Brad Onishi sits down with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Starr to dig into his new book, American Contradiction, and the idea that the United States is less a shining city on a hill and more a city built on a fault line. Starr traces how the nation’s promise of liberty has always coexisted with exclusion, hierarchy, and inequality, and how those tensions erupted in new ways during the 1990s. Together they unpack how the end of the Cold War, the rise of culture wars, and the shockwaves of policies like NAFTA reshaped party coalitions, fueled resentment, and set the stage for today’s political divide. Starr explains why the 90s were a turning point and how institutional structures like the Senate and Electoral College amplify polarization rather than contain it.
The conversation also explores the growing gap between social progress and economic inequality and the challenges facing a Democratic Party trying to represent both progressive activists and working class voters. Bradley and Paul talk about the power of political storytelling, from nostalgia for an imagined past to despair over historical injustices, and how both shape the current moment. Despite everything, Starr ends with a measure of hope that the United States still has the capacity for reinvention and surprise if it can finally reckon with its contradictions and build a more inclusive national story.
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We've often heard that America is a city on a hill, but my guest today argues that it's more a city built on a fault line.
Paul Starr is a Pulitzer Prize winner, the founder of the American Prospect, and a professor at Princeton University.
He spent a long time writing about American politics.
He's also been an advisor to presidents in the past.
His argument in his new book, American Contradiction, which is a history of the United States and its politics from the 1950s, is that we've always been a country based on a contradiction.
That we've had the promise of liberty, but the reality of enslavement and exclusion.
One of the things that's most interesting to me about this book is the way that it reveals the 1990s as a key moment in American politics.
We often are nostalgic about the 90s as a time of relative peace and calm, the moment after the Cold War and before 9-11, before the rise of populism, before the election of Barack Obama engendered the backlash of the Tea Party and eventually the populism of Donald Trump.
But as Starr tells the story, the 1990s were the moment when the end of the Cold War allowed conservatives in this country to look inward, to create a movement of divergence.
It was a moment in American society where the lack of threat from the outside led to internal division on the inside.
Almost as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, the voices clamoring for a wall around the United States began to grow loud.
This reveals something really key about where we are today, about the ways that revenge and resentment, the feeling of deep inequality, the sense that almost all of us have left behind, but in different ways, pervades our public square.
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Without further ado, here's my conversation with Pulitzer winner Paul Starr about American contradiction.
As I just said, folks, we have the privilege of Pulitzer winner Professor Paul Starr on the program today and to talk about American Contradiction, a brand new book that I think has a lot to teach us about where we are and where we've been.
So first let me say, Professor Starr, thanks for stopping by.
Really appreciate your time.
I'm glad to be with you, Brad.
I want to start.
This is a big book, and it's really a story of the United States and its history and politics since the 1950s.
You cover an astonishingly wide range of topics, but I want to start with big questions.
And I think the heart of the book, we've heard often in American history that this country is a city on a hill, whether that's John Winthrop, whether that is John Kennedy, whether that is Ronald Reagan.
They all thought of this country as a city on a hill in some way.
You describe it as a city on a fault line.
What does that mean?
Yeah, so I suggest here that running through our history is a contradiction that stems originally from the contradiction between freedom and slavery at the very founding of the country.
And we have been dealing with that conflict in a variety of forms at different times.
And what I'm suggesting in this book is that the conflict over race and exploitation became the basis of a wider conflict because Black Americans in the mid-20th century,
through their struggle for freedom, through the civil rights movement, set an example, became a model for other groups, not only other ethnic and racial groups, but also for the feminist movement, for the early gay rights movement.
There was a kind of direct spillover from one to another.
I try to trace that in, you know, from the 1950s through the 60s and 70s and 80s.
And of course, that drew a response.
It drew backlash from the very, very beginning.
And even the backlash was influenced by the new conceptions of rights and identity.
And that had a general effect on American thinking, American politics and society.
And we reached this crisis, stemming from this kind of enlargement of the original conflict over race.
So that's kind of the narrative in actually the first half of the book about what I call the American revolutions of the 20th century, and including this fight against it.
And then there's a second half of the book, which is called Sleepwalking into Revenge.
We can hold off on that for a moment, but that's the general theme of the book.
You also say, and I think it goes right at the heart of what you've just outlined, that Americans are both a nation and a people.
And I'm wondering if you can outline the difference for folks and how that plays into the ways that our politics often feel out of step with the will of the general public.
Right.
