Democracy is the sum of us

Heather McGhee made her career in pushing for economic policy changes at the think tank Demos. But she couldn't help but feel that something was missing from her work. So she embarked on a cross-country road trip to understand what's at the heart of what ails America's economy and our democracy. The result is her book The Sum of Us, which she joins us to talk about in this episode.

In the book, McGhee explores what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. She details how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

Finally, she offers examples of how this paradigm is changing in communities across the country when people work across differences to achieve a shared goal.

At the beginning of the episode, we reference our conversation with Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the architects of the Green New Deal.

‍Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.

Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Heather McGhee, formerly of the think tank Demos, and the author of the book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather spoke at Penn State recently, as part of a lecture series from our colleagues in the Rock Ethics Institute's. And this book has been out for a while I'm sure the title will be familiar to many of our listeners. But I think the lessons she gives in her story certainly are certainly worth sharing today. And I think that we all thought a bit about our conversation with Rihana Gunn-Wright, I'll link in the show notes if you haven't listened to that. But there are definitely some similarities between the paths that Rihana and Heather took to the work that they're doing,

Michael Berkman
Just to remind people Rihana Gunn-Wright, as a climate activist who worked on the green New Deal, and she talked about how her, you know, the physical experience of growing up in an area where there were no parks and where things were obviously not maintained, and just being exposed to sort of inequities in climate and environment, and propelled her into the kind of activist work she did, in terms of climate change. And environmentalism, see a very similar thing with Heather McGee and talking about the economic situation in which she grew up. And in that she saw what also strikes me about each of them is how they went so deeply in their careers and in their writing into thinking about policy, the importance of public policy and what we can learn by really studying public policy closely.

Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, I would also say, and I think having McGee does a really great job of really pinpointing the ways in which our common sense, needs to be troubled, and kind of unpacked both the patterns that we see at a particular moment in time, and then by expanding through history, we see that the thing that we have become very used to that we talk to as if it's always been that way it hasn't, and that there are other moments in history where we had opportunities to broaden a social safety net, where we had a kind of orientation toward what the government is supposed to do, toward, you know, whose votes mattered. And, of course, you know, not to not to romanticize the era before civil rights. But there there are things that she picks up on about what we think you know, what an average American thought the government should do. And that just because someone hold on, let me say this, not romanticize the pre civil rights era. But there are things that she notes that Americans had a different common sense about what the government owed to its citizens and what its responsibility was, to its citizens in a way that we don't think about now. And I think similarly, and not to just keep drawing a parallel between her and Rihanna. But like the green New Deal, suggests that we could think differently. And having Ricky's work shows that there are moments in time when we have very different orientations, towards questions of democracy, of economics, of labor, of well being of social welfare policies, and so on.

Michael Berkman
But even with that, I mean, as I as I read her and listen to her, I hear her saying that, even though there were periods of time, where we thought more in community terms more, more in ways that government can act in everybody's interest. racism still was pervasive in public policies. So even if you look at these periods, where I think she would say that there was this sort of sentiment among the public, the New Deal, or the Great Society during the 1960s, each of those, you know, public policy was really structured by racial politics and by out and out racism, but she really does a wonderful job throughout the book of developing this idea of these big grand public pools. That at one point represented this sort of communal interest in providing something for everybody in the community but they They were segregated. And when they had to be desegregated, they were filled in instead. And that her central point here with this metaphor, is to say that we can't have nice things. Because if black people are going to be involved, too, then we may as well take it away from everybody.

Candis Watts Smith
Right. The other part is that we could have very well turn left instead of right. And my students would not be surprised by the fact that beautiful pools existed for the public, that the government cared enough to build these things for average citizens to enjoy for free.

Jenna Spinelle
Yes, and there's, there's certainly a pattern here to have. I'm thinking about, you know, the episode we did with Derek black on public schools, we've covered this, you know, erosion of public goods and the why can't we have nice things, or this is why we can't have nice things and several ways on the show previously.

