Insurrection, White Nationalism, and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.: A Conversation with Robin D. Kelley

Between a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and the catastrophic surge of COVID-19 across the country, the beginning of 2021 has been even more turbulent than 2020. This special episode of Then & Now, recorded on Martin Luther King Day and released on Inauguration Day, features Robin D. Kelley, prominent UCLA scholar on U.S. and African American history. He looks at the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as fascism and white nationalism throughout U.S. history, in framing our current moment. His advice as we head into the next chapter of American history? “Always come from a place of love.”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Then and Now, brought to you by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. We are dedicated to studying change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we interview thought leaders, historians, researchers, and policymakers about what happened then and what that means for us now.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome to Then and Now, sponsored by the Lutzkin Center for History and Policy at UCLA. I'm David Myers. I teach in the UCLA Department of History and direct the Luskin Center, whose goal is to bring the past into conversation with the present, and in doing so to understand how we got where we are so that we can imagine alternative and better futures. We're recording on January 18th, Martin Luther King Day. This is 12 days after the armed insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., which brought to the surface the full fury of an overwhelmingly white populist movement whose venerated leader is Donald Trump, and which was prepared to take violent steps to satisfy his will by storming the United States Congress. It's also two days before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who inherit two of the largest crises in the history of the United States. The COVID pandemic, which is raging in unprecedented proportions, and the crisis of democratic legitimacy that Donald Trump, his Senate neighblers, and his legions of supporters have fomented. To shed light on this very murky world of ours, it is good to welcome to this episode of Then and Now my friend and colleague Robin Kelly, who is distinguished professor of history and the Gary B. Nash Chair in U.S. history at UCLA. Robin previously appeared on the show in June to talk about the legacy of racism and the principles of complicity and responsibility following the murder of George Floyd. We discussed then the notion of the banality of evil used by Hanna Arendt to describe the guilt of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann in his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Welcome back, Robin.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Thank you, David. I tell you, you're the best person to have this conversation with, I have to say.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