So these changes that I was just describing created changes in the American people, changes in the way people think about themselves, in the way they think about others, in the way they think about their rights.
Those changes also led to new immigration laws and an influx of new immigrants.
And there were changes in new generations.
I say particularly of women who didn't necessarily want to live their lives the way that their parents or grandparents had.
And that created some major shifts within the American people, within our society.
But the United States as a nation has institutions that don't change nearly as easily.
We have an 18th century constitution that is very hard to amend.
We have a two-party political system that is also hard to change.
We have a great variety of institutions that don't move so easily.
And there's this tendency people talk about institutional status quo bias, this deep resistance to change in many of our institutions.
So what I'm suggesting in the book is we had these changes in the people.
We had a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have been skewed in favor of the groups that are really afraid of these changes.
I'm talking about demographic changes and cultural changes that have been taking place in the United States.
I'm thinking of two examples.
One is the election of Momdani in New York.
And regardless of how one feels about Momdani, he gets about a million votes, which at least in my estimation is more votes than about one quarter of the senators who sit in the United States Senate, which points to the Senate as perhaps one of these institutions.
I'm happy for you to comment there.
And then also the Electoral College.
We all know about Trump in 2016 losing the popular vote.
We can go back to elections past and talk about how the popular vote and the Electoral College have not lined up.
Are those the kinds of institutions that lead to a nation that is seemingly not always coherent with the will of the people as they stand today?
Yeah.
So the Senate, obviously, gives equal numbers of seats to small rural states.
You know, look at the, I think the ratio of the population of California to Idaho is something like 74 to 1.
It's some outrageous number.
And so in effect, the people of California have only a fraction of the influence of people in Idaho on how the Senate votes.
And yeah, this is an upper house of a national legislature that is not proportionally allocated.
Now, most other democracies, if you look back in their history, they did have unrepresentative upper houses, but they've done away with that.
Modern constitutions don't have something like this, but we do.
And it does give disproportionate weight to those smaller states, which it just happens are predominantly white.
And what I've written is that let's just suppose that the smaller states that are represented in the Senate with as large a population as the big states.
Let's just suppose that those were predominantly black states.
I believe there'd be a significant movement to change that arrangement.
But it just happens that this is not something that the founders intended necessarily.
If you look back, you know, originally among the 13 states, it wasn't disproportionately white states that were small states.
But it's just worked out that way.
And then that's reflected in the Electoral College, too.
The Electoral College is also another institution dating from the 18th century.
Modern democracies don't have this.
We have cemented, we have entrenched these very old institutions.
And if we had different political institutions, I actually think the history of the last several decades would be very different.
In 2000, the Bush v. Gore election would have turned out differently.
That would have affected the Supreme Court.
2016, that election would have turned out differently.
That would have affected the Supreme Court.
We would not have today the conservative Supreme Court that we have.
So it's both affected the presidency and it's affected the Supreme Court.
I think these institutions have tilted things.
The other point I just want to emphasize here is that our electoral politics for the last 30 years have been incredibly close.
The 2000 election was the most extreme example of closeness.
But actually, even the 2024 election, Trump did win the popular vote, but only by 1.5%.
And if you look at Congress, again, these are very small margins in Congress.
So this question of how the institutions work really doesn't matter.
The tilt might have gone the other way with more representative institutions in the way that most democracies have.
This brings to another, I think, foundational aspect of the book, and that is the idea that our politics since the 1990s have been both deeply divided and also closely contested.
So we are politically deeply divided, but we're close in the sense that these elections, whether in Congress or in presidential politics, seem to be always at a razor-thin margin.
I mean, the memories that people will have, especially people younger than me, people in their 20s and 30s of some of their first presidential elections that they've voted in being these moments where they were waiting on counts or vote dumps in Georgia in 2020 or what was going to happen in 2016, not to mention the Supreme Court deciding on Gore v. Bush in Florida back 25 years ago.
Can you just help us understand what does it mean for us to be deeply divided, but closely connected when it comes to politics and elections?
So most analysts have emphasized the deep divisions, the polarization.
But I think equally important is the fact that it's been so close and the political intensity that goes into these close elections.
And I think we're kind of on a knife edge.
And the result is that each side is more determined than ever and willing to use tactics that it might not otherwise use in order to tilt things, in order to get control.
And I just think it's happened to work out.
It didn't necessarily have to work out, but it's worked out that this is what I describe it as it's been a tie game that Democrats have been losing.
