The Divided States of America

- The united or divided States of America.

- From darkness there's light, and hope, and progress.

And that's what this year's Thanksgiving in my view represents.

- [Yamiche] On this Thanksgiving weekend, we take a deep dive into the United States of America.

We look at what divides us.

- [Crowd] No more masks, no more masks!

- By not wearing masks in schools, it's irresponsible, We're killing people.

- On day one I will ban critical race theory from being in our school system.

- Your sixth grader's not being taught critical race theory.

- I love my party.

I love its history, I love its principles.

But I love my country more.

- I didn't see any violence.

- [Yamiche] And the things that unite us.

- Americans have great advantage.

To renew our country, we only need to remember our values.

- This is a great nation.

We are good people, we've come so far, but we still have far to go.

- [Yamiche] Plus.

- Actually being able to be around people again is great.

We're very thankful for that.

(turkey gobbling) - There you go.

- [Yamiche] Next.

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Once again, from Washington, moderator Yamiche Alcindor.

- Happy Thanksgiving.

And welcome to a special edition of "Washington Week."

This week, many Americans gathered around their tables to give thanks with family and friends.

Last year, COVID kept most of us apart.

But this year feels a bit different.

Some have been able to be reunited, though disagreements over COVID vaccines are still causing a lot of strife.

As a nation, polls show we are also deeply divided on many other issues.

According to a Pew Research Center study, 85% of American adults want significant political change, and fewer than half are satisfied with the functioning of democracy.

But we can't seem to agree on basic facts and what needs to be done differently.

Let's look at some other recent polling.

Democrats are more likely to support teaching about the impacts of racism than Republicans.

Republicans though, are more likely to believe misinformation about the COVID vaccines.

And more than half of Republicans believe the 2020 election should definitely, or probably be overturned.

Though, we should note of course, there is no evidence of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Meanwhile in Washington, divisions have played out in Congress.

Lawmakers have spent months wrangling over President Biden's agenda.

In our local communities, we have seen fights over race, education, and LGBTQ rights play out in angry school board meetings.

All this comes as President Biden's approval rating has been on the decline since July.

Recent polls say it is hovering around the low 40s.

There's also deep, deep anxiety about inflation and the state of the economy.

- Wow.

There is very high prices on everything.

So, it's impossible to get some food in the grocery store.

- People in middle class and low class can not afford to be paying gas prices of $4.

- No more Starbucks, no more like, ooh, those shoes are cute.

It's no, it's like, okay, I have to get to work, have to have gas, so.

- Joining me to discuss all of this and the divided state of America, Tim Alberta, a writer for The Atlantic.

He has deeply covered conservative politics.

He is also the author of the book "American Carnage."

He joins us from Pittsfield, Michigan, outside Ann Arbor.

Trymaine Lee, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, correspondent for MSNBC, and host of the Into America podcast.

He has extensively covered race and politics in our country.

He joins us from Brooklyn, New York.

And joining me here at the table, our table Susan, Susan Page, Washington Bureau Chief for USA Today.

She's a veteran political reporter who has written two books, "The Matriarch," a biography of former first lady Barbara Bush, and "Madam Speaker," a biography of house speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Susan, thank you for joining our Thanksgiving table.

I'm wondering if you can, we're gonna start with COVID.

Its science, it's in some ways still the surprising thing that divides Americans.

There's no question that unvaccinated Americans are the ones dying most of the virus, are the ones being more hospitalized.

Why do you think that we're so divided on science?

Of course, we know that the origins of this have been sort of how former President Trump dealt with the virus, and masks, and all that.

But I still wonder what you think is keeping Americans sort of still divided on this issue.

- You know, it's one of the big surprises to me, the fact that a disease that people see in their own households, in their own families, and with their friends, and in their workplaces, could have such a disagreement about things like does the vaccine work?

We know it does.

Do masks work?

We know they do.

And yet, we can determine, you can look at whether someone's vaccinated or not, and it tells you a lot about which political party they're aligned with.

I think that we're reaching an inflection point in terms of the, kind of the power of conspiracy theories, like some of the conspiracy theories surrounding COVID, and the faith in facts.

And we've seen that play out, not only within this COVID story, but in faith in the election returns, and attitudes toward whether the 2020 election was legitimate.

They're all threaded together.

- Yeah, and Trymaine, when we zoom out, I mean, in some ways it's a sort of the defining characteristics of America being put on display, the sort of the ugly parts of our country.

Can you talk a little bit more about how this COVID debate, this debate about facts and science, how it sort of exposes the deep fault lines in America?

- I mean, certainly.

Yamiche, thank you so much for having me.

