Eddie Glaude Jr.: Biden Needs to Thread the Needle

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Additional terms apply. Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. A little housekeeping, a little cleanup from yesterday.
After we taped and mocked Donald Trump for not having any of his family with him in trial, his dumbest son, Eric, did show up to court for dad at last. Isn't that nice? Today, he's got his extended family there.
Doug Burgum expected to join. And a recent friend of the pod, Mike Johnson, will also be there pathetically.
It was fun while it lasted, Mike. Tonight, we got a hot primary in Maryland.

Sarah and Michael Steele broke that down on the Focus Group podcast.

Go check it out.

Link in the show notes.

Tony Blinken's meeting with Zelensky as Kharkiv continues to be shelled.

And Michael Cohen is on cross.

We'll have been with us tomorrow to recap.

But first, at last, Eddie Glaude,

professor of African-American studies at Princeton,

a political commentator, public intellectual,

MSNBC contributor, his most recent book,

We Are the Leaders We've Been Looking For.

Welcome to the Borg podcast, Eddie. Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you too.
Thanks for having me, Doc. I'm pumped.
I was, I just, I have to admit, when it comes to these book interviews, I'm a crammer, I'm a procrastinator. And usually, you know, I'm sitting there, I'm multitasking, somebody wrote some political book, I'm on my little Kindle and I can kind of, I'm going to flick through it.
You know, you can read four sentences on the page and get the gist. That was not the case with your book.
So I did, I did the best I could to, you know, there's some pages where I'm like, man, I gotta, I gotta think about, I gotta sit with this for a minute. This is not a scanner.
So I made it about halfway through last night. But it was on the W.E.B.
Du Bois lectures he gave in 2011. He pronounced it Du Bois.
Is that right? Exactly, yeah. Why is that? Do you know? I don't know.
It might have been the Berkshires. Who knows where he was from? Instead of Du Bois, it's Du Bois.
Yeah. Well, there's a lot of heavy stuff there.
I want to get to it at the end, but we got to do a little news at the top, if that's all right.

Sure, absolutely, absolutely.

The former president is on trial.

You know, I said we're going to have a report from the courtroom tomorrow.

Just as you've been watching this, making appearances on MSNBC from time to time, it's

hard for me to, you know, kind of wade through the muck on this stuff and figure out what really matters. I'm curious what your biggest impressions have been of the trial so far.
You know, to be honest with you, I'm in the same place trying to make sense of the spectacle of it. You know, I see the entertainment value, at least the purported entertainment value would be different, of course, if cameras were in the courtroom.
So there is this kind of dramatic kind of event, historic event, you know, in that sense. And then there's the kind of, you know, sundry details that suggest to any reasonable person that this man should not be the nominee of the Republican Party.
And it leads me to ask the question over and over again, repeatedly, Tim, how is this possible? Right? So you have the court proceedings, spectacle, entertainment, you have the actual reality that the man may have broken the law, the historical reality that the first president is on trial, and then the kind of political and existential question, what is it about the state of the country that this man still remains a political force? And I have yet to wrap my mind around it, I think. It's funny you say that.
I started writing something last night. I'm hoping to maybe publish next week or the next couple of weeks.
But the interesting thing for me, this is a little myopic, I guess. We have all these grand historic things, a former on trial for the first time but you know to distill it down to your own personal feeling sometimes feels a little a little self-indulgent but i've come to terms over the past couple weeks like he might actually win again this is not a prediction this is not political analysis it's just like it's just reflecting on in 2016 i really didn't believe he was gonna win and in 2020 i was sure we were going to kick his ass and and i've now come around to the fact that like i don't know i mean you know but biden could still win for sure but just the fact that i think that he could win is very disturbing right like take the political analysis out of it just like this notion that it says something about how we look at our fellow americans a little bit right that you like watch this just try this sad man pressuring this woman and the sexual intercourse and the fraud and the gross stuff you do with the national inquirer and it's just like how how can people look at this and and not just totally reject it i don't know how have you obviously you have a different like kind of background than me me.
So maybe you wrestle with that maybe in a different way.

Yeah.

First of all, it's the nature of our political system, right?

That only a few states will decide.

And we know that our politics, whether you are for the Electoral College or not, it gums up things, right?

Where only a certain sliver of the country will actually decide the election.

It also kind of points to, at least for me, the depth of the culture wars. We're not talking about them, Tim, as much as we should.
But we know that there is driving so much of what we're experiencing in our politics today. And to describe it as culture war is a shorthand that might obscure more than it clarifies.

