Factually! with Adam Conover - Why the Black Lives Matter Protests are Different with Adam Serwer

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Writer and reporter Adam Serwer joins Adam to talk about why the protests of the past two weeks go way beyond Trump, why the system behind racist police abuse is the problem and how recent events could affect the November election. 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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We're gonna keep talking about what's going on in the world today. I don't think there's anything else I would rather be talking about. I hope there's nothing else you'd rather be listening to. All right, so let's talk about this. In this moment of mass protest about police abuse, it's easy to lay all your blame on one bad orange man, right? I mean, I've been watching some late night comedy the last week. I like to keep up on my industry. And the focus has been overwhelmingly on Trump.

And I get why. It's easy to make fun and to write jokes about this wannabe authoritarian who's clearing peaceful protests with tear gas so he can have a photo op holding up a prop Bible. I mean, did you see that? What? What? What?

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What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What?, What?, What?, What?, What?, What?, What?, What?, What SNBC watching blue state boomers want hating Trump to be all that's ever asked of them politically. These protests are not actually about Trump. They're about our abusive, racist police state. And the truth is that so, so, so many of the policies that have created and perpetuated this machinery of racist violence were and are set at the local level. The discriminatory militarized policing regimes being protested in major cities across the country and the world have been implemented and supported by Democratic mayors and city council members. Minneapolis, New York City,

and Los Angeles all have Democratic mayors and Democratic city councils. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Trump supporter among them. In fact, they're all constantly denouncing Trump in their public statements. And in California, Republicans are virtually extinct in the state. Democrats have a super majority. Yet our police forces are still killing and harassing black Californians and have been for decades. And to put it plainly, Trump didn't do that shit. So what's actually going on? Well, mayors and city councils are caretakers of a system that

was built over decades to protect and privilege the sanctity of the police budget above all else. In L.A., the police budget for the next year, get this, is three point one billion dollars with a B. It is the largest single item the city spends money on. New York spends six billion dollars on the police, which, as noted by sociologist Alex Vitale, is more than the city spends on the departments of health, homeless services, housing preservation and development and youth and community development. and youth and community development. So when we're talking about taking down systemic racist police abuse, we just have to remember that it is the system that is the problem. But look, all that said, the malignant force that allowed for the construction of this racist police apparatus by our cities is not separate from the one that got us Donald Trump

at the core of our body politic is a racial wound that has festered over centuries, one that we still, after over 400 years, have yet to come to terms with. Well, joining me this week to talk about all of this and more is someone I could not be more excited to have on the show. He is one of our best and most incisive writers on the subjects of race and American politics

and where they intersect that we have. His pieces in The Atlantic never fail to surprise me and always give me genuinely new ways of looking at what ails America. So to talk about race, politics, and this incredible moment in American life, please welcome our guest today, Adam Serwer. Adam, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So I just want to start off, like, what are your thoughts about the events of the last week and a half, two weeks or so? So I think that there's obviously a lot of factors in play,

a couple of them being the fact that people have been home for a very long time. A lot of people have lost their jobs. They're struggling financially. But I would say that I think a huge thing is simply that the invention of cell phone cameras and their ubiquity over the past decade or so has really offered a unusually vivid window into the world of interactions between Black people and American law enforcement, which has long been documented as a problem. I mean, if you go back to Hoover's Wickersham Commission in the 1930s, they're talking about police beating people in back rooms and stuff like that. And if you go to the Kerner Commission, there's a tremendous amount. My colleague, Adam Harris at The Atlantic, has a very good piece about how many different government reports the same problems with police and black people have been documented in over the course of basically a century.

And what cell phone cameras did really was that they the police had a systemic problem with this racial discrimination. And now it's something like 70% of Americans because the evidence has accumulated at such a tremendous rate that it's really sort of hard to sort of to blanket dismiss what's going on here is not a systemic problem. So I think that it's a combination of those things. It's also just that the George Floyd video is particularly shocking to watch. I mean, you know, the officer is just sitting there. He knows he's on camera. He's not doing anything. Floyd is begging for his life.

You know, he calls for his mother. It's just it's so shocking and horrifying. And, you know, obviously video can be misleading, but we know that even looking at it, there doesn't seem to be any possible exonerating context, and there is not. And so I think for a lot of people, that incident was obviously a big catalyst for these protests, but it's also that things like this sort of kept happening, right? I mean, you have the incident in Kentucky with Breonna Taylor, where she was killed when police tried to serve a no-knock warrant. You have the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, where local law enforcement in Georgia basically decided it wasn't a crime. Now we found out one of the men who was involved in chasing down Ahmaud Arbery because they thought he looked suspicious in their neighborhood, mentioned that one of the other people used a racial slur after they killed him.

So, you know, but that but in that case, of course, the local law enforcement said, you know, we don't really see a problem here until higher up authorities in the state got involved. So there is this there's just been despite the fact that we're in the middle of a pandemic and we're locked down, Despite the fact that we're in the middle of a pandemic and we're locked down, there's still been this accumulation of incidents showing a systemic, illustrating a systemic problem in law enforcement. While the COVID pandemic itself has disproportionately harmed the communities who also suffer disproportionately from police brutality. I think a dam burst. But I also think that white Americans are more receptive to this critique than they've basically ever been in American history. And that is something that is very new. And I think we perhaps have not seen before. two weeks like we we passed through a membrane of some kind like we're we're it feels like we're in a new reality to some degree um and yeah there are so many different there's so many different factors at play that feel like they're intensifying it you're talking about the cell phone recordings and one of the things that strikes me is that uh like the george floyd case is obviously a horrendous

case but it's as you, the recording was almost the most intense thing about it. Like we don't have a recording of Breonna Taylor, correct me if I'm wrong. Um, and like, that's as, uh, I'm not trying to, you know, compare senseless killings here. Um, but the, the, the recording itself of George Floyd, like is is the, as a media piece, it's so incontrovertible. And that's one of the things that's interesting about it. So, yeah, so this isn't the first time that we've had a really vivid recording of somebody being killed. There's obviously the Michael Slager, Walter Scott video. There's a number of other videos that are extremely vivid. But I really think it is just the volume of this kind of documentation and these stories. something that you thought, but I think that for much of the country is a very real part of their

existence. But for a majority of the country is not to see something to see this evidence of this thing that you may have previously dismissed or did not want to believe was true, rendered so vividly, I think it really did have an effect. And also the fact that again, it's happening over and over. It's not the first time. This is just the latest video and it won't be the last. And I've noticed, though, the types of people who like to dismiss events like say instead of instead of saying, oh, well, you know, he was asking for it or like he has a criminal past or that kind of thing. They're saying much more. This is horrible. But hey, it's just one bad apple, you know, which shows how much the window is moving in terms of how I think, as you say, like white America responds to this. So I think, you know, there's that Chris Rock routine about how there are some jobs you can't have bad apples in, you know, like airline pilots, you don't want a bad apple airline pilot.

