interviews
The Uniqueness of Electrification in The United States
by Gretchen Bakke
September 10, 2021
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid, and visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin. , Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by franknews. This interview was originally published in February 2019.
frank: I have your book here, it's such a great framing piece that simplifies something so complicated.
GB: Incredibly complicated.
I would love to talk about energy democracy. How people want to move forward, and what sort of policy needs to be in place.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
One thing that's remarkable about systems everywhere, is that there's some sort of universal electrification. Just the idea. That idea seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look for example, at Lagos in Nigeria, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. Even poor people means middle-class people, right? There's still a grid there, but it's like two or three generators, a bunch of cables, and it runs for one building or maybe two buildings. It uses heavy fuel oil, usually diesel, so it's a much more polluting thing.
The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve.
I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped, overhauled, or given a new shape at the lowest levels, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, with no interruption whatsoever, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – it might be that I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military. But give an inch and they take a mile. You don't want that to happen. I think that's one question. I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electricity systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced, while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down. But also has the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect. It's hard to manage, and it's hard to figure out how to pay for the grid if you do that, because you still have exactly the same giant infrastructure, but the way you make money off of it is removed.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an orchestrator. What we need is an orchestrator to make all of this complexity work together. It was still this idea that it would be a person. What I’ve found in the three years since, is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess. I always imagine a real button on the wall, but this will be on your phone.
Then if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, but you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where we lose democracy, actually, and we lose equity. Even though there's some sort of dead reckoning sense of where we want to get to.
We tend to think of renewable energy as good, but eventually those companies will accumulate the same amount of wealth and power as coal or oil. The question becomes, like you said, what are the challenges and how do you move forward?
And how does democracy need to be reformed? Because if you think of it as kind of old school democratic, then a house can be an entity that can vote somehow forward into a management structure, which then represents it up. Along the way, you can do that with little company forms. Like I have my own little electricity company, and this is how much I make. My block is represented by this other kind of electricity company, and that goes up. It's not rocket science, we know how to do democracy in that way.
The question is, does democracy in that way work? Does it only produce a trickle up of funds and a trickle down of responsibility and risk?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The premise is, and the fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but the bigger system, you can't just build a parallel system next to it. It's too expensive to do that.
The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it.
There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it. The expertise and the technology has the same structure. If we have 80% solar feeding into this grid, here's what happens when a cloud goes over at the level of five seconds. Now, this is a giant problem, and there's electrical engineers working on figuring out how to make the grid function in this case. There's a push behind the expert. At the expertise level, people are interested actually, in the larger infrastructure. And nobody else knows enough to get around it. It might just be like inertia when you sit there. One thing that I really have seen is that the way in which reforms are happening in the western part of the US, and the way that they're happening in the northeast are quite different. There are different logics at work that might actually, in 100 years, if we're still here, and not completely roasted to death, produce two systems with fairly different underlying structures.
What is the difference?
The west is inter-regional cooperation. The west is really like, how do you deal with the fact that you have hydro in the Pacific Northwest, and you have wind in the Dakotas, and you have all this solar on the south. It turns into this regional balancing of renewables that then depends a lot on people being able to take themselves off the grid in order to manage that in a reasonable way, but it's huge. That's why you have all these fights in California saying, we don't want to import any coal power from Idaho, and Idaho is saying, "We don't want to be part of this thing. You're going to force all of your renewables on us." The reason those fights are happening is because what's developing is, in fact, a very large regional balanced, renewable system.
What's happening in the northeast, because it's so much denser is, micro grids that can island themselves, but for the most part are interoperable. It's a very different shape. It's like a foam in the northeast, all these little bubbles that are stuck together. If this will happen, we'll see, but that seems to be the direction it's going. Whereas there's very few little bubbles developing in the west. What happens in the south is up for grabs.
Is one better than the other?
The grid is always about geography. It's always a local system. What you have available to you geographically determines what you're capable of doing. You can have pumped air storage in Alabama or Mississippi. The way in which the weather affects the grid is interesting. During Hurricane Harvey, one of the things they learned was that the solar panels stay on the house if the roof stays on the house. Really the weaker link is not how a solar panel connects, it's how the roof is connected to the building. These are things that in the West Coast, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest, are just not problems. The storms aren't that ferocious, but on the East Coast they are. There needs to be a reaction to that, that provides the resilience they all like to talk about. What they also found after Sandy, is that communities that had one house on a block that had electricity came back much more quickly. They had a sense of cohesion, of social cohesion, of neighborliness, and there was less sense of trauma, things will rebuild quickly, and everything worked better. In that in that case, you want to be able to have a micro-grid even if it's at the level of the home.
