Chris has spent a lot of time recently thinking about the arc of progress in America. In thinking about all of this, a paradox has been heavy on his mind: while the U.S. has gotten incredibly more progressive over the past few decades, we’re also in the midst of a marked authoritarian movement that’s showing no signs of slowing down. What does this moment mean for the progressive movement and its future? Our guest this week points out, “what an incredible gift [it is] to be alive at a time when we have such a chance to make a difference.” Deepak Bhargava is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a distinguished Lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and is co-author of “Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.” He joins WITHpod to discuss the trajectory of coalition movements, the state of the progressive movement in 2024, immigration reform and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Deepak Bhargava: How lucky are we to be alive at this point where like hundreds of years in the future, people will say what choices did they make? They made the right ones. Things turned out better because they did. So, I think of it as just an incredible gift to be alive at a time when we have such a chance to make a difference and we know what to do.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Well, it’s an election year, obviously, you know, 2024. That will be the focus of a lot of what I’m doing on our television show, “All In with Chris Hayes,” Tuesday through Friday, 8:00 p.m. MSNBC. We’ll talk about it on the podcast. But I’ve been thinking of a more broader terms than just sort of specific electoral terms because obviously there’s a lot that has to do with this election.
But thinking more about the sort of general arc of progress in America, and broadly, like there’s a weird paradox to my mind at the heart of it. It basically goes like this. I think that in many ways, since I first started covering politics when I was 23 or 24 in the Bush administration post 9/11, I think I would say that public opinion has moved in a progressive direction pretty strongly. This is particularly true if you compare to like the just immediate aftermath of 9/11, for people that weren’t there are very hard to express just how reactionary it was. It was just colossally, dangerously, and stultifyingly reactionary.
So, you know, in the 24 years or 22 years, say, since I’ve been writing about politics and covering politics as an adult, public opinion has gotten more progressive. The ideological argument on a whole bunch of fundamental questions has been won fairly definitively by the left. There’s certain examples people give all the time about this, like marriage equality for gay folks, right? Like that’s a place where it was a somewhat fringe view. It was a wedge issue in favor of people who were opponents of it by 2004. Then it became a majority support. Then it’s enshrined in law. And, you know, you see this in, you know, longitudinal polling data, Pew or Gallup, you know, people that approve of same-sex marriage, it goes up and up and up.
So that’s sort of the iconic example. They actually think it’s much deeper than that. I think on questions of basic questions of political economy, questions about the role of government and like regulation of businesses, questions about unions and labor rights. I think that the Reaganist, Milton Friedman free market arguments that sort of composed the dominant ideological vocabulary and paradigm from 1980 through the Great Financial Crisis has really been shredded.
Now the interests of those folks are still there, which is why the one thing Republicans did when they had unified governments was an enormous corporate tax cut. But the arguments for it have really fallen away, both as sort of ideological grounds, even like on economic theoretical grounds, and then in public opinion. So, there’s all these ways for someone of my age, I’m 44, I can point to real progress, tangible progress, both in policy, in politics, in the ideological argument being like won by the people on my side, even like stimulus versus austerity, which we sort of lost to the Great Financial Crisis in a cataclysmic way, like we won this time around to great effect, right?
The strongest job market in 50 years because we won that ideological argument and then it was implemented. But would you say like, well, things have gotten better in American politics, right? So, I could say like, well, in all these ways, we’ve won these arguments and public opinions moved in our direction. And there’s all kinds of ways in which the country has gotten, I really feel like I would say the country has gotten more progressive over the course of the last 20 years. And then you look around and you think, we’re teetering on the edge of the end of the constitutional republic and American democracy as we know it.
And there are tens of millions of our fellow citizens who are essentially part of what feels like a dangerously authoritarian movement. The politics and rhetoric on immigration have gone backwards unquestionably. Like we’re losing those arguments. They’re winning them. The public opinion is against us. People have gotten more sort of hardline and punitive in the way they view immigration policy, particularly the border, right? So, it’s not a neat story and you sort of put these two things together, opinion move to the left, liberals and progressives won a lot of the arguments. They’ve had a lot of political success, ideological and rhetorical success.
Meanwhile, almost half the country is devoted to a party that is intent on basically instituting kind of a right-wing presidential dictatorship. Like how do you hold those two things together about what progress has been made and how it’s been made and how to hold off the dangerous authoritarian movement in our midst. So, one of the best people I could think to talk to about that is someone who I’ve known. He’s been a friend of mine forever, who is just really one in a million in terms of his different life experiences and the sort of intersection of different circles he’s moved through as a progressive activist and writer and thinker.
His name is Deepak Bhargava. He’s a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. They do a lot of great work on progressive political economy. He’s a distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He’s led multiple nonprofits and NGOs. He’s been an organizer, as you’ll hear. He’s also co-author of a recent book about precisely this question about sort of bringing about social change called “Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.” Deepak, great to have you.
Deepak Bhargava: Wonderful to be here, Chris, thanks.
Chris Hayes: Do you agree with that general, like, does that framework make sense to you just off the bat?
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah, I’d even push it further. I mean, I think it’s like the best of times and the worst of times. It’s a really strange time emotionally. So, if you talk to people on the front lines doing social justice and progressive work, the vibe is pretty down. And I think it’s because the threats are so existential and people are just carrying an enormous burden, which is why I think it’s actually important to just kind of even go a layer deeper on how much progress there’s been.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: So progressive economic ideas are ascendant, they’re popular, they’re actually happening. Climate care, industrial policy, antitrust, guaranteed income. We saw the results of the movements of the last 15 years, the Fight for $15, Occupy, really galvanized people and changed the dialogue and the narrative and policy. I think progressives played the inside outside game super well in these last few years of the Biden administration. And I’m not even sure it’s totally landed how much progress there’s been.
