Winning the Civil War: Steve Phillips

January 5th, 2023

“The places that held people in slavery… are the places that are actually going to transform politics in this country.”

Steve Phillips is the host of the Democracy in Color podcast and the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. We start off a new year of civic engagement and fighting for democracy with a conversation about his political leadership, thought leadership, and coalition building.

The Confederate Battle plan of never giving an inch, ruthlessly rewriting the rules, distorting public opinion, silently sanctioning terrorism, and playing the long game has been present in every period of US history. Through organizing and civic participation, in the places that held people in slavery, the country is being transformed. The new American majority and the majority of eligible voters are people of color and progressive whites. We have the potential power to redraw the social contract.

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Credits:

Host: Mila Atmos 

Guest: Steve Phillips

Executive Producer: Mila Atmos

Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham

• Transcript

  Steve Phillips Transcript

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:05] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. Tomorrow is an anniversary that doesn't bear celebration, but definitely demands our attention. It's two years since an angry mob, egged on by the president of the United States, stormed the Capitol and attempted to overthrow our democracy. Two years later, it feels like we're still processing the January 6th insurrection, and we will be dealing with the forces that brought it into being for a long time. And to that end, we chose this date for this interview with this guest. I've wanted to have Steve Phillips on to talk about his political leadership, thought leadership, and coalition building for quite a while now. But with his new book, which was published by the new press in October, I knew we had to speak to him to start a new year of civic engagement and fighting for democracy, How We Win the Civil War, Securing A Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good is the perfect primer for understanding how the strength of the white nationalist movement dates all the way back to the Confederacy and what an effective liberation plan for all of us looks like. I'm delighted to welcome Steve to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.

  Steve Phillips: [00:01:32] Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

  Mila Atmos: [00:01:34] You have an incredibly impressive and frankly long bio, which I

  will happily read, but I'd love...

  Steve Phillips: [00:01:40] It just means I'm old.

  Mila Atmos: [00:01:43] Well, that's another way to look at it. But I'd love for you to introduce yourself to the listener, because I think you might be better at the highlights than I will be. You're the founder of Democracy in Color, author of Brown is the New White. Senior fellow at American Progress. You're a civil rights lawyer. You were the youngest person ever elected to public office in San Francisco back in the early nineties. There is so much here. What do you want listeners to know about you as we set the table for this conversation?

  Steve Phillips: [00:02:11] So I think maybe a few highlights. I mean, I like to say that I'm quite literally a child of the civil rights movement and that not only was I born in 1964, but my parents desegregated our neighborhood in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and we were the first Black family to move into our house. They wouldn't sell the home to my parents because they were Black. They had to get a white civil rights lawyer to buy the house for us. I read the biography of Martin Luther King in my local elementary school, and my grandfather was a minister in Cleveland. And so those themes of civil rights and the religious framework and also had a very strong interest in electoral politics from a very young age. And so a big influence and transformative factor in my life was in 1984, Jesse Jackson ran for the presidency and the whole Rainbow Coalition. So you had a direct connection to civil rights movement. You have a lot of religious metaphor that spoke to me in language, and I dedicated my first book, in part to Reverend Jackson, saying that he showed that this concept of the old minorities come together, they comprise a new majority in terms of the Rainbow Coalition concept. And I like to say I'm trying to build a small r rainbow ever since. And that through San Francisco politics through California, we helped to create country's first super PAC to elect Obama in 2008. And so I've been about trying to organize and support the increased civic participation of people of color in the electoral process as a force for changing politics in the country. And along the way, I was an English major in college and have liked to write. And so I write a couple of columns for The Nation, column for The Guardian. I've written two books.

  Mila Atmos: [00:03:46] Yes. Well, the book is terrific. I really enjoyed it. It's really easy to read. So I thank you for writing a book that's very coherent and really makes the case very strongly. So let's talk about How We Win the Civil War. The core thesis of the book is that the Civil War did not end and that we're still fighting it. In what ways?

