Its been four years since the murder of George Floyd at the hands Minneapolis police officers and the unrest that was unleashed in the wake of his death. And now we’re in a moment where another global protest movement is flourishing in denouncement of the Israeli war in Gaza. This week, we’re taking a look at the historical lineage and efficacy of protests, as well as ways we might rethink mobilization. Our guest this week has spent decades researching and writing about the dynamic nature and effectiveness of social movements. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell distinguished professor of African American studies at Princeton University and is the author of numerous books including his latest, “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For.” Glaude joins WITHpod to discuss inflection points in historical and contemporary mass movements, reaction to recent protests on college campuses, why he says we must avoid “outsourcing” change and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: This democratic work is hard work, but it has its anchor in the hard work that we do on ourselves. I believe a coalition of the decent is absolutely required for the fundamental transformation of this society. And that begins with looking ourselves squarely in the face.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. On May 25th of this year, you will be hearing this podcast after that date has passed. It will be the fourth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, and not just the anniversary of his death, but an anniversary of the protests and unrest that was unleashed in the wake of his death.
Depending on how you count it, they may have been the largest civil rights, racial equality protests of all time, sort of stunning statistics about the number of people, tens of millions of people that took the streets in all sorts of places, in states that we think of as progressive and states that we think of as conservative, in all sorts of different areas. And also, interestingly, and this was something that was borne out by the polling at the time, despite the fact that many of the protests did feature things like property damage, that the police precinct in Minneapolis was burned down, that people’s windows were smashed.
Despite that, by and large, the protests polled quite well, they were quite popular, and that is not the usual case. Most of the time, large scale protests at the time poll poorly. In fact, recently, in the wake of student campus protests against the Israeli war in Gaza and the U.S. support thereof, people have been recirculating polling about the Vietnam War or polling on protests on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement at the time, which were, by and large, unpopular.
And partly it’s almost tautological because a protest is a means of agitating and creating tension in a status quo that protesters view as untenable, politically, morally. And often that tension will produce discomfort and that discomfort will be reflected as disapproval. That’s part of the kind of dynamic cycle of democratic society and the part of dynamic cycle of social movements.
We are now four years from those protest movements. We are in another election year in which the specter of a real sustained blow to the project of self-governance and liberal democracy looms on the horizon in the movement behind the ex-president, in which another protest movement is flourishing. This one directed largely at the incumbent Democratic president for his support of the continued Israeli war in Gaza and the costs that are being borne by Gazan and Palestinian civilians.
And it’s a time when we’re sort of have to ask ourselves, like, what is the role and duty of a democratic citizen amidst this moment of maximal tension? How to navigate what our moral obligations are, our political obligations, how to temper our ideological commitments with practical and prudential considerations.
And all this is the subject of a book-length meditation by my guest today, Dr. Eddie Glaude. Dr. Glaude is the James S. Macdonald Distinguished Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. He’s the author of a whole number of books. His latest, though, is “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For,” which is, again, a sustained meditation on the question of what democratic citizenship looks like and should be and what leadership looks like in a democratic society in which we encounter each other as equals. And Dr. Glaude, it’s a great pleasure to have you on the program.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Oh, it’s so wonderful to see you, and it’s weird to have you call me Dr. Glaude. Chris, it’s Eddie.
Chris Hayes: Okay, I will call you Eddie. There’s a lot of places to go to in this conversation, some of which has to do with your background in democratic theory and the philosophy of religion and how that comes through in the book, which I find really fascinating. But I want to start with just a recent example from public life and from your personal life that I think is a great place to start, where all this stuff becomes very tangible.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, was invited to give the commencement address at Morehouse University in Georgia. Legendary historically black college and university. It is, among many other people, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. and yourself. And when that announcement was made, there was some disquiet on campus among people who strenuously object to the president’s policy on Israel and the U.S. support of the war there and a question about what to do about that.
What are we going to do? The president is coming to Morehouse. And my understanding is that you talk to some of those current students about how to think about what to do. And I’m just curious to hear what those conversations are like and how you approach that conversation.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: So, first of all, it’s such a delight to be in conversation with you, as it is always. You know, there were a whole host of process failures when it came to the decision to invite President Biden to Morehouse’s campus. And those process failures were in part because of the nature of what it means to invite the president to an institution and, of course, the administration at Morehouse. And so, there was some there was some discontent because it just, you know, the invitation was sent out prior to October 7th. But a lot happened after October 7th.
Chris Hayes: I see, okay.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s pretty significant, right? That a lot changes after that date, but the invitations happened before because you got to get on the president’s calendar pretty early.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. And it’s not something you can do. You may can disinvite the UN ambassador to be your commencement speaker. But that’s another thing to disinvite the president of the United States, right? And so, the students were upset. And, you know, that upset, Chris, had as a backdrop, you know, the college’s response to the protest against Cop City in Atlanta.