Chris Hayes: I agree with that.
Deepak Bhargava: And it’s true at the state level. You know, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan is way better for people of color, for working people than they were a few years ago. And maybe the most important thing is we have a resurgent labor movement, which in all my time in organizing, we have not had. So, the UAW won a huge victory. The Teamsters won a big victory. Fast food workers won sectoral bargaining, which is a huge victory for low wage workers in California that could be a new path to unionization organization. I spent the last couple of years working with a new union of service workers in the South called the Union of Southern Service Workers. And even in the worst terrain —
Chris Hayes: That’s a good name for a union of Southern Service Workers.
Deepak Bhargava: It is. And they’re like organizing at shops, at fast food restaurants and —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Deepak Bhargava: — winning gains in the job. So, it’s this very big paradox between how we feel about what’s going on and actually the level of progress. Now there are dark clouds on the horizon, which we can talk about for sure, but there’s been a lot of progress.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Let’s save that offer for another few minutes, because again, I don’t think anyone listening to this is like unaware of the dark clouds, but I do think like there’s actually a little bit of a problem of doomerism. I think it’s a real problem. I think if you try to point out good stuff, people get viscerally mad. Have you experienced this? It’s like there’s a sort of sense of like, it’s you can’t say something is good or got better. Now, part of that is the negativity upon which social media feasts.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I think that’s part of it.
Deepak Bhargava: Hundred percent.
Chris Hayes: It’s a condition of the medium. But I think the condition of the medium actually has a real impact to people psyches, particularly generationally. And so, there’s this real intense doom sense and a reluctance and even resistance to pointing out, you know, real progress. And it’s weird because I think that one thing, I think is really important for progressive politics, and this goes back to just even the origins of, you know, the French Revolution, right? When we think about like what we call left or right, right? Is that imagining something better, the opposite of doom, is kind of fundamental, the whole thing.
Deepak Bhargava: It is.
Chris Hayes: If you can only think of doom, like you’re a conservative, actually. That’s actually the way traditionally these ideologies are functioned. Like the sort of conservative tendency, which is if you try for anything better, it will only bring ruin and like domination and hierarchy or the natural order of things is like a bleak view. And the progressive view is like, man is actually perfectible and we can create new institutions that are better and allow human flourishing. And I just think that like, to the extent you lose that, it can be sort of emotionally but also politically dangerous.
Deepak Bhargava: It is. And you know, my amazing co-author, Stephanie Luce, when we started writing the book, she said to me, if we’re going to write a book about strategy, progressive strategy, we actually have to start at vision. And you know, the core asset we have, the energy, the energetic taproot for us, it’s really hope and community. So, for conservatives, it’s invoking fear, it’s tribalism, it’s kind of the whole negative emotional palette. And we don’t tend to do well for long. We may get mobilized for a short time on those emotions, but we don’t sustain it without a sense of deep connection to each other, without a sense that there’s a promised land to which we can get through hard work for sure.
So, I think the mood is in fact, a material objective factor that’s getting in the way of the possible progressive future in front of us.
Chris Hayes: A hundred percent agree with that. Will you talk a little bit for folks that don’t know your background, they’re like, who’s this guy and why am I listening to what he has to say about this? Because I think of you as like one of the 5 to 10 voices in progressive politics that I most want to hear from. So, you know, you and I, we went to the same high school, right?
Deepak Bhargava: That’s right. And, actually, my first protest was a protest on racial justice at our common high school that has gotten the wrong direction —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, has gone in the wrong direction.
Deepak Bhargava: — since we were students there, for sure.
Chris Hayes: You’re a New York City kid, like I am.
Deepak Bhargava: From the Bronx.
Chris Hayes: From the Bronx. We’re both Bronx boys, New York City boys, Hunter High School boys who were like outer borough, scrappy. I mean, really, it does a certain formative thing to you to go to this school, to commute every day, to be from the Bronx, which like not a lot of kids there are from. And then what?
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah. So, I’ve spent the last 30 years in organizing and social movements. My first job out of college was I went to work for ACORN, which no longer exists, but was a national poor people’s organization, organized in public housing and neighborhoods around housing, racism, gentrification, all those kinds of issues. And then I went to work for Community Change, which is a national support center for grassroots organizing all across the country and helped to start new organizations of low-income people, working class people all over.
And then I helped to run some big national campaigns on healthcare, on immigration, winning the first version of the refundable child tax credits, a lot of issues on poverty. So, I’ve been around all kinds of issues, all kinds of movements, been to almost every part of the country and neighborhood and really had a chance to see the power of organizing and collective action to change people’s lives.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk what organizing is because I think people don’t know what it is. It could also mean different things. There’s different kinds. There’s labor union organizing. There’s community organizing. My dad, which people on the podcast may know was a community organizer. And so, I grew up around organizing. He was a community organizer in the Bronx, particularly a lot around banking access and housing, particularly. But just for people that don’t know, what’s organizing 101? Like what’s that even mean?