  Steve Phillips: [00:04:04] So not only are we still fighting Civil war, the core thesis is that the Confederates have never stopped fighting. I think a lot of us think that, you know, the Civil War ended in 1865 and all that stuff was a long time ago. But in point of fact, and this is something I didn't even realize till I started really researching the book myself in detail. Everybody knows obviously Lincoln was assassinated, but we don't really know exactly when and exactly why, and I didn't fully appreciate that. And so the supposed surrender and end of the Civil War is in April 1865, just two days later, after the Appomattox surrender, Lincoln gave a speech talking about some limited voting

  rights for African Americans. John Wilkes Booth heard that speech, was given outside the White House. He says "that means N-word citizenship. That's the last speech he'll ever give." And three days later, Booth went into Ford's Theater and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. That's not surrendering. That's the continuing the fight. And so every step of the way I talk about there's this consistent Confederate battle plan. There was resistance to passing the 13th Amendment, just banning slavery. And not only was the resistance to passing that, they couldn't pass it out of the House originally, and they couldn't pass it out of a House that had no Southerners in it because they had all seceded. And so the opposition to steps towards equality and justice and the preservation of the conception that this is fundamentally a white nationalist nation has been fiercely defended and fought for. And so you take Lincoln's assassination, the handing back of the South to the slave owners after the reconstruction in the 1876 Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which then established white nationalism, legalized white nationalists in this country for 100 years. And then you fast forward all of that up to January 6th, right, where you have the insurrection as the culmination of an actual attempted coup in the United States of America. And so it's very, it's an abundant amount of evidence and data and information that the Confederates and their ideological and, in some cases, genealogical heirs have never stopped fighting the Civil War.

  Mila Atmos: [00:06:17] Right. Yeah. So that's really important. Why we're still fighting the Civil War is because the Confederates have never stopped. And you talked about how you didn't always know about this history just now. When did you start the journey to finding out and what set you on that path? Like, was there a moment when you were like, "Wait a minute, what's really happening?"

  Steve Phillips: [00:06:36] I mean, I've always been interested in history. You know, my wife talked about how what I was studying and researching my first book, Brown is the New White. As I kept getting back into all these historical examples and I'm quite fascinated with it all, and she's like, "You got to get up to the present." And so we would kind of go through that. But when the publisher came to me in April of 2020, you know, "so should we talk about writing your next book?" And we had seen what Trump had done in terms of fanning racial division and whipping up white racial fears in this country. And I said, well, why don't we use the Civil War as a metaphor for looking at this period of time that we're in? And so that's what set me on the journey, is to then

  look at the actual history around what specifically had happened. The more and more I dug into it, I saw just how on point that framework was.

  Mila Atmos: [00:07:28] Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. So when you're talking about Civil War, you're really not speaking metaphorically or making a comparative evaluation. You're drawing a straight line from then to now. What tells you that we're still in that same conflict?

  Steve Phillips: [00:07:43] So the book’s divided into two halves, and the first half is showing how the Confederates have never stopped fighting. And the second half is how do we go about winning? I take the book from the assassination of Lincoln all the way up through January 6th in the first half. And so what I've identified is are these core elements that have been present in each phase of history since then. That's what I call the Confederate battle plan: never giving an inch; ruthlessly rewriting the rules; distorting public opinion; silently sanctioning terrorism; and playing the long game. Those elements have been present in every period. So first, I take it from the Civil War to the end of the 19th century, talk about the assassination of Lincoln, the overthrow of Reconstruction, and handing the South back to the slave owners. And then you started to see this thing about ruthlessly rewriting the rules. And so the 14th Amendment was passed saying you can't discriminate on the basis of race in a state. But then the Supreme Court people say, well, but in Plessy versus Ferguson, separate but equal is okay. So, yes, this is 14th Amendment, but it doesn't apply over in this other situation. You see another continuous element in terms of the silently sanctioning terrorism in that the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which was created by ex-Confederate soldiers just eight months after the supposed surrender at Appomattox. And there was so much domestic terrorism and murder in the 1870s in particular, that there was major Congressional hearings. There is a 13-volume congressional report looking into; they found 2000 people have been killed in a short period of time just in Louisiana, all specifically designed to stop people from voting, to drive Black people out of the political process. And so this silently sanctioning terrorism piece in the 1924 presidential conventions, both Republican and Democrat, neither convention could get the votes to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. They were that powerful politically. And many, supposedly, you know, legitimate people, senators and even governors were either fans of, if not belonged to that. After Brown versus Board of Education was passed, this piece about never giving an inch. And so also putting Trump's post-election, never giving an inch in context after