Candis Watts Smith
Yeah. So I think one thing to just pull out there is that this strategy, to segregate schools by privatizing is, has almost become just kind of a way that we do things. So when we look at the politics around voucher systems, for example, or creating or not creating public parks, or we can go on and on or even about, like giving the state giving states power over Medicaid, and TANF, these things were all rooted in racist strategies to prevent the dismantling of Jim Crow, racial segregation and hierarchy. But over time, we have just gotten many people have gotten caught up in the this is just how things are done. Without knowing the background of it, we kind of move through life as if this is the way that we just do things. And so what I appreciated about The Sum of Us and having Ricky's work is to show that the patterns that we see the policies that we see, that seems so common sense. Yeah, a voucher program makes sense. We don't like public schools, let's just give the money to parents to go to private school. We've seen that before, to uphold a racial high, you know, a racist society. And we don't use that rationale anymore. But they often tend to have the same effects. We're really just kind of shining a light on the history so that we can see how these patterns re emerge, even under different auspices, or to the same ramifications.

Jenna Spinelle
And she also does a nice job of showing ways that these now familiar patterns are being broken in some ways larger than others, and in in certainly some isolated cases. But I think she also makes the case, as you'll hear in the interview, that this is all, you know, a broader scale change is within our reach. We're just stuck in a failure of imagination right now. So I know both of you have more to say about how there's work in this book. But let's go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle
Heather McGhee, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Heather McGhee
Thanks for having me.

Jenna Spinelle
So, I'd like to start before we talk about some of your work with some of the experiences that maybe helped form your political identity and some of the perspectives that you bring to the work that you do. You write about, you know, growing up in an all black neighborhood and then going to a predominantly white boarding school and then coming of age politically in the 90s and the era of maybe peak neoliberalism and those sorts of things. I wonder if you could just give our listeners an introduction to some of those events and and how they have shaped the way that you think about race and economics and politics.

Heather McGhee
Well, happy to so I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1980s. In a time where that very thick working and middle class black neighborhood was really under siege and it was the beginning of what would be the sort of dismantling of the kind of pillars of solid family life and economic life. there between the deindustrialization that caused so many factory closings, the budget cuts, where there were so many public sector workers in the black community, because historical discrimination had sort of, you know, been rendered illegal there first before the private sector. And I was the kind of kid growing up who would ask a lot of why questions. I know because I now have that kind of kid myself. And I was lucky because my parents were the kind of parents who would give me systemic answers and political answers and have me think deeper about the frankly, the narratives that we were seeing in the media. By the time I was a teenager, it was the era of the welfare reform debates. And, you know, a lot of the conversation was about, you know, kind of neighborhoods like mine, and families like mine, and my family's. And my families like mine, and my friends being the problem, you know, black single mothers and all of that, and I just didn't buy it, it really didn't track with what I saw in my community, which is, if you're going to bet on anybody in the world, you should be betting on a black single mother to be able to save the world and in make blood out of a turnip and all of that. And, and so I was agitated. As a young, you know, as a teenager, and I was interested in public policy, I was interested in the economy, I was interested in figuring out who was making decisions that was making it easier or harder for some families to get ahead, and I wanted to be at the table. And so I was lucky to get an entry level job at an economic and democracy Think Tank, when I was 22 years old.

Jenna Spinelle
And this is this is a very broad question. But you know, what, what you just said there? I'm interested to see where it takes us. How do you think about the relationship between economics and democracy? And how has that maybe changed over time?

Heather McGhee
Yeah, I mean, this was a big question. It was a strategic question for my organization. Deimos, we were founded on the idea that inequality in our democracy in our economy were inextricably linked. And it was sort of an intellectual pursuit of the founders of the organization to figure out kind of really what that meant, and how you saw evidence of it in the day to day and by the time I was in leadership of the organization, we'd really figured out by using some some wonderful research by political scientists, that there is a real feedback loop, that the economic inequality that's created by the class gaps in turnout. And in voting, as well as of course, the system of money and politics, have really verifiable facts on the decisions that our lawmakers make. And so people like Larry Bird tells and Ben page, these are political scientists who did research in the mid 2000s, late 2000s, for a second of the 2000s really showing that the more money you have, the more impact you had, and that the donor class as a whole had an incredible policy return on their investments. In the political system, where as for example, the lowest third of the income distribution had no independent ability to change policy at all right, if it didn't align with wealthier people's interests. And so that helped to explain a lot of the economic policymaking that was going on in a bipartisan fashion at this time, that was really allowing the minimum wage to stagnate that was continuing to pursue a trade policy that benefited multinational corporations and decimated workers that was willing to see union stay under attack and not update labor laws and, and on and on and on, and, of course, most importantly, to keep taxes on the wealthy, extremely low by historical terms. And and by comparative terms.

