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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show, on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, on the 5th of July. How was your 4th, people? What were you thinking or feeling about the country, and your place in it, on its 247th birthday? Think about it, three years from now, the US will turn 250, a quarter of a millennium. That's a long time, in human history terms, to have a democracy. "A republic, if you can keep it," said founder James McHenry.

Benjamin Franklin, back then, said, "Our republic is founded on the principle that it will continue only as long as the people keep democracy alive". Are the people doing that? Is the Supreme Court doing that? What a year, what a three years, what a 21st century, so far, it's been, from September 11th to January 6th, from the election of Barack Obama to the murder of George Floyd, from the war in Iraq to the pandemic.

From gay marriage as a new constitutional right to the right not to do business for those weddings, to the Dobbs abortion ruling, ushering in the era of former constitutional rights. I wonder how many of you, as you watched fireworks in person or on TV last night, as you ate hot dogs, or watched Joey Chestnut eat hot dogs, as you flew whatever flags you fly. How many of you, from any demographic, Democrat or Republican, privileged or marginalized, or however you see yourself?

How many of you are feeling better or worse about what our country is and what it means than you did 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or when you were a little kid, first learning about the 4th of July and the stories we tell ourselves about it? Later in the show, we'll have a call in on exactly that. What were you thinking and feeling about the country yesterday? The best of it, the worst of it. The past and future of it. What flag did you fly, if you flew an actual flag? That's coming up.

As often happens on the 4th of July week, many Americans were digesting the blockbuster end-of-the-term rulings from the Supreme Court on affirmative action, student loan forgiveness, on the right not to make wedding websites for gay and lesbian couples getting hitched, on the federal courts still being able to declare if gerrymandering violates the Voting Rights Act, and on state courts still getting to review district lines and, thank goodness, stop their legislatures from appointing fake electors after presidential elections.

Remember the stolen election live from 2020? Failed 60 times in court, mostly state courts. Imagine if all the state courts were rendered mute by the Supreme Court, but that didn't happen. They protected the checks and balances, at least of their own branch. Still, the latest episode of The New Yorker politics podcast calls this the dark money Supreme Court. As we all continue to digest what just happened there, while Joey Chestnut only has to digest his 62 Nathan's hot dogs eaten in 10 minutes--

Afar cry from his record, 76, just two years ago, by the way. Maybe the wildfire smoke got to his gastrointestinal system. I don't know. With us now, for some 5th of July thoughts, Susan Glasser, staff writer, and Washington columnist for The New Yorker, former editor in chief of Foreign Policy Magazine and Politico Magazine. Co-author of the books Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James Baker III, and The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.

All written with her husband, The New York Times chief, White House correspondent, Peter Baker. Susan, always great to have you. Belated happy 4th, and welcome back to WNYC.

Susan Glasser: Brian, great to be with you today. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Let's jump right in. You think about the state of our country for a living, not just on the 4th of July. Did you have any kind of dominant thought or feeling yesterday, or did you manage to just take a break and avoid sharks at the beach?

Susan Glasser: The truth of the matter, Brian, is that given the dyspeptic mood of the country, probably, we all had the day off, maybe, and see if that hits the reset button a little bit on our politics. I'm not overly optimistic that one day off will change the trajectory we're on, but it's a pretty disgruntled moment in American politics, isn't it?

Brian Lehrer: It certainly is. I think there's a lot of alienation, almost from any group. If you want to put it in terms of the more privileged and the more marginalized, or Democrats versus Republicans, it's coming from every side, it feels like.

Susan Glasser: I think that's an important observation, that it's not as though there's a clear consensus on anything, and that includes a clear consensus on who are winners and who are losers of this particular political moment. There's a sense across such a broad array of demographic groups, political affinity groups, everybody thinks that somebody else is doing better, or that somebody else is winning, or is very focused on the threats, fears, and concerns about that happening.

Brian Lehrer: On the Supreme Court, you tweeted the other day, "The backlash court is not done yet. My question is, how far will this 6-3 majority go over the years, to roll back other established rights?" What did you mean by the backlash court?

Susan Glasser: Well, it seems to me that that is pretty firmly the era of the Supreme Court that we've moved into, where it is playing a renewed role as almost a political lightning rod in our system, as it seeks to revisit what many believe to be settled law, in a number of key precedents it has chosen in recent years, Dobbs being the most famous, and, of course, now this affirmative action ruling as well.