  the Brown versus Board of Education. Dozens of elected officials in Congress, people in particular, signed this Southern Manifesto calling for massive resistance to desegregating the schools. School districts shut down entirely rather than educate Black children, and some of them shut down for more than five years -- longer than the Civil War itself. This is like 1950s. So there's this very continuous, unrelenting effort that will maybe ebb and flow in the public consciousness, but it's been very continuous and very powerful. And that's what I really wanted to make sure people appreciated, is the power, the intensity, the ferocity of this movement that we are up against.

  Mila Atmos: [00:10:46] Mm hmm. Yeah. I think one of the things that was really surprising to me was the way that voter suppression today is almost exactly the same as it was then with, like, you know, the eight-box primary. And I thought, oh, wow. Or talking about election integrity, it's literally the same words. It's not even different. And, you know, we are still living that history in this moment. So I mentioned January 6th at the top. Where does an event like that fit into this history? It was unprecedented for a sitting president to incite a mob to storm the Capitol. But what are the historical echoes or precursors?

  Steve Phillips: [00:11:22] The thing to understand about this period in time and I opened the book of the introduction is titled "A Choice between Democracy and Whiteness." And it's a phrase from Taylor Branch, the author of the Parting the Waters Civil Rights Trilogy. And he was in conversation with Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste, about the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump, particularly the Charlottesville March, to defend the Confederate statues. You know, a young woman Heather Heyer was killed. Now, Trump says there are very good people on both sides. And then most particularly after the Tree of Life shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, which was a direct reaction to Trump trying to whip up fear about the Central American so-called caravans. And so they started to drive turnout of Republicans and conservatives around the midterm elections. And so that drumbeat started on Sunday. The Tree of Life shooting took place on Friday after this guy was whipped into a frenzy around it. So what Taylor Branch said was that people said they would not stand for being a minority in their own country. The question is, if offered a choice between democracy and whiteness, how many people would choose whiteness? And as Wilkerson says, we let that hang in the air. Neither of us willing to hazard a guess as to that one. And so I think it's a perfect bookend to the Civil War itself. And this is the other thing. The advantage

  to be able to write a book, be able to step back and think about this stuff in its most basic elements and then try to communicate it in a clearer way, is that the civil War itself began because the candidate who was backed by Black people won the presidential election and the losing party refused to accept the results. And that's exactly what we had happened in 2020. And so after Lincoln won, rather than accept him as the president, rather than accept those election results, you had the states secede from the union, and that was the predicate. They didn't immediately declare that they were going to go to war. They declared they weren't part of this country anymore and they were pulling out and they were seceding and setting up their own government. And so this is what we're seeing happening now in particularly what we saw happening on January 6th is that a contempt and a disregard for the Constitution and for the laws of the country and for the democratic institutions of the country. And so we had an election. All 50 states certified the election results, all 50 governors, Republican and Democratic alike, certified the election results. And the election showed that Joe Biden had been elected president and then the Constitution required that those electoral votes be certified. So that's what a democracy is and does. But this mob, whipped up by the former president, refused to accept the democratic institutions and refused to accept the democratic process, refused to accept democracy itself, and that the talk in the book about a lot of not only the racial slurs that were being hurled by the members of the mob, but people carrying the actual Confederate flag, people wearing sweatshirts saying “MAGA Civil War, January 6th, 2021.” And so that insurrection was, I would argue, just the latest manifestation of the contempt for the actual democratic institutions and a clear indication that we are not all subscribed to the same social contract in this country; we're not subscribed to the same social constitution. And we're just not subscribed to the sense of common core commitment to one another. And the January 6th insurrection was one of the more recent manifestations of that, separate and apart from the most recent president of the United States tweeting that we should suspend the US Constitution and everyone just shrugging their shoulders.

