Regis Jesuit high school lacrosse game. And I did some things that are regrettable. And I was suspended from school for a couple of days. And they threatened to not let me walk. And eventually, I made up for it and atoned for my sins. And I was able to walk at graduation. And at the graduation celebration, my parents didn't like spend the time talking about my various sins, like we spent a day saying, look, you did 18 years of some bad days, some good days, but the good days are worth remembering and acknowledging, right? And obviously, this is not a perfect comparison to an anniversary. But you could think about it as a marriage anniversary, right? Like where you've had Iraqi moments in the marriage. And there's been a betrayal between one of the spouses. And it's like you're at your 40th wedding anniversary. And it's like, should the toast mention the time 22 years ago, one of you guys did something bad? You know what I mean? And so I guess that is my pushback, right? Like, is it really so wrong to have a day or a week or a year of acknowledging goodness and triumph? That's a great point. And it reminds me of, I'm gonna be an egghead for a moment, a nerd. It reminds me of a moment, a line in Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche's The Uses and Abuses of History, where he says, we have to cultivate our ability to forget, right? We can't live a completely historical life, right? Otherwise, we would be paralyzed. You'd have no friends if you remembered everything that every person ever did. But I think what's important though is during these milestone anniversaries, what we've, how can I put this? What we choose not to remember often exposes the limits of our conception of justice. What we choose to forget often, right, shines a glaring light on the gaping holes in our ideas of justice. So what am I saying? In these milestone anniversaries, every last one of them happens in the midst of extraordinary, a kind of flaring up of the contradiction. 1876 is the collapse of frequent reconstruction. By the end of the 19th century, over 53,000 black people will be dead. 1926 is the decade of the Klan. In the midst of that, you have the Red Summer of 1919. You have all sorts of violence that's happening across the South and in the Midwest and in the Northeast, right? So the moment in which we're trying to tell a story about our shared sense of value, there's this amazingly violent effort to discipline the roiling chaos underneath the appeal to consensus. And certain people are bearing the brunt of it. Certain people are taking it on the chin and having to bury their dead because of it. So part of what I'm trying to suggest here, unlike you, remember how you framed it? You said I had a tone for my sins, right? And I tried to do right. And so they let me walk. We're in the midst of the fever dream. The country is engaged in an all out assault on black life, on all out assault on the idea that we're a multiracial democracy. What does it mean to forget in this moment? It seems to me that forgetfulness makes us accomplices in the ongoing horror of those who believe that the country must be white or the country shouldn't be at all. I'm wondering what that looks like. One thing that comes to mind is when Obama first comes in, I think it was in 2009, he goes to Egypt and he travels and the Fox News kind of brand says the apology tour where he goes around the world and does, I'm curious what your memory is of that, but like to my memory, kind of this, like a fully actualized conversation about what America is and was and should be that wasn't just like, you know, goddamn America, it wasn't that right? It was a speech that talked a lot about what America had offered and what the opportunity of America was, but also acknowledging the flaws and the mistakes. How did that sit with you at the time? And like, is that the type of thing that you're talking about? Or is it something different? Well, I would want it to be more substantive. I think Obama was doing that. And then of course, you juxtapose that with this drone policy, you juxtapose that to the way in which, you know, I still got the Canadian Prime Minister in my head as he's describing the world in which America is the hegemon and how the rules were bent to benefit us and the world had to look elsewhere. So, you know, I'm committed to a world in which everybody, no matter their birthplace, no matter their color, no matter who they love or their gender or their class position, have the ability to actualize their dreams. And I don't mind symbolic gestures to that. I want substantive policy with regards to that. So, what I'm calling for is something much more fundamental, if that makes sense. You know, the end of the book, the arc of the book is right here. Usually when we write a book like this, people want you to say, so what do we do? Give me a damn blueprint, Eddie. You sent you the egghead in here. And I said, well, you know, I've written two other books that, you know, because this is the third in the trilogy that have tried to address the moment. And I said, you know, I don't want to offer a policy because that's what we do in order to make ourselves feel good, to make ourselves think that we're actually trying. Tim, we have to make a choice. Either you're going to be the knucklehead that did what you did that almost got you kicked out of school, or you're going to be a different kind of person. Either we're going to be a beacon of freedom and we can debate that. We can debate what that means. Or you're going to be a white republic. JD Vance wants us to be a white republic. His stuff is all blood and soil. He rejects the creedal notion of American identity. He did it on July 5th, 2025. He was explicit that declaration is not enough. That's the essential speech, actually, of the next decade, I think, honestly. It's the essential text. I talked about it a lot a couple weeks ago. And you know what, Tim? That text comes out of, you would think it's just JD Vance, but it comes out of an intellectual subculture that is thick, that is deep. It's Claremont Institute folk. It's all of these Straussian folk that are informing and shaping the way in which Vance has rendered that argument. These nationalist conservative folk. So, I mean, that's a different story. But the point I'm making is that we have to make a choice and then act accordingly. We can't be both and. