This is a Spiritual Crisis (ft. Ian Bassin)

there's so many places that I could go from here.

I think what I, you know, one of the things that I heard you quote is an adage that I think about in my own head a lot.

And sometimes not, I don't mock the adage.

I, I play lightly with it because it's, it's, it's an, it is a, May you live in interesting times.

And sometimes I kind of joke, well, yes, it turns out that can be a blessing or a curse, depending on which way you look at it.

You are, it's unmistakable, as you have said twice, I think already, or alluded to twice in this conversation.

that this is an opportunity.

You see this crisis as an opportunity to, you know, sometimes what I talk about in this podcast is create a better American future.

And

can you just talk a little bit about how we seize that opportunity in your mind?

Yeah.

I mean, first, let's think about what are the moments in this country's history that have been sort of the most canonical great leaps forward for freedom and democracy and equality, right? If you were to look at the history of this country, you'd say, well, the first one is probably just the Union and the Constitution when we threw off a tyrannical monarchy and became self-governing.

That's probably our first moment of kind of freedom and democracy.

Well, that comes on the back of a violent and bloody revolution, right? That was a crisis period that produced that opportunity.

I mean, the second one we might look at is Reconstruction.

the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

And that too, right, is on the back of the Civil War, right? Another moment where we have what historians called our sort of second founding, but it came off the back of a horrific crisis.

And I think if you were to identify a third one, you might look at kind of the combination period from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement, where we both established kind of a modern government with a modern safety net and the ability to sort of implement the kinds of protections that a modern society needs, like making sure that our food is safe.

We could talk about what's happening with that today.

And then obviously the Civil Rights Movement building up to the Voting Rights Act, of 1965, which is really the first moment that we become truly a multiracial democracy where all eligible voters have a reasonable opportunity to participate in our system.

And all of that basically comes on the backs of a Great Depression, two world wars, right? I mean, those really grow out of those moments.

So I think history teaches us that every opportunity that we've had has been preceded by a crisis so if that's true and we recognize that we are in a democracy crisis right now which i think you and i and probably many of our listeners would agree we absolutely are in well history would suggest that there's something better on the other side of this and the question is can we can we get there so to your question like how do we seize that how do we do it Well, the first piece, I think, is what we're doing right now, which is see it as an opportunity, right? Because this is sort of a meta point, but authoritarianism thrives on people's sense of hopelessness and isolation.

That's when people tune out or they decide to hand over all decision-making to some strongman who says, you don't have to worry about it.

I'll do it all for you, right? Those are responses to people feeling hopeless, right? and isolated.

And so step one is we will not give in to hopelessness and isolation.