Street Roots • June 8-14, 2018
KENDZIOR, from page 4
political climate of the U.S. We are still the
bellwether state, in the worst possible way.”
So I asked her, what do we have to learn
from Missouri right now?
Sarah Kendzior: Historically, Missouri
tends to be ahead of the curve. You see all
these innovators in American life that came
out of Missouri, like Mark Twain, or Chuck
Berry or Walt Disney - the sort of people
who kind of invented the idea of, or this
fantasy of, what America was.
It also was the center of industry. And St.
Louis was one of the first cities to have a
huge decline in the mid-century when you
saw the problems of poverty and racial
strife. We’re located between East and West,
between North and South. The issues
between white and black populations really
came to a head in regions where we lived.
So you saw white flight, you had segregated
housing, you saw a rise in violence. All the
bad trends that the U.S. has been dealing
with for the last 50 or so years hit Missouri
and St. Louis first.
I think it’s continuing now, and one of the
worst trends we have nationally is our
corrupt officials behaving with total
impunity with no regard for the will of the
legislature, no desire to serve the public, no
interest in the public welfare. Greitens
really embodied that. There had been calls
for his impeachment since January, when
these revelations about him came out. In a
rare moment for Missouri there was a
bipartisan consensus that he was so
abhorrent, and so awful for so many
different violations - he was charged with
multiple felonies - that he had to go. And
he just stayed there!
That’s exactly how I think Trump would
behave if Trump were impeached by the
GOP. It’s hard for me to imagine the GOP
actually getting their shit together and
having the guts to do that, but if they did, I
think he would just refuse to leave. And that
impunity, that total disregard for
consequences or accountability, is very
upsetting to see and you’re certainly seeing
it play out in Missouri in that it took so long
for Greitens to leave.
J o a n n e Zuhl: What compelled people to
support Trump? D id people struggling in
middle America really look at Trump and
think, “Yeah, that guy gets me?”
S.K.: This isn’t a monolithic group of
people. People voted for Trump for a variety
of reasons. One thing that is monolithic is
race, in almost everyone who voted for him
is white. I think you would basically need to
be white in order to overlook all of those
attacks on racial and ethnic minorities and
feel that you are going to be protected from
them.
That said, I did encounter voters who
really fell for his kind of economic talk. They
felt desperate, they felt angry, they felt
betrayed, and Trump is very good at tapping
into others’ pain. I don’t think he is capable
of empathy or compassion for other people,
but I think he has vulture-like instincts for
preying on people’s pain and exploiting it
and using it. You see demagogues across
history who have been very effective at this.
I’ll never forget, (Trump) once said the
unemployment rate was 40 percent. All the
pundits were laughing about it, like, “oh my
Conversation
God! Who would believe such a ridiculous
claim.”
And I kept thinking, that is exactly how it
feels. It feels like unemployment is 40
percent. Because almost everyone I know is
underemployed, working a part-time job, or
has no benefits, or has really low wages or
hasn’t had a raise in a decade. They’re
constantly on the edge of losing everything
they have or losing their home. And that
feeling is real.
So he told a lie that felt true, and that can
be effective. That resonated with a lot of
people because they felt like their concerns
weren’t being heard. And I think if he hadn’t
been such a massive bigot and xenophobe,
this approach of talking about the economy
that way might have also been effective with
low-wage workers who are not white. But of
course, (non-white voters) were listening to
him denigrate Mexicans, and knew his
lifetime of denigrating black people. They
saw through it and saw him as a con man,
whereas a lot of white people fell for it.
In Missouri, there has been a lot of
outcry, even from Republicans, about his
policies. Still, there’s kind of a sense of
community in confronting this, in saying,
“Wow. We were conned, yet again. We’re
going to be in for a worse ride, yet again,
and we brought this on ourselves by voting
for him.” And I hope that people just admit
that this is a lifelong con man, and when you
feel vulnerable it is easy to be exploited.
