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tv   Evan Osnos Wildland  CSPAN  November 27, 2021 1:55pm-2:53pm EST

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of chatter. people outside, obviously liberals and democrats haven't been able to let go of it and i hate to let go of this but we have gone more than the 45 minutes that we were recommended read we are added to our and i wanted to just ask if there's anything else you'd like to mention to people while you have their attention? spirit i just thank you john -- joe. cases that i talk about in the book that are now coming to fruition obviously the abortion case so the court is always a work i will say in progress, a work in transition. no termrds. we'll let people asw
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questions. now i'm going to introduce our author and put on my reading glasses for this. evan osnos is a staff writer for the new yorker, a cmn contributor and a senior fellow at the brookings institution. he work in the middle east reporting mostly from iraq, and he was a china correspondent at the new yorker for saw years from -- 15 years, from 2008-2015. his new book won the national book award and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. he also wrote joe biden: the life, the run and what matters now. after a decade abroad often championing america's moral commitments such as the rule of law, power of truth and the right of equal opportunity for all, osnos returned to find that each of these principles was under assault here at home. reported over six years following ordinary individuals
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in three places that he knows firsthand -- greenwich, are connecticut, hartsford, west virginia, and chicago, illinois -- the book "wildland are" illustrates the origin of that anger. and in discussion with evan will be tom hudson, vice president of news and special correspondent for wlrn. you probably know tom from the radio on our wlrn. he hosts the sunshine economy and anchors florida round-up every friday. with that, evan osnos. [applause] >> hill low, hello, hello! the miami book fair live and in person. is everybody wearing pants? [laughter] make sure. we haven't been out for a while. evan and i got the miami dress code which was blue blazer and
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collared shirt underneath. welcome to miami. >> thank you very much. i thought this was the one place i didn't have to wear pants, i could wear shocks, but thank you. >> welcome to the c-span audience as well. as patrick mentioned, we will be doing questions. so this is a terrific book and a heck of a piece of reporting that stretches eight years? i think it was? >> yeah. >> yeah, yeah. i want to go back though, because this -- you set this book up as looking through the lens of these three geographic locations from september 11th, 2001, through january 6th, 2021. we all know what happened on both of those days. so i just made a short list. war on terror, iraq and afghanistan, the housing bubble, the housing collapse, the great recession, growing catastrophic natural disasters and the role of climate change, the rise of social media, the destruction of truth on social media, gun
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violence, covid-19, social justice the reckoning. and then a phrase you use in the book, a failure of tragic imagination. describe what that phrase is, how that really kind of is at heart of some of the forces that you document in this book. >> yeah. thanks, tom. i have to say when you put the list quite like that, it's bleak actually. kidding aside, i actually, you kind of got to the heart of the key idea. really this was thing that as i was working away, as you know, when you're writing, oftentimes you really don't know until you're getting into the thick of it about what it is that ties all of the themes that you're interested in together. and this idea of sort of a failure of tragic imagination has been, i suppose, lurking in the background of american politics for close to a generation now. we first heard about that idea after 9/11. people said how was it that we could find ourselves flat-footed. the idea that somebody could plot an attack on the united
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states, in effect, from a cave was a that failure of imagination. and then, of course, there was the war in iraq. i was a young reporter in, i was embedded with marines. by the way, they thought i was ancient because i was 26 -- [laughter] they would ease me up and out of the vehicle carefully. and that, too, was a failure of tragic imagination or sort of catastrophic imagination. the idea that things could go as badly as they did. and i think that extends, ultimately, to things like hurricane katrina, the failure to take the seriously the warnings that accompanied that and the financial crisis which perhaps was sort of one of great examples of there were all oaf these blinking -- of these blinking lights that said we're taking risks beyond any defensible rationale, but what's the worst that can happen? and that does lead to the decision to elect somebody to office who had said i don't know
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how government works, i don't want to know how government works, that's my secret sauce. and in a way we, as the voting public, underappreciated how catastrophic that potential was. >> speaking about the 45th president, the most immediate former president of united states. how much of this book and how much of this reporting was driven by your personal desire to try to understand the country that you were returning to after reporting overseas in iraq, after reporting in china for so many years? >> yeah, that was, that was moment of conception. i'm an american, and i had kind of carried with me as i was overseas all these years some ideas about my own country. and i think in ways that i never really made explicit in my writing with, but it was certainly in my conversations with people particularly in the countries where i was living and working which tended to be authoritarian environments.