You're looking at a situation where the court is now in effect, reacting against Supreme Court decisions from previous errors of the Court, in what I would call a backlash way, rolling back rights is not something that we've seen as a recent history of the Supreme Court, and I think it's the foreseeable future.

Brian Lehrer: What rights do you think they could topple next, realistically?

Susan Glasser: Well, I go back to what I see is almost the template, or the wish list that both Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Alito, who are really this extreme right pole at the moment, of this current Court. Both of them, at various points in various opinions, have suggested further places they'd like to take the Court. I wouldn't rule out things like outright revisiting the historic 1964 Griswold decision, enumerating an unenumerated right to privacy.

Things like LGBTQ rights are clearly in the crosshairs of someone like Justice Thomas. Whether the rest of the court, this court, will go along with it, whether it will take a new set of justices who might even be more conservative than some of those who are on the court right now, we don't know the answers to that, but I think it would be wrong to simply say this is the high watermark of what this newly conservative backlash court would do, and anticipate that there's the potential for more rollback of civil rights in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your 5th of July thoughts and questions, welcome here. What were you thinking or feeling about our country yesterday, or the Supreme Court rulings, in particular, as you watched fireworks, or if you dodged sharks at the beach on Long Island or anything else, or any question for Susan Glasser, from The New Yorker. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You talk about rolling back privacy rights under Griswold.

That was the right to birth control, in fact, that was so limited, it was birth control for married couples, which wasn't necessarily legal in Connecticut at the time, if I'm thinking of the right decision and the Supreme Court established a right to privacy in that context, is that the Griswold decision? Do I have that one right?

Susan Glasser: Yes, I believe so. That's exactly what I was talking about. Again, I just think if you look at the principles on which some of the key decisions were made over the recent decades, you're looking at a situation where there is a radical right pole of this current Supreme Court. It's not maybe necessarily yet a majority that agrees with these things. Look, it's also already a sign of how far the center shifted, in effect, to the right, on the Supreme Court. Then, who are the two people now, basically in the middle?

Most of the time, it's actually Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. If you look at these very interesting end-of-term analyses done in The New York Times and elsewhere, what you see very clearly is that both of those Justices, who are very conservative-- Nobody would say that John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh are anything like, not only liberals or progressives, but even, really, centrists. They're very conservative judges, and yet, they have become the new center of this much more conservative Supreme Court.

Brian Lehrer: The center has moved to the right. You're a political reporter, obviously, not a legal scholar, but on the wedding website ruling, if I was a Christian wedding website designer and decided that making a website for a Jewish couple would be to publish a theology I didn't believe in, would that be okay now too?

Susan Glasser: I clearly would not presume to speak for the Supreme Court or any of the other courts at this moment, because I think some core principles are now in flux. I was struck in that decision, that while it came from the right, there was an immediate understanding, from Progressives and others, that free speech as a legal argument, with this court, could quickly go both ways.

Think about some of the things that are happening at the state level in Florida, or in other conservative states, where you have laws that appear to outright restrict speech. I think it's a two-edged sword right now, and I'll be very interested to see what the emerging contours of this new Supreme Court jurisprudence, where they end up, because in recent years, as you know, Conservatives have been the ones using the tool of free speech, related litigation to advance their ideology.

Yet, they have now left themselves open to a certain set of arguments that Progressives and others may now use against them. I think that this is going to be an enduring battleground, not only in our politics, but in our legal politics.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. I have seen the shoe on the other foot argument, in support of that Supreme Court decision, even in a narrow sense, like-- How about a progressive wedding website designer asked to publish a swastika, or a MAGA symbol, for a couple who wants to hire them? Personally, I think someone's God-given sexual orientation is not the same as hate speech, or politics seen as hateful, but that's an argument.

Is the decision possibly good for the Progressive free speech, as well as the Conservative free speech movement? Are you suggesting that things like Governor Ron DeSantis's ban on certain identity studies, majors, or teaching critical race theory, what they call critical race theory, usually inaccurately, or ban on teachers calling students by their preferred gender pronouns, that those could wind up at the Supreme Court, on the side of free speech?

Susan Glasser: Why not? Absolutely, Brian, why not? Again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know how strong those cases would be in front of these justices. Perhaps those who specialize in Supreme Court litigation would be wary of bringing them, but I have to say that the broad brush principles now are in conflict. It seems to me that Conservatives, there's two strands to modern conservatism, and those are in conflict. You have part of them that is framed in absolutist free speech terms.

