Why No Kings Isn’t Working

0:00This podcast is supported by WTTW. As Chicago's source for local independent reporting, WTTW News brings you essential coverage. Subscribe to the Daily Chicagoan e-newsletter for the news of the day directly to your inbox Monday through Saturday. And on Fridays, explore the natural wonders around us in Urban Nature, WTTW's newest e-newsletter. And watch WTTW's trusted nightly news program, Chicago Tonight at 5.30 and 10 p.m. and stream at WTTW.com slash news.

0:34This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:48I'm Nadja Spiegelman, and I'm a culture editor for New York Times opinion. Lately, I've been feeling overwhelmed. I just read headline after headline, and I feel helpless. Our institutions are eroding. The Justice Department has now set up a fund paid for in taxpayer money,$1.8 billion, what the president calls an anti-weaponization fund to compensate Trump allies. The U.S. Supreme Court today struck down one of Louisiana's majority Black congressional districts. Companies are eliminating formative entry-level jobs. the work handed over to artificial intelligence. Even if you go to protests, even if you go to the ballot box, it just still feels small in the face of these challenges.

1:39To more deeply understand where we are and how to move through it, I sat down with my colleague, columnist Tressie McMillan-Cottom, and New York Magazine writer Brock Collier.

1:54Tressie, Brock, thank you so much for being here with me today.

1:57Tressie McMillan Cottom:It's a real pleasure. Happy to do it. So I really want to talk about feelings today, how we're feeling about politics. I think it's genuinely important. But before that, I want a few numbers just to ground us in the reality of this conversation. According to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, one of the most defining shifts among young people is a loss of perceived agency. Half of them feel like people like them have no say in the government. There's a feeling that what they do has no impact on what happens next. And that feeling, that lack of agency in the face of the world, is really what I want to talk about.

2:31How it affects us, how we move through it. Here are just a few things that have happened in the past few weeks. Trump created a$1.8 billion slush fund to benefit the Jan 6 rioters. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. We're still at war with Iran. How do you react? How do you feel when you read these headlines and how do you process these emotions?

2:52Tressie McMillan Cottom:How are you feeling? I mean, I just left lunch with two people and I asked them how they were feeling. And I feel like the word I hear the most often is numb. I think sometimes, you know, during the first administration, I was almost more emotionally worked up, even though it wasn't nearly as bad as now. Like you had to just get used to this man being omnipresent in our lives. And now we've been dealing with Trump for so many years that it just doesn't feel, I don't know, I rarely react to anything with too much feeling. I think when ICE was taking over Minneapolis, that felt really intense for me for whatever reason.

3:32But everything else, you just kind of read it and yeah, move on. Why do you think that the ICE raids in Minneapolis felt particularly activating to you? I mean, this sounds horrible, but there was a sense that it could happen. It could impact your life soon. You know, we're in New York. The question was, is he coming to our city next? Is he going to that city next? You know, there was something kind of self, like I'm really just worried about myself and how my life is impacted in that fear. But it just felt like, oh, he's literally taking over a city. And that's freaky. Yeah. I don't spend a lot of time reflecting on what Donald Trump is doing, or I really try not to.

4:14Tressie McMillan Cottom:I have tried to limit my exposure to like exactly what you just did, that weekly roundup. I subscribe to some services that'll give me a brief on the day on the week. And that helps me not sort of spiral out into the details of all of the intersecting sort of global scale crises that seem to be ongoing in our lives. To Bra's point, Trump 1.0, I think, felt different than the current administration, in part because it felt like an anomaly. That, right, if we could just sort of solve for X, meaning Donald Trump and also X in the sense of the former Twitter.com, if we could just solve for X, we could get back to regular life.

4:55Tressie McMillan Cottom:I think part of what has happened is the slow acclimation to the reality that this is regular life, that there is not necessarily a going back. I think part of that is due to the fact that there is no idyllic past that we can sort of escape into. I think we are accepting that whatever is to happen next, it will be new and it will be different. Now, different can be good, but different can also be bad. And I think the paralysis is about not knowing which it will be. Does this extend to the people around you, to how the people around you are feeling about the world and the news the way that you're describing?

