HEATHER McGhee
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in the aftermath of the election, we’ve asked some of the most thoughtful people around to reexamine their presuppositions, abandon their priors, and imagine a renewed, revamped fight for democracy in the challenging years ahead.
Today, we bring you a conversation with author, activist, and policy wonk Heather McGhee, one of the most perceptive analysts of America’s political ills and clearest articulators of potential solutions to those challenges.
When we spoke with McGhee back in May, she made a prescient argument about why the Democratic Party had been unable to compete with Trump in the arena of culture. Where Trump was able to tell a story that let his supporters make meaning out of events in their lives, the Democrats offered only policy prescriptions.
Following the election, we reached out to McGhee to talk about how the election has changed her existing analysis of the Democratic Party’s problems and potential, about the huge challenge of the right-wing information ecosystem, and what it will take for pro-democracy forces not just to tell a better story, but to compete on the level of making meaning in the everyday lives of the American people.
Following the overwhelming disappointment and emotional blow of the electoral loss, and the prospects for what is likely to happen, as someone who has been a very good prognosticator, are you questioning anything that you thought going into this election? How has this upended your thinking and changed the things you've been thinking about?
I spent most of my career as a policy wonk and as a policy wonk focused on inequality. And in that role, I have focused on policy changes to improve the material lives of people. And much to my surprise, the Biden administration delivered on as much of the progressive economic policy agenda as they could.
I still blame Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for the Democrats not being able to run through the tape on an agenda that would have materially impacted millions of working-class people's lives. Things like $15 an hour, labor law reform, and the care agenda. These are things that — in a way that a long-term infrastructure plan could not — would have immediately been felt in working families’ homes.
And they are things the administration would have been able to immediately take credit for.
Exactly. So one thing I'm thinking of in terms of the policy framework is immediacy and marketability are more important and urgent than dethroning neoliberalism, dealing with antitrust, and creating new manufacturing jobs. All of these things feel very long-term and it’s easy to confuse who gets credit for it.
So that's one piece. But that's not a massive rethinking. It's a tweak, but it's a really important one if people are more enthralled with a $300 stimulus check signed by Donald Trump than they are with the highest rate of manufacturing since the 1970s; if people can vote for $15 an hour and abortion rights in Missouri while soundly rejecting the Democratic Party that stands for these things.
I want to ask you more about that because these are positive policies, which are also broadly popular, but when people voted they split those things off and voted for protecting abortion rights, for raising the minimum wage — and against the candidates who supported those positions. Were they voting for Republicans on the level of vibes?
I would call that on the level of brand. But I'm really thinking the most right now about solutions to the problem of our kabuki democracy — that we don't have a real democracy. The Electoral College, the Senate, our ridiculous voting system, money in politics, all of that means that the will of the people is not well-represented in our political choices and political outcomes. Donald Trump winning the popular vote says to me the problem is deeper than a structural one. It is, in many ways, a substantive one.
We need to look at the fact that we are now three decades into a right-wing takeover of our information ecosystem that is fundamentally changing people's frameworks. We're talking about the loss of local news. More than half of American counties have no access or very limited access to local news. We're talking about Sinclair, a right-wing operation taking over local broadcasts that reaches over 70% of the American population, with a deliberate agenda and a focus on crime, homelessness, and drugs. Add in social media — where so many people get their news — and how easily manipulable that is at its best. And at its worst, it's Elon Musk.
You combine that with the crisis in authority that was created by the Covid pandemic and the foreign disinformation campaigns that have become so brazen that people in the federal government are just saying, "We are helpless to do anything about it. All we can do is point out that it's wrong." You take all of that together, plus Fox News and conservative radio. Plus the entertainment ecosystem around men, especially young men: podcasts, and video games. And the rigorous journalism, meanwhile, is behind paywalls. So we can now see a full 360-degree wraparound alternate universe, for most people without a New York Times subscription.
That doesn't diminish the material concerns and the real privation facing working-class families. But it does mean that the meaning-making about why they're struggling to make ends meet, who's to blame, and who can fix it, is controlled by the right wing.
