hi, everyone.

welcome. thank you for joining us tonight in celebration of exurbia. now the battleground for american democracy. my name nyein and i'm a manager at the seminary co-op. as you might know, our was founded in 1961 and in 2019 became the country's first and currently only not for profit bookstore whose mission is? bookselling. this mission recognizes as a cultural endeavor. booksellers as professionals and bookstores as. a civic institution that supports an informed populace. we invite you to browse, and we also invite you to learn more about the co-op. our sister store, 57th street books an■dd support these unique cultural institutions by visiting our website. and of course, speaking to a bookseller after this event, one of the main ways you can support our stores is by buying a book. maybe likewe're the author willy to be signing books after the event. you can also become a member, the co-op and earn credit back on your purchases if you aren't already become a member when you

make purchase this evening. your support us to deliver a very rich and robust of free events. and we hope you'll join for another event soon. there will be time for audience questions at the end of the conversation. should you have any questions? please raise your hand during that time. and with that, i'm thrilled to introduce guest for this evening. david masciotra masi ultra. got it. is the author of six books a journalist political, analyst and arts critic. he has written for the new republic salon progressive monthly, no depression, the bulwark, crime reads and many other about politics, literature and, music. he and his wife live in indiana where he teaches at indiana university. northwell east. doug swartz, who he's been in conversation with, is the director of the writers program at indiana university northwest. please me and give a warm welcome to david and, doug. they do. good evening, david. good to see you. good evening, doug.

yeah, i will have to say that david has actually been my entree. a lot of the a lot of the sites that that show up in the book that that we met at zip's coffeehouse and, sanjay stereo. so david has been my guide to a lot of a lot of the the region that he is that he is writing about. i might begin by asking you to define terms maybe by doing a sort of, you may be an urbanite sort of routine or something like that and just, you know, you might be an exurbia might not even know it. that's right. yeah. so i would assume that most people are familr with suburbia and the suburb. it's a town to an urban area such as one in which where we sit chicago. differentiates an excerpt from a suburb is density and distance. so taking those in reverse and exurb has greater distance from the urban area than a suburb, so less population density and

exurbia began to take off, expand and grow and enlarge. within the past couple of decades as a later stage of white flight, which is perhaps something we'll in just a bit, but also exurbia is largely. real developers enter into these area as and they see that it's there's cheap land available they purchase it and they build housing complexes and strip malls and other accouterments necessary to establish something reasonable living a community and people. the diversity or the progressive politics of the city or the densely populated suburb they find themselves in exurbia. and there is a symbol closest that develops between the isolation of theexclusionary ane

political beliefs of the inhabitants. well, let me ask you, when i took in to be kind of the the big picture and the big question of the book and the big picture, you seem to be saying, you know, the focus is on escape buddhism and the what you call the coupling of christian nationalists and white flight and it sort of that therection o discuss the ways in which that to escape and. that the estranging it is turning into belligerence, you said. and i'm kind of what i was wondering andt. the subtitle of the book, you know, the battleground how, how, how much parallel we in, i guess, you know, in words i couldn't help from going to you know, taking the battleground for quite some timn kind of liberalizing it somehow

or thinking you know you said that they had they've gone from flight to fight. yes. and what forms that fighting is going to take? you know, you think of trump on january six saying we've got to fight like hell. we're not going to have a country. so that the moment in which we find ourselves in the converging crises which we must navigate are very because we're in such short term digital and the maga. what we find is that trump's elected returns his popular ity is off the charts and exurbia and the most psychotic members of congress lovable characters like. marjorie taylor greene, matt gaetz, jim jordan, some of your favorites. doug lauren boebert they all represent that are predominantly exurban.so the book begins, i'mo

get to your questions take the long way around the scenic route through exurbia. the book begins as a work of political geography that rather than examining trump because we've all read a number of of trump they're all quite gruesome and unpleasant. rather than inspecting let's inspect the perhaps through inspecting those places we can learn about the people who vote for them and the movement that they represent. and what we discover is the movement is reactionary, but it's also reactive in the sense that it's an adverse reaction it's a backlash to the progress, the immense progress that is taking shape across the united states in my lifetime, your lifetime, just over the past few decades, the progress on issues of race, progress on issues of gender the progress on, issues

