The Opinions - There Is No Trump Without the South

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

The South isn’t just a wellspring for American culture; it offers a blueprint for America’s future. For this week’s round table on “The Opinions,” three Southerners — the columnists Jamelle Bouie, David French and Tressie McMillan Cottom — explore how the nation’s fascination with Southern culture reveals deeper truths about race, class, belonging and the power of Trumpism.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Ptkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Vishakha Darbha and Kristina Samulewski. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Carole Sabouruad. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm David French, and I'm a columnist at the New York Times. Michelle is away this week, so I'm joined by my fellow columnist, Jamel Bowie and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Hi, guys. Hello, hello. Hi there. Because it's just us Southerners today, I thought we could zoom out a bit and talk about the South.

And I'm going to tell you y'all a story that is, I'll say it this way. It's the first moment when I knew that never Trump was absolutely cooked. And that was early in 2016. There had been some glimmers of hope that Donald Trump could be stopped after the Iowa caucuses. Remember, he underperformed there. And then he comes to the South, and I can remember watching him. Here's a New Yorker, a New York real estate developer, reality TV star, should not, on paper be somebody who's going to really connect with the American South. But then I looked at him

and I watched him operate and I thought, oh, we're done. He's sweeping sweeping Super Tuesday. Why? Because he was a very familiar figure if you are somebody who's paid attention to Southern culture and politics. He immediately fit into that mold of Huey Long, of a George Wallace, of a Edwin Edwards from Louisiana. And I thought, this. person is absolutely connecting at a very fundamental level with his audience. And he's kept connecting. We're all, as I said, we're all Southerners here. Let's talk about this. But before we dive into the substance of it all, let's establish our southern street cred, so to speak. I was born in Opelika, Alabama, raised in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. I'm coming to you

from Nashville right now. Tressie, what's your Southerd background? I could start by saying, well, I'm black, but I guess that doesn't totally cover it all. So I'll be more specific. Let's see, my family is from Eastern North Carolina, Robeson County. This may be one of the rare occasions where Robeson gets a shout out in the New York Times. I'm going to say that very strongly.

Robeson County is Eastern North Carolina. And we have been there for generations. I, like you, David, have lived all across this country. country, but have consistently returned to the American South. And I presently live and work in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Which is in the midst of a football-induced crisis at this very moment. Which, listen, if we want to pivot, I'm happy to talk about the football-induced crisis here. And in fact, if you give me enough time and a long enough ramp, I can make it the story of the nation, if you allow me. Bill Belichick coming from New England to Chapel Hill, North

Carolina to save us from ourselves at the behest of the state's Republican cultural elite. If you give me time, David, I can make it work. But yes. Oh, I didn't mean to open that can of worms. But believe me, I would love to hear every second of it. But Jamel, what about you? Trent lightly, my friend. We're going through some difficult things right now.

I have not lived as much around the South as either of y'all. My family is from my mom grew up in Waycross, Georgia, which is in Ware County, in the southern part of the state. My dad grew up in Quincy, Florida, just Gadsden County, and then also Fort Myers kind of back and forth between those two places. I grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and then went to the University of Virginia

and then lived in D.C. for a minute, and now I'm in Charlottes for Virginia. Like, I think of myself, like, as a southerner, yes, but also very much, like, a Virginian. Ah, oh, oh, shots fired, Jamil, drawing the distinctions. I'm not drawing a distinction, but I do think that for people within the South, there's like, people recognize the real cultural distinctions between places.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think what matters here is at this point, we have all said y'all appropriately. It's true. And that is everybody's credibility. So let's get into the substance here. Tressy, in 2023, you wrote a column called Why I Keep My Eyes and Mind on the South. And it's all about how you can understand where American politics are headed based on what you see in the South. Why do you say that?

