Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright, and you're listening to our new midweek show. We've given it a name -- On the Call because it's basically me calling up people I think are smart about politics and trying to get help keeping up with this suddenly very exciting election. This week On the Call, Anand Giridharadas. He's the author, most recently, of The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age, and his substack newsletter, The Ink, where he and the people he's been talking to are making the case that the Harris campaign has taken us in a fundamentally new direction for the Democratic Party when it comes to doing politics in the modern world. I want to talk to him about that. Anand, welcome back to our show.

Anand: Thank you so much for having me back. I usually only get invited places once, so this is good.

Kai Wright: Now, that is distinctly not true, but I'm flattered. In the moments after Harris announced Tim Walz as her VP choice, you fired off some thoughts to The Ink subscribers that were, to me, a tidy summation of the interesting and compelling case that you guys have been making about Harris in that space. You made it a six-point list. I'm going to just actually walk through those points because I just think it already summed it up for me. I'm going to start with the second one, which is the most striking. This idea that she understands the attention economy in which we live. Explain that point because it just feels so crucial to what we've seen over the last three weeks.

Anand: It sometimes takes a lot of time to realize you're living in a different era than the era you thought you were living in, or the era you were trained in your profession in. Everybody who is an interviewer like you, or a politician, or a writer like me, was not trained yesterday. We were trained in another time. Sometimes it just takes a second to realize that the whole way in which things work, politics works, media work, has changed. I think one of the fundamental things that has changed in your and my lifetime is attention. The nature of attention, the economy of attention, how attention works in media, how attention works if you're in politics. A lot of us are catching up.

What you've had happen is, sadly, the far right in this country, the authoritarians, but not just in this country, by the way, around the world, have been smarter to realize the shifting dynamics of attention in the modern world, have been quicker to realize that they who command attention own the conversation. To command attention, once you realize that that's really important and that getting 25 million people in the evening news is no longer how things work, but that being able to grab and then hold attention is crucial, it actually changes how you operate. Donald Trump saying "build the wall" is really dumb policy, but it's very smart from an attentional lens.

Whereas comprehensive immigration reform is a tougher thing to sell from an attentional point of view. In the last many years, I have been banging the drum about, look, the Republicans, the far right, are very smart about attention. With a few exceptions, like AOC, Democrats have generally just not even really been interested in the economy of attention or the politics of attention. There's almost this pride in doing the worthy thing, doing the work, building the bridges, talking about wonky things, and trusting that the higher selves of voters will reward those things, will study inflation tables and be thankful to Grandpa Joe.

That's just not how people work. It's certainly not how people work in today's attention economy. I think what you've seen in the last two weeks of the Harris campaign, including with the selection and rollout of Walz, is a campaign that for the first time in my lifetime is centering the imperatives of attention. Understand--

Kai Wright: It's been Donald who? I can't remember a time in the last, honestly, since he rode down that escalator in 2015 or whatever it was in Trump Tower to announce his movement. I can't think of a time when I've heard less about and from Donald Trump than the last three months.

Anand: That is so powerful because part of what happens with someone like Trump is there's two different ways to respond to someone like him. The dominant one, the one we're all tempted to do, is reaction and response. He says crazy things, he does crazy things, and we're all pouncing over it. The NABJ, National association of Black Journalists event. We're all just hyping it and talking about it. We're criticizing it. If you step back, we're talking about him, we're having his conversations, we're airing his ideas.

I always say to folks, if Donald Trump or some other MAGA leader says immigrants are animals and then you and I are like, "Immigrants are not animals." On a formal level, we're right that immigrants are not animals. We've taken the correct position. The problem is, you and I have unwittingly consented to participate in a conversation about the animalness of immigrants. That is a conversation I'd actually don't want to have. That's a conversation that any second it is being had is a bad second. I think, again, Democrats have not understood this point as well. Whose conversation are you having? You're right.

We had this piece at The Ink called Donald Who?, which right after the vice president rolled out her surprise campaign, where she wasn't rebutting him or going toe to toe with him, even though she was. The fundamental thing that was going on was she was making him not the conversation. She was prosecuting her own case. He was a figure in it, a minor figure in the narrative. And she says often, here's a problem with Trump, but this campaign is not just about defeating Trump. It's also about fighting for your future. Democrats have had a tough time doing that two step, and that tough time seems to now be behind them under the leadership of Vice President Harris.