And the point should be how do we solve
this? How do we make people’s lives fairer,
and turn this around? I think a key step in
that is getting rid of Donald Trump.
J.Z.: B u t it feels like things are getting even
more divided. We can’t rubber-band our way
back to where we were before. What are we
going to be like as an electorate, or democracy,
in the next elections?
S.K.: The majority of my adult life,
America, in my mind, has been in decline.
We’ve had two wars, one of which was
fought on completely false pretenses. We’ve
had a recession that never ended. We’ve had
all these very dramatic changes with social
media and how we can communicate, which
I think has been handled really badly,
leading to a mob mentality.
I don’t think we’ll ever be the same. I
think the goal should be to be better than
what we are, and to try to confront the
problems at hand rather than having
nostalgia for what came before.
What I’ve seen now is less assertive.
There is hyper-partisanship for those who
claim allegiance to a political party. That has
really intensified under Trump where you
have this tribalism and this blind loyalty,
especially on the Republican side, for
authority. But I think people in general are
mostly disillusioned. They’re scared. Most
people in the U.S. don’t belong to a political
party. Most people are independent. About
half of the country didn’t vote. So you’ve got
a lot of people who are fed up across the
board.
We’ve had these record protests, the
women’s marches, the anti-gun violence
marches, the teacher marches. We’ve had all
these mass movements of people who just
said, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to stand
up for myself. I’m going to stand up for
other people.” And that can lead to positive
change.
You see people confronting these
Page
problems in a very direct way and mobilizing
others to do so.
But then you have a power structure that
is much more oppressive than the ones
we’ve had before. One that has no regard for
the Constitution, for freedom of speech, for
freedom of assembly. One that’s actively
attacking the courts and our constitutional
principles. That makes for a difficult
situation.
I think the kind of surveillance effect of
social media is really damaging because if
people have a more ambivalent attitude or
they want to have a good faith argument, it’s
really hard to do when you have an
audience. And I see that on Twitter all the
time, where someone comes in with a
genuine question and they get battered
down. Or people will take Twitter as an
opportunity to humiliate others. And all that
is very negative, and it’s contributing to a
bad climate, but it’s not entirely
representative to what’s happening on the
ground.
J.Z.: You studied kleptocratic and
authoritarian countries. What are the lessons
for America today?
S.K.: I started out studying the
authoritarian states of the former Soviet
Union, especially in Central Asia. And the
difference between those countries and us
is that they’ve never had a democratic
tradition. It’s not to say there aren’t people
there who seek freedom, who seek justice.
You definitely hear a lot of demands
couched in those terms, but there’s never
been a government that’s given them that.
So their expectations are different.
We have a set of expectations, we have a
constitution. We’re used to basic rights,
although those rights are unequally
distributed. And we have had authoritarian
policies throughout our history - the very
obvious being slavery, the genocide of
Native Americans, Jim Crow laws - so we
were never immune to this. But it’s kind of
hard to compare because of those
expectations.
. I think better examples might be the
move toward authoritarianism in
kleptocratic governments in Europe,
particularly Hungary, Poland, Turkey -
countries which did have a democracy.
In the case of the former Warsaw Pact
countries, they had come out of being
dominated by the Soviet Union and being
deprived of freedom. They became
democracies and those democracies eroded.
There are a lot of things to look for, and I
document in this book the institutional
weaknesses: weaknesses in our economy, in
social trust, in our political system. Trusting
different parties to actually represent you
and acknowledge problems on the ground.
When that anger burns for such a long time,
it just takes a demagogue to come in and
exploit it.
Another thing that characterizes this era
is digital media. There’s a lot to learn about
propaganda when you look at Trump, and a
lot of people have rightfully brought up Nazi
Germany and its propaganda apparatus as
an example. But there has never been a
digital media infrastructure and this ability
to impersonate people - hordes of
anonymous bots that stand in for
conventional wisdom but don’t actually
See KENDZIOR, page 7