Anand recently had a live chat with members Indivisible About his book The persuaders. From the hadith the following article was adapted. It's about not losing sight of the incredible progress behind this era of backlash—and the difficult imperative of helping guide disoriented people into new times.
Sometimes we forget that we have made amazing and astonishing progress in recent decades. Because of this progress, life has become very confusing for many people.
Here and around the world, the position of women has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 50,000 years, I think. We have done more in the past 60 years to become true to our founding commitments to racial equality, words we never lived up to to begin with — more in the past 60 years than we have in the past 340 years.
We've done more to build the kind of multi-ethnic democracy where people from every corner of the planet live together and build extraordinary things together – things that their cousins and grandparents in other parts of the world often never had the opportunity to create because we weren't collaborating with people from anywhere. Another in the world.
Because of this extraordinary progress toward a greater “we,” it is not strange, but rather natural, predictable, and predictable that this will destabilize many. Managing people through the loss of status, the loss of what was not deserved, turns out to be one of the most difficult problems faced by human beings. When you get used to the privilege Says the famous old saying Equality feels like oppression.
Companies have what is called “change management”. But we don't know how to do that for entire societies. We make progress and expect people to reinvent themselves in their own time. It's very discretionary.
Keep in mind that we have completely changed what it means to be a man and what you can and cannot do as a man in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Thank God. But let's be honest: We've done a better job of dismantling some of the old stories, practices, and structures of masculinity that needed to be dismantled, than we have of teaching men new ways to be men. The result is a void, and some podcast charlatans are very skilled at getting in there and channeling men into new, misogynistic visions to fill the void.
That's how it often goes: we're better at dismantling than putting the cover back on. (Understandably, some think this is a good thing. Why should we make a fuss about the people we have He was Fuss for a long time? Finally, the time for fuss is over.)
We've seen a similar dynamic regarding race. Think about the tremendous legal and structural progress that has been made — those who loved America least, loved America unrequitedly enough to bother to toil to change it — and think about this: how many white people of a certain age knew about whiteness as a concept when they were growing up Above, talked about whiteness, wrestled with whiteness, seriously engaged with the problem of race?
But I bet every white person reading this book has had to confront those ideas, in one way or another, whether they like it or not. We forget how long we lived in it. We forget how many battles we won.
That is why I sometimes feel more hopeful about our current political situation than events seem to warrant. The context of this moment is that we have achieved a great deal of social progress in recent decades, fought for by movements determined to give more of us a say in making the future. And much of this progress will necessarily require that millions of people acquire a whole new sense of self, a whole new sense of how they relate to others, and a whole new source and definition of their esteem.
If you're a white man and a coal miner in West Virginia, this vision of progress, to some extent, asks you to step out of the definition of masculinity you grew up in and live in a new definition. It may be asking you to break out of a certain state of inattention or denial about race, and demanding that you engage with it, even if it seems far removed from where you live. It asks you to leave the industry that gave you, your father, and your grandfather meaning, purpose, and place in society, and suggests that we may not have that industry in the future to save the Earth, which may seem like trading abstract gain for concrete loss.
By the way, I support all of these changes. For my taste, it can't happen fast enough. But sometimes we don't admit it, Yes, it's a lot. We often ask people – Really People ask a lot.
And when we see people unsettled by that, and confused, many of them are just trying to absorb whatever the new age is asking of them. Authoritarians reach it earlier and more effectively than pro-democracy movements. Thus people who begin life merely disoriented by change turn into extremists into fanatics.
Let's say you're a 65-year-old white man in Arizona, and you're not particularly interested in politics or immigration and borders. But you go to Walgreens to refill your prescriptions, and you have more pills every year because you've been there for years. It's a kind of ritual for you. You can get your cereal. You can chat with the ladies who work there. You stay a little longer than you need to because you're alone and don't have people to talk to.
Over the years, some of the people you chat with have stopped working there. They are getting old. They are being replaced by younger, Spanish-speaking employees, in keeping with Arizona's changing demographics. Maybe you can't connect with them or feel like you can't.
What I've learned from organizers on the ground in Arizona and elsewhere working on this issue is that such an incident in and of itself does not make someone a hardcore anti-border or MAGA Republican. Just being sad about the loss of that ritual doesn't make you a cruel person. Wishing older white ladies back doesn't make you heartless. It's a natural thing I've described so far. Change is always difficult.
Think of this guy as being at the first stage in the political version of what companies call the customer journey. The far right has a whole host of offers for him to move along the path of extremism — to explain that moment, give him a story about how Biden did this, Obama did that, and so on. How it's all part of a grand conspiracy that suddenly explains this case and every case.
The right has its churches and other dense networks in real life that help in this conversion. They have their own propaganda media to help. They have Fox News. And they have billionaire supporters, who, in this particular era of expanding inclusion, have weaponized people's sense of status threat and their fear of each other to consolidate more and more wealth and power at the top, in their own hands.
And so people experience normal life things like, Huh, my kid's book tells a different story about Jefferson than the one I grew up with; I feel unsettled because of that – Again, this alone, in its embryonic form, is normal. Not a bad person to feel that way.
And then the right has a conveyor belt to take you from that discomfort to “I'm going to war with critical race theory.”
I don't think many people who claim to be worried about CRT – I'm putting aside the minority of hardcore activists and talking about millions of ordinary people – actually understand what CRT is enough to honestly worry about.
Instead, I think they have the universal fear of every parent who has ever been a parent that one day your children will grow up and leave you, which they will. That once they leave this body, they will never return to it, that every day is a further separation, and that one day they will think different thoughts than you think. The whole purpose of their life is to separate from your life. It is the great joy and great fear of any parent, a fear that is heightened in times of rapid change. It is armed by the right Your children are being brainwashed Whether it's about history, race, gender or sexuality. But what is the basic feeling? Basic emotion is much more interesting, and we can talk about it if we understand it.
Likewise, the sentiment behind the panic at the border is more interesting than the actual situation at the border. Why do people feel that way? Invaded? Why do people feel little control over their environment? What makes racism so easy to activate?
The missing piece of the puzzle in our fight against today's authoritarian threat is a serious, concerted effort to help millions of people — not hardcore MAGA fanatics, but the next segment of pro-fascism, fashion-curious voters. – Help them navigate the era. It is an organization not for the faint of heart.
However, to me, this is the central pledge of the pro-democracy movement in this country, if we are to have a movement worthy of the name: to be deeply and continually engaged in the psychological process by which millions of Americans try to conceive. They learn about these changes, discover the times, find new identities in a changing country, and ultimately come to see themselves the way they want to be seen on the far side of change.
“Anger is often what pain looks like when it appears in public,” Krista Tippett wisely said. The worse the anger, the more important it is to process the pain—but also the harder it is to do, because empathy for the pain is undermined by the anger.
This is exhausting work that many rightly feel they should not do. But in my years of writing about people living through epic change, I've taken on the mantra that the burden of citizenship is to accept that what's not your fault may be your problem.
And to be honest, I think the pro-democracy cause is not nearly as engaged in the kind of work I'm describing—in this process of guiding people to the vision of progress that we seek. The hopeful point is that we can choose to start this work now. But the hour is late and the work cannot be more urgent if we want to save the country and achieve what it promised.
Anand's latest book is The persuaders.
Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
