afterwards is available as a podcast to listen visit c-span.org slash podcasts or search c-span your podcast app. and watch this in all previous afterwards interviews at booktv.org. just click the afterwards button near the top of the page. weekends on c-span 2 are an intellectual feast every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors funding for c-span 2 comes from these television companies and more including comcast. are you think this is just a community center? no, it's way more than that. comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers to create wi-fi enabled liftings. so students from low-income families can get the tools.

they need to be ready for anything. comcast along with these television companies support c-span 2 as a public service and tamiko brownagan dean of the harvard radcliffe institute, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's kim and judy davis dean's lecture american women and the ongoing battle to save democracy. before i introduce our featured speaker jennifer rubin, i'd like to take a moment to thank kim and judy davis who support makes his lecture series possible. i also want to acknowledge the members of the radcliffe institute leadership society and all our annual donors. your generosity keeps radcliffe programming free and open to the public and we thank you. today, we'll explore the ground swell of women's activism and political engagement that is reshaped american in recent years.

this topic is a particular significance to us here at the radcliffe institute. we trace our origins to radcliffe college established in the late 19th century to educate women who at the time were denied access to harvard and we sustain a founding commitment to the study of women and gender. women's political engagement is a particular strength of our slender library collections, and i encourage anyone who's interested in learning more to visit our website. now when we think of american politics we often think first of elections legislation and courts. but for generations women in this country were largely shut out of formal modes of political participation. just last year. we marked the centennial of women's suffrage and incomplete but important turning point in the expansion of citizenship in the united states.

since then women's participation and formal politics has increased though significant gender inequities persist. women now hold 143 seats in congress. and in 2020 kamala harris became the first woman the first black person and the first south asian person elected vice president. in every presidential election since 1980 women have voted at higher rates than men and pundits have often cited women's votes and national elections as decisive. much remains to be done, but this progress has both symbolic and legislative significance. it moves us near to the american aspiration of opportunity and inclusion for all. yet democracy is far more than formal politics and institutions and as a scholar of a civil rights movement. i've studied how generations of ordinary americans.

particularly those originally excluded from full american citizenship have transformed this nation by demanding and live up to its highest ideals. history of social movements shows us that change happens not only through governmental institutions. but also through community-based activism nonviolent protests and civil discourse. and as our distinguished guests will argue today women from across the ideological spectrum have played a particularly crucial role in the recent history of our democracy and both formal and informal ways. arrows as i fraught historical moment, and it can be tempting to disconnect from politics and the daunting challenges we face. but the last several years are if anything a powerful reminder that we must continue to engage one another. especially when we disagree.

today we're fortunate to be joined in this discussion by jennifer rubin. a distinguished and independent minded journalist whose writing analyzes the broad spectrum of democratic participation happening across the united states from community organizing to bids for public office. jennifer is of course the author of the new book resistance how women save democracy from donald trump? her opinion writing and the washington post covers foreign and domestic policy and politics including the conservative movement republican and democratic parties and threats to western democracies. jennifer also is a contributor to msnbc. she has previously written for commentary magazine and she practiced labor law before beginning her career in journalism.

following jennifer's remarks she'll be joined in conversation by michelle martin. michelle is the weekend host of npr's all things considered and previously worked at other major news organizations including abc news, the washington post and the wall street journal. michelle also an alumna of radcliffe college and we're thrilled to welcome her back. thanks so much. it is a pleasure to be here. and i think the timing is perfect. i must say when i wrote the book or when i finished the book. i wondered how relevant it would

be going forward because donald trump was leaving office after all and what do we have this week? we have a major fight in congress over an enormous bill that is essentially aimed at on and drafted by women. we have a major fight going on in texas regarding abortion rights. we have the continued criticism of the supreme court. thanks to the machinations that allowed both justice kavanaugh and justice amy coney barrett to get on the court. and of course we have not too long from now. we're going to have midterm elections. so i think both in terms of the subject matter, but more important i think some of the lessons that i learned and hopefully others will take away from the book are as relevant

now if not more so in the wake of january 6 and in the wake of nine months or so of a new president. so let's go back and start where the book starts which is 2016 and i start with some vignettes of women who were experiencing that night of the election in 2016. i don't do this to give people the flashbacks in an emotional crisis, but it is hard to remember sometimes, um, the strength of that impact the shock the disorientation the anger that many women felt when they learned that not only had the first woman of a major party not one the presidency, but she had lost to a man who had a long string of sexual harassment and sexual predator victims who had

