Join us this week for an All Ears rapid response to Election Day 2020! Awash in uncertainty the morning after election day, Abby talks with Anand Giridharadas, the journalist whose unsparing criticisms of the liberal establishment have themselves made headlines. Abby and Anand consider Trump’s popularity with voters and why it’s such a bitter pill for liberals to swallow. They talk about how neoliberalism has put mainstream Democratic leaders at risk of losing blue collar workers. Anand says Joe Biden’s two political personas help explain how the party has lost credibility. There is “Scranton Joe” (the small town, working class defender of the little guy) and “Delaware Joe” (the corporate-friendly elite catering to powerful donor constituents). And, although toxic masculinity as modeled by Trump still holds strong, Anand does express hope about how the needle has moved on race, leaving Abby a bit more optimistic than when the conversation started.
Special Guest
Anand Giridharadas
American journalist and political pundit, former columnist for The New York Times
Anand Giridharadas is a writer.
He is the author of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and he is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink.
He has spoken on stages around the world and taught narrative journalism at New York University. He is a regular on-air political analyst for MSNBC.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and in Maryland, and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard.
He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker, and their two children.
Episode Links
- The Sazerac (Cocktail recipe via Bon Appetit)
- Democrats And Neoliberalism Vox
- Clinton Says Era Of Big Government Is 'over' In 1996 State Of The Union The Washington Post
- The Burden Of A 40-year Career: Some Of Joe Biden’s Record Doesn’t Age Well LA Times
- How Delaware Thrives As A Corporate Tax Haven New York Times