Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I hope many of you are listening to Kai Wright's live call-in show on Sunday nights, The United States of Anxiety. It's on 6:00 PM, right after All Things Considered. As it happens, I was among the guests this past Sunday night, as Kai was interested in how you were all responding to the impeachment trial as it was going on. Did it serve a purpose for you in any way, even knowing the outcome, almost certain acquittal, even in advance? We're going to continue a conversation now that I was fortunate to be a part of on Kai's show.

Kai was interested in whether the trial felt like a step towards a meaningful reckoning with the anti-democratic and white nationalist parts of our political culture, not just Donald Trump. To set this up, personally, I don't think the House impeachment managers centered those issues very much at the trial, but they did refer to them, such as when impeachment manager Jamie Raskin told the story of one of the Capitol police officers who had to fend off the rioters for hours.

Jamie Raskin: Afterwards, overwhelmed by emotion, he broke down in the rotunda, and he cried for 15 minutes. He shouted out, "I got called an N-word 15 times today." Then he reported, "I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face. I said, what the F man. Is this America?"

Brian Lehrer: There was that. After the acquittal, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at least brought the topic up in his list of things that he felt Trump was not held sufficiently accountable for.

Chuck Schumer: Remember the crack of a solitary gunshot. Remember the hateful and racist Confederate flags flying through the halls of our union.

Brian Lehrer: The topic of racism--

Chuck Schumer: Remember the screams of the bloody officer crushed between the onrushing mob in a doorway to the Capitol, his body trapped in the breach. Remember the three Capitol police officers who lost their lives. Remember that those rioters actually succeeded in delaying Congress from certifying the election. Remember how close our democracy came to ruin.

Brian Lehrer: Forgive me for jumping in early there as Senator Schumer was pausing between lines. The topic of racism on display in the riot did get brought up as you heard, if not emphasized, as they spent most of the time trying to establish former President Trump's individual guilt. Kai joins me now to pick up where we left off on Sunday night. How can this country have a meaningful reckoning with the anti-democratic and white nationalists parts of our political culture, not just Donald Trump? Hi, Kai. Welcome back to the weekday side.

Kai Wright: Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: First, what's your own answer to the question you were asking on Sunday night, how much the trial felt like a step toward a meaningful reckoning or not?

Kai Wright: Well, not fair. I just wanted to ask the question, not answer it. If you'll indulge me for a second, I think what's important is that we have to think about this differently because how we think about it shapes how we act. The first thing is that I think we need to understand that the fighting debate in American political life, it's not partisan and it's not ideological. I don't mean to de-emphasize those things, those are real differences.

The core debate for 150 plus years is between those of us who want to live in a plural society with a multiracial democracy and those who do not. It wasn't just an attack on our democracy, it was an attack on our very particular kind of democracy, a plural democracy. That debate has existed since Reconstructionist. Following the Civil War, we wrote the 14th, 15th, later, the 19th Amendments. They define the United States as plural.

Everybody born here is a citizen. All citizens get the same rights. Adult citizens get to vote. These became the new ideas of who we are, who the United States is. A meaningful and powerful segment of our country disagreed with those ideas then and still does today. Their partisan affiliation has shifted. It's changed over the years. Their level of direct power over government has waned sometimes, but it has never actually been truly removed from power.

We have to understand that, currently, the dominant force in the Republican Party, and this has been true since 2010 at least, the dominant force in the Republican Party are those who do not believe in a plural democracy. Then if we understand that means a couple of things about every single political conversation we have, impeachment included. One is that, among those of us who do believe in a plural democracy, there's a wide and well-meaning debate about how to achieve it, conservative to liberal, everything in between.

I strenuously argue that the necessary first step is to reverse centuries of policy that was designed to create the idea of whiteness in the first place, and then prop it up. Among us, those of us who want to live in a liberal democracy, there is that debate to be had. While we have that debate, we also have to understand that those who oppose the idea of the United States, and I think we really have to think of it that way, who oppose the idea of pluralism in the United States will do anything, up to and including destroy everything, to prevent it from coming to be.

That is what we saw on January 6th. That is what we saw on the Confederacy. That is what we have seen in violence for 150 years in between. Ultimately, it's a long answer to the question, but I think the first thing, we have to be able to do two things at once. We have to be able to debate amongst those of us who want a plural society, while understanding there are those, and they sit in positions of power, who don't want it. That piece has to be addressed.