made serious accusations here was a man who openly disparaged women who really showed no compunction. about ridiculing whether it's their intelligence or their parents and who quite frankly on sort of sold himself as a bully as a guy who is going to help lift the spirits and the prestige of white men. so it wasn't simply the loss of hillary clinton it was this candidate in this time. and i do look at the years prior to 2016 that in some sense women made huge strides since the 1970s, but there was also a plateauing effect in terms of women in congress in terms of number of women ceos in the fortune 500 in terms of salary on and so i think people had

expected with hillary's wind that well, we're going to get some energy here. we're gonna read juice our economic political power and we're gonna have a new period of progress that did not happen. and what happened. is that rather than retreat from politics, which would have been an absolutely normal human reaction and rather than become completely depressed women did what women often do and that is they reach out to other women they they commiserate they help is a traumatic event which this was and in this case what i saw over and over again whether it was in los angeles whether it was in michigan whether it was in alabama, connecticut, virginia, is that women began to knit together networks of their friends their neighbors? these were not people who were

necessarily involved in politics at all previous to this many of the people who i interviewed kind of stupidly said, well, i tried to vote in every election, but i probably missed some but they had never been to a demonstration. they were worked on a little campaign that never protested. um, but with the connections that they were making a light switch on and that light really on was a recognition that democracy is not something other people do that our country had taken a very alarming term and that it was up to them collectively and individually to step forward when their country needed them many of the women. i spoke to who ran for congress for the first time in 2018 had a national security background abigail spanberger who was in the cia amy mcgrath who had been a marine pilot and to a person these women said i felt like

once more i was called to duty they had had a sense of public service in their military careers, and they really felt that same sense of obligation. now that democracy seemed to be imperiled by this very dangerous character who had little of no appreciation for our democratic norms and institutions and so they began doing things some of them organized some of them protested some of them ran for office other. which volunteered for campaigns and part of the fun of doing this book was really seeing how women network and created their own networks on if you think about it in a traditional political setting. um, let's say a political party decides to get someone to run for office chances are it's a wealthy person because it always helps to have people who've been self fund and most wealthy people are still males. we saw this in the 2020 election

when the billionaire showed up and the billionaires were all male. but these women didn't have that they didn't have a network of money. they didn't have long-standing ties in the political community many of them had never even held office at the local and state level as women in 1992 the social year of the women women did on and so they had to figure it out. they had to figure it out as they went along now there were multiple ways in which they did this on there were some existing organizations that played an absolute critical role in this emily's list and i spent um hours and hours with their political folks and their organizers. they're leadership on that is the source for money and training and support for women who are pro-choice and i tell the story of the women's mark that when this thing was up and

running many of the established groups including emily's list. really know what this was about they weren't running it. they weren't involved. they kind of looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. they didn't know it was going to be a big deal. it seemed a little odd who was gonna turn out in washington the day after the inauguration. it didn't seem like it was destined for the success that later had but emily's list said, you know, let's rent a hotel room. let's rent a small room so that we can if anybody shows up offer on training offer assistance for women who might be considering running for office and let's just make sure that we can cut the room down in case nobody shows up. well nearly 1,000 people showed up which is extraordinary for one of these particularly since they hadn't done massive advertisement massive marketing and that gave them a little bit of an incline. something is happening.

something is up and when they went to their email sort of dropbox, they discovered that by thanksgiving some 3,000 women had contacted them online wanting to run for office. this had never happened before it also was the case that money began pouring into their coffers. usually emily's list like most other political organizations has to save money after elections so they can pay meet their payroll because people are worn out they don't want to give after they've just finished giving they're tired. they go back to their regular lives, but here there was money coming in. there was a level of enthusiasm that was remarkable and that of course was the beginning of a cycle of recruiting helping to train helping to network with women and the women who did run again and again point to emily's list and as a source of what they would call magic money