of acceptance and opportunities for lgbt q people. and it's not to say that we live in an in an endemic paradise or a. there's still so much work to do and so many injustices to. correct. but it's due to the quiet revolution of the civil rights movement that is still in motion. and it's due to the increasing of people of color and lgbtq people in positions of power and prominence that the people who have fled to exurban counties and exurban towns have run of the means of escape. as you were asking. so it's a fight or flight politics and there's nowhere left to take flight. so they've adopted a fight mode against the very mechanisms, against the very that made the progress that they so vehemently

oppose. and that is constitutional liberalump they found an authoritarian figure to speak for the hinder lands, to speak for the exurbs, speak for the small metro suburbs in of an aggressive against the mechanisms, the systems and the culture. all forces that have made this country more more just diverse and more progressive. so exurbiaecomes the staging and breeding ground of a radical right wing insurgency that is opposed to what's in cities such as this one and what'sappening in the suburbs that immediately surround. hmm. would the people you're talking about. yeah. and this is. this is an impossible question, i'm sure. are they able to conceptualize

their own position? articulate their own position? one of the things i sort of vaguely was thinking i would find in the book, but i didn't, you know, waounter with you and serbian and exurban escapist themselves? you did write about attending a tea party rally and saying, well, what is the evidence example of that? and they had this sort of very trumpian locution, well, you just need to pay attention to what's happened, you know, which trump continues to use and then proceeds example. so i used to question how you know if we're thinking what is a battleground democracy? is it possible to conduct the battle on, their turfs other than theirs. that's an interesting question. so. one of the early reviews of the book that offered a criticism is is something t■■dt you're echoig right now. so so thanks for that doug.

i appreciate it. and that's that that there are profiles of the maga. exurbia writes in the book i did that for the deliberate reason that and perhaps this this is a flaw i'm rfecy willing to acknowledge. but i grew rather tired those profiles■p the the reporters gog into the diner and talking to the guys in the ball caps and saying, why do you support trump and and and why you support marjorie taylor? greene and. and do you really think that bill gates is implanting a micro trip inside of your skull? i grew rather tired of that because i found that it was reinforcing the prejudicial bias that those are the real americans. so i to instead fill my book with correct who represent something different even in the suburbs, even in the exurbs. youth or people who

start a local environmental group in. the town where my wife and i live. or robert cotton, who was part of the cotton family, the first black family to move to a sundown town of valparaiso. and cotton, now on the city council of valparaiso. so stories of hope and stories of and stories the diverse possibilities that exist in the united states of america. but it's an interesting question you ask about how much are the exurbia nights reacting in the fight mode against the progress that has occurred in this country consciously aware of their opposition to democracy. of they would say that they're not■they would probably argue tt they're defending democracy. but what i find is that often

times you can't take these people their wso i draw on a ste book about when white flight in my hometown, no one said, we're town of lansing, illinois, south of chicago, because more people and a few latino people moved into our neighborhoods. they cited, like property values and fears, crime and real estate trends. so there is always a way in which they will smuggle through custom of fear or and anger against multicultural and the culture that it creates. and of the thing do in the book is write about the on the ground that exists in the in which people actually live their lives in these towns

gives some sense of what life is like in these towns because so much of our political dialog and discourse has become radically divorced from reality, you know because of of the dominance of the right wing culture wars and the need for a reaction to it. we can't just ignore these things. we spend half our time about the bisexual eminem's or or aaron rodgers or there's illegal immigrant on every corner preparing to kill an elderly christian. you know, these fever of the right wing and we're not talking about what's actually happening in small towns like lansing, illinois, or highland, indiana or, or three oaks, michigan. you know, fill in the blank. so we're not talking about health care. we're not talking about living wage. we're notsustainability.

