Anand Giridharadas: Expanding empathy and breaking political binaries (Ep400)
“This kind of ‘win-win’ social change is dangerous not just because it obscures how little is changing, but also because plutocrats use this fake change as a smokescreen to distract us from their continued plunder.”
For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridharadas, a writer and journalist whose books include The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, Anand has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink.
Spanning themes of philanthropy, political change, and social media, Anand unsettles the assumptions of “win-win” social change. How does the rise of elite philanthropy and plutocratic “do-gooding” coincide with the hoarding of power? We look at how in an age of bifurcated American politics, many people fighting for social change face burnout or have given up. Accordingly, Anand calls for the need to stay with the art of persuasion and simultaneous calling-in and calling-out—digging deeper into the political spectrum rather than simplifying people’s complex humanity into binaries.
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Additional resources:
Learn more about Anand Giridharadas
Learn more from Anand’s interview on The Daily Show
Learn more about the referenced author V.S. Naipaul
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Musical feature: Drop The Stone by Oropendola
Episode-inspired artwork by Tinuke Illustration
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Anand Giridhardas: I am first and foremost a journalist and a writer. I think the turning points, or the formative moments, to get to some of those topics was not necessarily having some preconceived agenda about those topics, but trying to bear witness to the world that we're in. I think if I had written at different times and different places and different scenarios, it might have been a whole different set of topics that animated me. But I think at the moment, certainly thinking about my writing in America over the last ten years, because I started as a foreign correspondent in India, where I wrote about a different, but related, set of issues.
Certainly in America, since I came back from being a foreign correspondent in 2009, the dominant story, the inescapable story, has been the bifurcation of American life into not just haves and have-nots, or a tale of two cities, but a very small class of plutocrats who privately owned the United States or try to, and a kind of war on regular people whose consequences we live with every day.
I think that erosion of the commons, of the common good, of what we kind of nostalgically call the American dream, which is something that really kind of only exists in some parts of Europe, that erosion is related to just the manifest cruelties of American life, declining life expectancy, the kind of precarity that the pandemic made even worse, mental health and other material crises in our cities right now, the rise of Trumpism and decay of democracy. So that has been my subject in a way because as I have reported on this country, it just is the reality that stared me in the face again and again and again.
Kamea Chayne: And this is about this country primarily, but as we know, the world is so interconnected these days that as a lot of these people try to own the United States, that also has grave impacts across the entire globe.
In our troubled times, a lot of people still look up to philanthropic giving as these generous gifts from those at the very top help address some of the issues different communities face. And I know personally, my dad will often use the world's billionaires as model examples for me. Like, if you want to change the world and maximize your impact, then that should be your goal, because once you've amassed that much power and wealth, then you can have a much bigger impact. But there's then cause and effect.
Anand Giridhardas: Are you saying that he doesn't think podcasting is the way to do that?
Kamea Chayne: Well, he definitely will always say that I can do more, and I should set my goal as making as much money as possible, so then I can use that money as a power to have the greatest impact in the world. But this all calls into question, who gets to decide in what direction our world changes or progresses towards, and how does being at the top of the socioeconomic ladder even change people's interests and incentives and compromise their values, or change or limit their visions of change?
These are all questions that your book Winners Take All addresses, and you ask, "Why is it that this era of extraordinary elite generosity, which is real, happens to coincide with an age of extraordinary elite hoarding?" I would just love to have you speak to, as you say, how the ways we seek to change the world are carefully chosen to not change our world, maybe becoming sort of an illusion of change, and how the so-called winners of the world give in ways that protect the systems they most benefit from, and yet that is what uphold structures of injustice and exploitation for most other people.
Anand Giridhardas: Let's start at the beginning, at the 101 level, for people who maybe haven't paid a ton of attention to the question of philanthropy or how the super-rich operate. Everyone listening to this has seen these announcements in the press about billionaire X giving enormous sums of money to a cause. Why? And it's you know, Mark Zuckerberg is giving a bunch of money to end all disease. Never mind that his own company is a plague, but that's a whole different issue. Elon Musk is doing this thing to change the world, he's going to help create a backup planet on Mars. Bill Gates is going to partner with the W.H.O. to try to help with global vaccination. And every story like this we hear, and I have heard these stories as much as anybody else, and I was curious about the fact that we live in this time in which all these very rich people are constantly falling over themselves to seemingly give money away, make these splashy announcements, tell us they're going to change the world, make a difference, give back, go to Africa. A lot of Africa is in their plan. They love, love, love going to Africa or going to Davos and talking about Africa, which is the other thing they love.