It's a mutual uh admiration society. Um we're recording on Martin Luther King Day, um, as I said, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts about um what the memory of Dr. King summons up for you today.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Yeah, you know, I kind of been thinking about this a little bit. I mean, you know, his message was always, you know, reminding us of the imperative to fight what he called the the triplets, uh the three triplets of evil, right? That is racism, materialism, and militarism, um, and then to build the beloved community. Uh and his definition is one which is really no outside. You basically build community intention, um, even with people that you might think of as your enemy, right? Um, but it's an interesting context because I'm reminded that, you know, King's whole experience as a leader in SELC and Civil Rights Movement is that he's confronting both fascist state policies in the South, and you know, in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, but also mobs, fascist mobs in places in the same place, but also in Illinois and Chicago. Um, not to mention the fact that, again, his childhood experience in Germany with his dad was, you know, during the period of Hitler's reign. And that's where he got his name, Martin, from Martin Luther, and his father changed his name as well. But what was really striking about thinking about the way in which someone like Dr. King uh faces um both fascist policies and fascist violence is the fact that he faced it under a liberal national regime. That, you know, one of the most liberal federal governments since Roosevelt's New Deal state. I mean, this is the regime in the Democratic Party which you know sought to make um compromise with the civil rights movement and was a source of King's disappointment. I mean, this is a regime that that, you know, of course, King criticized. It waged war over and covert in Vietnam, Dominican Republic, uh, Indonesia, Brazil, Portuguese Africa, Portugal's African colonies. Um, it is one that even of even the Republican regime under Eisenhower was considered pretty um liberal, right? And King fought for and lived through the implementation of civil rights legislation uh that you know he believed would make a difference, but ultimately uh didn't, and had come to see that this legislation couldn't resolve the problems of militarism and materialism by which he meant capitalism. Uh, and of course, what did it do? It put him in direct conflict with the great society. Uh, and that's very different from the moment that we just came out of uh with the extreme right-wing regime, but is much closer to the moment we're about to enter. And that is how do we, you know, deal with some of these questions in the face of the Biden Harris uh liberal um uh uh government, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah. Well, I want we'll get to um the future and and the immediate past. I wanted to stay, if we can, with with Dr. King and his sense that you know, even at moments of uh of great achievement, um, the seeds of disappointment were also stone. Um and I think of this in the context of his last book, uh, Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community, um, when he opens by talking about um the momentous occasion on which uh President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Um, and um King shares his intimation that that legislative act wouldn't solve the problem for which the uh act was intended. Um and if we fast forward today, we see um certainly in the last presidential election, but in almost virtually every election since 1965, that one or another party, and in this case uh the Republican Party, uh, has been using any means available to disenfranchise voters of color. Um that's a point that even the Republican Party's leading election law expert, Benjamin Ginsburg, has affirmed on many occasions. King anticipated that the passage of the Act would not solve the problem. Um, and there was a kind of um poignant clairvoyance in 1967, and where do we go from here? Um and it's sort of waved today that we we think of Dr. King as the prophetic messenger of hope, but he also understood the despair and the likelihood of the persistence of deep structural racism. And so I guess I'm wondering did he absolutely get it right? What does that history of voter suppression and disenfranchisement look like to you from that, I guess, 55-year perspective? And thinking Dr. King's own anticipation that this is that the road ahead was a very long one.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Right. Yeah, no, I think that's I think that's true. I think on one hand he's prophetic. On the other hand, uh there's a way that he sort of had almost too much faith in the federal government. Let me just explain what I mean by that. So in Where Do We Go From Here, um, he does make the case, you know, at the beginning of the book, where, you know, there's this the signing of of the Voting Rights Act, but then there's the Watts Rebellion. And part of what he was trying to get at was, I think, uh, two things. One is that the vote wasn't enough to fix the problem. That, you know, we could you could enfranchise black people, which should have been done with the 15th Amendment, uh, but it wasn't enough. And that the Watts Rebellion pointed to other issues, issues of poverty, issues of state violence. Um, and the other thing is that he was concerned uh about the kind of white backlash to the Black Freedom Movement, uh, especially in response to the urban uprisings. Uh, and and we've seen this, we've seen this in 2020 in terms of the response to the uprising of George Floyd. But let me just go back to um to voter suppression, because I think when I say that King almost was too um, you know, had too much faith in the federal government, he he did think that the Voting Rights Act would resolve that particular issue. Um but you know, I think that he would have been somewhat surprised, maybe not, I don't know, that voter suppression and the outright um uh de democratization, not just in the South but across the country, starts to take place in the 70s, like soon after he dies. I mean, you have white Southern elected officials who are using the allegations of voter fraud uh in the 70s as a pretext to prosecute, intimidate black organizations and voter registration groups. Um, Alabama has these significant cases in 79. Uh you know, Jeff Sessions, of course, is involved in some of the ones in the 80s. Uh Jesse Helms is most famously in 1990, mails out these postcards to 125,000 black voters, uh, threatening them with jail sentences if they went to the polls. That's 1990. I mean, you have the series of church burnings in the 1980s. The FBI is investigating what they have what they investigate. They investigate uh ministers who are involved in voter registration campaigns. Um, so there's lots of examples and some really striking historical examples that we never talk about. Like, you know, a lot of people are talking about the Wilmington massacre of 1898, but in 1981, uh Eddie Carthon was elected mayor of Tula, Mississippi, uh, first black mayor. And soon within weeks of being in office, he's arrested by the police on some made-up charges and taken out of office. I mean, just straight up sort of stripping him of any, of stripping the voters of their candidate. Michigan, right now, you know, Michigan is a really interesting place where the whole recent uh case around the poisoning of the Flint River and the indictments of the mayor of Rick Snyder and others points to the fact that that state um had disenfranchised black voters across the state through the use of emergency financial managers and things like that. And you know, when when Trump was elected, the the GOP run state secretary of state, Secretary of State basically threw out 48,000 votes from Detroit in 2016, and Trump won Michigan by 10,000. So voter, so voter suppression, I think, is is so important, and just the stripping of democracy is so important. And I think that King by now may not have been surprised, but uh it shows a complete and utter failure of the federal government to actually protect people's uh democratic rights, you know.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