and the people who have create this culture war, who fund it, who feed it, and who support it. they will that they're interested in a higher standard of living in, a more robust democracy. but all of their actions from voting to consumption to habits of assembly indicate otherwise. well, one of the i think one of the another misperception or misconception that you seem to want to address in the book is the idea that that there's an economic behind support for trump. and then you want to reestablish priority of the social and the cultural. and i want to get to this in a minute the sort of the religious or the cosmic, even sort of motivates us. so could you talk maybe about that? yeah. so in some ways the book was born ofk( frustration because is

noted earlier, i live in region that i write about and i've enjoyed showing you some of those spots. maybe we'll do an exurbia now tour. i'll get a bus and it's we count on you to attend. so noticed in a contradiction and a pretty extreme one from the start of when trump declared his candidacy in 2015. people clamored to claim that support for trump was to frustration over trade deals and economic precarity, and that the average trump voter was the or. some character out of a woody and perhaps there was some truth that at the very beginning. but now we've had nine years to

review data, to review to review journalism. and the the the evidence is overwhelming that the majority of the the paradigm, an overwhelming majority of trump's support, cultural and rooted fed hostility towards fear and hostility toward voters of■f cor fear and hostility towards progress of. the secular. sort for lgbtq■[ people, for liberal women and i at this point donald trump isn't even talking about economics it's all of it's all this grievance tour and a resent tour and yet there are still people who insist that there's a very powerful class dynamic at work. one of the ways that i address in the book is to do a big push

back against the asinine david brooks stuff notion of working class. i owyou deeply admire. doug. ig"■] should say, since we're oe record, doug does not admire david brooks, but but david brooks is one of those most responsible for defining working as someone without a colso othey school making $33,000 a year is not part of the working class. foreman. making $85,000 a yr working. so that's most of trump's support that people define as working class people make in the trades earning a good living and s to still ity towards immigrants, towards single women, towlgbt po

forth. and it's important because if we don't properly diagnose the threat and understand the motivation behind it, then we won't know how to properly combat. well, yeah. can you follow up on that? because i sort of remember a passage or a sentence, the book where you say it's easy, mock this and find it ridiculous, but that you thought it would be better a wiser choice would be to meaand wondering. it's kind of another version of my question. okay. how do we actually combat? how do we actually kind of engage? i mean, can you engage with these trump voters? can we talk them? they used to be a kind of genre of, you know, ten ways to talk to a trump voter or something like that different ways to kind of here's how you can you can engage them and not not yet. and they won't shut d that how ?

how do we how do we know what we're dealing with and how we then. well if so, there's two ways to answer that question. there's there's the sense. of our own personal lives and what we do at the family gathering when quotes alex jones or you know you say pass the gravy and he says the wall or something like that. you know, how do we handle that? awkward moment? i think that it's it's it's possibleil to in those scenarios and and i've found some luck asking questions because these c thing is they're the first to lambast for being woke or politically correct or a snowflake but they're often the most sensitive. so if you if you go into th qued kind of ask them how they feel, you might find an avenue to to

go down and find some productive possibility. but in terms of overarching political strategy, i don't think it behooves leftist organizers or people working within the democratic party to try to reach out to the voter. and this seems to be a bit of a sickness on left, or at least the democratic party left that we can we can always r out to the right wing voter rather, trying to maximize turnoutmong the base is, you know, i wrote another book on jesse jackson and he addressed this in the eighties. he said the democrats were so worried about regaining the los, that they neglected their own natural base, blacks and latinos, student voters and others and think that there are some democrats who fall into the

temptation of doing that again, whereas jesse jackson also says that, if we vote, our numbers will win. if we don't vote, our numbers will lose. this with your very first question. the numbers are the side of the voters, lgbtq voters, a majority of women voters. so those to win elections should do what they can t maximize their turnout. but in our own private, personal lives, you. i don't think we should just tell trump voters to go to hell. although it's. yeah, i see your facial expression. it's a tempting option, but you know, we can look for opportunities to have conversation. i was sort of thinking the question that i started with that i agree with and accept that approach. part of what is frighteningly

perilous about our situation is that win orntial section of our society isre going to be trouble that. if trump wins, then certain kinds of violence and certain kinds of harassment and cerin kinds of things will be sanctioned and empowered. if trump loses, then stop the steal again then. yes, that that that. we that elections can be won and it's just not thinkable. that they will say, oh, well, we gave it our best shot. mm hmm. yeah. yeah. those. you're up on some of the frightening developments that i try to address in the book. one of which is political violence. so tell a story very early■r on that occurred in crown point, indiana following the murder of george floyd. and we the black lives matter summer, some high school and