  Mila Atmos: [00:15:16] Yes, everyone just shrugging their shoulders. It's definitely not de-escalating. I mean, looking at the choice between democracy and whiteness, Marjorie Taylor Greene is back in the spotlight for saying that if she had been in charge of the January 6th insurrection, it would have been armed. I mean, aside from the fact that it was armed, you know, and we have the testimony from the House committee laying all of that out. But this is domestic terrorism, political violence, armed insurrection,

  explicitly endorsed by a sitting US congresswoman. And I know this is only audio, but I'm guessing that what you're giving right now is not your shocked face.

  Steve Phillips: [00:15:58] It's not. And this is what I think is important for us to understand is the appetite for this level of outrageous, inhuman, inhumane behavior. And that the more the extreme things that get said, again, people, they keep shrugging their shoulders like, oh yeah, well that's that's that. Somebody had a really good piece. I have to go back, find out who it was. They were talking about some of the not most right wing Republicans, but those who enjoyed Trump's power were saying, you shouldn't take Trump literally, but you should take him seriously. But there were people who took him literally and said, what happened on January 6th is that those who took him literally stormed the Capitol, hunting down the Republicans themselves, including Mike Pence, with a gallows for him. The people who were taking him literally ran into conflict with those who were saying to take him seriously. And so they were... It was all kind of the chickens coming home to roost situation. And the more that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene say these types of things, the more that Trump says suspend the Constitution, and that it gets normalized and that we lose a sense of outrage around it. And it just lowers the level of the social discourse and fabric to the extent that that level of, frankly, I mean, certainly radical, but if not treasonous behavior is just simply tolerated and we just kind of move on. A true democracy has to have consequences for people who try to overthrow that democracy.

  Mila Atmos: [00:17:35] Mm hmm. Well, it reminds me that it's really a continuation of this long pattern since the Civil War of people looking the other way when non-whites are at risk, you know, that to to preserve white supremacy or white nationalism is sort of like, "well, that's how it is, I guess, and we're just going to look the other way or pretend it's not happening." And it feels to me, after reading your book that everything that we're seeing in response to things like Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments or Trump's comments are basically same, same. So on the democracy side of the choice between whiteness and democracy, are we doing enough to defend it? You talk in the book about, for example, the FBI disbanding the office dealing with white domestic terrorists.

  Steve Phillips: [00:18:28] Right. And so what we're not doing enough and, you know, people like to throw around the words "law and order" and throw around the words "fighting terrorism." The Republicans and the right wing like to do that, but they mainly

  like to do that as a way to try to inflame white fears. So when they talk about terrorism, they're trying to conjure up images of dark skinned Middle Easterners. They're not talking about young white men in this country. And so that's very much part of the reality of what we're facing. So what I referenced in the book is when Obama was running, there was actually a Department of Homeland Security officer who was tracking the rise of white domestic terrorism alarm and activity, in response to this potential that there could be a Black man elected president. And so he wrote a paper about this and he did an analysis and a report that only was the report attacked by Republican members of Congress, including Mike Pence. Then they went and defunded that branch of the Department of Homeland Security. So this whole defunding the police of some, it's not even Democrats to talk about it, but some activists may talk about it. But the people who have done it have actually been Republicans when it comes to there being real law enforcement around white domestic terrorism. And so that's the particular example that I reference, is that rather than hear what this white man security expert was saying, what he was seeing about white domestic terrorism, they reacted by silencing him and the report and dismantling the entire apparatus to track these types of activities. So it definitely is not been taken seriously enough, not taken seriously at all in a real regard in terms of what we're actually facing, what we're up against.

  Mila Atmos: [00:20:28] We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, how Arizona, Georgia and even Texas are showing how we win the Civil War. But first, a shout out for fellow MSW media podcast called Cleanup on Aisle 45. Trump's Department of Justice was particularly messy. On Cleanup on Aisle 45, Alison Gill of the Daily Beans and attorney Andrew Torres of Opening Arguments team up to discuss what the current DOJ is doing to clean up from the previous administration. Cleanup discusses the current happenings at DOJ with ample smarts and snark. Each week they see if the department is living up to the promise of equal justice, especially as it pertains to mopping the floor with lawyers for a certain former president. So subscribe to Cleanup on Aisle 45 wherever you get your podcasts. That's Cleanup -- one word -- on Aisle 45. And now let's return to my conversation with Steve Phillips.