So, in light of that, I wonder what you hear when you hear the expression rule of law, and when you hear people say, you know, what's so striking about this period is that there's been an assault upon the rule of law. Um we've talked about state-sponsored voter suppression. Right. Um we've talked about theft of votes. On the other hand, we've talked about, you mentioned the imminent indictment of the indictment, or imminent indictment, I can't remember, of um a former governor of the state of Michigan for his negligence in in Flint. Um I'm just curious, you know, especially in light of those kind of dual commitments of Dr. King to manifesting hope and to continuing the struggle, what you hear when you hear that expression.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, I mean, it's it's the the rule of law is is this baton that's that's used in so many different ways. And on one hand, it evokes uh police power. You know, um Trump adopts the law and order discourse of Reagan, of Nixon, um, and that is about suppression, suppressing dissent. Um, on the other hand, the Democrats and those who are pushing for impeachment are like, what about the rule of law? That the president's not above the law. Um and here again, it's the prosecution of those who are supposed to be um untouchable, uh, like a Rick Schneider, like a Donald Trump. Um and now then there's the rest of us who kind of watch the spectacle. And what do we actually see? Uh, what we see is that for all the rhetoric around the application of law evenly and equally, it just never happens. It just doesn't happen. I mean, I was thinking about the rule of law watching um the assault on the Capitol, um, and thinking to myself, that's that looks like Charlottesville, where the police are watching, like literally watching in Charlottesville, um, a white guy shoot a black person in the foot and don't and they don't do anything about it. They're watching all these people invade the Capitol building. And look, I'm the I'm the first one to say that the police who tried to stand in the way and who were injured and fought back, that they they did the best they could do. But ultimately, now people now the FBI is scrambling to try to figure out who did what after these people planned the insurrection, um bragged about it, posted stuff online. So that to me is evidence that the rule of law is not something that necessarily works uh on behalf of a robust democracy. It should, but it's not applied the same way. And at some point, I know we'll probably talk about it, um there's a there's a sort of third dimension of the rule of law, and that is the way in which um even this descent that we don't like can open up the pathway for you know domestic terrorism legislation that actually could undermine um civil liberties in ways that I think could be blowback. So, you know, we it would be great if we could really have an honest discussion about the rule of law, number one, and two, if we can have a like a national civics lesson about how the law works. And three, if we can be reminded of what's happening with the Supreme Court now that it is um a machine for the the for the current um regime that's in power now, at least for the next few few hours.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

You know, right. I mean, I guess the question is, you know, as you talk about the uh very uneven application of the rule of law, um, there's a strong implication that, you know, it's it's really about the system, it's not about the current office holder. Um, you know, when you talk about, you know, um uh police officers standing by and watching here and there, and they've done that presumably under Democratic and Republican regimes. Right. What what's the sort of underlying analysis that um informs your assumption about the uneven uneven application of the rule of law? What what what is going on that in your mind um obliterates the distinction between Democrat and Republican and and sort of points towards the deeper structure? How would you give voice to that?

SPEAKER_02 16:45

Race, class, and gender. So, you know, and no no matter who's in power, um racism and class and gender uh structure power. And so the the not just the application, but even the the design of our constitutional system is based on this idea that some people are are have more access, more power, are more uh protected than others, that there's some categories of people that are just not protected. We see this in terms of immigration policy. Uh, we see it um certainly in terms of uh police authority and police power. Uh, we saw it definitely in um the Roman detention center in Georgia, where all these uh immigrant women were sterilized with no protections. You know, um the most vulnerable are those who don't have the protection of the law or are subject to laws that target them. In other words, it's not simply the absence of law, but it's also the presence of what we call the rule of law that um allows for, I'm gonna give two examples, um, allows for certain uh regions of the country, for example, to have more power than others, uh through the electoral college, through the way we do elections on the one hand, and then allow other people to not have protection of the law, uh undocumented uh immigrants, for example. Um and then you have a kind of deep inequality in terms of class, in terms of the way certain communities are vulnerable, vulnerable to uh environmental hazards, for example, with no law protecting them. Um people who are who are subject to unequal schools and education. Still, you know, we had a Brown versus Board of Education decision, which did not and could not address the kinds of class-based inequalities that are also based on race as well, and just don't address those things. And why? Because we have a legal structure in place that finances education uh through um property taxes. We have a legal structure in place that values home, values property uh through all kinds of means that are actually legal, you know, um legal in terms of home ratings, legal, despite the fact we have one of the things that King fought so hard for was the Housing Act of 1968, which still did not resolve the problem. We dealt with um what was legal, that is the legal application of finance uh capital which allowed for subprime mortgages. Uh the the legal Stripping under Bill Clinton and the Republicans in the 1990s of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed for the sort of the collapse of banks that are finance banks versus those that are savings banks to basically spend our money or gamble our money. These things are all done within the framework of legality. So I think that if there's an analysis, we've got to figure out how to understand the underlying structures that reproduce inequality around race, gender, and class, sexuality, address those things and think about a legal regime that could protect everyone, you know, all protected categories, to understand the vulnerabilities of certain groups of others.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