I feel like you're getting at something that's pretty important there. We posted last week asking why the left doesn’t have its own Joe Rogan. But what you're saying is that it's really not that simple. You’re competing with a completely separate ecosystem of media and a marketing funnel from memes and video games to far-right YouTube channels that leads people into this entirely other way of understanding the world
Well, first, let me just say, Beyoncé is great, but she's not giving you an analysis of where your problems are coming from and telling you how to fix them. There's a real difference between having someone co-sign a candidate as a personality and having someone in your ear every day saying, "Look at this piece of news. This is how this fits into my story of grievance,” as Joe Rogan does.
That’s meaning-making in a real way. It's about being there on voters' shoulders all day, helping them make sense of the world. And there is a version of that across multiple platforms in the right-wing ecosystem.
Vice President Harris came out with a strong populist message and set of proposals on costs, about corporate greed and price gouging, right? And then the chattering class responded and said, "Oh, that's so stupid," right? You know It may be smart politics, but it's dumb policy. And then the billionaires who wanted to be on the Democrat side said, "You're going to have to get rid of Lina Khan." And so it just got muted and muffled and put aside.
But that’s just not the same as saying — as fans and Trump did — that the reason your housing is so expensive is because of illegal immigrants yeah and the government giving them all the good houses and saying that over and over and over again until people believed that it was true.
You read about people’s reasons for voting and it almost seems that beyond that, the prevailing sentiment was "Well, as long as I got mine, forget it.” Whether that’s about rights, housing, or anything having to do with my taxes paying for someone else's needs.
That's where the zero-sum nature of the right-wing argument is just so powerful, right? That this fabricated other is a threat to you and yours. And unless that fabricated other is actually billionaires and powerful corporations, it's a story that creates the seeds of fascism and creates an authoritarian answer.
One of the other things I was really surprised about was how nearly a decade of brutal, dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the right instead of creating a racial solidarity consciousness among Latinos offered them a choice. That is the choice that has been offered to immigrants throughout our history, which is to either remain the maligned and dehumanized other or opt in and be white. Just be white, you know which is the greatest thing in the world to be, apparently.
And Latinos literally have that option on the census, they're not a race. They're white people who may or may not be of Spanish-speaking origin, It's not surprising in the sense that many people have predicted that this would be what would happen. But I think that the scale of it, and in response to such pre-genocidal rhetoric. Rhetoric that fully dehumanized immigrants, made them into mortal threats, that created a blood libel narrative.
So I don't want to blame the people who are making that choice because it happened in the context of what looks to have been disappointingly low turnout from Democratic voters overall. And I wonder about that failure to motivate the base. There was this overall failure to appeal. And I don't know what to make of that either, in that context that you described, of this outright fascist rhetoric.
I really do think that the Democratic brand has been so defined by our opposition. At its worst, we are what the right wing says. But at our best, we are ineffectual. We promise a lot of things and we can't actually deliver.
So when Bernie Sanders says that Democrats abandoned the working class, you know that's a tough charge to level against Joe Biden on the picket line, right? But the problem is the Democrats also include Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and Bill Clinton.
People who directly prevent delivering for the working class.
Exactly. And so you know I think this is why in late-stage capitalism, in an era of astounding inequality, clear populist messages continue to win the day. An anti-status quo message; throw the bums out. Politics will keep whipsawing this country back and forth until there is a fundamental political realignment and the Democrats get more coherent on the class agenda so that they are not co-opted by phony populism.
A lot of Democrats are probably going to be saying, "Oh, we need to embrace what the right is selling and just go there." But really, the idea here that you're pressing on is that what you need is a real left populism.
You need to actually embrace the real needs of working-class people, really try to deliver against all odds on those promises, and you need to be able to sell it.
But we're in the wilderness, right? Democrats are in the wilderness. So we're not going to be able to govern and deliver in most places. Certainly not at the federal level. But we can really recognize the monumental task of the information ecosystem problem for what it is and start rebuilding there.
So what does that look like?