And so, there was this sense in which the university or the college rather had turned its back on its social justice mission. There’s a way in which Morehouse men or men of Morehouse are socialized into understanding themselves as race men, as people who have a responsibility to pursue racial justice in the country. So, we met with some of the student leaders and, you know, Morehouse tried to kick me out three times for precisely the organizing that I did while I was a graduate student. Now I’m on the board of trustees. It’s an odd journey.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I want to talk about that because that opens up to other vistas, but continue.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah. And so, part of what the conversation was or involved, at least from my vantage point, was to insist that the students not fall into the trap of mimicry, of mindless imitation. So, there’s this sense, Chris, and we can talk about this and I grapple with it in the book, that there’s this nostalgic longing for the 1960s, for the struggles of the 1960s, for the way in which people engaged in struggle. And to my mind, as a person who’s very attuned to historical matters, those protests were actually anomalies.
When you look at the long historical record of struggle in the United States, the mass movement that constituted the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century isn’t the standard. It’s actually anomalous in terms of the way in which people went about their work. So, I was saying to the students, it is absolutely your right to protest. You must. You must give voice to your opinion, but do so imaginatively. Do so creatively. Don’t fall into the trap of mimicry.
You don’t have to just go run and take over a building like Samuel L. Jackson and his colleagues did. You know, think and use your skill set. So that was one thing. And then the second point I made, which I think landed, I hope it did, I think it did, is that I wanted them to take seriously the prudential consideration about Morehouse College. What would it mean for Morehouse to become the face of anti-Semitism at this moment?
And see, this is a real interesting thing that we don’t really talk about, and that is the way in which race and spikes of anti-Semitism, right, tend to merge in these moments where Black people often become the face of anti-Semitism, whether it’s Louis Farrakhan, whether it’s early Al Sharpton, or now it’s wokeism. Remember the early kind of conversations? It’s wokeism. It’s Bill Ackman’s DEI. Suddenly race entered the picture or we wouldn’t be responding to the student protests the way we are if these folk were Black. We heard those sorts of comments.
And so, I wanted the students, as they were thinking about protesting, to think about what it meant to be a student of Morehouse. And what were their responsibilities to that institution.
Chris Hayes: I just want to clarify one thing just so that it’s clear. When you say what it would mean to be the face of anti-Semitism, you don’t mean as a first order substantive commitment that to protest the Israeli conduct of the war or the president’s support of it is by definition anti-Semitic. You mean that the way that the discourse would be formed in the wake of it, that they should take into consideration how their actions will resonate out in the public.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: And be marshaled in the context of the rhetorical battle happening over the war.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Absolutely. That’s exactly what I mean. Now, mind you, I’m doing this, Chris, while I’m being approached by the president’s speechwriters to help him think about the speech. So, there’s this stuff with the students, what they’re going through, and then there’s the stuff I’m going through, which I think falls fairly neatly into your lead, right? They’re not only the kind of considerations, practical, moral, ethical, and prudential considerations that I wanted the students to take seriously, but I had to do so. I had to do the same thing as we navigated the process.
Chris Hayes: So, what I saw of what emerged from that was that the valedictorian gave a speech in which he called for an immediate ceasefire with the president seated behind him. People applauded. I thought it was a good moment of, you know, democratic discourse. You know, it’s a free and open society. He has an opinion on an oppressing matter. He’s been asked to address the class. He’s addressing it. People cheered. The president heard what he had to say. It also wasn’t a scene of chaotic disruption I think I would describe. Do you feel like some synthesis was achieved there?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Somewhat. You know, not only did we hear the valedictorian call for an immediate ceasefire and President Biden applauded as well. It wasn’t a vigorous applause, but he applauded. We saw students, a few students, turn up and turn around and turn their backs on the president while he spoke. We saw faculty in the back holding up the Congolese flag to say that there are other issues of mass murder that ought to come to our attention. And there are synergies between the state of Israel’s policies and what’s happening in the Congo and the like, at least certain actors who overlap those two crises.
So, I think on a certain level, there was some synergies there. And also, you know, Chris, you should have seen the baccalaureate. The day before, the baccalaureate speaker, Reverend Reginald Wayne Sharp, offered a full-throated critique of the policy of the U.S. government and of Morehouse’s ask of his students to, in effect, silence their voices. So, at that moment, the college actually performed its role, its pedagogical role, to create this kind of dialogical contrast, right, where the baccalaureate was actually speaking to the commencement. And the students were wildly enthusiastic during baccalaureate and were very measured during commencement.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You mentioned in passing something that I wanted to raise with you because I used it in a monologue that I delivered on air, which is about in 1969, several Morehouse students, they had frustrations about the university, about the broader civil rights context, the university, I think partly about the war. But not only did they take over the building, the administration building at Morehouse. They essentially took trustees hostage, including Martin Luther King, Sr.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Daddy King, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: Who they let go as he started to have heart issues, cardiac issues. This is one year after the murder of the man’s son. I mean, think about like the catastrophe if you took these actions and they ended up in the death of Dr. King’s father, Dr. King Sr. And the reason I started my monologue with this is that I think there’s a tendency once we get away from protest movements and people come to some generalized consensus that like, yeah, the civil rights movement was directionally correct. Yes, the war in Vietnam was a mistake.
To sort of retroactively sanitize what happened. You know, talking about sending police officers into campus and was talking to people about Kent State, which we all know and we all remember the image of the mourning woman, the 16-year-old girl, in fact, over the body of the student who’s been shot by the National Guard. The National Guard was called in because they burned the ROTC building to the ground.