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah. So, organizing is really the practice of people coming together in numbers. So, in general, oppressed people don’t have a lot of money, but there are usually more oppressed people than there are oppressors in any given situation. So, what they have is people power. So, they come together in organizations that they democratically govern and control, whether those are community organizations or unions. Often there’s some kind of elected structure. They come together and they talk about what are the issues that we face in this neighborhood, in the city, in this country, and what are we going to do about that together.
And typically, they will run a campaign where they define an issue and say, you know, here’s the target that is going to make the decision about this issue. What can we do together in order to shape their behavior, shape their thinking, move them on the issue? And the key thing about it is it brings people into public life who would not otherwise be there, right? So, you’re knocking on a door in a public housing project and you’re inviting somebody in to say, well, what do you think should happen here in this area? What needs to happen in this project? And then they maybe speak in front of the city council and maybe one day they run for the city council.
So, it’s very different than the tradition of mobilizing, which is very important and which is probably more familiar, which is I’m really passionate about this issue. I’m going to send out an e-mail and let’s like go to city hall. Everybody already agrees with me. Let’s go get them. Organizing is a process of bringing people in to civic life, to politics, who may not think of themselves as ideological or political at first. They may hold lots of different complicated views, but by coming together with the neighbors or with coworkers, they find common interests and then they take action together on those interests.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. One way I think that’s useful to think about it is when you talk about mobilizing is how often basically affluent folks do this. So, like if you’ve like been on Nextdoor, right, it’s like, there’s a bunch of cars that have been speeding down our street and it’s dangerous and people get together and like, this is crazy that we need a speed bump. And this is part of the, you know, lowest, I don’t mean lowest in a derogatory sense. I mean, the most basic level of politics, right? Like there’s a public harm here. People are speeding down our street. There’s a public solution to this, which is speed bump. And there’s a representative, our alderman or city council person who could bring this.
And people get together all the time or they want to build a new big building in our neighborhood. I mean, you want to see people mobilize. Oh boy. And it’s going to take up the parking and it’s going to overcrowd schools and it’s going to cast a lot of shadows, you know. So, all this stuff is, you know, if you’ve been in affluent communities, it’s pretty second nature. Like people do it really quickly and really easily. They want to put a homeless shelter around us. They’re going to put a new section eight. Like it’s doing that for folks that don’t have often the same connections or social capital or status or economic capital.
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah. The organizer’s job really fundamentally is not to be a public leader or a public voice, but it’s to help people find who are often excluded from public life, right? Who are not taken seriously by the powers that be to find their own public voice and to become leaders, to step forward and testify or participate in a protest or speak at one to develop a new idea or a new agenda? And so, the magic of it is that it kind of expands our democracy and who has a sense of a stake in it and who belongs in it. And I think it’s a huge part of the solution to our democracy crisis, worker and community organizing.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, there’s another part aspect to organizing I think is really important to talk through and stay on for a second, which is about people’s politics and their ideology. So, there’s a long running debate in democratic theory about this. Go back and read Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion,” which is the sort of one of the kinds of canonical texts on this, which is like fundamentally like, do people have fixed views on stuff, right?
Like what are their politics and what does it mean to represent public opinion? How well developed are those ideas? Where do they get them? Are they exogenous and real? How much should representatives listen to them? What if a lot of people believe a really bad thing? Like majority support for a Muslim ban, which was polling with majority support at a certain point.
I don’t think there’s not a hard answer to this question. It’s actually an eternal debate, right? But that question is really at the heart of organizing in a way that’s actually really tricky. More than organizers ever like to let on. And I know this for a fact because I’ve known them my whole life. Because they’re like, well, we’re facilitators. It was like, well, your facilitators, but you’ve got a vision and you’re trying to facilitate people towards that vision.
So, this question of like, what are your politics? What are their politics? What is organizing? What’s manipulation? What’s indoctrination? Like these are all really complicated questions, right? If you go to the doors in a housing project and people like, there’s too many immigrants. which is a thing that people in poor neighborhoods will say. I don’t think like a majority will, but that’s a view that some people have. It’s like, okay, well, what do you do with that? Right?
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah. And I think organizing has changed a lot over the last 20 years where organizations are much more clear about where they stand on issues, and to be clear that they’re about inclusion and not exclusion. But I think the key point is most people are not fundamentally ideological. They hold like a bunch of ideas that are highly contradictory.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: You know, we came across this fascinating study that nearly half of the people recruited into the anti-abortion movement were not anti-abortion. Some of them were in fact, pro-choice. Why did they come in? It’s because they felt seen, recognized, heard. They felt like they belonged somewhere.
Chris Hayes: They were part of institutions, namely churches, Bible study groups and the like, that are connected to the movement.
Deepak Bhargava: Correct. Yes. So, they were recruited in on things other than the issue itself. In my own experience is that when you bring people together in the right kind of framework, you can actualize the better angels in their nature.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Deepak Bhargava: The people in the right circumstances really, and that tends to last, like if people kind of see each other’s problems as their own and they build those ties, especially across lines of difference, that really does tend to last over time. And that’s why I think it’s so important to as a strategy to kind of break through this current situation we find ourselves in.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point. And I think this question of ideological formation is a fascinating one. Like, it’s a question I ask people a lot of, like, where did you get your politics? How do you have your politics? And there’s all sorts of, you know, there’s so many different origin stories. I mean, you know, I was a closeted gay kid in a conservative evangelical household and conservative evangelical community. And then I went to high school, and then I went away to college, and, you know, I found my people, and that, you know, that opened up a world.