The elections have been very close.
They're more or less a tie, you know, over this period of time, but Democrats have been losing because of the structure of the institutions.
Ty goes to the runner and tie goes to the GOP.
This brings me to the 1990s.
And your book is, as I said, is wide-ranging and it covers really the period from the 50s to the present.
But I was particularly struck by all of the material in the 1990s.
And I think this is where we do get this tie-ball game scenario.
It's in the 90s that these razor-thin margins begin to appear.
And I wonder if we just stay on that topic, if you could help us understand why, when you have elections, whether they're for a congressional seat in Georgia or for president or for senate in a purple state, if it's going to be so close, why does that lead both parties, I would argue predominantly the GOP, but both parties to engage in tactics that are more fierce, harsh,
some would say eroding our democratic norms in order to win.
How come the closer the race, the less friendly it becomes?
Okay, so I think a key figure in this turn toward a more belligerent, confrontational, hostile politics.
I think Newt Gingrich was a key figure of this, in figuring this shift.
So he was the one who urged the Republicans to put aside the old bipartisan civility that used to prevail in the House.
And he succeeded.
And his success, I think, became an important model for later figures.
And one of my colleagues here at Princeton, Francis Lee, who is a professor of politics, a student of Congress, argues that when you have a long period, which is what preceded this, when one party is the majority and the other party is the minority, members of the minority don't expect that the next election is going to give them control.
Individually, they try to get what they can in terms of pork barrel or maybe some compromise, some provision of a law.
And they're used to negotiating.
When the possibility opens up to upend the majority, to turn things around, well, then the incentives really change and the incentives move to messaging, to getting across this message and ensuring that the majority doesn't have much success to claim.
So there you get stalemate.
You get gridlock.
We're not going to let anything through.
And so even if there might have been grounds for compromise, there's this incentive not to let it happen, not to let it happen so that the incumbents lose.
They don't succeed.
They don't get anything done.
And of course, then the public is very frustrated the way it has been for decades.
Opinions about Congress fall to such a low level, and people feel the system is just not working.
And I think that's a lot of what's a lot of what's happened.
I also think, I think the other thing you have to bring in about the 90s is that the Cold War was over.
And we went from Cold War to culture war.
And so the Cold War led to a certain amount of agreement about foreign policy, an emphasis on what were sort of the enduring American values as distinct from the communists.
So that during the whole Cold War, there were these incentives for national unity and cohesion.
When that was over, well, that was gone.
And, you know, you might have thought Cold War is over.
There'd be an era of good feeling.
The U.S. had triumphed.
You know, it was good.
Why shouldn't we just be proud of that?
And instead, you get an even more bitter politics.
So there's this huge irony about what happened in the 90s.
It seems to me that as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, the voices clamoring for a wall to be built around the United States started to find their momentum.
And of course, 1991 is the early 90s or the end of the Soviet Union as we knew it.
But I really want folks listening to understand the point you've just made, which is 1945 to 1989, there is a sense of America in conflict with a big, bad other.
And that could be the Nazis and Mussolini and Hitler.
That could be communism around the world embodied in the Soviet Union.
When that finishes and there's no more external threat, there is this sense of, well, now we can turn on each other and fight about who we are.
And the consensus that had held some of those extreme voices, nativist voices, xenophobic voices at bay, were now allowed to enter into politics as the internal tussle for power really ramped up.
Is that a fair assessment in your yes, I think it is.
There's also another irony about the 1990s.
There was this stereotype of Gen X as being politically uninterested and not really caring about anything with any, you know, with any depth.
And there was actually a lot of public coling evidence that young people at that time were less interested in world affairs, less interested in politics, read the news less, followed events less.
And that doesn't really correspond to a culture war, you know, but it wasn't emanating from young people for sure.
The culture war was a, really, it was a product of elite conflict, I argue.
So like I go through some of the data on polarization, and it's really striking that the polarization began among the elites, among the best educated, and only gradually came to involve the rank and file of each of the political parties.
So it's, it's, you know, it's, and there were a lot of people that I'm talking now about my, my fellow sociologists and other social scientists who initially just said, no, there's no polarization going on.
They looked at the public opinion data, said, no, it's not really happening.
But indeed, it was happening.
And we began to see it more and more in the following years.
So you had an up-close look at the Clinton presidency.
And, you know, one of the things that struck me reading your book was that Bill Clinton really tried to balance two things.
And there's a lot of folks listening who have really mixed and or negative views of the Bill Clinton presidencies.
