Factually! with Adam Conover - Are We Fucked? with Chris Hayes

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Climate change, racial inequality, and the anti-rights revolution all feel like comets heading towards our inevitable destruction. If you’re depressed about these challenges, you’re not alone. So how do we fight back? In this episode, author and journalist Chris Hayes joins Adam to discuss whether we’re as fucked as we think, and to offer solutions to the interlocking predicaments we find ourselves in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. I want to say a special thank you to everyone who came out in Nashville for my stand-up show at Zany's. We had an awesome weekend, sold out a couple of nights. It was great. If you live in Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, New York City, San Diego, or Portland, Oregon. I am coming to you soon.

Come see me. You can find tickets to my brand new standup show called Pay Attention at adamconover.net slash tour dates. I do a meet and greet after every single show. We can take a selfie. We can hang out. We can hug. It's so wonderful to meet all of you and to meet so many people who come up and say, I listen to the podcast every week. That means so much to me, honestly, to hear from you because this is a medium where, you know, most of the time I'm just recording here on GarageBand on my computer and I don't actually get to interact with so many of you who listen to the show. So when you come out and see me live, it truly does mean a lot to me. Thank you if you have. And if you live in Spokane, Tacoma, New York, San Diego, or Portland, or thereabouts, head to adamconover.net slash tour dates. And by the way,

if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash adamconover and subscribe. When you get there, you will get ad-free episodes of this show. Every single episode from now on, uploaded there with no ads. You'll also get bonus podcast episodes. You can join our community Discord, hang out with like-minded people. We have a community book club. We just had an awesome session with C.T. Nguyen, who walked us through his book, Games Agency as Art, and answered our questions about the book. We have a blast. So if you want to join us, please go to patreon.com slash adamconover and support the show. It really does help out and we'd love to see you there. Now, let's talk about this week's episode. So look,

if you've been paying attention to the world at all recently, you might have felt a sense that things aren't going great. You know, I don't think I'm alone in feeling a lot of doom and gloom lately. And I'll be honest, there are a lot of good reasons. America faces manifold, huge problems. There's a couple of comets heading right towards us, and we don't seem to be doing much besides staring at the sky and pointing where to start. Okay, there's the crisis of gun violence and our total refusal to do anything about it by taking even the most basic steps to regulate guns. Then, of course, there's climate change, where up until some recent encouraging news, it didn't seem like we were going to do anything to stop, you know,

Florida from falling into the ocean. Then there's America's racial reckoning, where every move towards progress is increasingly met by shriller and more violent racist reaction. Then, of course, there's COVID-19, not to mention the next pandemic, which we have not prepared for. Then, of course, there's entrenched and massive inequality, the pullback on women's rights and civil rights in general, and then there's America's slide away from democracy in the face of right-wing authoritarianism, which could very well win or simply take the presidency in two years. Did I cover everything? What did I leave out? The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial?

I think you get the picture. You would not be wrong to feel a little out of sorts and even depressed about the state of the future and to wonder what can you do about it? Well, the good news is you are not powerless even in the face of all of these challenges. I'm here to tell you this right now. And in September on this podcast, we are going to do a series of episodes that will give you the tools and the knowledge you need to help solve and fix the huge challenges that we face. So look for that special series coming up in September. But first, to whet our appetite, today we are going to map out some of those challenges and ask if we are really in as deep a hole as it sometimes feels with a guy who follows the news more closely than anyone. His name is Chris Hayes,

and he's an author and a journalist and the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. And I know what you're thinking, Adam, aren't these cable news talking heads just reading off of teleprompters? But let me tell you something. Chris Hayes is the real deal. He is a really deep and informed thinker on so many topics and one of the keenest observers of politics in America today. So he joins me today, not just as a fellow talking into cameras man, although he does do that quite ably, but as a genuine expert on our political situation and what we can do about it. I know you're going to love this conversation. Please welcome Chris Hayes.

Chris, thank you so much for being on the show, for taking time out of your busy news schedule. You're probably one of the more tightly scheduled people we ever talk to. Well, thanks for having me on. I'm a factually fan, and it was great to have you on My Podcast Wise is Happening, and so I'm happy to get to talk again. Thank you so much, Chris.

Well, let's jump into it. You are probably more immersed in the news of the day than most people I speak to. Unfortunately, I well, and a lot of people I talk to now don't really want to immerse themselves in the news because shit seems so bad out there. Do you feel that way? Do you feel that things are really fucked uh in in any particular way or in every respect um i have felt yeah i mean it's pretty it's been pretty bleak although i've actually felt we're speaking right at the end of july i don't know when people will hear this but um it's felt like the last few days or week have been encouraging in some ways um you know i've been very focused on trying to me,

just at the level of national politics, which is, you know, just one level of the many ways that you can think about the news and think about our world and people's lives. But at that level, which I cover pretty closely, like my feeling about this administration, the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress is that the grade they got was a pass fail grade based on whether they passed a climate package. Um, like my sense of things. And I was like, well, they're, they're going to, it looks like a failure. It looks like a failing grade here. And in the last, you know, 48 hours, it looks like there is going to be a climate deal, which is, you know, Brian shots who, who sort of is one of the most sort of biggest climate hawks in the Senate, who's from Hawaii. He said he gave it an A minus.

He said, you know, it's not as good as what I would have loved or written, but it's pretty darn good. And if they get that, it makes a big difference. I mean, because it really will do a lot of things that are important in accelerating the transition away from carbon burning energy. So on that, I'm feeling kind of hopeful. Yeah. Generally, I understand people feeling bummed out and desultory and dyspeptic and taking breaks. Those are great words. Thank you very much.

Well, I talk for a living. So this is what I got. So yeah, I think I totally get that. And I think the people in my life feel that way. A lot of my friends feel that way. I kind of feel that way. Except I have to do it because it's my job. Yeah.

I mean, I definitely had whiplash over that climate package. I mean, I think when we booked you for this a couple of weeks ago, that was around when it had failed, when the first one had fallen apart. And I started reading articles that were like, hey, even though federal intervention on climate change is going to be impossible for the next 10 years, which is terrible. Yeah. Hey, you know what? There's still a lot we can do.