  Mila Atmos: [00:21:26] Well, we are airing this in early January, and the last quarter of 2022 was a doozy. You've got the escalation from a certain MTG saying how she could have run a better armed coup. As you mentioned, the disgraced former president calling for the, quote, termination of the constitution so he can be handed the presidency.

  We've had surprising midterm results, a 51-49 Senate delivered by Georgia for a minute; and then a minute later, 51-49 becoming 50 to 49 after Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced she's leaving the Democratic Party. Wow. And I didn't even get to what's happening on Twitter. So how are you doing? And in terms of Sinema, did you see that coming?

  Steve Phillips: [00:22:10] Well, I mean, I tweeted after she announced this... that the person in the country most disappointed in Raphael Warnock's win is Kyrsten Sinema, is that she thought she was really going to be this power broker and hold the Democrats over the barrel and taking away that 50th vote. But Warnock makes her, you know, far less relevant. And so her big move takes much less impact. No, I actually it was interesting in researching the book, I have a chapter in the book on Arizona and how Arizona is a real example of the path to change in the strategy for how we win. But I didn't even fully grasp I was researching that chapter how long she has been an opponent of progressive activism. I actually met Kyrsten Sinema when she was a state legislator around 2008, 2010, something around in that time period, and that she was, you know, certainly posing as a lefty, green, lesbian or bisexual, you know, progressive person. And sure, her credentials were on the left in terms of how she came of age. But I did not realize how far back it went. And so after the precipitating factor around changing the trajectory of Arizona was this whole SB 1070 Show Me Your Papers Bill that was strongly anti immigrant bill, really again designed to whip up white fears and resentment. And the architect of that was Russell Pearce, who became the head of the state Senate. And so the progressives and Democrats that by Randy Perez, one key activist writes about this in his book Dignity by Fire, that they went about trying to recall Pearce and they ultimately did recall Pearce as the first sitting state legislator in Arizona to ever be recalled. He was the head of the state Senate. It was a very major deal, which started showing the activists the power that they had that has led to the root of the progress we've seen in Arizona. Kyrsten Sinema opposed recalling Pearce. She was actively calling people up, telling them, "Don't do this, this is going to block our bipartisanship efforts, and that if you do try to do this, I'm going to try to punish you." So she has a long track record of being on the wrong side. And so the long way of saying that I'm not surprised by her latest antics and efforts, I mean, who prances down the aisle of the Senate and like, in delighted fashion puts her thumb down to not raise the wages that people working at a minimum wage and is happy about that. I mean, what

  kind of person operates in that fashion other than, you know, really a megalomaniac who doesn't care about normal human beings?

  Mila Atmos: [00:25:00] Yeah, that was definitely, that was definitely a scene seeing that video of her voting this way. Well, the examples that you've had in the book in the second half, you know, about all these amazing organizers. And like you said, you just had a whole chapter on Arizona. But let's talk about Georgia. It's a state you know well, which has been transformed electorally against some serious headwinds. What can we learn?

  Steve Phillips: [00:25:24] So Georgia and Arizona in particular are two, I think, real strong case studies and examples of what is possible. It's interesting and a little amusing having been, you know, kind of shouting in the wind for years about these that, you know, after the Warnock's victory is all these articles about, "oh, Georgia's a, you know, swing state in a, you know, purple state." And I was like, we've been trying to tell you that for a long time. So I feature Georgia the Georgia journey, right? I met Stacey Abrams 12 years ago and have been on this journey with her for a long time. I remember her saying, you know, decade ago, there's a million and a half unregistered people of color within Georgia. I'm going to go register them to vote. And steadily, methodically over the course of several years did that and laid the foundation for the results that we've seen. So Georgia really is, I think, in a lot of ways exhibit A, Exhibit One, One A, along with Arizona of what I call in the book the Liberation Battle Plan, and that all of these places that I feature, Georgia, Arizona, Harris County, Texas, San Diego, and Virginia have had very common elements of their work. And so they have what I call level five leader drawing this concept from Jim Collins's business book, Good to Great, about a leader who is very personally humble but that ferociously dedicated and demanding for their organization, strong civic engagement organization, detailed data driven plan, and playing the long game. And Georgia has had all of those elements, right? So Stacey Abrams began this journey in 2010 when she became the minority leader, began to put in place the organizational infrastructure to do the civic engagement work. And so this vast civic engagement operation, America Votes, and organizations like that are organizations that she basically incubated, spawned and helped to get created. So they have a massive voter turnout operation and then a very data driven plan. And I first met Stacey, she had a 36-page PowerPoint that laid out the numbers within Georgia, the numbers of eligible voters that are broken down by