People don’t actually remember that part or they don’t talk about it. So, like the spikiness, the actual like genuinely questionable actions taken by the protesters back in, like, I don’t think it’s a good idea to take Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. hostage personally, you know, just sitting here in 2024. That stuff does get washed away a little bit as part of how we internalize the lessons of the protests, because no one wants to really reckon with how militant they could be at times.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Well, on a certain level, it gets washed away. Another way of describing it, Chris, is the civil rights movement, the mid-20th century story is often a narrative of declension. So, there’s a story that, you know, you tell the story of 1954 Brown v. Board, 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, 1960 student sit-ins, right? Then, of course, ‘63 March on Washington, ‘64 civil rights legislation, ‘65 Selma, ‘65 Voting Rights Act. Then you jump to ‘68 and King’s murder.
Because you don’t want to talk about what happened in 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi, the march against fear, Stokely Carmichael. We’ve been saying freedom now. We’re going to stop saying freedom now. What we want is black power. You don’t talk about what happened in Watts in 1965. You don’t talk about what happens in Oakland in 1966 with the Black Panther Party. And remember, Barack Obama, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, says —
Chris Hayes: This is his whole theme of the speech.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. Here we lost our way. That’s the transitional moment. And so that narrative of decline is to talk about the radicalization of the moment, the moment in which black power makes its way into schools. You have men and women brandishing Afros and guns at Cornell University, students taking over buildings, that movement then merging in the public consciousness with the movement against the Vietnam War.
Of course, in ‘68, King speaks in Riverside. We see the moral weight of his voice being brought to bear to the anti-war movement. And all of this in the minds of a certain conscription of the narrative of the civil rights movement into the American story, right? All of that has to be on one level denied, whitewashed or viewed as a moment of declension where we lost our way.
And part of what we have to do is to tell a thicker story, right? Because many of those very students, many of those very activists who were part of those, shall we say, second phase of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, all of them were most of them were veterans of the first phase. Stokely Carmichael was one of the most extraordinary nonviolent organizers that we ever saw.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: And he actually said he only broke nonviolent discipline once. And that’s when cops attacked King in the March Against Fear. So, I think you’re absolutely right. The way we’ve told the story of the black freedom struggle, it comes to us in such a sanitized way that allows everyone to accept it as generally right when it was hotly contested across the whole gamut from ‘54 to ‘75, ‘78.
Chris Hayes: Right. So, there’s two things going on there. And again, this theme comes up in the book when you write about sort of the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. If the idea, is we lead ourselves, then what is incumbent upon us? What responsibilities does that call from us, right? And this is the thing I’ve really been wrestling with in thinking about the protests now on campus.
And it’s true with the George Floyd protests, too. I mean, let’s talk about the George Floyd protests. Like there were amazing moments of sort of transcendent unity. There were a bunch of people who like broke into shops and wailed on people and like really ugly stuff. And all that happened together, way more of the former than the latter, I should be clear.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right.
Chris Hayes: But I guess what I’m trying to say is social movements, street politics and social movements are sort of unruly, almost by their nature. And that unruliness and that roughness, that means that there’s a totally righteous mainstream movement of folks marching against the Vietnam War who are correct and would have saved the lives of tens of thousands of American service members and maybe millions of people in Southeast Asia.
And there’s also radicals who are Maoists or are figuring out how to make bombs in, you know, a building in the village that they blow up. Like, I think there’s a desire to separate those two. But I guess what I’m driving at is like that prickliness feels to me like inescapable in the milieu of social movements. So, then the question is, well, what do you do with that? Right. Because I don’t think it’s a good idea to like take Martin Luther King, Sr. hostage or to make bombs. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to like keep a bunch of Jewish students from crossing the quad because they’re, quote, “Zionists” and you’ve declared your quad a liberated space.
Those are examples in different milieu of stuff that I think is just bad, wrong. Yeah. But also in some fundamental way, a little inseparable from the zeal and intense, frenetic moral energy that is central to social movements. And my question to you as someone who’s writing and thinking about this, like how separable are they? Do we have to take the whole thing?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: No, we have to take the whole thing and we have to understand that solidarities are made and remade over and over again. They can’t just be presumed or presupposed. So, in the context of protest on the ground, struggle, struggle close to the ground, they’re going to be moments where arguments are going to happen. We’re going to have to argue whether or not this is going to be our decision-making process.
Will we make decisions by way of the majority or will it be consensus? Some people are going to get pissed when they say consensus, right? Because that means we’re going to be up until midnight trying to figure out or to the next morning trying to figure out what we’re going to do. The SNCC was notorious for these 24-hour damn meetings, right, in some ways. So, I think part of what has to happen is that the argument has to be made by those close to the ground.
The nature of the struggle cannot be dictated by those who hold power. It just nonsensical. You’re going to dictate the terms of which I engage you, right? No, there are some students who are going to make a decision. They’re going to make the decision to risk their careers, just like folk made the decision to risk their lives to sit in at a lunch counter. They made that decision, even though it was a nonviolent act. And then someone made a decision I’m not going to subject myself to being beaten over the head by a rageful racist. I’m going to defend myself at all costs.