There's a whole litigation in historical perspective.
But what came through to me in your pages was that Clinton was trying to balance a social progress that had been inaugurated through the civil rights movement and then had carried on to it to really tear down all of the hierarchical cultural barriers to equality in American society.
He was trying to be on the side of social progress while also being a somewhat economic neoliberal who wasn't necessarily a radical break with the Reagan administration and the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush.
Is that fair?
And what did that do?
I mean, was that a good move?
Was that negative?
What did that leave in its wake?
So you mentioned that I had an up-close look.
And viewers should realize I worked in the Clinton White House in its first year.
I worked on health care reform.
And Bill Clinton was trying to bring about universal health insurance.
So I was seeing a lot of these things from, you might say, the more progressive side of the Clinton White House.
There were different factions represented within that White House, within that administration.
And in that effort, we were trying to reach out to Republicans, to conservatives.
Now, many people may not realize that in retrospect.
I was there.
I know it.
I met with Republican members of Congress.
And so if you go back in time, just your little history about the issue of universal health insurance, you go back to the 1940s and 50s.
At that point, Democrats were calling for a national health insurance system in the sense of one like Social Security, one provided through the federal government the way Medicare was originally, but now for everybody.
That was the original idea.
And the debate in the 1960s and early 1970s was between that idea, a government health insurance plan, and some compromise.
Richard Nixon also advocated a universal health insurance plan, one that tilted a bit more toward the private sector, but still a very broad plan.
Democrats later regretted.
They just hadn't, I mean, they would have been good to have embraced Nixon's plan in 1974.
But by the time we get to Clinton now, in 1992 and 1993, he was trying to reach out to Republicans with the idea that we'd have a national system, but it would involve private plans competing with one another.
And that idea is one that Republicans have been talking about.
And so it was really an effort to kind of reach across the aisle and get support.
And the failure of that effort really was, I think, an important watershed.
I don't think that's just because I was involved in it.
It was clear that as that worked out, it's partly because Democrats couldn't really agree on what Clinton had proposed, but Republicans were not going to let through any kind of compromise.
They were dead set against it.
And that's an example of where compromise failed, where it was impossible to find common ground, even though there was a real effort to try to bridge the gap.
And so there was that side of the Clinton presidency.
But then there's also the side which tried to embrace even more market-oriented ideas.
And that's the side I think that many Democrats now justifiably regret.
And that included NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and then later the opening to China and the extension of normal trade relations with China.
And these ended up having a very serious impact on manufacturing jobs, NAFTA, particularly in the South.
The China shock, very devastating to jobs in the Midwest.
And one consequence of that was that many working people felt that the Democratic Party was no longer standing up for them.
And yeah, go ahead.
Well, is this why, as you say in the book, that the Democrats truly lost the South in the 90s, not in the 60s, not with the Dixie Crat and the end of that era, but with NAFTA and the tides of globalization?
Yeah, so I think that was a very big factor.
A lot of people say people often cite a line that Lyndon Johnson supposedly said at the time that he signed civil rights legislation.
I don't know whether this is really true, but everybody cites it saying, there goes the South.
So many people say it was civil rights that cost Democrats support in the South.
It did cost them some support.
But remember, Jimmy Carter got elected governor of Georgia.
Bill Clinton got elected governor of Arkansas.
For 30 years after civil rights, you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for 30 years after that, the South was competitive.
Democrats did win lots of elections in the South.
But 1994 was a huge setback for Democrats in the South.
This is right after the NAFTA agreement.
These are the midterms.
Yeah, those are the midterm elections, right.
And Democrats lost a lot of seats in the South.
And so I'm not saying NAFTA is the whole explanation for it.
But if you look back, how Democrats had been competing in the South was to bring together the newly enfranchised black voters with white working class voters.
They created coalitions.
That's how Bill Clinton got elected governor of Arkansas.
By the way, he won 10 elections in Arkansas.
10 elections, because it was every two-year terms.
There aren't many politicians that can claim to have done that.
But those coalitions came to an end in the 90s.
And the loss of those white working class voters in the South and then later in the Midwest, that was a huge turn historically.
And that's why, one of the reasons why in this book, I see the 1990s as pivotal.
And that chapter in the 1990s opens the second half of the book.
I see this whole period, you know, there's a kind of direct line from what happened in the 90s to the world we're living in.