college students in this little town of crown point, where i've had many good times, they had a for a while they had a bar with a bob seger theme, which was fun, but some high school and college students organized a black lives rally protest march around the courthouse. they were flanked by mostly men, white men with osama bin laden, beards holding, assault rifles. and because indiana an open carry state, there was nothing do about it. so you had these this this multiracial, multi gendered coalition of teenagers and 20 somethings and some of their peaceful marching around the square and with menacing looking white dir. i end the about political

violence with the question what happens when they decide to shoot and that relates to at a recent turning point usa turning point usa is kind of the maga youth you know the nazi youth reincarnate. somebody asked charlie kirk, leader of the organization, when do we start to use the when can we just start shooting these? and kirk said we shouldn't do that, but very revealingly he didn't say we shouldn't do that because to kill innocent people is wrong. you know, that would be woke to say that murder is wrong. instead, he said it would play into hands and it would them to depict us as fascists and violent. so by any stretch of by any imagining the definition we're living in an era political

terror because. the united states army defines terrorismqv as, the use or thret of violence to achieve a political threats against libraries and school and election workers are of terrorism to try to make these people resign and sometimes they succeed. now much of that to the part of your question is fueled by an infamous national ecosystem that has become so narrow that can't pene alternate analysis, can't enter. so i have a chapter in now about the death of local the year 200. to thirds of news have shut down and in many these exurban towns there no such thing as local media. so there's nothing there to

provide an on the ground perspective that might clarify an issue that might introduce someone to a person who he or she believes is a threat. sof of the latino immigrant or you're afraid of the transgender teenager to a local newspaper profiling a person, those characteristics might dispel you of some of those fears and some of that hostity. but when none of that exists, people living in isolation, they go to tucker carlson or steve bannon or fox rage, it feeds the paranoia and feeds the prejudice. and as robert putnam, author of the classic of social capital bowling alone argues, isolate asian is isolation is political, extremism thrives and exurbia is

a region of isolation, both in the in the or all in physical sense, the socioeconomic sense, but also in the sense in that they're not they're not getting the that could introdureality ty paranoid. well that leads me a question. u kn, mentioned bowling alone. there's i want to talk about nostalgia here and there seems to be kind of a paradox nostalgia in the book which is the one hand there's a sort of maga back before pre-civil rights free women's movement pre lgbtq. on the other hand, they seem very comfortable with a world that's nothing like it was, that's full of box stores and and an you know that in which the way things used to be is just no longer, even accessible.

and then kind of the way you weave your own stories in the kind of you have this, it's not i'm not trying to both sides is a different kind of nostalgia but you do write about a vanished when there was more opportunity for neighborly association and local involvement and local and and but you also then kind of seem to say we can progress towards that. there's a wonderful phrase about something more communal and i can't remember the third term communing and it more recently than i have sung, but i mean, it's sort of it's that's what sort of paradox that i the sort of samsense of the world that i grew up in being no longer accessible. what i began to think about, well, it was a world in which, you know, differences. i think it wasn't the as it should be. you know, you start by talking about we haven't reached the progress hasn't reached where we want to. but it was there was much deeper sense of tngs that be. mm hmm. and i don't know how much that

is just my own nostalgia. you know, you think the way things feel when you're younger. well, you're kind of, you know, a lot of the stories that you tell, a lot of the that you mentioned about how people live, their lives and the great variety, diversity of perspectives and backgrounds and activities, art and culture and beer. i learned a lot about reading the book. i didn't know about the it's nt part of the book. it was yes and yes. i realize i have not had a budweiser since 1978, i guess it was. no, you're making a brilliant point. and it's one that no one's ever made before. so i'm trying to absorb myself. that's that's a really fascinating contradiction that you point out, is that so much of the current right wing movement is around nostalgia, but it' nostalgic the good things. i mean i mean and forgive me if i'm really simplifying your point but you know walkable and

green spaces and and neighborhoods where there were communal networks of support like the united states of america has lost much that and and i could certainly understand and relate to nostalgia for those types of nostalgia that we influencing much of our politics is the nostalgiai quote elbert campbell in the book as saying as dangerous because it can lead people to committing act of evil in the name of an unknown realizable good. campbell warns that that's the danger. romanticizing the past is. you can't bring back the past, but in an effort to do so. you'll resort to violence orperg back a past that never was. exactly. yes, exactly. t orrect that there some things about which even i write nostalgically when