Well, I said one. I mean, I believe it deeply and truly. And at the time that I was writing that, of course, in 2023, you know, there was some nascent hope that we were turning a page on, I think, southern politics and its hold on national politics. We thought we had a strategy even for Trumpism. We had survived it once. We can survive it again, right? And one of the things that I was trying to remind people, something I think Jamel does particularly well here,

is that in fact, what we needed to be concerned about is that Trump had realized how much power he could derive by deeply embedding himself in the ideas of the South, the iconography of the American South. And, you know, unfortunately, I think that is one of the things that we have learned to be true. But I think one of the things that when we say Trumpism, I'm talking about both Donald Trump and the infrastructure around him that makes him powerful and to a certain extent effective, I think one of the things they learned is that the most efficient way to control the public's attention was to just hammer these ideas that I think are deeply fundamentally Southern. So these are ideas about race, obviously, and these are ideas about the inherent character of the nation, about who is included.

and who is excluded, not just constitutionally, but whose citizenship is always conditional, right? These are all deeply and fundamentally southern relationships of power. But I also would like to point out the reason why those ideas are so rich and so powerful in the South isn't just because the South is uniquely racist, right? It is because that's where the nation sort of shunts off all of those conversations, right? And so we tend to hold all of that energy, all those ideas, all of those histories for the rest of the country. And I think that what Donald Trump has figured out is something that

national politicians have long figured out in this country is that that well never runs dry. And I thought one of the mistakes we made the first time, and by we, I will include myself here, although I would like to say I did not make the mistake nearly as bad as some of my professional peers did or consistently, wasn't thinking that somehow we had moved beyond that. And that, you know, that you could understand the sort of broader political map and imaginary by looking at it from the vantage point of New York or California or the Midwest. And I just thought that one of the reasons why we missed, why a message, economic populism message packaged in Trump's, you know, infotainment sort of package, why that would work in the

South as you talk about seeing him live. I also saw him live in Richmond, Virginia. I saw him in South Carolina, saw him outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It was never surprised to me that he spoke to Southerners. I was surprised by how many of us professional observers weren't paying attention to how well he worked here, because I thought that was a message for how well he was going to work across the country. I want to add a note to Tressy's last point there. So one observation, I'm sure, we, everyone on this conversation is made and other people have made is the way that there has emerged kind of a almost generic national rural culture, right? It's a certain kind of country music. It's a certain kind of country music. It's a certain kind of pickup truck.

You see it, if you go to rural New Hampshire, if you go to rural Montana, if you go to rural Illinois, you'll see it. And it's very much rooted in sort of like a franchised version of a white southern ruralality. And I bring that up to say that it's both the case that the country will sort of shunt its difficult conversations. The trustee said about, say, race to the south and make it a southern problem. But it's always been the case that like the rest of the country has been fascinated by the South in really important ways.

The people who push the narratives of national reconciliation in the decades after Reconstruction weren't Southerners, right? It was a bunch of New Jersey academics at Princeton. Woodrow Wilson, although born in Virginia, very much a man of the North, the Mid-Atlantic, you might say. Hollywood's fascination with the South. You cannot understand, I mean, there's obviously the birth of a nation, but you can't understand the history of American film without a recognition of a real, like, fascination with the imagery

and the culture of, like, at least a particular version of the South that pulses through westerns, that pulses through, screwball comedies, like, it's everywhere. I was about to say TV. I mean, you know, we all get a little, Southern when this nation is going fascist is just what it is, right? We all want to consume the romantic version of the South, the verandas, the magnolia trees, the music, the food. To Jamal's point, you know, when I look out across sort of like our popular culture even, I'm always going to

start paying attention when country music is ascendant. I'm always going to pay attention when SEC football now becomes a national obsession. I'm going to pay attention when the Bama Rush girls are driving, you know, millions of dollars of free marketing for their university. Because what that does for people, again, an audience that is consuming this from outside the South is we can always say, no matter how bad it is in California, no matter how bad it is in Montana, at least we're not the South, right? And so you consume the palatable parts of the South is sort of make yourself feel better about where the national trend lines of politics are going. But yet we produce an idea of America

that says, well, we're not as bad as the South, but also the South wasn't really always that bad, now, was it? Right. Right. We're always doing both of those projects at the same time. In the context of Donald Trump, I think it actually, Donald Trump's usage of the South, like, for example, his occasional references, sort of like they took down the statues and that kind of thing.