Jenna Spinelle
So to take that and bring in what is a key part of the thesis from your book, The Sum of Us how does the idea of the zero sum mentality that you describe in the book fit with this picture you've just articulated?

Heather McGhee
Well, I really felt I have to say once we had kind of been able to do a big kind of signature report at Deimos that laid out the relationship between inequality and of democracy in our economy. I felt like we had really we figured it out. Right. This report was called stacked deck. It was really well designed with this great graphic designer. We did a lot of donor briefings to foundations and people who fund nonprofits like ours. We did lots of legislative testimony and presentation on it. It just felt like Okay, we really we figured out the whole darn system, you know, but there was this sort of nagging feeling for me, which was, there's some part of this that's missing. And the part of that this that's missing, really, in some ways goes back to the rhetoric that I grew up with the political rhetoric that I grew up with. And how raise had been this kind of silent actor, in every single conversation about the soak scope and size of government that had ever happened in politics in my life, from Reagan, to Clinton, to, you know, Gingrich, and certainly through the Obama era, where, you know, research really demonstrates that the kind of figure of government in particularly the imagination of white voters became very racialized, and then became a new layer of voters, positions on issues that are not at first blush, racial issues, but really economic issues, questions about the size and role of government, about social programs and who we are and who we are to one another. And what people deserve, really became highly racialized and partisan structure became highly racialized, and there was sort of a splitting, it was like, if you liked a joke, it's like you became someone who had more progressive as we now think about it, policy ideas and more of a Democrat, basically, if you liked the Obamas, would want to hang out with somebody like them. And if you didn't, there was something about them that rubbed you the wrong way, then you became more conservative on things that maybe weren't that ideological previously. And that's a very kind of simplistic way of putting it, but at the same time, it's kind of true, right? You saw white voters, you know, move to the Democratic Party and become much more progressive on both economic issues, but also on racial issues. And, and this factor known as racial resentment, which is the idea of this sort of narrative that it is a zero sum, that progress for people of color is a threat to white people has to come at their expense, there's sort of just a fixed pie of well being in the US and you, you and your group need to get a bigger slice. And that will mean yes, that other groups will get a smaller slice that whole narrative, that story that says there's this hierarchy, and we you know, we really did sort of jealously guard our our groups place in it is one that became a lot louder in political discourse, particularly in conservative politics in conservative talk radio, and this sort of zero sum us versus them. It's not just about taxes, it's about America, and who's in and who's out and our way of life. And this isn't just about health care. This is about, you know, destroying the American, you know, the American idea, right, that that really began to reveal to me that there was something else going on that race was a bigger actor. And so I set out on what would become a three year journey to find out what racism was costing us the extent of racism and our politics and our policymaking. And that would end up becoming the book for The Sum of Us.

Jenna Spinelle
I want to pause on on The Sum of Us story for a minute and talk a little bit about the world of think tanks and nonprofits. You mentioned that, you know, you had this big report from Deimos, and you gave presentations to foundations and people who fund nonprofits. And I wonder how much, you know, thinking about the work of ananka Das, and some others who sort of take aim at this nonprofit industrial complex, so to speak. And I guess I wonder, as someone who has been in that world, how much do you think that those structures impede progress on the issues that you are so diligently and passionately working on?