Kai Wright: Who knew? Another point on your list, the day after Walz's announcement was the one many of us are familiar with. Weirdness. It's related to this. Tim Walz leaned into it again in his speech Tuesday night when he was introducing himself. In that list you sent out, you said there's a nuanced point we have to understand about the way Tim Walz is using this attack that is important. What is that nuance?

Anand: Yes. First things first, I think it's really important. A lot of people are confused by both these things. They're confused whether it's a good idea, and they're worried about the deplorables echo from 2016.

Kai Wright: When Hillary Clinton called the MAGA movement "a basket of deplorables," and that was just used to beat her up for the rest of the election.

Anand: Let's take each of these things in turn. First of all, the strategic imperative behind dismissing these guys as weird is actually very real and very logical and based on some real political science. We often just as consumers of cable news, you don't necessarily realize all the people behind the scenes who are studying these things. This is an example of a thing that was really studied. Here's the logic. In moments of rising authoritarianism, you have to call out the other side as a strong man, a wannabe dictator, someone who's going to have all this force and power. It's important to do, but there is some risk in subconsciously building up that person at the same time.

People like strength. You keep calling someone a strong man, yes they may not like a strong man, but their brain is absorbing thousands of messages about the strength of this person. It's absorbing messages about a decisive toughness. When people are scared--

Kai Wright: Which is how we arrive at Donald Trump as this caricature of a decisive tough guy when there is nothing about his life or record that suggests either thing.

Anand: Exactly. When people are anxious, when people are wary of change, when people feel undefended by events, there is this gravitational to strengthen protection. One of the things Democrats found in 2020 was that there's some risk. You want to call out the strongman, but you don't want to make him seem like a Marvel action hero at the same time. It's complicated. This weird thing is perfect because you keep saying the strongman stuff, but you also point out that this is also just weird, fetishy stuff. It's not. Walz kept saying, "Who is sitting in the bar in Racine and asking for this stuff? Who wants this stuff?" That's really good because it connects.

They're doing authoritarian stuff that nobody wants. That's useful instead of just, "They're like father of the nation building it up." That's the first point. The second point is, is this dangerous because it risks showing what is dangerous in marriage and in politics, which is contempt. Contempt is a very, very, very bad emotion.

Kai Wright: Name calling.

Anand: And a kind of dismissal of people. Hillary Clinton really struggled, but that deplorable line, a lot of people thought it was a mistake in retrospect, I think this is not like that. As long as we listen to Tim Walz carefully, what he has said and many of his disciples in using this language have not been as careful as him. What he has said is you call the leaders weird. You never called followers weird. This is really, really important. You have to have a power lens. You have to recognize if you're treating Rupert Murdoch and your wayward uncle the same, you don't understand power.

Your uncle may be voting in ways that make you less safe, but Rupert Murdoch is strangulating democracy around the world. They're not the same. One of them, I would argue, is a victim of the other one of them, even though they may also be making your life harder through how they vote. Tim Walz has said many times, "These are our neighbors. These are my family members who are succumbing to the other side. These are my friends. These are people I grew up with." The leaders are weird and regular people are being manipulated.

I think that kind of, in a way, Democrats, I would argue, and I've said this in my book, The Persuaders, Democrats need to actually be more ferocious towards the leaders and more magnanimous towards the followers. I think right now they're in the suburbs on both. They're like not quite angry enough at the leaders, not quite calling out the leaders enough and sometimes reading as a little hostile to regular MAGA people. I have met enough MAGA people to know just regular, regular folks out there that it is very largely related to a mass media brainwashing epidemic in this country that has happened through Fox News and other outlets.

I think we have to be able to hold in our heads the notion that what they're voting for, what they believe is dangerous, but they are victims of very powerful billionaires who have spent billions of dollars trying to corrode their minds and have succeeded.

Kai Wright: That is difficult. I'm going to be honest, it is. At this stage in history, it is difficult for me to hold that idea.

Anand: Very difficult.

Kai Wright: We're a lot of years into this. I hear the point politically. Our communications part.

Anand: Those of us who want a more progressive future for the country, I think part of where we've fallen short is we don't actually realize how much we've already changed in this country. Progressives are very bad at taking credit for accomplishments because the personality is a kind of restless what's not yet done thing.