Including even, in recent years, getting the Supreme Court to go along with the idea that corporations have free speech for the purposes of elections. That was the basis on which John Roberts and others decided to get rid of our campaign finance restrictions, on the basis of free speech. There's one strand there, but then there's a conflicting impulse, which is what you might call the earlier conservative impulse to restrict behavior, to regulate very strongly and into aspects of people's personal lives.

Those impulses, it seems to me, come into conflict at a certain point, in this free speech-related litigation. I'll be interested to see which strand of conservatism comes out dominant. The strand that says, "I want to tell you what you're allowed to do in school, down to the level of restricting the kinds of history you can teach, the kinds of ways in which you can talk to children about things like sexuality, race history, and other uncomfortable topics," versus the absolutist view of free speech that led to the Supreme Court decision just last week, that led to years of free speech-related litigation.

I just think those things are intention and potentially in outright conflict with each other.

Brian Lehrer: For good measure, or for bad, a federal court ruled yesterday, on the 4th of July-- Who was working in the federal court system on the 4th of July? Somebody was. That under the First Amendment's free speech clause, the government may not communicate with tech companies, like Facebook and Twitter-- Listeners, some of you have not probably heard this yet, that the government may not communicate with tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, to ask them to manage disinformation, like they did on COVID vaccines, and a lot of fake election narratives.

That lawsuit, also brought by Conservatives, which has won in court for now. It's let the disinformation fly as protected by the First Amendment, said the Trump-appointed judge, around the same time as Joey Chestnut was downing his dogs. Have you gotten your mind around that one yet?

Susan Glasser: I think that is a really fascinating case. We'll see what happens. To be clear, it's an injunction. It's not yet a ruling in the case itself, but the presumption is that there's a strong likelihood that the judge, who is the federal district judge, will rule in favor of this Republican state attorneys general who brought the litigation. Frankly, some of the language is just outright eye-popping.

Alleging that there is literally a conspiracy between the federal government and these tech companies, to somehow censor COVID misinformation and other misinformation online. There could be an appeals court that blocks this. It could go even higher, up to the Supreme Court, but for now, what it is, is a preliminary injunction that stands to potentially let much more disinformation flow, as a result of this.

I think, again, you're looking at these conflicting impulses in modern conservatism right now. These free speech arguments have worked very effectively with them, in the federal courts, at the same time, there's got to be certain limits, one can imagine. It does seem like this is a really extraordinary ruling. I have to underscore that, it seemed to verge some of the language into outright conspiracy theorism.

Brian Lehrer: With Susan Glasser, Washington columnist for The New Yorker, Matt, in Nyack, has a thought about the state of our democracy, on the 4th and 5th of July. Hi, Matt, you're on WNYC.

Matt: Hello, Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller.

Brian Lehrer: Glad you're on.

Matt: I grew up in a pretty radical left environment. It's ironic to me, that what they call radical left today is nothing like it. It seems very centrist to me. I believed in the ethic, the idea, or the trope that if voting could change the system, it would be illegal. That belief was broken, to some degree, with Obama's election. I found that the election of Donald Trump, as much of a disaster as it was, was also further evidence that democracy is alive and well in this country.

It was amazing to see who was opposed by all the establishment, the Republican, the Democrat, every entrenched interest in our country was against the rise of Trump. As much as I despise his politics, it, I think, was evidence that democracy is still a thing here.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, thank you. Thank you very much. What do you think, Susan? That's an interesting take.

Susan Glasser: It is an interesting take. Look, one-- I don't know if it's a contradiction, but a point to make, of course, is that Donald Trump was a minoritarian president. He showed, in fact, that the system was not based on a pure kind of democracy, but the Electoral College, and the way that demographics and politics work in this country, with states, means that Trump was able to win election while not ever having support from a majority of the country, at any moment in his entire four-year presidency.

He's the first and only president for whom that's the case, since the rise of modern polling. He's actually-- I don't know if you would define that as democracy in a pure sense, to have someone who was never supported by a majority of the country ruling that country for four years. The other thing that I think is an enduring takeaway from Trump's extraordinary rise to power, it's not only that he was opposed in his rise, by virtually every entrenched interest in the country, but the relative impotence of key institutions in our society.