Or, you know, my mom worked 16-hour days and I saw, you know, how brutal the bosses were to her or my church group or I was on campus and I didn’t like the lefties. I became a conservative. Like these are all sorts of different ways that people get their politics.
Deepak Bhargava: There are. I think, you know, it’s one of my concerns about the progressive movement these days is that we’re not that tolerant sometimes of all of these contradictory opinions people hold and maybe not patient enough to work it through with them. And so, I think a good organizing culture recruits people in and works with them over time and kind of lives with the fact that people have all these different things going on inside them. And that’s the difference between an organizing approach and a mobilizing approach.
And we won’t win if we don’t get big enough, and getting big enough just means interacting with people with lots of complicated and often objectionable views on things. And that to me is just an essential piece of the puzzle to build a durable majority in this country.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and I think you really see it to me in this degree divide, right? Because, you know, conservatives are not wrong to target colleges and to locate their problem, a huge problem with higher education. Higher education, four-year colleges, are places where a lot of ideological formation is happening that is bad for conservatives. That is 100% true.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like they’re right. Ron DeSantis doesn’t want freshmen from Florida at the state colleges taking sociology.
Deepak Bhargava: Right.
Chris Hayes: He’s right. He is right. Sociology is a way of knowing that expands the way that you think about the world in ways that I think tend to have pretty profound progressive effects. He’s not right substantively, they should learn sociology, but in the narrowest tactical sense, like when they identify colleges and universities as a site of scale ideological formation, that is hurting them politically they’re correct. The problem of course is if you ask the question, where are the institutions of ideological formation and collective power, social solidarity that aren’t universities and colleges? That goes a long way to describing our politics right now.
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah. And I really want to stay with that for a second because for all the progress that we have made over the last decade at the level of ideas, at the level of policy, we have not made enough progress on the question of organization. So, we do have a labor upsurge, but we still aren’t seeing massive growth in the number of union members in the country.
Chris Hayes: No, we just set a record for the lowest union density in history, unfortunately.
Deepak Bhargava: We did. And I think this isn’t something that progressives often see as important as the right does. So, I think they’re very clear about the importance of capturing institutions, building institutions that are kind of political homes for people where people get ideas and connections and socialized into a way of thinking. Universities are that for progressives, but we don’t have the equivalent of evangelical churches or other institutions.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Deepak Bhargava: So that’s why this kind of project of organization is to me like the central challenge of this next generation. What are the 21st century organizations that people will belong to in large numbers, where they’ll find meaning, where they’ll get mobilized politically, where just honestly their day-to-day needs for community and being seen and processing stuff, all of that will get made. Now, I think there are promising signs, but it is a big project ahead of us. We’re not going to win this just at the level of ideas and policy where there’s got to be kind of a ground game element to this.
Chris Hayes: Right. And you’re also like to the extent that you have this sort of, you know, there’s a lot of divisions in American life along demographic lines and religious lines and geographical lines, particularly along, you know, race which I think remains the sort of brightest and most salient for the sort of power structures in many ways, but a million others, right?
But this sort of degree problem, like it just shows up everywhere over and over again. And when you control, like control for women, control for black folks, control for Latino folks, control for Republican primary voters, like take any set, control for it, map the support for, you know, whoever, Trump is a sort of stand in, but just generally like certain forms of right-wing politics. You’re seeing this divide over and over and it’s replicated in almost fractally, whatever group you want to take, and just control for it, you’re going to see it.
Deepak Bhargava: Well, it may be the case. I mean, multiracial democracy is like a new phenomenon, right?
Chris Hayes: Very new.
Deepak Bhargava: It’s not hundreds of years old proposition. It may be that in order to have it, you have to have unions at a large scale.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Deepak Bhargava: And it may be that the decline of democracy and the decline of unions are actually very close. There’s a couple of political scientists who argue this, that without significant organs of solidarity for working class people to make meaning of what’s happening in the economy and politics, that we become a kind of atomized, easily swayed by social media and so forth. So that’s why I think it’s such a pivotal strategy in the fight for democracy.
Chris Hayes: Well, and then there’s also the question of when you talk about organizing and sort of institutions of meaning making and solidarity, right? Like people in the public sphere connected to each other across lines of difference, pursuing some shared interest, you know. Then there’s the sort of the media question, which is that social media has become sort of the means by which an entire generation does that. And again, the data on this is pretty striking. Like people just even at a very specific level, like people have fewer friends, people are spending time, less time hanging. This is a pre-political observation, but it’s important, right?
Just before you even get to politics, like are you a home alone or are you hanging out with other people? And it’s like the time use data we have on this is that it’s declining across all these categories. People just hanging out. And politics, the connections of politics, you know, particularly for the youngest generation of people who are, you know, above teenager or teenager above, all of this is happening online. And I’m curious what you think that means for this project.
Deepak Bhargava: I think it’s a huge challenge to be totally honest. You know, we’ve been through this era of mass protests, the Arab Spring and Hong Kong and all this.
Chris Hayes: And 2020 George Floyd, which was, I’ve never seen anything like that.
Deepak Bhargava: Right.
Chris Hayes: In my life.
Deepak Bhargava: Much of it mediated through and organized through social media.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: And for some of those examples, at least, say the Arab Spring or Hong Kong, you see kind of people ending up worse at the end of the series of protests than they started. I think the movement of Black Lives is a different story and the verdict is still out because I think it’s having reverberations in culture. But I think the reasons for that are that you can now mobilize people at a large scale without having to do this kind of nitty-gritty work of building relationships, getting over our personal differences, figuring out who’s going to order the porta potties for the march. You just do it.