I think that looks like taking very seriously the rebuilding of the local news infrastructure. There are major capital plays that our donors could be doing, right? Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? How much would it cost for unions and groups of medium investors and some class-betraying billionaires or millionaires on our side to map the news ecosystem and really aggressively try to take it back over? To build up our influencer network to really make a play for the world of video games. We just need to take it seriously, and understand that it's not enough to be an elite party.
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Heather Charisse McGhee is a New York Times bestselling author and policy advocate. She is a former president and currently a trustee emeritus of Demos, a non-profit progressive U.S. think tank.[2] McGhee is a regular contributor to NBC News and frequently appears as a guest and panelist on Meet the Press, All In with Chris Hayes, and Real Time with Bill Maher.[3][4][5][6]
Early life and education
Heather Charisse McGhee grew up in the South Side, Chicago and is the daughter of Gail C. Christopher and Earl J. McGhee.[5] In seventh grade, McGhee enrolled in The Bement School as a boarding student.[7] graduated from Milton Academy in 1997.[8] McGhee received a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University in 2001.[5] She was initially drawn to theater and creative writing but eventually became interested in economic policy.[5]
McGhee attended the UC Berkeley School of Law, citing how law school could help give her the credentials to change public policy. She graduated with a J.D. in 2009.[3][5][9]
Career
Positions
After graduating from Yale in 2001, she taught English in Barcelona for a short time, but soon after the September 11 attacks she moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in television writing.[10]
After about a year, she moved to New York City and began working with the non-profit think tank, Demos.[5] In 2003, McGhee first connected with Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, on the topic of credit card debt.[5]
She left Demos to attend law school and serve as a Deputy Policy Director for the John Edwards 2008 presidential campaign.
McGhee returned to Demos in 2009 and co-chaired a task force with Americans for Financial Reform which helped develop the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2009.[11] McGhee became the president of Demos in 2014.[5][9][12] In early 2018, she stepped down as president but remained a distinguished senior fellow at Demos.[13]
In December 2019 McGhee became chair of the board of directors of Color of Change.[14]
Appearances and talks
In 2016, McGhee's televised phone conversation with a man named Gary on C-SPAN who admitted racial prejudice ("I'm a White male, and I am prejudiced. The reason it is something I wasn't taught but it's kind of something that I learned.") was widely covered by news media organizations and viewed over a million times.[15][16][17][18] A year later, Gary stated he had taken her advice to heart and his views had changed.[19][20]
In 2019, McGhee presented a TED talk entitled "Racism has a cost for everyone."[21]
In 2021, McGhee was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, titled "Why racism hurts everyone, regardless of race."[22]
McGhee has appeared on episodes of Pod Save America and was a guest host for a live recording of the podcast in Boston.[23][24]
In September 2022, McGhee gave a brief interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro to discuss the student debt crisis.[25]
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
In March 2021, her book "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together" debuted at #3 on the New York Times best seller list (for non-fiction). In it she discusses what she calls "drained-pool politics".[26]
The Sum of Us Podcast
In July 2022, McGhee debuted *"The Sum of Us Podcast"*, which expands on her book by the same title.[27]
References...
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NATION MAG
New York City Has a Rare Chance to Kick Big Money Out of Politics
Here’s how the city can limit the power of big donors—and bring real influence back to regular voters.
Jul 27, 2018 / Heather McGhee and Daniel Cantor
These are dismal times for small-d democrats: a degraded public discourse emanating from the White House; corporate control of the on-line “public square” known as Facebook; the continued tidal wave of “secret money” from a tiny number of hyper-wealthy individuals that threatens to drown us all; and a Supreme Court that increasingly treats the right to donate and spend money as more precious than the right to live in a democracy characterized by racial, gender, and class equity.
But if you vote in New York City, there’s a real chance to concoct an antidote to the chaos that surrounds us.
Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the creation of a Charter Revision Commission and, in doing so, asked the commissioners to look closely at improving voter access and reducing the influence of big money in politics. Our message to the Charter Revision Commission can be summed up in two words: Be bold. The basic principle of democracy—the political equality of persons—is under attack. New York City can use this process to powerfully reassert that ideal, and not a moment too soon. We believe the nation will take notice.