meaning that after they had tapped out their own resources, they could rely on emily's list to get the money to get them some financial support. so there are organizations like that that they could at least access but then is a flurry of new organizations indivisible which many of you may have heard of now tens of thousands hundreds of thousands people strong started with a husband and wife who were bombarded by their friends and neighbors with questions. and please what is it that we can do we feel so helpless we feel so um unfit and unprepared for this moment. and so they put together a little kind of how to organize pamphlet on and they sent out a google doc into the internet and lo and behold thousands upon thousands of people reply and by the end of the year they had

over 17,000 people who had signed up that's extraordinary and about 75% of them were women. so there were formal organizations that were new organizations and then of course there were women who just organized themselves. i tell the story of a district in virginia, which is abigail spanberger's on district on one of the many counties that are present in her district is chesterfield county which is a pretty conservative district. it had voted for trump and yet there was a group of women there who had watched the elections who were reeling from this experience and they wanted to do something they heard about another group that had also formed they merged their groups and pretty soon the liberal women of chesterfield county had about 3,000 members and these women recruiting candidates to run on the democratic ticket many of those races. never had a democrat

participating. um, they volunteered on campaigns and they began to act as sort of a endorser and a vetting force so that politicians who wanted to run for office one of these women's endorsement if you can get 3,000 people to put their approval that's worth doing so in all of these instances. instances what happened was i think women began to look at themselves and politics differently for those who had not been politically active suddenly. they were political activists. that's how they began to define themselves for those who had been somewhat passive on this meant that they were perhaps going to devote their entire energies to the the new field of politics. and of course it meant for women like myself who had been republicans it meant a complete. reevaluation and a shift away from the republican party that

had really betrayed or deepest values and i know i'm going to talk at length with michelle about that. so i'll save that bit of the story on but what you had was when i looked out on the landscape and in 2019 when i actually began reading the book writing the book rather it struck me that they were everywhere women were running women were organizing and although there was plenty of coverage of the resistance the informal name. we used to describe the people who oppose trump and his policies. it was not evident from the car for how strongly women were contributing and moreover. we didn't really get a sense of how women's own lives were being transformed and that was really the impetus for the book. i wanted to show not only how women were participating and making but how women were reinventing their own lives in

meaningful ways, um not because they were interested in self-promotion not because they wanted the fame of politics but because they felt like they had reached a crisis point in american democracy. so the book hopefully gives a sense of the depth and the breath of women's involvement in politics, and i want to fast forward for a bit to for 2020 election. um, i say i was stunned it was the only word i can use to describe it when at the beginning of the political season. i heard from many democrats as well as men. that now was not the time to nominate a woman for president. that was too risky. we can't if this up they would say over and over again and what they meant by that is that the thought of four more years of

donald trump was so terrifying that they felt like they had to find a safe candidate and in their own minds what was safe was a white male was a traditional model of presidential power and all of the women running particularly the four senators who ran for female senators had to come back this notion that they were too much of a risk to go up against donald trump. now what we found of course is as soon as kamala harris was chosen as vice president people touted her ability to expand the electorate to bring in new people to bring in women to bring in women of color on but when they were beginning to run for themselves you had this constant refrain and i think that comes from two factors one was a assumption that is common in such situations that when you have someone who is in an underrepresented group and they

fail at something the overwhelming conclusion is that they failed because of their membership in that group, so it wasn't that hillary clinton was fed candidate. it wasn't that james comey put his foot into the election 11 days before people went to the polls. it wasn't because they made a mistake and that's spending more time in wisconsin. they decided it was because she was a woman and hence america was not ready for a woman. so to my surprise i found that the election after hillary clinton was in many respects harder for women to run than it had been for hillary clinton and it was fascinating to watch all of them run on and i think we learned a few things one was when you have more than one women woman. they're allowed to be an individual just like the men are allowed to be individuals just like you wouldn't ever confuse pete buttige and you know, joe

biden different people different platforms different backgrounds. and so without the woman candidate they could feel free to present simply as a candidate. i will say however that it was very evident to me that the standards for women the coverage of women was markedly different than it was for men. i spoke to stacey abrams at one point and she had a great way of putting this. she said a man rolls out of bed and says he has a good hair day and sides. i'm gonna run for president. a woman will agonize she is not prepared enough. she doesn't have the experience. she needs more policy positions. and that differential in the level of preparation and the level of experience was so evident to me in 2020 on that if it were quite disturbing and quite said it would have been funny. um, you had someone like elizabeth warren who had a stack

of white papers about yay high. um, and then you had people who had like tom steyer who was a billionaire had never run for anything. um, you had andrew young who again didn't hadn't run for anything hadn't held office again. and so you had this huge disparity and yet the refrain of who was risky and who was not risky remained in gender terms and i think um, we have still to get through that assumption those sets of assumptions about women running for executive power. we've had very few women governors in our history. obviously, we have had a woman president. and i think the battle has a long ways to go as it were. but i also look at how joe biden ran his race how he won and what he's doing now, and that kind of brings us back to the present.