And then once people are gathered, there’s really not a lot of place for them to go. I also think the threat then of protests to the people who are the subject of it is a lot less because they understand that there’s less organizational capacity.
Chris Hayes: They can wait it out.
Deepak Bhargava: They can wait it out. Leaders aren’t developed or decided —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Deepak Bhargava: And so —
Chris Hayes: Just wait it out.
Deepak Bhargava: — protest is by itself just less functional. Now what I think that means is that we can’t ignore social media because it is the currency of thought for this generation, but we have to find ways to combine online or offline work, in-person work that create the sense of community dialogue back and forth, being held, kind of cut down some of the reactivity that comes from social media and still preserve the assets of scale. And I don’t think we’ve figured out the secret sauce on that.
Chris Hayes: And there’s this vanguardism problem, right? Which is, again, if you’ve read your left history, as we both have, is like as old as, you know, again, to went back to French Revolution, as old as the French Revolution, you know, Marx and his circle in the 19th century are wrestling with this question all the time. Well, we’ve got these, you know, super religious, benighted peasants who are complete reactionaries. What do we do with them? Well, we ignore them. Well, we’ll bring them along, you know, all these debates about what to do with these folks. And up to now where you’ve sort of seen this resurgence of, say, democratic socialism, right? And which is very encouraging.
But a lot of it is, you know, people who went to like pretty expensive four-year schools with socialist politics, and again, no shade on them. They’re doing their politics and really living in them. I’ve seen folks do in the streets and organizing and doing mutual aids. These are not dilettantes. I’m talking about like real people really doing the work day in, day out of politics. But again, getting a base of that politics that really is truly mass and truly working class again, in the absence of unions or other union institutions is a real challenge, even if you’re really trying to do it. Like ACORN’s a great example. ACORN was an institution that tried to do this at scale and had a lot of success, and the Republicans destroyed it because of it.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And their own self-inflicted wounds, I should say.
Deepak Bhargava: Well, this is where there’s such asymmetry, right? Because the right is super clear about the importance of institutions in which working class people and people of color acquire power, right? So, when they took over state houses in 2010, the first thing they do is they go after public sector unions and voting rights, the two pillars of any kind of social progress for progressive social change in the country.
Chris Hayes: Particularly in those states, we should say.
Deepak Bhargava: Absolutely. And there has not been that kind of same ruthless focus among progressives in elected office or outside on how do we think about using policy to create and support and nurture a next generation of institutions where working class people can gather and build power and speak for themselves. It’s more like we want to get the policy right, but then we’ll not worry so much about the institutions. But the policies are fundamentally unstable without the organizational foundation.
Chris Hayes: Well, and there’s also a real problem with that too. And we saw this with, you know, the transition from ‘08 to ‘09 with Organizing for America. So, the Obama campaign really did organize. I mean, they really did, it was real. I was there and I saw it. That organizing partly came from a guy who’s a sort of legendary organizer named Marshall Ganz who has five decades of organizing It came from the fact that Barack Obama had been a community organizer. They used his organizing model and it really did work and they did real stuff.
And then the question was like, what now? And they tried to keep it going. And this is a story I know very well because my brother was intimately involved so I saw it at ground level. And basically, it was like, there’s a tension that’s inherent and ultimately was unresolvable about it, which is that organizing is actually wielding actual power based on what the folks who are in the organization want.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And if you’re a politician, you want to control those people.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You don’t want to give them power, like this is not the way it works.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And so those two things were ultimately irreconcilable.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that’s another thing that comes down to this question about the asymmetry here is born of a deeper asymmetry. It’s a Republican destroying an institution that will facilitate progressive power and leverage like a public sector union, is an easier choice than a Democratic governor empowering an organization that will leverage progressive power because that organization may end up in conflict with him and her if it’s doing its job, right? It’s a more tortured choice.
Deepak Bhargava: It is, although, you know, you kind of see the rights kind of focus on how do we strengthen and relate to evangelical churches as kind of an example.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: Whether that’s tax breaks or that’s kind of alternatives to Planned Parenthood and public funding for those kinds of institutions.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: There is a very different model of relationship and I think a deep-down understanding. And I think sometimes on the progressive side, it gets seen by elected officials as special pleading. Oh, the unions want a bill that’ll make unions able to organize.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, its transactional special interest politics, right? What’s your ask?
Deepak Bhargava: Yes, and the entire enterprise rests on their ability to organize or voting rights. It’s a classic case and the way that it kind of gets pushed to the side often in the priority setting. Now, I do think it’s important to say there are counter examples of it, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Deepak Bhargava: So, in FDR’s era, we saw significant institution building. We’ve seen sectoral bargaining advance in Minnesota and California, which is a new way for workers to kind of come together and form their own organizations. So, I’m not giving up hope on it. And I think we have to socialize the idea that without power, the ideas aren’t going to go anywhere. And that if there’s a mutual long-term interest between electeds and organizations, even with all the tensions and finding a way to do that.
Chris Hayes: So, I just want to stay because you mentioned FDR and there’s all these stories about that, that some of which are apocryphal about his relationship with that, but my favorite example of this is like, you know, the Wagner Act, which is the National Labor Relations Act, which basically creates collective bargaining in its modern form. It’s the most significant piece of labor legislation that ever was passed. It is ultimately produced the vert to the extent America ever had, some sort of like labor social democracy. It flows from that act and also the very hard work of the union organizers and unions have brought into power, you know, Walter Ruth or the UAW blah, blah.