I mean, Donald Trump's, the extent to which he connects or connected with Southern voters in 2016, and the center which like the Southern Evangelical has become kind of its core constituency, to me, reflects both things happening internal, but also this sort of national interest in fascination with the American South. The other thing I'll say just in terms of Trump as a familiar and recognizable figure. So, you know, you mentioned David Hugh Long, Evan Edwards. You know, part of Trump's political appeal, and this isn't, I feel like this isn't talked about enough, is that he presents himself as this perfect avatar of a kind of patriarchal masculinity, right? Like he has all this money and he has this gilded home and he has his big family, right?

Even elements of him that, you know, the joke, if Obama had done that people gone crazy and they would have, such as his multiple wives and, you know, basically multiple babies' mamas, is in this image of patriarchal white masculinity, southern masculinity, not an issue, right? that that particular image of masculinity is so deeply rooted in southern culture going back to the very beginning and Trump just slots right into it. No problem whatsoever. You know, there's a time in my life when hearing you, you all talk about the South like this, I would have bristled a bit. I would have said, okay, I'm going to fully acknowledge there are radiating still negative effects of the South's past in the South, no question. But it really has turned a page in a very decisive way. But I think for me,

one of the things that has been very dispiriting about the present moment is that I don't think the South has changed as much as I thought it had changed. That a lot of the elements

that I thought of the quote, what we call New South, what we're called the New South, I'm sure you guys remember Atlanta being called the city too busy to hate, that it was sort of turning the page on racism in the past

through commerce, through, you know, hatred was bad, bad for business. And so the South was moving on. It was a commercial place. It was a place that was growing economically, growing in population. It wasn't a backwater anymore. And I grew up in that period right after the civil rights movement, came of age politically after Richard Nixon is gone. And this kind of blip of a moment where the Republican Party, which was rooted in the South, very much started to identify itself around the concept of personal character in response to

Bill Clinton. And to me, that was the New South. It had left segregation behind. It had left hatred behind. It was still struggling with the legacy of all of that, but it had largely left it behind. It left all of that populist nonsense behind. And then here comes Donald Trump and makes me rethink almost all of that. And it was as if the new right, what we call the new right now, really is truly the old right. It really is an older right than what you saw say in Reagan, Republicanism, and its center of revival is in the South. I'm curious, and either Jamel or Tressie, this really interesting fusion, though, if you look back on it with the intense religious fervor of the South, at the same time that it has this legacy of extremely corrupt

political figures and this symbiotic relationship that they had that seems to be have persisted into this present era but channeled and funneled into the person of Donald Trump. Is that too much to say? You know, our perspective on where we are in history is just always shaped by where we enter it, right? And so we can have an overinflated sense of clarity about, oh, this is the direction that we're going in. And I think things are far more cyclical than we are usually willing to. admit, and one of the things that some people have struggled with in Donald Trump is the fact that he is both a departure from the way that politics were operating in the moment, but is not a departure historically. Again, when you talk about like the commerce angle and how much we relied on economic nationalism to sort of save the cultural, moral and ethical failings of the American South, that supposes that, um, economic progress is at odds with racial regression. And what I would argue is that those things have always not just been compatible, but have been symbiotic. I mean, you know, slavery is an economic system. So these two things are not at odds. It is just that in the South, they are always hyper visible in a way that other regional economies in this country cannot say, right? And like, you know, listen, God bless Atlanta. Atlanta raised me culturally, right? I owe, you know, like 30 percent of my personality to

outcast. You know, I grew up wanting to be one of the new Black Americans and the Black elite coming out after the Cosby Show and living my great dreams in Atlanta, like every good black person in the 1990s. But the idea that there was ever any truth to the idea that we were too busy building a commercial economic powerhouse for Black America for us to be bothered with racism really flies in the face of what was happening on the ground during that time of so-called economic progress. This is, you know, you can look at something like, you know, Bill Clinton's America. This is also the creation of a police surveillance system that fundamentally pends black Americans into everything from substandard housing to being geographically isolated out of the economic progress