Brian Lehrer: Now Speaker Pelosi is calling for a 9/11-style commission to look beyond Trump into the roots of the insurrection and the failures that allowed the insurrection as far as it did. Presumably, Congress will have the votes to establish such a commission. If that happens and maybe we have the ear of somebody who has Nancy Pelosi's ear, are there specific questions you would like them to try to answer about race and the interaction that connects with what you were just laying out?

Kai Wright: Again, we'll have to do two things at once.If that report, to me, if it's only about, and we talked about this on Sunday night, if it's really just about the narrow question of security at the Capitol, which is a very real question, I want to be clear, if it's just about that, then we're not getting to this kind of reckoning. If it is also about the growth of a white nationalist movement in this country, about the relationship between that white nationalist movement and people who hold power in government, starting with the former president of the United States, but including people who sit in the United States Senate today, if it gets into that, and honestly, the relationship of foreign powers to that white nationalist movement.

There's a lot of conversation about to what degree Russia has played in fomenting, and building, and encouraging that movement's growth over the course of the last four to, really, again, going back to 2010. If it's a report that gets into that and creates a record of that, and informs the law enforcement response to that, then it's useful. In this particular reckoning, I don't know that that's where it's going to be. We'll see.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some of your phone calls as we pick up where The United States of Anxiety left off on Sunday night. Moving beyond the question of whether the trial did any good in the way it focused on Donald Trump, to what should be the next steps in exposing and discredited, or prosecuting when there's a crime involved, white nationalist movements in this country that Trump enlarged or emboldened. As Kai describes, are not interested in having a pluralistic democracy in the future. (646) 435-7280. One of the things that occurs to me, and I'm curious to get your take on it.

This is part of what I brought up on Sunday night in one of the answers to your questions, is whether the focus on explicit white nationalism, like the person who flew the Confederate flag in the Capitol and that was all over television, and calling that police officer the N-word repeatedly as Jamie Raskin described in that clip, distract from a harder work that maybe had begun or taken a new leap in 2020, of trying to get to the next level of dismantling structural white supremacy that's not of the Klan or Proud Boys kind? That even, let's say well-intentioned white people, need to be reminded exists and will require tough choices?

Kai Wright: This is again where I just think we have to be able to do more than one thing at a time. You can pick your metaphor. Maybe healthcare is a good one. We know in our bodies, when we ignore a problem for decades, it gets worse. If you address cancer at stage I, it's one thing. If you wait till it's stage IV, it's another. If you test positive for diabetes and you start controlling your sugar and taking care of it, it's one thing. It's another if you wait until you now have to have limbs amputated, and now you gain weight and you've got internal kidney problems and so forth and so on. We know how these things mount.

The same thing is true with this question of pluralism in our society. We did not root out the opposition to the idea of the United States as a plural society. We've never actually addressed it, and so it has grown and metastasized. We now are in a place where we both have to be doing the immediate work of dealing with structural racism in the way that you're describing, and reshaping our society in every way. From culture, from the books we read, to the education we get, to the healthcare we receive, all of it.

Because we have ignored it, at the same time, there is in fact a growing and violent, direct, and immediate threat in this white nationalist movement. It's not just a rhetorical matter, as we have seen. They were 100 steps away from potential mass assassination of elected officials. That is a very real threat that has to be addressed. We have to do both things if we're going to get anywhere.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, the insurrection was not the only white racist incident in this country in recent times. Everybody's so focused on the insurrection right now, but the FBI had already labeled that the most rampant and salient to-be-dealt-with kind of domestic terrorism in America today. Shawnee in St. Albans, you're on WNYC with Kai Wright. Shawnee, thank you for calling in.

Shawnee: Thank you. I just want to say, I love both of your shows. I thought these proceedings is very much like a Jim Crow trial. It reminds me of what I imagine maybe the Emmett Till trial was like, or even what To Kill a Mockingbird is like watching that.

Brian Lehrer: Whoops, did we lose Shawnee's line? We did lose Shawnee's line, but she said enough there maybe, Kai, that you might even respond to that a little bit. Likening it to a Jim Crow trial, which I think she was going to say the outcome was determined. The racist lynchers were going to get off.

Kai Wright: I have to agree with her. It was hard. I really struggled to watch it. I said this on Sunday, I'm paid to do so, and I really struggled to stay tuned into it because of that. It really, for a lot of people, probably felt like just a repetition of that insult. As we also talked about on Sunday, Brian, for other people, it felt quite cathartic to watch, even if the outcome was premeditated. To be told that these things did happen and I'm not crazy. Again, I think it's another place where multiple things are true at once with this really difficult moment.