But the most legendary and acclaimed union organizer at the time, John Lewis, hated FDR, became obsessed with how much he hated him, turned the union against him, endorsed the Republican opponent, tried to take him out of office. Like my point just being that like, part of all this is that conflict is inherent in the whole thing.
Deepak Bhargava: It is.
Chris Hayes: And you can’t escape it like people have different interests. They have different ideologies. Like, they’re rubbing up against you. That is the point of democratic politics. And to come back to your thing about the right is like I do think it’s a more authoritarian model in many ways. And I also think that there’s a form and content thing of hierarchy. They are more down with hierarchy. That’s actually a philosophical commitment to be down with hierarchy. It’s sort of a defining aspect of being conservative, right?
So, that idea of like, we’re going to empower the evangelical churches, it’s like, are they going to turn on you? You could probably manage them, right? And sometimes that’s not true to give credit were due.
Deepak Bhargava: Not always true. I think, no.
Chris Hayes: They have absolutely torn up Republican politicians who did not deliver them. I don’t want to also allay that difference. My point just being that like, when you get into the nitty gritty of this stuff, you can never escape in democratic politics that people have different commitments, principles and interests, and they will be in conflict in any coalition ever.
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah, for sure. And to me, that’s actually a sign of success, right?
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: So, I think what we were missing in the Obama years to some degree to maximize what could have happened was the presence of mass movements on the outside that were pushing hard enough on foreclosures, on unemployment, et cetera.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: You know, there’s the famous A. Philip Randolph quote that, you know, at the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats, you get what you can take and you can keep what you hold.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Deepak Bhargava: It’s an argument. It’s very unsentimental, but it’s an argument for the centrality of organization and power and that needs to be negotiated in a healthy democracy. There’s lots of that contestation and negotiation and frustration and irritation, but that’s what it looks like.
Chris Hayes: And I also think, to come back to the social media, right, like the other thing about institutions and organizing and actual institutions is channels’ processes to have dialogues of conflict intention, which is super important, right? Because like, again, people don’t agree on stuff. They don’t want stuff. My favorite example is when I started out with some NIMBY fight about a high rise being built. It’s like the people organizing against it are not misapprehending their interests. The light they have will be blocked by that building. They don’t want that.
Now, you can talk to them about why you could organize around that, right? But the question of where does the conflict go? Because I think what you’re seeing a lot now when it’s all mediated through social media is just a turn towards, I’m out, doom, frustration, whatever those are. Because there’s no other channel, right? So, like, what else are you going to do?
It’s the old Albert Hirschman book, “Exit Voice and Loyalty” about what people do with institutions that they have a problem with, right? It’s exit, you leave it, voice, you speak up, or loyalty, you just suck it up. And if you don’t give people voice, then you got exit and loyalty. And like, I feel like that is at a grand level, a huge issue right now.
Deepak Bhargava: It is and I think social media is maybe an impossible vehicle to build a bigger we, right? And if you think the project of democracy requires relationships among people who share some common values, but disagree about a lot of things and have to work that out inside their institutions and organizations, social media kind of deeply disincentivized that kind of dialogue. And so, it’s through these kinds of institutions that you can get to some kind of common ground. And that’s why I think there are such pivotal forces in American life.
Chris Hayes: Tell me about how you see that vacuum being filled now like places where it is being filled, or are there existing institutions that could do it? Labor unions expanding, for instance. And we’re seeing promising things on that, but again, it’s against the backdrop of difficult decline. I think you would have to have a real regime change at the policy level, like passing the PRO Act or some piece of legislation that would make union organizing easier at a national level. Is there a new version of ACORN? What would it look like to have mass organizations at scale doing this kind of organizing?
Deepak Bhargava: Yeah, I think we’re in a period of incredibly exciting experimentation on exactly that question. So, on the labor front, we’re seeing organizations of workers that are basically saying we are a union because we are workers acting together in our own interests, whether or not we’re recognized by the NLRB. And I think that’s quite a promising development. In fact, you know, before we had labor law, we had workers together —
Chris Hayes: That’s what we had.
Deepak Bhargava: — in organizations and we may be back at that point in large sections of the country. That to me is an exciting development. Second one is this use of sectoral bargaining, setting wage standards in states where that’s possible, so workers can bargain with employers to set standards in a whole industry and kind of take wages off the table and then create an organization underneath that to advocate. There’s also the next generation of community organizations developing that are organizing in really tough terrain. So, groups like Hoosier Action in Indiana organizing in the teeth of the opioid crisis in very conservative areas or down home North Carolina organizing in areas where white supremacists organize in rural North Carolina, trying to build community across difference and recruit people in.
And so, there’s a new wave of community organizations that’s trying to kind of move out into much harder terrain. I think that’s incredibly exciting. And then I think the third thing I’d highlight is the kind of attempt at bringing together the best of online and offline organizing, sort of have authentic relationships and community, but be able to work with the kind of tools we have to achieve some kind of scale. So, I think we’re going to see in this next 20 years, I hope, a next generation of organizations that perform the same function, but may not look the same in their design —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Deepak Bhargava: — as what we’ve had before.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Can we talk about immigration a little bit?
Deepak Bhargava: Sure.