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves in this position over and over again. And my grandchildren will end up having to deal with this just like my son is having to deal with it now. And so now I'm going to do the thing that you just said you can't fully answer, which is what do we do? But in the micro, in the micro, I'm talking about the micro. I don't know. I've been thinking about the 250th anniversary in the 4th of July, kind of a lot, but a little bit. I have like this sense of dread about it, kind of in the same way that I had like that feeling around Trump's inauguration. And this time I had to work during Trump's inauguration and I'm embedded to our bosses at MSNOW for making me do that actually. But eight years ago, when I was not gainfully employed, I just checked out. I just turned my phone off and I went and saw my godson and I took him to the park and whatever. And I kind of have that instinct about this time. And I guess that is in a cousin to my other question about, isn't there some value about forgetting? Is there not some value to that? Is that the right, like what is your instinct about how to handle it this year? Is it a moment for action or is it a moment for this to shall pass and we'll get them back in November? Well, no, I think it's not that because we're on the precipice. I don't know if we're going to survive. I don't know what we're going to look like on the other side of this. And so all hands are on deck. And what I tell, the story I tell in the book is that in each of these moments, 1876, 1926, 1976, Blackfuckers speaking back, even though they're trying to be, people are trying to disappear us. There's always been a kind of alternative celebratory calendar while the country was lying to itself about freedom. We were celebrating the end of the transatlantic slave trade on January 1st, while the country was lying about itself on July 4th. We were celebrating July 5th, New York abolition day. This was before Juneteenth. We had this kind of ongoing signifying on the country. What I think we need to do come July 4th is show our asses. I mean, the full diversity of the country has to speak back to this narrowing vision of who we are. These folk are engaged in an all out assault on the America that has made our lives possible. And as a father, both of us, you're raising your baby in New Orleans of all places, right? That diversity is in our language. It's in our taste buds. It's in our food. It makes us, it makes America swing, right? It's what makes us distinctive. And I think in response to, you know, what Trump and Mago will try to represent as the country, we need to speak back at the highest volume with the diversity of the nation, right? And drown them out as best we can. I don't know what that will look like or how we will do it, but we need to do it, it seems to me. Well, you were to that point, following the Kalei decision. You were in the day of action in Mississippi, a lot of times the flat circle, whenever that was last week, two weeks ago. We had Justin Jones on as well, who was there was talking about that. Talk about kind of what the spirit was there. And also, you know, if there were any elements of that day that you felt like were productive or useful or augured for positive progress. Yeah. You know, Mississippi is the metaphor of America, you know, I like to think of Mississippi as at once mystery, metaphor and meat, you know, because I'm from the coast of Mississippi, but it was 82 counties in the state, 52 of them showed up and they were pissed. The state is 38.5% black, 40% black, and they were pissed. And so you had this energy of celebration. It wasn't a kind of nostalgia for the Mississippi movement of the mid 20th century. It was really a sense of this is where we are really, this is where we're doing, this is what we're doing. And then it was organizing and mobilizing. So there was there was this conversation that was being had to him in the midst of it. Okay, they want to they want to redraw the maps in light of a set of assumptions about turnout. This is the numbers. So they were said, I remember hearing there, Johnson, basic president and CEO of NAACP, he said, this is a math problem. Right. So what do we need to do? How many do we need to get registered to vote? And per each county in each county, what should be our turnout numbers to just simply undermine the assumptions of their redrawing? And so I kept hearing in my head, something I had said before, you know, they thought we turned out for Obama, which transformed the map. Just wait till they see us turn out for us. And what I saw in the churches and what I saw across, because it was a rainy day on a Wednesday, folk work. And it was about 5000 people, right, in the convention center. And so I was I came away on fire, right, hopeful, because the organizing was just beginning. And if there's any state in the south that you can awaken the beast, it would be a state where the population is 40% black. The key in that there's Scott Coulom, who's running for US Senate, it's a little kind of under it's, it's for good reason, it's under noticed because it's Mississippi, after all. But I guess I'm gonna give you the optimistic and then hear my concerns. Like the optimistic case is that turnout, combined with like some level of backlash, you know, combined with potentially a depressed, mega base, which is unhappy about the war unhappy about costs. You can imagine a path, you know, for a surprises. And in the showing up part, you know, even putting a scare into them, there's in Mississippi, there's some value to sudden, I don't know. Anyway, was Scott there and like, was the focus there about Mississippi itself? Or was this kind of a this is a staging ground for, for maybe more fertile turf other places? It was