And so, we’re going to police the police, right? How the Black Panther Party began in certain ways in Oakland, right, before it became a kind of symbol of black revolutionary politics or third world revolutionary politics in the 1960s and ‘70s, right? So, the answer to the question is that you can’t kind of draw these lines of division and to say this is a legitimate form of dissent. This is an illegitimate form of dissent. You need to identify with one or the other. That’s not going to happen from above. That’s going to happen in the mix, in the actual struggle itself. And people are then going to have to get clear about their commitments.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Clear about where they stand and give voice to it.
Chris Hayes: Right. But I totally agree, right. So as a practical matter in terms of descriptively, okay.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Who is going to make these lines, draw these lines? It’s going to be the people who are engaged in the, you know, campus encampments, right? They’re coming together to make these lines, right? But again, like as a Democratic citizen or as a fellow student on campus or as someone who writes about or thinks about the news or opines on it, it’s like, well, I’m going to say I don’t think you should stop students from crossing the quad because they have the wrong ideological affiliation.
And particularly when it’s a Zionist affiliation, which is coterminous with a lot of Jewish identity on campus, that seems to me really suspect and barring students from moving across. Now, again, you’re right. It doesn’t matter what I say at all. So, like, good luck, old man, like you can tell me what. I’m just saying that, I guess I’m pushing a little bit because it just seems to me like we all have to have normative commitments about all kinds of things in life, right?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: We do. We do.
Chris Hayes: But it can’t just be that like whatever the protesters do is right, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: No, no, no. Well, but we also have to be very, very careful, right? So, think about what happened in Memphis the week before King is assassinated or a few weeks before King is assassinated. He has the first march in Memphis. It turns violent. Certain folks start breaking windows. And then suddenly King’s movement is held responsible for those actions, right, when it’s general knowledge that King, you know, deplores that sort of response.
So, you have a few students who declare this is our quad or, you know, these students can’t walk across. And then we, those of us who opine, look, you know, we don’t look for the nuance.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: We say that act is definitive of what you guys are doing, which then makes it the responsibility of those who are organizing close to the ground to respond to fringe actors. So how do organizers who are doing the hard work close to the ground of organizing respond to kind of easy generalizations about their practice based upon marginal actors?
Chris Hayes: Well, this is the sort of discursive turn that we see time and time again with protests. We saw it with the student encampment protests. And one of the things that was driving me a little crazy and something I tried to talk about on the air is —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right.
Chris Hayes: — there’s a term from the underlying, should the U.S. continue the war in Vietnam? Should the South be allowed segregation and public accommodations? Should the U.S. continue to supply arms and support for an Israeli assault in Gaza no matter the humanitarian cost, sort of as long as Netanyahu and the War Cabinet deem it necessary? These are all central moral and policy questions. They’re difficult questions.
In some ways, they’re kind of easy questions, actually, I think, on like on segregation, public accommodations or any of them, depending on where you stand. But my point being that the discursive turn is from that to, well, what do the protesters do? What kind of protest is and isn’t acceptable? What ends up happening is it becomes a conversation about the protests. And you saw this with George Floyd, right, where it’s about —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — it’s about the protest. This was entirely the sort of conservative story about it. It was not about the murder of a man at the hands of police officers and the fact that, you know, an enormous number of Americans every year are killed by police in ways that are completely out of line with any other country of our ilk. And I guess part of it is, I guess, is that an unavoidable part of the way protest works? I mean, because the same thing happened with King, right? No matter what you do, that is sort of the way protest works.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Absolutely. And it’s our task, I think, as thoughtful folk to not fall into the trap. I mean, it’s almost baked into the cake. I mean, going back to Edmund Burke, there’s always this fear that the mob —
Chris Hayes: Yes. Oh, yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — is going to turn into Robespierre, right? They’re going to start chopping off heads.
Chris Hayes: That’s the original conservative insight and impulse and fear.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. So, you know, there’s always this kind of Burke-ian, you know, kind of notion that when all of these people gather —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — to challenge, it’s going to end up Shays’ Rebellion or something.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: It’s going to end up this violent act or the violence is in tow.
Chris Hayes: Or mob justice, particularly, right? Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Exactly. And so, part of the task, I think, is not at least for organizers, for students on the ground in this instance and for organizers broadly, is to try to control the narrative as best as possible, but to understand that the work isn’t reducible to these broader characterizations of what you’re doing.
Chris Hayes: It’s also ironic, too, because the nature of protest politics often is that, you know, let’s say 20,000 people show up for an event like you can’t control what 20,000 people do, right? In fact, there’s a civil litigation working its way up, possibly the Supreme Court, on exactly this question that would have a very chilling effect on protests in the country. But that aside, it’s also funny, too, because a bunch of these protesters and protesters had a policy where they wouldn’t talk to the press except through specific spokespeople.
And then I saw a lot of reporters complaining about that. And I thought to myself, well, I get it. As reporters it’s annoying when people direct you to a comms person. You want to just talk to me. So, I get that. But also, it’s sort of like attacks from both directions. You’re not having enough message discipline. And then when you have message discipline, then you’re stonewalling the press. It’s like, well, you got to do one or the other, right?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right.