Brian Lehrer: Let me replay a clip of one of the calls from your show on Sunday night. Very powerful caller, who I know you were just helping me set up by saying some--

Kai Wright: I think Shawnee set her up, I have to say.

Brian Lehrer: With help from Shawnee from St. Albans, Queens, too. This is a caller named Renée, who described in very personal terms, how despite knowing it was not going to go the way she wanted it to go, the trial was cathartic for her.

Renée: It was extremely cathartic for me and I think for a lot of women, who have suffered some PTSD and been triggered under the five years that Trump has been here at the election and then as president because it triggered the sense of coercion and domestic abuse. As a survivor of domestic abuse, who never told anyone what was happening, and I was lucky to have survived when the man tried to kill me, I found that listening to the trial, I allowed myself to let it be the trial that never happened for me.

Though I knew what the outcome would be for the Republicans not voting, I allowed myself to say, "Yes, it happened. People believe me. It was wrong. People know it was wrong. People saw it. I have been seen."

Brian Lehrer: That was Renée in Bridgeport calling Kai's show The United States of Anxiety on Sunday night. Kai, that phone call has stayed with me ever since. What I was thinking to ask you as a follow-up two days later is that though her story is particular to her with an actual case of domestic abuse against her that she never got justice for, not even a day in court, could we take that as representative of, A, millions of women who are not literally abuse survivors, but who experienced Trump's public sector misogyny in that way, and beyond that, even a larger metaphor for a purpose the trial may have served regarding Trump's abuses of any kind, including racism, or is that a stretch?

Kai Wright: I don't think it's a stretch. It stuck with me as well. I've heard from a number of listeners it stuck with as well. It's honestly not something I had thought about until Renée said it, that this idea that so much of the Trump era has been about committing atrocities in public and saying they're not so. Even the insurrection itself. It's not just Donald Trump. There are sitting Republican senators who immediately began to make excuses for its existence, and tell you that you saw something different than you saw and experienced something different than you experienced.

I think that has been its own form of trauma. It's an overused word, but it is true. It has been its own form of wear on all of us, again, who fit in that camp of people who want to have a plural society. I do think it probably served that purpose for a lot of people. The other thing I'll say, Brian, on this question of how we deal with both things at once, how we deal with this overt white nationalism and the systemic racism that you're asking about, they do fit together.

Because part of what has happened, I believe, in the Trump era is that, and really, again, I say since going back to 2010, is the collapse of whiteness. It's the collapse of this project of whiteness, of creating this privileged cast and centering society around it. For a host of reasons, it is under greater threat in this moment than it has been in some time, and no one is managing that project. For white people who are happy about that change, we're in a debate together about how best to move forward.

For those who have been challenged by it, the Democratic Party, and other liberals, and white liberals have shied away from engaging that conversation in a meaningful way until now. That leaves space for a white nationalist like Donald Trump to step into it and create a different narrative. One of the things that I hope would come out of a truth process, like the 9/11 commission, is that as well. Is thinking about how do we tell the truth about the collapse of this idea of whiteness and what it means for our society?

Brian Lehrer: A few minutes left with Kai and a few more of your calls. Dawn in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dawn.

Dawn: Hi. Thank you both so much for the reporting and insight you give. It's selves to all of us. To Kai's point about embedded white nationalism inside of the Republican Party, one observation or example of that that I saw in, actually, the rebuttal or the Trump defense team's case meant to dismantle the whataboutism that went on, was that with Stacey Plaskett's response to that barrage of images of protestors from last year and how a large majority of those images were Black women.

She made the point that, this is her quote, "The defense counsel put a lot of videos out in their defense, playing clip after clip of Black women talking about fighting for a cause or an issue or a policy. It was not lost on me as so many of them were people of color, and women, Black women. Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children, your children." I just thought that was a really good example of the de facto racism even contained inside of the defense. It just seems so deeply embedded inside of that party.

Brian Lehrer: Dawn, thank you. Kai, any thought?

Kai Wright: I couldn't agree more. It's a striking example of exactly what we're talking about. Again, what I hope we can now do is take the next step together of like, "Yes, it's embedded in the Republican Party currently. Before that, it was embedded in the Democratic Party." The point is to start thinking beyond this partisanship frame, which is how we engage politics. I get it, but the core divide we have here is these people who do not want to exist in plural society and those who don't.