I became curious about how it is that we live in this time in which all these rich billionaires are doing this, and at the same time, the same class of people, in fact, in many cases the same people, are increasing their stranglehold over our economies, societies, and polities.
Every day they're increasing their concentration of wealth and power, they are increasing the gap between them and everybody else. So what is being given away exactly? If every year they end up with more, than the rest of us who they're supposedly giving to, if they pull further and further away from us, how much is being given and what is being given? And what is the effect of this giving?
That was the prompt that began the investigation that became Winners Take All. And I think what I found in my reporting, this is not an armchair opinion book. I went reporting, I talked to people, I went into this world, I interviewed people, I tried to understand the arguments that different people are making in this world. And what I came out understanding better is that there is a genuine effort by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world to 'make a difference, make a change, fight injustice,’ you name it. Empower women, heal racial divides. However, they promote a very specific kind of win-win social change, meaning they can help the society and they must prosper also—a kind of win-win social change that is not real social change, that is not structural change, that does not change material conditions for very many people and that promises, above all, to leave their privileges alone. In other words, the richest and most powerful people use philanthropy, but also things like impact investing and give one, get one, and all these other fancy terms that we've heard a lot in recent years. They use it to kind of promote a form of no-change-change, a kind of fake change that seems like it's changing, that seems like they care, that seems like they are on the case of redressing the injustices atop which they sit, and that gestures at doing those things, while protecting the status quo.
This kind of “win-win” social change is dangerous not just because it obscures how little is changing, but also because plutocrats use this fake change as a smokescreen to distract us from their continued plunder.
They use giving as a kind of reputational laundromat to wipe off the stink of their economic and political sins. And they use giving and this kind of alleged do-gooding to increase their power over public life, not decrease it. As it is, just in their economic power alone, and their political power through campaign contributions and other forms of corruption, they already wield an extraordinary amount of power over public life. And then when they turn to philanthropy and giving and dictating how public health should be, how education should be, how women's empowerment should be, how the racial wealth gap should be narrowed, they don't reduce their ridiculous levels of power relative to other people, they increase them further. So I came to see that the kind of giving that I was interested in investigating is not a kind of way to beat back the excruciating, ugly inequalities of our era. It is part of how we maintain them.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And sometimes it's not even just philanthropic giving to maintain or mask the system and its injustices, but even expanding the system of commodification and exploitation and eating into the commons. Just as an example, I learned about how the Walton Foundation, in their efforts of 'water conservation', have been disproportionally funding initiatives in the Colorado River that take us down the path of privatizing water as a means of conservation. And I know that a few projects that tried to stand against those intentions had their funding pulled, and also a lot of the biggest conservation philanthropies support modes of conservation that displace local and indigenous communities as well.
So there's a lot of change-making constantly going on in the world, but the questions are, what types of change get the most funding and support, and what types of change get sidelined, or even worked against, by other people's visions of change? It's something that I still get stuck on because as it exists, philanthropy in the nonprofit industrial complex almost just feels like this marketplace of change where again, those with the most financial resources have the most say in terms of what forms of change happen.
I wonder how you would add to all of this and expand on the thought of win-win as a dangerous ideology, where maybe things like social entrepreneurship or philanthropy after becoming rich and powerful first often get propped up as the most impactful ways that people can create positive change.
Anand Giridhardas: Well, I think if there's one idea that Winners Take All is trying to kind of disembowel, it's the notion of the win-win.
Win-win social change has been one of the most important and fraudulent ideas of our era.