Certainly when we see, early on especially, but ongoing, who's been most impacted by the Coronavirus are those who've long been marginalized and forgotten, through structural racism, institutional racism, segregation, and so on.

And so I think what it's revealed is just how fragile of a nation we really are in so many ways.

Not just in terms of access to healthcare, but our actual social fabric, right.

How fragile it is and how dangerous it is when we continue to kind of twist up and bind the most marginalized in the margins there.

And COVID revealed that.

But also those who were most likely to be susceptible to this misinformation and the mythology.

America is full of mythology and lies, but we've seen so much of that revealed, and weaponized, and exploited.

And folks have paid the price, but we've all paid the price.

- Yeah, yeah.

And Tim, you're in Michigan, you've talked to so many people in that state.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about sort of the beginning of the modern era of this, you told, you said at one point that we should really be looking at sort of 9/11, former Presidents Bush and Obama, and how they sort of led into January 6th.

I should also say, I was reading the article that you wrote on January 7th, the day after the Capitol attack.

And you talked about the fact that people who didn't see this coming it was because they were wanting to ignore what was coming.

- Yeah, I think that's right, Yamiche.

I think they wanted to ignore, as Trymaine just said, the fragility of this country.

I think there's a willingness to believe that we are sort of foundationally stronger and fundamentally more cohesive as a people than perhaps we really are.

And I do think that you can trace that back probably 20 years at least.

But if you think about the modern era politically, culturally, you have to look at 9/11 and the immediate aftermath, and the remainder of the Bush presidency with two failed wars, and with the economy going over a cliff, and with millions of manufacturing jobs across Middle America disappearing virtually overnight.

And a big nasty xenophobic debate over illegal immigration, and offering citizenship to millions of people here unlawfully.

And then of course, the cherry on top is the election of the nation's first Black president, and the economy continuing to sputter in his, in the early days of the Obama presidency.

And this, in other words, was a powder keg that had been building, and building, and building.

And so when we look around now and say, gee, how did we get so divided?

What has happened to us?

It's actually not that complicated.

This has really been a perfect storm in many ways that's been brewing.

And we're just now, I think, beginning to discover how bad it really is, and reckoning with the fact that it could get worse.

- Yeah, yeah.

And Susan, Trymaine's talking about how fragile our democracy is.

Tim's talking about the idea that this is sort of a perfect storm.

I wonder what you make of sort of the election lies.

And the fact that the GOP, as Democrats are trying to convince people that they're sort of, in some ways, threatening American democracy, they also have the edge going into the midterms.

They're winning elections with sort of really galvanizing people by lying about the results of the election.

- You know, Trymaine used the word fragility about our democracy, we're not used to thinking about the US government and our commitment to democracy as being fragile, but I think it is.

And, you know, we see not only the events of January 6th and the lack of faith in what was, in fact, a legitimate election the previous November, that goes to the heart of our foundation, the heart of our ability to govern ourselves.

Because if we do not believe that elections are to be trusted, that elections are to be accepted, that elections can be overturned by force, then that is not a democracy that we have maintained.

And the unwillingness of some in Congress, some Republicans, to even wanna study what happened on January 6th, I think raises huge alarm bells for those of us who see that as the most shocking event that I've ever seen in my time of covering politics.

- I mean, it is shocking, and it is in some ways telling that Republicans, a lot of Republicans, don't even wanna study what happened.

Trymaine, I wanna come to you because when we think about studying what happened, when we think about studying history, it takes us to this conversation about race and education.

You were one of the people who contributed, you are a contributing writer, wrote an essay for The 1619 Project, and for the book.

Talk a little bit about sort of this era that we're living in.

I wanted to also bring to your attention something that a New York Times writer wrote.

He wrote, every episode of racial progress has generated a backlash like the one we're living through today.

Talk about that concept of America always having a backlash to progress, and how that connects with The 1619 Project and your work.

- Well, it was certainly, Yamiche, this backlash has often been a violent one, right?

With actual bloodshed.

We think about what drew the end of reconstruction, and the decades and decades of actual violence being heaped upon the backs of Black folks, and the Black blood that was spilled in this country.

But this new debate and this new fight over critical race theory, which again, we have to say repeatedly, is not actually being taught in these schools, right?

But it's about maintaining a sense of whiteness.

And not to be redundant with the idea of fragility, but this idea that there needs to be a patriotic education to make sure that we are cocooning White children from the realities of this America in which we live.

But also, this moment we're living in now is not new, right?

We've been reckoning with this idea of this backlash from the very beginning, especially when it comes over the politics of memory, who are the gatekeepers of memory and history.