The idea of being islandable seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building, and people were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor in that skyscraper were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
Problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There's a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant, didn't understand what it was as a system. Those interventions were people putting solar on the roof, and then they're super mad that when their house blacked out. I know a lot of people who have bought diesel generators instead because during a blackout you get to have power.
It was also just this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else that has been so damaging to the system. There were a lot of interventions happening in the grid, and I just thought well, we need a primer. That's a super practical side of it.
The other side was this desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.”
But the uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
There are pockets that are not that way for historical reasons, and ideological reasons. The fact that the business community has been so interested in the book, I think it's been really good, I hope. I hope it's really good. Those were the two pieces. It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
Not to glorify China because it does not need to be glorified at this moment, but I did see one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not about just money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison has been upgrading their system, and the way in which PG&E was not upgrading their system. At this very basic level of how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has, and I would say at this point, it might be interesting to talk to Southern California Edison. Because there should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same. With the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, this grid. I embrace this, the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us, and if I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
It's not like this Occupy Wall Street movement of electricity independence, we'll just destroy the entire country. One spark at a time. Even the companies do it wrong, and they're well trained people. I think there's a place for expertise in the future. If you want universal electrification, there's a place for expertise in there.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but the reason I say it has to happen at the level of policy, is that as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change. I don't know if you've seen this yet, but you should, you will – you stop seeing a house with like two solar panels on the roof. Every single rooftop should have solar. Where you're moving away from private decisions about household electricity use being mimicked in the infrastructure into a larger, statewide decision. For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there's laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think law saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? I find that interesting, in a good way. Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly.
Without global warming, we will be doing this anyway. The question is if we need legislation to make it happen, because we need it to happen faster.
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There's a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier than thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that? I feel like there are people who have believed that climate change is happening for a while, and now what they really want is action, and that group is growing every single day. People are just like, "Could somebody do something, please? Someone."
Anything.
Anything. Anything will be fine. I believe that each of those anythings, if they can be done, then opens up a whole new world of possibility. I can say, "Yes, we just need to get rid of fossil fuels, no extraction, no sale, no trade, no use." You can say that. I would be fine with just, we're going to stop having cars with engines in them.
Yeah.
I mean France said that. France is all nuclear, so they can. I guess it's still kind of how do we knock down a giant fireball, and while, by the way, we're doing that, try to make the world a little more equitable. The number one thing I would say needs to happen at the small level is that people with rooftop solar or small wind, need to be able to keep their lights on. That just has to happen.
How does that happen?
Essentially the problem is that if there's any electricity feeding into the system, when the men working on the system try to bring it back up, they get electrocuted. There just needs to be a switch, essentially, that automatically takes anything generating electricity off the system. There are places where this is being discussed more seriously, but if you have a diesel generator that already happens. You can do it with solar.
You can do it...
Yeah. To run a microgrid with solar power is more complicated technologically than with a diesel generator. With diesel, you actually have to go turn it on, and in that act of turning it on, you make a signal that says this house is an island. But with solar, it just stays on, there isn't any break. There would have to be some sort of artificial break put in, like maybe your power goes out for 45 seconds and then comes back on again. I don't know how it would work, but I could tell you that it's not so complicated.
It's a legislative problem, and it's a systems engineering problem, but it's not a technological problem.
I think the argument that everybody starts with is the good one, which is that electricity is everything – it's money, it's information, it's family, and some ways it's communication. It's the sense of how you're connected to the world. Just the idea of a blackout is a ridiculous misnomer, because the lights are not what matters anymore. If the electricity goes out you don't have running water anymore in your house. It's become this completely essential substructure of everything that we are and do.
Of course we should be interested in it.
We can't remove it anymore.
interviews
The Black Candidate’s Burden
by Stacey Walker
September 15, 2020
This interview with Stacey Walker, Linn County Supervisor, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Stacey Walker | I was born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I think that's important to my background because it is a predominantly white state.
I was born to a single teenage mom, she was not college-educated. We lived in low-income housing. We were on welfare.
My mother was a really, really sharp woman. She was an incredibly eclectic, dark-skinned, Black woman. She had a wicked sense of humor, and lit up a room - she was the life of the party everywhere she went. Looking back, one of the things that I really admire about her is that her interests were all over the place. I grew up watching MTV, when MTV still played music on TV. Although we lived in the hood of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, my mother loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers. To this day, my music interests are all over the place. I really credit her for allowing me to explore that sort of thing. In the African American community growing up, you weren't cool unless you exclusively listened to rap and hip hop music.