Kai Wright: Oppositional and [unintelligible 00:12:39]

Anand: Like good, that's fine. I don't know, it's so interesting. You rarely hear progressives talk about we've changed more in the status of women in this country and in many countries in the last 60 years than in the previous like 6,000 years. That's a lot. Just think about it, just that one issue. Then we've also changed a lot on race and demographics and who gets to belong and who gets to be American., what our default idea of ourselves is. We've changed a lot in technology. We're changing a lot because of climate. It is a lot.

Kai Wright: I have been alive where I was concerned as a gay man about being arrested for having sex. Like I have had that experience in my adult life.

Anand: Think about that. That's probably actually the single best example of a change, not just in law, but in the hearts of virtually everyone around you. It was bad in the bluest places in your and my lifetime. I think we sometimes forget we've achieved a lot, we've won a lot, we've moved people a lot. We've moved law a lot. Throughout history, when you move societies this much in this kind of burst of time, you will have some 15, 20, 30% of people engage in a backlash. While it is very painful and difficult, and I oppose what they want, if you step back, you say this is literally what a body politic would do.

A body politic subjected to these kind of pressures of change and growth and political dysfunction would erupt in welts like this. If we're a doctor looking at this, we're not shocked by what we're seeing. I think it's going to be really important for Democrats, therefore, to not just win on policy, not just win with excitement, although that's incredibly important what's happening right now. I think the real deeper level of our politics, where the new VP nominee in Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, comes through, is in actually demonstrating to a lot of those Americans who are still in that fetal position about the future, that they're going to be okay, that the future's actually fun, the food's going to be better.

Here's a 60 year old white guy who delights in having a Black woman as his boss, who delights in a joyous vision of a multiracial future, who delights in making sure all kids in his state can eat, who delights in standing up when he's a football coach for the gay-straight alliance in his school, recognizing, as the vice president, said last night, that a football coach, being the faculty advisor to that gay straight alliance, would have more power than like, I don't know, the theater teacher.

Kai Wright: This is '99, right?

Anand: Not exactly like the move.

Kai Wright: In rural Minnesota where he stood up and said, "I'll be the leader of that." Which is brings us to this other point you're getting at here but just to name it, that you brought up in the reaction to Tim Walz, this idea of him as a translator, that he is poised to be someone to translate these ideas about a multiracial democracy to a group of people who have been scared of it.

Anand: Yes. I think one of the really interesting things that's happened, and I would also invoke Joe Biden's name here. One of the really interesting dynamics that's happened in what I would call the Biden era has been some of this tension between progressives and more moderate people being resolved through this powerful synthesis where progressive goals could be achieved by moderates embracing them because they realized that there was a lot of energy and power around them, but moderates using their talents to strum very mainstream chords in defense of those ideas.

When you hear Joe Biden, for example, talking about ambitious climate stuff, it's a lot of stuff that AOC has championed and is very excited about. He may not talk about it as a Green New Deal or as any of those kinds of things. He talks about it as like, "There's nothing we can't do in this country. Any of you want to challenge me that there's something we can't do?" Now that's a very mainstream way to frame climate action. Look, I think often, again, progressives don't necessarily, they're better at narrow casting than broadcasting in part because of the structure of our politics, narrow districts where they win and represent.

I think you see in coach turned governor Walz, someone who had a moderate record in Congress, did a bunch of progressive things when he was a governor in Minnesota, but more importantly, is able to translate them into common sense. First of all, the things he's doing are actually just good. Like universal breakfast and lunch, that sounds good. I love both those meals. People, good luck trying to paint those kinds of things. Good luck trying to paint a sergeant major in the army as some radical dude. I'm sure the army just admits a bunch of communist radicals and promotes them all the way up the ranks. Good luck with that.

This is a guy who is able to make it seem like this is just taking care of our neighbors. The other thing I'll say is he's unapologetic. I've heard so many Democrats say since Vice President Harris stepped up, "Oh, well, she's going to have the San Francisco thing tied around her neck and it's going to be tough and she's going to have to defend, she's a San Francisco--" Then Democrats are like, "Oh, yes, well, San Francisco is a problem and she has the same." Tim Walz, I don't know if you saw this, he sat on the Ezra Klein Show a couple days ago, and he's talking.

He's like, "By the way, people always talk about San Francisco. I went to San Francisco for the first time in my life a few days ago, and I went for a 5-mile run around the presidio. I got to say, this is the most beautiful city in the world. This place is amazing. This place is incredible."

