Show notes
In this episode, Chris Hayes of MSNBC discusses how American politics and society changed after the Obama years, where things might head in the future, and how his own views have shifted along the way.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsI often reflect on a particular moment in the summer of 2015. It was not long after the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal across the nation in Obergefell v. Hodges. And America was in the middle of one of its regular fights over Confederate monuments and flags, which were being pulled down by progressives across the country.One afternoon I ran across a cartoon — I think it was on Facebook? — showing a Confederate flag being lowered and the LGBTQ flag being raised in its stead.Hot damn, I thought. Maybe we really do get it right eventually.I now think back on that moment as the peak of my belief in what you might call the Obama creed, which the nation's first black president repeated in one way or another in virtually every speech: that the essence of America is its continuous struggle toward the egalitarian ideals of its founding. Again and again it delays and falls short and takes two steps back, but it never stops striving, improving, bit by hard-fought bit. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.To a first approximation, everything that has happened since then has sucked. We fell into the ugly 2016 Democratic nomination fight, followed by the ugly presidential election, then four years of daily insults to dignity and compassion by Trump, then a plague that we bungled in countless ways and that has killed more than a million of us, and now, the Supreme Court is systematically dismantling the pillars of the modern administrative state while Biden and the Democrats fumble their way through a slow-motion catastrophe, setting up an openly seditious Republican Party to seize near-total power in the coming two elections.To put it mildly, these developments have been rough on the Obama creed, at least for me and many people I know. Much of what Obama himself did was crushed or reversed by Trump, and Biden has barely begun rebuilding from the wreckage. More than that, America's reactionary minority seems ascendent. And its intentions are clear: to follow Viktor Orban's lead in Hungary. To whittle democracy down until it's entirely hollow, one-party rule in all but name. It finds echoes in similar reactionary backlashes currently rising in nations across the globe.Is America redeemable? Is white Christian patriarchy ready and willing to destroy the country before it gives up power? Is the arc of history bending, or is it merely flailing back and forth, with no larger purpose or pattern? Is modern multi-racial, multi-cultural democracy still a viable long-term project?To help ponder these weighty questions, I've turned to the inimitable Chris Hayes, who, as they say, needs no introduction. You've seen his shows on MSNBC, you've listened to his podcast, you've read his essays and books, you know that he is one of the leading liberal voices of our time. He’s also a friend. We are part of the same generation of journalists, living through the same dumpster fires, seeing the same patterns, and our paths have crossed regularly over the years. I’ve also been on several of his shows! We go way back.I’ve always felt that Chris and I share similar political and intellectual instincts — one of the few people at the commanding heights of US journalism and punditry about whom I can say that — so I’m curious to hear how his political outlook has changed since 2015, whether he still believes in the Obama creed, and what he thinks is coming in America’s near future. So with that portentous wind-up, let's bring him into the conversation.Chris HayesThat was great. I love that. I found that very moving.David RobertsOh, great. Alright, well, thanks for coming on Volts.Chris HayesI should say I'm a Volts reader, too.David RobertsThank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. We're talking during a very dark time. Dark. I mean, it's all shades of dark these days. It's particularly dark in the wake of the latest ...Chris HayesChild murder?David RobertsChild murder. Yes, child mass murder. That we're all going through the motions as we always do, until that fades and something else horrible comes up in the news. But let's pull the lens back. I want to do some big picture talking, and then a little bit more close in, like proximate, what's our proximate future talk? But let's start with the big picture. So I just want to start by asking you in the most general possible terms, if you think back to 2015, which I mark as sort of the last normal year, how has your political outlook changed?I think of you as basically sort of a Left liberal, Scandinavian, welfare-state kind of guy. Has any of that fundamentally changed? Or if not, have you changed your mind about any big things? How have you evolved since then?Chris HayesYeah, I think my basic orientation, which is like, a Social Democrat, a Rawlsian liberal, a mixed economy, freedom plus groceries, adherent — freedom plus groceries, a