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and i would find myself having conversations with people where i would say, look, i know the united states is not perfect, and we've made a lot of mistakes particularly in recent years, but bet on us. give us the benefit of the doubt because we have a few things that are durable like the the rule of law and the power of truth. and, i think fundamentally, this idea that you can change your station in life, you can get from point a to point b. >> economic mobility. >> economic mobility. social opportunity. even physical mobility. the idea you could move from one place to another. and i moved back to the united states in 2013, and all of those ideas were quite dramatically urge threat to a point that i had to ask myself, was i lying to people overseas, frankly. and was i lying to myself. was i, in a way, kind of captive to a, maybe the muscle memory of what i wanted the united states to represent to us and to the rest of the world, and i had to
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go out and figure out what had changed if what endured. so that was really the beginning of this. >> tell the us -- tell us what has endured. what as you went out and explored these three geographic areas that you have personal or family relation, ties with, what has endured? has that rule of law, has that dedication to honesty and truth? >> i think we are, i sometimes, you know, obviously when i'm thinking about a book of this kind and talking about it, there's a tendency for us to say, okay, what gives us hope at this point. and i often actually come to the view that the relevant word is not hope, it's work. it's another four-letter word. it's sort of like what is it that we have to do in order to reinvigorate those values. because they're not gone. it's the not as if we've given
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up on the idea that there is very filing fact -- verifiable fact. but it is suddenly kind of dramatically obvious to us that it is a much more fragile thing than we even recognized as recently as a decade ago. so one of the things that endures very clearly to me, and the idea that we're having this kind of -- not just this conversation, but a kind of national public conversation about precisely what we have lost, that is actually more than an innocental fact. that's a -- incidental fact. that's a part of the process of beginning to revise these things. >> describing it as a conversation seems very diplomatic. >> genteel, perhaps. >> more of a food fight? >> right, yeah. yeah. and yet we can look back and have a grasp of history and understand the divisiveness that we're experiencing as a country mow has been worse -- now has been worse in the past. this country, obviously, went to
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war with itself. i was on the stage not too many years ago at the book fair talking with lawrence are mcdonald who wrote a book about 1968. he talked about the political, cultural and social upheaval that was there. so look ahead. look beyond here a little bit. draw upon some of the reporting that you include in this book about the options ahead, frankly, that we have. >> so i think, actually, you brought attention to an important comparison. let's compare 1968ing, for instance, a moment when we were also divided in these furious terms. in very physical termings. or 1963. it's easy for us not to dwell on just how scary it was as a period of consideration of the future of american diplomat, democratic project. there are differences though. the biggest differences for me are the tools that shape our politics today and our economics
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are are very different. give you an example. one of the things i draw attention to in the book is the place where i grew up, greenwich, connecticut, which in 1968 was, it was, it's always been a wealthy place. it's always been a place that's kind of like the engine room of american capitalism. you can get a lot of insight into where money is being made, how it's being made and what are the forces that are driving it by going there. and if you'd gone there in 1968, you would have met people like the ceo of oil companies, and that's a whole other set of implications. but one of the things that's changed between then and now is a lot of the money that's being made at the high ranks of american economics, it's wealth built on wealth. so in a place like greenwich, between 1968 and today, it became known as the hedge fund capital of world because there is an entire domain of financial, what i call tools,
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but it's a whole way in which you have accumulate capital and then deploy your decision through the american economy with huge impacts on workers. and the reason i mention this is it matters not just how much money is being made, though the income inequality is at the core of this book, it matters also how that money being made and what the effect is on people at the other end of the income scale. and one of the things i try to do in this book is to spend time at both ends, the making of money and the people who feel precare use and -- precarious, to understand the connections between those two. >> let me try to make some of those connections that i understand in the book, because i think this is fascinating. to some degree, there have been congressional hearings and laws written for years and years and years about trying to rein that
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in or put some kind of guardrails post-enron in the 2001s and 2s and, of course, the financial of the house -- financialization of the housing market, all those types of things. you worked and then went back to coal country in west virginia, and hen you also traced -- and then you also traced your personal family history to the south side of chicago. >> yeah. >> both of those had their industrial havens and created middle classes. over the course of maybe a generation and a half, maybe two generations, maybe slightly longer before you saw perhaps that trajectory shift considerably with the financialization. >> and i think this is fascinating, for me, realization along way. we all know the story of sort of the rise of the rust belt, the idea of the collapse of industrial economy. but what we don't talk enough about are the implications on
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things like dignity, on the social organization of a family, of a town. i'll give you an example. clarks burg, west virginia, is the place i write about. i works in clarksburg as a photographer right out of college, not a particularly good photographer, i should point out. t it's a town with about 16,000 people in the northern part of west virginia. and the first thing you notice when you get there is it is a place that had a real sense of ambition. you go back to the 19th century and read the things that people wrote about what they wanted it to be, we want it to be the at a thens of allegheny, an economic capital, a place of consequence. and they had some of the first telephone lines in the state of virginia. and they built these tall buildings in this little town that feel as if they were a kernel of what they expected to be something much bigger.