Kai Wright: Stop being so frigging defensive about--

Anand: Our country is beautiful. Stop being defensive. Stop being apologetic. San Francisco, yes, places have public policy problems from now and then. San Francisco is one of the most astonishingly beautiful places in the world. It has given the world so many ideas, so much culture, so much literature. The tech platforms we're all using come out of there whether you like them or not. Like, get a grip.

Kai Wright: Get a grip.

Anand: I think there's something there that I think is a very powerful complement to the vice president.

Kai Wright: Let's take a quick break and come back and wrap this up with a couple more things about Tim Walz, including the idea of him as a coalition pick. Stay with us.

[music]

Kai Wright: We've talked about all the things that the Tim Walz pick suggests that Kamala Harris understands the attention economy, that you need a translator for some of these ideas. Don't be so defensive. Another thing you pointed out that I think has gotten lost in the Tim Walz conversation is it was a very Joe Biden-y choice in the sense of building coalitions. Everyone pointed to Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro in terms of the cold, hard political calculus, and that Tim Walz was somehow the easy choice. There's another view here that he's actually the masterful choice from a coldheart political calculus because of the coalition building that he offers. Explain that.

Anand: I again, I want to invoke Joe Biden here, because I think in many ways, this is a continuation of what was very significant about Joe Biden and I would argue really grew out of Joe Biden's first chief of staff, Ron Klain, who I think physically assembled and held together a coalition through the power of respect and communication. This is a little told or untold story that I think will be told one day. Joe Biden was a historic moderate. He came in after two Bernie campaigns that had basically electrified the country, even though it didn't win, an Elizabeth Warren campaign, AOC, the squad, a wealth tax in the air. Then there was this kind of real coalescing around Biden that allowed him to win in 2020.

All the energy, all the joy, all the excitement in the party was on the progressive end. This in many ways could have been a big problem. If you win but all the fight, all the joy, all the excitement is in the losing faction of your party, it's a disaster potentially. What happened?

Kai Wright: It's the road to MAGA for the Republican Party.

Anand: Correct. You could have your own tea party or whatever. Latte party, whatever the equivalent of the left is. That didn't happen. I think it didn't happen for a few reasons. I think progressives like Bernie Sanders and AOC showed a real grown up, real politics savvy in fighting for their ideas but not allowing themselves to remain permanent oppositional activists. They got inside and got some of their stuff done. Bernie Sanders has had more influence under the Biden presidency than he has in his 40, 50-year political career. AOC, I think, is closer to this White House and has more respect from this White House and vice versa than I think a lot of people realize.

While also they were holding together Joe Manchin, et cetera, and Ron Klain as the chief of staff, really held a lot of that together, made lots of people feel respected, kept various people in the fold. What you now have in this election of Walz, I think, is a doubling down on that model. You can argue with people who are critical of Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, or not. We don't need to litigate that now. You can argue about people who didn't like Mark Kelly, senator from Arizona on the border or not. Again, you and I don't need to pick positions. The objective fact was there were significant schisms about some of the other choices.

It would be making some people delighted and other people not delighted, whatever you think of those positions. Walz was the only person who maybe didn't electrify as many people across, but actually no one had a problem with him. He was not offensive to any part of the coalition. By choosing him, I think it is a path of least resistance but that can sound like a boring thing. I think given the context of coalition I was trying to lay out, a path of least resistance means the vice president is choosing to continue the tradition and it's a new tradition of valuing the breadth of the Democratic coalition and the health of it and the relations of it above all, right?

Kai Wright: Which has always been its Achilles heel is the breath of the Democratic coalition [unintelligible 00:24:12].

Anand: Barack Obama is a brilliant, talented person who had his brand of politics. If you read his own memoir, his contempt for the left wing of his own party, his contempt for it, it comes out and people felt it. Under Bill Clinton, a lot of them felt like they might as well be under a Republican president. Cutting welfare and making all kinds of deals. This is new, and it takes so much work. Keeping AOC and Joe Manchin happy at the same time--

Kai Wright: Both of whom have celebrated Tim Walz's choice.

Anand: Then she tweeted yesterday or today, "Dems in an uncomfortable amount of array" referring to the comments about her and Manchin being on the same page. She and Manchin have been on the same page a lot in the last four years, and that's not because they're naturally on the same page. It's because there has been very careful curation of the pages put in front of them. I think the vice president has obviously been part of that work for the last four years, part of that coalitionist approach, I would call it. It seems to me she's really doubling down on it. Essentially, what it means at the bottom is you actually value what it takes to hold your people together, even if you don't agree with your people on all those things.