i think about growing up in lansing illinois and, you know, as cliched as it sounds hillar clinton's book title, it a village, that's how my childhood that the entire village addition to my two wonderful parents my entire village was involved raising and rearing me and nurturing and discipline me. and so much of that is gone per perhaps there is if the right wing could get outside of this informationalthere's opportunitn ground there to discuss what we've lost as a society. but we have tma the right diagnosis. so why we lost tt as a society, it's not of immigrants and not because of secularliber. it's because of the forces of an increasingly corporate and

commercialized economy. it's because of the destruction of local networks, of democracy. and we also have to talk more clearly about how to get out of that trap as you mentioned, i try to end the book with notes of optimism. and at one point i write about the organizations towns, which does wonderful work, advocating for more livable spaces. and i also quote the great patti smith who talked about going to burnt out cities and dilapidated cities or going to small towns and an art scene to try to get something going. because she said so many neighborhoods in chicago, new york and san francisco and l.a., they've just priced people out of doing that, doing the kinds of things she did when she was young. so look for another place to do it. hmm. yeah. yeah.

one of the things i learned about you from the book didn't know you had a lutheran school background. so i might want to ask you chap, especially since in the last couple of weeks, sort of bizarre religiosity of trump's, you know,■ explicit appeal, you kno, in selling bibles and the address to the national religious broadcasters and just explain what seems to us sort of just laughed. well, really, you know, biblical illiteracy and, you know, just vulgar ism. how howw, the great mystery of why it is, although some people have said there's no mystery at all. when you study evangelicals. why do evangelicals in increasingly large majorities find trump not just. a candidate that they can use to advance theirho they regard kinf

chosen and. yeah. yeah well, kind of. they do. right right. yes. well, charles darwin, great hero of the religious, wrote that we origin. and that statement applies is to the religious right, because there's a common misperception out there that the christian conservative movement began as oppositional toward abortion and maybe gay rights, but in reality, christian evangelicals voted the first time in large numbers for jimmy carter. in 76, they turned against him in 1980 and supported his opponent ronald reagan because carter been aggressive in punishing christian elementary

and secondary schools in the south that, refused to admit black, latino and native american students. so the religious right was born and and by way the religious right leaders all discussed th'e best historians of american christianity, he's written about this in a number of his books. this isn't something they tried toegan as a move meant for raciala segregation. so in some sense, it's that they would continue as a movement sort of resistance against. the integration of lgbt people, integration, people of color into all of sectors of society. and christianity's at the same time christianity has morphed into this this muscular version

scholar of american calls it jesus and john, that many wing evangelicals have convinced themselves tt someone operates e bounds of christian ethics to win a victory for christian ethics and something else that's interesting that relates to the geography of the book and the cultural geography of the book is that traditional churches such as the lutheran one, in which i raised and that i write about are dying. while megachurches to grow and continue to their numbers. well, so many megachurches have become citadels of christinatior communal charitable church is struggling for members. so tha made american

christianity much more aggressive, much more exclusionary, and much hostile in its political■ posture and is social comportment. yeah, and i should say that most megachurches are in exurbia. that's that started for very practical reasons. the land was cheap and there open spaces. it hard. it would be hard to build mega church in the middle of. yeah in the middle of chicago or a densely populated suburb. but they could build in an exurbia. but then there's another symbiosis at work in that these megachurches then act as a magnet for people to move to those towns because some of the megachurch members are very devoted and theyn sunday but fok and bible classes. so they move to that town or they move close to it, helping toincreasingly right wing

direction. well, thank you. maybe the last question before you open up the question, do y'all the question of optimism? we talked to you in the book with a glimpse, a potential, and it kind of gathers together a bunch of other glimpses throughout the book. but how can we begin to like a motivation or a program or real sense of direction? because, you know the other part of reading the book was, you know, frequently think the direction things are going is sort of too far gone to. it's that we can't recapture that we can't back, that we can't continue to build on the progress that had been made because we have to spend so time fighting off the right. yeah. and that is, that is the frustrating part i'm going to get to part about hope because it's very impnt that we spend so much of our time playing defense that it colonizes and cannibalizes our