It's important because, even if for somehow, some way those in the Republican Party who decide, "Okay, we're going to abandon this strategy of courting that part of society," decide to purge themselves of this overt white nationalism, it's still going to exist. It'll go somewhere else. They were Dixiecrats before they were Republicans. We have to name them for what they are, regardless of where they exist in our politics, and figure out how to keep them out of power.

Brian Lehrer: I think David in Englewood is going to be a dissenter from some of the thoughts that have been expressed. David, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling today.

David: First of all, I just want to say one thing, and that is, you need to have some Republicans on your show. You maybe have a Republican maybe once every three months so it becomes like a democratic public relations show. Let me give you an example. You have one color come through to criticize Cuomo. If that had been Trump, you would have had 15 callers, one call. You need to go and revisit that issue because Cuomo is corrupt, he's super arrogant, but he's a liberal. He's protected by the media, including WNYC.

Brian Lehrer: David, I will say that we were inviting calls on a frame of how responsible is Cuomo for deaths in nursing homes, and most people were expressing what they saw as complex situations in nursing homes that couldn't be traced so much to the governor. When we got a call that was putting it on the governor, we put it on the air immediately. Anyway, go ahead. I want you to go on to your point about the content.

David: I'll just leave that alone. My point is, put some Republicans on your show. Now, to what this gentleman here is talking about, this is the problem with the left. You only talk to one another. You only talk to one another. For example, he pretends like every Republican loves Trump or what he did and everything, but it's ridiculous to say that everybody is for white nationalism and all this stuff.

The biggest problem Black folks face is a failing education system. The Democratic Party is controlled by the teachers' unions. If every liberal sit up and say, "Listen, if this school system has failed for five years, give them a damn voucher." Then you would have some income and equality and everything else. As long as we have these school systems--I grew up in Chicago. I went to public school from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. Went to a public university for undergrad. Why are the Catholic schools operating and all these other schools closed up? That's the real problem.

Brian Lehrer: David, let me ask you a follow-up question. I will defend the show and say that we have multi-point of view debates on issues where there are multiple legitimate point of views, and school vouchers is certainly one of those. There are people who take different positions on that. We certainly have Republicans on the show certainly when it comes to that particular issue. Are you not concerned about what appears to be a growing body of explicit white racists in this country, and those in that camp enough to consider violent extremist acts? That there should be a lot of focus on that after January 6th?

David: Yes, and let me explain. I am very concerned about that. I don't agree with anything like that. Trump should have been found guilty. It was all on TV. Those people would not have gone there, in my humble opinion, if he had not been there at that rally. That was the first mistake, for him to appear at that rally. At the same time, that's not the major thing that's facing Black folks. It's a poor education system from Chicago, to New York city, to Cleveland, to Atlanta, and not to mention crime.

Those are the issues that are facing us day-to-day. Let's face it. Under Trump, the Black unemployment rate reached a record low. Democrats never recognized that. They're, "Oh, they're messing with the numbers." A record low since 1972.

Brian Lehrer: David, thank you. We always appreciate your cause. By the way, it was nice to meet you in person when you came to The Greene Space before the pandemic. Kai, address anything that David brought up and then whatever closing thought because we're going to be out of time.

Kai Wright: Well, I guess I would repeat myself. My explicit point here is that a partisan framework is insufficient for what we are facing. It is a fact that the people who oppose pluralism on our society are the dominant force in the Republican Party currently, but they have been the dominant force in the Democratic Party in the past. They will be the dominant force somewhere unless we deal with the fact of their existence.

The way we need to start thinking about our politics is those of us, and it sounds like David is one of them, who want to have a debate about how best to have a plural democracy and the meaningful existence of people who do not share that goal, but nonetheless have power in our society because of the way we've designed our democracy to give them power. In some ways, I'd agree with David. Partisanship is not a useful framework for this.

Brian Lehrer: Kai Wright hosts The United States of Anxiety, both the podcast, which you can hear at anytime and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts because that's what they always say, and his live Sunday night call-in show in the 6:00 PM hour, Sunday nights, right after All Things Considered. The live version of The United States of Anxiety, it's only Tuesday, but do you know what you've got planned for this weekend?

Kai Wright: Before the impeachment, we'd been on a project in February thinking about Black History Month, and what purpose does it and does it not serve us still today? We will be in our next installment of that conversation.

Brian Lehrer: See around the virtual water cooler, Kai.

Kai Wright: You as well, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks a lot.

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