both and yeah, Mississippi, we can, you know, because it's the metaphor for the country is, you know, what happens in Mississippi, of course, plays itself out across the South. Remember, in the context of the collapse of reconstruction, it's the Mississippi plan that provided the blueprint for the rest of the South to do what it did in order to, to engage in redemption. And so, so I think Scott understands, right, the numbers game. Remember, espi didn't lose by much. Everybody's talking about Texas flipping. Yeah. But in that environment, that's, impressively, also, exactly. So we're so given the numbers and given the number of folk that you can turn out who are white liberal, you know, and the like and it's suppressed vote on the other side, you can have there's a chance here. But I think what's important though, is that folk weren't just simply focused on electoral politics. They understood it as, as a critical component. But they were talking about it in a much more expansive way. But again, my cynical self will kick in. Yes, all of these elements are in place, but then these folk will damn cheat. That's one part of the cynical. Here's another element of it. And I try to be like, precise when I'm talking about this, because obviously, black voters voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats and, and, you know, Trump won a majority of white America, like that, that's so granted. But across every demographic group, like we saw the same trend, right, which is people that have higher education attainment, people that have higher trust, people that are reading the news, like Kamala did disproportionately better with them. Right. And that was true among black Americans too. Right. And particularly black men. And what you saw in 2024 was a lot of particularly younger black men that aren't as engaged with everything that's happening that may and probably still aren't like just to be honest, like probably still aren't familiar with the details of the Kalei case, they're not listening to podcasts, right? Like they're working, they're living their lives, they're not, you know, whatever. And there was like an appeal to what Trump was offering on an economic level. And I think a feeling of disconnect from a democratic elite that was, you know, serving the interests of whatever the coastal, you know, elites or college educated elites. And I get excited about this too, like this engagement and that day of action. And what you were talking about when Justin was talking about, I get excited about it, but like there's this little thing in the back of my head, which is like, are they engaging still the same people that are that care about the news and are passionate about this? And maybe they're more engaged now, but like, how do you reach that next layer of black and brown folks that like, that don't feel like they've really felt fully connected with, you know, the anti-Trump movement, the Democratic Party, whatever you want to call it, pro-democracy movement. That's the million dollar question or in this kind, in this context, the billion dollar question. Right. So one of the things I saw on Wednesday was a generational cross-section of folks. There's one point I was taking a podcast with Angela Rye and Andrew Gillum and Benny Thompson and folk. And in the middle of it, it was interrupted by these young folk with bull horns coming in. It was, they were all young and they changed the energy of the room almost immediately. And they had just been marching in the streets. And so they seem to be engaged, right? In a very interesting way. Folk weren't talking about, you know, just simply salvaging the seats of the CBC or keeping district two intact. They were talking about power and policy that could address specifically the circumstances of black Mississippi. And I thought that was really important because I think you're right. The Democratic messaging, whatever you think of the autopsy report for the Democratic Party and the shit show that that has been, what we do know is that there has been a disconnect between the symbolic gestures and the policies that could actually impact working people and working poor people. And in Mississippi, those two things, you know, index black folk in a very clear way. And so there are folks who are really, really at least from what I saw and the energy I saw are really kind of looking to push the political entities in a direction that could actually address their lives. They're not looking to the Democratic Party for salvation. They just know they got to get the fastest out of office. But they're not in doing that. They're not looking to the Democratic Party as the salvation. But they know that they're going to vote for, but they're not looking for that to be the panacea for the problems they face. Do you think that that notion has sunk in? Like when you were there with the Benny Thompson's of the world, I sometimes I worry that the Democratic establishment kind of feels like, hey, all we got to do is register more black voters and turn out more voters and that'll work out for us. And like we learned in 24 that isn't like right quite true. Yeah. Yeah. When you talk about persuasion, a lot of times people are talking about my people, you know, the moderate Republicans in the suburbs, independent, right? Like there's some persuasion that needs to be done, you know, within the black outweighing within every community. But in particular, we saw in 2024 within the black community, young black men and younger men that were kind of, you know, drawn at greater percentages towards Trump. Do they get that? Do you think? Some days they sound like some of them get it. And other days it sounds like they're just following the same blueprint. I mean, you know, you and I know that American politics will not change until there's a massive shift in the political consulting class. Yeah. They're these folk who make millions of dollars given the same damn advice every election cycle. And particularly with regards to black voters, right? Yeah. So I think you're absolutely right. Right. That there has to be