You know, in thinking of sort of that deep structure and the Systopian nature of the struggle, um, I wonder about the power and efficacy of Dr. King's prophetic voice, a faith-based prophetic voice, which on one hand constantly called out to us to forge coalitions to recognize the inherent humanity in the other, uh, that rested on a grassroots inner faith coalition that preached the possibility of hope. And on the other, which didn't fail to call out, also in prophetic fashion, um, the complicity of uh of the majority uh of the system of his fellow clergymen, as they did in the letter from the Birmingham jail. Um and then again, and where do we go from here when he talks about the white backlash that awaits the uh the the aftermath of the voting rights attack? Um so on one hand, hope and and and on the other, uh the imperative to call out injustice. What do you think of that kind of voice today, that that prophetic spirit?

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Right, right. Well, it is it is extremely relevant today and has been relevant, um uh, especially during the summer of 2020, but even at this moment, it's relevant, you know, and in fact, I would argue uh has been embraced by a number of white anti-racist activists, you know, who have adopted the slogan of silence equals complicity or silence equals betrayal or silence equals death, which goes back to the AIDS campaign. But you know, King has been saying had been saying this uh many times in his critique of liberalism, and there are groups like um Showing off Racial Justice called Surge, Southern Crossroads, who have been pushing this idea um for a long time. But I would say that um there's another side to this, and that is that while there's a kind of robust anti-racism that recognizes complicity uh in silence that puts their bodies out there, there's also another sort of trend in anti-racism, uh, which is very different from like the 70s and 80s, which was really tied to like Marxist organizations and left. And that is this idea, this kind of new age idea of kind of Robin D'Angelo's white fragility that has no analysis of class and very little understanding of structural racism, but treats racism largely as as attitude, as unconscious bias, as requiring kind of self-work to improve oneself, and doesn't address race, dress racism as ideology, uh, which then obscures the system. And I think King was very clear about this. That you know, it's it's not it's not just bad attitudes, um, but it's housing policies. You know, when he went to Chicago and lived in a slum, um uh slum housing, he was talking about like this is just this is worse than being called the N-word, right? This condition. And so one of the things that I'm concerned about, and and the other side of King's Vision, which needs to come back, and that is an understanding of class. Um, when Reverend William Barber and Reverend List deal Harris, in the name of King's Vision, uh just this past year, um, you know, built a poor people's campaign, right? On the anniversary of the poor people's campaign, you know, this is very, very important. They recognize that for a lot of working class white people, um, not just in rural Appalachia, but throughout the country, um they're, you know, they're not, their privilege is is like in the mine, and their privilege is very limited. These are people facing staggering unemployment. These are people who are who are dealing with the effects of fracking and strip mining on their environment and their water supply. They lack affordable health care, they can barely pay their premiums on health care, they're shadowed with student debt, they're suffering from COVID, poverty. In fact, for the first time, I think I was reading um the life expectancy for working class and poor white people has actually actually dropped in terms of age. I mean, so to begin by saying, well, you know, well, the the white privilege, we need to do white privilege first and everything else second, then alienates, I think, a community that Reverend Barbara and Liz Theo Harris was trying to build uh unity with. That's not to say that it's easy. And that's not to say, you know, but I think to go back to the events of January 6th, um, I've been arguing with my students and with colleagues and friends. Those people taking over the Capitol were not working class white people. They were not. There might have been a handful, but these were elected officials, these were cops, military people, these were small entrepreneurs, these were like the middle class that looked like the second clan middle class. Um, these were people who had some resources. They were not those suffering, the white people suffering right now who haven't worked for like, you know, 10 months, right? So I think King would have understood that. He would have understood that with with clarity, that, you know, um it's it's that these are the white folks who it's not just their silence, but they need to fight for themselves and we need to fight for them, right? As he fought for them. That makes any sense.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Yeah, absolutely. So just as there is an ongoing continuity um in a system that uh creates the conditions um in which um uh inequality can persist. So too, there is a particular moment um in which we are located. Um and we are um historians um who situate events in specific contexts and I want to sort of capture um uh a little bit more closely that moment, um, which you argue both belongs to a long history and also has its contextual specificity. And I specifically want to take up with you uh the relevance of the term fascism to describe what we saw unfolding or the Trump era. Um, as you know, there has been an impassioned debate amongst historians about the relevance and appropriateness of the application of that term fascism to the Trump regime and to the attempted uh takeover of the Capitol. Um perhaps most famously in this past week's New York Times, Timothy Snyder wrote a long piece called An American Abyss that says if we haven't reached uh the fascist uh age, we are imminently to do so. A number of other historians, his fellow Yale historian Sam Moyne has consistently argued for all of his bluster and ill will, uh, Trump has actually not marshalled the levers of government very effectively in ways that um might merit the designation fascism. So I'm just wondering, as you offer your own um interpretive uh lens to the current situation, um, as you talk about the persistence of inequality um of race, class, and and gender, how relevant do you think the term fascism is to the current moment?

