The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy - Hardcover

Giridharadas, Anand

 
9780593318997: The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593318994 ISBN 13: 9780593318997
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy—from disinformation fighters to a leader of Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more—by the best-selling author of Winners Take All and award-winning former New York Times columnist

“Anand Giridharadas shows the way we get real progressive change in America—by refusing to write others off, building more welcoming movements, and rededicating ourselves to the work of changing minds.” —Robert B. Reich, best-selling author of The System

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Americans increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over. Debates are framed in moralistic terms, with enemies battling the righteous. Movements for justice build barriers to entry, instead of on-ramps. Political parties focus on mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical. And leaders who seek to forge coalitions are labeled sellouts.

In The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. We meet a leader of Black Lives Matter; a trailblazer in the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and, hovering menacingly offstage, Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans’ fatalism about one another.

As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS is the author of the international best-seller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Von der hinteren Coverseite

An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy―from disinformation fighters to a leader of Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more―by the best-selling author of Winners Take All and award-winning former New York Times columnist

“Anand Giridharadas shows the way we get real progressive change in America―by refusing to write others off, building more welcoming movements, and rededicating ourselves to the work of changing minds.” ―Robert B. Reich, best-selling author of The System

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Americans increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over. Debates are framed in moralistic terms, with enemies battling the righteous. Movements for justice build barriers to entry, instead of on-ramps. Political parties focus on mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical. And leaders who seek to forge coalitions are labeled sellouts.

In The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. We meet a leader of Black Lives Matter; a trailblazer in the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and, hovering menacingly offstage, Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans’ fatalism about one another.

As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.

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1

“The Waking Among the Woke”

I

Linda Sarsour

So the story,” the activist Linda Sarsour began, “is an old lady from Hawaii, a retired lawyer, posted, ‘I think we need to march on Washington.’ ”

It was the evening of November 8, 2016, and Donald Trump was emerging as the president-­elect of the United States. Millions were in the first hours of a shock that would last for days. Among the anguished was Teresa Shook, the retired lawyer in Hawaii, who suggested the idea of a march on Washington, to protest the incoming president and all he represented, and went to bed. Sarsour, who lives on the other side of the country, in Brooklyn, continued the story of how she came to be associated with Shook’s proposal for a march: “She wakes up viral. She’s a little old lady; she probably gets six likes usually. All of a sudden she wakes up, it’s like . . .” Shook had gotten ten thousand RSVPs. In parallel, a woman named Bob Bland, a fashion designer, had posted a similar idea. “Somebody connected the two,” Sarsour told me, “and said, ‘Why are two white ladies doing two separate things? Why don’t you make this together?’ And so they did. And the event was called Million Women’s March originally.”

It was shortly thereafter that Sarsour saw the post about the now-­merged event and, with some incredulity, the name. Her reflex was, “I’m not going.”

Sarsour might have seemed like a natural customer for the march. As a progressive activist who works on immigrant rights, criminal justice, racial justice, corporate power, labor policy, and other issues, she has spent much of her life marching. As a Palestinian American, a feminist, and a Muslim, she had a special loathing of Trump, who had spent his campaign degrading people like her. If the worst visions of his presidency were to come to pass, she knew the diverse, heavily immigrant communities she organized in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn would be among the first to hear knocks and watch loved ones whisked into unmarked vans.

But Sarsour, like many on the activist left, didn’t necessarily view her enemy’s enemy as her friend. She didn’t assume that any formation of women organizing a march to resist Trump were her people, aligned with her values and goals, just because of their common fear. She had been around long enough to know that when the undocumented immigrants, women of color, poor people, and other marginalized groups she represented entered into coalition with other groups, especially those with more power, they could be silenced and shut out, told to focus on what the more powerful groups deemed important and to defer their own most pressing concerns. History overflows with cautionary tales. Black women agitated for women’s suffrage, only to see white women secure the vote for themselves with the Nineteenth Amendment and leave Black women out. Sarsour’s fellow progressives routinely answered the plea to vote for moderate Democrats (“blue no matter who!”), only to see their concerns sidelined after the inaugural.

When Sarsour looked at the post for the proposed march, her in­stinct spoke to her plainly: stay away. The first tell was the name, the Million Women’s March, which all but appropriated a protest with a similar name by legions of Black women in Philadelphia two decades earlier. That suggested to Sarsour that this upcoming march didn’t merely happen to be convened by “two white ladies,” as she put it, but was anchored in a kind of white women’s feminism that Sarsour had learned to recognize and guard against: a kind of feminism that was big on issues like reproductive rights and equal pay but could be considerably quieter about the needs of women in the marginalized communities Sarsour organized—­for workers’ rights relative to corporations, for protection against the immigration authorities and the police, for economic redistribution, for environmental justice.

Sarsour might have been loath to join what she viewed as a white feminists’ march under any circumstances, but Trump’s election had intensified the feeling. Like many, she was infuriated by the recent disclosure that 53 percent of white women had voted for Trump—­in spite of the sexual assault allegations, in spite of the Access Hollywood tape, in spite of his sexist bullying. (The number came from exit polls, and it was later said by some analysts to have been just under half rather than slightly over. But 53 was everywhere at that moment and a source of anger.) “White women sold out their fellow women, their country, and themselves last night,” the writer L. V. Anderson declared. And that 53 number strengthened Sarsour’s inclination to keep away from the march, even if its organizers were from the other 47 percent. “You’re catching me forty-­eight to seventy-­two hours after this election,” she told me. “I’m not really fond of the women who voted for Donald Trump right now. I’m not feeling like I have any trust, particularly in white women.”

The 53 percent statistic reinforced Sarsour’s skepticism of the kind of coalition building that comes at a severe cost. What was the point of allying with white women—­who suffered from sexism but couldn’t help but benefit from white domination—­and abiding the sidelining of one’s particular needs, if some of those white women were inevitably going to sell you out at the first available chance? “I said, ‘Do I have the heart for it, really?’ Because I don’t organize white people,” Sarsour said. “Before the Women’s March, this was the community that I organized with: North African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and, beyond that, the immigrant rights movement, predominantly Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and then, beyond that, Black people. I never organized white people.”

Among the great projects of Sarsour’s life was the dismantling of white supremacy. But she shared with many in her activist circles a fatalism about individual white people changing as part of that broader transformation. It was almost to be assumed that white people would ultimately side with their own. You didn’t fight supremacy by appealing to white hearts and minds. You fought it by organizing your own communities of color, amassing real political power, and changing the rules and structures that upheld systems of white domination. “My mission,” Sarsour told me one day, sitting in her small office at the Arab American Association of New York in Sunset Park, “is I want to build power among people of color, knowing that we are eventually going to be the majority and we’ve got to start building our power. I don’t want to just be the majority without power; I got to be the majority with power.” That guided the work she did bringing together communities in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge that didn’t have much interaction but had common concerns. It informed her pleading with voters of color to be more than reliable Democratic voters, to demand a Democratic Party that pushed for real, structural change and answered their unique needs. And when Sarsour did this work, when she sought to build power for her people, what she often found herself up against was white people refusing to change the oppressive systems that kept them in power.

So Sarsour was wary of the march. But that didn’t stop her from doing a bit of constructive prodding. Looking at the event page one day, she noticed that the white women of whom she had been...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593318994
ISBN 13 
9780593318997
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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