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and we know, all of us, sort of the end of that story which is in this more or less period beginning the late '60s until today, jobs vanished, downtown dried up. but what's fascinating to me is to talk to people about how it feels. how does it feel. somebody at one point made to observation that what happens when jobs disappear that fast is that grandparents end up competing against their grandchildren for jobs. and that's destabilizing on a level that's not just economic. that destabilizes your sense of yourself as a person, how do i fit into this community, what gives me respect. and how do i feel about my position as somebody who can provide or not provide. >> so talk about some of the institutional retreat that contributed to that on the south side of chicago -- >> yeah. >> -- that you experience firsthand with just a stellar
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tour guide that you write about in the book. >> yeah, that's a great way to put it -- >> you know chicago, you've lived before. >> i had an encounter with somebody as you sometimes do in reporting that really ended up opening the city to me. i've lived there, i worked there as a reporter, but i came to understand it, i think, better through the experiences of somebody named maurice clark. i was doing a story for the new yorker in 2016, and i was standing on a sidewalk in chicago reporting on a shrine to somebody who'd been killed in a gang shooting. and a guy came up to me and said who are you with. i said, well, i'm with the new yorker. and he said is that one with the cartoons? [laughter] i said, yes. he said, i used to read that in prison. i said this is somebody i'd like to know better. and maurice clark, who is just almost my age, a couple years older than i am, had grown up on
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the south side. he had concern the first question i said was, well, why did you go to prison? and he was very matter of fact about it. he said, well, i went to prison when i was a teenager for gang crimes, attempted murder s and he spent a decade in prison. he came out when he was 30. he said if you want to really understand why this shrine is here, why shooting happened, i'll take you around and show you, essentially give you a tour. and that, honestly, was like the beginning of about a five-year tour. he and i started having interviews. i'd go home with him and talk to him about not just his life, but his parents' lives, his grandparents' lives and his son's life and how these pieces all gave us insight into what it means to be, in his case, a black man on the south side of chicago in 2021. but one example of the way his life has been shaped by this institutional retreat, you know, he remembers very distinctly
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growing up at a time when his older brothers, he had two older brothers who used to go to a her camp in the summer. -- summer camp. public school would get out, and they'd go out into a fresh air fund sort of camp. and it's the kind of thing that we think of as the most routine element of the provision of some sort of basic public service, keeping kids occupied during the summer. and they would come home at end of the day, and they would talk about what seen. they'd left city, they'd gone out to the woods, or they'd gone to the lake. and they'd come back, and he would hear about this as a younger kid. and if then the summer camp disappeared. and that was partly because illinois and chicago particularly were at a state of kind of deteriorating financial condition, and they just began to rim around the edges. you don't pay attention to it. you think the, okay, well, they've had to narrow down the summer camp offerings for kids on the south side. it was a profound impact. he talks about the end of the
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summer camps as the kind of moment that we might think of as major legislation in american history. that's the impact. and so he said, you know, what did you expect people to do? we would hang out on the streets. that's what was available. and there's one piece of the chicago, specific chicago experience that i think is so important to highlight. which is that having had that time in which young people were, there was an infrastructure that would take them to places like lake, there are now young kids, you run into them -- it's not all that infrequent with actually social workers who alerted know this, young kids who live 2, 3 miles from the lake who have never been to the lake or spent any real time. and the reason why that's a revealing indictments is that the lake is a public good. in fact, the lakefront of chicago, it was conceived deliberately as an organizing
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presence for a sense of a social common, a political common. it was a place where people of all different kinds of tastes, backgrounds, politics, color and ethnicity the could come together. and because the policy choices that we've made, kids are being deprived not only of that experience of going and feeling like they're part of this city is, but they're also deprived of something a little more abstract but no less important which is awe. there is something really powerful, and there's been fascinating research done on the political element of awe. the sense that it makes finish you go to the lake and you feel smaller. you feel part of something bigger, and it also kind of takes you out of your world. >> years ago i remember talking to the then-ceo of the miami foundation here in town, and i asked him if you've got a company who is looking to move, a headquarters or to open up, what would you -- and they're going to come to town for two