But there's a deep unease in the country about who we take ourselves to be, who we're becoming. And that unease is taking the form of some very ugly kind of commitments, ugly kinds of expressions and ugly politics, it seems to me.
And Donald Trump is his avatar. So the fact that this man who's obviously unethical, this guy whose character is deeply questionable, who doesn't seem to be very smart, even though we're often attributing to him a certain kind of skill set.
Savvy, maybe. Yeah.
I think there's a difference between being savvy and being smart, right? Or being intelligent or being curious, right? I mean, in so many ways, Tim, he comes off as this knuckle-dragging troglodyte, right? And the fact that he's attractive to people shows us that we're up to our neck in the culture wars that we don't want to admit, that we don't want to acknowledge. We'll dance around it at times, but we don't want to say what's really motivating the American electorate at this moment.
What part of it do you think that we're not acknowledging appropriately? I think the country is profoundly, profoundly unsettled by the questions of race, unsettled by the question of class grievance, unsettled by the fact that for some people, and you can think about this in some ways, Tim, as a divide between rural and urban, you know, blue states and red states, however we want to divide it. But there are some folks who believe they've lost their country to these urban elites, snobs, who have their thumbs on the scale for minorities, right? And so the idea of who we are as Americans, right, is up for grabs.
And these folk feel like they're losing ground. And they are, but it's not because somebody has their thumb on the scale for black folk or LGBTQ people or immigrants, right? They're getting sold a bill of goods in order to exploit their grievances it seems to me yeah i think this is an interesting conversation because you know obviously there's some category hillary the basket of deplorables i'm not running for office so i can say that you know i can call them i can call it what it is like there's a category of deplorables i just want to like put them over there for a second we spend a lot of time talking about the deplorables on the podcast there's another category of people that you're talking about that feel like they're losing the country that aren't really motivated by animus but by just a feeling that maybe their kids are not going to have the opportunities that they did right that and maybe it's unfounded right but Maybe maybe it's this feeling that like you know little johnny right that has a b minus average you know is not going to be able to get into princeton to get into eddie's class right or maybe little johnny that has an a that gets good grades isn't going to get in because one of those slots is going to be taken by you know a kid that you know gets in because you know they you know fit a different marginalized demographic group and that the parent isn't upset.
They don't want to tear that other person down, but they're worried. What do you say about the sliver of people that I think have legitimate anxiety about the ways where they might be left behind? You know, I think that's such a great question.

And it's something that we always have to grapple with because when we're in these moments of transition as a society, right, we're never really kind of doing the hard work of reimagining the we of who we are. Yeah.
Right. And so, you're going to have these moments where exclusions are going to be denied, right? the way in which we organize our lives to say that only certain people have access to certain things, that that's no longer the case.
We're going to include more people. But we never do the hard work of changing the we.
We just simply say, now you're a part of it. And so the people who think that they ought to have a certain benefit, right? My kids should have access to Princeton and Harvard and Amherst and Williams.
And now they don't because Amherst and Williams and Princeton and Harvard are admitting, you know, these black and brown people, these working class folk, and we've put out all this money from pre-K to now, and now my kid can't even get in. You got to go to George Washington.
Exactly. Go to George Washington or or God forbid, University of Texas, Austin, or University of Wisconsin, Madison, or something like that, right? And so, what you get is this sense that we haven't changed how we understand ourselves, how we interact with each other, right? There is still the presumption that my, who I am as a white person, as a white person of a certain privilege, I should benefit from that in certain sorts of ways.
And because we haven't, shall we say, unraveled the game, Tim, of certain people having access to certain institutions, right? We need to understand that you can get a really great education at Lafayette. You don't have to wind up at Princeton.
You can get an extraordinary education at Rutgers. You don't have to wind up at Harvard.
And we know that people are running the country who've gone on to all of these institutions across the United States and have found their feet. Why are we buying into this idea that the only way to gain access to the upper echelons is that you got to go to Ivy League schools.
Well, we got to change that game, right? In some ways, right? We got to undermine that set of assumptions. And that's going to require more fundamental engagement with who we take ourselves to be.
So, you know, the short answer to the question is that we have to attack the assumption that because you are who you are, that you're supposed to somehow benefit differently, right? That you're guaranteed access to all of this stuff. And that's not the case anymore.
And people are pissed about that. That's true.
That's true. People are pissed.
And I kind of get it. I get it, though.
I do, too. I get it, too.
I understand why they're pissed. And it's like a frustrating thing for me, because I want to hug them and be like, it's going to be okay.
You know, like, this is not, Donald Trump is not the solution to this problem, right? And the kid is going to be fine, right? Plenty of people have gone on to have great lives that didn't, you know, hit every rung on the ladder on the way up, right? It's kind of good, you know, particularly for a kid of privilege to not hit every rung on the ladder on the way up, right? You learn something from that. Right.
And we have to undo the idea. We have to unravel the idea that it's only these folk at Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Brown and Dartmouth who are at the top of the food chain, right? That, you know, because if we undo the idea that merit can only be evidenced in having access to these institutions, success is only evident in having access to these, that's part of the game that we have to undermine, right? And we need more than just simply Ivy Leaguers on the Supreme Court, damn it.
Yeah. I'm interested in your feeling on this, because this is maybe where we might have some policy disagre disagreements we totally agree on the on the fact that we need to unravel that we need to change the perception but how i was just listening to scott galloway the other day and he's given a pretty compelling take about why there's so much focus on this now and he's like in our current economy if you are one of the top five percent that get into these schools and that get into business school and, you know, go and get the job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, like you have the best life in the history of the world.
Maybe not the most fulfilling life, but you have the best vacations, you have the best stuff. And if you're in the 50%, if you're in the middle of the bell curve right now, you're really falling behind in a way that you kind of weren't in past generations, at least as compared to peer sets.
So, that I think is driving a lot of this. But I don't know, I mean, you're with these, you know, these kids on campus.
Maybe there's a different view on that. I don't know.
What do you think? How can we unravel that? Is that true, do you think? I think it is true. And it is a reflection of, you know, the classed nature of our society, right? I mean, our class structure used to look like an hourglass.
Now it looks like a golf club, a driver in some ways, right? And the top one-tenth of a percent, right, is getting all of this benefit while the rest of Americans are busting their asses to keep their noses above water. And, you know, that's not consistent with the American dream as it's articulated, right? And so, I think part of what we have to do is to challenge the underlying assumptions that inform Scott Galloway's description.
I think it's wrong. Now, mind you, I'm a beneficiary of it all.
By virtue of having a Princeton PhD,