And as you're speaking, I think folks can probably connect the dots that if you're living in 1993, 1994, 95, 96, and you see the shock of jobs and trade changing the American landscape of labor and manufacturing,
you can see the cultural resentment starting to grow and not justifiably and not in a way that I think is good or honorable, but you can see this spirit in certain sectors of the American population of saying, well, the people that must have took my jobs are the ones across the southern border.
The people that must have took my jobs are the ones flowing across this border and infecting our society.
And so the xenophobia and the sense that the Berlin Wall fell, but we need a wall around our country seems to go hand in hand with everything you've just outlined with NAFTA and trade and manufacturing.
Brad, you're exactly right about that was the so we passed immigration legislation in 1965 that ended the old quotas that had been introduced back in the 1920s that limited immigration, especially from, at that time, southern and eastern Europe.
That legislation in the 1920s was actually mainly directed against Catholics and Jews.
And there was at that time a complete ban on Asian immigration.
And then, yeah, so this change took place in 1965.
But immigration really didn't become a big political issue until the 90s.
Now, there was one additional reform in 1986.
This is interesting.
Ronald Reagan signed a big compromise that included an amnesty for what turned out to be about 3 million people who had come to the United States illegally and were able to get a pass to citizenship and were able to become citizens.
So that was Reagan in 1986.
And then beginning in the 90s, you began, it was actually first in California where the anti-immigrant sentiment started to build up.
And the fears began, there began to be reports that white people were going to become a minority.
And I argue in the book that these were very misleading.
Those reports assumed that all people of Latin American descent are non-white.
And actually on the census, people with Latin American backgrounds, about half of them identify as white.
And many of them do come from European backgrounds.
They came through Buenos Aires or Caracas or some other place, but actually they had Italian backgrounds in Hispanic.
A German grandfather.
Yeah.
You know, so not all people of Latin American descent are non-European.
So we have this problem that people, anybody who identified as Hispanic has gotten classified as non-white.
But if you look more closely, isn't.
It's not very likely that whites are going to become a minority anytime soon in the United States.
But that fear, that fear began growing in the 1990s.
And I think it's very important to understand that as a driving factor.
At first, I think it was almost below the surface.
And then, of course, with Donald Trump, it comes out into the open.
All right.
So we have the 90s.
We have this moment of progress in some sense, social progress in some sense.
But we also have what I think you characterize, and I'm happy for you to correct me here, is regression in terms of inequality on the economic front, that there's a growing economic divide in the country.
Now, we could spend the next three hours litigating how Reaganite policies exacerbated that and really led to some of that divide.
But I think that as we move from the 90s into closer to the present day, it's probably helpful for people at home to picture a United States that is always marching towards fuller and more equal representation for every person in the country.
Now, we've not achieved it, and it's never been fully realized and not even close.
But by the Obama years, we get the Oberfeld decision and marriage equality.
However, by the Obama years, we also get this incredibly chasmic gap between income levels and the 99%, the 1%, and so on and so forth.
How does all of that propel us into a place where someone like Kamala Harris can lose by a hair and someone like Donald Trump can run for a third time and be restored to the White House and the presidency?
Okay, so that's a very big.
And we don't have nine hours and I know that I'm going to have to let you go eat lunch here in a minute.
So I understand my question is ridiculous, but I'm just trying to draw some broad threads at least that we can get to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what I, you know, what I argue in this book is that, you know, in spite of Reagan, in spite of backlash earlier, the country did continue to move toward greater social equality, as you, as you mentioned.
Greater equality across racial and ethnic lines, greater equality across gender lines, greater equality, you know, across lines of sexual orientation.
I mean, this was, this continued to happen over these decades.
But at the same time, as we're moving toward greater social equality, we've also been moving toward greater economic inequality.
And that is, it's hard to reconcile.
And a lot of people who were losing out in this process, who had had a secure foothold in an old industrial America, they had working class jobs that paid middle class incomes.
You know, and the ground was being cut from underneath them.
It was partly because of technological change.
It was partly because of trade.
There are lots of things went in this.
But if you're in that position and you feel you're losing, I think, you know, you become a target for those who want to sell you on the idea that there's somebody else who's really the cause of your problems.
And it's foreigners.
It's those damn immigrants.
And I don't think that's what the evidence shows, but I understand how people would come to that conclusion.
And because they did not feel that their interests were being well represented, in particular, you know, by the party that historically had supported unions, that had supported better, higher wages, a higher minimum wage.
I mean, go through all the policies.