I started my exploration of Blackness and what it meant to be Black at a really young age and I credit my mother for that. My mother was murdered when I was four. It was an unsolved homicide. After that, I went to live with my maternal grandmother. My father was never in the picture.
My grandmother raised me and my younger sister. My grandmother was also a young mother. She was born and raised in rural Alabama in a time where Black people weren't valued as human beings. She made her way North toward the tail end of the second wave of minorities moving from the South to Northern cities. She landed in Chicago in the 60s, and then made it to Iowa in the late 70s. She was following her sister, my great aunt, who was one of the first African American students at Upper Iowa University. That's how my family got to Iowa.
My grandmother is the greatest inspiration in my life. She saw family members lynched in the deep South. Two of her brothers were chased out of Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan. She was in Chicago during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Her family was active in the Black Panthers. She was a good Christian woman. She set me on my path of justice. She was very fair. She was resolute in what was right and what was wrong.
Growing up, we always had at least a passive interest in politics. Although my grandmother didn't go to college until her fifties, she had a strong understanding of why the community was the way it was.
We were doing everything we were supposed to do, but opportunities never seemed to come to my family or other families that looked like mine. I think that's where I got the social justice bug, from my mom and my grandmother. And here I am today.
Photo via @swalker06
I grew up knowing I was going to pursue politics, but it happened a lot faster than I anticipated. The politicians I grew up admiring were all white, wealthy attorneys, and I thought that was what you needed to be in order to be successful. I thought I'd have to spend 20 years putting in the legwork of politics before I got a shot to run for office. But, 2015 was the hardest year of my life. My grandmother died, my best friend's congressional campaign went up in flames, and the girl I thought I was going to marry left me. It was the worst year of my life.
It also happened to be the year there were several youth gun violence incidents in my community. We had one where a 15-year-old shot and killed a 14-year-old. Our community just broke after that. I was asked by the city council to assemble a group of people and come up with recommendations as to how we might address the issue. Bringing community leaders who all had competing interests and agendas and reasons for being there, to the table, ended up being quite the exercise.
Unbeknownst to me, this work ended up kick-starting my political career.
I was invested in understanding the social dynamics of our community and understating what we could do to mitigate violence. My political career was born off of this report that I co-authored along with Dr. Mary Wilcynski.
frank | How has your community evolved since you initially wrote this report? And how did that affect the response to the latest wave of protest?
Right after I was elected, a police officer fired on a young African American man, Jerime Mitchell, three or four times at point-blank range. He was paralyzed.
This was a turning point in my political career. I hadn't even been in office for six months, yet it was clear that no other elected official was going to touch this case. The case was being prosecuted by a County Attorney who is a Democrat and still in office. Our sheriff is a Democrat and still in office. I mean, I live in a Democratic County and no elected official was going to speak out against this. I couldn’t believe it.
The video had been released - we were all seeing the same video. The man was unarmed. The police officer was clearly the aggressor. The man tried to escape, and the officer pulled out his weapon and fired on him.
I will go to my grave believing that the way they treated this man was one of the greatest aberrations of justice. A grand jury was convened, which meets in secret and the prosecutors get to decide who they call as witnesses. I think the prosecutor's only witness was the police officer.
The prosecutor told the story. The police officer told the story. The jury was sold one side of the story. So of course the jury found the police officer had acted within his rights to protect himself. Jerime Mitchell was saying, “One, I literally couldn’t speak. Two, I was laying in a hospital bed. Three, you guys did this in a matter of days.”
So I spoke out and I just got blasted by the Democratic establishment. Up until that point, I was kind of climbing this ladder of the model Negro politician. I could relate to white folks. There were a lot of comparisons to Obama.
But after that it was like, holy shit, that's Malcolm X because he dared to challenge the criminal justice establishment. So I said, fuck it. I was done with being the guy obsessed with doing all the right things, and virtue signaling, and putting out tepid statements that didn't mean anything. I figured if my career ended after this first term, I was young enough I could find something else to do.
So I led the charge for justice for Jerime Mitchell, and I've been leading similar fights since I've been elected. I've started the law enforcement round table. I published the safe, equitable thriving communities task force report. I've convened a number of community conversations. I’ve successfully implemented changes to body camera policies. I don't want to sit here and throw out credentials, but for a while, it really felt like a one-man show. During this recent reemergence of the Black liberation movement, I think these efforts primed our community to have the conversation. There is a tragic lack of understanding on the part of white leadership as to what the Black liberation movement is and what it stands for.