the life of my family was fundamentally transformed.

Well, I read the book though. Your dad was a mailman though.
So, you know.

Yeah. My dad was a mailman.
My mother was a supervisor of a janitorial team

at Ingalls Shipyard, right? So, my life fundamentally was transformed by virtue of

going to Morehouse College and then getting a PhD at Princeton. But I don't think it's just

Thank you. Right.
So my life fundamentally was transformed by virtue of going to Morehouse College and then getting a PhD at Princeton. But I don't think it's just right.
I don't think it's just. And it leads to this perception of scarcity that has people at each other's throats.
Unnecessarily, it seems to me. I don't want to spend all day on campus but while we're there I'm interested in your thoughts on the protests

on the discourse around it

what's driving it. Is the media over obsessed with it? I just had to, you know, my cards on the table.
I'm pretty shook by just like the acceptance of some sentiments that are anti-Semitic, maybe not intentionally, but in practice, right? When you're talking about globalizing the Intifada, when you're talking about, you know, having the leaders of these groups, you know, having part of their agenda being, you know, Palestine should have a state from the river to the sea. You know, maybe that's intentioned in a different way than it's coming out, but it's coming out in a way that is going to cause a lot of an eliminationist sensibility about Israel.
So, that concerns me. So, I'm interested in your take on that, you know, on sort of that type of rhetoric, and then just also generally on, you know, these campus protests and what you think is, you know, manifesting there.
The easier question is, of course, the latter. I think it's a reflection of a generation of students who are convinced that the country and the world as it is, is broken.
You could describe them as the catastrophic generation. They've come of age, Tim, in the midst of cascading crises.
Can I challenge that though? Is that really true? What about somebody that was like in college in 1976? You know, they had lived through assassinations. The president got assassinated, Martin Luther King, president's brother did, Vietnam War, hyperinflation.
Then they go to college in 1979. They're the Gen Xers.
They all turned out okay. Did we? I mean, the question is, did we? I mean, in a really interesting way.

You know, of course, there's some historical parallels, but I mean, I think it's really important for us to understand these folks as coming of age in the midst of global pandemic, coming of age in the midst of school shootings, in the midst of climate crisis, in the midst of our politics and the way that they're shaped, in the midst of what we might describe as the defunding of public education

in the United States as state schools are transferring the rising cost of education onto the backs of working people and how that then segments higher ed and the like and how it impacts the way in which students understand themselves. And so we see student loan debt surpassing credit card debt.
I mean, we can go on and on to talk about these folks And particularly these young folk today, these are COVID babies. They didn't graduate.
They didn't have graduations. And we're seeing across the board, Tim, problems of socialization.
And we're seeing problems that rates of suicidality, students who are coming in already medicated, those numbers are just skyrocketing.

So I think we're seeing problems that are different. So I understand the pushback,

you know, but I think that this particular generation is unique in relation to the

problems that they face, the particular problems that they face. So they are, I think, are drawing