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days, what would you do? downtown, winwood, the beach. >> what about day two? go to the everglades. we can't understand this urban landscape that this person wants to move a business to without understanding what this used to be geographically speaking. and so to that point, i adults who have never, who have grown up in miami who spend very little time at the everglades or beach, for that matter. we have two places to go for that kind of natural sense of awe here. >> and i am returning very often in the book to the interactions between the physical place and how we live as people. actually, it was churchill who said we make buildings, and then they make us. or we make places, and then they make us. he was on to something. physical spaces we inhabit are reflections of how we live, but they shape us. in greenwich i ended up writing about another of these small
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little details which is the growth of the stone walls around people's houses. because, you know, there is this ancient tradition, a kind of new england stone wall, robert frost kind of perhaps. tizeed about these farmers -- rhapsodized about these walls. and about 20 years ago, the stone masons wrote it at the time and started talking about it, but there was the creation of these things they called greenwich walls which were these large sort of fixed 8 or 9-feet fortifications really around the outside of where people were living. and it was a reflection of a changing mindset about a form of seclusion really within ourselves and within how we see our connection to one another. >> and if i remember the saying, it's that fences make good neighbors, right? not walls. >> yeah. the marketing term for stone mason is large fences make good
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neighbors. >> we will do some questions, so feel free to line up there. i want to get back to this idea of awe and dignity, right? these really important sensations and feelings that all of us experience as humans. and you write in the prologue america wasn't just losing a story of itself, it was losing a habit of mind, a capacity to envision a common good. >> yeah. i think if i had to describe the feeling that i had looking at politics but even more specifically, i suppose, on january 6th which was day in my experience as a reporter -- >> you were on capitol hill. >> yeah. i went down there as things began toen kind of go crazy -- to kind of go crazy. and i did have the sensation, i mean as having been a foreign correspondent and then coming back to the united states and coming to washington, it was
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this moment where it felt where some of the threats of my life had fused and here it was watching this moment that felt very much like the kind of thing i was accustomed to covering in other places, but here it was right now 3 miles from where i lived. and i think dominant impression i had at that moment based on the interviews i was having with people there -- interviews sounds deck rouse. it was tense. it was the a crazy place, a crazy scene. but you could learn a lot by talking to people. and the thing that i was most struck by was the number of people who said to me that day that it was their first trip to washington d.c. >> how did we get into a situation where their first trip to washington, d.c. was, in a sense, trying to sack the cow? and what that toll me was a sense of estrangement not only from the short-term dynamics of our politics, the specific people, obviously, the effect of donald trump, but also this
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deeper sense of this liquefying political common ground. and, you know, that's our major project. and it's something, it's not a hyperbole to say that this is our national project. everything else flows from there, because if we can't figure out how to reestablish the idea that it's even a. plausible -- >> the phrase that i've taught about witnessing everything from florida, the crucible that is florida for the rest of country, loyal opposition. >> yeah. >> that idea and whether or not it, whether or not, frankly, it still exists in practice. and also looking at the political spectrum. and if an office holler considers him or herself a conservative, what is it they want to conserve? if they consider themselves a
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liberal, what is it they want to liberate? and i have not found asking those questions -- which i think are are profound, simple but profound -- really a lot of reflection. >> you know, in its bare form, the definition of democracy is the willingness of loser to concede. because in the end you can't lose an election and carry on the next day, you don't have a democracy. and i think long before we had a president who wasn't willing to concede, and it is important to remind ourselves to this day the former president has not conceded, we were already getting to that. over the course of all these pages, i was coming to terms with the ways in which we had lost that ability to see things beyond sheer fact of winning and losing. i mean, that was -- i'm struck, you know, yesterday there were folks here, i'm hire, who heard from susan glaser and peter baker about james baker.