SPEAKER_02 28:41

Oh god, that's a hard question, David.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

That's why we bring you here, Robin.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, um I use the term, and let me let me let me sort of walk through this because I think it's a it's a very important uh uh question. That is, are we in a fascist moment? Have we ever been in a fascist moment? What is a fascist moment? And here is where I think I I strongly disagree with with the brilliant, you know, and thoughtful Sam Moyne on this, but for different reasons. Not because I think Trump succeeded, I think Sam's right that you know the the Trump regime hasn't fully, I would say partly, but hasn't fully been able to use the levers of the state to achieve all of its aims, but partly it has, and I'm gonna talk about that in a second. Um but I also and where I also disagree is that you know the the the argument often is can we use the analogies of the 1930s Europe to understand the US now? And what I would argue is that we don't need the analogy because um we have homegrown fascism, uh that fascism has its own organic uh roots here in the US. And as you know, I've been making the case for a long time that um, based on my reading of Cedric Robinson's work, based on my reading of Du Bois, M. Césaire, uh uh Oliver Cox, and certainly Hannah Rent, that fascism has earlier roots in colonial rule. One could say that about the United States. Um and I want to kind of jump back and then move forward to the present, and that is you know, when you look at whether it's the history of Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, uh, what Du Bois calls the counter-revolutionary property, counter-revolutionary property, um, this is mob violence. Mob violence mobilized against black citizens, overturn governments and elections. We saw that happen. We saw it through lynching, whitecapping, we saw it in Mississippi, we saw it in South Carolina, we certainly saw it in North Carolina. Um, we saw the use of the fascist state to force, you know, ostensibly free black people into convict labor to provide labor for the state. We saw it in segregation, we saw it in the rise of the second clan, who takes all the symbols as early as 1915, many of the symbols and ideologies of what we think of as 1920s and 30s fascism out of Italy and Germany, and you could see it there. Um, if we think of in fact, Sarah Churchwell actually wrote an article about the American roots of fascism and has some really good ideas about this. Now, having said that, I think that when we look at uh what did happen in the United States, it's hard to not look at Charlottesville in 2017, uh, to not look at the Michigan State House attack in April of this year, to not look at um uh, you know, the Dylan Roof's murder of non-black worshippers, Robert Bowers' uh attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, uh Patrick Crucius uh killing 22 people in El Paso, that these were acts of white nationalists, fascists who espouse anti-Semitic and racist, xenophobic great replacement conspiracies, and they're building. These are not just individual one-offs, these are they reflect movements, uh mob movements. Um, and so at the level of the mob, um, you know, there you could trace their roots straight back. They may they may claim Nazi connections, um, but you also have other connections that the Nazis drew from from the United States. Um there's that. But then when you think about the role or the level of the state, what did Trump and his people actually achieve? Well, they used the state to mobilize 70 million people behind a slew of lies to violently suppress anti-racist protests, to remake the federal judiciary, to support a right-wing, anti-woman, anti-worker, anti-earth racist, pro-corporate agenda. Um the state promoted white nationalism while you know smuggling in this ongoing free trade policies while saying America first. It promoted American isolation, isolationism, while also waging foreign wars, assassinating foreign leaders, um, and actively undermining sovereign governments. In other words, the fascist state, you know, wasn't fully fascist, but partially fascist and was able to achieve some things that have to be done, be done, undone. But even when it didn't achieve those things at the policy level, it laid the foundation for what we're about to face. And that is the stuff at the Capitol is nothing compared to what's going to come down, I think. Um, it may not happen on inauguration day, but certainly the year to come is gonna be rough.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

What do you anticipate?