the conclusion that the world is broken. And some of them are reaching for old languages of order So they're reaching for the old languages of autocracy And you can see them in Europe, young folk in Europe Reaching for the old languages of fascism, right? And some of them are reaching for new languages Trying to imagine the country the world differently.
So we see students kind of responding to, I think, the substantive judgment that the country is broken and that these institutions are complicated in their own way. In terms of the specific protest, I think it's also a reflection of the particular ways in which this generation sees things.
I mean, how they view Israel is not the same as how we were educated to view Israel and how the baby boomers were educated to view Israel. Israel gets read very differently.
What is the impact, the longstanding impact of the Likud Party's rule of that country? How is it being assessed and evaluated in light of the ideology of the Likud party? And how is Netanyahu represented by a lot of these young folks? Israel is not seen in the same way. So it's subject to a different level of criticism than what it was when I was a college student so long ago.
And so I think that critique is really, really, really important to kind of drill down in if we could. The thing that I think that worries me the most is the racialized framework of, you know, kind of colonizer and being colonized, right? And I think that there's some legitimate social justice side about this.
I think there's a little bit of awakening in the traditional woke term, right, of the ways that colonialism, you know, caused longstanding problems. But then, you know, I see it kind of perverted sometimes, like on social media with left folks that are like, you know, showing pictures of Jewish people and like, this isn't their homeland.
This can't be their homeland. Look at how they look.
They don't look Semitic. They look white.
Boy, I don't know. Some of that stuff gets into a space that makes me very uncomfortable given the history of the region.
So, I think that there's some good elements to that framework, but I think that it can be taken too far. I don't know.
What do you think about that? I can understand that criticism. I can understand that unease, but I think we need to understand the significance of 1948.
We need to understand what the British Empire, what it was doing, what Europe was doing in relation. You know, it wasn't as if the homeland could be established in Europe for a reason, right? I mean, obviously, there are historical reasons for why the Jewish homeland would be imagined where it is and then implemented in the way it was.
Part of our fault, actually, also, a lot of folks were coming to America and then a lot of Jewish folks that were facing persecution in Russia, Eastern Europe, were coming to America and then couldn't anymore. Exactly.
And we have to understand the geopolitical implications of what it meant for the West to have a state like Israel in positioned in the Middle East, in that particular region. And so, to understand the politics and to understand the moment, right? I mean, we don't really begin to see the discourse of decolonization until until I mean, what starts in the 1940s.
Right. When we begin to see the decolonization of the third world, decolonization movements across across the globe and Israel emerges within that context.
So there's a historical way in which we can understand or account for the emergence of Israel. Right.
And then to understand the history of describing it as a Jewish state, a Jewish democratic state. What does it mean to describe it as a Jewish state and to commit to democracy at the same time? So when we were growing up, when I was growing up, the idea of describing Israel as a Jewish state was contested, right? Because the idea of it being Jewish ran smack up against it being democratic.
It's like describing America as a Christian nation. Those things collide when you think about it in light of the notion of it being democratic as well.
What do we do with other religious groups or other religious identities and the like? So it's only a fairly recent development that it's accepted to describe it as a Jewish state in public debate. So I think, Tim, you're right to be uneasy about some of the rhetoric coming out of the protest, but I think to delve deeper into the history of it requires us not necessarily to put aside the passions, but to be open

to the complexity of the arguments being made.

And that's sometimes difficult to do when some arguments are by definition seen as anti-Semitic.

Critiquing Israel is not by definition anti-Semitic, it seems to me.

And I hold that view that to critique the policies of Israel, the execution of its war

is not necessarily an anti-Semitic gesture at all. Totally concur on that.
Plenty to criticize of the Israel government. Like my show map just gets totally blown up when Eddie comes on the podcast.
You know, I'm like, I have this and this, and now we're going down. We're in 1948.
We're all over the place. We're in James Baldwin.
But I have two other present day news items i want to do a little history in the book sure there's a lot of discourse right now around and the polls and how they are responding to joe biden and responding to trump the times poll yesterday had biden at 63 with black voters trump at 23 biden 192 versus eight in 2020 you know we can go around and say well schmoles and, you know, cross tabs and blah, blah. Let's just put that aside.
Yeah. There's one thing that seems true, or you can tell if you don't think so, that there's at least some subset of black voters that are very upset at Joe Biden.
Maybe it's related to the economy. Maybe it's related to the discussion we were just having.
Maybe other issues. And they're looking around, at least.
They're window shopping. Maybe not landing on Trump, but maybe looking around at RFK or Cornel West or not voting.
What do you think is driving that? How big of a problem is it? Or is the media overstating it? What's your sense of that situation? I think sometimes the media overstates it, especially when we look at the polls and we look at the number of black respondents in those polls. Sometimes there's a shift of six people and suddenly we see this percentage shift, right, in some ways.
So I think we need to be duly skeptical of some of this stuff. Also, it's May, Tim, it's not September.
And when we talk about the electorate generally, we're talking about people aren't locked in really yet. In fact, they're trying to keep all of this stuff at arm's length until it actually gets down to the serious months, as it were.
And black voters are no different in that regard. We're trying to live their lives.
They might not be tuned in the same way that other folks are tuned in, at least the way we're tuned in. Oftentimes, we exceptionalize black voters in a way that we don't treat them as other voters, right? So, I think it's May, it's not September.
So, let's be clear about that. They got lives.
People got lives. Exactly.
They got jobs. They got bar.
They got something. We're coming up on barbecue season.
It's like, I got to start worrying about this already, you know? Normal people aren't worrying about this. We say that about American voters generally, right? And I think it applies to African-American voters too.
But I do think Biden has some issues though. And I think he has some issues around the assault on voting.
We have some issues around the assault on affirmative action, the assault on DEI, this quote unquote, critical race theory or whatever the hell that means these days. the way in which some people don't view him as fighting as vigorously as he should.

How that's going to translate in terms of actual political behavior, I'm not sure.

I think at the end of the day, just as black folk made decisions in 2020, they will make some decisions in 2024. Yes, to engage in the blocking and tackling, right, that requires, you know, turning out black voters, because it's not about them turning around and voting for Trump.
It's about turnout. Because if folk think that there's no substantive difference between the two choices, that their lives haven't been fundamentally transformed by Biden's policies, they didn't, they won't turn out.
And if we don't turn out at high numbers, then he's in trouble. He's in trouble.
So I just think he just needs to get the turnout, get the GOTV machine, get going.