a different kind of messaging. It has to be a messaging that kind of bridges AOC kind of stuff with a traditional kind of attentiveness to the realities of race and how race over determines those working class issues in interesting sorts of ways. You're going to have to appeal to young folk in a very different way. But you know, you think about Kamala Harris's campaign or even Clinton, Hillary Clinton's campaign, they think that they can just trot out a whole bunch of celebrities. And that will be enough to turn black folk out. Yeah. And it's just not true. Or you just say people died for the vote. And that's enough to turn them out. That's just not true. And what we saw with Hillary Clinton's campaign to go back to 2016 is that the numbers just simply returned to 2004. She was expecting to get the historic turnout of the Obama years, and it is just reverted back to normal. You know, so the short answer, Tim, is that, yeah. I don't even like to see people try things totally different and throw things off the wall. I just think it's so crazy how conventional the thinking in it's like Barack Hussein, Obama and Donald Trump are our last two term presidents. And for some reason, everybody still is stuck in this very conventional mindset. And I'm here and I talked to Van Lathen last week out in LA and he's great. And his politics are also very AOC-ish, broadly speaking. I'm sure they have differences, right? But he also is very acknowledging of, you know, he's from Louisiana, he's from Baton Rouge. And he's like, you know, they're elements of the community that is conservative, right? Or that is out of step with, you know, maybe what like an elite, you know, Ivy League college progressive would want. And there needs to be like some kind of combination of these sorts of things. Like where you have this AOC-ish talk to working class concerns, but also, you know, there's some different type of messaging on social concerns and different types of language, you know, than what you might see from an Elizabeth Warren platform. Like it's people are complicated. We are complicated. You're absolutely right. You know, what we say are progressive issues. The folk don't want to go broke because they're sick. That folk want to work 40 hours a week and be able to put a roof over their head, put food on the table, right? That they want to be able to send their kids to affordable schools and the like, so that they can have a better life than them. The stuff that we think of as far right, right? And, you know, there was a whole, whole Pew research data point that said, if you control for race, black folk as conservative as Mormons. Yeah, but that conservatism, because I'm conservative in a certain way. I got a T.S. Eliot streak in me, right? But it doesn't map onto political ideological behavior, but it's just certain ways in which I was raised. I'm raised Catholic on the coast of Mississippi. Damn, right? So, so part of what I'm, I think if, you know, you can't use no labels because, you know, you know how that goes. But part of what you're suggesting to me, right, is that, you know, people are complicated that they, one day they sound like, you know, a conservative Republican, the next day they sound like a progressive Democrat, because what they're trying to do is to live the best lives that they can for the people they love. Period. I want to end with Baldwin, because I'm with you. I'm with you and all that. There's a sphere of Baldwin. It was one, he wrote this letter to Faulkner. Remember that one that I really liked, I liked the American South Pierce should read that. There's this quote in your book that is kind of an echo of the same message that he was, he was offering in that, and I want to read it. To be an American Black is to be in this situation, intolerably exaggerated of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization, which they could in no ways honorably defend, which they were compelled indeed to endlessly attack and condemn, and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Yeah, yeah. Democracy at its best. Democracy at its best is a disinterested form of love. You don't have to be a member of my family. You don't have to be a member of someone that I love deeply. It's just, I want good for you. Right? So I want to take love of country out of the abstract and bring it down to the ground. I love the folk here, the folk who make this place possible. And it seems to me in this moment, we have to dare to imagine the country anew based upon that love. And I got something from my student in my Baldwin seminar. She says, maybe it's not hope that we need. Maybe what we need to do is just simply tell the truth with love, lit by rage, and maybe that will open the door for a new way of us being together. I really like that. So we'll just leave it there. Eddie Glaude, I appreciate you very much, man. It's good to see you. America, USA, How Race, Shadows, The Nation's Anniversary is out today. Go get it. Good luck on the book tour. We'll see you soon, man. Thank you, man. I appreciate you so much. I love that holla. All right. Oh yeah, that's my guy. All right, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show. We'll see y'all then. Peace. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer, Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. I'm Elizabeth Derrico from Chicago, Illinois. I'm a Borg subscriber because I believe in truth. I believe in honesty and I believe in integrity. The Borg has been a beacon for me in very troubled times to uphold the values of liberal democracy that I hold dear. And it helps me fight and it helps me understand the present moment and take action to ensure the future. Join because the Borg work is not run by a bunch of oligarchs. You are supporting people who are dedicated to the notion of a free press as a bulwark against tyranny. Join the bulwark community as a bulwark plus member. Right now you can access everything on the bulwark's website for 50% off your membership for the next year. Head over to the bulwark.com slash sanity. That's the bulwark.com slash sanity.