I'm going to count it as a small win that at least people are willing to engage with the topic. Five years ago, they weren't even willing to do that. It was a subject you did not talk about. You certainly didn't talk about it if you were a politician. You certainly, certainly didn't talk about it if you were a politician who wanted to advance. You certainly, certainly, certainly didn't talk about it if you were a politician and person of color who wanted to advance.
We recently interviewed Jecorey Arthur, he said, how are you supposed to govern a group of people if you don’t know them? Do you think like we’re seeing a reflection of lived experience in elected office?
There is a browning of politics happening in America right now. People of color are winning seats at the local level and the federal level at a rate that we've never seen before. That's incredibly helpful, especially in places like Iowa where politicians have long been exclusively white people and mostly white men.
On the flip side, candidates of color in predominantly white communities have to do this dance that I call the Black candidate’s burden. On one hand, we feel an obligation to represent minority voices and those who look like us, because we know other folks aren't going to do it. But we also know if we venture too far into that space, we will lose credibility with the majority population. You know you will be type-cast as the politician who cares about Black people's issues, and only Black people's issues.
I’ve had to sit down and have serious conversations with a lot of journalists in this community about coming to me on issues outside of those that deal with race. I'm a pretty smart man and I've lived an interesting life. I have a lot of different experiences outside of being a Black person. But, again, on the other side of it, if I don't take up this mantle, no one else will.
How do you acknowledge both the reality of racism and the reality of poverty –especially in a predominantly white state?
Delicately and gingerly, is the short answer.
The more thoughtful answer is that good politicians are skilled communicators. The challenge is helping poor white people understand that they have more in common with poor Black people than they do with Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or any of these other wealthy, Ivy-league educated Republicans. They preach to poor white people and tell them that the only reason they are in the position that they are in is because of some boogeyman - people from South of the border, or the Black people in your neighborhood leeching off the welfare system.
All that from the party of “personal responsibility.”
Right? Yeah, it's riddled with hypocrisy. Uniting those two thoughts becomes a challenge because America is still a very segregated place. We are tribal by nature, and it's easy to develop an us-versus-them mentality, particularly when you don't have anything. I think Bernie Sanders found a way to talk to these two seemingly disparate groups of people in a way that helped them to understand that their economic destinies were intrinsically tied.
But it gets really, really tricky to explain to white people that they can still have something called privilege.
I can understand how that group of people can't reconcile these concepts. Republicans have figured out how to capitalize on that divisive political wedge. They say, “when they say Black lives matter, that means they don't care about you. They keep talking about privilege, but what kind of privilege do you have?” And it works.
Democrats don't know how to respond because they’re maneuvering for votes and are consumed with figuring out centrists. The genius of the Republican party is that they are not divided on this, and it's not really a political issue, it's emotional.
I agree with your assessment that Democrats writ large, aren't good at that conversation. I don't want to say anything that's going to harm Democrats' chances in the fall, because I am a team player, and we need to win. But, the general criticism that I have of the corporatist, establishment Democrats is that we spend way too much time worrying about how we are going to appeal to disaffected Republicans and to those right of center. We end up losing sight of what it is we actually believe in.
Is it because, at the heart of it, that's not what the corporatist, establishment Democrats, actually believe in?
That was my next point. I think we spend too much time trying to figure out where the electorate might be and allow that to inform our policy positions. In my view, that is totally backwards.
If the electorate isn't there, then your next job becomes is to persuade and to win the hearts and minds of the electorate. Your job is not to figure out where they are. It is not your job to lick your finger and put it in the air and say, “Well, I think they're over here, so this is where we're going to go.”
If we keep believing that the key to electoral success is winning over disaffected voters to the right of center, we are going to continue to pull the Democratic Party to the right. We're seeing that right now, and the right is not where the policies are that will help people.
There can only be so many elections where we feel as if we are in a hostage situation — that if we don't just go along with this platform then something really, really bad awaits us. There's only so many elections left where I think that the activist class is going to feel like they're getting an unfair shake. I am afraid for the moment where the Democratic party, which is already splintered, fractures completely. I hope we don't get there. I hope progressives win. I hope the leadership structure starts to change. But the threat of fracture is a real and present danger for this party.
How do you think about this coming election with the reality you just outlined above? How do you talk to other people about voting for Joe Biden? And how do you talk to yourself about it?
This particular election is all of the things politicians have warned us about during all of the other elections. This is actually real. I think Donald Trump absolutely represents an existential threat to democracy. I think it's a very real threat that we may continue to slide into authoritarianism, and into a place that we may not be able to recover with another four years of Donald Trump.