Don't treat black folk as cattle chewing cud so that you invest only in these high profile black leaders to go out and say, come out and vote for him. No, get on the ground blocking and tackling.
Get into these communities, get into Milwaukee, get into Detroit, get into Philadelphia, get into Atlanta and do the hard work that you need to do in order to get these folks to turn out to the polls. And this ties into the theme of the book a little bit.
You talk a little bit about how Baldwin thought about this, how he voted, and about buying time, the notion of buying time. What is the message, right? I hear all you're saying.
I spend all this time talking to, on this podcast, talking to, you know, college-educated, relatively conservative white folks, right? Who like, man, I'm just upset about this. You know, I'm upset about the student loan handout.
I don't know if I can do it. I might write in Jack Kemp instead.
You know, and I'm over here going, no, like, no, please. Like, whatever you don't like about Joe Biden's not that big of a deal compared to the threat of Trump.
And I get very upset with them, you know, because I feel that's my people. It's expectations.
You know what I mean? I feel like on a little bit more unstable ground, like doing that same kind of, you know, what the fuck to young kids that are progressive and to like working class black voters, like who inflation and COVID hit a lot harder than these other groups. So like, how do you talk to those groups like that are unhappy, that haven't gotten everything that they wanted, and that I think have real anger with Biden over either policy or results? The first thing you don't do is condescend.
Yeah. Right.
And when I hear Hillary Clinton talking about young folk and when I hear them talking about people who aren't, I often grumble under my breath or curse under my breath. We can curse on this podcast, so it's okay if you need to get it out.
Yeah, you know, like, come on, man, give me a break. So, the first thing you can't do is condescend, right? You only have two choices.
You have to choose one, right? That's not true. That's kind of true, though.
You have three choices. America only has two.
No, you have three choices. People have three choices.

People have three.

People have seven choices, but America only has two.

Right.

You only have two in terms of the party, but in terms of what you do, how you act, not voting is a choice.

It's an active decision.

Yeah.

Right.

When people decide not to vote, it's not because they're just simply lazy.

Right.

That's the easy account of people not voting.

When in fact, many Americans don't vote because they are making a judgment about the political system. They're passing a judgment about the political choices in front of them.
I hear that. I hear that judgment.
But let's say, look, if I'm at a buffet, you know, I'm at the slop buffet, all right? You know, they got the chicken or the fish. I can choose neither.
I can be hungry.

But it's going to be chicken or fish.

Right.

That's what it's going to be.

It's going to be chicken or fish.

If the fish is rotten, I'm brutalizing this metaphor.

No.

Eventually, you're going to have to eat or you're going to starve.

Unless you have no other option.

You only have those two choices. But one of the choices is, Tim, fuck it.