Those had come from the Democratic Party.
But to many working people, it looked like that party was no longer giving them priority and instead giving somebody else priority.
And that is, I think, behind a lot of the changes that have taken place.
I'm interested in what you're saying about the Democrat.
I have two more questions and then I'll let you go.
But I think one of the questions I have is, it seems to me there are at least two Democratic parties de facto in the country at the moment.
There's the Democratic Party that's electing Mom Donnie and Katie Wilson in Seattle, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and so on.
And then there is a Democratic Party that feels more similar to the one you're outlining, which is attentive to, at least in rhetoric, social equality, gender sexual equality, inclusion, diversity, but is out of step with economic inequality.
And there are folks who think of the typical Democrat now as somebody who has an upper middle class income, lives in a neighborhood that is somewhat racially diverse, where the gay couple down the street is welcomed without any sort of batting of an eyelash at the potluck.
And the Democratic Party works for that group.
They're upper middle class.
Diversity is not a threat to them.
But there's this whole other group that is behind Mamdani, behind Katie Wilson, behind some of these progressive candidates that is saying that Democratic Party has nothing to do with my day-to-day reality.
Is that a fair assessment?
Or is some of that reality coming from your analysis and what you've shown us historically?
Well, let me just say that if the Democratic Party is really divided into two parties, it's not ever going to win.
Sure.
Because that split is devastating.
But let me just say that a lot of people who come from college-educated backgrounds are really now facing a lot of the problems that other Americans who haven't had a college education have faced.
And there's a lot less security in jobs for everybody.
I actually talked to my students about this.
The prospect of artificial intelligence, of AI eliminating a lot of jobs or at least reducing opportunities for new graduates.
I mean, you've probably seen this, that, for example, of all people, graduates in computer science, have had the highest unemployment rate among college graduates recently, because AI is devastating to the kinds of coding jobs that they thought were going to be out there for them.
So there isn't security.
I mean, this problem of economic change is really hitting a lot of people who may not before have thought that they were exposed in any way.
So I don't know that this division that you're talking about is really going to remain.
I think people who come from what have been privileged backgrounds may recognize that that privilege is not secure.
One of the things I talk about often on this show is the story that is being told.
And we've talked a lot about how conservatives and the Republican Party tend to be able to tell stories in more effective ways.
Some of that is because those stories are based on fearmongering and based on paranoia and conspiracy.
Nonetheless, you seem to outline two stories that are predominant in our country today.
One is the idea of a city on a hill that needs to be restored.
The other, though, is one of a recognition of America's original sin and all of its sins in the intermediate.
And it's a story that can hinge on despair, that there's nothing salvageable about this country.
There's nothing to be proud of.
And as we finish today, I'm wondering, is there in your mind a way to tell a third narrative that is not enchanted with a kind of myth of what this country used to be, but that also somehow salvages what we might call an American narrative that is one of pride or at least a foundation for moving forward?
I sure hope so, you know, because I think this country has been an extraordinary place for people to achieve things that they could never have achieved anywhere else.
And we have come through dark periods and somehow found the leadership that got us to the other side.
You know, the challenges of the Civil War, of the Great Depression.
I mean, there's plenty in our history that we can look to, not just for comfort, but for a confidence that there are other possibilities out there.
One of the themes I think that ought to come out of this book is that this is a country capable of surprise.
Okay, it was a surprise that we could elect a black man president, Barack Obama.
It was also a surprise that we could elect Donald Trump.
So we're capable of surprises on both sides.
And the people who would like to see more of those, I don't know, progressive surprises, they have reason to believe that they can do it.
That There are better angels to our nature and that it's the job of people who believe in that alternative to summon those angels to get people to fight for the better side of this contradiction that runs through our history.
I hope we have good surprises in store, but we shall see.
Professor Paul Starr, thanks for your time.
Are there ways that people can link up with you?
I don't know if you're doing book events or if there's places online where people might connect.
I am doing book events and I have on my website, I think you probably find it just by Googling me, find a website for this book.
And in particular, come January, I'm going to be out in California, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, speaking in a number of places.
And I'd love to see anybody who is watching now and would like to come talk with me.
That's great.
Well, I appreciate your time.
Thank you for your detailed work on this book and hope we can welcome you back in the future.
All right, y'all.
I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Paul Starr.
Definitely somebody who has just an encyclopedic knowledge of these issues and also, as you heard, really lived it as somebody who was part of the Clinton administration working on healthcare.
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