Not just impotence, but the ineffectiveness or inability of these institutions to function as their founders imagine them to do so. For example, he was twice impeached, twice acquitted, if anything, underscored the impossibility of impeachment, really, as a tool of constraint for modern presidents. Why? The founders envisioned ultimately that the competing branches of our government, that Congress, in effect, would define its interests potentially as differently from that of the executive branch.

What they didn't envision is parties, political parties, and partisan concerns, Trump institutional concerns. That's really the world that we live in right now. I see Trump as also a story about the ineffectiveness or the hollowing out of institutions. The other institution, of course, that is really hollowed out, is the Republican Party. It's true that the Republican Party [unintelligible 00:20:50] did not support Donald Trump, but they also fell into line and refused to stop him.

They could have stopped him. They could have passed a resolution that said that the Republicans cannot nominate someone who has a history of bankruptcies, who has a history of untruthfulness. They chose to go ahead with it. I'm not sure how positive of a story it is, but I appreciate the effort to look for something longer-term, in this story of Donald Trump.

Brian Lehrer: To the point you were just making, I think it indicates that it's not just that the Republican [unintelligible 00:21:29], as you call them, were afraid of Donald Trump. They were afraid of Donald Trump because while Trump may have been a minoritarian president, as you called him, he never won the popular vote, in either of his two presidential elections. He is overwhelmingly popular in the Republican base. That is, in a certain way, who Republican America is, even if the former leaders of the Republican Party thought that a lot of that was disgusting.

Susan Glasser: That's right. Look, everyone, going all the way back to the beginning of American democracy, anticipated and understood the power and the potential power of demagoguery and populism in our system. There are essays about this in the Federalist Papers. This has happened in democracies going all the way back to ancient Greece. It's not that people didn't anticipate the potential rise of a demagogue, but that the countervailing power of other institutions would be there to constrain and check a potential rogue actor in the presidency.

That did not fully happen. I would say if it was a stress test for the institutions of American democracy, I think some very serious weaknesses and fissures were revealed.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call, and see what Manuel, in Brooklyn, has to say. Hi, Manuel. You're on WNYC, with Susan Glasser, from The New Yorker. Hi, there.

Manuel: My question is regarding a long history of the United States, since 1965, since the passing of the Voting Act on Johnson, and on immigration, which was good, however, the country, from then, on began to decline. Then came Nixon, and of course, Spiro Agnew, who believed that the silent majority, which means most of the white people in this country were not speaking their mind. Now, let's jump to the new world, on Trump. Trump is a demagogue. No doubt, it's dangerous.

Be honest with you, I voted for him because I saw the country was falling apart. I said, "Maybe we need a change," but now Trump is out, and now there's no one there that can really run the country. because the other guy, DeSantis, in Florida, I don't know, he has so many crazy ideas, that I don't trust him. Then, of course, we have Mr. Biden, who has been around politics since he was a Congressman, which didn't do much for us over the years. Unfortunately, he's 80 years of age.

I don't think he can run the country, and we don't have a real democratic candidate who can say, "Look, we have to change, we have to have a vision the way Abraham Lincoln could have, and the way LBJ had." I don't know where we're heading here, but this is not a good, fair place to be. Trump will not be here. Trump-- It's over for him, but he may divide the country, because a lot of people with Trump don't realize who Trump really is. I'm in New York. I've been watching Trump for the last 40 years. What can I say?

Brian Lehrer: Manuel, let me follow up on one thing that you said. Why did you say that you think Biden can't run the country? He's running the country, and a lot of stuff is done, whether you like it or not, no?

Manuel: Look what he did in Afghanistan, the way he got out of there, 13 Americans died. Look what he's done with the migrant issue. He is not able to control the borders. I understand these poor people who come from Mexico and Guatemala, they want to be here, but he is not able to control that. He just ignores it. Now, we have, in New York City, over 100,000 migrants, the mayor of the city can't even know what to do with them. Where's the politics to provide for the American people?

Look, everybody wants to be in the United States. If we open the doors, everyone in the world would be here, but we know we cannot do that. We have to control our borders. We have to control who come. By the way, they don't only come from the south of the border, they come by airplanes every day, because I live in Brooklyn, and I know what kind of population is here now. They come from everywhere. It's not only the people from--

Brian Lehrer: New York is--

Manuel: Am I making sense?