of Atlanta. The cost of living starts to push black people out of its inner core, for example. So these things are all happening simultaneously. This is about the difference between the reality of our political life and the story we tell ourselves about our political life. And I think what Donald Trump and the GOP, which I always want to take the opportunity to say, these are now one and the same. But what they have been able to exploit is like our constant forgetting about that and how much we want to believe that economic progress will take care of these things. And I would just, you know, I was harking back to like somebody like a Du Bois who says,

these things are not antithetical to each other. economic progress and racism are deeply intertwined. Yeah. In addition to this cultural and political piece, I would identify just the economic agenda of this GOP as a kind of national vision of what the South has been, which is a region of a region of a weak or no rights for labor. That's right. Of surveillance, of control, of low wages, of low services. and of not just low taxes for those that already have wealth and privilege, but essentially their kind of right to dominate the entire economic and political sphere unmolested by those they proceeded to be below them.

Like that is Trumpism, right? That is Trumpism. And I think it's important to recognize the way that this is not just a cultural thing that's happening, that what we're looking at is the influence of an economic model. that has appeal to political elites across the country, as it always has. Always has. Right? The first off-shoring wasn't to Mexico, wasn't to Vietnam.

It was to Alabama. It was to Georgia. It still is. The car factories are in Tennessee because the labor protections aren't in Tennessee. Oh, yeah. Southern politicians go out to the rest of the world, and they say to them, our labor is easier to control than the labor is in California. Our labor pool is difficult to unionize in the American South, and this is the deal we make you.

So every time a southern politician goes out and they congratulate themselves about building the new car factory or the new battery maker in some rural part of their southern state or municipality, what they have generally done is they have made a deal with either a national or transnational conglomerate. that says you do not have to worry about unionizing, right? That is the deal. It is a continuation of the same idea. Well, you know, I do think it is interesting. You brought up the economic piece of this. I come from a town. When I was growing up there, it was about 8,000 people. We had three stoplights in Kentucky, a rural town in Kentucky. That's where I spent my elementary and high school years. And it's unrecognizable now because a Toyota manufacturing plant came there and completely transformed the city. And these are good, high-paying jobs. They are transformative jobs in these parts of the South. But it is absolutely true that they also pull and draw jobs from

other parts of America. And it's one of the reasons why I think so many people have been moving to the South, which is, let me, let me raise that. One of the interesting elements to me about the current national moment, is that it's not just that the politics of the South are so dominant. In many ways, as I mentioned earlier, the culture and economics of the South are growing more dominant as well. And you've had a huge in-migration from other parts of the country coming into the South, into the Sun, you know, Texas growing in population. Florida, growing in population. Tennessee, at Nashville, where I am, has been exploding in population. What are you seeing are the reasons for that? What are the reasons for why the South, aside from climate, which is better than other parts of the country, but some days can feel a little too hot for a little too long? Why is that? Why is it functioning as such a magnet right now in American migration? Jamel, I'll start with you.

That's an interesting question. I think it's a couple of things, right? It is economic development. And I want to quickly just say, like, I'm not opposed to the construction of factories down south. I'm opposed to, like, to the exploitation of labor. So, like, you know, if you can have well-paying jobs with people who have, like, meaningful economic freedom and input and say and can collectively bargain, that's great.

It's when the deal is you get this job and also you shut up and you like it. And if we decide that we're going to take this job away or we're going to subject you to worse conditions, you just have to accept it because it could be worse. It could be nothing. That's what I object to. But as far as migration, it's certainly economic growth. It's housing, right? Like, you know, part of what's happening is on the West Coast and in the Northeast, basically

sort of like the housing markets are calcified. There's very little new building. And so if you want to own a home, which is still a dream for many Americans, you go to where the homes are, and the homes are in, you know, Greenfield development throughout the South. Yeah. Jamel points out something really elegant, which is that one of the things that has happened with our internal migration is that plenty of solidly middle class, upper middle class, upwardly mobile, white Americans are feeling, I think, at just a basic demographic level, a pushing a pull that they have not had to participate in or haven't felt in quite some time.