We could all buy induction stoves. And I was like, fuck, that's what we're reduced to. That's a huge retreat from saying, hey, we're going to do some kind of coordinated, central, all of society effort to guess what? Let's all head to Best Buy and buy some shit that's 20 better um and i had complete whiplash seeing uh oh my god we actually are going to get a deal through and that's so that is look one of the things i'm often pessimistic about is climate and maybe we can set set that aside and say hey if this gets passed maybe by the time people hear this it'll have

fallen apart again but we we can feel a little bit positively about it um but the prospects for the rest of you know american society uh you know continue to seem pretty bleak i mean we've got uh one party that appears to be trying to put together like single party minority rule in ways that are breaking the institutions that we have just enough that it's going to be very hard to undo them in terms of, you know, stacking the judiciary. That's been like a 40 year project in terms of, you know, gerrymandering was always a problem, but is, you know, becoming hypercharged. And then, of course, the longstanding problems with our political culture that we have been dealing with for decades now. problems with our political culture that we, you know, have been dealing with for decades now. I mean, look, I know that when you look at it day by day, you can maybe have a little bit of a forest for the trees problem. I don't know if you ever experienced that where you're,

you're looking at the, at the day-to-day minutia of how things change, but do you share that big picture concern? Oh, yes. I mean, I think the, you know, the two most acute crises are the climate crisis and the democracy crisis, you know, in the country. I think the democracy crisis has a lot to do with a bunch of other things that have to do with particularly economic inequality and race and hierarchies around- Civil rights generally. Yeah, civil rights and hierarchies around, you know, who feels like they're on top of society and who's on the bottom. And it's a's a very complicated story. I, you know, there's a bunch of sort of single variable theses people will select to tell the story. Some of them very compelling about, you know, just the central role of race in producing

backlash politics, post Obama in, in producing this kind of retrenchment on things like voting rights and an attempt to sort of, you know, barricade this white majority inside, this former white majority inside a kind of minority rule. There's things having to do with just the structural design of American democracy, which is very much an outlier. We have what's called a presidential system, which there actually are not that many of. In fact, my favorite fact about this is that the U.S. government, and maybe your listeners know this, and maybe you know this, but there's a very famous political scientist called Juan Lins who wrote a very famous book called The Perils of Presidentialism that was all about why presidential systems like the ones we have can be very volatile and subject to collapsing, often because different branches of government at the same time have equal claims to legitimacy, and there's no one to broker those equal claims and you get these standoffs. That's not true in a parliamentary system where the government as a whole, you know, the new labor government or the Tory government either governs

or falls apart and there's new elections, right? So you don't have these, you don't have these standoffs between branches. And one of the, my favorite facts about this is the u.s government obviously throughout its many years running essentially an empire often had occasion in many countries to like consult in the authoring of a new constitution and always steered people away from presidential systems wow really because they were too because precisely because they were volatile and weak and towards parliamentary systems which were viewed to be more durable. So there are some deep structural issues like just the presidential system itself, the United States Senate, which gives square acreage voting rights, and the Electoral College, which is built atop that, that all create these impediments. And then you've got this you know at the most macro

level you want to talk about the forest is like and the thing i keep coming back to is in human history no one has ever built a truly enduring truly multi-ethnic pluralistic multi-racial democracy like there just haven't been a lot. Like right now you've got, you've got the U S since the voting rights act, 1965, you've got Brazil in the last 30 years, you've got India as India has only really been a functioning kind of two-party democracy after the Gandhi's party that, you know, Indian national Congress was, was defeated by this. It's sort of right-wing alternative, but, and it's got its own democratic problems. But it's hard. It's a hard project. It's a hard project, and it's not like there's a lot of great, successful, enduring models. So we're out past the frontier. So that, in a weird way, gives me some hope because it's not like, duh, guys, this is so easy. It's not. Weird way gives me some hope because it's not like, duh, guys, this is so easy.

It's not. Yeah, I think a lot about, you know, look, you're part of the, you know, the media that covers the January 6th hearings and Trump and all that. And you hear a lot of not from you specifically, but from, you know, cable news world. Right. You hear a lot of overheated the death of democracy, right. And it's often easy for it to sort of slide by and say, oh, this is maybe overheated rhetoric. But when I look at what's happening, a lot of it does hit for me, but in a subtler way that I feel is not often represented in the coverage.

Because look, I have the experience of, I'm a member of two unions, right? One of my unions is democratically run, right? Where the, uh, the members have elections and they are, you know, the, the people that are elected are able to decide the course of the union. And the reason they're able to is because it's just sort of structurally set up that way. You know, like there's the, the various, uh, the various organs of the democracy all come together. Like literally people get together in a room and they debate and they discuss, which one is that? Which one? I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America West and I'm a member of SAG-AFTRA. So you're saying WGA West is the one that you're, just because I have a very dear friend and writing

partner who's a WGA guy. So you're saying WGA West for you is the example of like a genuinely vibrant democratic union. In general, yes. I'm sure one could have one's quibbles, but that is my experience of it. My experience of SAG-AFTRA is that it is a less democratically run union, that it's much more dominated by its staff. And the reason is like the structure of the democracy makes it very difficult for members to actually have power. There's many more members.

There's about a thousand different elected offices. And there are not like specific days where people come together and hear the various candidates debate. It's very difficult for people who are running to communicate with the members it's like all of these subtle little things that cause the power imbalance to be such that actually staff has a lot more power than the membership does and even you know and it's very difficult to uh you know get new leadership in etc i'm not sure if i being clear, but it's like the devil is in the details. Very, very clear. Right. Yes. And, and that's made me think about our, our, our overall government differently. Um, and you know, again, we have so much focus on like,

what is in the constitution and the soul of democracy. And I'm thinking like, man, how, how possible it is to register to vote in a particular state, right, really affects how democratic America is. And it's very, very difficult to change that one little specific rule that's way down at the bottom, because if you don't have a functioning democracy in that state, you can't change the rule. And it's very difficult to sort of slide into an area in which democracy is becoming degraded without even noticing. It's a great point. And I think there's two parallel issues you're pointing to. One is institutional design and also habits, norms, and practices in institutions matter

for the level of democratic vibrancy in any institution, organization, country, local municipality that is ostensibly democratic, right? There are places, there are towns that are ostensibly democratic, right? I mean, there are places, there are towns that are like ostensibly democratic that are like really run by a local machine that like have very little, you know, democratic accountability in any real sense. Correct. And there are places that are much more vibrantly democratic, just the way that you're describing these two unions.

And I think there's two ways to think about the problem, right? One is this question of institutional design and reform, right? I mean, the Voting Rights Act, other things that we've done to constantly be trying to, you know, re-enliven democracy. But then there's this broader, more profound issue. And you see this in unions all the time. In fact, there's a great book on this by a sociologist, German sociologist named Robert Michels, where he calls it the iron law of oligarchy. And Michels actually takes up his problem with the question of why was the trade union socialist movement of Germany that he was a part of

so dominated by this small cast of party functionaries? Why was it run by the staff, essentially? And these were the people in early 19th century and early 20th century Germany who were the biggest believers in democracy, right? Yet they're running this not particularly democratic organization. And he basically says that there's a kind of entropy that acts on institutions and organizations where for reasons of complexity, for reasons of fatigue, for reasons of comparative advantage, a small amount of people are going to do a lot of the work and then kind of assemble to themselves a certain amount of disproportionate

power. And then representation gets attenuated. And he basically thinks this is a sort of inevitable natural process that you'd have to just keep working at to undo all the time. Now, Michels would later conclude that like democracy is a farce and turn and become a fascist, which is a sort of a sad end to that story. But I do think that that iron law of oligarchy is really useful for thinking about, and that's why I think it's a very, a really astute point to point to these two unions, right? Because there's like, A, there's an institutional design question, but then there's also this just question of entropy. There's a question of like, of the need for kind of constant reform, constant updating, constant vibrancy in any organization or any democratic institution.