It's like any of us who have big families or spend time with your family at Thanksgiving. There is some trade-off between making the dish you absolutely want and keeping your family joyful. The coalitionist mindset says, "I would rather keep my family joyful than make my green beans spicy." I think that's a very, very powerful, and it's been a very effective idea in this time.

Kai Wright: All right, so these are all the great things about the now Harris-Walz ticket. There's no denying politically she's had a remarkable first few weeks of this campaign, but we don't live in a perfect world. She is not a perfect candidate. What are you concerned about in terms of either it's things that you've seen thus far or that you expect to see from the now Harris-Walz ticket, particularly in this lens of communicating, persuading, trying to sort of say, "We can turn the page from the MAGA moment and convincing enough people that that's true"?

Anand: A few things, I think what I'd like to see, there's a lot of economic pain and anxiety and concern, particularly around prices that is still out there. It cuts across every identity group. When you talk to regular folks of every background--

Kai Wright: Certainly me. Count me in.

Anand: Yes.

Kai Wright: Everything. It's too much money.

Anand: The price of eggs comes up more than war with Iran or whatever.

Kai Wright: Absolutely.

Anand: I think broadly, Democrats have not connected on this issue in the way they could. The things they have said are correct. They're not wrong about price gougers. They're not wrong that it's gotten better. They're not wrong that their policies have helped. I don't think I have yet heard anything pretty much from any Democrat that shows a real empathy for and kind of rage on behalf of people that matches their own feeling that doesn't gaslight them into, "It's better, it's better, it's better." That's very hard to do when you've been an incumbent in office as the vice president for three and a half years to channel that rage but not have it boomerang back on you.

She's going to need to find a way to, I think, amp up the seeing of people on that issue. A pain point, recognizing that what they've done is great but not enough, that people are really hurting. She talks about freedom a lot, that inflation cuts into your sense of freedom. It gives you less choices, less power.

Kai Wright: Absolutely.

Anand: Then she needs to tell a story about why that has happened, who has done that? All the price gouging and profiteering and monopolies and various other things that are behind that. Then tell a really evocative story about how she's going to break with and go beyond existing policy when it's her own White House to do something different that will really make a difference. I think that's a complicated story to tell. It's very--

Kai Wright: Because I don't know what it would be other than a very serious federal housing policy. I don't know what else.

Anand: I think it could be all those things. By the way, that's the kind of thing that people are hungering for and the cross-partisan stuff. Just having a lot of visual things you can see and touch and feel like, "I'm going to build a 20 million homes in this country. Here's how we're going to do that." Things on the level of the interstate highway system. Things that people can really feel and see their country being remade. That's big. Another thing is going to have to be a very ambitious economic policy agenda.

We're in the vibes moment and I've been a big advocate of Democrats talking less about policy and really connecting with people first. At some point, there's going to need to be a really bold agenda. I think the second term Biden agenda was good, was impressive, but about a quarter as bold as it could be. I'm not saying which ideas need to be at the fore or not. They have to do ideas that are consistent with their philosophy, but I would just say--

Kai Wright: Bigger and bolder is the point.

Anand: Bolder. Take whatever you want to do and multiply it by four. Take whatever Democrats normally do and multiply it by four. For example, the vice president has been talking a bunch about, let's make sure your medical debt can never be used on your credit score. How about we just get rid of people's medical debt?

Kai Wright: Great.

Anand: How about we create a healthcare system where medical debt is a-- Like in France, I don't think a lot of people have medical debt. In Germany, I don't think a lot of people have medical debt. In England, I don't think a lot of people have medical debt. In Spain, I don't think a lot of people have medical debt. Democrats sometimes get into this kind of small-bore area of, "Let's make sure your medical debt doesn't hurt you on your credit score," as opposed to, "Let's live in a world without medical debt." I would encourage her at every step of the way to do the bold, simple to understand thing and not be afraid of big policy swings.

Lastly, I would say she is someone who came out of-- I live in Brooklyn, New York. She's from Oakland, California, the Brooklyn of the West Coast. She has not had to address at the top of the ticket a general election audience in a center right country in a long time, maybe ever in this form, rather. I think she's going to need to go even further than she already has, and it's been exceptional already, but to really in the writing and in the rhetoric and the ideas strum some of the deepest, broadest American chords. You see little glimpses of it. Last night, she had an only in America riff.