You see this every time you see Goldman Sachs and Starbucks teaming up to fight the racial wealth gap, or ExxonMobil knows that renewable energy is the future, and we all must partner together to figure out a transition to get there. These kinds of things, this rhetoric is everywhere around us. And it sounds good, right? Win-win. When I used to play sports, not very well, someone would always have to lose. And I guess win-win sounds more fun than that. I mean, I would have had a much higher victory rate if my sports games as a child had been just all win-win. So win-win is a very appealing proposition. And the idea of the win-win comes out of market exchange. If you have ice cream and I have money, we may do an exchange where I give you some of the money and you give me some of the ice cream and everyone's happier than before, that is a real example of a win-win. The problem is social change is not a market exchange, social change is not a win-win, and the empowerment of women is not a win-win, the way you and I trading ice cream for money is a win-win.
The reason is social change, real change involves the loss of power.
Think about what it takes to empower women, liberate women, to play all the roles women can and want to play in a patriarchal society. Well, a lot of those things come at the expense of people who've gotten to dominate women in the past, and there's no way to do liberation without ending the domination. And so when you enter the social sphere, as opposed to the ice cream-trading market exchange sphere, a lot of the change we need involves someone else coming down from domination. You couldn't get rid of child labor in the factories without making life harder for factory owners. Not a win-win, still worth doing. You can't empower women without ending men's impunity to behave in a whole bunch of different ways that were fine socially in the past and are not fine now. Not a win-win. You cannot fight racial disparities in education without ending a system of property tax-based public school funding that privileges white neighborhoods hoarding their resources and their educational dollars, you would have to challenge that power and privilege to do right by folks you're trying to empower.
So when you enter the world of politics, which is what we're talking about, and climate change is politics, racial justice is politics, gender is politics, the kind of safety net we should have, it's all politics, all of these fears. Real change involves the loss of power and the win-win theory, at the heart of this kind of elite do-gooding compact that I describe in the book, is that real change doesn't have to involve loss of power, that you can somehow magically narrow the racial wealth gap in ways that have no costs for white people, that you can empower women in ways that do not affect men at all, or only for the better. It's a lie. It's not true. And it is a it is a crushingly bad but influential idea that I think in many ways has rigged the discourse. And a lot of what Winners Take All was trying to do is unring the discourse and make us remember how we made the kinds of changes that made our societies what they are today.
Kamea Chayne: This also requires us to think about what a win even means. So perhaps if people had a more holistic definition of a win that is centered on collective well-being because we're all entangled and interdependent, then maybe those who have to give up some in some form of currency for our collective health could see that sort of surrender as a personal win as well if they redefined what that win even meant.
Anand Giridhardas: Yeah, I think that's very true. But that's not how they see the world.
Kamea Chayne: So of course there are lots of minds to change. And also, just as you share about how the so-called winners who have disproportionate resources to give as philanthropy aren't going to contribute to the changes that are in some ways self-destructive, or that would eat into one's status and place in the world, I also think about this at a global level in terms of how people look up to events like the U.N. climate conferences led by nation-state institutions, disproportionately influenced by the most powerful and extractive nation-states, and even with influence from multinational corporations as well—and how this takes on a similar pattern in that the sort of deep and systemic transformations that the world needs and a lot of everyday people yearn for, can't come from these sites of change that are led by and limited by the visions of change from the nation-state institutions that currently benefit the most from the structures of status quo.
And then even beyond that, these decisions of change still mostly involve the political elites of each country, and so what gets left out there in terms of the injustices baked into a lot of countries' inherent social structures? So I think a lot of the points you raise are helpful and can be used to apply to different agendas of change at different levels as well.
And then maybe the answer becomes quite clear already with everything we already talked about, but a lot of people have awakened to the grave limitations of conscious consumerism to bring about systemic change. This idea of voting with your dollar, because who gets the most votes with that? So even though philanthropy and the nonprofit world seem to be completely focused on 'doing good', what do you think are the prospects or potentials of this sector possibly being able to be reformed in some way to drive the myriad of meaningful, deep change that a lot of people want today?