  legislative district and that guided where they would focus their efforts and time in each successive year. And that's a very similar type plan to what happened in Arizona. I mean, John Laredo convened the organizers there. Those activists from this Show Me Your Papers period, formed organizations. Montserrat Arredondo we had to run the One Arizona Coalition. Alex Gomez created, was one of the leaders of this organization, LUCHA. And there's a whole array of a few dozen civic engagement organizations led by young activists, mainly activists of color, who are doing the work of registering voters. And that's the essence of the fight and the irony of it. Maybe it's the poetic justice of it, the places that held people in slavery being the South and the places that used to be part of Mexico before Mexico was taken by force in the annexation of the Southwest in the Mexican-American War are the places that are actually going to transform politics in this country. They've historically been the most conservative places, and that's because they've had to be more conservative, because there are so many people of color there. They've had to suppress them and suppress them with great intensity. But there's also mathematically, that's where the larger numbers of people of color are. And one place is that many people don't see as as having much, much potential is Texas. Texas is only 39% white. The majority of eligible voters in Texas are African American and Latino. So these are the places. And so the example we draw from Georgia, from Arizona is when you have the elements of strong leadership, civic engagement work, and a meticulous multi year plan, that is what is required to be able to flip these places in these states. And that is what we have seen in Georgia. We have most recently seen it in Warnock's reelection.

  Mila Atmos: [00:29:14] Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think you lay that out very clearly that all of these things have to be in place. So you said you've been screaming into the wind about Arizona and Georgia, but do you remember when you first started thinking that Georgia and Arizona would be competitive states? Did it take that one meeting with Stacey Abrams? Or did you, did you start believing that even before this one?

  Steve Phillips: [00:29:38] I would say in terms of my own trajectory, is that what does somebody say something about "You get educated in the school of big events." And so Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns were transformative for me, the '84 and '88 campaigns. He both modeled how to inject race conscious social justice politics into the electoral space. He modeled how to, for activists to get involved in politics. Much of his campaign was civil rights groups and unions and community leaders and students and

  young people. I was a student at the time, so I ran as a delegate for Jackson. I was the statewide student coordinator for him. So I saw all of these elements at play and I saw the outcome of what was possible. And so this is kind of lost to history as well is actually both how well Jesse did between '84 and '88. So he went from 400 delegates in '84 to 1200 delegates in '88; 3.5 million votes to 7 million votes, highest runner up in any presidential election to that time. So I saw the power in the potential. So Jesse won Georgia in the presidential primary in '88. He won Michigan. And I'll never forget that. And he actually was in first place off of that. But this was all off of mobilizing large numbers of people of color. And so I saw and appreciated and knew that the South and the Southwest could be the places that could transform politics within this country. So I say I've been trying to build a small r rainbow since the eighties. I saw through what was manifested through the Rainbow Coalition campaigns, the power and potential of those places. And so I've just forever has always been on my radar since then. And also it's also what people have missed from the Obama's elections in 2008. Obama came within 230,000 votes out of, you know, 5 million cast of winning Georgia in '08 without contesting Georgia. And they didn't invest any resources there. But he actually came much closer than people realize. And so the potential was always fairly evident if you looked carefully, but it was not necessarily something that was prioritized by those who controlled political campaigns.

  Mila Atmos: [00:31:49] Right. Yeah. I mean, I think the case you make for data is so strong and your book is littered with PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets. I was kind of like, "Oh, this is so exciting. People are really into actually unpacking everything." And like you said, this evidence that in Georgia, Obama got so close even though they didn't really spend any money there. So I kind of asked that last question about turning points in Georgia and Arizona, because I'm thinking about Texas and of course, you spend a whole chapter on this as well. But, you know, in Texas, I spend a lot of time and was honestly really disappointed the way the midterm went there. So give me some hope. Do you see potential there? How long of a long game are we talking?