I mean, we're looking at a pushing pool that is very close to, like, the urbanization of the United States at one point in time. And so people are feeling, I think, a push out of some places, as Jamel points out, the high cost of housing, the high cost of transportation. And then I would also say just the sort of friction of trying to support like a family life in some of those places, how difficult that then becomes, the high cost of childcare being one that I think about a great deal. And then I think the things pulling people are that, you know, our culture has been nationalized to a certain point. That once you learn how to accept. grits and say, y'all, you'll fit in and you'll do fine. And so there's less friction there

there about migrating and moving across a region than I think there used to be. And then I want to put a final point on this thing about like economic development and across the like southern economy that you kind of alluded to there, David, which is, yeah, you can build a new plant that creates all of these good paying jobs. But the story over and over again has been, especially in the South, that that doesn't necessarily improve mobility in the quality of life for people to the area. So the opportunity structure that I tend to be interested in in the South is, okay, well, build me a wind farm that then transforms the mobility of the people who have been here intergenerational, who are sort of trapped to that sort of sticky floor of the bottom

of the economic ladder in the South. And what we're seeing here is not just a transplant of people, but of ideas that don't necessarily create that kind of mobility for southern workers across the South, which then leads to a war, a battle for the soul of rural America that you can feel very tangibly in the South. That is just about, like, I think, these demographic push and pools that are moving people around the country in these ways that concern people about their political hold on their homes. Yeah. Well, you know, you both have mentioned housing and cost of living. In my experience, I've talked to a lot of transplants who've come to Tennessee a lot. What they will say,

time and time again is that the exact thing that you said about housing and expenses that they feel as if they just couldn't afford what, you know, the American dream in California. They couldn't afford it in New York, but they absolutely can afford it in Nashville, or at least could until Nashville became almost as expensive as some of these cities. But is there anything that Democratic Party can learn from this? If you've got entire regions of the country that are pulling citizens at scale from sort of core blue areas into these red areas, what can Democrats learn from this from a matter of policy? I want to make two points about this.

And it's going to reflect, I think, what Democrats can do, but the limits of that. What Democrats can do, obviously, is in places where they have unified control, they can make it easier to build housing. I mean, I think Democratic, medical ed states should try to kind of stem the bleeding, right? Like, make it easier to construct housing for the people who want to stay who like where they are. As trusty said, it is quite difficult to get

people to move, and some people are moving because they feel they don't really have any choice. But I also want to say that part of the allure of the South as a cultural object, and this is getting back to what trustee said earlier, about cost of living, is not simply that things might be cheaper, but that you have an opportunity to use your wealth. Yeah. For lack of a better term, that kind of dominate other people, right? You can, you can, you can, you can have a big compound in the middle of Texas and drive a gigantic vehicle and use all the resources you'd like, emboss people around. And that is. It's the yellow stoneification of the country, Jamel. Yes, yes. And that, that aspect of it cannot, you can't, there's nothing, there's no policy you can do.

That's right. To compete with that, I guess, because what a place that California is offering, the tradeoff, right, is it's going to be more expensive to live here. You won't be able to, unless you are in the highest echelon of income owners. You're not going to be able to hire someone to look after your house for dirt cheap, right? You won't be able to exploit someone so easily. But you are going to live in this multicultural, cosmopolitan place where people are going to exist, at least, like, culturally at least, on some. plane of equality. And if you like that, right, if you like that kind of life and experience, that's what you're here in L.A. for. That's what you're here in New York for. That's what you're

in Chicago for and all the places that are kind of their own places, but offer a smaller or more manageable version of that thing. People are going to want to choose that and are going to make the sacrifices necessary to choose that. And then the people who want to be able to, you know, live the Yellowstone life are going to choose that, which also come to the own set of sacrifices. And so there really is like a competing visions of what the good life is in the United States. And parts of the South, or in the cultural imagination of the nation, the South offers one particular vision. And there are things perhaps that blue states within the South as well, there are things you can do to sort of say, well, if you're leaving because, specifically because the cost of housing is so high, we can do something about that. But the cultural thing is the cultural thing.