One of the defining precepts of democracy is supposed to be “one person, one vote,” not “one dollar, one vote.” New York City has already taken steps to make this so through its system of public financing of campaigns. Under the current system, participating candidates can receive matching funds at a rate of $6 to $1 for contributions up to $175. While that’s a good start, wealthy and well-connected donors—including those who “bundle” contributions from others—still wield outsized political influence, at the expense of everyday New Yorkers. There is more to be done to ensure that the people funding New York elections reflect the city’s residents.
What would a bold proposal for campaign-finance reform look like? For starters, it would dramatically lower the current limit of nearly $5,000 for contributions to mayoral candidates. For candidates who choose to participate in the City’s public-financing program, the limit could be dropped tenfold, to $500. For those who opt out of our matching-fund system, we could lower the limit to $1,000. (In New York City, contribution limits apply to all candidates, whether or not they participate in the city’s public-financing program.)
Admittedly, either contribution level, $500 or $1,000, is still much more money than the average New Yorker can part with. But that’s okay, because lower contribution limits for all candidates should come hand-in-hand with another key reform: dramatically increasing the amount of public matching funds that candidates who opt into the system can receive, especially for the smallest contributions. What if contributions under $100 were matched at a rate of 8 to 1, or 10 to 1?
These two reforms alone would go a long way to diminishing the influence of major donors and bundlers while providing substantial “no strings attached” public funding for candidates who agree to participate in the program. Successful candidates will be those who can convince 10,000 people to give them $20 each, rather than getting 2 lobbyists to “bundle” the same amount of money from 20 rich couples at $10,000 a pop. Which of these approaches seems healthier? To ask the question is to answer it.
For many New Yorkers, there is another contribution limit imposed not by law but by our own economic reality: zero. The median family income in New York City hovers around $50,000. After rent, food, health care, utilities and transportation, it’s easy to run out of money before you run out of month. And if you do manage to eke out a little extra income, contributing to a political candidate isn’t likely to rank high on your list of what to do with it.
To bring this large segment of New Yorkers into the process, the Charter Revision Commission should borrow a page from reforms recently enacted in Seattle. That city’s “Democracy Vouchers” program provides all residents—including homeless residents, who have been politically activated by the system—with their own source of campaign funds: four vouchers, each valued at $25, which residents can dispense as they see fit. In New York City, residents could “contribute” their vouchers to a candidate or party of their choice, which would then “redeem” the vouchers for actual money to help cover the costs of mailings and literature, canvassers, and get-out-the-vote efforts.
And the creativity doesn’t have to stop there. Since the Citizens United decision, democracy advocates have been rightfully alarmed at the aggressive growth of Super PACs funded by a handful of millionaires and billionaires. It’s a problem that limiting contributions to candidates cannot solve. But New York City could be a pioneer in developing a different remedy: a public match on low-dollar contributions to “People PACs” to make it possible for grassroots groups and New Yorkers of modest means to have a fighting chance against the developers and hedge-fund managers who can fund independent expenditures with a single whopping check. While we may never get all money out of politics, we can loosen the influence of big money by amplifying the voices of everyday people.
Most New Yorkers are paying far less attention to the Charter Revision Commission’s deliberations than they are to the alternately absurd and horrifying nightmare playing out in Washington, DC. But nothing would represent a more emphatic repudiation of Trump’s agenda than a system in which low- and middle-income New Yorkers have as much political clout as deep-pocketed real-estate developers. That’s a worthwhile goal to which the commissioners should aspire.
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Here’s How States and Cities Can Fight Climate Change and Inequality in the Trump EraHere’s How States and Cities Can Fight Climate Change and Inequality in the Trump Era
Let’s make polluters pay for carbon reduction and invest the revenue in disadvantaged communities.