Chris Hayes: It’s something you have a lot of experience with. You’ve worked on, you know, organizations that were very involved in organizing around immigration at the ground level and then also at national policy fights over it. And I’ve followed immigration as a reporter for, you know, since McCain and Kennedy, which was what, 2005 or thereabouts. And I feel pretty freaked out and pretty upset by the nature of the conversation, which just gets it seems more and more dehumanizing every day. And the polling is not good on it right now.
Like progressives are currently are on the wrong side of this issue in terms of national polling. I don’t think that’s like unchangeable or says something that like people inherently hate immigrants, whatever. I just think like right now, the messaging media environment, all these things. As someone who is, again, really been part of this fight for like 20 years, what is your assessment of where we are on this issue particularly?
Deepak Bhargava: It’s really hard to fathom just how low we’ve sunk here in the immigration debate.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: It’s hard to imagine that, you know, just 10 years ago we were on the cusp of legislation to legalize, provide a path to citizenship for millions and millions of undocumented people. And, you know, this is a global phenomenon. It’s happening in the United States. It’s happening in Europe. It’s driving the authoritarian turn and the rise of far-right parties. I think there’s two basic ingredients to get out of this. So, one is there has to be an alternative that’s articulated clearly and forcefully by our leaders to the nativist term.
And that has not been done consistently in this country for a significant amount of time. Now to me, the nature of that alternative has to be, we want to be the most welcoming country on earth. We want to make it part of our DNA, that immigrants are good for the country, they’re an asset, that in fact are economic destiny because of aging population and a care crisis that’s necessary and a moral case given the horrors that people are fleeing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: I think there’s plenty of evidence that it can be made good politics with effort. It’s not going to happen inevitably, but we’ve seen California turn around. We’ve seen Arizona turn around to a remarkable degree through the mobilization of kind of popular sentiment with an aggressive pushback against anti-immigrant policies. So that to me is part one. There’s got to be like a positive vision, you know, which is where we started, of what immigration would look like that made sense for the country. That has to be articulated.
The other piece of it is civil society has got to get involved in the job of welcoming immigrants. And under the radar screen, it is actually happening.
Chris Hayes: It is, yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: You know, there are thousands and thousands of people who families, rotary clubs, Kiwanis clubs that have sponsored Ukrainian and Afghan refugees. There are thousands of people who are helping the asylees when our governments are failing to do it, providing food and shelter to them all over the country.
Chris Hayes: My entire social circle is constantly organizing drop-offs at Floyd Bennett Field where there are asylum seekers finding lawyers for people, like getting coats. This is like people are really doing it in New York.
Deepak Bhargava: Yes, it’s really happening. And so, there’s like an upswell of goodness that hasn’t found political expression.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: And I think it could if the call went out. So, I know it seems like we’re at a very far low, but I feel like with the right combination of imagination, some courage and some really good organizing, it could turn around quite quickly. We are not, as a country, the level of discourse that is common now in our politics. We are much better than that. And people hold such complicated views about immigration.
Chris Hayes: They do, yes.
Deepak Bhargava: The better parts of us can be called upon, I think.
Chris Hayes: I totally agree with that. I totally agree with the complexity. I think weirdly, the debate has been Democrats don’t seem interested in fighting on it.
Deepak Bhargava : No.
Chris Hayes: And they’re making a tactical calculation, which is don’t raise the salience of an issue where you’re losing, which is, I get it. Like that’s not a crazy, narrow, tactical consideration in a campaign year. Like let’s talk about abortion, right? Like we’re 65-35 on the right side on abortion. We’re 40-60 on the wrong side on the border. So, I mean, let’s talk about abortion. That’s a totally rational calculation.
What has happened though, I think, is that increasingly it feels like no one’s on the other side of the argument. I mean, it’s like, who’s making the case?
Deepak Bhargava: Yes, and this is where I think we need institutional leaders from the faith community, from business community, from labor, there needs to be a significant organizing project to put voices out there that can kind of reestablish a moral center in the politics that I think could be established fairly quickly. It’s important to say that all the evidence from Europe where this has been extensively studied is that when politicians on the left mimic the rhetoric and the policies of parties on the anti-immigrant right, that they lose ground.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Deepak Bhargava: That it is not actually a winning, even short-term solution because people are just going to choose, if they want a nativism, they will choose the nativist party. So, I think it is a very bad on political grounds. It’s demobilizing to a very significant part of the base, and it lays a predicate for further and further right-wing motion.
Chris Hayes: I think there’s two other aspects of this and I think you just sort of mentioned this. One of the things I think that’s scary for Democrats and I think, you know, delights the right and also political observers, is that there’s some real salience to this particularly among working-class voters and particularly among working-class voters of color. And I think there was a little bit of an assumption, this sort of demographics is destiny of like, the border demagoguery will turn off Latinos.
And I just think it’s like a very cramped view of like people’s politics to your point. It’s like, first of all, xenophobia or nativism can happen between people who are quote, unquote “of the same race,” which itself is a ludicrous and constructive category. But it’s like, this has been happening throughout history. Like —
Deepak Bhargava: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know. I’ve said this all the time, but it’s like when Iraqis were fleeing to Syria, there was a huge, even a million of them during the Iraq war. There was tension around that and it’s like, they’re both Arab, but people, you know, this is politics. So, that assumption, I think, and really got shredded because we really saw that in two places, South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley, right? The numbers there are just clear as day that those moved in 2020. They move in the direction of the right. It’s pretty clear immigration was a high salience issue in those places. And, you know, the argument was not successfully made there.