political discourse and we're not talking about things like how to subsidize child or how to create a health care system that's more access able, affordable and equitable or how that people can get a bachelor's degree without having to spend 20 to 25 years making student loan payments. culture and the right wing movement against democracy that we all have to guard against is it takes up precious time. we're not talking about climate change. we're not talking about other issues. but i would say that i mentioned jesse jackson once earlier. i once asked him how you end every speech you give the words, keep hope aliv him myriad problems and crises have as a society and you say keep hope alive every speech and you seem to mean it. you seem and he talked about the

he had in his childhood was arrested the first time trying to check a out of a public library. he witnessed the assassinati was in his childhood but he mentioned that experience as well and he said i'll never forget when he said this. he said when you're climbing your way out of a hole, sometimes times you become so focused on the distance you have yet to climb that you forget to look over your shoulder, see how far you've already come. we've come so far as a country on of race, on issues of gender on issues of lgbtq acceptance and opportunities that we could continue, that we should use that as motivation to harness of that energy and replicate some of those tactics and.

work on the issues that still elude us. those issues of economic justice, the issues of making our democracy, more robust and, accessible and representational. and what it requires that, first of all, we have to vote. i know that there are many people who are cynical about voting and there are many people who are disappointed that we have this version. form in an alley that nobody wants, you know, like it's like the rematch. nobodyt if we if we don't vote,n we're essentially guarantee being our loss because then we're going to have to play defense against the trump or a gubernatorial administration. so voting is very important, not just on the national level. about and i hope people take away from

this book is of at the local le. we see this come alive in technicolor in recent years with all of the book bands the book bands are happening at the the local town council, the county, the school. the only way to fight that is to get involved at the local level, at the county level, with the school board. so many of the most important battles that take place, as i quote, the great novelist james lee burke in the first line of the book happen, in places few people care about. so if you live in one of these places that few people about well, you care aboutúc that. your friends and neighbors care about that place. so you need to get involved moved in that place because that's exactly what the right wing is■e doing. that's why we see these astroturf organizations like moms for liberty, and that's why we see steve bannon using his

podcast to instruct his audience to get involved with the local election or the school board or the library, if they're doing it and the democrats, liberals, lefties, socialist, whatever you want to call, are not doing it, well then you're guaranteeing the outcome. and again, this militant movement against democracy, reactionary, reactive. it's only so aggressive and vociferous right now or vehement right now, i should say, because they don't the progress that they've seen take place. so we need to unite in an effort to advance and continue progress rather thanithdrawing from the very practices and procedures that made possible. okay. thank you.

all right. questions for david. if you could look into the future and at time when p or ie republic party regains its sanity. where do you see the people exurbia well, that's an interesting so first of all, i would say that doug did such an outstanding job tonight thank you very much. originally my interlocutor is supposed to be a guy named david ferris who wrote a book, the kids are all left and that is about how younger generations of americans are more progressive than any previous generation. they're more politically involved than previous generations, and that's unlikely to change for a whole host of reasons that he documents and

describes in the book. so that's another reason for hope. and that's another reason why will they vote? will they vote. that's the that's the big question. that's the big question. know that you know, joe isn't an exciting candidate to name the big race, but they should vote. if you're watching this, you should vote. but exurbia gore vidal wrote, it's bit of a cliche, but he wrote that a clock ticks only in one direction and exurbia is going to become like the rest of america. in fact, in some sense, it's already happening in. parts of rural america, all of discussion of rural america is about voters underlining and underscore a certain bias that exists in the media. but voters of now make between