Anand Giridhardas: Look, I am not and I've never been an absolutist. And I have been very clear in the discussion of Winners Take All and around Winners Take All, that I don't think there's no role for philanthropy. But I think if you are in charge of a large pot of money, money that may have been ill-gotten in a micro-sense, that specifically, the way that money was made was kind of unjust and may be illegal or corrupt, or ill-gotten in a collective sense, that it was amassed at that scale because of unjust social structures that should not have been in place but were—if you're sitting on that money now and it is what it is, that money exists, we don't yet have a different system. We're in this system now, we're in this world now. What do you do?
I'm not of the view that there's nothing you can do, I have said that. I think for those philanthropies, those foundations, those people with those kinds of means, the most important thing you can do is use your philanthropy to break down the system that made that kind of unjust hoarding possible.
It is possible for the richest and most powerful foundations and individuals in the world to use their money to dismantle the plutocracy. And I think that's what they should do. I think they should get into the political arena to advocate for higher taxes, I think they should support efforts to, for example, have training for people from nontraditional backgrounds to run for office, to diversify who gets to run for office. I think they should use their money to advocate getting money out of politics, overturning Citizens United one way or another. These are the kinds of things that I think are real and committed plutocrats who are serious about ending plutocracy, this is the kind of thing they could do. It's there for the taking, and too few of them do it.
Kamea Chayne: And certainly more definitely have to hop on board, and it does require changing minds. So your new book, The Persuaders, is a "Stunning insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens who are on the ground working to change minds, bridge divisions and fight for democracy."
I'm curious about how the types of change-making that we just discussed, that came out of Winners Take All, relate to these types of changes that are more so coming from the bottom up. And what compelled you to focus on this theme of persuasion after exploring all the ways that those at the top have been trying to change public opinion and people's worldviews and ideologies of progress and futures in the world?
Anand Giridhardas: Well, I think that the two books to me, one very much grew out of the other. Winners Take All was an attempt to condemn and criticize and provide a kind of map of how plutocrats use fake change to distract us from making the kinds of real changes that our societies need. And The Persuaders picks up where Winners Take All left off and says, how do we make those kinds of real changes? And I think one of the things that I found in my reporting that guided The Persuaders, which is my fourth book, is that a lot of what comes in the way of the real change that I believe we need is these very powerful, plutocratic actors I was telling you about. But there's another thing also…
In a lot of spaces where we are fighting for progress, there has come to be a kind of fatalism about winning over our fellow citizens. That fatalism, in many ways, has been stoked by the plutocrats.
The plutocrats benefit. Rupert Murdoch benefits when those of us who are fighting for progress give up hope in the possibility of winning over someone who's flirted with voting for Donald Trump or someone who doesn't want the vaccine, or someone who's spouting Fox News talking points, or someone who thinks crime and inflation is more important than the freedom and dignity for women and their bodies. And the book, in many ways, The Persuaders is an argument against that kind of pessimism, against what I call the great American write-off in which too many of our voices for progress have written off the possibility of reaching people.
I followed a group of activists and organizers and cognitive scientists and door-to-door campaigners and others who are bucking the trend, who are showing that it is very much still possible to change minds in a polarized time. But it requires going about things pretty much the opposite of how many of us do. It requires instincts that are the opposite of a lot of our instincts these days. And it involves, above all, understanding that people, voters, and citizens, are complicated, that many more of us are conflicted internally about even fundamental values, about the future and nature of our society, and that if you give up on people, you are giving up on this opportunity to help millions and millions of people try to make different meaning of this moment and of the kind of future they want to see, then they could make.
The far right, the increasingly fascist right in America, doesn't need a lecture on the importance of persuasion. They believe in persuasion. They do persuasion work abundantly. Fox News is a giant persuasion engine, but in many ways, the political left has given up on the idea of persuasion. And this book is a loving intervention with my political tribe saying, wake up. We need to reclaim this notion of persuasion and we need our movement to become a movement of persuaders.
Kamea Chayne: Our listeners will know that I've been really curious to consider the cultural impacts of social media as the means that a lot of people nowadays are socializing or communicating with others, with loved ones, and also with strangers that we don't know that well. So when we talk about this idea of persuasion, I can't help but consider how important the setting and the context is. As in how do we create safe spaces for people to let down their guards and reveal their very relatable struggles and anxieties and worries, and not feel like they're going to be misunderstood or judged in superficial ways or be written off due to some part of their identity or story not being politically aligned?
