Anand recently sat down with Vanity Fair’s Brian Stelter, for his Inside the Hive podcast. They talked about the larger underpinnings of this suddenly hopeful moment in U.S. politics.
Check out the episode here: [Apple] [Spotify] [PRX]
Here’s an excerpt below. As always, if the ideas and perspectives we share make you think, will you consider subscribing to support our work?
BRIAN: It’s all summed up with one word, only three letters. Joy. J-O-Y. It’s the word Tim Walz keeps saying. Joy. Is that all it took? To have him come out and say that word? I mean, Harris has said it, too. Joy versus anger.
ANAND: It is. You know, the difficulty is when you are up against very dire movements, one can quite reasonably get into a posture of living in perpetual reaction to those bad ideas, and constantly feeling the need to point out the badness of that idea, and now the badness of this idea, and the inhumanity of that idea.
It’s a full-time job.
BRIAN: And then everybody’s angry. Then both sides are mad and scared and fearful.
ANAND: If you think about, if you step back and think about what you’re talking about, you’re not talking about anything joyful now.
So let’s step back and say we’re trying to resist authoritarianism; I’m trying to resist a white supremacist movement rising in this country. What are we for? We are for something that’s actually awesome but that you never almost never hear discussed on the pro democracy side.
Let’s pick abortion. We’re not just trying to prevent attacks on abortion freedom. That’s such a narrow — like, we are trying to do that, but why are we trying to do that? We want people to be able to have sex and not be afraid all the time.
Because in many societies around the world, they can’t do that. And it’s so much more fun to live in a society in which you’re not giving yourself a permanent new identity every time you go on a date and feel something with someone.
BRIAN: So happiness. The ability to have a family when you want to.
ANAND: And to love kids with the most you can give them because you’re doing it in a time that you are ready for, that you’ve chosen.
But it’s really easy to get stuck into the defensive crouch. They are rousing people and then the pro-democracy people are not rousing people back the other way. They’re just saying the other side’s rousing is dangerous.
I want to get us to rouse people the other way. I want us to feel like so damn excited about immigration. So damn excited about the free life you can live when you have control over your body. About the amazing things a mind can do when it’s allowed to read whatever it wants.
I think we can be amazing. And we too often are reacting to their conversation instead of having our own.
BRIAN: This conversation’s making me feel so joyful.
Check out the full episode here: [Apple] [Spotify] [PRX]
This post was originally published on The.Ink.