25 and 30% of rural america. that's going to happen in ■oexurbia well. the eat the will become more diverse and the people who are opposed to tt diversity and opposed to the progressive politics that invites they're not going to have anywhere to go. ■xso i think that the future is bright. if we can emerge this short term danger that currently presents itself against us and of the things that makes the short term so severe, is that the political system works to the advantage the current exurbia night. so we have an electoral college that more weight to land than voters. we have a skewed senatorial representative system. there are 3 million people who live here in. that's more than both dakotas

and yet the dakotas have four senators in washington, d.c. illinois has only two. so there some major structural but culture. the united states of america is becoming an increasingly diverse and progressive polity. so that will an interesting collision. just maybe a follow up and perhaps a little of pushback on that. is i feel like just because trump leaves thecene doesn't mean trump is on leaves the scene. so i think, you know, the party has probably shifted to the right for the foreseeable future. and secondly, there there's a polling out that biden is losing just we can't just rely on divt having a

non white electoral population necessarily leaning left. african-americans tend to be more socially conservative, perhaps same thing with hispanic americans. can't just rely on that. so how do we also shift the narrative, kind of get that back in without necessarily just assuming they're going to come back? that's that's a great question. so in no effort to duck or the question, i do think that biden has his own unique problems. we sometimes to forget that these potiindividual roles and e they havestrengths or weaknesse. if if biden dropped out of the race months to a year ago, i think whatever. whoever would have replaced him on the democratic side would be polling much right now, including with all of the groups that you mentioned.

but i understand questions much deeper and broader than that. so i would say that, first of all, there are things about the society tha've that are unsustainable. on easter, my wife and i were talking to my wife's niece who has a two young children and. she was talking about how the cost of daycare for the two young children is, what, $3,000 a month or something like that approximate. and this isn't anomalous. it's not like she's experiencing some fluke freak situation. sustainable end to your earlier about economics. there are people who are going to react adversely against and demand something different just out of necessity not necessarily even out of a political

sophisticated or political aptitude. it's just the feeling that we his. we can no longer live with a crippling student debt. we can no longer live with going to the emergency, as i did, i had high blood pressure and then getting a bill for $3,000. and i was there for all of half an hour. so some of those those crises that descend upon people on a daily basis will bear political fruit. but what we need are democratic leaders who are willing to speak to those crises aggressively, but also speak to those crises aggressively in a way that doesn't cancel out issues of identity. because my fear is, is so often people create a binary choice in we can talouwe could talk about.

we can talk about class or, we can talk about social groups. those issues go together hand in hand. if you're raising a a gay or transgender teenager right now in the state of florida and you're also having trouble paying for your health insurance, you're not going to live in a way that separates those two concerns. so we need leadership that meets the the moment by speaking in such a way that these issues are not contradictory but complex entry and i don't have the magic bullet for it i mean if i did i wouldn't be here be sitting in the oval office or sometng tha'e demands in that we have to spe'.

and we also have to see that. class. and you class in economics and sociology are all a piece of the same situation situation. and there's something there's something to your point. i mean, you are correct that many black be because of high levels of religiosity have some social conservatives. same with latino voters but they're also we act as if the maga movement isn't dangerous. but there's something pathetic about it as well. i and and it's it's maybe a little risky to speak this way because you don't want to downplay the threat that it presents but when trump hawking

the lee greenwood god bless the usa bible. i it's very difficult to imagine anyone who has actually read the bible or read any other book puthat that purchase. if you're around anyone under the age of 40 as we are routinely it's very difficult to imagine anyone in that cohort out buying the lee greenwood god the usa bible there's there's a quality of punching against the wind with this movement that i if if if the democratic and if leftist organizers can politically suffocate it will be difficult for them to come at

least in the short term. but i say that because the united states of america history always moves in cycles, and these reactionary, paranoid pop pop up excuse me, these reactionary, paranoid pop up, and then put down and then something and they p up agai so an ongoing battle, but there's somethin quixotic about all these right wing movements in that they're the source of. their defeat is built into it from the start. it's just a matter of people voting, their numbers in and getting involved. the national and local level. well i will say congratulations on the book. thank you. just before the conversation i had to cram read it over the last 24 hours. so i'm looking forward to rereading and lingering over your anecdotes so that certainly a delightful part of the book as said, i learned a lot about you

and i think that was a kind of a brave choice, an interesting choice, a way to kind of thank you, kind of your own experience and observation, reflection. you named an interesting further establishment. so i want to well, check out well we'll go together the exurban tour. yeah and i say doug is my supervisor at indiana university northwest so i took a major risk him to do this it could not only lead to an awkward conversation, but termination of employment possibility. sure of writing you have this autocratic power. yes. thank you for coming, erica. thank you.