he had a large number of women who worked on his campaign including his campaign chief who was jennifer o'malley dillon now at deputy chief of staff in the white house on the virtual convention, which was a huge success was run by a woman directed in large part towards women. when it came to running out rolling out his agenda rather on he looked to the work of neurattended who at that time was head of the center for american progress later to be nominated for the office of management and budget and dinged by republicans who were terribly upset. you see by her spicy emails on spicy posts, but in the context of joe biden she had laid out in agenda that she called the new social contract. that was the build that better

again. almost whole hog biden took that and he said, you know, it meets a couple needs one. it's consistent with his view that government needs to work better for working class and middle class people, but it is also very heavily aimed towards women and he knew that issues like child care issues like universal. a issues like senior care where things that were much much more important to women voters, and he realized that as the election were on he was going to have to win not only the women's vote but when it in very large numbers and so you can see kind of the process by which he won and developed an agenda. he wasn't a woman but women's handprints were all over this and i don't think we now having a discussion about whether it's 3.5 trillion or two trillion. um had it not been for the

emphasis and focus on women. i think before we bring michelle back in um or michelle in um, you know, i'm asked very often what now? so what? um, and i think the lesson of the last four years for me was that democracy is a participatory sport that we have noxious forces at work in american society. we have a right-wing media silo that cuts people off from reality. we have a toxic social media. we have a underlying white grievance and white supremacist movement that has become highly activated highly engaged. you have a large segment of the

population that no longer thinks democracy is the best form of government or is indifferent to democracy. and when you have that array of factors and when you have demagogues who can easily capture the microphone the twitter or the facebook account you need everybody else on board and for me the takeaway from the book and my hope going forward is that this is an example just as our host was saying of the best in participatory democracy the best in grassroot politics that people have to organize themselves find their way find their niche and it's only through mass participation that the principles of democracy will be secured. so i look forward to getting some questions. why don't we bring michelle onto the virtual stage if we can? hello. hi. hi good to see you again.

we should probably let people know in the interest of transparency that we've actually spoken about the book before so i'm happy about that and thank you for participating in this conversation. i do want to remind people as dean dean brown reminded everyone that this is a conversation that you are our listeners. our guests are invited to to join through the q&a function and is interesting because some of the questions that are already coming in or questions that that i have myself and and your book focuses on democratic women or democratic leading women or women like yourself who previously did not identify as democrats or as progressives, but who found themselves so appalled by what had occurred in 2016 and what was to come as in the trump presidency that they were drawn to these political actors and political movements in ways. they had not been before so i'm going to cast forward and ask. why do you think it is then that there is now a record 35 republican women serving in

congress breaking the previous record of 30 a sharp increase from the 13 republican women elected in 2018. so basically two years after democratic women set records for participation and for election taking back the houses. we know republicans basically did the same thing when it comes to participation of republican women. why do you think that is well part of the explanation was trump and was 2018. i talked to a number of women who helped fund those campaigns help push for them and what they told me is the republican party had never been keen on trying to recruit women as women. they said well, that's max of you know, sort of identity politics. we don't like that kind of stuff. we just want the best person and as a result women were often edged out. the party wasn't anxious to fund them. and so what happened is after