But I think that, you know, one of the issues with this is that we really don't have tremendously good data on police misconduct, because the United States government doesn't collect it. and unconstitutional conduct, basically any kind of abuse, not just fatal abuse, but, you know, any kind of behavior that violated the constitutional rights of local residents. And it was the most aggressive effort that we've seen in its history. That authority was actually passed in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots in the 1994 crime bill. Police reformers had been trying to get it passed for a long time to provide some sort of federal oversight of police departments. And they got it into the 1994 crime bill as a sort of compromise. But the idea was that if we head off police misconduct

before it happens, we can prevent urban unrest. Because for the past 100 years, when you have these kinds of riots, they're almost always sparked by some form of police brutality, which is itself the tip of an iceberg in terms of a terrible relationship between the local community and law enforcement that erupts over this sort of one thing, which is also the case in Minnesota, as we're now discovering. But that created a tremendous backlash from American police unions, which are very well organized. They are catered to by both parties. They're tremendously powerful in local governments, as you can see in New York City and New York State right now. And, you know, neither Andrew Cuomo nor Bill de Blasio wants to cross the NYPD.

De Blasio did it before and it cost him politically very severely. So it's not just a Republican-Democratic problem. But the federal government is not as, like, the political economy of the federal government is not different. They're not as worried about police unions. So they have a freer hand for dealing with this sort of stuff. for dealing with this sort of stuff. And what happened during the Obama administration is they created this sort of tremendous federal record of government documents

of how racism exists in modern policing. In Ferguson in particular, everybody was like, why is everybody rebelling in Ferguson? And then we discovered that the police there were essentially, you know, using poor black residents of Ferguson as a revenue building mechanism for the city government

because they didn't want to raise taxes. So people were being arrested every five seconds for dumb things so they could get $300 fines that they would then have to pay if they wanted to get a driver's license or something. So it created this sort of incredible government record of discrimination in policing. There was a tremendous backlash to that among police in America, to Obama, to the Civil Rights Division. The head of the Minneapolis Police Union, Bob Kroll, he was like at a Trump rally and he was saying Trump ended the oppression of police officers. He took the handcuffs off us and put them back on the criminals. And this was indeed one of the first things that the Trump administration did was they stopped this kind of systemic oversight. And what that does is it doesn't just prevent it, keep the federal government from preventing this relationship between the police and local communities from deteriorating.

It also prevents that record from being created. So you don't have this evidentiary record of police misconduct that can be a guide for systemic reforms because you've decided that you're not even going to look for that misconduct at all. I mean, that's what Jeff Sessions said when he testified when he was nominated for attorney general. He's like, these investigations are bad for morale and they give the impression that there are a lot of racist cops. So we're just not going to do it. So we lost that data. That data is, we haven't been collecting it. We haven't been collecting it. And we should probably been, I mean, there's so many different, I mean, when we're talking about lethal use of force by police officers, what we know about that

has been essentially collected by academics and newspapers because the federal government doesn't collect it. But in the case of looking into local police departments and seeing how their practices may discriminate or may, you know, encourage police to use their powers in a way that violates people's constitutional rights, We don't have that record in the same way we had it during the Obama administration. And that's by design. That was why the police unions endorsed Trump. He rewarded that key part of his constituency by saying they weren't, the feds weren't going to look into that anymore. Bill Barr was actually asked about it, you know, during his interview with, I believe, CBS last week. He said, you know, I don't think we need to look, open a pattern or practice investigation into the Minnesota police. The state's already investigating it. So I don't think we need to worry about anything. But, you know, the reason he's saying that is because

they don't, I mean, they have an ideological belief that the federal government should not be used for that reason. But they also have a influential political constituency that does not want the feds to go in there and look at what police are doing and decide that some of the things they're doing are wrong. But what strikes me is that that political constituency, our local elected leaders are held to that as well. And that makes like the the connection between national politics and Trump and the issues that are being processed, protested in the streets are really complicated. You know, like I was talking to my talking to my parents and about what's happening here in L.A. and they sort of brought it to, oh, yeah, man, Trump. Trump is really bad, isn't he? You know, like all the thing with the Bible is really bad. And I was like, yeah, that's not what the protests are about, though.

Like the protests here are about the LAPD specifically. But but there's so much of our political culture. Even local leaders here in L.A. are saying like they respond to the protests by saying, oh, yeah, Trump is really bad. And, you know, the Minneapolis police need to do something and not hearing that, like the problem is local. And the problem is like the mayor of Los Angeles and the city council of Los Angeles being beholden to the exact same political forces that you're talking about the Trump administration being beholden to. And that's kind of unusual in American politics, isn't it? Well, I think so. So two things. I would say that this problem predates Trump by so many years and so many decades. I mean, if you if you want to be really cute about it, you could you could say, you know, the first casualty of the American Revolution, Crispus Attucks is a black man killed by law enforcement. So, you know, like, obviously, like, that's a little too pat.

But the point is that this is a serious problem that has existed for many, many decades. It predates Trump. There's no question that Trump himself has made it worse as a matter of rhetoric and policy, both as I described earlier, by pulling the feds back from overseeing local to police departments, but also in the sense that he has vocally encouraged police officers to engage in police brutality. The most obvious incident, of course, was his 2017 speech in front of police officers in Long Island, where he says, you know, you don't have to treat these guys too nice. You can when you have them in custody, you can bang their heads against the door as you're putting them in the car or whatever. And the police sort of laughed and cheered. So, you know, that's a that's a very direct and specific message. If you want to abuse suspects, the president has your back. The president agrees with you.

But this did not begin here. And it's a mistake to look at it as a Trump problem for the reasons you describe. Police unions have incredible influence in local jurisdictions such that, you know, Democrats and Republicans alike do not want to cross them. Even if Democrats have ideological reasons for wanting to do so, they are a powerful constituency that punches above their weight in terms of raw numbers. An example is, you know, Bill de Blasio, who's the mayor of New York. He was elected. He got that job in part because at the time New Yorkers were reconsidering Bloomberg's legacy of stop and frisk. Yeah. My favorite statistic about stop and frisk was one year they stopped more black men between the ages of 18 and 35 than there are black men in New York City. Yeah.