Chris Hayes: If the idea is you want to focus message, you don’t want just anyone talking to the press. And that’s the way it works. It’s the way it works as someone said when someone’s complaining about this, if you sat outside “The New York Times” building on a park bench and just tried to get random “New York Times” reporters to talk to you on the record, there’s no way they’re going to do it, obviously, because that would be massively reckless.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah, exactly. But you know what, Chris, too? Remember the discourse of law and order doesn’t begin with Nixon.
Chris Hayes: No.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: The discourse of law and order can be found, right, you can identify it among southern local mayors, southern governors and even in the mouth of Lyndon Johnson, right. So, the fact that people are engaging even in the whitewash narrative, in the in the neat story of the civil rights movement, as if these marches were not considered, right, illegal, disruptive, right. As if King’s letter from the Birmingham jail is not talking to, as if he’s speaking to just simply George Wallace and not talking to white liberal preachers who are telling him, you’re going too slow, you’re being too disruptive.
And so, if we can see this from King’s movement to black power, to the student movement, it’s baked in terms of the mainstream status quo’s response to struggle. It is.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One of the theses of central themes or theses of this series of lectures in the book is about the kind of outsourcing of democratic citizenship in our conception of leadership. There’s a particularly pointed critique, I think, about the role that Barack Obama plays in the sort of culmination of a certain vision of black politics. But it’s broader than that, which is a world we live in, in which we just sort of outsource citizenship to, quote, unquote, “leaders.” And I wonder if you could just give us a version of that of that argument.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah, you know, Chris, what’s in the backdrop and I mean, I gave these lectures in 2011 and it’s like lifetimes have happened since then and now. And in the background of those lectures is a deep disappointment or fear, rather, of what was happening around Barack Obama’s presidency, that somehow the arc of the black freedom struggle, you know, the aim of that movement was to have a black man in the White House, a black man as the leader of the American empire as it were.
And then the narrowing of what constitutes legitimate forms of black political dissent. So, it seemed to me, and I wrote about this in “Democracy in Black,” that black political debate had now become and still is in some ways a debate within black liberalism. Those are the only legitimate forms of debate. When you think about the early 20th century, you got black Marxists, black anarchists —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — black leftists, black nationalists. All of these folk are —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — you know, are really trying. It’s a vibrant moment in debating, but right now, it’s a debate about where do you stand in the Democratic Party? And that worried me. And it’s happening against the backdrop of the insidious workings of neoliberalism or whether you want to call it Reaganism or whatever. And one of, you know, Wendy Brown, the philosopher out of UC Berkeley, puts it beautifully. She says, you know, one of the effects of neoliberalism is that it transforms citizens into self-interested persons in pursuit of their own aims and ends in competition and rivalry with each other.
As a result, it’s the evisceration of any notion of the public good. Because I’m just, with my tribe, with the people I love, pursuing what I want. So much so that liberty becomes a synonym for selfishness. Freedom, a synonym for selfishness. So, what does it mean against that backdrop to then assume responsibility for the demos, to assume responsibility for the republic, to enact one’s responsibilities as a citizen? Well, no, I’m busy trying to get paid, trying to get the bag. I’m going to elect you to represent me. You do it.
And the result is that you get self-interested persons, right, who become elected officials and their modus vivendi is power. Period. And we see it with the Republican Party, right, that we can call them racist, we can call them fat (ph). What we see is an unadulterated commitment to holding power under any condition. Right. And so, what I wanted to do in the book is to say we can’t survive as a democracy functioning this way. Madison was right. Democracies require a certain kind of virtuous character to work. And if those folk disappear, then it’s a wrap.
Chris Hayes: I thought that positive citation of Madison’s point about virtue was really interesting because I associate it with the political right in some ways, and I actually been thinking a lot about virtue recently because, you know, virtue ethics are very big in Catholicism and, you know, Augustine and there’s a long tradition of thinking about virtue and virtue ethics.
And I’ve always associated that with a sort of conservative idea, partly because of the political valence it took on in the ‘90s with Clinton and things like that. But I’m sort of an old school Catholic in that way. Like, I really believe in virtue and I think virtue is very important.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Me too.
Chris Hayes: Like, I really do. And maybe it’s just me getting older like me getting more conservative as I get older. But I’m actually scandalized every day by the lack of virtue in our politics. I mean, virtue in a deep sense. I mean, like actually having a set of ethical principles you’re committed to and doing your best to live them out. We all fail, of course, because we’re all sinners.
And I thought that was an interesting formulation. We talk about like Madison talks about this, meaning sort of a virtuous citizenry to inculcate these sorts of democratic virtues, because I think I spent the first part of my career, particularly in the wake of the Iraq war and the great financial crisis, first book I wrote about sort of elite failure.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right.
Chris Hayes: And I still think a lot about that. But more and more, I thought about the sort of the specter of mass movements, of genuine mass democratic movements that are really ugly and that like bad mass politics. You know, this formulation that I had in my head of sort of mass politics are good and the elites are bad.