We think about after the Civil War, the Daughters of the Confederacy started taking over school boards to make sure they had control of the books, to make sure they can molest and shape how slavery was viewed, how the South was viewed, so that the Civil War became the war of Northern aggression, not the Civil War over the rights of people to own and sell other people, and do so in slave labor camps that we now have a genteel phrase, they're plantations now, right?

So this is nothing new, but it also speaks to how uneducated and miseducated Americans are around our true history.

Not to, again, be redundant about this idea of mythology.

But we think about the stories we tell, race and mythology about this kind of exceptionalism, but from the very beginning was spoiled and tainted at best.

- Yeah, I mean, that mythology, that sort of reckoning that we're dealing with with history is absolutely at the center of this.

Tim, what do you see when you talk to people, when you're talking to conservative voters, or you're talking to people in Michigan, maybe liberals as well, when you talk about sort of this history that we're dealing with, the critical race theory arguments, the falsehoods that are being told there?

What's your reporting tell you about this debate?

- Well, I think, Yamiche, the most important thing we have to recognize is that this country is now very much, you described the fault lines that divide us.

I think one of the biggest fault lines, and one that's maybe a little harder to get our arms around, is just the informational fault lines.

We don't have disagreements with one another based on any common baseline of information anymore.

Whether it's critical race theory, whether it's the assault on the capital in January, whether it's Barack Obama being born in Kenya.

There are sources of information that are now readily available to anyone that will confirm their preexisting notions or worldview, depending on what the subject matter, or the debate of the day is.

And so I think you can draw a straight line in many senses from what's Trymaine was just describing with the historical analog of the post-Civil War period and the reconstruction period, to today.

Where you knew in the hours after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, you knew that that history was going to be rewritten in real time.

And that it wasn't going to be long before people who were in that building that day, taking cover, putting gas masks over their faces, fleeing for their lives into a bunker that was secured by Capitol Police.

Those very people would, within days, if not maybe weeks, begin reshaping and recrafting the story of what actually took place that day to suit their own political ends.

And so it's not a new routine that we're seeing here.

I think perhaps what is new is the degree to which that misinformation and those outright lies can be easily disseminated straight into the veins of the American public.

- That is completely the way to put it when you think about sort of the media landscape that we're living through here.

And even the vice-president who was running for his life as a crowd was yelling, hang Mike Pence.

He has said that that people are talking about January 6th too much.

Susan, I wanna come to you because the other big part of sort of what we're living through is inflation.

People are paying more money for everything from the turkey they're putting on their table to the gas they're putting in their cars.

I was struck by the idea that looking at the history, John F. Kennedy dealt with this, Lyndon B. Johnson dealt with this, Richard Nixon.

They all tried to deal with inflation.

They sort of all failed.

What's President Biden sort of up against when you look at history, but also when you look at the GOP that is very, very ready to use this as a wedge issue, going into the elections?

- And remember Gerald Ford and whip inflation now buttons?

It's been a long time since we've had to deal with a really serious episode of inflation.

And you saw the Biden administration, I think, dismissing this early on as something to be transitory, that people didn't need to worry about.

They were wrong.

Nothing in the economy hits people more directly in their faces than inflation, 'cause they see it whenever they go to the grocery store, they see it whenever they pull in to fill up their gas tank.

And it becomes a more compelling political argument than even jobs, or even growth.

People get very concerned about inflation.

It can cripple a presidency if a president does not seem to be addressing it effectively.

And now you see a kind of a turning by the Biden administration to take it more seriously, to hope that their new reappointed chairman of the federal reserve will take it seriously, will help them bring it under control, because it saps the approval ratings of a president.

And we've seen Joe Biden already be hurt politically by the fact that his approval rating has sunk to new lows.

- Yeah, and Trymaine, just another question on inflation.

You wrote as part of your essay in The 1619 Project, you wrote about Elmore Bolling in Alabama.

And you really talked about the fact of the racial wealth gap being a consequence and a legacy of slavery.

Talk a little bit about this, because I've always thought as a reporter, economics, wages, it should be a unifying thing because it's a class issue in some ways.

But it's not because of who you blame, who Americans blame rather, for why they don't have a job, or why their wages are so low.

- This idea of you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, just work hard.

And we think about the average Black family has just a 10th, a 10th of the wealth of the average White family.

And this history goes back decades, and decades, and decades, with the collusion of the federal government in terms of access to housing, red lining, so on and so forth.

But in this conversation, I think we always have to remember that the policy makers, at least in Washington, none of them are hungry, right?

But in America, in communities that are already suffering the losses from COVID-19, rising homicide rates, this dramatic, dramatic wealth gap.