Deepak Bhargava: One contrasting story that I think is interesting is you’ve seen in Arizona and California a motion in the opposite direction in the sense that there are very vibrant movements, community organizations, labor, that came together in response to anti-immigrant policies.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Deepak Bhargava: Most notably Sheriff Joe Arpaio and that turn that anger in the community made it a matter of like, of identity, of pride, of respect, and really transform both states politics. So, to me, that just —
Chris Hayes: Great point.
Deepak Bhargava: — actually speaks to how the path is not inevitable.
Chris Hayes: Great point.
Deepak Bhargava: It’s a matter of conscious action and organizing.
Chris Hayes: It’s a great point. And it’s also to me, the other thing that sort of ground level organizing, I think faith groups too, it’s just a place where it’s really important. And I think actually like the kind of scary authoritarian turn of a lot of evangelical churches is really scary because I think a version of them 10 or 12 years later would not be that way. But that first thing you said about making the argument why it’s good for us. And there’s a moral argument to make, which I think is strong and airtight.
The problem with the moral argument is sort of proves too much and I had this conversation with David Miliband, which is like, when it comes down to it, like, you know, if we’re really going to go behind the veil of ignorance in a Rawlsian sense of like the natural lottery, like basically everyone should come here because like not their fault, they got born where they got born. So, but the practical sense, it actually does make us better, like for sure, like unambiguously, is an enormous thing that makes our country better, stronger, more money for everyone, getting away from the fixed pie idea. And that argument used to be made all the time. Like you and I saw it made. Am I crazy or is no one making that anymore?
Deepak Bhargava: It’s bizarre. You know, someone showed me a clip of Ronald Reagan —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Deepak Bhargava: — debating George H.W. Bush.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Deepak Bhargava: And a nativist asked a question and both of them —
Chris Hayes: The 1980 primary.
Deepak Bhargava: — kind of go out of their way to reject the whole premise, argue back —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Deepak Bhargava: — talk about the role of immigration as something that renews America socially, culturally, economically, et cetera. And I think it’s a really strong case and we are not seeing our public leaders make it out of what I think is a misguided sense of fear and that you can actually engage people in dialogue about this, and they have experience. They have relationships. It’s possible. And then, you know, there’s just the brass tacks reality in everybody’s lives that you could also speak to about, for example, the care crisis that we’re suffering in this country and an aging society.
And so, you know, just very material things that are going to need to be solved one way or the other. I mean, I know that some on the right dream that we will have a birth explosion of, you know, native born babies if we have the certain kind of policies and I’m all for pro-family policies, but they’re trying that in Europe and it’s not working too well. So, immigration is inevitably part of the solution to this problem. It’s going to happen one way or another. So, I’m not sure how much courage it would take to make the case for being a much more welcoming country because it makes sense.
Chris Hayes: You know, one of the things that I have liked about getting older, I’m 44 now, is that I really do feel like I’ve been doing this long enough that I can recognize certain patterns that like I’ve seen things get really bad and then get better, which is a really important thing. Like I remember the morning after election day in 2004 thinking like, we are toast. We’re toast. I can’t believe we reelected that guy. And obviously election day 2016 and like I’ve seen things get real bad and get better, and that has given me a certain, I don’t know, like rootedness as I go through all this. And you’ve been doing this for a long time and have seen that as well. So where do you situate things right now?
Deepak Bhargava: The last couple of years I’ve really spent researching social movements for the last couple of hundred years. And it gives you a really powerful lens to look at our current moment. If you think about what the abolitionists, those who were fighting to end slavery, were up against over, you know, hundreds of years, it was an incredible machine and seemed utterly impregnable, and then they won. And they did it out of just incredible strategy, organizing, coalition building, consciousness raising.
They had a clear North Star vision of where they were trying to go, and they kept marching forward. They had this just enormous sense of determination and grit and being in it together. And you see that throughout the history of social movements in this country, that there are many, many ups and downs and many periods where all the effort you just expended seems like it was totally wasted. Like the game is over, it is lost, et cetera.
And the thing that comes clear is it’s only in the other side of the film when you’re watching it, that it’s clear how those choices were so pivotal and that the things actually turned in a very different, more positive way. And so, I think we’re kind of at that point in the movie now where what we do in the next 10 years, it’s pivotal for democracy, it’s pivotal for climate, it’s pivotal in so many ways. Like we are living at a hinge point in history.
And so, the way I think of it is, how lucky are we to be alive at this point where like hundreds of years in the future, people will say, what choices did they make? They made the right ones. Things turned out better because they did. So, I think of it as just an incredible gift to be alive at a time when we have such a chance to make a difference and we know what to do.
Chris Hayes: I love that. That is a great note to end on. Deepak Bhargava, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, co-author of a book recently out called “Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.” And also, if I’m not mistaken, because I want to do this properly, a podcast, right?
Deepak Bhargava: Correct, a podcast you can get on all the usual platforms, a spinoff where we interview people, organizers, and academics we talked to in the book about how change happens.
Chris Hayes: That’s awesome. I’m going to subscribe to that and maybe even steal some of your guests. Deepak, always a pleasure, man.
Deepak Bhargava: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Deepak Bhargava, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and the co-author of the book, “Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.” Would love to hear your thoughts about our conversation today. Inbox withpod@gmail.com. We’re also on all kinds of social media platforms. Too many to mention.
We’ve got TikTok. You can search for WITHpod. We’ve been putting some more content there recently. You can follow me on Threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky. We’re also at the bas place, X, Twitter, or whatever you want to call it, @chrislhayes there. “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?