I think she's done very little biography in these speeches. She's kind of reportedly quite averse to it. I think her biography is an extraordinary narrative of the American dream and the American story.

Kai Wright: Daughter of two immigrants who did well and sent her off. Then she claims her blackness through HBCUs and all these things.

Anand: Just as an aside, as I'm an Indian American and she's half, her mother was Indian. Her father's Black Jamaican. Of course, there's this whole controversy with Donald Trump trying to question her identity. I don't think. I haven't heard anybody talk about this, and I'm thinking about writing something about this. It's really interesting having someone who is biracial being specifically Indian and Black. Here's why it's interesting. I think, in a way, these are two of the most powerful stories in the history of this country merged together in one person.

In a way, the Black American story is a story of this country having these great ideals that it lied about and wasn't true about to lots and lots of people from the beginning. Then the Black story is a story of people unloved by America loving America enough over and over and over again to make it better, to fight, to change the law, change people's hearts, and perfecting a union slowly over time. Indian Americans generally are only in this country in large numbers because right after that tradition of Black resistance led to the Civil Rights Act in 1964, immigration was opened up in the same kind of spirit.

It was only from white countries largely before that was opened up to the whole world on the back of the Civil Rights gains fought for by Black movements and immigration was opened up. A lot of Indian Americans came here. Almost every Indian American who's here is there because of that law change in 1965. The Indian American story, by virtue of having a different story and being on the back of those Civil Rights gains, has been a story of extraordinary fortune in this country, of being allowed to come to a country as guests at first and become American and find fortune and find the opportunity to redefine and remake yourselves and create things.

These are both true stories about America. America has blood at the root. America has hypocrisy at the root. America has gotten better every generation, thanks to resistance and activism and fighting, and America is a country made of the entire world, made of people from everywhere who find their dreams realized here. Both those stories are true. They're really important to say at the same time. Kamala Harris identity in being a Black woman who is also the daughter of an Indian immigrant embodies both of that. The rendition I just gave you there, I think could be very central to a narrative that she tells here that is honest and hopeful. She's got 90 days to do it and I'm sure she will.

Kai Wright: It's a story of the American dream redefined. That's really well put. Final thing, when we last spoke, it was early in the Biden presidency. You were hopeful that he would be a leader and in a particular moment who could finally dislodge what is perhaps the most lasting idea of the Reagan revolution, which is that government is bad. Government was a slur. Do you think he did it?

Anand: I think he did. I think history will reward Joe Biden very handsomely, because part of what he did, part of what we all can do in different moments of our life, is use who we are to maybe say or do what others can't. If you are a man in a meeting and women are being treated in a certain way, you have an opportunity maybe to say something to interrupt the pattern that it would be hard to ask another woman in the meeting to do. If you are a white person who is able to call out racial animus or injustice at your school, it has a power coming from an ally like that. In a way, Joe Biden turned out to be this historic moderate, this 80-year-old white guy who nobody could call a communist.

It's just really hard to label Joe Biden a radical. He used his insulation by being an 80-year-old white guy, by being someone with a really long moderate record, by being someone with Republican friends like Strom Thurmond. Once he got to the presidency where it really counted, he used all of that capital to bring in an incredibly diverse and progressive team, to nominate to the federal judiciary an incredibly diverse and forward thinking, futuristic bench, and to really embrace policies that were not who he was in his lifetime, that were not where the Democratic Party was in his lifetime, and that probably you could argue a Barack Obama being a younger Black leader or Bill Clinton being a young leader maybe couldn't have done.

Maybe they should have fought for things that they didn't. I think Joe Biden used his all Americana vibe in a lot of the more moderate and red parts of this country to get through a lot of change and a lot of progress that maybe no one else could have quite done and without being tarred as an extremist. Most people listening to this are not going to be president, but I think it's a reminder that in all of our lives to think about what you have that can be used to get important things done, saying things that maybe others couldn't say, making a case that you are protected and making that maybe others are not.

I think because of that, we have action on climate, we have action on infrastructure, we have action on industrial policy. More than that, I think Joe Biden challenged the neoliberal notion that what is best for money matters more than what's best for people, and that government is always the problem. Then he brought government back and did it without making a big fuss about it.

Kai Wright: Anand Giridharadas is author, most recently, of The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age. His sub stack is called The Ink. Anand, thanks for this time. It's been fun.

Anand: Thank you so much for having me, as always.

[END OF AUDIO]

 

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