Yeah. One of the things that I really started to think about in and over the course of making the show, the G word was that, you know, there's all these parts of our government and the agencies which we have designed or we hope to be generally democratic or to be uh you know to have equity in how they operate to like you know take this public good and divide it equally and some of them do it but then there is this other iron law where you know the more resources some group of people or some organization has the more resources they're able to suck to themselves the the larger companies are able to get more ppp loans despite the the fact that the smaller businesses need it more. And that's just sort of like a law of the universe. The rich gets richer and it's incumbent upon us who are like have a stake in the government to constantly fight back against that trend and look for places in which that law of the universe has like invaded this structure we've tried to build and try to like root it out.

That's part of the project. Yeah. And that's part of the project, too. I think of a functioning liberal democracy is to create the space for the constant dynamism that, you know, like a free press that can write articles saying these big businesses are getting it. And then that, you know, people can complain to the representatives like you want these kind of constant feedback mechanisms and the danger always,

which is the one that you kind of started this part of the conversation with about this sort of, this kind of, you know, auto-catalytic process, right? This sort of snowballing of anti-democratic rules, right? So it's like, if you could control the gerrymandering, then all of a sudden, and the Supreme Court won't review it,

then all of a sudden it looks a lot like you can kind of do whatever you want with 44% of the vote. And then you've kind of diffused one of the means for Democratic feedback, and then you can do other stuff, right? I mean, one of the other things they're talking about, you know, there's this talk about Trump in the second term sort of turning a lot of federal employees into at-will employees through this somewhat obscure thing called Schedule F. But, you know, if you can say, if you can order up an audit for someone that gets too loud in their critique of you, like at some level you still have a democratic liberal society, but to the extent that happens, you're getting towards something else, right? you're getting towards something else, right?

Like, and no one ever has to like change the constitution for that to happen. That sliding can happen in all these kinds of insidious ways. Yeah. And I mean, the odd thing is once you start looking for these, you start to see ways in which our government was never that democratic to begin with.

And it starts to look like, you know, I mean, look, I'm reading a history of the civil rights movement right now. And I'm just reminded of the fact that, you know, up until the mid 60s, much of the country was an apartheid state. And, you know, we broke that relatively recently. And the question is whether that's a blip or whether that was, you know, whether we achieved a new level of American democracy or whether we just carved out a little blip that, you know, is suddenly going to be eroded back to what it was. Well, that that that is the reason. And people who've listened to my podcast or listen to me on other podcasts know that I'm somewhat almost monomaniacally obsessed with this. But that is

the reason to me that like the reconstruction era in America is so important and why everyone needs to spend a lot of time reading about it and why it's so undertaught in American schools, because I think people underappreciate how remarkably radical the aspirations of the radical Republicans were and how successful it was for about five to eight years. You know, my favorite stat is that a few years after real reconstruction starts, what we call congressional reconstruction, which is when the radical Republicans are sort of in charge, the S the lower house of South Carolina state legislature is majority black. That's in the late, it does in the early 1870s. Now that has never been replicated again in any,

any sense. Wow. You had black us centers, you black members of Congress. You had, you had black U.S. senators, you black members of Congress. You had you had fusion politics. So like you had a political party in the Republican Party who, for their own incentive reasons, needed to produce big, durable coalitions of white and black voters. And they had to mobilize white and black voters and they had integrated campaign rallies. white and black voters and they had integrated campaign rallies. I mean, now this was all destroyed by the reactionary backlash of what we call, quote unquote, redemption, redeemers,

terrorist violence from the Ku Klux Klan, the sort of hacking away in this kind of entropy fashion. And then sometimes outright coups like happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, when the multiracial government was literally just set upon by a mob that stormed the Capitol and took it over and never gave it back and ran all the Black people out of town. So when you really focus on that period of history, this sort of simple story of the arc bending towards justice gets really complicated because instead they're smack dab in American history is this lost city of Atlantis that got flooded. It's now, and was underwater from basically the 1880s to 1965. Um, and when you think about that, when you think about it's possible to go backwards,

yes, that gives you a whole new perspective on the on the stakes, you know, of these sort of fights about multiracial democracy. Yeah. And that brings me to like a question I have about framing, because we, you know, talk so much about, all right, abortion rights are under threat. Voting rights are under threat. You know, black Americans are subject to police violence democracy is being blah blah blah you know we have all these sort of individual issues to me i've started looking at it as wait are what we deal are is it the case that what we are actually dealing with is simply an anti-civil rights movement like i was brought up being taught about hey the 60s the

70s we burned our bras we marched vietnam war protest and the good guys won which you know i eventually realized was not the case because we had the immense you know backlash of of the nixon presidency and everything else um but you know that we had this sort of clarifying moment where all of these you know marginalized groups got up and spoke for themselves and you know society moved forward and became a more inclusive society and the arc bent in the correct direction. And I'm looking around going, hold on a second, are we seeing just the opposite of that movement? Like a focused group of people who are trying to undo all of those pieces of progress and they've been working at it for 40 years and now they're finally having success.

Is that what is going on? I think that is extremely accurate characterization of particularly the right wing legal movement, the Federalist Society, the majority court, which is basically a rights counterrevolution, right? There's a rights revolution that happens in the 20th century that happens in a whole bunch of ways. It happens at the ballot box, but it also happens in the Supreme Court and the Warren Court. You know, it happens through civil rights legislation. It happens through Roe v. Wade, almost the passage of the ERA, very, very close to happening, which is remarkable when you think about what's required for a constitutional amendment.

The movement for marriage equality and gay rights, the movement now for trans rights. There is a comprehensive rights counter revolution that is happening right now. And that, and that, you know, the majority of the court subscribes to as their agenda. I mean, that, that is absolutely, I think a very accurate way to think about it. That there was an expansion of rights and an expansion of not just rights, but also, you know, it really gets down to me again, to get back to this fundamental about the sort of fundamental dignity of different kinds of people to flourish on equal footing. Yeah. And an upending of received hierarchies

about who should and should not be on top. And that's the moral force at the core of it. I mean, there's a legal question about how that's enforced, right? But the moral force is, it's just this basic democratic pluralism. Like, whatever you are, you should be, you get to vote, and you and I are on equal footing. And we should be on equal footing because we're both individuals. And, you know, to the founders, that was because we're both created by God and we're both white men. So it was a very, you know, a very circumscribed version of that. But in our current vision, it's because we have human dignity.