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after all, kind of a giant of the republican party. and one of the central themes of their book has been the fact that he had serious problems with donald trump and yet vote for him not only in 2016, but also in 2020. and i think that idea, the sense of, well, it's my team, it's my vote, i've got that do this, otherwise i'm depriving myself of power, i won't have any influence if i don't get on the winning team, we take this kind of winter take all -- winner take all. but it really is this occluding vision for the idea that it is the win above all. and i write in the book as the person who i think of as the ultimate interpretation which is mitch mcconnell. his view is -- you know, he started his career as a pro-choice democrat, not a democrat, but a pro-choice moderate. and he's been asked why did you go 100% the other direction?
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and he said, well, i wanted to win. and many a way, he was providing his own kind of fortune cookie description of the future of american politics which was the win. above all. and that is a very december candidated form of political dynamic and unsustainable. >> such an uplifting tone of the conversation here. laugh but the hope is coming soon -- [laughter] while we're here, i just want to go to one other piece that you write late in the book. in the hope chapter. the agonies of 2020 have not snapped americans out of their divisions. the rifts were too wide and the combatants too enfrenched -- trenched, but the trump presidency and the to covid pandemic forced americans to reckon more explicitly than at any other moment in years with the costs of inequity, seclusion
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and disengagement. >> actually, i mean, all kidding aside, that really is, we are living through a period where we have been snapped to awareness in the sense that, you know, there are not a lot of reasons to say that we are better off as a result of the pandemic, god knows. but one thing it has forced us to do, it has had a clarifying effect in having the kinds of conversations about sources of our disillusion and where that came from. that's a huge piece of the process. i mean, one of the most interesting sets of interviews i had in the course of the book was robert putnam, you know, a harvard political scientist who has looked at this fascinating piece of history from guilding age to the -- gilded age to where we are now. obviously, tremendous income inequality the. and there was this feeling that we were kind of heading in this direction of kind of into my.
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and yet we turned this corner, and american politics found its way to doing things like creating public high schools and imposing a tax code that would ultimately allow us to fund kind of a much more sustainable provision of public service. .. and in some cases they didn't come to it and tell was right in front of them, i mean cases who saw fires in factories and realized oh this is how serious the problem is in the labor force and this is why we need worker protection and on some level we have gone through that over the last couple years both in the pandemic and also the threat to american democracy in
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the sense that we came as close as we did on january 6 to losing this thing that we hold here and i don't want to be overly optimistic but it has brought some of us in so much sharper focus. to that let's bring the focus to florida because that's been the focus of a number of big policy trends at the heart. i read the book and i thought maybe the second edition you should add an asterisk to the title and maybe florida is kind of an exception here. i'm not sure if that captures what's been happening here in florida during this pandemic. how would you describe it? >> you very much better wordsmith than i, i will leave it at that. so you travel and talk to people florida has been held up as this great beacon of economic freedom at a time during a public health
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crisis and has been held out as a place that has had a vocal minority to be able to direct policy. >> yes you come and visit us here given all the work that you did in west virginia and in chicago and greenwich how do you see it here and what's been happening here in florida is a relates to all of those threads you are able to really articulate and have such dynamic characters in the book talk about. >> i would look at it from a slightly different angle. i'm certainly not going to try to explain foreign politics to folks who ask another subject but to other folks i would. [laughter] but if you go back and you look at one of these moments and at the beginning of this period in her politics you have to look obviously at the 2000 election.