SPEAKER_02 33:59

I anticipate more um violent insurrections as well as individual acts of assassination uh and and killing. And these, and again, I I think it's important to not separate the individual acts from organized uh uh white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racial violence. I mean, the you know, the Proud Boys, um uh the you know, the um uh you know, all those different organizations on the right, I think that they are not only organized, but we already know that they are they have close alliances, if not uh actual members in law enforcement, in the military, you know, the rise above movement, oath keepers, boogaloo boys, um, and Nazis and the Klan. The separation, the thin blue line between those organizations and a segment of the police uh is not so thin at all. And I and you know, it's weird. It's like um, I don't know, you know that remember that movie, um I think it was called uh American History X or something like that. I think it's called that. And there's a moment where the Nazis and the clan are coming together, and this one guy's like, you know, wait a second, to the Nazis, like I, you know, my my father fought you guys. And I had this kind of epiphany, it's like, wait a second, the same people who are invading the Capitol, we were fighting them in June. It's like some of the same people, not all of them. And the black police officers who have also been under enormous stress and strain, have all of all are also fighting them inside their departments. So one of the things I'm terrified of is not just the way that um these militias get a pass, but these militias are actually um promoted, supported tacitly through the structures that are supposed to protect us. And then whenever any of us say we need to remake the police, we need to defund the police, we need to create new modes of public safety, don't realize that it's not about getting rid of the police, but about getting rid of the fascists in the structure that we call the police. You know, so I just I'm I'm terrified about what's going to happen.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

So you, you know, if when or to put the pieces together, um, there's this long-standing tradition of white nationalism. Um, there's a long-standing tradition of what you would assert as a kind of homegrown American-style fascism. Um, there is um a uh an unprecedented political agitator, the likes of which we have not seen in the form of Donald Trump, uh, to sort of uh provide that kind of combustible energy to deprivatize, as it were, um people, push them into a much more visible public role, as we saw 12 days ago. I'm curious which role you would ascribe to social media as a forced multiplier in purveying the message, uh sharing techniques, um, uh hatching strategies, and what do we do about that, you know, in a in an in a society which reveres the First Amendment, right? Right, right. Uh as we saw in the conversation over whether Donald uh Trump should be thrown off of Twitter, um, with civil libertarians saying, you know, hold on, maybe maybe that's uh a step too fast taken. So social media.

SPEAKER_02 37:49

Yeah, I I I go back and forth on this because I think social media is a main um uh I won't say culprit, but certainly social media has played a critical role in the speed and the massive you know uh dissemination of all these lies and conspiracies. And of course, I was reminded that lies and conspiracies are not new, they're they've been part of politics, certainly American politics.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

Um But something is new.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

I mean something is new, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

The Trump variant of lying is is many orders of magnitude.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

No, true, true. And it's not even just the lies, it's it is um the question of authority, the authority of knowledge. So um there's the the democratization of of opinion. Uh that is to say, you know, everyone has a blog, everyone can make a certain kind of claim, no one has to be fact-checked. But the the this the power and authority one has in social media allows for kind of mob violence on social media. The social media could could check people, could destroy them, could um, through, you know, various forms of myth, could generate support, can get, you know, because what a lot of people are looking for is confirmation or affirmation for ideas that they already hold. They're not looking for critique. And one of the things that advances a democracy is robust critique. Social media does not allow for that. It allows for all kinds of haters and attacks, but the kind of robust critique that could allow for a deeper dialogue and a move toward a kind of synthesis of ideas or transcendence, that space is not there because what you're doing is you generate likes and supporters to be able to overwhelm other people with these other things. And then they try to overwhelm you, which has nothing to do with fatigue. That to me is terrifying. And again, the speed by which one can mobilize actual physical violence is terrifying. You know, and I you know, we we we've inherited this.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