Which is, you know, absolutely incredible as a statistic. Every man was stopped more than one time. Right. So he he he he runs and he says, you know, he does this commercial where he you know, he has which his son Dante is in. Mayor de Blasio is married to a black woman. And so he's saying, you know, I understand what black and Puerto Rican communities go through when they're profiled by law enforcement. So, you know, I will be a responsible steward of the New York police. I remember this ad. I lived in New York at the time and I was like, yes, this is exactly what we need. Someone's finally running on. Hey, this is, you know, unfair and unsafe for all of our

black fellow New Yorkers. Great. And I voted for him for that. Right. It's a tremendously moving ad. You know, and there's a reason why it was so effective in helping him win. He said, I have to talk to my son about what to do when he stopped by the police. I know how many other New Yorkers feel. Wow. What a powerful message. This is this is the reformer we need is was the feeling. Right. So, I mean, there's a there's a there's something that's called the talk that black parents talk about having to give to their children. That's something, you know, we have to give you the talk about the fact that police, you know, an encounter with police might end your life because you are black. And so here's this white dad who's saying, I have to give my black son the talk, which is obviously tremendously affecting if you're thinking if you're a New Yorker and you're wondering which of these mayoral candidates cares about me. And so what's what's striking about that is today de Blasio is essentially completely terrified of standing up to the NYPD. He paid a huge price

for the stop and frisk thing, and he does not want to pay that price again. And so it's an example of, you know, of the power that those that police unions wield, even in the bluest of constituencies. And so if that holds true, you know, in New York City, it holds true for, you know, for parts of the United States that are much more divided between the Democratic and Republican parties. And even, you know, you look at a state like Wisconsin, there's a reason why Scott Walker, when he was trying to bust the teachers unions, didn't bust the cop unions. You know, these are in that that political power is it's more than just significant in terms of state and local legislative reform. It's important because the unions typically use their influence to set up bureaucratic barriers to police being held accountable when they do abuse their authority. So it's not simply

a question of votes or good press or getting political donations. It's also a matter of how they wield their power in negotiations with the city for setting up behavioral for setting up barriers to, you know, a police officer really ever getting punished for doing something that they shouldn't be doing. Yeah. And so, look, I know you're not a labor reporter, but I'd love to talk a little bit more about that because I've covered labor a lot on this show. And I find that to be a really interesting dimension of it and a really difficult prospect for reform here, because to a certain extent, like the police unions are using the tools of, you know, collective bargaining, leverage, work stoppages, all those sorts of tools that are in the labor toolbox in order to extract, you know, extract these concessions, right?

And some of them are moral and political. Like I remember being in New York when all the cops turned their back in unison on de Blasio at the funeral for these police officers, which was like so, I mean, I imagine being him and how humiliating and upsetting that would be to have that happen. But it's also upsetting because you're like thinking, wait, is my police force insubordinate?

And are they are they like going to threaten me or the rest of the city with violence or with, you know, not obeying lawful orders? And, you know, there's all this stuff about already in L.A., you know, the L.A. city leaders have proposed of extremely small cut to the LAPD budget, a three percent cut. And, you know, LAPD Police Protective League is already saying, oh, maybe those council members, you know, next time they call for the police, we won't pick up the phone. Stuff like that, which is it's hard for me to look as a union member right it's hard for me to sort of separate okay how do we discriminate between what is a legitimate use of you know union leverage and what is a nefarious use of it in a way that we can make policy around uh without saying like how can we uh uh reform police unions without also creating a wedge to destroy teachers unions later down the road when someone wants to do that? And I'm

curious if you have any thoughts on that. So so there is. So this does put labor in an awkward position, right? Because if you're a libertarian, you can very easily just say, well, this is why we shouldn't have public sector unions because I've seen libertarians say that already. Yeah. Yeah. If you have public sector unions, they can extort their taxpayer funded services to the as use their taxpayer funded services as leverage in a negotiation, which is wrong. And I think, you know, there's obvious I mean, that has a certain ideological consistency. What the labor movement is saying is like, look, you know, we think, we think the police have a right to organize. And I would say, not the, people who are liberals and leftists who are generally favorable to labor can make the argument like, look, we believe the police have a right to

organize for, you know, better conditions, better wages, better benefits. But when you're negotiating for, you know, what is essentially, you know, the right to sort of kill people and get away with it, that's like a different thing. And that shouldn't be a part of that shouldn't be a part of those negotiations. The other thing is that police unions have very have not really pulled their weight in terms of showing solidarity with other unions. Yeah. Not that are not part of law enforcement. So, yeah, I was on the line with the I was on the picket line with a teacher strike here in L.A. a year or two ago, and I didn't see any cops there. And I didn't see any cops there. Right. So I think that they what they want to do, they want to strike the balance between undermining the logic of public sector sector unions to begin with and saying that, look, this is a kind of this is not the kind of damage to human beings or society. But I think it is sort of it does put the labor movement in something of a tough position. But I think the obvious thing to do is for legislators to strip those kinds of things out of contract

negotiations. So beyond police unions, though, when you look at, say, the growth of the LAPD in L.A. or the Minneapolis PD or any of these departments into the punitive, abusive, discriminatory, like almost military forces that we see. What do you feel are the forces that have caused those to grow? I mean, obviously, police unions play their role, but that can't be the whole story. caused those to grow? I mean, obviously, police unions play their role, but that can't be the whole story. So there's been a lot of comparison of this year to 1968, particularly by some Trump supporters, because they want to say, oh, Trump can run on law and order, and he'll get reelected because of this disorder. The problem, right, like Nixon, the problem is, there's a lot of problems with that analogy. One is that Nixon wasn't the incumbent in 1968. The other is that when Nixon ran on law and order, everybody sort of reflects on Nixon now as this like obviously corrupt, racist president. But in 1968, Nixon, you know, he had been Eisenhower's vice president. He was Eisenhower's point guy on civil rights. In 1957, he was the guy who was trying to get the 1957 Civil Rights Act through the Senate,

and his big nemesis was Lyndon Johnson. So, you know, Nixon, when he came to the law and order question, he was basically triangulating. He was saying these liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey have been too sympathetic to the civil rights protesters, and they've sort of helped disrespect for police turn into a kind of anarchy. But on the other hand, he was also looking at George Wallace and saying, I'm not a lawless racist like George Wallace who just wants to see the police crack black people's heads. What we need to have is justice and equal respect for the law. The law and order, Nixon's law and order campaign was much more coded than it is at the time than it is when we reflect on it.