You know, however you define that, whether religiously or sexually. whether religiously or sexually. And I think there is, there is a deep sense that like the actual necessary ordering form of human life is hierarchy that, um, a government that attempts to guarantee too many rights descends into sort of chaos. Wow.

You know, I think the, I think this is a real right-wing view. I mean, like, Okay, yeah, yeah. Like, this is, people believe this. Like, there's a version of,

there's versions, you know, Josh Hawley's got a new book out soon called Manhood, right? Like, there's people who think patriarchy's a good thing. Like, a positive good. Like, those people exist. They really believe it. And they are really fighting for it.

It's not, you know not they're not trolling. Yeah. So, yes, you're right to identify like basically what I think amounts to a rights counterrevolution as a huge driving force in the modern right. All right. Well, let's talk about what we do about it in a second. We'll do that when we get back from break but before we go to break i want to talk a little bit more about how bad things are because you say that this is a a viewpoint that the supreme court has adopted and or the courts generally and um so let's just talk about how how deep shit we are in in terms of the supreme court like when you know amy coney barrett was appointed i had this sort of vision that like oh my god we're in like a christopher nolan movie you know amy coney barrett was appointed i had this sort of vision that like oh my god we're in like a christopher nolan movie you know when the christopher nolan movie goes in super slow motion and they start cutting to other stuff and it's going to be a while before

you see the aftermath i was like yes the the suv we're in just hit like the spike strip or whatever and started flipping over and bad outcomes are locked in that are not actually going to take place for another five to ten years. But we just saw the first couple in less than a year, and they're already worse than most people expected. And that is the kind of loss or the kind of, I don't know, it's a very difficult reality to live in of, uh, I don't know. It's a very difficult like reality to live in knowing that we're, we're headed for that. How do you think about it? I'm, I basically think that's accurate. Um, I, you know, I really try not to subscribe to

doomerism. Like I, I, I, I both, both as a kind of, you know, you know, what Graham, she said, uh, you know, uh, optimism, the will pessimism, the intellects, like you have to, you have to sort of will yourself to be optimistic is the only way that you can make things better. You know, the, the, the darkest source of this to me is the court. I mean, they just, it just is, it's really bad. Um, and it's really bad. It's gonna be really bad for a while and it's just terrible. And they, they are particularly,

I think Alito and thomas who are the kind of leaders of that wing of what is now a pretty durable majority whether it's six three or five four depending on the case um they dg af yeah like they are just like like strap in everybody. Yeah. And that's, I mean, Thomas has been waiting for it for 30 years. Thomas, of course, is the one we're talking about the rights revolution. I mean, Thomas's concurrence in the Dobbs decision that overturns review aid is the one that says, look, we want to, we should reexamine all the cases in this line. Dobbs that are essentially the substantive due process, which is, which is the substantive due process, which is the legal architecture of the rights revolution in many ways. A legal architecture,

by the way, built on, to bring this back, the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, written by a bunch of radical Republicans who were enshrining into law actual pluralistic multiracial democracy for the first time in American history. Like, the 14th Amendment is a lefty document, okay? You want to talk about the founder the 14th Amendment is a lefty document, okay? You want to talk about the founder's intent? It is a lefty document. It is a document that envisions the enshrinement and expansion of rights.

It's an expansive vision of rights. And these so-called originalists want to basically shrink it back down. So yes, the court is really bleak. The only thing I would say to like, just put like a little drop of hope in this cocktail um a the court is an institution that is embedded in a democratic society and if people it will have an effect i don't know how if people fight back against the court meaning that its

public opinion diminishes meaning that people um pay start paying more attention to judges that there are street protests um you know civil society rises up and and and says you know we don't like the dobbs decision um yeah there are democratic avenues there's going to be a vote in kansas um as you and i are speaking in three or four days that is a vote about whether they will change the state constitution in a means that would essentially outlaw abortion or keep it legal. So there are other avenues that people can fight back with that you have, like, you got to get real clear on, particularly on abortion right now, like what, what can be saved, what

can be fought for, what can be enshrined and how do we do it? Yeah. What can be enshrined and how do we do it? Yeah. But how much is that, are those things that we do a retreat from the more important battlefield? Like in my own activism, I mean, you saw the show or the G word. I make this big point about local government being the most important form of government. As I was making that argument, I was feeling, I was reading people writing that, hey, the focus on local government is, sure, it's important. It's also a retreat.

Hey, we don't have power in national politics. Let's focus local, right? Oh, let's fight state by state for abortion rights. Well, you only have to do that once you've lost the broader national battle. And I think of it similar to the article I read, hey, guess what? We lost federal change on climate change. Let's go buy induction stoves.

It's like, well, it's not nearly the victory that we need to win. It's just simply the best that we can do. And so that is my, to stay on the optimism, pessimism dichotomy a little bit. Yes, we can be optimistic and go do those things. We can always live to fight another day. We always have the opportunity today to make a change that's going to result in a better tomorrow, no matter how bad things are. But at the same time, do you ever feel in the

back of your mind, ah, that is still a retreat? Yes. Oh, yes. I mean, it's unquestionably a retreat. Dobbs is a disaster. It's a disaster. It's a disaster. There's no two ways around it. It is a disaster. It will continue to be be a disaster it'll be disaster that looms that kills people that ruins lives for like a long time but to to take your metaphor it's like look armies beat tactical retreats so that they can fight to live and fight another day like they don't do it out of choice like when you be a retreat it's because you're getting your butt whooped. And so you try to regather your forces and figure out how to reattack, how to conserve what you have because you're forced to do it.

But yes, it is a retreat. Fighting state by state for abortion rights, as opposed to a constitutional regime in which that right is guaranteed, is a retreat. It is a constriction of rights. It is the most, probably the most significant constriction of rights of the last 50 years. And I would even say you could make the case. It is the most significant constriction of rights in America since the period of redemption followed reconstruction. I was going to, I was going to ask in American history,

but I think that is the bigger example. Yes, that's the ultimate one because people went from being full citizens to having basically their citizenship taken away in the span of a few years in some cases. For then, like for the better half of a century. Yes, for a very long time. And that's the other scary thing.