Heather McGhee
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I think that we need more civic engagement, more dollars going into institutions that are durable, that help everyday people get involved in our democracy that help them see the connections between their problems, and public solutions. And so I actually don't think that the quote unquote, nonprofit industrial complex is an impediment to a thriving democracy. And I've seen times when it's, you know, a few think tanks and a couple scholars on a phone call are the only thing you know, keeping Wall Street reform intact, right? I've seen more often when think tanks, research and expertise is ignored at great consequence to our economy and to our society. So I don't I actually don't really buy that, you know, if we just say stopped letting wealthy foundations and individuals you know fun nonprofit organizations, things would be better. But I do think we need more of the other stuff. More grassroots citizen funded organizations, more labor unions with strength, right, that are funded independently by working people with an agenda around working people. I think that's more of the problem than too much or nefarious kind of nonprofit Think Tank infrastructure.

Jenna Spinelle
So to get back on track with with The Sum of Us, there's this kind of parable of not not a parable, because it's true. And it happened the drain pool for listeners who might not be familiar with that story, tell us what that is and how it ties back to that zero sum idea you were talking about earlier.

Heather McGhee
Yeah, it'd be to. This really became sort of an obsession of mine. On my journey to write The Sum of Us, which was a it was a literal journey, I traveled uncounted and tallied miles across the country. And one of the things that I stumbled upon was this phenomenon of towns and cities that used to have lavish well funded grand resort style public swimming pools, that were part of a building boom of public goods in the 1930s and 40s, part of the sort of New Deal era of public goods, both, you know, public roads, bridges, library schools, pools, but also economic public goods, like Social Security, and a massive investment in housing, the GI Bill, right, the Wage and Hour and labor laws of the New Deal, right? All of these public goods have to build a strong middle class and in some ways, the well funded, beautiful free public swimming pool is just kind of a glittering reflection of this good life, right. And what I discovered was that usually these public swimming pools were for much of the 20th century segregated, even in places like Pennsylvania, and Boston and Chicago, that you wouldn't normally think, would have this kind of Jim Crow style segregation. And that once communities, black communities, communities of color, and their allies sued to integrate public swimming pools, many towns and cities across the country, not just in the Jim Crow South, were willing to destroy their public pools rather than integrate them. They would literally drain out the water, backup truckloads of dirt and gravel. And this phenomenon of the drained pool being a cost to the public, of racism and the the literal willingness to destroy something rather than share it, this zero sum thinking that if it's not entirely mine, then if I share it, somehow, that makes me worse off something good for you is worse off makes me worse off. You know, that kind of thinking, which led to actual pool closures across the country, is something that political scientists also picked up in our politics, in the wake of the civil rights movement. And you saw a massive ideological shift away from collective solutions, the kind of New Deal thinking about government's role in ensuring a decent standard of living for people, once the people included all the people, right, not just the the white majority. And so I do believe that that was a really important predicate. That integration and the resistance to integration, the triumph of zero sum thinking over collectivism, once the collective was truly multiracial, was one of the predicate for the rise of neoliberalism. Right? So if you drain the public pools, then you have private backyard pools. Right. And, and so you began to see the shift from the New Deal kind of coalition among the majority of white voters that of course, has remained today, right. The majority of white voters haven't voted for Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil rights and Voting Rights Act.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, I mean, we see it in private schools, other spaces that used to have public things I you know, we've talked on the show before that the library, the public library may be one of the last kind of bastions of this although it too is is facing its its share of challenges, but the thinking was not always this way. You also cite some research and polling from the late 50s, early 60s about the people used to have even the kind of median white voter using air quotes had much more radical views about what role the government should play in the this notion of public goods.

Heather McGhee
That's right. That's exactly right. There really I mean, you can just think about kind of what the New Deal program was the unfinished work of the New Deal you know, FDR is second address which said, you know, we need a an economic Bill of Rights and it was a guarantee of housing and all have that and he was wildly popular with the majority of white voters and, and there's a study the a NES that I cite in the book, which which shows that almost 70% of white voters in 1956 and 1960 supported a federal job guarantee, and a universal basic income. And that's kind of, you know, impossible to contemplate today that 70% of white voters would be in that place. And, and by the time the 1964 poll was fielded, you'd really seen a sharp decline in support for those ideas of government having such a robust role once government began to go from being the enforcer of the racial hierarchy to the sometimes and often reluctant, but up Ender of the racial hierarchy, right, and government became to be seen as a force that should be distrusted, right. And that, of course, became a part of the corporate classes, agenda, their political agenda, to drive a wedge between white voters and the very idea of government very idea of public things, public schools, public solutions, taxes, regulation, etc. But of course, you know, the bottom line here is who really benefits from that drained pool politics, right? White families don't get to swim in the public pool, either. Right? If you, you know, the only people who benefit are people can go to country clubs, right? Which cropped up all over the country after after the wake of public pool integration, right? So it's that that parable, which really shows that it's really the the wealthy and well connected who benefit from a middle class white voter, being willing to go on their own instead of seek common solutions to their common problems with people who might be of different backgrounds.