5:40Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yes and no. I occupy a really interesting place sort of professionally and personally. On the professional side, so I would say among my, if I'm honest, my better educated, better sort of inoculated friends, the ones who are going to feel the least amount of crisis and instability in their lives because they are highly educated, they are high income earners, they're sort of, you know, solidly middle class and in the middle of their lives. And so they're settled, tend to have the most anxiety, which I think is interesting. Then there's this other part of my life that is a sort of broader cross-section of people about like class and race and region across this country that are, they seem more pragmatic about what is before them.

6:26Tressie McMillan Cottom:And I think that pragmatism helps give them a sense of agency, interestingly enough. I think it is the sense that you have to sort of get to a level of acceptance before you can act. And so in that part of my life where there are people organizing in their local communities or even just understanding what the politics are in their local area, a lot of people in my lives have sort of rededicated themselves to understanding local politics and civics and what is possible. Those people in my life right now are actually doing a little bit better. And I think there is a lesson in there. There's a certain type of work that exhausts us, right, that is overwhelming.

7:05Tressie McMillan Cottom:And then there is a type of work that refuels you. That makes a lot of sense. I want to drill down on that. Like, can you say even more explicitly why it's the people who are materially the most comfortable and perhaps the most protected from these existential threats impacting their daily lives imminently who are the most anxious? Oh, yeah. You know, we really struggle in American discourse with understanding status and status anxiety and how much our sense of well-being is tied to knowing my place in the world, right? And especially if you have been groomed to perform well in that system, to go to the right schools, to pick the right profession, to marry the right partner, to make the good, right, proper decisions, there was supposed to be some good, right, proper outcome to all of that.

8:03Tressie McMillan Cottom:And for a long time, we've been able to assume that all of that outcome was a consequence of our individual decisions. I think some people are experiencing, for some of them the first time, the realization that there are some things that are bigger than our own individual choices, that you could do everything right. And things still may not come out positively. I also think that there is a fear that this moment is going to ask something of us. So, again, some of the paralysis is about not knowing what to do. Some of the paralysis is about knowing exactly what needs to be done. And understanding that that is going to take some sacrifice.

8:44Tressie McMillan Cottom:I think the larger backdrop of everybody's anxiety is the political moment. But the political moment itself is a reflection, I think, of us dealing with the anxiety of climate crisis and just sort of massive global changes. We are going to have to change the way we live. That's just the truth of the matter. And for some people, that will be a greater sacrifice than for other people. And I think paralysis can be a way to try to hold off the inevitable decision-making that has to come, which is, okay, how are we going to live different? And how is the American way of life, how do we redefine it?

9:18Tressie McMillan Cottom:And then consequently, what will be my place in it? That makes a lot of sense. My father's side of the family were Polish Jews. My entire father's side of the family were in concentration camps. My grandparents were the only ones who survived. And I grew up thinking, like, one day I, too, will be tested. One day there will be this dramatic moral battle where I will have an opportunity to be tested and to be good. And I thought about that a lot as a child growing up in the 90s. And I feel like now I'm in this space where I'm like, oh, but is this what it looks like? It's so slow. It's so incremental.

9:51It's so unclear to me how I act in this moment. And I think that's part of what I've been struggling with. Yeah. I think also when it comes to personal responsibility, especially for young people, you know, this generation that was like maybe graduated high school or college during COVID. And COVID was the big test of that personal responsibility. Am I going to mask and care for my community? But so many young people are, you know, questioning the vaccines. And I think for this generation that, you know, all these states didn't make the best decisions when it came to opening or closing schools.

10:27and they feel like, oh, I kind of did my part and what was it for? And it didn't help me. And it just all seems to be have been wasted or something. It does make a lot of sense. And it's one of the things I've been thinking about is we live in such an individualized society that it feels like we must be able to do an individual action that is going to be big enough, bold enough, that it will have the kind of impact that we want to see on the world. And I'm curious where you think about sort of individual action versus collective organizing and how you see the interplay between our generally individualized society and actual organizing and activism.

11:07Tressie McMillan Cottom:When I see that Harvard Youth Poll, and I speak to college students all the time in my capacity as a professor, there is a sense that why do I delay my gratification today if there is no social payoff. And the reality is they are right. No one is telling them what the new thing will be. And I think some of the overwhelm and the dissociation and paralysis that we see in something like that poll is as much about the fact that we have not socialized them to this moment. That's really interesting. I think that as a millennial and as a queer millennial, it was really easy for me to believe it gets better.