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the 2000 election which was you know, in the pantheon of florida political performance is one of your most prominent masterpieces performances, performances. you know what's fascinating about it is it actually almost different matter and i will tell you why. because west virginia had voted for democrats in every presidential election and then in about 1999 karl rove who was president bush's chief strategist looked around and said west virginia is unnaturally democratic and during the great depression and the democrats had direct did a lot of relief to west virginia who suffer terribly and it created a political good will that lasted really for
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generations. and what karl rove realized was there were cultural opportunities. one of the things he could do was he began to say to the people of west virginia are wars the greatest enemy of the whole economy which is at the core of not just our economy but are self merit and he opened a bunch of offices in west virginia for the bush campaign. he hired people to go out and introduce bush at rallies to talk about bush wearing his mining helmet and george bush won west virginia vote in the 2000 election and if he had not won florida would not have mattered so in a way the beginning of that process and a lot of democrats would say oh my gosh democrats won florida everything would have been different no iraq war and part of the reason why it happened
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was because there was years of building pressure and essentially west virginia had partly led to that possibility. can i'd mention one other interesting fact cliques if you want to understand why was possible the west virginia could be peeled away because it is the most dramatic transformation of any state in the country in terms of the of the swing from blue to red. when i was a young reporter in 1999 the higher congressional dog ration was democrats and there's only one left in the congressional delegation. you may have heard of him. what's amazing is a 1960 west virginia was so important that democrats in a presidential year that john f. kennedy won a little town of clarksburg west virginia where jackie kennedy came from and bobby kennedy and ted kennedy, hubert humphrey
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came lyndon johnson came. this is a town of 16,000 people in jack kennedy got on for half an hour and answered questions in clarksburg west virginia. i ask people on the historical society i say you know who else would come? what other presidential candidates have been there since and they checked and they said well we can't really find any except one, jesse jackson in 1986 and that's it. what happened was places like west virginia, places like clarksburg settled off the political map of the democratic party and it was not deliberate and it was not malicious but it was a huge factor and when that economy began to collapse and people said well who can i blame and who is going to help me and who is here for me, you have a guy like karl rove who spent
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that moment felt the electricity in the air and harvested it. i'm going to skip ahead 20 more years to 2020 because it's not just in most small towns of the industrial rust belt. we saw that here in urban south florida in different census tracts were voters remarkably from election to election one political party was able to tap into real or imagined concern and how another political party ticket for granted. so i want you to talk a little bit about just the use of those techniques and they are not exclusive certainly to west virginia not exclusive to chicago but how those techniques and what those messages and issues have been to tap into that group of voters that his
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bill again real or imagined, ignored and not listened to. >> it's an interesting case. if you look at in a way they were premonitions of what was to come in 2016 bar before election night. like any political reporter i thought more or less that hillary clinton was going to win on election night and all the data seem to suggest that except after-the-fact after-the-fact if you go back and look at it you realize oh my gosh we were blind. i was in chicago in the early part of 2016 where i'm at maurice clarke and i was interviewing young activists, young black activist particular on the south side and a ramp or being at dinner with a guy named jamal green and he said i'm really excited. i remember thinking, a
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septuagenarian vermont socialist was going to be a natural draw to jamal green. it just didn't see it and he was talking about decriminalizing marijuana and talking about mask incarceration he was talking about things that would make a major change in my life and there were signs, there were still signs of that. the thing that's interesting in chicago even though the chicago machine in the democratic party is not at all what it once was there still a reasonable expectation that democrats appealed to do well and get people to turn out if you have a nominee that they felt performed on one of the things that ended up happening when you look back at the data in the 2016 result the democratic party really underperformed particularly among the young voters and as a result they didn't feel the
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candidate was speaking to them and i think that's one of the reasons. >> i will share with you at a similar experience here. miami-dade has an enormous foreign-born population. we are community of immigrants like no other in the united states and i remember sitting with the voters in the studio blocks from here and it was a spectrum of registrations republicans, democrats and independents. i remember one gentleman in his late 50's born in cuba came here to miami as a civil engineer and had been working for 30 years and i was asking about immigration and how we felt about the immigration issue. and at one point he stopped and he said you have to realize i'm not an immigrant. people who came after i did, they are an immigrant and i'm not an immigrant. fair enough, right? that so he viewed himself on not going to debate that but that
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was an epiphany to say oh zero as a reporter's. >> we talking before a little bit about their something interesting about american political history and how brief it is actually. what you're just describing was essentially the acceleration of experience. but immigrants are the people i'm talking about now and in no way i come to this is somebody who is in china for eight years and when you talk about politics you sometimes start with the jin dynasty and you debate how did the manchu get incorporated and all these kind of things and our entire extraordinary american political history can fit in one slender brochure at the end of the chinese political chronology which is part of the