Brian Lehrer: You're making your points. Your points are clear, Manuel. Thank you. Please do call us again. Susan, what were you thinking there?

Susan Glasser: Look, I think this dynamic now is very well established, which is that the public says that it's extremely disillusioned, and it is, with political polarization and the resulting gridlock that occurs, and yet, they vote for it again and again and again. We have a divided Congress, with some Republican control, some Democratic control, a Democrat, right now, in the White House. In that situation, it's very hard to do things like sweeping immigration reform which was been attempted and failed in recent years.

You have this dynamic in which the public essentially is an agent of its own disaffection. You also see this dynamic, unfortunately, which is understandable, but part of the loop that we're trapped in, which is that people don't like polarization. They say they don't want it. They say they want national consensus, and then they blame the other side, whoever the other side is, for the continuation of the polarization. That, I think, is a situation we find ourselves in, a broad swath of the American public.

What's one thing they agree upon right now, they're not happy if you ask them in surveys about the prospect of a Joe Biden/Donald Trump rematch in 2024. Yet, that is exactly the scenario that we're hurling towards, because partisans in both parties continue to favor their party standard bearer, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and not produce different options. We're locked in this cycle.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Susan Glasser and more of your calls, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text to that phone number. We'll watch our text messages go by and read some if they're salient, 212-433-9692. We're also going to ask Susan, heads up, this question will be coming, for Susan's take as a political reporter on the political implications of the conservative Supreme Court decisions from last week. Maybe it will have a 2024 electoral backlash of its own. We'll find out. Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. If you're just joining us once again, happy belated 4th of July, happy 5th of July. We're taking stock of our country in this segment. We'll do a separate call-in later in the show, specifically on what you were thinking as you watched the fireworks last night, on television or in person, or as you were at your picnics or barbecues, at the beach, or wherever you were. If you were thinking about the country, what's the best, what's the worst?

Are we better off as a democracy than we were five years ago, 10 years ago? How about those messages you received about the 4th of July when you were a little kid in school, or maybe even from your family? How do they hold up today, in this age of disillusionment? Are there still things we can love about America, even as, from so many different political corners, people are alienated and polarized? I think Susan called it-- Was it dyspeptic, that you described the country as, before?

Our guest, Susan Glasser, Washington columnist for The New Yorker, and with you, right now, on these things, 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692. Here's a clip of President Biden from late last week, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action based on race and college admissions.

President Joe Biden: Today, I'm directing the Department of Education to analyze what practices help build a more inclusive and diverse student body, and what practices hold that back. Practices like legacy admissions and other systems expand privilege instead of opportunity.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to do a separate segment later in the week, on exactly what the president was referring there, referring to the other ways that people from, particularly, Black racial minorities in this country, who've been obviously discriminated against officially, and in so many ways, officially and unofficially, for so long, how that marginalization can be taken into account in college admissions.

We're going to talk about alternatives that exist even within the context of the new Supreme Court ruling coming up as this week goes on. Susan, for you, as a political reporter, did the Supreme Court last Thursday and Friday just help Democrats in the 2024 elections by mobilizing multiple parts of their base? We remember what happened in the 2022 midterms, after the Dobbs decision did away with the right to an abortion.

Now we have Black voters, young adult voters with the student loans, LGBTQ voters with the wedding website decision, maybe more immobilized than they were a week ago.

Susan Glasser: Yes, Brian. I think Democrats certainly think that's the case. It's interesting, I think they're grouping it under this broad idea that not only, as Biden said, is not normal, the Supreme Court, but that it is part of a general argument that you're going to see from Joe Biden running for reelection, that he is running against a MAGA extremism writ large, and that it's an assault on settled principles of rights in this country that Trump and his followers represent extreme attacks on things like the sanctity of the election, which they tried to overturn in 2020.

I think that's the general heading that it's going to fall under, is that there's extremist radical, even right-wing elements in the society that Democrats are running to protect you from in 2024. I do anticipate that being a campaign theme, I would point out that the affirmative action is a little bit different as a case, in terms of the politics of it, than, say, the abortion rights. Abortion rights, a year after Dobbs, are more supported by more Americans than previously in their history, according to most surveys.

You're looking at, well, more than two-thirds of Americans, one year later, who support reproductive rights and are not in favor of that decision. That has not been the case, historically, with affirmative action, which has been much less popular, even with Democrats, overall. It's not necessarily a straightforward one-to-one, like the Supreme Court threw out, affirmative action, and that's going to bring people to the polls.