11:50There will be progress. There will be social progress in the world. My life as a gay person between 16 and now has become so much more possible. I can imagine getting married. I can imagine having kids in a way that when I was a teenager seemed so far away. And it happened so quickly. And I think part of what's happening now is this sort of backlash whiplash, this feeling of, oh, we kept believing that things would get better, but actually, why would we think that? It's entirely possible for things to simply get worse. I wonder how you think about that through the lens of your queerness. In some ways, like every generation thinks that the things that are happening to them are unique to them.

12:26But then you have this generation where they're actually like, things are happening to them that have never happened, you know, pandemic, the onslaught of AI. I mean, talk about this kind of paralysis. It kind of feels like with AI, we're in that moment right before the pandemic where we were all talking about it, but we really didn't know what the effects were going to be. So what are we going to do? It feels like we're in a very similar moment with that now. You know, 10 years ago, it felt like Gen Z, these young people, they were going to save everything. The kids are going to be all right.

12:55You know, the Parkland survivors were rallying around gun violence and Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement were talking about environmentalism. And all of that seems to have gone away. We don't really have this idea anymore that young people are going to save us. We think of them as these, you know, kind of jobless, lost creatures stuck on their phone with no ability to do anything. And is that accurate in your experience? Like, is the apathy described in that poll something that you actually see in the world? I think so. I mean, I don't think, again, what we're circling around here is what do we do?

13:29And yeah, what do you do to get really tactile about it? You're going to recycle. You're going to quit buying from Amazon. You're going to, like, nobody's going to give up their social media to protest the tech companies. Yeah, I think that there is a feeling of, like, the majority of Americans want stricter gun control laws. Many Americans want abortion access. And yet, even though there's majority opinion on these issues, they haven't moved towards that opinion. And it can feel so frustrating to be like, what do we have to do to make this happen? Darcy, I'm curious because you teach and you're with students all the time.

14:04Is this apathy that we're describing something that you see?

14:06Tressie McMillan Cottom:No, and then there's also a lot of self-selection here. Let me be fair. The students who find me usually are the ones who are really struggling to feel agentic. And so that will skew my perception just a little bit. I take this apathy, I think, as a little bit more complex. What I see on the ground is a divestment from our political system, from electoral politics, from retail politics that have operated as usual for all of young people's lives with very little material effect. And in fact, the only material consequences most young people can see to political action has been on the side of reclaiming rights, taking away people's citizenship, right?

14:51Tressie McMillan Cottom:Making the world less pluralistic and less equal. And so in that sense, I'm not sure that that's apathy as much as it is an accurate assessment of their political reality, which to your point is none of us believe in this thing. And yet there doesn't seem to be anything that we can do about it. So I separate out like the accurate assessment or diagnosis of the political problem from whether or not young people feel like they can do something. You know, we have just come off of the last three years of really, you know, maybe not a historical high, but a historical moment of a lot of young people organizing, a lot of young activists.

15:34Tressie McMillan Cottom:And what happened to most of them is surveillance, stigmatization, expulsion, right? Some of their lives have now been marked, or they certainly have the feeling that their lives have been marked over the life course precisely because they tried to do the type of agentic action that we're asking them to do. And then we come and we say, well, do you feel like you have control over your life? I don't know that it's so much apathy as a reality that some of us are far removed from. I don't know. It's funny. I think young people, when it comes to protesting these, obviously, the pro-Palestine protests on campuses got a lot of media attention.

16:13And to your point, those students were punished for it. I think that they were also held to strange standards by adults in the left and the media who wanted their politics to be perfect. And their politics were inherently flawed in many cases, but they were held to different standards. But I think because of that, like, yeah, what is a protest going to do? I also think that young people have sometimes they have trouble focusing these kinds of public demonstrations. You, I don't know, I was at a Pride March last year and everybody started chanting and like against AOC. And it was just so strange.

16:53And you look at these Palestine protests and you see the LGBTQ flags, which become this dog whistle for the right. And I find that unfair, but I'm also like, we should focus this. Why are there pride flags? Like, what are we doing here? What is the goal? Like, what are we really organizing around? They're a little scatterbrained. I think that young people protesting are a little scattered. Which, of course, leads us to talking about the No Kings protest, which has been a historically large protest in this country. And yet, I know that sometimes I feel like, is that effective? I mean, I was an activist as a teenager.

17:31I believed very strongly in the power of protest. And I think that sometimes now it can sort of feel like, well, we're making the largest protest in U.S. history. That protest has a very clear organizing idea. There are no kings in America. It's easy to get people to rally around that. And yet that protest skews much older. And I'm curious your thoughts about this.