The other thing is that Trump's, you know, Trump's approach to this has already been heavy handed and that didn't work. In fact, people started protesting more when he got involved. And in some ways, even though the protests are not about Trump, particularly, they are a kind of rebuke to his ideological and political approach to these problems. But we are very much living in the world that 1968 helped create. The perception that America was a lawless, had become a lawless country, led to the growth of the war on drugs, led to the growth of mass incarceration, which was, you know, built over the course of several successive Democratic and Republican administrations. Nixon started it. Reagan extended it. Clinton extended it. It was very much a bipartisan thing. I mean, the current Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, was the author of the 1994 crime bill.

He's the guy you can find on the floor of Congress saying the liberal wing of the Democratic Party wants more cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party wants more prisons. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party wants more drug kingpins in jail. So, you know, what has really happened here is that the political paradigm has shifted among, you know, for a lot of reasons. One was that crime was genuinely rising at those periods in time in the 60s and the 80s and the 90s. The crime rate was pretty high. Now it's much, much lower. So it's much harder to make the argument for tough on crime policies than it was. But also, and I think Trump does have something to do with this,

I think that there's a big segment of white Americans on the left who have come to view anti-racism as a big part of their personal political identity. And for them, this is an opportunity to show what they believe in, the world that they want to see realized. And part of that is changing how law enforcement treats people of color in this country. Now, I think history shows us that these moments of enthusiasm happened before, and we don't know how long they last before, you know, a backlash sets in and turns things in the other direction. But I think that, you know, we are living in the world that 1968 helped create. And so it's harder to say that this is 1968.

It's actually kind of a backlash to the decades between 1968 and 2020, in which both, you know, a backlash to a policy course that both parties have a tremendous amount of investment in. that both parties have a tremendous amount of investment in. Well, let's talk about this political moment and like what's happening in the streets right now, because I'm struck by how swiftly and how massively a new consensus has formed, not among Americans at large, but, you know, a large segment of Americans. I feel that like it feels like we're moving very very far very fast um and it seems like some of the laws of gravity have changed to a certain degree like when i saw the news that a couple days ago the minneapolis city council said they had a veto proof majority to dissolve their police department um i thought okay wow things are like like there's no gravity in Minneapolis right now.

Like things have changed so profoundly that the normal laws that I believed in don't apply. That's even happened in a certain case in L.A. I never thought they would propose even a three percent cut to the LAPD budget because of how I understand politics to work in this city. And you're suddenly seeing, you know, the degree to which the public is moving on, you know, these eight can't wait police reforms as being, oh, we need to make incremental reforms to reduce violence to. No, that's not enough. We need to defund, abolish. Just the degree to which people are talking about these things seems huge. And it seems to, as you say, be far outpacing any of our political institutions, like any like anywhere where the Democratic Party is anywhere, certainly anywhere the Republican Party is. The public is like radically moving in a different direction very quickly or large segments of it are.

Yeah. What do you see? So I think that I think that social media enhances that perception. So I think that social media enhances that perception. But I think when you look at, and I think that the people who are saying defund the police or abolish the police are creating an important space for liberal or moderate reforms to seem less ambitious than they might be. But when you look at, when you talk to say, like, obviously Joe Biden is saying, you know, I'm not going to, I mean, obviously the author of the 1994 crime bill is not going to defund the police and he has said you know i'm i'm not i don't want to defund the police but it's also bernie sanders saying things like we need to pay cops more and you know there's there's just um there is a the the the the the radicals who are saying defund the police and abolish the police are certainly moving the conversation. But I would not describe that as a consensus position.

No Democrat is going to endorse that when it's polling at the level that it's polling right now, which is extremely low. I think most people want most people want people. Most people are at the point where they're like, things really, really need to change. This is a serious problem, which again, is like a very, it's, it is a, it is an almost revolutionary place to be in terms of the American historical paradigm. going to change policy, I think it's really hard to know yet how far people are willing to go. And I think a lot could change very quickly depending on what happens. Yeah, I want to be clear. I didn't mean consensus among the public. I meant consensus among a movement, right? That like we had on Sunday, by some measures, 100,000 people in Los Angeles. That's what the organizers said. The police said 20,000 answers probably somewhere in that very large gap, but, um, you know, filling the streets of Hollywood, all demanding the same thing, um, with, uh, you know, a unified voice that, uh, was surprising to me as to how quickly

that program came together. Um, and like how, how, how loud the call for it is. And yeah, I don't expect that to be a consensus political position in America, the American public as large at large. But to have that be a strong wing are calling for those programs is like a pretty seismic change in itself. So what I would say is that there's a there's a group of there's a lot of academics, journalists, activists who have been thinking about this stuff for a really long time. And so when the protests happen, when people were sort of trying to make sense of what we should do next to make things better, these folks were really ready to say, hey, we have been thinking about this for a really long time, and this is

what a better world looks like. This is what we think should happen. And I think there's something to be said for that approach to policy, politics and policymaking. I mean, obviously, the fact that we're even having a conversation about defund the police and what it means is a reflection of success on the part of those people. So I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, it's sort of hard to tell. Right. I think a lot depends on what what happens in November, how much how if Biden wins, to what extent he wins, to what extent the constituencies that are most concerned with police reform are responsible for him winning, or if Trump wins. You know, these things are all going to be a huge factor in what happens next. But I think Trump has made it a little harder for himself in the way

that he responded to the protests. I mean, if you look at the polling, it's something like 30% of Americans think he did a good job, in part because the mood of the public changed that, you know, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, was just not where the public was. Everybody was too busy being horrified by what they saw

and by the fact that they've seen it so many times that people just felt like that was just a complete insane overreaction. And that's not just, you know, regular people. It's also the Republican governors who didn't respond to Trump's request for them to call in the military so they could start cracking heads. And it does seem like the like the public is moving, like we've gone from a world where, you know, Black Lives Matter a year ago was not a slogan that most major brands would sign on because there were still so many people in American political discourse saying, oh, that's a terrorist group or that's a mainstream hashtag that is, you know, becoming broadly accepted, you know, like fucking Whole Foods can hashtag it. And and that's acceptable. And I'm seeing so many people saying, oh, yeah, my you know, my parents who normally wouldn't be open to this type of thing are saying, oh, yeah, this is something we really have to do something about like sure there's you know these these protests are uh very rowdy but you know this is a real issue that we that we need to correct yeah i mean look uh that's the the only thing you could argue the only things that are comparable to in terms of the speed of shift of public opinion are like marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage rights.