So what do we do? This is this is the question. What do we do? I mean, the the the internet has no regulatory body to sit over it. Um we value free speech. Um we especially value free speech that has that that element of critique. What do we actually do? Constrain, to alter, to uh to censor, to differentiate.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Yeah, I don't know. Because on the one hand, to censor is to undercut the censor opens up the the um Pandora's box, um, because we know who ends up being censored as well, those who actually have really sharp critical positions that make sense. Um so censorship is not an answer. Um the fact that these social media uh platforms are corporate and privately owned is a problem as well. I mean, yes, we can applaud today that Twitter has uh you know suspended Trump's account or or um or any other you know fascist, but it's because the corporation has the power to do that. Once they open up that box, they can also silence people who are critical of their own platforms. I mean, there's all kinds of things that could happen, uh, but to me, this comes back to the question that you posed earlier, and that is how do we understand the rule of law? Um, at what point do we see the response to incitement, for example, as merely pulling the plug on Twitter and then a pardon? Or an actual robust legal inquiry and judicial process that has some consequences, right? And that to me, having having the consequences of losing Twitter to me is nothing compared to actually having to face um some kind of consequence, whether it's a jail sentence, whether it's a fine, something. Um and that's the thing that we're not gonna see. That's the thing that that doesn't happen all along. Uh, and that's one thing. The second thing is that as long as social media is corporately owned, um even the most well-meaning people won't have enough control to be able to shape it in a way that's more democratic. So what what we need to do is not abolish social media, but figure out a way to make it more democratic and more accountable, not to corporations, but accountable to broad swaths of people who you know can actually intervene and say, you know what, this is not even true. Um, we also need to be accountable to our students as faculty. We we we have to be able to um to stand up with acknowledge, truth, and critique. And what I see also in the university is a kind of um capitulation, not from everybody, uh, but a certain kind of capitulation saying, well, you know, study the what what what do you feel and what do you think? As like, well, what's your opinion? And then leave it there as if somehow um the academy is a place for people to express equally their opinions to be left alone, because this is an expression of speech. Sometimes people need to come back and be challenged, critiqued. We need to be able to critique each other uh and to come back to that culture, uh, which is so essential. It's not to say it's a savior, it's not the nirvana, but it's something that we need to be able to move forward.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

It's interesting because um observers on both left and right would say the university has ceased to be that place. It's it's it's there's a complete shared critique in that regard, that it's no longer a place where you can challenge and and be critical and defy convention. Um, you know, the university has failed in that regard. Um but I want to move in this um last segment of our conversation to something that came up um uh in your talking about um uh in your in your last set of observations, um, just thinking about what awaits us, um uh, particularly uh in two days when when Joe Biden and and Kamala Harris are sworn into office. Um my sense is that um as you look at the constellation of forces uh array um and uh the long-standing patterns of American political history, um you're not uh suffused with great hope that uh that a different model of the rule of law or a different model of uh uh of uh critical discourse, or for that matter, a different model of uh of structures of governance will emerge. So there's a kind of uh weariness. Here we go again, we have another democratic uh uh president, you know, people are gonna say it'll be different, and you know, plus challenge, the more it changes, the more it will stay the same. Um you've also suggested that uh that you uh you fear um uh cascading violence uh in coming months and years. And so um rather than my surmise, why don't you tell me what what it what expectations do you have? What expectations do you think it is reasonable to have? Um uh having at long last brought an end to this unprecedented four years of uh of a mix of uh of you know unrestrained entertainment, uh debasement, vilification, uh uh commodification, uh that's coming to an end. Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

Well, I suppose you could say there's good news and bad news. I mean, I'll give a mix, and some of the bad news is like I was saying, um I think that everyday life in the United States will continue to see the resuscitation of the extreme right, whether it's under the name of Trumpism or something else, uh, and that the threat of violence is going to be imminent. Um and I think that you know we have to remember this because even under Obama, you know, I mean, we have to remember that it was under Obama that you have this resurgence of white um nationalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism. I mean, it was it was really deep under his his reign.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

The only difference is that classic white backlash, as as King called?