2018 republican women both republican women who had been in office former senators as well as women who were engaged in fundraising and activism looked around and said, okay. we are in trouble the gap now between republicans in the house just you and point out and democrats in the house between republicans dem. huge and it's going to keep growing unless we do something about this so they took a page from the book of the democratic women in 2018. they recruited newcomers. they did a lot of their own fundraising in some cases. they had to -- heads with the party who wanted to shrunk them off into a district that wasn't particularly conducive to a democratic win on and they figured out just like their democratic counterparts that if they were gonna get anywhere in the party. they had to organize and they had to run and it's a true-ism

in politics that you don't win races. you don't run and they recruited a very large number of women and because the republicans did better than expected. um, talk about why that was on in 2020 below the presidential level a lot of them were successful and a lot of them were moved into office. now i would keep an eye on many of those women for the following reasons. they came into office in most cases not all cases. we have the margery taylor greens. we have the lauren bobbits and we have those people but many of them came into office as kind of old school republicans. these were fiscal conservatives strong and defense republicans. they didn't particularly identify with donald trump on they won in many districts because people were willing to split the ticket vote for biden for president, but for a republican for a house, the question is now what happens

going forward now that virtually all of them have signed on the dotted line and voted right in step on with the republicans whether it was on impeachment whether it was on refusing to raise the debt ceiling they now i think are going to be judged quite differently than they were when they were on the scene for the first time in 20. and i think what you're going to see is, um some rematches some democratic women against facing democratic incumbent a republican incumbents at this point on to raise the issue have these women really been true to their promise aren't these women part of the problem, and i think we're going to see in these districts that are really marginal some of these discs were one by one or two points or even less on i think you're going to see the democracy debate played out among women on you can say that it's

disappointing that you still have women on the republican side cheerleading for donald trump, but on the other hand at least you have a a debate within with the women's, you know, sigh and so i think and we are going to reach a period of time when women who won in the democratic in the republican. trump era are going to have to be held accountable for what they did when they were there and i will be looking out for that. i assure you going forward. well, and it's interesting that we have a lot of we have a lot of questions about about the appeal of trump in to women per se. i mean the reason i'm sort of jumping ahead to the questions. is that is that i think that there are questions that a lot of people have and again i invite you to throw questions into the q&a function of your chat and i think that's the question a lot of people have is you know, how do you explain the appeal of trump and trumpism as

it's now called to largely white women in the republican party. i know we have you know, there are some obviously examples of people of color women of color who have gotten a lot of attention in the media or who for example, like a, you know, office holders like nikki haley who's some women of south asian descent later became um, ambassadors continues to align herself very closely with the former president. but a lot of people want to know how do you how do you understand it? yeah, it's largely a white woman phenomenon. in fact, the fact is the data is clear that a majority of white women voted for the former president in 2016 and did so again in 2020. how do you understand it? right? this was one of the great questions i had going into this. um, i didn't know the answer to this and though i think um, there is, you know, still more to be learned. i think i came away with the following and that is that women like men are complicated people

and you have to look at gender, but you also look at education level religion geography. income level and within those the preferences are going to cut in various directions if you look at the comparison between white men and white women, which i did the other day after our first conversation because i was compelled to go check on this. um, why did better with white women he still lost them but he'd been with white women than white men. biden also did much better with college educated white women than even hillary clinton did and college educated whites both men and women have moved dramatically in the direction of the democratic party in the trump era perhaps not surprisingly as they have turned to this sort of know nothing ism and this bully nationalistic

profile. we also saw latinas vote very heavily for joe biden, so it is not i think impossible to understand that for certain women. they are in the same sort of mental emotional space as white men. they sit there watching fox news all day long. they have come to believe that christianity is under attack. they have come to believe that their way of life. which in many cases is place is threatened by immigrants so they are not immune to these forces. the good news is that there are attracted to republicans in lower numbers than republican men, but they're still not as you correctly point out have not made the shift out of the party and i think when i look at myself, i look at other women who made them migration out of

the republican party. we're very representative of white college educated women who for whatever reason had some policy agreement with the republican party, but then realize how dangerous it had become toxic it become how antithetical democracy it had become and made that switch. this is a work in progress and i would say to women who are organizing now and expectation of 2000 and 22 2024 then, the job is not done there that specific instances you might move people a little bit on the dial, but it is still a vast undertaking. i looked at the election and december of 2017 in alabama that of course was a special election because jeff sessions had been appointed to attorney general and so doug jones was the

democrat and boy more the republican remora was a former judge a radical, um a sort of rock rib racist to be honest on very anti-gay and it turned out a series of women came forward and revealed that as teenagers. they had been sexually accosted sexually, um abused by way more. he denied the allegations in that moment. you saw it a little bit of a hesitation for white women who had always checked the r box and yes some of them flipped over but really the people who elected doug jones or african american women who turned out in huge numbers greater than they ever have. and so that was i think what you're talking about this double-edged sword that sometimes you can move the dial, but it is in many instances and