It's just been incredibly fast. Obviously, last week there was a video of Mitt Romney who was marching and he said Black Lives Matter. Now, Mitt Romney's dad was a very serious civil rights guy. He was genuinely committed to it. George Romney was so pro-civil rights, he was basically drummed out of the Nixon administration. So, you know, he has that heritage and he has that conception of himself. But it does mean something when the 2012 nominee for president is going out there and saying Black Lives Matter. And, you know, one of the reasons,

and this is, again, one of the reasons why some people are reading this as a rebuke to Trump, is that he is reading it that way. After Mitt Romney said that, Trump quote tweeted the reporter who put up the video clip and sort of mocked Mitt saying, you know, oh, you know, that sounds so sincere as though he couldn't possibly have meant it. So I think, obviously, when corporations want to sign on to your protest movement, that is obviously a sign of success. Now, I will say this, again, the policy implications of this remain unclear. So like, when we look back at the LGBT rights movement, obviously, there were a lot of anti-discrimination laws that were passed, same-sex marriage was legalized,

you know, those rights, those victories were won pretty quickly, although not obviously quickly enough for a lot of people who suffered as a result of not having those freedoms. I think we are still at the stage where we don't yet know whether this shift in public opinion will lead to the kind of Titanic shifts in policy that people are contemplating openly now that they were not contemplating before. But it's definitely clear that politicians are feeling a kind of necessity to do something about this problem that they were not feeling, you know, two months ago. Well, we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Adam Serwer. OK, we're back with Adam Serwer.

Okay, we're back with Adam Serwer. I do want to ask, like, you cover politics, American politics, as your day job. Is that exhausting? Like, how do you manage having to follow this stuff for work? It's hard enough for me to do in between writing my stupid comedy show. So, first of all, I love your show. I just want to get that out of the way. I joked when your folks reached out to me,

I was like, okay, I'll do it, but only if we can make an Adams ruin everything joke. I will put it in the description. But so, yes, I mean, look, American politics is, I think my former colleague Matt Ford in like January 2017 he's like it's less of a news cycle

these days than those episodes of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons are attacking every 37 minutes or whatever so it has been tremendously exhausting I am fortunate in that I live in Texas my wife is in the army and she's stationed here. So we live far apart from the sort of Beltway stuff. And I think that helps give me a sense of perspective. also just very lucky to have a family and friends who care about me, who hold me down, who make sure that I'm not losing my mind. But I think it is, you know, I think people are, it is extremely,

I mean, the technology itself, and this isn't any profession, it's like you're always at the office because of email and Slack and stuff like that. But when you're covering politics, like you never know when the president's going to tweet something that you may have to write about. Um, so there is something crazy about it. And the only thing I can say is that it's very important if you're in this gig or in a gig that's like it to have outlets that, uh, you know, to be able to distance yourself in the sense that of like putting down the phone, turning it off and like spending time with your loved ones and reminding yourself of what's important, but also just having things to do that have nothing to do with politics at all so that you can keep some perspective. It's difficult to do, though. I've had a harder time personally unplugging in the last week of I spend all my time working and then on Twitter just looking at displays of police brutality and protest videos. Yeah.

Well, but sometimes it's hope scrolling. Yeah. Because there's a lot of – I often feel optimistic about what's happening in the streets right now, as often as I feel horrified. You know, there was a video, somebody that came across my feed that was protesters in Seattle pushing back the police with umbrellas, you know, just taking little steps forward. And the police were stepping backwards. And I was like, oh, this is so beautiful. Look at this. It's like the, you know, the people inexorably winning through sheer force of will. And then I retweeted that. And someone was like, yeah, about half an hour later, the cops tear gas the hell out of the street and sent me the follow up video where all the same protesters had to flee because the cops had literally turned the street into a wall of, you know, choking chemical gas. And so that's a little bit where I go back and forth moment to moment because both those things are true.

It's an inspiring moment and a horrifying moment. And then I find myself at the end of the day like, OK, well, I'd love to just fire up my gaming PC and play some Dark Souls. But I don't feel I don't feel right doing that. Like, I don't, I kind of want to stay in it for a little bit. Actually, so what I would say is I would encourage you to fire up the gaming PC and play Dark Souls. Everybody needs, I mean, like, I think, you know, it's very easy with social media, particularly Twitter,

You know, it's very easy with social media, particularly Twitter, to get really. It can be depressing, like when you when you're watching the videos of police brutality or if you're watching people get hurt. I mean, you know, people who are trying to defend their stores from looters getting attacked or hurt, like all those kinds of things. You know, it's not that we shouldn't realize that they're happening or shouldn't be aware that they're happening, but there's no, there's no shame and there's no dishonor in having to detox from that. Um, and I, you know, and I would encourage people not to feel like they have to be surveilling, um, the apocalypse at all times. Um, but I think you are right in that, look, there's a lot of things to be hopeful about. I mean, this public opinion shift is something that we just haven't

seen before. I mean, it's tremendous. This is, as I said, you know, there are government reports going back decades documenting this phenomenon and only until recently has much of the country said, yeah, you know what, this is actually real. And we understand this is really happening and something should be done about it. Again, we don't know what will be done or if necessarily if what will be done will be necessary to solve the problem. it is it is the fact that so many people care is actually a tremendous uh victory and something to be hopeful about i'd like to ask a little bit about like because you're not just a consumer of this in the way that i am you're also putting out uh putting out your your own views you're looking at what's happening and you're developing

an analysis that you uh relate to us through writing like i was just going back and looking at some of my favorite pieces of yours um before this conversation you wrote one uh earlier this year i think about trumpism called the cruelty is the point uh which i remember reading and thinking ah this is a really this thesis is uh fresh to me this is not a way i had looked at it before. I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about, first of all, the takeaway of that piece, but also the process of observing events, but also finding, wait, this is what everyone else is missing about events.

I think that piece is about an aspect of human nature um which is that cruelty towards outgroups is a kind of bonding mechanism um and trump as a politician has like no other figure that i'm aware of um in american figure that i'm aware of in recent years, has sort of elevated this sort of cruelty towards people he considers his political enemies as a kind of public spectacle, as a kind of bonding mechanism between him and his supporters against this world that they can't stand. And, you know, if you, this is a thing of human nature, if you have ever been made fun of by the cool kids, when you were in like sixth grade, everybody was like, look at the fat kid with his dumb shorts.

Then you understand exactly how this mechanism works. And the truth is, is that human beings, you know, some human beings grow out of that impulse. Some human beings can resist it, but it's not it's not something that is relegated to one side of this political spectrum. It's universal. But in this case, what has happened is that Trump has used his platform to, you know, to have this kind of bonding ritual between him and his community of supporters where they sort of flay their ideological enemies. And that becomes a way of creating community. Um, and I think that it's obviously dangerous because you can't contain it. Now, I think what Trump didn't anticipate and what I didn't anticipate, frankly, is the extent to which, uh, you know, that, uh, I think we sometimes overestimate the political power of that kind of cruelty for obvious reasons. Human history gives us a lot of examples of how effective it can be.