And then in the age of Trump, having to reckon with the fact that there are bad versions of mass politics and they’re real. They’re not a creation of some bad manipulative elites. Like there are formations of mass politics that can be dangerous and ugly and hateful and authoritarian, all these things.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: True.
Chris Hayes: And I’m trying to reckon with that as a person from the left to think about what do I think about these movements? Because I think the cop out is to be is to say it’s Fox News or it’s someone up there at the top is the problem. And I believe that to a certain extent. But I think that’s skirting things a little bit, like —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Hey, Doc, you should see me, I’m getting all of these chill bumps because you’re hitting it right on the head, because not that we’re both just simply, you know, old school, in my case, lapsed Catholics, you know —
Chris Hayes: I’m lapsed too, yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — Josephite tradition on the coast of Mississippi. But I think you’re absolutely right. James Baldwin hit me with this point when I was working on the “Begin Again” book. He says, you know, and I’m paraphrasing him. He says, you know, the messiness of the world is in part a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. And he has this line in this interview he did in New Orleans near the end of his life where he says, you know, the moral question is the beating heart of my work.
And the moral question is, what kind of human being do you take yourself to be? Right? And so, what I’ve tried to do is to split the difference, because I think these labels, you know, Chris, I’m tired of arguing within the framework of 19th century ideologies. I mean, we’re still taught that are you, Marx? Are you Smith?
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Come on, man. Let’s begin to break free from this stuff, right? So, what I try to do is to take what might a radical politics look like when described as self-cultivation in the pursuit of a more just world? What does it mean for you and I to reach for higher forms of excellences by trying to leave an older self behind and reaching for a higher self, understanding that we can’t do it in a world that’s organized in such a way that presupposes disposable people? And I use the analogy of James W.C. Pennington, the first African-American to receive an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg in 1849 or something like that.
Chris Hayes: He went to Yale, too, and they made him sit outside of the class.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Outside the class. And Chris, he says in “The Fugitive Blacksmith,” this is this wonderful line that hit me and I remember getting up and walking around my study pacing because it hit me so hard. He said, slavery, this vile monster, I will never forgive it for what it did to me. And he wasn’t talking about his brutality. He said, it robbed me of my education. I spent a lifetime trying to rid the sound of slavery from my tongue. But there’s nothing that I can do to replace what I was denied. And he says, here’s the line. All that I’ve tried to do is to make myself more efficient for good.
Chris Hayes: It’s an amazing line.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: It’s an amazing line. So, when I read it, I said, oh, so it’s not enough to just simply aspire for virtue, to live a virtuous life. It’s not enough to simply engage in what Emerson might call this perfectionist impulse to reach for a higher form of excellence. The world gets in the way. The world, as it’s organized, rewards you when you’re selfish —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — rewards you when you’re greedy, rewards you for all of these things that distort and disfigure the soul. So, if you’re engaging in self-cultivation without pursuing the actual notion of a more just world, then you’re not doing much.
Chris Hayes: Right. But the key to this, and this is why I’m 100 percent on the same page why I like this book so much, but is that it’s both end —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — because I think a lot of people don’t want to do the self-cultivation and they don’t like all of that virtue stuff seems reactionary or backwards or something where, you know, to me, it really is both like we have to hold ourselves to standard. And it’s funny you mentioned Baldwin because Baldwin really is a moralist, I mean, you know, as much as he’s a queer Black man of the left and also 100 percent a moralist in everything he does and everything he writes —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: In everything.
Chris Hayes: — like, you know, ferociously. And yeah, that sort of dual private public, I mean, the notion that they can’t be severed from each other and that a cultivation of a virtue in the self and a just society outside it, again, these are very sort of very Catholic ideas that are falling back on. But I think that’s a part of my guiding ethos, too. But then the question becomes and again, it’s like I have been wrestling with despair about democracy —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — in a way that I haven’t in my whole life recently, and there’s like there’s this H.L. Mencken quote, which I love, which is a very funny and cynical, typical H.L. Mencken quote, and I’ve used on the podcast a lot, but Mencken, of course, was one of the great kinds of democracy skeptics in American letters through the years. And, you know, he says democracy is a theory that people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. And I’ve been thinking about that line.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: That is so amazing. That is so —
Chris Hayes: I’ve been thinking about that line a lot because I’m a little like, what do you do if a lot of people want something? Now, again, there’s false consciousness, there’s the institutions that mediate that desire, all the things that you’re saying about neoliberalism, the atomization that has been brought about. But that line between what’s the responsibility of my fellow citizens not to plummet this country into authoritarianism and how should I feel about them? I really am battling that right now.
I don’t have a point to make here, but it’s something that I’m really battling with sort of every day, day in, day out in how we communicate on the show and how I think about it. Because I guess what I want to say is I don’t want to feel rage and hate at my fellow citizens because I share the country with them and sharing the country with them is actually really important to me as a kind of civic sacrament. Like that’s the thing we all do together and all do together mean you’re in it with all these different people. And yet at the same time, I feel despair.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: No, you know, and Baldwin would describe it as an elegant despair. And he will then say, I don’t have the luxury of my —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — and he would use the possessive pronoun of my elegant despair. My task, in effect, is to ensure that, you know, that I raise my babies.