uphill struggle and there's gonna have to be a really concerted effort to figure out and effective way of talking to and with these women if they're gonna pull them out of the republican party. i want to talk about both of the things you just raised here. i want to talk about white college educated women like yourself, and i also want to talk about women of color and all of the organizing and kind of political transformation that has occurred with with these women in recent years, but let's start with you frankly. um, i think a lot of people would be interested to hear about you. like what was the moment? what was the light bulb moment for you? and as you know, it's never easy to change sides as it as it were, you know, we've got a couple of high-profile examples like jim carvel and mary madeline of people who are kind of, you know married high profile people in politics married to somebody across party lines, you know, i just realized i just reading adam schiff's new memoir that's coming out and realizing that he grew up in a

really bipartisan household. in fact, he says a number of members of his family never voted democratic until he became a congressman. he said, okay, but but it's as you know a person like yourself, it's not it's not just the lever you push a lot of times. it's your friends. it's the people you hang out with it's the people you call on the phone. it's the person you go with coffee with it's the it's the seminar you go to so, what was that light bulb moment for you when you said you know what i thought of myself this way. i thought this was my basket of issues. no longer is and i cannot abide this anymore. what was it? well, i was in denial for quite a while when donald trump wrote down that as golden escalator. i said to myself this is impossible. republicans are never going to let him be present. and in fact there had been very extreme candidates very sort of crack pottish people who had surface from time to time. they had never gotten very far and as time went on it became

more and more clear on that. he had a following and i kept waiting for the republican party either from a grassroots level or from people in positions of authority and power to say no, we're not taking this guy. he's a threat to the republic. he doesn't articulate conservative views on he's authoritarian and he is a menace that didn't happen and they embraced him and right around the time that it became clear that the nomination would not be taken from him. i wouldn't he would not be from the nomination i said, okay. i got to be out of here. i cannot be a part of a movement that would embrace someone who is so openly misogynistic. so openly racist so openly xenophobic and it was a tremendous change of perspective on in many ways. it was somewhat head spinning that suddenly the people who used to be on the other side or

quote now on war side, um that i suddenly was discussing issues that were near and dear to me like the rule of law like voting access with democrats and republicans were the ones on the other side who i thought were really serious challenge threat to america. so it was a somewhat out of body experience when you experience something like this. um, the only thing i can analogize to it and i have myself been divorced but are my divorce friends? it's that level of kind of emotionally wrenching experience that you no longer as you say hang out with those people you no longer get your identity seek your affirmations seek encouragement see professional assistance from those people now, it's the other people now, i was fortunate enough that i

wasn't exactly alone who was a group of us informally dubbed the never trumpers on and men and women who were appalled by this and too few of us. i think sadly i remain stunned that so many people have simply gone along with trump, but there was a small community of us that kind of banded together. so that was one thing on and i think my perspective also changed tremendously i really was no longer interested in exactly what the top marginal tax rate was gonna be. i in the preservation of democracy i was interested in how we're going to prevent a party from continually claiming fraud and foul and using the violence or the threat of violence to get elected. i'm concerned about the -- of the justice department the use of political players to force

prosecutorial decisions. i'm very concerned about attempts to suppress the vote. so my perspective change and the people who were obviously much more engaged with them issue where the democrats and i think to some extent my perspective has remained there because the threat remains there and i think there are healthy disagreements within the never trump / democratic coalition and all sorts of things on afghanistan and the size of the reconcili. package, but the one thing that bans us together is this concern about the rule of law. democratic norms institutions and truth talent that we've all gone through four years in a continues to this day of this gaslighting of this absolute inability unwillingness to deal with reality and that i think is

an underestimated threat to democracy as well on you can't have a self-governing people and a democracy in which we hold people accountable if everybody is simply going to make up their own facts in their own world and and that is among the most troubling, um trends that we have seen and that certainly continues today as we've seen the effect of covid denial objections to mask mandates and to vaccine mandates. so it's those issues truth democracy preservation of the rule of law that keeps me now very tightly bound to those group of those people and that broader coalition. what i ask about and the number of people are interested in what will you think race is playing in this and and there are so many ways in which race has become a part of this conversation both and what we