Dec 1, 2016 / Heather McGhee and Robert B. Reich
sident-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature climate policies—the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement on global emissions reductions. If he is successful, we will need a Plan B that the Republicans cannot obstruct. That means turning to states and cities, and in a big way.
Some have already started to think about how climate change can be fought at the state level. But there is a lot more work to be done. One of the most hotly debated ballot initiatives in 2016 was Washington’s first-of-its-kind proposal for a statewide carbon tax, known as Ballot Initiative 732 (I-732). Despite the robust debate over its merits, however, the proposal went down to defeat with only 41 percent of the vote. That was at least in part because many who support aggressive carbon taxes or other carbon pricing approaches welcomed I-732’s defeat. We were among them.
A quick review of the proposal shows why we objected. The tax side of I-732 was actually quite strong. It would have covered 85 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions in the state, and, starting at $15 per metric ton of fossil-fuel emissions in the first year, and rising to $25 per ton in the second year, the tax would have risen 3.5 percent annually thereafter, up to $100 per ton by the middle of this century. Taxable sources of emissions would have included both fossil-fuel consumption and the carbon emissions embedded in any imported energy. The tax schedule offered by I-732 appeared to be one of the most aggressive in the world at any level.
So why did we oppose it? Unfortunately, the proposal went badly wrong on the revenue side of the equation, starting with the major flaw of adopting a “revenue-neutral” stance. Revenue neutrality means that the burden of the carbon tax should be offset by other tax cuts or tax benefits. I-732 provided for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts for corporations, helping to generate an estimated net revenue loss of $800 million over six fiscal years, according to the state’s Department of Revenue. That made I-732 not revenue neutral but revenue negative. Underscoring these problems, the advocacy group behind the initiative, Carbon Washington, did not seriously seek out and incorporate input from environmental and social-justice advocates and community leaders.
For millions of Americans, climate change is indissolubly linked to racial inequity and economic exclusion.
If I-732’s backers had sought guidance from advocates, they would have realized that the principle of revenue neutrality is deeply out of touch with the realities of both climate change and inequality. It essentially suggests that polluters don’t really need to pay for the carbon reductions, and that nothing else in the economic system really needs to change. Yet for tens of millions of Americans, and especially for people of color, climate problems are indissolubly linked to problems of racial inequity and economic exclusion. Many are doubly hard-hit by the fossil-fuel economy—disproportionately hurt by its pollution and climate impacts, yet largely excluded from its economic benefits. There is nothing neutral about the consequences of carbon pollution and economic exclusion. Therefore, policies that determine who pays for carbon pricing and other climate policies—and who benefits from such reforms—must not be neutral, either. Indeed, they should be specifically targeted for the benefit of the communities that suffer the most.
Some “revenue-neutral” climate-change proposals—including I-732—include tax cuts and/or tax benefits targeted for lower-income households, and proponents may characterize such policy features as a blow for equity. But this misses the point: While neutrality on revenue may sound fair or maybe even equitable in some forms, in fact it is neither, because it simply maintains an already highly inequitable and unsustainable status quo of revenue starvation and public disinvestment. In Washington, the state Supreme Court has mandated K-12 spending increases estimated at nearly $6 billion, and long-term disinvestment in the state’s higher-education system has driven up the cost of college tuition by 154 percent since 1990. Given such realities, keeping revenue neutral may be a plus for the corporations whose taxes are cut, but it’s a negative for people.
The better way forward, for people and for the climate, is a “revenue-positive” approach, whereby polluters pay for carbon reduction either through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, and the revenue generated is directly invested in disadvantaged communities. This “price-and-invest” model, in other words, takes money from the polluters and gives it back to those they have harmed. The money is invested in clean-energy and clean-transportation projects, with three important results: improving community health, creating new green jobs for residents, and reducing carbon in the atmosphere.
How Populists Like Bernie Sanders Should Talk About RacismHow Populists Like Bernie Sanders Should Talk About Racism
To mobilize a multiracial coalition, progressives need to demonstrate how racism hurts us all.
Jan 28, 2016 / Feature / Ian Haney López and Heather McGhee