I'm not eating at the slot buffet. I'll go down the street and eat at McDonald's or something.
But there is no other street. I mean, I guess you can move, you can go to Mexico, where are you going? There's no other street.
That's the point that we're pushing back on, right? That when we look at the number, the percentage of Americans actually participating in our electoral processes, to make the judgment that these folk are just simply lazy or they're not responsible or they don't care about our politics, right, is in some ways to push the burden onto them when in fact, in my view, it's a reflection of the brokenness of our politics itself, right, of the choices we often have. Now, I'm not trying to suggest that people don't vote because we got to hold the fascists off, which is very different from my position in 2016, right? I see what's on the horizon.
Why is it different than 2016 for you? Because I didn't think that the country would elect Donald Trump. Yeah, right.
It goes back to the beginning of our conversation. It was just a naivete.
Yeah, it was. And for somebody who studies this country and reads race the way in which I do, I should have known better.
Yeah, were you mad at yourself? I was really mad at myself. I was pissed.
And I'm still pissed because, you know, a million people are dead. Yeah.
Right? And some of them could still be alive. Right? And so, the fact that I'm actually thinking, I actually thought I had to space, Tim, in 2016 to break the back of Clintonism.
Right. I wanted to finally say, oh, my God, we can finally get rid of or kind of break free from the DLC and its children.
Right. And we can imagine a different kind of politics.
Thinking about what Bernie Sanders opened up, what Occupy movement opened up, we could actually imagine the Democratic Party differently because they've elected a troglodyte. They've nominated someone who's obviously not qualified to be the president of the United States.
And look at what happened. I should have known better.
But today I know better, right? I know the threat that Trump represents. So it is incumbent upon people to do two things at once.
And this is what I think Biden's folk have to be very, very clear about. Biden has to speak to his left wing and his base in this way.
Hold me accountable. I want young people to give voice to the America that they desire.
We may disagree on Gaza, and I want you to hold me to account. But we can do that.
We can have that disagreement. But we have some folks who are trying to challenge the very basis for us to disagree.
We got some folks who are not committed to democracy at all. So hold me to account.
Trump literally said this week he wants to deport people. Exactly.
That protest that are here on college visas. So what I say is Biden is committed to a set of conditions that allow for people to protest and to hold him to account.
He's not saying shut up. He's not saying don't protest.
He might say, you know, law and order and all this this other stuff and I might disagree with that particular rhetorical move But the point is He is committed to the background conditions that allow for the argument to be had For you to hope for me to hold him to account these other people These other people are not And so he has to figure out how to thread that needle to give space to these young folk and others who are pushing for a politics that could address the contradictions at the heart of the nation. Right.
And at the same time, understand the fascist threat that looms in the shadows, that threatens the entire republic itself. in the book you write about Cornel West, your close friend, mentor, I think you might even use the word mentor.
My mentor. He's the godfather of my son.
Yeah, absolutely. Is that true? I did not know that.
Yes. Wow.
The son that just graduated law school, right? I see that. Yeah, he just graduated from Berkeley Law.
Congratulations. Thank you, Dad.
Not what you say to him. I don't care about your personal relationship, but to the people that are compelled by what he has to say.
Do you worry that your message isn't getting through to them? Do you worry that there's going to be a significant number of people that throw this all away? I understand. And under other conditions, I would agree with Cornell.
Like if Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee, maybe you'd agree withnell probably you know and and what i what i mean by that is this tim for the last 50 years we've been living under a particular political and economic philosophy you could describe it as reaganism or neoliberalism or whatever that's had don't get me excited now i know i know um that's had its right? And the Democratic Party, as it's currently constituted, is its mirror reflection. So, as we see the age of Reagan collapsing, its contradictions coming into full view, its contradictions evident in its economic philosophy, in its political philosophy, right? So, the idea of bowling alone, the idea that we're now no longer citizens, but self-interested persons in competition and rivalry with each other, such that a robust notion of the public good no longer seems to be attainable, right? And so the contradictions of that ideology are in full view.
And the Democratic Party as a mirror image of that ideology, right, is cracking too. It was constituted to respond to the age of Reagan.
So it is full and fraught and vexed, full of problems, fraught and vexed. And so when Cornell talks about the duopoly, I get it.
I understand the critique of Silicon Valley money driving democratic policy or Goldman Sachs or Wall Street driving democratic policy. I get it.
But the threat of Trumpism, of MAGA Republicans, right, threatens to undo the very context in which we can make that argument. This is, as you know, as Molly Jongfast says, you know, this is the election about whether we're going to have any more elections.
Don't we need Cornell to be the one carrying that message? Can you win him over? I'll work on my people. If you work on your people, how about that? Of course, I'm working on him.
I'm working on him every day. I think at some point,

again, I understand what he's doing. I think there has to be an off-ramp at some point.
But I love him to death. I love him to life, actually.
But I disagree with him on this issue. If we survive November and Biden wins this election, can we have a rain check? Can we have a date for like a full hour on neoliberalism and you know the campus economy just do that just totally off the news we're just going to do one hour on neoliberalism and okay okay i want to do that listen to you talk i was struck i've just really been struck by something i had i talked to bakari sellers last week or i don't know times a, but the other week.
But his dad protested with Stokely Carmichael, right,

and was there in Orangeburg.

And he said something to me that just, like, really struck me

about how his dad feels like we've made no progress,

that we've gone backwards.

I don't want to misquote him, but it was a deep disappointment

with the progress, I guess.

Let's just say that.

and then I'm reading your book and

Thank you. I don't want to misquote him, but it was a deep disappointment with the progress, I guess.
Let's just say that. And then I'm reading your book, and Baldwin's the same.
I kind of thought I was a Baldwin completist, and I'm reading your book, and I'm like, man, there's all this Baldwin I've never even read. And so, you know, the dude is prolific.
And you're quoting from him at the end of life, I guess, in mid-80s. Yeah.
Kind of expressing the same, like a sadness. I don't get it.

I don't get it.

Explain it to me.

There just has been this unbelievable progress between Baldwin's birth and then his death.

And then another set of unbelievable progress between 85, whenever it was, and now.

And yet, still, this ennui.

You know, in my book, Democracy in Black, I introduced this phrase, this concept called the value gap, that, you know, behind the achievement gap and the empathy gap is something much more fundamental. And that is this belief, this practice that some people, because of the color of their skin, ought to be valued more than others.
And that valuation, Tim, evidences itself in our political, social, and economic arrangements. And it's the through line of American history.
So what the value gap looks like in the context of slavery is very different than what it looks like in the context of Jim Crow. It's very different than what it looks like in the context of the first black president or the first black vice president.
Right. But it still obtains.
So we still live in a society where certain people are valued more than others. And that valuation determines the distribution of advantage and disadvantage.
And so even though there's progress, my life is not my father's. It's not my grandfather's.
My dad couldn't go to Princeton. And now I'm a university professor.
That's progress. But I still live in a world.
I still live in a country where police can mistake an apartment, barge in, kill a black guy who's in the air force