But in this case, I think what you're seeing is it with these protests is a different idea of community that is not built on that kind of cruelty. And I think it's a really hopeful thing. Yeah. I have to give you props for how well you navigated your cat walking all over your lap as you gave that extremely thoughtful and nuanced answer. Thank you. Yeah. I have, I have, I have a lot.

My wife and I have a bunch of cats. They're all orange. So we call them the Garfields. And that was Eggsy who is trying very hard to, he's a, I can a bunch of cats. They're all orange, so we call them the Garfields. And that was Eggsy, who is trying very hard to... He's a... I can't really explain it. He's a very... He's a huge fan of firm pats on his rear end, so he's always trying to maneuver himself

in a way where he can stick his ass, like, directly in my face. Yeah. So he's just, like... It's not just that... he's not the type of cat who like comes up and like curls up next to your keyboard. He is strategically trying to maneuver his rear end in front of me, which causes all sorts of problems

when you have a messy desk like mine. Well, talk to me a little bit more about the community, the sense of community that you're seeing in the streets that you mentioned. Well, I just, you know, this is something that's happened before in American history. I mean, you know, in the aftermath of the Civil War, for example, the Republican Party developed a political identity that was organized around the notion of a true multiracial democracy. Now, keeping, I mean, let's not overstate it, that vision, you know, did not have a consensus view that women should be a part of that. Some of them did, obviously, people like Frederick Douglass were, you know, devoted suffragists. But this idea that

America was now going to include everyone, regardless of race, was a big part of the ideological identity of the Republican Party at that time. Now, it didn't last. So I think that, you know, there's a warning in that. But I do think that, you know, this particular moment, you are witnessing people who, there's a lot of white Americans who have decided that that anti-racism is a part of their political identity that they want to embrace, that they want to express, and that they want to act on. And I think, you know, there are moments in American history where the rest of America is so moved by Black activism that they embrace this identity. I mean, you could see it in the 1960s as well. You know, the March on Washington was famously a multiracial affair.

You know, there are these moments where there's this fusion of American ideals with anti-racist politics that can be tremendously powerful. But it's also the case that it doesn't last forever. So that's why it's hopeful and it provides an opportunity. But I think it's not clear yet how long that moment is going to last, how activists and politicians are going to be able to take advantage of it to make actual change. But it is like a moving thing to see. It is wonderful. And it, you know, it's, it's particularly because some of the, um, more violent aspects of the earlier protests have subsided. Uh, I think there's, it's been more difficult for the people who oppose these protests

to characterize them in the way to mischaracterize them asize them as violent uprisings the way that Nixon did in the 1960s. Because there was actual, I mean, like, those protests were much more, in 1967 and 1968, we're talking about, like, deaths up to, like, 50 to 100 people each year. Whereas now we're talking, like, maybe five people have died so far. And hopefully it will not be any more than that. But these are much actually much more peaceful events and they have tremendously moved public opinion in a way that, again, has happened before. We don't know how much effect it will have, but I do think people are right to feel good about what it says about American identity that it is happening. I the fact that you, you know, you mentioned again, we don't know how long the moment will

last. That that is the has been the question for me. Like, I think about so much. There's a line from funny person to quote right now, but there's a line from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I think about all the time where he talks about the, you know, the movement of the of the 60s. And he's writing, you know, some years later that I'm going to butcher it. But, you know, we we felt we were like an unstoppable force based on our will alone that we could create a new world. And then there's a line like you can see the spot where the where the wave crested and rolled back, looking at that. You know, he's looking back at that movement some years later with a sense of disappointment that like how we felt we had so much power and we didn't realize that there was that there was a limit to it. And that's the the question in the back of my mind right now.

It's like, yeah, I feel I feel optimistic for all the reasons that you mentioned, but, um, uh, we, we don't know how far it'll take us or what will actually happen. Right. So I would say that, um, you know, that's a very good line. And I think that when you look at history and you can see where the wave crests, um, in reconstruction, the wave crests when, um, the Republican party, which is very much still a party of capitalists, begins to look at black workers in the South as a kind of labor interest that, you know, is trying to use legislation to get things that they don't deserve. Free stuff in the modern parlance. And they sort of drift away from the idea of strong federal intervention to defend the political rights of Black Americans because they're afraid of what Black Americans are going to do with those rights. They're looking at the emerging immigrant labor interests in the North, and they're saying, well, we don't want Black people to be like that. And then when you look at 1968, that was, you know, the reason why

a lot of Trump supporters want to see this as an analog to 1968 is that's also when the wave crested. That's when the Fair Housing Act passed. That's when King was assassinated. That's when the riots created, you know, already, you know, at the time King was unpopular. This is something that people don't like to remember, but King was unpopular. But the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and then the riots created, really soured a lot of white public opinion on the protests. And so I think there is a theme, there is a parallel in both of these events, which is that, you know, when you look at what people are asking for in the street, we don't want armed agents of the state paid with taxpayer money to murder us. That is a fairly reasonable demand. It's not one that

requires any great material commitment from people of tremendous privilege. But when those demands turn to a redistribution of wealth and power, people tend to sour on them. And so that happened in the late 60s. It happened in the 1870s. And I think it may not happen here. Maybe things are different this time. But I think when you look at the past, Martin Luther King was pivoting much more towards a question of poverty and economic justice. I think what we don't know yet is, you know, when the demands go beyond simply, you know, fix the police or reform the police or make the police better to questions of material deprivation, I think that's when we're going to see much more resistance. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned earlier the speed

of the gay rights movement and the movement to legalize marijuana, for instance. And I thought about those a lot, like, you know, because those are those are two issues that like when I was in high school in 1999 seemed impossible that mainstream American would would ever change their opinion on. And then, you know, here I am 20 years later and, you know, so much progress has been made. But you're right, because those are movements that don't ask people in power or people in wealth to give up anything. You don't actually have to give up anything to let gay people get married in any way or to frankly let pop be legal. In fact, you can make money doing that.

And you know what? You might not have to give that much up to reform the police or even to defund the police to some extent because hey, it's less taxes perhaps. Right, exactly. In fact, you might make more money. Yeah.