17:54Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, I, you know, I don't want to completely characterize young people's activism and organizing as like the only form of organizing that does not have like a clear articulation. I think that's just an American problem. I even when we have to your point about like no kings rallies, a sort of clear unifying message on the ground looks just as complicated. The same thing where like people's messages are speaking past each other. I wouldn't know how to both pack the court and get the government out of my life. And yet you'll see both signs, right, at one of these like massive demonstrations. To some degree, that's just the function of like trying to do a massive spectacle, right?

18:37Tressie McMillan Cottom:A big tent will bring people who have internal contradictions. And that is not unique to young people's organizing. I think part of it is that the way we cover some of the more middle-aged, middle-class, if I'm frank, the more holdover from the 1960s ideal of protesting, the way we cover them does not get into those contradictions nearly as much as we get into young people's organizing. To your point, I think we hold them to unfair standards, right? In part, I think, because we kind of resent them for living in this little bubble of like a socialist utopia, which is what college is. And so we're a little resentful of that.

19:16Tressie McMillan Cottom:And we think that our organizing is more practical and material. And frankly, I'm not sure that it is. But it is very important, I think, for us to acknowledge or like to really come to accept that in the 21st century, what has happened with the corporate capture of the surveillance infrastructure that this country has built and is continuing to build? One of the reasons why I think Minnesota was a flashpoint was because we saw materially, I think for many of us the first time, what that surveillance dragnet looks like. And some of the fear that, yes, this might happen in my community was, I think, also a fear that, oh, they can turn that on me in an instant.

19:55Tressie McMillan Cottom:And yes, they will. And we don't yet know how to deal with that. And I think until we get to that place, I think we're going to feel a little politically neutered. I think that's really wise. Around the No Kings protest, Erica Chenoweth has introduced this idea that if you have 3.5 % of the people in the streets, the government has to listen. And the No Kings protest have had 2 % of the population. There's other research now showing that more than peaceful protest, economic disruption and boycotts might be more effective than peaceful political protests and marches. And how do we think about civic engagement in a world where perhaps the old models of what we think of as useful need to change a little bit in terms of what could actually affect change in the country?

20:43Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, I think the marches and the spectacle still matters. I think the issue here is that it cannot be the only form of engagement. And to your point, economic boycotts, which I'm going to define pretty broadly, because I think there's like the sort of big level where we look at something like the Target boycott, or you can look at the boycott of CBS in response to censorship that holds a lot of promise. But there are a range of others. And the question is how comfortable Americans are with being truly disruptive, right? And I think a lot in this moment about finding the points of friction. in the system, right?

21:23Tressie McMillan Cottom:You don't have to have a perfect politics. You don't have to have a perfect march, right? But I do think we need a better analysis of if we do aim our disruption, economic boycott at the system, where can we be the most disruptive in a way that will force politicians or the electoral process to listen to people's will? That has become a little more complicated, a little bit more textured, but I do think it is both still possible and I think it is the only immediate way forward. It also makes me think, just thinking in my lifetime, the most successful political, like economic boycott I've ever seen is the rights boycotting of Bud Light over partnering with Dylan Mulvaney.

22:09Exactly. That's a great one. And that Bud Light never recovered. And I don't know, I think the left is almost too big tent, too divided, too scatterbrained and too complacent to like do that to a company. I mean, I did a part of a large part of what I want to talk about has to do with comfort, the amount of comfort that Americans have that stops them from taking risks. And I really want to talk to you about that, Tress, because I know you've thought about it a lot. And also, no, I see you over there. What you got? I was just going to say for me, sometimes it's as simple as like, okay, I'm not going to boycott Amazon because the prices have been jacked up at all the grocery stores.

22:48And this is the easiest way to get toothpaste cheap. And that's comfort. And that's like where the conversation ends for me and people I know. Absolutely.

22:57Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah. No, the contradiction there. That's exactly, I think, what I would say. So we've got these like different nested problems. And I think within that there is, you know, a common thread. And one of them in the American context is this other contradiction, which is people are anxious. They're angry. I keep thinking that one of the most underreported stories of this moment is just how angry people are and groups of people who have not historically been angry. And that anger being unreported, misunderstood is part of our challenge in this moment. At the same time, Americans are not nearly as desperately poor or economically vulnerable as we probably would need to be for a mass social movement to happen.