are encouraged to talk about and what some conservatives have now determined we should not talk about ever like so called critical race theory which is something that i'm sure a lot of people on this call or know well and know that sort of the the sort of this this sort of furious debate on this. i mean, it's become an issue with say that in the virginia governor's race, which is sort of currently ongoing and i'm just interested in what will you think as a number of the people on our call are interested in what role you think race plays in this? i know you talk to stacey abrams and it would be interesting first of all to talk about whether her her trajectory in seeking public office is different or the same of that of the other women that you that you interviewed as a woman of color who has her own sort of unique story and then more broadly what would you say about how race is a part of an anim? this whole conversation. i think grace is absolutely front and center and i think

whenever we talk about democracy whenever we talk about the trump movement the maga movement really at the bottom of this is race because what he has appealed to is a sense of white grievance of white frustration that we used to be in charge of everything and now all these other people other people being women other people being immigrants other people being people of color are taking something away from us and it is this frantic angry. backlash that trump fed and played into with the help of right-wing media that has fueled much of this and when you look you don't even have to scratch the surface is right there at the surface, um many of the issues come down to nothing, but race, um, what is the replacement theory now that you hear about that? the fox news people are babbling

about that is about race when you talk about voting access voting suppression. we're talking about denying people of color primarily, but also poor people working women and up and the opportunity to vote on. so again and again it is right there is right front and center and i think the there's a certain strata of white americans who properly see that the demography of has changing it's never been static honestly, but now they can see the trajectory and they are insistent on that. they continue to hold the lovers of power. they reintroduce and revere the confederacy, which was the the last attempt by armed force to maintain, you know, racial

supremacy before the era of jim crow on and i think what has happened is that this has simply infused the entire conversation and whenever there is something that they can talk about that is race related. they will do it. so rather than talking about education they want to talk about critical race theory which is not taught in the public schools, which is nothing to do with much of anything, but they really want is to have a rewritten history of america that excludes and exonerates whit and excludes the african-american experience. so i think this is a vitally important issue. i think it is front and center. they are shameless about it. they don't care about being called racist at this point. they revel in it. they have a right-wing media universe that encourages this that continues to instill a sort

of a fear of and a loathing of we have known for some time that the crime issue is often a code word for race and that continues to this day and i think that some in the never trump movement and perhaps some democrats who think of this in very sterile terms democracy rule of law on tend to minimize the issue of race, and that simply cannot be we're not gonna get to the bottom of this. we're not going to be able to get past this moment without addressing those issues. stacey abrams is i think a unique person people say that all the time everyone's unique. um, but she really is for the reason that she doesn't currently hold any political office. she was never in a federal office. she was never in an executive office. she was they head of the minority party in georgia. that was her political experience, but what she did was

she became a political organizer and a political i think that restructure um of the kind that we saw during the civil rights movement and her ability to organize her ability to surface these issues of voting rights her ability to litigate and press these into the national conscience have made her. um, one of i think the primary figures in not only issues race and voting but frankly the democratic party. notice that each time that the democrats came out with some incarnation of voting rights the first person to say, yeah, this is fine with stacey abrams and that was because i'm sure they checked with stacey abrams and made sure she was on board on she has also shown democrats that you can change the electric rather than trying to find some water down version of a democrat who would pass muster in

georgia. what she did was go out and change the electric she went out to organize to campaign to register voters who had never been talked to before who had never had anyone come to their door. um who were frankly on had many issues in line with for whites or they were rural communities with poor urban georgians. um, but they really had not been asked as it were and she in georgia on showed. can change the electric you need help from some other forces certainly atlanta is now drawing a college educated class to that metropolitan area, but she also showed that you don't have to simply deal with the electric as you find it it was it was formed by intentionally in the past and you can with intention change that and it wasn't just in the

black community. i also looked at the native american community in arizona which for the first time was really organized and turned out by women by native american women and because that race was rather close you could say that that was the difference in arizona likewise the turnout of asian american pacific islanders doubled in some states that's phenomenal update on and they overwhelmingly voted for democrats again, asian american and a pi women were very essential in organizing in many of these suburbs. so i think when both when we look at the role race is playing and we look at the avenues out of this problem out of this divisive polarized really anti-democratic error on i think you have to look for people who