If you're Charles Koch, you're like defund the police and lower my taxes? Yes, please. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe that's even a, you know, sort of a cross cutting incentive that we can make use of in order to make that happen. You know, certainly I know that in conservative circles for exactly that reason, there's been progress on criminal justice reform there was the you know the the that uh forget the name of the bill but the bill a few years ago first step act thank you yeah which was very much there hasn't been a second step but right but the very least i mean a first step it was kind of remarkable for exactly that reason yeah it was good but uh yeah once once, you know, the question I've always asked myself is why was so much progress made in gay rights so quickly?

And it feels like the civil rights movement is continually, you know, waging a sort of Pyrrhic battle, rolling the boulder up the hill and making, you know, like winning the moral battle in the minds of up the hill and making, you know, like winning the moral battles battle in the minds of the public in many ways, but, you know, not winning the material battle.

And it often seems to be for that reason, because like at the end of the day, white people need to give something up in order to in order to correct that. And that's a much harder thing for them to do or much harder thing to convince people who are clutching tightly to acquiesce to. Right. I mean, you know, and who knows, it might be different this time. I mean, you're seeing a lot of relatively affluent progressives in the suburbs who are like taxes are too low. Maybe we should have a wealth tax. You know, things could change. should have a wealth tax. You know, things could change. I don't, all I am saying is, historically, when you start asking people to give up some of their money and their power and not just,

you know, make things a little more equal for people who are not like them, then, you know, people start resisting pretty strongly. Yeah. Are you an optimist though in general so you know it's funny um before this happened a couple you know people would ask me in sort of 2018 2019 is like everything you write is so depressing um and i'm like well i don't actually think of it that way i mean i, I think, you know, in an extraordinary way, you know, I think back to the midterms in 2018 when Trump was just running an extraordinarily race baiting campaign. He was talking about remember the caravan? He was talking about the caravan and how there was an invasion of poor Central American migrants. And he was going to send the military to the and he sent the military to the border.

And he was just, you know, trying as hard as he could to to to get to his assumption was that the more he demonized the caravan, the more white voters would flock to him. And it didn't work right. The Dems won the House. The Republicans had their biggest midterm loss since Watergate. It didn't work. I don't think it's going to work this time either. Right. The Dems won the House. The Republicans had their biggest midterm loss since Watergate. It didn't work. I don't think it's going to work this time either. And in a way, you know, part of this sort of part of this emergence of this white American political identity that is so tied with anti-racism, racism, part of it is a rebuke to Trump because Trump has so explicitly run on the use of state violence against religious and ethnic minorities that people have come to, like, that is certainly a part of a lot of liberal whites absorbing anti-racism as a part of their political identity. Again, we don't know how far that goes. But I'm hopeful for it because it didn't really exist in 1874. It didn't really exist in 1968. It's something that is actually

relatively new to American politics, this shift in white American public opinion. And I don't think we know ultimately what the result of that would be. Now, again, part of this, what I always try to emphasize to people is that part of this is also the. So they have developed a political philosophy of tolerance as a result of having to share power with people who are unlike them. This was also true of the Republican Party after the Civil War, that that kind of integration, the sharing of power is what breeds like true, actual tolerance. And I think that, you know, if you make it a story just about individual people being good, then you miss what's really important here, which is, um, you know, the fact of having to share power with people who are different from you. Yeah, it's a political coalition based on solidarity to a certain extent. Yeah. I mean, look, I think what happened with the Democratic Party, which had been the most racist institution in American life until that point in the 1930s and 40s and 50s,

was that black people began to wield power within it. And once the Democratic Party began to answer to a black constituency, it became more racially tolerant. In fact, it began to advocate for equal rights. And so, you know, it's much more important to understand that story as a story of black people wielding power in politics and not a question of simply everybody becoming good and wonderful. Right. And that's how that's a really interesting point, because, you know, I feel like there's often these debates on the left about joining, you know, working within a institution that you deem to be corrupt, right, within like a Democratic Party that's run in a way that you disagree with. But when you consider that,

you know, as you say, black Americans started wielding power within a Democratic Party that like also included Dick Russell, like the arch conservative racist senator who stopped single handedly or as the leader of the southern democrats blocked civil rights legislation for decades um and like it shows how much can be done when you choose to participate in uh an organization like that uh despite it being full of racist assholes and you say well fuck it i'm gonna be a part of it anyway and and bend it to my will yes a determined and a a sufficiently determined and numerous uh political constituency can bend a political party to its will even if it is doing so against the party's will and the

dixiecrats learn that lesson the hard way well Well, so let's end on this, because I'm really curious about how you would analyze the state of the Democratic Party currently, because we've got obviously the folks in the street are the Democratic Party's constituency right there is those are not Trump voters. At the same time, you've got Joe Biden out there saying, hey, we got to train police to shoot him in the leg. And, you know, I'm not in favor of defunding the police. And you have Joe Biden who's got to make a very weighty vice presidential pick. He's obviously the establishment wing candidate. But there's this progressive wing which seems more allied with the people in the streets.

more allied with the people in the streets. And you've got, you know, all of the weight of a general election happening where you've got every different part of the Democratic coalition is going to be coming out and voting. How do you see the party shifting in response to what's happening if you see it doing so? So the way I would describe Joe Biden is that he is studiously, he makes every effort to make himself the median Democrat. Wherever the center of the Democratic Party is, that's where he's going to be. And if the center of gravity in the Democratic Party shifts to the left, then he's going to shift to the left with it. And I think you see that reflected in his policy proposals. You know, I think the Joe Biden of the 1980s would make fun of the Joe Biden of 2020 as a communist. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

He's actually a much more liberal politician than he was in the 1980s and 90s. I think that the truth is that when you look at the Democratic Party, wherever the whatever the ideal policies of Democratic voters are, Joe Biden read the mood of your average rank and file Democratic voter much better than a lot of the other candidates. And that's why he's the nominee. I think that Biden is not going to go further than he thinks he needs to go to keep his constituency united and to prevent the other side from being able to demonize him. So I think he's a very careful politician, despite his reputation for insane exaggerations. And so, you know, he may not be where the future of the Democratic Party is in terms of younger voters who are significantly to his left. But I think he has a good sense of where the Democratic rank and file electorate is and is probably going to try to swim in the

middle of that, in the middle of those two polls as much as possible. But do you feel like we had the political scientist Rachel Bitticoffer on and her analysis is that the reason Hillary Clinton lost and what the Democratic Party needs to worry about now is the basically the progressive left and folks of color staying home and not being motivated to turn out that, you know, getting the the suburban white Democrats is great. That needs to be done. But also you need to get out this entire other constituency. And, you know, the when I look at it, I'm like, well, is Biden has he learned that lesson? Does he know that? Does he realize that, you know, those folks need to be energized to some degree as well? That to me is the big open question. I'm curious what your thoughts are. to some degree as well. That to me is the big open question. I'm curious what your thoughts are. So I think that Biden understands that he's nobody's he's nobody's hero. Biden is if he wins,