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extraordinary and fantastical thing about what we have here. but it's also wiping people in china and quote unquote ancient civilizations look at it. they marvel at it because it is -- >> let's take the scenes of the wildland of the sources that you identify and in just wonderful detail. it's a terrific book just wonderful journalism. we have the pivotal state election here in florida which we may see a future republican presidential candidate, while he is running for governor here so look forward and where do you see these scenes that you have identified as the source and are
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they being extinguished? have they've been quieted? >> there are some reasons why i'm very encouraged and why i think we are at the beginning of this. the encouraging fact is when i started on the book we were not talking about income inequality in the way we are talking about it now. the idea that bernie sanders was going to transform the possibility of what the democratic party could be and what it stood for was completely over the horizon and i will give an embarrassing admission myself which is i was interviewing then vice president joe biden in 2014 and i was in the white house talking to him about at that point the question was he going to run for office and he said to me you know i think the democratic party has a serious
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problem in getting the working class to believe that we are on their side and he said it and i've remember thinking this is a political oiler plate and i didn't understand that he was onto something. whatever you think of joe biden he has a good sense of it in a sour things were going and over the course of the next couple of years you had the emergence of a much more explicit populist desire within the democratic party to address inequality and injustice and the deprivation of opportunity so that is a hugely important factor but the democratic ready today in 2021 is very different than i was five or six years ago. yes there are people who are turned off by it but it's also encompassing people who may not have felt like they had a home. that's a huge factor. but i also think we are really
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in the early time of this intense period of national politics that's going to go on for a while because i mean if there's one lesson that comes out of my experience i describe january 6 as partly because it was so viscerally dramatic but also because i really want people to come away the understanding of just how close it was. the thing that protect did the integrity of the 2020 election it was the most slender area. it was individual republican party officials in places like georgia who call the president of the united states asking him to find votes. how slight are those shoulders on which this whole thing now rests and i think the reason is we have a really good capacity
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to forget political pain and away we are to be reminded of how just close it was because we'll have moments like that again and we need to be prepared for it. we are taking some questions. if you have a question please just line up in front of the microphone here at the center. we will ask of you while -- it may appear to be a soapbox would please ask a question and we can hear from as many folks as possible. >> you've talked to radio people around the country in places it in particular in your book. did you find common ground? >> thank you for that. this is the marvelous feature of the american identity and i say this having lived in these other countries. one of the very few places in the world that we find impossible to imagine to be born
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in anything but american. we are such a dig and extraordinary civilization in such a big place that we have such an encompassing role in the way how people experience pop culture. china has a similar experience. it's hard to imagine being anything the chinese when you are worn in china. there is this very strong sense that the united states is a concept and an idea is worth fighting for and worth protecting in shoring up. we have a vastly way of going about it -- we have a vastly different way of going about it. england is a people friends is a land that america is the willingness of the heart and that's a really big and enduring facts now and you'd be amazed at people in desperate conditions who will say, expressed express
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real hope and belief and confidence that the united states can be fixed. so i don't mean to rain on that in terms of commonalities. as i traveled in the year of the election 2019 i think i was sometimes struck with all the differences black chicagoans and white appellations had shared america's political culture a feeling of being trapped by the undertow of economic history of being ill-served by institutions of being estranged from a political machinery that was designed above all to serve itself. >> one thing that struck me was the way in which folks in folks in chicago's works. see the same problems but they feel as if they are occupying a separate political planet imparted by project for writers
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is our job actually to get things things out into show this is not a problem of one place. >> hi how are you? thanks for coming. >> my question is to give you a chance to talk about the role of reagan's war on education, nation at risk publications, privatization, state testing and now we are down to discussing how to teach history. >> i go back to the story of murray's clarke a guy in chicago who i've learned so much from, his experience to school is quite telling. he was a high school student in 1981 which was the year that william bennett said that chicago had the worst public schools in the country and the interesting thing about that was
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he would have agreed with you being a high school student in chicago but the effect of that kind of policy despair and that idea of giving up on the system was profound because it began to peel away, carve away some of the things that made a high school function to the point that i was reading this poignant letter written by parents that ear to the school board saying we are losing some of the things he or that make a high school at high school like supervision of the lunchroom. they have a started to cut away and programs that these decisions ended up shaping his life in a profound way. the curriculum questions are separate issues but i'm struck by the degree to which the idea became planted in her politics in a certain way that it was okay to starve schools in the way we have any affect on it.