You know, it's 1876 is, 1877 is when the U.S. troops leave the South. That begins the slow process, sometimes not so slow, sometimes slower of of the sort of reimposition of white supremacy, of of sharecropping and debt peonage of the establishment of Jim Crow laws and all that stuff. And it's yeah, it's really it endures until the 1960s. laws and all that stuff. And it's, yeah, it's really, it endures until the 1960s. Yeah. And you talking about that makes me think of, I often have this flip in my own mind where, you know, I was brought up to believe that, you know, certain changes in American life were permanent or, you know, certain trends were, hey, this is the way the world is now. The Supreme Court is a good example of that. Oh yeah, we have this, you know, Supreme Court that is always

guaranteeing more rights to people. And then you start to look around and go, hold on a second. Have I actually been living in the blip, not the new regime? And am I about to enter a new regime? And when I'm 90 years old, will I look back and say, oh, we had it really good for about 30 years there. And then, you know, now, oh, but now we're actually living in a very – in a different world that – Absolutely. I mean the most extreme example of this always and probably in human history and it always sings with me is like if you ever read the literature about the Holocaust, particularly if you watch movies or documentaries and you listen to cosmopolitan affluent Jews of Berlin in 1929 or 1931 like talking about their life and it's like

we we went to shul we like we had parties and we had bar mitzvahs and life was good and i took piano it's like there's a lot of people i mean obviously there's always anti-semitism you know in germany at that time and but there's you know you can listen to these interviews of you know someone a woman talking about like you know her her her you know her brother's bar mitzvah you know and yeah and and now the you know the mayor came and all that you know and it's like this little island that now we view and we're like oh my god you didn't realize what was in front of you of course you didn't realize what was in front of you but in that little world it was like yeah we're doing well. We're pretty integrated. Like there's Jews who have big, powerful jobs. And, you know, I go to the gymnasium with my, you know, my, my Christian

friends. And, um, you know, it, it, that, that reality, which I think is like, how old are you, Adam? I'm about to turn 40. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm 43. So we're basically the same age. I do think for us particularly, there's like this weird rupture of coming of age at the end of the Cold War and this sort of sense of progress, end of history, globalization. Everyone's going to be democratic and capitalist. That's going to sort of like go over the whole world.

There'll be a tendency towards like one form of liberal democratic capitalism and then just like seeing how much that was not the case and the sort of just the notion of progress, not being guaranteed backwards, things can move backwards and they can move really badly backwards is, is both disruptive, but also kind of ubiquitous, I think, in the way that people of our cohort think about things. Yeah. And it's contrary to what, again, not just what we were taught in school, but what like the entire medium is, you know, I was brought up watching Forrest fucking Gump, you know what I mean? Where it's like the world constantly gets better. And that I think is the baby boomer vision and like, not wrongly, it's the baby boomer vision and i think that's still the dominant culturally hegemonic

view because of the the the continued amount of power that that generational cohort has and again i think you know generations are very flimsy analytical categories but but but there are groups of people that experience a whole bunch of things in in sort of cohort fashion like actual material things and the actual material cohort experience of those fashion, like actual material things. And the actual material cohort experience of those folks was like, basically things just getting better and better and rights expanding and expanding. Not to say there wasn't like, there was obviously like there was the AIDS plague, which was like the most horrific thing for people that watched like, you know, 80% of their friends die. It's not like nothing bad happened in that period, but the general arc really was, you know,

going in the right way. Well, now that we are seeing arc really was going in the right way. Well, now that we are seeing that things are going in the wrong way, let's talk about what we can do about it. But first, we've got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Chris Hayes. Okay, so we're back with Chris Hayes. We've been talking about how we are facing a counter-rights revolution, and we have that locked in with a Supreme Court for the next God knows how many decades, and we are currently beating a tactical retreat. So what do you think, Chris, that we can do about all of this, like in the face of those massive challenges?

And again to not looking at a piecemeal oh my god we got a problem with guns oh my god we have a problem with abortion oh my god we have a problem with gay rights looking at it as an overall movement that is you know sweeping the country what what can be done about it where do you suggest we start i know it's a big question yeah i mean i i i mean i think you're i really liked what you said on my podcast about and and on the g word about local government, because I really do think that's really true. And I think, you know, there's a difference between being a practitioner of politics and a fan, right?

The difference between like rooting for teams and actually playing the sport. And I do think there's a little bit of like spectator fandom politics junkiness that can set in. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like there's a great book that sort of critiques this by Eitan Hirsch called Politics is for Power,

which he sort of critiques what he calls political hobbyism. I had him on Wise is Happening, which you could look up if you want to get the 55-minute version, digested version of the book. But the book is really good where it's like, you know, his critique is like,

we fall into this kind of like, we approach politics like fans and we're sort of rooting for this or that. But that's not a great way to think about politics like democratic politics is actually like what we do civically like yeah you know how we engage civically and i think you've been really great about that and i think that's really true i mean there's broader strategic questions to be debated i think at the national level of like the progressive movement or, or, or what the democratic party is doing, particularly what it's doing on the courts. Um, I think that there's also a little bit of like, you know, when you're back footed, um, you went, or when you're in retreat,

you have to, you have to prioritize, right. You have to triage. Um, and I think that like, to me, the two crises I'm most focused on, which is climate and democracy, are like the ones that feel most perilous. Like, we need, we really need to make sure that we do what we can to shore up and vouchsafe and protect the basic mechanisms of American representative governance against essentially would be authoritarian fascists. Yeah. And, and also dramatically reduced carbon. And I think there, there are local ways to do that too. I mean, particularly on the carbon front, like to get back to your induction point, you know, it's true that like, that's not enough, but it's also true that like towns doing things like adopting building codes for all new buildings can't put in gas

ranges or like that stuff really will matter, you know? Yes. So, but the individual piece of it, hey, we can all go out and buy. No, no, no, no. It has to happen. It matters when the city does it, which means it's vastly more important when the whole country does that or when a state does it. Yep. So, so, yeah, I don't have like some great blueprint. I do think, um, I'm torn between two, two things that I think about national politics. One is that it's incredibly important not to let, again, essentially an aspiring authoritarian party gain full control of the federal government.

government again like extremely important like life or death kind of life or death of american democracy important it's also just not tenable to say we have a two-party system but you can't let one of the two parties get power or the game ends yeah like yeah like so there's some way we got to figure this out and i don't know what that is but you cannot be the case i mean right now that is the case but it cannot be that's just not the way a functioning multi-party democracy works like yeah if you have multi-party democracy what it means is sometimes people will elect the conservative party sometimes they'll elect the liberal party sometimes you know in other places like the like the centrist party or the leftist party or the but but we can't have a situation in which it is literally an existential threat to the whole system. If one of those two parties gains full control. And right now I just

think it is, I don't think there's any way around that. And I don't know how to think your way out of that paradox, you know, but it also is just like, it just feels like you can't keep this up as like, well, if Democrats just win every election, it's like, well, that's not going to happen. Like, you know, sometimes, you know, democratic polities react thermostatically. They sometimes are pissed off about inflation and they go to the polls and they vote out the party in power because inflation side. Sometimes that party is conservative. Sometimes it's liberal.