he'll be like the first president who is not in a long time, who is not surrounded by any kind of like cult of personality. Everybody understands that Biden is a human being. He's mortal. He's a regular guy. Um, I think that people are very Democrats. When you look at the polls, they are extremely energized to beat Trump. Yeah. Um, and I think that when you look and when you also look at the polls, I think it's a mistake to look at like progressives and people of color. These are not the same constituency. Yeah. Right. I think the divide in the Democratic Party is is is more is more about age than race. When you look when you look at the numbers, but young people don't vote in large enough numbers to impose their will on the party the way that many of them would like to. So what you've got is a heterodox party. You have a party made up of people from very, very different, varying ideological backgrounds. You have

conservative Democrats, you have moderate Democrats, and you have liberal and left-wing Democrats. And what is going to happen in a party like that is those different constituencies are going to have different visions of what the ideal policy will be and whatever is produced by the process of them competing against each other is going to be, it's not going to be exactly what one of, what one of those constituency, constituencies want. The Republican party is ideologically unified in the sense that they are like almost entirely conservatives, but that causes other problems. For example, with being unable to reach out to people who are unlike you and to grow your tent that way.

So there are obviously like advantages and disadvantages to each type of coalition. I tend to think that, you know, when you have a coalition that is not diverse, that is made up of one specific group of people, that's actually kind of dangerous historically for democracy, because those people begin to view people who are not like them as a kind of threat to the democratic process who should be cut out of that process. Yeah, it's a monoculture. It leaves you open to a potato famine. But but so, you know, the Democratic Party's policy and politics will always reflect the fact that it is divided ideologically. Yeah. As long as that remains the case, you know, their their policy and politics will reflect that division. And it's going to be easy for it's going to be subject to infighting. It's going to be subject to one side calling the other side sellouts and the other side calling that side delusional. It's just like the nature of coalition politics. I think that, you know, people are very fired up and very united around the idea of beating Trump, even if they're not so jazzed about Biden.

I think what happens after that is a very interesting question. Yeah, I just I completely agree with you. It's just all those all those factions also need to be excited. You know, they also need they also need to feel that they all need to feel that they're being heard and that they are represented by the party in some way. And when I listen to, you know, my Twitter follows on the left, like you hear a lot of them not feeling that way. And that to me me, looks like the job that Biden needs to do, or at least a big component of it. And that's that's what I'm curious. I'm curious about the internal conversations that they're having and how much they recognize that. Yeah. I mean, I think Trump did Biden a big favor by doing an authoritative

like encouraging an authoritarian crackdown on people protesting police brutality. like encouraging an authoritarian crackdown on people protesting police brutality. But look, you know, there's, like I said, the Democratic Party is a diverse party, both ethnically, religiously, ideologically, and that's going to cause a tremendous amount of friction. If you don't have that kind of diversity, you may seem more unified, but you're also going to, at almost every every turn offend people who are not like you because you're not able to uh form relationships with those people because you don't have them inside your party yeah and this moment really does seem remarkable to me because just one other thing i've noticed is that people who you know i know in comedy even who are not uh you know they're

not progressives there may be uh you know they're anti-SJW types. You know what I mean? Even those folks are responding to what's happening and saying justice for George Floyd and like, what the fuck are the cops doing to that guy? You know? Right. I mean, look, there are certain there are certain ideological currents in American life that diverge in many, many places. But one of the places where most of them converge is that the police shouldn't be able to kill a man for no reason. It's pretty, pretty basic, basic principle.

I mean, you know, if you go there's a there's a great article in The New Republic by my former colleague, Matt Ford, which is about the history of policing in the United States and sort of the ideological disputes about whether we should even have police to begin with. You know, the emergence of professional police forces and why they emerged, the ideological debates over their existence, which I highly recommend reading because we didn't always live in the world that we live in now. And it helps give some perspective as to how that world emerged. How would you like to see policing reformed or or defunded or changed in any way? So I think there's there's a lot of there's a lot of very clear things we can do. One is that you have to reform the unions so that they're, you know, they're not capable of throwing up all the road barriers that they can in front of police, in front of police accountability. The reason for that is, is that even if you are a good cop, the institutional incentives against you speaking out against someone who has broken the rules or done something terrible are so strong, because if you do, you will be isolated by your former officers.

You know, they'll turn their backs on you and the guy probably won't get punished anyway. So it's a sacrifice that will produce almost nothing. The incentives for pushing the bad apples out instead of keeping them in are completely screwed up. You have to get rid of qualified immunity, which is the Supreme Court doctrine that basically says, you know, unless you do something absolutely, you know, absolutely insane, and probably not even then, that the police are immune to civil suit because, you know, because they were performing their duty as an officer of the law. I think you have to restore federal oversight of police departments in terms of like the federal government, the civil rights division, the justice

department, looking into the patterns and practices of police and making sure that they are in line with the constitution. And I think finally, you have to, I mean, local politicians have to figure out a way to be able to challenge the power of the police unions so that they don't have a monopoly on both parties and are capable of stifling any kind of local reform that comes through the legislature because their ability to influence politicians on both sides is just almost unparalleled. And if you want to see an example of this, I forgot to mention this earlier, but you should read about the police riot that happened under Mayor Dinkins that was partially instigated by Rudy Giuliani before he defeated Dinkins in the mayoral election.

Well, I've never heard about this. Oh, this is a tremendous moment in New York City political history, which is so long and so colorful that it's difficult to pick the really important ones out. But I highly recommend reading about the police riot. And it was highly covered at the time. One of the cops there referred to the mayor, David Dinkins, the first Black mayor in New York as a washroom attendant. There has to be a new kind of political universe where elected officials are willing to stand up to the police. So those are those are four things that at least that need to happen, at least before we even really start looking into other stuff.

But those reforms are necessary. Can you come up with a catchy slogan that starts with four? Like four, four and then more. Or four, I don't know. I feel like we gotta do that. This is exactly why I'm a journalist and not a political strategist or an activist

because I'm not good at pithy stuff like that. Well, this has been, you were great at this conversation. I really thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I had a great time. Well, thank you once again to Adam Serwer for coming on the show.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Sam Roudman and Dana Wickens, our engineers, Ryan Connor and Brett Morris, Andrew WK for our theme song. Hey, you can find me online at adamconover.net

or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. And we'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. that was a hate gun podcast