great quote from a New Deal congressman describing the New Deal, which has never been improved upon for basically Social Democratic, mixed economy, rule of law. Broadly, I'm a liberal, and I'll talk about that in a second because I actually think that I'm more that in a specific philosophical sense than I ever was before, actually. But, yeah, that hasn't really changed. But things have changed. So one, I do think I'm a little less, I don't know what I feel about progress.What I do feel with age, and with now going through having been a sort of professional working journalist for 20 years now, just like that, there are reformist moments and reactionary moments, and they kind of alternate and being able to recognize when you're in one almost the way that an athlete can recognize a defense. It's like, "Oh, yeah, no, right now we're in a reactionary moment." I just know what a reactionary moment feels like because I've been through a bunch of them. And in some ways there's a little bit of some comfort, I find, in that, because there's a little of "this too shall pass" about the nature of reactionary moments.First sort of reformist moments, radical moments, even. I mean, I think there were moments in the Trump administration where we're almost sort of revolutionary in some ways, a level of sort of radical thirst for and exuberant enthusiasm for taking on Patriarchy and White Supremacy that I'd never seen before in my life. I mean, the the sort of both "Me Too" and the Women's March and then the George Floyd protests. So I think I've gotten more, just like a little, again, I think a little wisened or sanguine about the fact that you go through different periods in the life of a society, in a democracy.I also think things are more tangibly perilous than they've ever been. I think that's informed by actual hard facts. And it really is the case that January 6th hadn't ever happened before. It really is the case that one of the two parties is openly seditious, or contains a faction that's openly seditious. It really is the case that we've pissed away 20 years that we could have been doing stuff on carbon, and now have a much tougher road ahead. It really is the case that, whatever you want to call it, populist ethnonationalism, 21st-century sort of authoritarian models are on the rise, and there's and there's democratic retreat in a lot of places in the world.David RobertsMy experience since 2015 has been sort of comprehensive, 360-degree, sort of disillusionment. It's one of those things like when you do yoga for years, you're like, "Oh, I didn't even know there were ... I had muscles there." I still had illusions.Chris HayesRight.David RobertsYet they're falling. But one of the things I want to talk about is history because it's odd. I'm not sure why the timing worked out this way, but it seems like one of the things that's happened since then is a lot of people on sort of the broad Left have been getting a little bit more interested in reconstruction and looking more closely into that period of American history right after the Civil War, which is not taught very well in schools. I did not learn, I did not get the full picture in small-town Tennessee, in the 1980s when I was learning history.But through the lens of that, and then looking more at American history, it's sort of come to me that it seems like American history is not so much reactionary moments followed by reformist moments, as very brief reformist moments followed by long swaths of reactionary moments. Like, if you throw a dart at a timeline, the odds are you're going to hit a period of horrible, reactionary backlash. Most of it is horrible, reactionary backlash. What we learned about in school are these brief periods where the reactionary backlash somehow gets out over its skis or goes too far, or causes some rupture, and then there's this sort of reformist burst.But really, most of it is dark. So in that light, one of the things you often hear, there's a sort of like, "everybody calm down" faction in the punditry. I know you're familiar with them. And one of the things people like that often say is, "Oh, you know, like, think about the '60s and '70s there were bombings in the cities, and leaders being assassinated, and blah, blah, blah." Or think back to like, you know, the 1910s, or think back to the 1890s, citing these periods of American history which were genuinely awful, in which things genuinely did seem to be falling apart.But you say, flat out, it's as bad as it's ever been. So how do you think about those historical comparisons?Chris HayesThat's a great question. So, yeah, I would agree, probably in terms of sheer years on the dartboard, you're probably right. I think I started reading, getting really into Reconstruction right after Trump's election, and spent several years reading a ton, including the Du Bois classic on it.David RobertsIt's so infuriating. It's impossible to exaggerate how infuriating it is. The deeper you get into the details.Chris HayesIt's also like one of those things ... sometimes you read, like, you encounter some text and you're like, "It just feels like it