And only go on administrative leave

We still live in a society where

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Becomes the kind of mantra

For a reassertion of white privilege

A reassertion of a certain understanding

That certain people ought to be valued

Going back to our beginning of our conversation

Certain people ought to be valued more than others

And so Baldwin, under different contexts

Let's do this. reassertion of a certain understanding that certain people ought to be valued.
Going back to our beginning of our conversation, certain people ought to be valued more than others. And so Baldwin, under different contexts, that this is the guy who was writing in the 1940s and took his last breath in 1987, he understood who Ronald Reagan was, one of your guys.
Right? Reagan was the governor of California, Doc. Look, I guess I'm putting it as reassure reagan had problems i mean i get sure and baldwin's living through the gay there's the gay there's aids and he's living through all this is that he cannot look there are plenty of criticisms of i guess what i'm saying is though also just unbelievable progress along with the you know kind of lack of attainment right like there's sadness life is complicated right like we're never there is no utopia we're never getting to utopia oh man i don't know it makes me sad it like fills me with sadness that there wasn't at least this feeling from baldwin at the end of just like this great accomplishment and satisfaction no because you know think about it think about it he's he's he's looking his nieces and nephews.
I remember when Trump was reelected and now that Trump is doing all of this and I see all of this and, you know, I have to deal with the Christopher Rufos and deal with all of this nonsense, right? And the thing I keep saying to myself is that they're doing this shit again, right? And my baby has to go through this shit, right? I had to deal with it. Right.
Now we just got access to the damn institutions. Now they want to kick us out.
We just got access to these elite places. Now that if we're there, the students who got admitted, they don't even want them to be comfortable.
They're going to close the DEI offices. Right.
They don't even want them to have resources to navigate the space. And, you know, so I keep saying to myself, even though I'm a beneficiary of everything you're describing, right, is that they're doing this shit again, right? And my baby has to go through this, right? My child has to go through this.
And if you're responsible to your children, to the generation to come, right, of course you can say, baby, you don't have to experience what I had to experience. But then you have to look them in the eye, right? And deal with their hurt and their pain and their fears, right? And try to keep the hatred from taking root in their souls, right? Because white folk are losing their damn minds again.
And that truth, right, is something that we have to tell ourselves. You know, when the fever dream spikes, because the fever dream always spikes here, right? How do we survive it, Tim? How do we make it through the storm? Yeah.
And it's a good question. The parallels, you know, you quote the Baldwin, you know, kind of line about history not being history.
Yeah. I'm going to tell you, I just read for the first time last year shame on me but just so i was interested to have this conversation uh the souls of black folks oh absolutely and it's amazing i just read it for the first time last last summer partially shame on me but also shame on my fucking jesuit school teachers like what were you doing what were you doing okay anyway it just gave me such a much more three-dimensional view of that struggle you know like reading about it in real time like first person you know about just like the nature of like the different strategies the different like what frederick douglas with booker t washington like with somebody who like who like was looking up to that you know what i mean like that had lived through all that and kind of the anger like it's funny there's like this parallel and that that, in what he's talking about and kind of what you and Cornell are talking about right now, right? The same shit, right? It's like, do we need radical over? And should we work with these fucking white bastard? It's like, should we, like, how do you do it? So anyway, I don't know.
You kind of live in this world. I'm just, it's a big question.
I'm just kind of wondering, going back through these lectures you did in 2011, going back through the source material, like, are there other big lessons? Are there big lessons or big echoes or reverberations that you take away? The big lesson that I took, because I had to return to the lectures, Tim, because I lost my footing again. Why did you decide to return to them? Because I'm not okay.
You know, I've lost a couple of friends in COVID, couple of friends in COVID that I'm asked to comment on it every single day. The shit has taken root in me and I'm constantly asked to interpret the fucking drums.
I'm constantly asked to make sense of this when I'm trying to make sense of me. And so these lectures were really transformational for me because out of them came four books, right? The second chapter of this book is the source of the Baldwin book, right? Democracy in Black, I was writing at the same time as I was thinking through these ideas.
And so I wanted to go back and see what I was doing. And what happened was, you know, 2011 to 2020, 23, so much had happened.
So much had changed. And so I wanted to find resources to kind of find my feet to think anew.
And one of the things that came to me as I rewrote them and revisited them and revise them is that, you know, we got to become better people. It sounds cliche, Doc, but if we're the leaders that we've been looking for, if everyday ordinary people are going to take on the responsibility that democracy demands, because Madison is right, democracy doesn't work if we don't have a certain character.
If there's not a certain virtue evident in the person, democracy is going to collapse. So we got to be certain kinds of people for democracy to work.
Well, why are we so willing to throw democracy away on behalf of certain things or certain people, right? So we got to become better people. In order for us to become better people, we got to build a better world because the world as it's currently organized gets in the way of you and I being better people.
And so I wanted that insight, right? That at the heart of me reaching for higher forms of excellences in pursuit of a more just world, that that's a radical politics. Suddenly I have a bridge.
It's not personal responsibility talk. That's not quite what I mean.
But it's something about working on being more decent, working on reaching for a better way of orienting oneself to one's fellows, of understanding the good as critical to one's self-conception, which would then lead us not to be selfish, not to be greedy, not to be so open to mean-spiritedness and cruelty, right? We got to be better people. And so, what I was trying to do in the book is to give philosophical weight to that easy formulation, right? Because I don't want to say that it's just me being a better person that can make the world better.
No, no, no, no, no, no. We have to do it together.
So when you and I disagree on policy issues, Tim, when we come at it from a different way, but we're a coalition of the decent, that you and I are committed to a world where everybody, no matter who they love, no matter the color of their skin, no matter their gender, no matter their class position, that you should be able not only to dream dreams, but to make that dream a reality. And we want to build a world where that's possible.
We can disagree about how we get there, but we're a coalition of the decent. But there's some folk out here, Tim There's some folk out here Who don't give a I was about to cuss Who don't give a damn About other people And they are more willing And this is the history I know I'm going on and on about this But I just wanted to say this There are and we know this at the heart of policy.
Oh, if you're going to let black folks swim in our pools, we won't have fucking swimming pools. If you're going to let black folk into our schools, fuck it.
We're going to leave those schools and start sex schools. And we want you to take your tax dollars and fund our sex schools.
If you're going to integrate the country, we're going to divest from public