Jenna Spinelle
And I mean, there you also give examples in the book of people who are seeking common solutions to common problems with people who are of different backgrounds. Tell us about the community of Lewiston, Maine and what you observed there. Yeah, so

Heather McGhee
The third big idea in the book, beyond the zero sum racial thinking and the drained pool politics is, is the idea that I end on I in most of the chapters with a kind of hopeful example of something I call a solidarity dividend. And I actually would, I went on after the book was published to to create a documentary style podcast also called The Sum of Us, which is exclusively about solidarity, dividends, because they felt like, you know, we need to pay a lot more attention to this hopeful story that's happening in every corner of our country, if you just look for it. And so the idea of a solidarity dividend is, is a game that people can unlock, but only by coming together across lines of race. And Lewiston, Maine is one of the you know, smaller cities in Maine, which is our, the whitest state in the nation. And it was a dying mill town, the same kind of town that, you know, most people are familiar with, with deindustrialization and population loss, and you began to see, you know, the diseases of despair. And all of that was a familiar story of decline of a, you know, almost entirely white, small town. And what towns like that really need are new people, right to stop the kind of circling of the drain and, and that happened by an accident of history. But those new people in a very kind of inward looking town, ended up being African Muslim refugees and immigrants and the stories of those everyday people from Maine who are white, and who, you know, had very little in common on so many levels with folks who had fled from Sudan and the Congo, you know, in other places, really, it tell stories, both in the book in the podcast of white and African folks finding a way to help each other that can really address some of the things that are plaguing small towns, whether it's the loss of family farms, which I talked about in the podcast, or the very idea of of loneliness and isolation, which is the example that I give in the book as well as healthcare because it was a real multiracial coalition, anchored in the towns with more diverse new Mainers that was able to help win a ballot initiative in 2017, I believe, to win the Medicaid expansion that had been vetoed five times by a governor who used really racist rhetoric to justify cutting welfare. You know, it's like these illegals and these drug dealers are coming here for welfare and so that's why we have to cut it and of course, if you cut welfare in the state of Maine, which is over 90%, white, you know who's getting hurt, right? It was a very clear drain pool. Politics, but a multiracial coalition was able to unlock the solidarity dividend of better health in Maine.

Jenna Spinelle
So to to unlock those solidarity dividends, it seems to me you need both a culture where these, you know, cross racial, maybe cross other kinds of divides can thrive. But you also need the structure to help enact that change. In some cases, it's a ballot measure, in some cases, it's things that happen at the at the local level. So how do you think about the interplay between culture and structure when it comes to making change?

Heather McGhee
Yeah, that's a really good question, as I'm sort of ticking through the solidarity dividend and liberal a hold on one second. That is a good question. As I'm sort of filing through the solidarity dividend examples in my head, a number of them were ballot initiatives or multiracial coalition's that were able to provide democracy right to the people and sort of circumvent the powerful. And then I think of some examples where a community where democracy, the structures of democracy made it very challenging, where you could have community organizing, which is what it really is at the, at the heart of it. But you know, you could have structures at the local level that were really resistant to change. And a couple of examples, the local leadership was the most resistant to change, and activists needed to go to the county or the state in order to win fairness, and justice. So it's, it's actually interesting, it's, it's not a it's not a kind of obvious formula, one size fits all. But almost by definition, every single time, people try to come together to change things at a significant scale, they have to interact with decision makers, they have to have some lever to pull. And we have a very complicated system, right. And so there are ways you can align it to make local people more powerful. And to align our structures democracy more towards justice and fairness. And then there are ways you can gum up the works and make it really hard for things to change for the better.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So you you say in the in the book that you are fundamentally a hopeful person, you certainly as you've said, Here, just today, you tell lots of hopeful stories. I wonder, what makes you What's making you feel hopeful today? And maybe what's next for you? What is the next chapter of The Sum of Us or what other projects you might be working on?