As we consider this idea of the medium is the message, I'm curious what you've thought through in terms of how the cultural mediums and formats of communication and discourse, or more specifically, how short-form social media sets people up to converse with one another, impact our capacities for empathy and building trust and seeing the complex humanity in others, and not resorting to limiting snap judgments based on, as Dr. Bayo Akomolafe said, these “pixelated selves.” I would be curious what your thoughts are on that.
Anand Giridhardas: In political life, in civic life, in social life, being able to engage with other people in a way where you know where you stand, but you also try to cultivate empathy for other people. You try to understand why they think what they think, even if it's different from what you think. You try to win them over to your side by showing them the kind of respect, and that builds trust and makes that kind of mind-changing possible. If you were to say that's the goal, and then say, help me invent a tool that would be the most destructive to that goal, I think you'd have to invent social media.
Now in many ways, I'm not a social media universal critic by any means. It's become a really important part of my and a lot of our lives. And I think for a lot of people with a more marginalized relationship to power and authority and gatekeepers and centers of influence, the kind of decentralization and fracturing and opening up of voice that came with social media is an incredibly powerful thing that I think none of us are ready to just give up. However, there is, built into the particular contingent design of these tools, a set of incentives of how we should relate to each other, ways of relating to each other that are more rewarded, and ways of relating to each other that are less rewarded.
In a way, this has nothing to do with social media as an abstract idea. We could have had different social media portals with different incentives and different structures, and different results, but the ones we have are optimized for engagement, keeping people on the platform. Fast motion. Lots of small dopamine hits instead of long-term connection building, etc.
That particular expression of social media as it is unfolded in the kind of manic hyper-capitalism of early 21st century America has created an encouragement of a way of relating to each other that is fast, judgmental, prone to pylons and mob behavior, prone to picking out what is most contemptible in what someone has said or someone thinks, rather than trying to find common ground.
And I want to say, look, I do all these things, I'm not above this. I would challenge anybody listening to this to prove that they're above this either. We all do this. We are all playing into the logic and the structure of these very powerful platforms.
The most insidious part of it is that I think when it comes to political life, these platforms have given a lot of people an illusion of being civic that you feel like spending 45 minutes on Twitter is doing politics when it's doing anti-politics. It's just driving people further away from each other, fomenting a kind of relationship with one another that makes it impossible to have a coalition and mind-changing alliances and things like this.
And so there's not gonna be a world without social media, but I think there's a very important question for a lot of us, are we doing politics? Are we doing persuasion when we log into social media? Or should we just recognize it as a kind of entertainment space that has nothing to do with political and civic life? And for a lot of us journalists, I think that means what a lot of us I think are already doing, which is spending a lot less time there than we were a few years ago. I think it's not the space where we're going to get the country we need.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, really recognizing it as a tool rather than being consumed by it. I also don't want to say that social media can't play a positive role, especially in raising awareness for certain issues, but I think it is important to be aware that the structures of how a lot of these platforms are set up incentivize and encourage, I would say, more dehumanizing modes of communication. So just important for users of these platforms to keep these things in mind.
I think the binary of the left and the right as dominant modes of categorizing one's political position is something that also encourages people to write the other side off, or just be on the other side. And then somehow moderates are often framed as those being in the middle who aren't extreme and therefore may be more reasonable. And you point out how, as Shankar Osorio shares, "Associating moderate with the middle of the road is a mistake because moderates are confused, torn, and not sure which pole is their pole. And not that they prefer the mean between the two poles." So you offer this reframe of moderates as persuadable or malleable.
From this, several questions come up for me. The first one is whether the creation of a binary, having two poles and if people don't consider themselves as a part of the two, is self-limiting in a sense, compared to perhaps there being a multi-dimensional spectrum of political values and cultural views and everybody being persuadable and shiftable in a sense? I also wonder about people who don't identify as either a part of the political establishments of left or right, who also don't see themselves as in-between as moderates or corporate centrists who try to play off being in the middle as being neutral and the most reasonable. And then also people who indeed are kind of both, because on certain issues they might lean one way and on other ones, they lean the other.