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hi, good afternoon. they will take care of that for you sir, yeah. >> i want to come back as a tall male blonde hair in a pocket full of change. my name is orlando and i'm 75. when i came to this country was 12 and we came under dire conditions. we have escaped but i thought it was a great adventure at that age. in any case i wanted to clarify that perception is reality and i believe the differences between liberals and conservatives is clear and cheeses and everyone around him was probably liberal and fighting the system.
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our founding fathers were trying to escape from a society that was impinging liberty and freedom on them. from your comment i believe he came to florida for three main reasons and one is we have -- the second reason is there are no state taxes and the third recent because this is the closest place that we can reach freedom. another comment is to me the spaniards say everybody here is an immigrant just because spain was here before anybody else was except for the indians. my question is why do we have
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such a big rob lowe him and coming together and why is there such a huge divide between the right and the left in the country where there are so many well-educated people that would love to come to the middle. we have all this stuff going on in extremes. really quick times we have had 100 million conservatives and vice versa. everybody accepted that there presence -- that's my question. >> banks are linda, appreciated. i'll give you two reasons i think why as you are rightly describing even though there are people who say they desperately are longing for the middle and this goes back to the idea of
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tools, the tools of economics and policies for the given example. the way that our media operates, tom and i are practitioners and we watched some of this evolution over the last 20 or 30 years and it's an amazing fact that 50 years ago the average sound bite on television was 62 seconds long and today the average sound bite on television is six or seven seconds long. why does that connect? i think it's smaller. our skittering attention is one of the ways in which it's harder to keep in context to understand not just a source of outrage at the moment but the origins where the problem began and why was it that this happen what were the political decisions that led to adore another example another towel is the way the political parties are formed. traditionally a political party is designed to take a vast array of ideas and merge them together
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stir them up and come up with some version that they can use to negotiate with the other party. our party at the moment because of gerrymandering a particularly because of money politics has served precisely the opposite function which is they serve an application device for extremists and they serve to take people within the party and make them more pronounced in order to get out of republican primary. you don't run to the middle you run to the right so the reason i identify the specific elements is it's not a esoteric issue of how we got this way. you can lay them on paper. >> you right in the look ideas at their best and worst become only more mobile racing around the country without the friction of gatekeepers such as your former editor in the clarksburg newspaper there. >> we have time for one more and
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the author is going be the signing table afterwards so if you'll come over that way. >> i often tell my younger friends in my contemporary and my foreign friends the 60s were much worse than what we have experienced over the last five years the great leaders of vietnam and everything that went on with civil rights and everything. though we haven't yet seen not with the big y. we came out in the 60s. we recovered from that and we went toward. would you see happening in comparison? >> one way to think of it is there is this clear pendulum effect in american politics and this is the future of american politics. having worked in these other places and other countries this is our special sauce and i can't
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promise we are looking forward in seeing it and using it but the ability to adapt and push the pendulum back that's the right verb is to push the pendulum back. it doesn't happen on its own. if all this aside in this room we are not comfortable with the idea that there should be as much violence, violent rettig -- violent rhetoric, it's up to us to say we are going to reward people who participated in and added to celebrate and make it a part of their political identity. it takes choices and it takes will out like to say that i think things are going to happen this way like some meteorological effect but what i do believe isn't available for us to say we can choose to push back. >> ladies and gentlemen evan osnos

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