Heather McGhee
Thanks for the question. Yeah, I'm hopeful most of the time, I'm hopeful fundamentally, because I know that decisions made the world that we are living in today, and better decisions can make a better world. I'm hopeful because I've had a discipline for the past number of years of really focusing on the overlooked stories, in places, you know, that are themselves overlooked in rural Maine and small town, Nevada, and, you know, Memphis, Tennessee, and, you know, coastal towns in California places where, you know, everyday citizens are doing extraordinary work. Where the energy of the summer of 2020, which you saw, you know, both this renewed focus on racial inequality, and this sense of connectedness that came from the shared experience of the pandemic, and the lock downs, where that spirit of Okay, actually, we the people decide, and our country has been to a degree that, you know, has not been taught to most of us in our schools, our country has been structured in order to create a racial hierarchy, but we don't want it to be and that spirit is alive and well. And so that makes me really happy and optimistic. And in fact, the the next thing I'm going to be writing is is a book about solutions and about where communities can go to repair to heal from the past to create more equitable structures, looking at so many incredible examples from overlooked places in the US and also places in other societies around the world that have had to deal with how do you come together as a country despite your differences and despite the trauma from factionalism, separatism, racism war in the past?

Jenna Spinelle

So one last question, so I too, as we were chatting before we started recording have spent a lot of time with some of these local stories and I think share your sense of hope again, for the most part, but you as as I was doing this work I'm curious if you share this it's like you can kind of feel sometimes like you're Am I just burying my head in the sand here like I'm around all of this positivity and all these good things happening locally. But meanwhile, if you turn on national news, it's like, democracy is still a dumpster fire. So it's portrayed. So I wonder how you think about that contradiction?

Heather McGhee
Well, I do work for and talk about big structural dysfunction, right, I think it's important for us to walk and chew gum at the same time, right? For us to know that these structures that were set up in our society to privilege a small group of people over working and middle class people of all races. They were made for a reason. And they're trying to be upheld by a narrow, self interested elite. And that's real. And you see that in so much of the policymaking and so much of the democratic structures that simply are not what our country deserves. But you can't fight for change, if the only thing you see is a narrative that says it's always been this way, and it's always going to be this way. We need the sources of inspiration, like your podcast, or the people decide, like The Sum of Us podcasts, like the book that say, actually, throughout history, we've always had people fighting against an economic status quo. We've always had people willing to, to link arms and do extraordinary things. And those people have usually just been ordinary people, right? A sharecropper, a seamstress, a preacher, right? Those are the kinds of people who have shaped history for the better. And it's always been a struggle. But I think if we let our media ecosystem be dominated by bad news, then we miss out on the inspiration that can happen for the next incredible leader who is somewhere out there, listening for reasons to hope and to get involved.

Jenna Spinelle
Heather, that is a fantastic note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Heather McGhee
Thank you.

Michael Berkman
Jenna, that was a terrific interview. And yeah, I really enjoyed seeing Heather in person. And here again, on your interview, Candace, you said that you use this book in your class, you talk a little bit about that, like, why, what kind of reviews did you get? What was your thinking?

Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, we had a lot of fun. It was a class on racial attitudes and American politics. And you know, the premise of the class was just to help students recognize how expressions of racial animus evolve over time. And so this book, I thought, really kind of paying a lot of the goals of that class, the students are Gen Zers. And very, you know, this is a generation that really wants to do something, and they want to see change. So their, their reviews were mostly positive, and then their constructive reviews, I think, or I think they asked questions. So on the, you know, they were really, they really, as I mentioned, we're really enthralled by this idea of these beautiful public spaces that don't really exist anymore. So they really took in, you know, idea that there are ways that people just used to have a different way of thinking about what's the role of government and what it is that could be done so that the kind of trends in public policy and how we moved out of, you know, this great society, excuse me, New Deal state, which yes, was completely racialized, but also, like, in an air invoke democracy, like the parts that were good for White folks. Like, what if we did that for everyone all the time, like, just it's mind blowing? I think on the other side of their kind of questions they had was, Who is this book for? Because it is premised on the idea that racism hurts us all that drain pool politics hurts us, all. Right, that filling in the pool means that white folks can't get it. Black folks can't get it. privatizing schools means that rich white folks can get it. Poor white folks and black folks cannot get certain things. And so, you know, there's something to like, yes, that is true. But they were just kind of like, well, why does the wellbeing of white folks have to be centered to make an anti racist argument? And so we kind of, you know, that's the question of like, who's the audience of this book? Who were we trying to bring along? But I do think that overall, the idea of the solidarity dividend was something that they wanted to think through Who is responsible for initiating the work required to make sure that we have cross racial movements, who has to do the work the hard work of bringing along the other group who is responsible for cleaning up this mess that that we've been living in and that some people have benefited from?

Michael Berkman
I'm really intrigued by their thinking about, they're surprised that we used to do these things like that we're used to bring the build these poles and I was thinking of last night, and our listeners will will hear this in a few weeks, I'm sure that we had a David Hogg, the young gun rights activist from Parkland was here, and he's probably a little older than your students. But similar, similar generation. And one thing he kept saying, of course, for him largely in the context of why we don't have some control had to do with this, I guess, we sent people to the moon, obviously, we can do this right, we did this. And it was like going back to all these big projects that we had done. And everything. Yes, we have. But these days, it's a, it really is very difficult to imagine any kind of large public works projects. And think about where we were the debate has gone in, like, what, three days around the bridge in Baltimore, that President Biden got out there. And you know, I mean, it's a major port affects the whole country, and we got to rebuild this bridge, we're going to rebuild this bridge, and then immediately conservatives like, what's this we business? It's not our bridge, why are we going to rebuild this bridge, let them rebuild their own bridge. And, you know, the whole idea of interstate highways out of these huge public works projects, we have the obviously technical know how to do it, but we have lost political knowledge or what political will to all be able to work together and the system is so polarized, that it's it from where I sit, almost impossible to imagine, these days. It's sad that our students recognize this actually, that, that it is so hard to imagine the country pulling together for large projects anymore.

Candis Watts Smith
I think that's the part that's hard to imagine, I think that they can really think through what kind of world they want to live in. They want to live in a world that they can go outside, and that, you know, people who live on barrier islands or islands or whatever aren't being aren't, you know, their homes aren't going to be brushed over by the next hurricane or tornado or whatever. Right? I mean, they have an idea about living in a world where, you know, their younger sisters and brothers don't have to learn what an active shooter drill is, and to be nonchalant about it. So the kind of ideas that imagination is there. It's the how to get there. That is the tricky part.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to think of large public project, either. I mean, I'm sort of moving in the direction of public works, but we're talking more broadly about large public projects that would benefit the public, whether that be climate change, or education or, or anything like that, but they just, it's just, it's not in their memory, to think of times when that is happening. And the times that it does happen.

Candis Watts Smith
I mean, I think, but again, why Heather's book is really important. And what's good for them is because I think they have a sense of, it doesn't have to be like this. But more importantly, it hasn't always been this way. And so that means that there is a way to think through and, you know, she does give us these examples of when there are successes. I mean, you know, we were just talking about Desmond Meade earlier today before the pod started. But the work that Desmond Meade and his team did in Florida, I think, was an unimaginable for many formerly incarcerated people for a very long time. But through grassroots efforts and a lot of hard work. And there still is pushback. But there was a success, and it had to be cross racial, because, you know, you needed many Floridians to get on board to extend the rights of formerly incarcerated people as an example. So yeah, I guess I guess we're saying the same thing is that it is hard. But if we and this is why Heather's future work is going to be really important and is to show when things do go well. That way, perhaps, maybe we just need more good news. More often.

Michael Berkman
That is a much more upbeat note to end on. Well, Qantas, this has been a terrifically interesting book today. discuss with you from from Democracy Works. I'm Michael Berkman.

Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening.

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