So I'm just thinking about the concerns that might arise from defining these two sides as binaries, rather than breaking down the sides and allowing the complexities in our humanity to shine through.
Anand Giridhardas: I think in a way, the book is making a case for what you're talking about.
In the book [The Persuaders], my attempt to reframe what the moderate is is very much trying to take us to a non-binary conversation about the nature of left-right in political moderation.
In many ways, it's a remarkable thing that we've, in our national conversation, in some ways made more progress in understanding that gender is not binary and is on a spectrum and is complicated in ways that we have not understood in politics and in the idea that the left-right thing is a very facile frame for understanding what's going on. So if you are stuck in this kind of left-right-center framework, then a lot of these things do seem very hard. And once you get past that binary notion, and even the linear spectrum notion perhaps, you start to get at what voters are actually like.
Any reporter who has done political reporting and interviewed voters will tell you that this is the case. Binary does not exist if you talk to voters. It's like, we have to make voters part of this political binary as part of the way we write stories. But voters themselves, when you talk to them, this is how they sound, voters are like, I just hate big government. And big government is the worst, communism and all of that. And that's why I just hate this government messing with my Social Security and Medicare. Oh, okay, so you hate big government and you just absolutely do not want big government to hurt your big government programs. That's how actual voters think. Or the sheer number of racist people who voted for Barack Obama twice. That doesn't mean they're not racist, it just means they're racist and they love Barack Obama. Admirable guy with a lot of great personal qualities, and enough racist people in a lot of rural parts of the Midwest and elsewhere who are like, I don't like Black people in general, but I like that Black guy, and they voted for him. That's complicated. I'm not sure where that is on the spectrum.
That is, as you were saying, just human complexity. People are not coherent, I'm not coherent. I don't know if you think you're coherent, but most of us are not coherent, most of us do not cohere. We're all over the place. We clean ourselves up for others, we try to pin ourselves down by framing ourselves on a resume or a social media bio. But we are all complicated. And particularly when you get to the kinds of voters who move around from election to election, sometimes called low information voters, sometimes moderate, sometimes swing voters, people who actually can be influenced, they're not paying a ton of attention to the process oftentimes. They're not deeply steeped in ideological frameworks. They're not listening to podcasts like yours every day. There are a lot of Americans who are not part of a world in which these things are talked about. They may have some facile copy-paste barb that they throw about trans people, but honestly, they have not spent 5 minutes thinking about the issue. 5 minutes. They've never read an article, they've never watched a video, they have copy-pasted some uncle's email forward or some facile FoxNews talking point that they were imbibing while ironing shirts in the living room.
And I think a lot of what I learned from the people doing hardcore persuasion work on trans rights, on immigrant rights, on a lot of these very hard issues in American life, is that so many of the people they see have very strong opinions, very lightly held. They may spout off about any number of things, but the roots of those convictions are not especially deep and they can be disturbed by actually getting in there and building trust with those people and building relationships through sustained political organizing. And not trying to implant some alien view in those people, not try to implant your view in those people, because people can sniff that a million miles away, but trying to stir some cognitive dissonance in those people so that their contempt for trans people has to at least contend with their self-image as being someone who always stands up for underdogs, always stands up for the person on the wrong end of a fight. Those two identities are actually in tension with each other, but a lot of people have not reconciled that the way they think about trans people and the way they think about themselves as the champion of underdogs is intention and good political organizing, of the kind that we barely do, can help people reconcile, that can help people get more coherent on that, can force people into a kind of reckoning around, what do they believe, what side are they on in some of these issues?