could have been written yesterday." There's just aspects of that that you're just like, "Holy crap, like, wow. This doesn't feel like the Dead Sea Scrolls. This does not feel like this got cracked out of some vault."David RobertsThis feels the dynamics, change the rhetoric a little bit, the dynamics are so similar.Chris HayesYeah. And I think the reason that's useful, I think the reason I got into Reconstruction, I think it's useful is just because it got covered up, because it is so inimical to the view of progress, right? Because we had a huge amount of progress and then this enormous backlash, right? So things move backwards. I always describe it as like the lost city of Atlantis, of American multi-racial democracy, where there was a civilization that got built, and then just flooded, and then completely like, everyone just floats on the surface and it's like, "Wait a second."David RobertsYeah, lost to history.Chris Hayes"Wait a second. There was a majority Black state legislature in South Carolina in 1869. Wait, what?" never been replicated before. Like, we've never had a majority Black legislature in any state since then. So I think, yes, I think that the reason a lot of people have gone to that. I think precisely because when you feel like history is being wrenched backward, or reactionary forces are ascended, that's a real touchstone. And I think also your point about ... I have some sympathy to the Just Countdown Caucus insofar as there was tumultuous stuff going on in the 1960s and 70s, and think the way that I square the circle.And this comes back around, in some ways, to answering the first question, which is that the biggest change is appreciating the difficulty and preciousness of liberal democracy. That I just took it for granted. There's the old David Foster Wallace, who has a very famous graduation speech he gives called "This is Water", which opens with him citing the old joke about the big fish that swims by the two younger fish and says to them, "beautiful day, boys. Enjoy the water." And the big fish swims away, and one the little fish says, the other, "What's the water?"David RobertsRight?Chris HayesAnd democracy is the water for us. It's just like, "Oh, right, yeah. That's how we have a liberal democracy." And there's, like, a court system. There's a rule of law. There's inalienable rights. There are means of redressing grievance through nonviolent adjudication of grievance and accountability.There is ...David RobertsPeaceful transition of power.Chris HayesPeaceful transition of power. Like, all this stuff is just like, "That's the water." And then all of a sudden, it's not.David RobertsYeah.Chris HayesAnd that is the big thing for me, the understanding the preciousness and the vulnerability of it and the real profound recency of it as a project, which is to say actual, genuine multi-racial democracy. I mean, 1965, basically, when we get the Voting Rights Act, is like when you can really plausibly start the clock on it.David RobertsYes, younger than many living Americans.Chris HayesYounger than many living Americans, and I mean, younger than, like, my parents. And that's also true around the world. I mean, you know, India starts the clock in in '48, and, you know, Brazil, you know, starts the clock probably earlier, but then has multiple military dictatorships, and sort of its modern incarnation of, like, a durable liberal democracy is, what, 40 years old, probably.David RobertsThink about Franco in Spain. That wasn't that long ago.Chris HayesNo, not at all. And I think that also the other connection that that gives me. The other thing I think about is thinking about the generation that survived fascism, and saw fascism and also Stalinism and authoritarianism in different stripes, and the appreciation that gave them of how thin it was, how fragile, and also that they had watched it collapse in on itself. I mean, that's the other thing I think that ... that experience, which is, like, the fascists came to power in environments of, quote-unquote "liberal democracy and elections".David RobertsYeah, talking about hearing echoes. Go back and read about people living through that, and the sort of like, it's the conservative moderates that didn't step in and restrain the extremists. It's those center Leftists who were too comfortable and didn't worry when they went after this group and that group. I mean, it's just all ...Chris HayesIt's the Leftists who said after Hitler, "Us, the worse, the better." There's a lot of blame to go around.David RobertsBut it's all happening again. It's all like mirror image happening again right now. And this is part of my despair, is like, yes, we had not just a generation of Americans who sort of lived through this kind of thing happening, but all of modern history is full of this kind of thing happening. And full of people like Hannah Arendt, and on and on, sort of doing these incredibly, erudite, deep dives into the mentality of it and the psychology of it and the sociology of it, and really, forensically laying out, like, here's what happens with, pres…
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