life. And we're going to create a rhetoric to suggest that big government that's trying to

reimagine society is oppressing us by forcing us to live with them. That's not decent.
It's not

loving. It's not virtuous.
And we've been willing to throw democracy in the trash bin because of it.

We're going to get started. that's not decent it's not loving it's not virtuous and we've been willing to throw democracy in the trash bin because of it we just here in louisiana middle louisiana up in baton rouge a group of people literally de that's not decolonized but like created a new jurisdiction like mostly white people that like they're like we don't want to be part of baton rouge anymore too many black people in this democracy and they've created some new jurisdiction.
I mostly white people that like, they're like, we don't want to be part of Baton Rouge anymore.

Too many black people in this democracy. And they've created some new jurisdiction.

I forget what it's called,

but I'm like,

I know that they're doing exactly what you're talking about.

It's crazy.

I want to close with this.

Speaking of indecent people,

not our vice president,

but the people who were making fun of our vice president for something she

said yesterday and attacking her and being harsh.

And I watched it.

I was like,

man,

I actually think this is right and good. And we should hear more from her on it.
I want to play the clip, but the lead up to the clip, because it's a shorter clip that people are dunking on. The leader of the clip was, she was talking about some advice her mother gave her.
She said, don't you ever let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.
Don't ever carry as a a personal burden your capacity to do whatever you dream and aspire to do based on other people's limited ability to see who can do what and then she says this we have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open sometimes they won't and then you need to kick that fucking door down absolutely people are giving her trouble for that but like

dude won't and then you need to kick that fucking door down absolutely people are giving her trouble for that but like isn't that what we need more of out of her and out of our leaders out of everybody we need people to be real and honest and genuine right and you know this false you know clutching of the pearls as it were tim i mean me a freaking break. These are the same people who are ardent supporters of Donald Trump, right? Some of these people are, right? And, you know, these are the folks who want to police the manners of folk in public space from the vantage point of what, of what commitment.
So she's right, right? And to say it in that way is to understand what is often required of us to break through those doors. Baldwin has this wonderful line in Many Thousands Gone.
He says, and I'm paraphrasing him here, he says, oftentimes we have to wash our faces blank in order to wash away your guilt. That the precondition for my entree into your spaces is that I have to leave the particularity of who I am at the door.
That's the only way I can get in. So if I want to bring the fullness of who I am into a room, sometimes that requires breaking the fucking door down, right? To just walk through it with the fullness of who I take myself to be.
And you know what? We have yet to figure out how to be together when I bring the fullness of who I am into the room, when you bring the fullness of who you are into the room, and folk just simply figure out how to live together genuinely without the masks. so I'm glad she did it.
And it says more about the folks who are complaining than it does about her. Man, that's beautiful.
That's exactly right. Eddie Glaude, thank you so much for doing this.
That's so good. Please, please come back again soon.
I got my notes. I got so much we didn't get to, man.
There's just so much out there. Man, that's because I'm running my mouth too much.
No, no, no. It was really good.
I appreciate you very much. The book, We Are the Leaders We've Been Looking For.
He's got a bunch of other books. Go ahead and get those too.
Come on back to the Borg podcast sometime soon. I'm going to work on Chris Christie and Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney.
You got to work on Cornell, all right? That's just the deal. I got you.
I got you. That's our deal.
We're going to work on him. I promise you.
We'll see you soon. We'll see everybody back here tomorrow with Ben Wittes talking about the Stormy Daniels

Michael Cohen trial.

Maybe a little less uplifting than this podcast.

We'll see you all then.

Keep in the play.

I see you as you're looking over.

Friends in my way.

You never could have been a good lover.

Watch what you say Could never mean a word I'm still hurt to you Look the other way Please tell me that I'm wrong So wrong I never was in love You know that you were never good enough Fall asleep right next to me, you know that you were never good enough Fall asleep right next to me You know that you were never For good enough I never was in love You know that you were never For good enough Fall asleep right next to me You know that you were left For good enough The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing

by Jason Brough.