SPEAKER_02 47:11

I I think it's I think it's classic white backlash. And I think King was actually correct, was even more correct than the way it's been framed. It's often framed as backlash against Obama's election, but I think it's classic backlash against um the movement. In other words, the backlash even became more intense, um, not just because of Obama's election, but with Black Lives Matter, with Trayvon Martin's death, with the emergency. So it's a backlash against the movement. That's one thing. Um, but I also think that uh we're gonna we let our guards down sometime because we've inherited this idea that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the saviors against an individual, evil, unhinged man, when in fact so many of the policies, even under Trump, were a continuation of policies that we saw under Obama and George W. Bush and Clinton and others, right? So um I do think that it's gonna be difficult under the notion that we've been saved to be critical of democratic policies. Uh it's gonna we're gonna see a kind of silencing around the kind of abolitionist demands we saw in the summer of 2020. And we saw that. We in fact we saw the silencing of those kinds of more radical demands in order to support the election of Biden and Harris. In other words, people were quiet, we were saying, look, don't talk about defund the police, don't talk about that now, because we got to get them elected. It's gonna be hard to bring that conversation back. Um, but the other thing I'm most, I didn't say most afraid of, but extremely afraid of uh in terms of the next coming months is the way that countering domestic terrorism could be blowback. And I mentioned this before, uh, but you know, in 1947, when Truman was president and put together a panel to look at um uh civil rights and look at all this racial violence in America, one of the things, one of the outcomes of that was a more robust criminal justice system that was meant to protect Black lives against racial violence. But what happened was that very cis, that very robust criminal justice system did the opposite. It actually expanded the Carson state, expanded policing in inner city communities, and gave the fuel for the Johnson administration to also use the war on poverty in order to fight the war on crime, you know, through expanding police. So what we're gonna see is we tend to be the victims of the very counter-terrorism operations meant to protect us. So that's my worry. And then finally, there's some good news on the horizon. I mean, I have to say, in terms of the things that I'm seeing uh under Biden Harris, it's a more progressive agenda than Obama. You know, I mean, we're gonna see, yes, same old neoliberal policies to a certain degree, an emphasis on corporate growth. We're gonna see that, but we're gonna see uh, you know, an attempt to actually raise the minimum wage at the federal level to$15 an hour. We're gonna see some worker protections, we're gonna see um some commitment to a green economy. Uh, it's not perfect, but I think you know, it's stuff to fight for. And it um and what it is to me is a foreboding of the power of social movements to put these things on the agenda. I mean, all that fight over the last few years for these things are coming to fruition. It's not it's not this, it's not gonna save us. It's not gonna completely undercut uh inequality, but it's it's certainly a step forward. And I have to say, it makes me happy. It also reminds us that we got to keep fighting because it's the fighting that got us to this place in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 51:26

And in that regard, maybe a final question, which is um one of the features of your um career is that you have been both a scholar and an activist. Um, and I'm wondering how that mix of rules changes, if at all, in the transition from the Trump era to this new administration.

SPEAKER_02 51:48

Um I think it's I think it's exactly the same, which is so I just like three things, and it sound like slogans, so forgive me, but um always remain vigilant and critical. Um and I always think about Marx's famous statement from 1844 where he he talks about like um you know the fact that you have to always be critical even when it even with if the conclusions that you thought you came up with are not right. In other words, you have to be prepared to move in a way that you critique self-critique, and that vigilance and and criticality is just necessary for anyone who's a scholar and an activist, or both. But then I also have this thing, you know, I always say, and I have it taped on my my thing here, which I'd say, you know, love, study, struggle. Those are the three, that's my my mantra. Um, just like you know, King had his triplets of evil, um, my triplets of struggle, love, always love, always come from place of love, including the people who are threatening your life. You know, like to come at um uh some of these folks who are MAGA supporters from a place of love is damn hard. But it means it's this constant struggle to build community. Um, study, meaning that you got to keep looking at things that you may not agree with and study deeply and understand and struggle, which is to say that it's through struggle and participation in struggle that you're able to ask the right questions and know how to study and know how to love. So that's all. I mean, again, it's baby cliche, but it's work for me so far.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

I can think of no better way to conclude our conversation and perhaps no better tribute to Dr. King uh than to hear you offer those uh three charges to us. Um thank you, Robin Kelly, for joining us on Then and Now. It has been, as always, a really illuminating and uh and fascinating time with you.

SPEAKER_02 54:05

Thank you, David.

SPEAKER_01 54:06

Um, and thank you to our listeners out there. Let us know your thoughts on this or other episodes of then and now by emailing us at luskincenter at history.ucla.edu at L-U-S-K-I-N center at history.uclai.edu. And special thanks to our executive producer Maya Ferdman. Until next time, wishing you a safe and healthy day. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 54:32

Thank you for joining us this week on Then and Now. Then and Now is brought to you by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, where we study change to make change. For more on our work, follow us on Twitter and Facebook at our handle at Leskin History. Our show is produced by Maya Ferdman and David Myers, with original music by Daniel Reichmann. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.