Chris Hayes: That’s right. And he was one who was extremely clear eyed about all this because he had no illusions about the better angels carrying the day.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. Baldwin has his line, Chris, where he talks about human beings, where, you know, in effect, he says, we’re both SOBs and miracles and we have to understand that. You know, going back, we mentioned Edmund Burke earlier. Burke’s fundamental suspicion about democracies is that the mob will eventually overrun it, that these people aren’t really equipped for the for the task of self-governance.
Chris Hayes: And I used to think that was a crazy reactionary view and I’m like, yeah, there is. There’s a point there.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: I mean, Walter Lippmann is going to make the argument, right, that these people are too busy in a mass consumer society consuming and doing their things. So, we just need to have elites, technocrats, running the government and let these folk do what they do because they can’t engage in self-governance.
Chris Hayes: Right. And you see a lot of that in modern liberalism. I mean, that view is really a very mainstream view, I think, in lots of permutations and tendencies in modern liberalism.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: You know, some people will say, you know, the best cure for democracy is more democracy.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: I would say the problem with democracies is the absence of genuine democracy, right? And so, part of our task in this moment is to understand that we human beings could be SOBs and miracles, but we have to double down on us being miraculous.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: And this is what make Ms. Ella Baker so important to me. Right. She’s going to go in to the South and, you know, in the 1940s as the field secretary for the NAACP, organizing among all of these folk. And if it wasn’t for her, Chris, she meets Amzie Moore in the ‘40s and then she introduces Bob Moses when Bob Moses comes to McComb to Amzie Moore. So, you get generations connecting as the movement is on, but it’s all close to the ground.
Chris Hayes: Okay, let’s stay on this, because I think this gets to it, to go back to what you’re saying about this movement, that the sort of iconic late ‘50s into mid-60s civil rights movement, Brown to Selma, we have a snapshot, okay, as an anomalous social movement in American history.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There’s a lot of reasons it is. One of them is when we talk about democracy, we talk about citizen-led action. The mediating institutions that exist, the grueling labor that’s put in, create forms of collective decision making that are just light years away from anything we have now. So, if you think those mediating institutions matter, that like the people is not a meaningful phrase in some ways because a collection of individuals can act all sorts of different ways depending on what’s social context, they’re in.
Those institutions that those folks created from the traditions they were drawing on produced forms of like democratic debate, discussion, dialogue, collective action that were truly sublime, elevated, unlike anything. But we just don’t have anything remotely like that now. Not saying that it couldn’t be constituted again, but it just seems to me that part of what and, maybe this is neoliberalism stripping that out, but when you talk about those SNCC meetings and you know —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — what Ella Baker was doing and what Bob Moses was doing in the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools, I mean, just the sheer thickness, I guess, is what I’m trying to say of what they were doing as practice, it seems very remote from most of our politics now.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: And I don’t want to romanticize the moment, right, because remember, it doesn’t last for long.
Chris Hayes: No, it doesn’t. No. Partly because it’s hard. It’s just being in hot churches and arguments for 10 hours out of every 24.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. And then when you think about it, the approach is just absolutely one that’s from the bottom up, not top down. So, the idea is to go into the backwoods of Mississippi or Alabama, not to helicopter in to say this is what you need to do in the march and this is what we’re going to do, but to create the conditions under which an indigenous cadre of leaders will emerge, right. Bob Moses once told me this story, man, it was so crazy.
Chris Hayes: By the way, for folks who don’t know, will you just tell us. Bob Moses, one of the great, probably one of the most legendary organizers of all time, but also, I think lots of people have no idea who Bob Moses is.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah, Bob Moses was one of the key figures, I mean, the mastermind behind Mississippi Freedom Summer, was a critical figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a master’s degree in mathematics at Harvard, started the Algebra Project after he leaves the movement, is a MacArthur Genius Award winner for that work and who, when he became the object of a certain kind of adoration, left the United States, changed his name and went to Tanzania —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: — and did work over there, right. To give you a sense of his deep suspicion of a certain kind of charismatic model of leadership. But, you know, Bob told me this story, Chris, I’ll never forget it. He said they were in Sunflower County going to register to vote because Bobby Kennedy said that they should register black people to vote and stop trying to desegregate, you know, stop doing the freedom rides, right, the bus and challenging the bus interstate commerce or whatever, however they describe it.
And so, they’re on the bus and they know they’re driving into violence. And he said this person was in the back of the bus singing every spiritual in the hymn, in the hymn book. And everybody was like, what is she doing? And then someone says, I know what she’s doing. She’s fortifying the spirit. They didn’t know who she was. Turned out to be Fannie Lou Hamer. Creating the conditions under which indigenous leadership emerges and then providing the support and stepping back, stepping away.
How else do you need a Blackwell? How else do you get a John Hewitt? You need a Blackwell and John Hewitt, who organized in Lowndes County, Alabama, before the Black Panther Party was ever there. You know, they set the stage for what would become the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. So, these folk, for me, are extraordinary examples, even though they succumb to charisma, even though that form of organizing gets captured by a certain kind of model.
So, our task, I think, and this is what I commend in the book is a kind of politics of tending. I get it from Sheldon Wolin, but I see it in the work of Ms. Baker. What does it mean to tend to the human beings right in front of us? What does it mean to imagine a politics that’s local, global, however we want to describe it? And then it’s networked and then it has a national implication.