  Steve Phillips: [00:32:30] Well, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg and that I saw this in Georgia as well. People not believing, not believing. And so it kind of took Stacey doing whatever she could do with whatever resources she could actually put together. And I think I mentioned this in the book. This was I think it was 14 years ago as I was talking

  to a foundation executive at a major foundation who was from Texas, and I was asking her where they were focusing. Her focus was on civic engagement, and she mentioned some number different places. She didn't mention Texas. And I was like, "Well, what about Texas?" She says, "Well, Texas is a long game" or a long proposition. And I'm like, "Exactly. So we have to start right away." And so the lack of investment is the major part of the problem there. The numbers are clearly there in Texas. Texas, it's largely, if not only, a turnout game. So voter participation levels in Texas are much lower. They're lower than they are in places like California, and they're particularly low in the Latino community. And so what we need is to invest in the strategies organizations, in the procedures to increase voter participation to the levels of which people are in the population. But that's not how the resources get allocated. The Democratic money gets, you know, they spend, you know, tens and hundreds of million dollars on television ads targeting, you know, white supposedly swing voters rather than hiring up and staffing up. My... Coming out of the midterms, which I actually feel quite affirmed by, in terms of this analysis that I tried to lay out in my first book about there is a new American majority, people of color and progressive whites are the majority of people and the majority of eligible voters, if we will organize them and turn them out. And everyone kept saying that Democrats are doomed in the midterms. And I was like, "well, why are they doomed? Because that's not what the math shows." Then someone says, "Well, when the president's party holds the White House, you always lose." But that's because people didn't, don't turn out to vote. They feel it's all, the president's got it. We don't need to come out and vote. You can see it in the numbers. The dramatic drop off is why the out of party power tends to do well in the midterms. But if you would mobilize the voters, the Democrats should do quite well. And that's exactly what happened to the point of that shouldn't even have actually lost the Congress. And if you look at these races in California and New York and how close they were, if they had invested in a turnout strategy, should still actually hold the whole Congress. So I say all that to say that that's the deal in Texas is, are we going to invest in a voter turnout operation that's going to manifest the power? Now, what's hopeful is what the primary case study I have in the book is about Harris County, Texas, where Houston is right. That over the past decade, led by the worker, you know, Texas Organizing project, which is the main civic engagement group in the state, they've steadily increased voter turnout of people of color, change the composition of the electorate to the point where the Democrats have flipped most of the control of that county. So that's a model in general. And then not inconsequentially, Lina Hidalgo, who was elected the county executive in 2018, they

  really came after her to try to defeat her, but she won that election. So she was reelected in 2022. She has great promise and potential. She could be a governor of Texas. And so are we starting to lay the groundwork now to put in place the infrastructure, because you need somebody to inspire the voters as well as part of the voter turnout operation? But you have to start early and you have to work hard. I mean, I went back and looked at my emails to figure out the exact date, and it was May of 2012. I was at a dinner in Georgia at somebody's house, a small dinner with Stacey Abrams, where she told me she was running for governor in 2018. So six years in advance, she had her eye on that and was working steadily and methodically towards it. So by that measure, we're already behind for Texas 2026, but the elements are there. And Texas is the most promising place demographically in the country, actually. But if we need to convince those who have the resources to really, I keep saying, add a zero to what they invest in Texas so we can staff up exponentially. And that will then give us the capacity to be able to start flipping elections in Texas.

  Mila Atmos: [00:37:02] Right. Well, in this last election, 9.6 million registered voters in Texas did not turn out. You know, if we could get a big portion of them and some of the evidence that you cited in your book of, you know, voter contact that turned out something like 80% of the people reached is like it would be unbelievable to have 80% of 9.6 million more people voting in Texas. That would definitely turn the tide. And I love what you said about the long game. The longer the game, the sooner we need to start. That's good advice. So in the epilogue, at the end of your book, you wrote that once we win the Civil War, we can craft a social contract for the society we want to live in. What does it look like to you?