I think as part of this broader argument that a group of settled rights and protections are under assault by a radicalized supreme court, that has a political resonance, and you're definitely going to see that as a part of the 2024 narrative from Democrats.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the text messages coming in, a listener writes, "The Republican Party is not torn between two factions, free speech versus restriction of speech. They are clearly in favor of restricting speech that they don't like." Another writer chimes in, "Brian, you let the caller Manuel off the hook. Immigration is not controlled, not because of Biden, but because Congress chooses not to do their job."

Another listener writes, "Regarding the gay couple free speech ruling, how often do Supreme Court cases revolve around a hypothetical?" We will let that stand as a rhetorical question. There was no gay wedding website that the plaintiff there was asked to make. It was hypothetical, just in case I'm ever asked to do something like that. Another listener writes, "I felt completely null on the 4th of July, as a member of the dying community and politically far left, I'm feeling like the United States has completely spun out of control."

Another listener with a question, it says, "Question for Susan. What do you think about our aging representatives in general, how do they keep getting elected for so long? What does it say about our democracy?"

Susan Glasser: [laughs] Big questions, Brian, to end on. Look, I would say, just to your broader framing today, on the day after the 4th, I think it's a really important question to ask people, what, in a big-picture sense, does the US mean to them, at this moment in time? I do think that's part of what's powering this feeling of discomfort and dis-ease right now, across our politics, is sharply clashing competing visions of what the country means to people, and why our politics is the way that it is.

I was thinking of my father yesterday, for whom the 4th of July, I have to say, was literally his favorite holiday. It was a patriotism of a different era. He just passed away six months ago. He really loved the 4th of July. There was nothing he liked more than fireworks and Shawn Phillips, he was a lifelong Democrat, but he was a Democrat, I would say, from a different era.

I don't know, I was thinking yesterday, how many people who had the exact same political beliefs as my dad would also have this feeling about the 4th of July of a younger generation. I don't know the answer to it. I suspect far, far fewer.

Brian Lehrer: One more call before we run out of time. Deborah, in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Deborah.

Deborah: Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I was at a barbecue yesterday, with a number of people who were from the former Soviet Republics. For all of the criticisms that we're hearing today, and that my family typically makes of what's going on in government and politics, they reminded me of all of the basic things we should be grateful for. I guess with the fall of [unintelligible 00:36:00] these people for 10 years didn't have elevator service in their buildings. They had to walk four miles to get to school.

Some of them had no electricity for long periods of time, without explanation. There was unemployment throughout their families, suddenly. All they could think of was how to have a better life. They figured out how to get here, and they are doing very well. They definitely are taking advantage of the social mobility that our country is built on. We all just looked at each other, the people who are homegrown Americans, and said, "We do have a lot to be grateful for." I just wanted to share that.

Brian Lehrer: Deborah, thank you very much. Social mobility, more for some than for others. Susan, do you want to give us a last thought, going out the door, listening to Deborah?

Susan Glasser: Yes. Deborah, thank you so much for that. I think that there was never, for me, as clear a sense of the opportunities and incredible advantages of holding that blue passport and being a citizen of the United States than the four years that I spent as the Moscow [unintelligible 00:37:12] for The Washington Post, 20 years ago, at the beginning of Vladimir Putin's tenure. It's really remarkable.

In a way, it speaks to the incredible dominance of the US, that we tend to be very inward-looking and hyper-entitled as a country, and not thinking about why it is that people are so desperate to come across our borders and why it is that we have had these extraordinary advantages in the world. I spent four years in parts of the former Soviet Union, and I think you might come away with a renewed appreciation for what some of those freedoms mean, and why it is that so many people are so eager to come here to the United States.

I really appreciate that, and it really squares with my own experience of working, living, and trying to understand different countries with different histories and different legacies overseas, because we take a lot of things for granted here, [laughs] that maybe we shouldn't take for granted. Frankly, with our dysfunction in our politics, I think it's become a lot clearer to others that these are rights that we don't necessarily have forever, and that each generation has to renew their own commitment to them.

Brian Lehrer: Susan Glasser, staff writer in Washington, columnist for The New Yorker, and co-author of the books, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and The End of Revolution, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, and The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021. Susan, thank you so much.

Susan Glasser: Thanks again, Brian.

 

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