are going to stitch together new constituencies who are going to organize communities who are going to get people literally into the streets and to the ballot box and i think stacey abrams is absolutely the the model for this and i have real for years that i frankly think the billions that excuse me, the party's play pay in for voting ads on tv. so completely waste of money all of us ignore them that they should put every dime they have into organizing voter turnout voter engagement and hopefully there will be other stacey abrams in other states going forward. we only have about five minutes left. so i want to give you a chance to kind of give us a closing thought but i do want to give you a sense of what some of the other things that people are interested in so that perhaps you can address those things in your closing remarks what i see in a lot of the questions are

really a deep concern about obviously critical issues that affect people's lives in a very deep and personal way like access to abortion like reproductive rights and things that is something obviously that people are very concerned about what i but i really sense in many of the questions, um a sense of despair and pessimism about why it is how we got to a place in this country where people can't disagree in a principal fashion. i mean, obviously we've always had terrorism in this country because what is the ku klux klan but a terrorist organization dedicated to suppressing the lives and hopes and dreams of a particular group of people or groups of people, so it's not that that's never existed. but what i see in many of these questions many people want to know is you know, what's the future do you could you ever can you know, how is it that these authoritarian elements hold such sway over people that other people had believe in so i guess so the as we kind of conclude our conversation here today is i think what i'm sensing that a

lot of people want to understand is is their hope what is the source of your hope and what can people do to to sort of keep going if that makes sense? so with that he said i'm going to give you the floor for. a great final thought and then i'm going to kind of set us on our way for the evening. so jennifer. thank you so much. thanks to all thank you program together. and what what is your final thought for us today? i think this book and these women give us the answer and that is um, the future really is in our own hands that if we let our guard down if we express exhaustion and frustration, which are very natural reactions after covid after donald trump after january 6th, um that we will be in deep deep trouble. um the demands of democracy right now are great on it

requires. still that we have all hands on deck democracy is under assault in lots of places around the world on eastern european countries that seem to be on the road to liberal democracies have now turned starkly authoritarian on and you see these regimes on in many eastern european countries down. so, how do we avoid that that fight and how do we push back against people who seem to exist in their own little world? um, and i think the answer is you have to be a warrior for democracy. you have to engage yourself your neighbors. you have to vote in those local elections in the off-year elections in the midterm elections. you have to be willing to engage with your political leaders and voices because the other side is going to the demagogues have figured out how to push the buttons of their supporters and

engage them. get them completely tied up in knots over nothing issues. so the pro-democracy side is going to have to do the same and i think i came away from writing this book tremendously optimistic at a time where i was depressed on one level about what was going on in the world and remain so this was such a firming story to me. it was people who reinvented themselves. um, really fulfilled the basic principles of democracy, which is self-government self-education on reached out to their neighbors their friends and like me in some instances reached across the aisle on because democracy was the fundamental concern on we live in a highly polarized highly crazy, um political time and i'll be frank it's because one

party is politically crazy and stream and i think one of the issues one of the problems. is that the media people i work with people that you work with on have not properly alerted the american people they tend to treat the two parties, you know, two halves of the same coin they talk about polarization or radicalism as if it's kind of free floating as opposed to recognizing that it's one party that has gone off the deep end they talk about gridlock as opposed to seeing the obstruction that is driven by one party. and so i think media has a role to play on this. i think we have to be on the side of democracy. um, we don't necessarily want to take sides in policy arguments, but when presented with democracy or not democracy, i don't know how a free press avoids making a choice avoids on showing america what is going on? okay. you have to we have to conclude

before we have a very hard and so thank you jennifer rubin. the author of her latest book is resistance. thank you to all who participated in this conversation today. i want to mention the today's program has been recorded and will be posted on the radcliffe website in about a week and for information on upcoming radcliffe virtual programs or to see videos of past events. you can visit www.r radcliffe dot harvard.edu. thank you for joining us today, and i do hope that we will meet again. so much. book tv continues now television for serious readers former editor of the national lampoon and best-selling author pjo rourke has died at the age of 74. he was the author of 19 books including eat the rich. peace kills and his final book 2020s a cry from the far middle. he appeared on book tv moreha