Washington, D.C. is so dysfunctional that the actual work is happening on the ground. And what does it mean to conceive that? It means you have to do the hard work of organizing close to the ground. And that can’t be just simply people helicoptering in and having a march and then going home.
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s bring this conversation back to where it started with the —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Sure, Doc.
Chris Hayes: — looking back at those George Floyd protests. There’s a sociologist named Zeynep Tufekci, who wrote a really interesting book called “Twitter and Tear Gas” years ago. And she’s Turkish and it was about some of the protests against Erdogan that took place in Istanbul, I think about a decade ago. Mass protests, the sort of biggest protests that the regime faced, and I call it a regime advisedly. He’s democratically elected, but it’s a kind of authoritarian presidential system.
Anyway, one of her central theses is the network social media era, and I think we saw this in the Arab Spring, makes it easier than ever to mobilize mass street protest. You can get people out in the streets in a way you never could before. I mean, this sort of virality and urgency and power of social media can do that, but it can often happen without any of that underlying work. And then what happens is backlash, oppression, entropy sort of goes away and it hasn’t necessarily built something.
Now, the Arab Spring being an extreme example of like insane levels of violent repression against unbelievably brave folks. But I wonder, like how you think about that and I’m not saying that’s the case with the George Floyd protests, but like what was built there. How do you think about that moment of protest and arrest four years later?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: You know, let me just begin to answer the question, Chris, viscerally, you know, and part of the reason why I decided to go back, return to these lectures is because I had lost my footing. I’m not okay, right. We’ve lost over a million people, some of my closest friends are dead. And, you know, to kind of have to deal with, you know, I keep saying to myself, particularly when I was writing “Begin Again,” you know, they’re doing it again, white folk are doing it again, right.
They’re losing their damn minds again. And now my son has to go through this. I went through it. My dad went through it. They’re doing it again. So, I wanted to go back to this moment because I knew that this was a pivotal moment in my intellectual career. The writing changed. My thinking changed. Right. Four books came out of this book, out of these lectures. And I wanted to see what I was up to. It’s a long-winded way of getting to the answer about what happened, right?
There is this sense in which a certain segment of white America that claims to be committed to racial justice took advantage of an opportunity to virtue signal and to do nothing substantively to fundamentally transform the underlying conditions that led to the murder of George Floyd. And by turning out in massive numbers, because we’re still shut down by COVID in some ways, right, it was a way of venting and declaring one’s virtue to connect to another part of art without actually having to live it.
And at the same time that this was happening, right, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself, as Twain would say or might have said, but it damn sure rhymes, right, is that you have this figure who’s stoking grievance and hatred. The backlash, the betrayal is happening all simultaneously. You know, George Wallace doesn’t emerge after.
Chris Hayes: No, it’s contemporaneous. It’s always that way. Yeah. Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Reagan is not just elected in ‘80.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: I mean, you think about it. The last major piece of legislation passed of great society is, what, the Fair Housing Act of ‘68.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Reagan is elected 12 years later to undo it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: I mean, just think about it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Fifteen years later after the Voting Rights Act, he’s actually thinking about undoing it, right? And then calls for the elimination of Section 5, right, that Roberts Court eventually eliminates. So, it’s happening simultaneously, Chris, because this is and I’ll say this really quickly, because we never grapple with the fundamental transformation of the we. We always tinker around the edges, include people like me, pat ourselves on the back and everything else remains the same. And we saw that in that moment.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. We put some screen in front of a Disney movie or take a Golden Girls episode off streaming. I mean, there was just like this amazing list of things that were like —
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Paint Black Lives Matter and was —
Chris Hayes: The racial reckoning. Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I guess that work remains, you know, forever in front of us. I mean, I guess the last thing I would just say is –-
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — it’s also like one of my most strongly held beliefs about democracy is that there’s no final resting equilibrium for it, which I think is also part of the uncomfortable reality of it. I think you want there to be some point where it’s like, we got it. It’s good. And it’s just never that way ever.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: You’re sounding more like a pragmatist every day, Chris Hayes.
Chris Hayes: I am deeply a pragmatist in the sense of the American philosophical tradition, very much so.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. You know, that’s the Charles Sanders pursuit of the way in which we think about truth.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Right. It’s this regulative ideal towards which we strive, right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Which we never instantiate —
Chris Hayes: Process.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Yeah. Part of our task, Doc, is to understand that this democratic work is hard work, but it has its anchor in the hard work that we do on ourselves. I believe a coalition of the decent is absolutely required for the fundamental transformation of this society. And that begins with looking ourselves squarely in the face.
Chris Hayes: Dr. Eddie Glaude is the James S. McDonald Distinguished Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, author of numerous books. His latest is called “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For.” It’s a great pleasure. Thank you so much.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: Man, thank you for such a wonderful conversation. Appreciate you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Professor Eddie Glaude. You can check out his book, “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For,” as well as other work, which I highly recommend.
You can also e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the #WITHpod across various different social media sites. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for #WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads, Bluesky and X all @chrislhayes. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?