And that's a struggle that's not going to happen in the realm of politics, such that it is a struggle and not just simply like a thing that is the case about this country that we share. Yeah. You know, I think about I'm not comfortable with telling the Democratic Party what they need to do. I'm much more comfortable saying I can tell you what I think people are saying they need done for them. And whoever steps into the void to do that, that's politics, right? Like come and give us your vision. And I think one of the things that happen with the Democratic Party in the South, and I'm just going to say this plainly as someone who's seen it. The Democratic Party just has to reckon with the fact that if it wants to matter politically, it has to negotiate with black political power.

And if it wants to be viable and competitive with the Republican Party that is figuring out a message of economic populism that cuts across some race differences, it had better figure out how to invest in and grow the black political infrastructure. One of the challenges I think that the Democratic Party is facing in this moment is that just like everyday life of black political life in the South has changed, right? So you see this decline of what we like called chocolate cities, a place like Atlanta or D.C., seeing these massive demographic changes, which does weaken the black political structure of the South, which the DNC needs, right? And then, you know, whichever party is going to respond to the economic pain of America is going to have to respond to how complicated it is to get the right economic message when so much of that is embedded in racism, right? And just because it is hard doesn't mean you get to write off the American South because it's just too hard to come up with an economic message when you have to also deal with deep racial divisions. my argument has been if you cannot sell your economic message in the South, you are not going to be able to win, right? You do not deserve a national economic message if that economic message makes no sense. It's incoherent when you bring it to South Carolina or when you bring it to Georgia or when you bring it to rural parts of the American South.

And they have not figured that out. Now, the Republican Party hasn't figured that out either. But what they have figured out is that if you play to the national impulse of grieving, strongly enough, deeply enough. You can get people to buy into national politics because there is no local politics happening around them that they can see. There's no local politics that is serving them.

Now, this is unfair. This is an asymmetry in our political system that the Democratic Party needs that message more than Republicans do. But life is not fair, little girl, as my mother like to tell me. Politics are not fair, little girl. You still have to go out there

and shape a message for them And, you know, if you don't do that, then the national message of grievance will win out every time. Well, you know, in my experience, it's almost as if outside of the local power centers within the South, the Democratic Party even is taking seriously the idea of competing. Yeah. You know, one of the things that is puzzling to me is why does, with a few exceptions, the Southern Democratic Party consistently bring candidates to the polls who are every bit, for example, a socially liberal as you have, say, a Democratic candidate in the West Coast or the East Coast. How about a more aggressive outreach to more socially moderate and socially conservative voters in the South? And it seems as if that very idea is sometimes an anathema. I think the exact opposite is true, that what we see, Certainly in my party of the South, I talk to local politicians all the time who would love the support of the Democratic Party is that they have a message to local constituents on the ground who absolutely want, oh, I don't know, tenant-owned cooperative housing, who absolutely want to increase their local minimum wage or they want a living wage.

These are things that at a more like nationalized level sound, you know, socially liberal and out of step with our idea of Southern voters. but that Southern voters want, they will have a candidate who wants to deliver on that for them locally. But because that message doesn't fit the Democrats' national message that they find they don't get a lot of the state party support for those candidates. And I actually think that that across the South, especially with poor and working class Southerners, strong economic messages that may sound deeply radical on the national stage can play fairly well at home if they trust the political party. Right. Now, I think at the state level, again, especially in places like North Carolina, we tend to prefer a more socially conservative performance of southern politics at our state level. But on the ground, especially when you're talking about local elections, it is that the Democratic Party wants to run a far more conservative candidate than can excite the base across the rural parts of the South. And when I also add to this point about trust, which isn't just about stepping in southern politics. but national politics. I often think that the desire for candidates, you know, to say, why don't Democrats just run someone who holds more conservative social views? This is an attempt to do a