That's just the way democratic politics works. And you have to have a durable enough democracy that you can survive that kind of conservative, sometimes it's liberal. And that's just the way democratic politics works. And you have to have a durable enough democracy that you can survive that kind of thing because that's how it works. Yeah, I mean, you need to have a, this is my very dumb, dumb version of why democracy is important, but like you occasionally need to change your government,

it's gonna happen, and you wanna do it without having to shoot people. And so you therefore just need a mechanism by which you can elect one group of people rather than another. And if we have a system that tends us towards two parties, and so we need it to be okay for either one of those parties to be in power in a general way. Yes. And in fact, it's also the case that like there are democracies that are ostensibly two party democracies, but have essentially been one party democracies the entire time. And they're not particularly strong.

I mean, Mexico was that under the PRI for decades. South Africa, whose ruling party is African National Congress, which as an organization was one of the most morally righteous and effective movements in global history, destroyed apartheid. Right. Yeah. And, you know, talk to South Africans and read South African reporting like 40, 50, 40 years on is like, you know, pretty corrupt. There's lots of problems with the ANC. And, you know, so that that's also to get back to that Robert Michelle's point about entropy. Like you do need competition. You do need, you know, people have different options. People in power need to be kept on their toes a little bit. Yeah. So all of that's necessary, but we just have a very weird situation, a tragic and scary one where

it's like, you just can't trust one of the parties with the keys to the car. And, you know, that's just really not tenable long-term. And, you know, that's just really not tenable long term. But and you can see that need in, you know, when you see Democrats go like, look, I love my responsible Republican friends and I love Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney is OK. You know, like you can. That's what I see when I see Democratic politicians saying stuff like that is they're like, look, for the love of God, we need to have a functioning other party. so let's at least boost up the people who are not completely batshit. But at the same time, that also looks to people like me, who I'm aware of the incredible authoritarian tendencies of the Republican Party, the way in which they're trying to lock in one-party majority rule forever, especially to the courts. It looks like, oh my God, the Democratic Party doesn't see what the fuck is going on. Yeah, I think you're identifying is not equal to identifying a profound tension of, you know, when Nancy Pelosi says we need a strong Republican Party and Joe

Biden waxes, you know, poetic about bipartisanship, that frustration of like, guys, they are an existential threat to American democracy. But at the same time, I'm also sympathetic to the idea more than sympathetic. I mean, an outright support of the idea that like one of the projects right now, and Jamie Raskin, who is on the January 6th committee and is quite eloquent on this, is to basically build a popular front to protect American constitutional democracy. And the popular front like includes everyone from Lynn Cheney to Noam Chomsky. Right. Like the you know, it's it's it's it's all the people who are on the side fundamentally of like this red line issue of do like is a coup OK or not, you know. And then there's beneath that there's a bunch of other levels in which like Liz Cheney didn't vote for H.R. one, which is the voting rights expansion and like the Republican party institutionally, you know, is, is really bad on all this stuff. But, you know, the sort of celebration of Rusty Bowers, who was the speaker of the house in Arizona, who talked about how it

would be breaking his oath to basically allow Donald Trump to like overturn the electors. Like that was very moving to me. And you know, that guy's politics suck. Like there's no two ways about it, but what he did was the right thing when it counted. And we do actually, it's really close that that doesn't happen. So we do actually need to build a kind of popular front. You know, I think there is a strong majority of Americans who want to keep and maintain American democracy. And we do need to strengthen that. keep and maintain American democracy. And we do need to strengthen that. Unfortunately, it is, you know, as with all things in America, if you take a poll of all Americans where every American is counted equally, you get very different results

than if you weight Americans as they are weighted in the Electoral College and in the Senate and via gerrymandering and everything else. But look, I understand that, that, you know, if you're looking on the issue of democracy, you need to find the people who agree with you about that. You don't agree about everything else. Maybe you can get them to vote for your, you know, reforming the electoral college bill or whatever. The problem is sometimes those coalitions don't seem like they're actually going to do the thing that needs to be done. So if we're talking about like the Supreme court, right. After Amy Coney Barrett's appointment and the Dobbs decision, you know, there's just constant talk about expanding the court package, all these different things that could be done to the Supreme Court. A lot of those to me seem like, you know, fantasies or hypotheticals, especially given that the the mainstream of the Democratic Party isn't even agreed on those policies.

the mainstream of the democratic party isn't even agreed on those policies. So what do you think in terms of practical reality of what can be done about the Supreme court? Do you see any hope in the next 10 or 15 years of structural changes being made to the Supreme court whatsoever? You do actually. Well, I do in the next 10 or 15. I mean, I don't think in the next, I don't think, I think every, you know, you can only stretch your rubber band so far and it's going to snap back. And, and, and, and that, that goes in a lot of different directions. It goes for people on the left too, right? Like,

you know, if, if this court continues on its current trajectory, there just will be more and more mobilization to strip the court of jurisdiction on issues, to rein in the court, to expand the court as to dilute. And people should keep working on that. That's going to be a longer term project. But it's but and that also serves. I mean, that that serves as its own kind of democratic check. I mean, you know, the famous story of of FDR's court expansion, right, is that. And this is like sort of, I would say, depending on which historian you read, like kind of half myth, half reality. Basically, the the the conservative court is striking down all his a lot of his New Deal legislation. The conservative court is striking down a lot of his New Deal legislation. He reacts by proposing to expand the court.

The proposal to expand the court is met with significant political backlash. It's really the first kind of political backlash misstep in some ways that FDR endures. He loses people over it. The Republicans attack him, and quite effectively so. But then some of the conservative justices switch their positions and start green lighting. And the question always is, how much was the cudgel of court expansion responsible for what is called the switch in time that saved nine. The switch to accommodate New Deal legislation, particularly a more expansive view of particularly the Commerce Clause and the ability to regulate private enterprise.

And no one can really say for sure, but to me, it's a story. I think there's good evidence it did affect. And it's good evidence for the fact that that's just a democratic means, right? Of trying to resolve this in a way that's not lawless. It's like, okay, there's a legal mechanism by which we can expand the court.

I have proposed this to the populace. Okay, people are arguing about it. Okay, you don't like it. Okay, well, you're now freaked out that I'm gonna expand the court. Maybe you think about that when you rule. That's all like fair game in democratic politics. And there are going to be more and more efforts like that if this court continues on the trajectory that it set for itself in this term. have the power to, you know, play that.