We have seen this again and again, I think most significantly in our lifetimes on gay rights. There has been a profound moral revolution that we cannot discount on that issue. Think of, I don't know, the past 10,000 years of human history on that issue relative to the last 20. Right. How much total progress on gay rights was made literally in the last 20 years? Out of 10,000. Why? Because an incredible array of gay rights campaigners pursued every kind of strategy, from radical strategies to provocation to activism, to institutional plays, to legislative place, to on-the-street plays, to art, every inside and outside means. But they never gave up on the idea that even people saying horrible things, believing horrible things can be moved. And by the way, a ton of them have moved over the last generation. And today, you can go find across this country, and opinion polls bear this out, a bunch of evangelical Christians who believe a whole welter of toxic things, but are now fine on this issue. That's an enormous, enormous shift in American life. Mitt Romney voted in the Senate to endorse and uphold gay marriage. There has been a sea change and we cannot erase the insanely powerful work that those activists did. And those activists never gave up on persuasion. I believe the kind of mind-changing they did applies to a whole bunch of areas of American life.
Kamea Chayne: I shy away from labeling or categorizing myself because I want to be fluid and open to change and honor my complexities and many confusions, so I resonate with a lot of what you just shared. I think it also helps us to maintain deeper empathy and openness to engagement when we remember that a lot of people do parrot these slogans or talking points without ever having spent a lot of time and effort unpacking those roots. And they can be dug up and disturbed and disrupted, as you said. And overall, I think a lot of our listeners see themselves as not fitting into conventional norms or boxes, and people who want to help break barriers and walls and sides. So I think your insights and curiosities about persuasion can be impactful for us.
I recognize the importance of opening and changing minds and refraining from judgment, and also this recognition that communication is an art, and there are particular strategies and ways of expressing and standing up for our visions of collective thriving that can help us to welcome and invite more people on board. As you share, "Let us build a movement that is self-confident enough that can take people in and teach them." With this in mind, what would you like to share in terms of the roles of call-out culture and call-in culture? And then finally, what tips or approaches of persuasion would you like to share and offer as inspirations?
Anand Giridhardas: In many ways, the book deals with the ubiquitous nature of call-out culture in our time. And the alternative of calling in, which as one of the people I write about, the brilliant activist Loretta Ross says, calling in, says, is a call-out done with love. And I'm not someone who is against calling out universally. You know, I think there has been a lot of like bad-faith right-wing, like, call-out culture has gone too far. I think there's a place for the call out, I think it's important to call out grave injustice. I think it's really important to call out police killings. I think it's important to call out the billionaire class. Calling out is crucial in any kind of coherent politics. At the same time, I think we sometimes in the present cultural moment, think calling out is like the only political tool we have, that it's the only kind of mode available to us.
What a lot of the characters I'm writing about in this book are exploring is, how do you be a call-inner and a call-outter at the same time?
If you're AOC, who I write about extensively in the book, how do you call out the maligned forces that you're rightfully calling out and at the same time try to expand the base of people who are interested in your ideas of redistribution and Green New Deal and these types of things? Is it possible to simultaneously call out things that need to be called out, stand firmly for what you believe, and reach out?
// musical intermission //
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Anand Giridhardas: I learned to go back to the basics for me. I mean, I learned so much about the form of writing that I came to follow, these kinds of books that look at the way people are living amid the big forces of our time through personal stories of people grappling with them. And I learned a lot of that from the writings of V.S. Naipaul, specifically the travel writing of V.S. Naipaul, which was a very important literary influence for me.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Anand Giridhardas: I live in, as so many of us do, a very fast-paced, intense world. I live in New York City. I have two kids. I have a wife who has a very demanding life and job. And I think it's very possible to live life in overdrive. I'm one of the people who I think is least in overdrive compared to most people I know, and I think it comes from my parents who had a very strong ethic when I was growing up of carving out time for my life, right? Not just your work, not just trying to get ahead, not just trying to succeed, but life. I grew up in a house where we would not start eating dinner if music had not been put on the stereo to accompany our dinner. Moments mattered. Creating moments mattered, and having time to connect mattered. And I try to pass that on to my family now.
Kamea Chayne: I love that. And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Anand Giridhardas: My hope is that this podcast will change your father's mind.
Kamea Chayne: I hope so. Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have links to Anand's writing and books and references from this conversation linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. Anand, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a huge honor for us to have you here for our big 400th episode. So thank you so much. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Anand Giridhardas: Congrats on hitting the big 400. I wish you 400 more episodes of success. And look, I hope all of our green dreams come true.