But you asked two questions: How do I talk to other people about it? And how do I talk to myself?
Somebody from team Bernie said to me, when it was apparent that he was going to drop out of the primary, we just need to win. That's how we solve a lot of these issues — we need more progressive wins. We need a progressive nominee for president. Until then, we need to stay in this fight and pull our party to a more progressive position. And that makes sense to me. I've played competitive sports for a large part of my life, and one of the things you learn to do is how to lose. We lost. We didn't have enough people who showed up for us in the primary, especially in the Southern States. That is how it works sometimes. As a practitioner of electoral politics, I'm able to leave it at that and know that a lot can change in two-year election cycles.
But how do I talk to other people about this? I mean, you have to have that conversation with them too.
It is helpful that I am able to point to people like Cori Bush, members of the squad, and other progressive folks that are coming up through the ranks. I can point to them and say, that could be us. I do believe with each generation, we are becoming more liberal and more progressive. I do believe that one day we will have a progressive leader of this party who will give people something to believe in.
It's tough because for millions of Americans, the system has just never worked for them. Most Americans aren't really living, they're just doing their best to survive. It's hard to go to these folks and say vote for this person because they are going to be less dangerous than the other person, as opposed to vote for this person and you will get free healthcare. We are going to alleviate your medical debt. You are going to be able to send your kids to college for free. We are going to legalize marijuana. We are going to expunge the criminal records of individuals who have been arrested for marijuana crimes. We are going to reinvest in communities that have been devastated by the war on drugs. We are going to implement a Green New Deal. We are going to build a good society. It's easier to motivate people when you bring that.
Why doesn't the party acknowledge that?
It is a party problem. I think the folks who have an outsized influence in the party are afflicted by any number of problematic political diseases, if you will.
Some politicians are outright calculating. Some believe that the path to victory means being closer to the middle than closer to the left.
It's much easier for them to say, “I support the police, I support all lives matter, and all people, all lives, have value.” They don’t have to explain or move the electorate or build a coalition.
For some people, its political calculus, but other folks just have differing opinions. I think Joe Biden falls into that category, and I actually have a lot of respect for politicians like him. He says what he actually believes in. It's okay to have people in our party who have differing beliefs about the issues or different approaches to different issues. I have a great amount of respect for other politicians in the Democratic party who don't share my beliefs but have arrived at their policy positions through shared experience or their own work on the topic.
Then there are politicians in this party and in the other party who base their political beliefs not on intellectual curiosity or studies or any sort of enlightenment, but solely upon where they believe the electorate is. These are the people I struggle with because that approach is harmful.
The status quo, as history has demonstrated, is not always right. We fought a civil war because the status quo thought that people who look like me ought to be treated like chattel property. The status quo in the sixties was that Black people like me were second class citizens. We know the status quo is not always right, but we have politicians in both parties operating under the belief that we can never go against the status quo.
Joe Biden and I disagree on marijuana. Joe Biden and I disagree on healthcare policy. Joe Biden and I disagree on environmental policy. But he's got a record of showing how he's arrived at his beliefs, and he's remained steadfast in his beliefs. On some level, I have respect for that.
There are these other politicians who have to wait before the coast is clear before they say that Black lives matter. They have to make sure that other politicians are going to give them cover. They have to make sure that everybody's going to be on the same page. That's disgusting to me because people are dying in the streets. People don't have healthcare. People are being crippled by medical debt and student loan debt. I am 32 years old and I'm still financially impacted by my student loan debt.
I struggle with that.
It's depressing.
This stuff is depressing now only because we don't have ambitious plans to address these issues. It could be exciting to imagine what our country, and what our world could be like with a bold vision, but perhaps that will come in another cycle. Our top priority this time around is defeating Donald Trump.
So much of this is based in an American obsession with an individualistic pursuit of success.
Yes. Rugged individualism isn't all bad. I think there is merit in people doing everything they can to make sure they're self-sustaining in order to help their family. I get that. But there's a difference between rugged individualism and crippling poverty and institutional racism that doesn't even allow the individual to start on that path.
When you reach a certain financial point you can hire accountants to help you find every loophole in our tax code, you can donate to politicians who promise to lower your taxes and support your financial interests. That's how you get the scenario that we are in today. We are in the worst economic crisis since 2008, the billionaires are getting wealthier, wages are continuing to drop, and we lost the battle on Medicare for All, politically, even with 70% of Americans supporting it.
These monied interests are really, really hard to beat. They have captured the leaders of both parties, and they have a stranglehold on our politics. That's a whole other conversation about how we get out of this morass, but it's hard to beat.