Like FDR is playing power politics there, right? He said, well, you fuck with me, I'm going to fuck with you. He also had an enormous majority. I mean, you know, the thing you always got to remember about FDR, right? Like FDR is that, you know, he's just dealing with like insane majorities. But yes, I mean, to your point, and I think this gets down to a deep, deep question is, it often appears to me like many members of the Democratic Party don't actually believe there is an existential threat to democracy. Yeah. Even if they say it, they don't act like it.

Yeah. And I do think you're identifying a significant disconnect, which I do think there is, between how viscerally they feel that peril and how viscerally I think, say, you and I feel that peril. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Much. And we're both white men, right? Like we feel, we feel the peril, but often on behalf of our friends and loved ones who are in much more vulnerable positions than us. And so let's talk about that piece of it. Let's talk about the civil rights part. I mean, I'm dismayed by how much I am still hearing debates on the left, among people who care about civil rights broadly, but they're saying, hey, we shouldn't worry so much about pronouns. We're turning people off right now. We need to worry about these other issues. And I'm looking at it going, hold on a second. They're coming for

everybody. You know what I mean? The same people who are raising a big hue and cry over, we don't want to use people's preferred pronouns, who are attacking trans rights, who see trans rights as a position they can win on, that they can use that to beat the... Those are the same people who are taking away abortion rights. Those are the same people who are taking away voting rights. Those are et cetera, et cetera. It seems to be difficult to build solidarity among the folks who are the fucking victims of this. And so how do we, how do we go about beating that into, you know, our own, our own coalition? Yeah. I mean, look, I think solidarity is always going to be hard. And I also think there's always going to be, you know, there's always fights.

Like, you know, you said you're reading a, a civil rights history and, you know, I'm reading parting the waters by Taylor. Yeah. So I was just, it's funny. So I was going to say that the, the, the great one is parting the waters by Taylor branch. It's a, it's a three part trilogy. It's incredible. And I don't know if you're where you are in that book, but one of the amazing things about that book and then the other two, which is the American King years is that he does very granular,

you know, passages about the internal fights in all these groups. It's not like everyone's like, like we get all the, you know, we get all the, like everyone's singing the folk spirituals. Like they are at each other's throats constantly. This is what I love about this book. Martin Luther King is, is at war with the NAACP. They hate each other. They hate each other.

John Lewis, this is my favorite story. John Lewis gets basically like kicked out of SNCC after the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They're like, you suck. You sell out institute. Like John Lewis. Yeah. John Lewis.

Yeah. So. The hero. And the great thing, and that's actually a great thing about the Branch books is that he really dives into these fights, right? That is also to me, always a really useful touchdown to remember life. It's endemic to human collective endeavors. So that's one thing on the specific point that you're pointing to, I think on particularly on trans rights, but, but more broadly, right. I do think it's important to distinguish between what your principles are and what you want to fight for and how you communicate about them. So I think the way that I think of it is like, my principles are like trans people deserve equal dignity and rights to flourish as every other person in this, under God, I'm not that religious, but like, and in this country, right?

And I'm going to be committed to fighting that they have that. Yeah. And if I'm going to communicate about that to someone who is skeptical or not, or just sort of ignorant, I want to communicate in a fashion that will be the most persuasive to that person, which means I don't want to shame them or bludgeon them about pronouns. I want to explain to them why using the pronouns a person wants is an important knot of respect and common human fellowship and why embedding that into our social practices. So I do think the seed of this critique that I think is correct is that sometimes the way the left communicates outwardly can be either alienating or a little like hectoring, et cetera. And that there are ways to

have the principles you have, which is like, we fight for these people. These are our people because we're all our people because these people are fellow human beings and their fellow Americans, but they're also like on the, on the wrong end of a lot of persecution and contempt and that's messed up and that's not okay. And we fight for them and they're with us. And there's a way to tell that story. That is an open, accessible, common sense story about human decency together and fellowship that I think sometimes we don't do a great job of doing. I agree with you that, look, the, it's important to speak to the audience that you're speaking to. And that's something I seek to do in my own work. And I'm also the type of person who I'm like, look, language is important sometimes, but it is

far too much been the focus of far too many, far too many liberals and leftists spend too much time criticizing each other's language on Twitter. Right. I don't think that that is political action. However, when someone writes in, you know, when a, when a, when an anti-trans almost right-wing liberal writes a New York times op-ed

that says, Hey, we're spending too much time on pronouns when there's real issues to talk about. They're not making the point that you're making. They're, they're using that as a way to say, I don't think trans people should be a part of our coalition.

Right. And it's also like the fact that that's an active debate is really worrying. I totally agree with that. Or that they're just sort of sacrificable. But I also think that it's a false choice. That's my point is like, I actually, I actually think that people can be communicated like, and maybe this is dumb of me, but I think that part of that is a false choice, right? That point is like, these people over here are never going to come around to your view

libs on like trans folks. That's going to come around to your view libs unlike trans folks that's going to be weird nailing to them so just shut up about it and don't talk about it and ignore it so that they'll listen to you on other stuff right that's the argument and my argument is like no they will come they can come around like like like not all of them and some like and some of them are going to have to be like battled. Right. And in through the through the mechanisms of civic, you know, nonviolent American democracy. Right. But some of them also can be persuaded. And so you don't have to run from it. And there are ways to talk about it that isn't alienating. I'm sorry. Like abandon my principles of solidarity or standing with people that are under the boot of incredibly scary, horrifying state threats to their health care and their bodily autonomy and their ability to flourish and live in dignity. I'm not going to abandon them to score some political point because of your theory of what people will think about it. Like, that's my view. because of your theory of what people will think about it. Like, yeah, that that's my view.

I think that's a wonderful view to have. And I think it's like the, the starting point that we need to, to, you know, build a politics that fixes some of this. I'm curious though, are there any issues that you feel are too far gone? Like when I think about guns, for instance, I think, my God, this has been the example. Yeah. Okay. It's literally the example.

Like, like I'm looking around, my God, gun violence is terrible. Here's my dark thought. And please, please, everybody, don't judge me too harshly for my dark thought I have in the middle of the night. But I look at the gun violence stats in America. I say gun violence is terrible. But we're also talking, look, traffic deaths are also really bad. We have a lot of those too. You know, we have a lot of those, too. And the problem with gun with with gun issues is that, oh, my God, we have a dedicated, focused movement that has been working for 50 years, has built an incredibly broad coalition of their own.