And then on top of that, they're dealing food insecurity already.

And we don't talk enough about the actual poor in this country, certainly becomes a political issue, right?

And we talk about the middle-class.

But we're talking about those who have been marginalized for generations, and this is by no accident, right?

Because what racism has really always been about is control of the resources.

And where resources are scant there is crisis.

And we've been in a perpetual state of crisis for far too long in this country.

Again, and the roots of this are very deep.

This isn't just an administration's making, this is administration, after administration, after administration, after administration.

Because we accept a certain degree of, dare I say, anti-Blackness in this country, that allows Black and Brown people, especially on the margins, to continue to live that way.

Because our baseline of understanding and acceptance of this is that some folks are gonna struggle, some are not.

You just need to work harder.

When in reality, the whole system and institutions that are kind of bolstering this.

- Yeah, and it's that history, and that real plain telling of it, that is in some ways deeply needed.

I wanna also now turn to some of the things that unite Americans, or at least it should unite Americans.

Over the years, Democratic and Republican leaders have spoken extensively about the need for national unity.

Here's President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address, and General Colin Powell speaking in 1994 to graduating Howard University students.

- United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures.

Divided, there is little we can do.

All we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

- [Colin] Never lose faith in America.

It's faults are yours to fix, not to curse.

America is a family.

There may be differences and disputes within the family, but we must not allow the family to be broken into warring factions.

From the diversity of our people, let us draw strength and not see weakness.

- What is clear, based on my reporting, is that regardless of political views or race, most Americans are unified in wanting to be able to survive and thrive.

A lot of people just wanna keep a roof over their heads, put food on the table, and have access to decent healthcare and education.

But many disagree on how to get there and who to blame for their struggles.

In other words, since the beginning of our founding, Americans have been arguing about the American dream, how to get there, and whether it exists at all.

Tim, I wanna come to you.

Talk a bit about sort of this overlapping need that Americans have.

They wanna be able to survive and thrive, but they argue about who to blame and how to get there.

- Yeah, Yamiche, I do think that at the end of the day, when you strip away all of the political debates, the cultural debates, the religious debates, questions of education, and class, and race, I do think that there is sort of a primal cohesion that we have as Americans.

We love our families, we love our communities.

We want to believe that the American dream exists, even though historically it has been far more attainable for some of us than for others.

But at the end of the day, I think what makes this moment so difficult, and it probably underscores everything that we've spent the last few minutes talking about, is just the institutional crisis we face in this country, as far as the lack of faith we have in our governing institutions specifically, but in our cultural institutions more broadly.

Whether you're talking about criminal justice reform and folks of not just minorities, but increasingly White voters telling pollsters that they no longer have confidence in law enforcement.

Or whether you're looking at government itself, and Congress, and the presidency.

Whether you're thinking about the public education system, organized religion, the financial sector, and whether they have our wellbeing in mind.

Sadly, one of the things that truly does unite Americans at this point is a distrust in those institutions.

And that's, I think, why we're in the position we're in at the moment.

- And we only have about a minute left here.

So I wanna just, it's a lightning round, but I wanna ask each one of you in 10 seconds, what are you thankful for?

Susan, I'll start with you.

- What do I think what?

- What are you thankful for?

- Oh, I'm thankful that a year ago at Thanksgiving, I set a table for two, and this year at Thanksgiving, I was able to set a table for 19.

- [Yamiche] That's beautiful.

Trymaine, 10 seconds.

What are you thankful for?

- I am thankful for my health, my family.

And it's never lost on me, just how truly blessed and blessed I truly am.

Being able to tell the stories of our people in particular, but I'm just enormously happy just to be here healthy and happy.

- [Yamiche] Tim, 10 seconds.

- My wife, and my three boys, and the good health that the Lord has given me.

- And I am thankful for all of you coming here on your holiday weekend to talk to us.

And I'm very thankful, of course, for my family and my friends.

And to be able to see people, to be healthy.

It's so, so important.

So thank you all.

That's it for tonight.

Thank you to Tim, to Trymaine, to Susan for your reporting.

And thank you for joining us tonight.

There's no "Washington Week Extra," but it will be back next week.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend.

I'm Yamiche Alcindor, goodnight from Washington.

(dynamic music) - [Announcer] Corporate funding for "Washington Week" is provided by Consumer Cellular.

Additional funding is provided by the estate of Arnold Adam's.

Koo and Patricia Yuen with The Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

Sandra and Carl DeLay-Magnuson.

Rose Hirschel and Andy Shreeves.

Robert and Susan Rosenbaum.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you, thank you.

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