shortcut to the trust question. The equation being offered is if you hold X, Y, Z, moderate, to conservative social position, this will buy you the trust you need with the critical voters you need to win to be able to win an election. But I just don't think that. that works. I think I think we've seen quite clearly it just doesn't work that the trust deficit is so deep that there's no messaging along those lines that's necessarily going to bridge that gap. And so the questions, well, how do you fix the trust deficit? And that is kind of rebuilding, I think, the Democratic Party, not as basically like a glorified messaging organ, but as an actually present local organization that is engaged in the kind of work that local organizations

are engaged in. So you can build trust the force of personality, but for parties to build trust, they have to build trust through, I think, actually delivering things to the people they hope to serve. In delivering can happen at the level of the state. It can also happen at the level of sort of like parisstate organizations. And that's what I would say, right? Like, I think, for example, that it would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to make serious investments in Mississippi, a state where Democratic candidates with no investment routinely hit the mid-40s in statewide elections. That's a clear sign. Like, it's going to be really hard to close that gap because of racial polarization in the state, but the gap can be closed. And making

Mississippi competitive would be a huge blow to Republicans. Yeah, it changes the game. It changes the game. It does. What does that look like? Well, what it looks like is redefining what the Democratic Party is. Mississippi State, where there is such low state investment, will use the Democratic Party as just sort of a private organization. as a venue for public investment, you know, local Democratic parties are creating public spaces for people to gather. Local Democratic parties are providing, you know, kind of basic services, fixing your taillight, you know, offering tutors for your kids, that kind of thing. And building trust so that when election time does come around, it isn't vote for us because you have

some cultural affinity for us. It's a vote for us because we've done something for you. and we'll do something for you if you put us into office. All right. On that note, let's move on to our recommendations. So Tressy, as the guest of honor, your first. Oh, I am. My stuff lately has not been a whole lot of fun. My reading, I just finished rereading my first time in a while reading Deacons of Defense.

So if anybody wants to talk about, you know, armed resistance across the American South, I'm primed for that. But I guess that's not lighter. Yeah, I just finished rereading. I hadn't read that since undergrad. and found it especially powerful reading it today. Jamel. I have been on a Duke Ellington kick for some time.

Obviously, I know who Duke Ellington is, but never really, like, listen to Duke Ellington in a serious way. So just to sit down and, like, seriously listen to Duke Ellington. And I have this experience of being like, yeah, this guy rules. As it turns out, yeah, he's pretty good. This guy's great. So I would recommend his 1944, piece for his first concert at Carnegie Hall that's called Black, Brown, and Bage. And it was

Ellington's attempt to kind of tell the story of Black America in jazz. And it kind of composed jazz symphony. There is a version of it that he recorded in 1950 with Mahalia Jackson. That is absolutely wonderful. So it's, and you can find that like for streaming on Apple or Spotify or whatever. But I highly recommend it. And just like to really, don't like listen to it while you're doing things. Like just listen to it and like sit with it and actually kind of like, try to experience it. Because it is just, you'll listen to it and you'll be like, yeah, Duke Gallington's one of the great composers of all time.

Like, not just great American composers, but like one of these singularly great composers that has ever lived. Well, mine is grim. Mine is a movie called A House of Dynamite. It's a Catherine Bigelow film. And the premise is, it's just a normal day at the office in the American National Defense Establishment until a ballistic missile launch is detected. and then everything changes all at once in the most tense ways imaginable.

So Catherine Bigelow's very adept at directing tense thriller-type movies, and it's a very tense, very sobering, very good movie. So with that, we'll wrap it up. Tressie, Jamel, thanks so much for chatting. Oh, it's always a pleasure. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to see you all. even if it is virtually. If you like this show,

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