And it is you know, they have won in the courts and enshrined this argument that 50 year movement to undo it. And when I look at the broad sweep of all the issues that I care about, climate, civil rights, democracy, all these other things, I'm like, Oh my God, maybe this is not the one for me at the same time that I think people are being killed every day. And so I, do you, again, that's a dark thought. I don't feel that way every day. That is almost verbatim my how i give how i think about it um the the problem with guns is there's just so many of them and they last a long time and there's 400 million circulating in the country yeah um that's just a that's it

that's a problem that's different than like a little bit of a problem of even changing someone's mind because it's like a physical artifact in the world that endures and can and a lot of people who have them say if you try to like okay we got to go get some of that gun those guns off the streets well a lot of the people who have them say i will literally shoot you if you try to take it away i find this like one of the most one of the most disquieting elements of american democracy at this moment is increasingly the mainstream argument from people from gun rights advocates and Republican party members is if you pass a law to restrict gun use, I will murder you. Yeah. Like literally that is the, that is the, the argument is when they say,

come and take it, or do you just try to take my guns? What they're saying is if through the democratic process, you pass a law to like a gun license, a simple, yeah. To limit gun use, restrict it. When you, when the agents of the state come to my house to enforce it, I will put a bullet in their brains. Yeah. And that's like the, that is the message. Yeah. Like that's like a wildly seditious message yeah and it's a hundred percent mainstream message now yeah it's not hunting and it's not self-defense again those are both like it there's

recreation there's like three levels there's there's there's recreation which is fine i agree go do your thing there's self-defense i think I think it's more problematic. I think there's lots of reasons to think a gun in the home makes your home more dangerous. The statistics bear that out, but okay, fine. And then there's, no, I want to murder agents of the state that try to enforce the law. It's like, that's not a legitimate political argument in the context of a peaceable democracy, that's, that's an attack on the state's monopoly on legitimate use of force. Like that we can't, that's not, you can't have that. That's not a, that's not an okay argument. You can't have that argument. And it's, but it's also not something that you can defeat really at the ballot box because,

you know, that's the whole point of the argument. Yeah. You know, the whole point of the rule of law is that, OK, we actually all agree to obey the laws. Yeah. You know, like I don't like the Supreme Court decision, but I will follow it because I live in a society. And this is a rejection of that principle. Well, right. I will not obey. And the threat of violence.

So, yeah, I have very dark thoughts about the gun stuff, too. And I think I also think it's just very it's indistinguishably bound up with the democratic decline problem. Um, you know, that, that, that I, I tweeted this the other day, you know, there's this incredibly, there's a very brutal political battle brewing in Iraq right now, um, between the, the current government and a, and a challenging party. Um, it's actually he was the, the, the, the head of Iraq and then, uh, Muqtada al-Sadr sort of famous Shiite cleric who has this, you know, Shiite opposition party. Anyway, they, they had, they had protests that, that, that broke into the presidential complex, you know, overran a wall. So then, and, and it was, you know, dicey and sort of scary. And then Maliki is later photographed holding an AK-47

and with armed guards around him, like walking out basically to be like, just try and come back again, right? And I took a picture and I tweeted, I said, in other contexts, it's just obvious and uncontroversial that politicians posing with guns is not the sign of a healthy

democracy. Like, like in other contexts, like you see that image, you're like, what's going on there? It doesn't seem great, but that's how people run for Congress. And here it's like how you run for Congress. Yeah. That's wild. Um, okay. Uh, let's, I know we have to let you go. Um, I would love a couple words from you in terms of building the kind of political coalition that we need in terms of fighting back against some of these trends. How do you hope that people will do it on an individual basis, right? Like you said, we don't want political hobbyism. We don't want people to just watch your show on MSNBC as good as you simply think it is. Well, I mean, I think a both-and situation there.

Of course. But Chris, let me tell you something. And I don't want to be insulting to you. In my own local political work, right? When I work on the, you know, I'll say progressive side with people who are actual, you know, activists and et cetera. One of the things we say is, how do we get the MSNBC watchers involved? Yeah, totally. Right.

How do we get them off the couch? And, you know, these people with liberal progressive values who, you know, care about trans rights, care about abortion rights, how do we get them to fucking leave their houses? Yep, yep. And so how do you think about that? And how do you hope that people listening to this, what is the, what I'm trying to get to is,

what is the first step for people, and maybe the second and third step in your mind? I know it's a tough question, because you're not an activist, but, or maybe you consider yourself to be one. I'm not an activist, and I'm not an organizer, even though my dad and my brother are. I mean, I think, look, you can find, you should find out, first of all, you should figure out who represents you. That's one thing.

Then you can find out about what are things happening? Like for me, here's an example. of things happening like for me here's an example our middle school district did a big um and it's a little different for me because i can't actually get involved in the way that i would as a normal citizen because of my job and because of you know standards and practice and stuff right so but like you know in very like liberal brownstone brooklyn park slope like there was a big um desegregation plan for the middle schools there. There was a fight in the neighborhood over a homeless shelter for women. Those were two examples of places where it was like, this is like, this is where the rubber hits the road. You know, do, you know, do we believe in this stuff or not? So let's, you know,

and, and, and to, you know, to the credit of the folks in the neighborhood, like the good guys prevailed in both of those. But I think that there is some something happening in your area that's like that. Yeah. Where, you know what I mean? whether that's about who the County sheriff is, which are like these races that no one pays attention to, but like routinely elect some of the most like corrupt authoritarian figures in all of American politics. DA's races are great places to get involved. Primaries of state reps.

If you've got a machine state rep, who's kind of checked out and been there for years. And there are some young, like those are all great things you can be a part of where like the numbers are small enough that you can actually have an effect. Um, like if you go knock doors on two weekends for a primary challenger in a state race, like you, you have appreciably impacted their chance of winning. Yeah. Um, and it's also a great feeling

like knocking doors is a great, a great thing that everyone should do. And there's, I wonder if it can be a way that we can start to build, you know, locally, the coalition that we need nationally, like what we've been able to do in Los Angeles and just my like three or four years working in local politics here is we've been able to like find these candidates who actually come from, you know, working class, you know, labor organizing backgrounds. And we are able to build a coalition around them that goes all the way from, you know, the DSA leftists who listened to Chapo Trap House to the, uh, you know, uh, the, the MSNBC watchers in the $3 million homes. Um, and all knocking doors for the same people. And they're all showing up for the same things.

And I if we could build that nationally today, I think I'd be a lot happier. But maybe we can start and then build into that. Yes, definitely. I definitely think so. Yeah. Well, look, I know we have to let you go because you're a busy newsman. But thank you so much for being on

the show, Chris. It's wonderful to hear your perspective on all this. Yeah, this is a real delight. Thank you, Adam. I appreciate it. Well, thank you so much again to Chris Hayes for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did, please go support the show on Patreon. the likes of Adrian, Alexey Batalov, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Ann Slagle,

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