  Steve Phillips: [00:37:45] Well, first I try to tie those threads together. And so if we're looking at the fact of the unrelenting conduct of the Civil War by the Confederates. And then we come to this current moment. And so one of the things I try to first lay out is that this current social contract is a series of compromises with white supremacists. And that we need to think far more broadly. I mean everything from like, well, why do we have to renew the Voting Rights Act on a regular basis if we actually want people to vote? And we actually think that democracy includes everybody voting all of the time, why are we so concerned about enforcement measures in terms of protecting the right to vote? That's a compromise with white supremacists. We've got as much as we can get within the current context, but it's not a full reflection of manifestation of our highest dreams

  and our greatest aspirations if we could construct the kind of society that we all believe in. And so that's what I'm pushing for. Trying to point us towards in the epilogue is that we do have the numbers. We have a majority of people. We have the potential power to redraw the social contract and to really lay out a whole different set of policies and agendas. And somebody had said after the very first COVID bill was passed and they passed $1,000,000,000,000 relief bill in like a matter of weeks. Someone tweets out, "Oh, so we could afford reparations, right?" So in terms of what this, the amount of money that this is the example I use of universal basic income, Dr. King talked in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here about the idea of a guaranteed income. So Michael Tubbs who was the mayor of Stockton, California, and it's really it launched a group, Mayors for Guaranteed Income has lifted up this concept and drawing from what King had put forward. King was saying, we have all these programs and things designed to address some symptom that will then actually help poverty. He says, maybe the best way to address poverty is to address poverty, and that to actually guarantee a basic level of income so nobody is poor. And so this is the fundamental like, gets at the question "What are our values? Who are we as a people? Do we have a social contract based upon our highest ideals? Do we believe that in the richest country in the history of the world that nobody should be poor? And that if we believe that, then do we have a public policy system instead of agendas that advance that?" Dude, I went to China in '98 and I was a delegation of educators. They called their after-school centers, children's palaces. And I thought that was so fascinating, the level of value that they attached to their after-school care. And whereas we're having to fight to get any resources for public education, period, let alone to after school. And so do we invest in people? Do we move our resources to making sure nobody is poor? So every single person's quality education, so every person has quality housing to live in so that then people can unleash their talent and potential and contribute that to the society. That's the kind of society we could have and that we should be looking towards, and that I'm encouraging us to carry ourselves with the confidence that the majority of people would actually back that. That's the kind of society that is possible once we start constructing a new social contract based upon our deepest values and our highest ideals.

  Mila Atmos: [00:41:24] Right. Well, I believe that people have these common goals. We all want good schools for our children. We all want good jobs, have good housing, like nobody's against that. But we talk about it always as a zero-sum game and that some of us can have some, and some of us cannot. And and I think we need to really

  stop talking about it in this way. So I always ask this question about what we can do as everyday people. So what are two things an everyday person can do to strengthen what is now just the beginning of a multiracial democracy?

  Steve Phillips: [00:41:58] One is to sponsor, and use that term broadly, a civic engagement leader. And so to take an interest in and support of somebody who is trying to do significant civic engagement work in some of these key states. Right. So I lift up several of them in my book. It's a good starting place, but anyone who's trying to particularly get the electorate to look more like the population trend, to get people of color into the voting population, you know, as an organization is dedicated to do that work. I actually talked to somebody. There was one I met Carol Toll. I met her, I met Carol in 2007 when we were trying to put together the Obama support work at super PAC side. And then she told me a few years after that. So she has a small scholarship program that she provided in, like a dozen students in Georgia. And I was all like, "Oh, do you know Stacey Abrams? I should connect you to Stacey Abrams." And so I did. And they've been, you know, friends and supporters. And Carol's a progressive donor. She supported Stacey. I just learned for two years, Carol sent Stacey flowers every single week, every single week for two years, just to encourage her and support her and keep her going and letting her know that people were backing her. So there's that level of support. You know, you can do like part of your sponsorship thing. You can try to raise money from your friends. You could do a Zoom event with your friends for the leaders of that organization, but take an interest in one of these organizations and their leaders and stick with them and back them. So that's one major thing that I would suggest to people. The other is to use your whatever platform you have, whether it's just your Facebook page or if any of us can still be on Twitter or whatever it is. But it's to hold particularly the people who control Democratic Party spending more accountable and specifically accountable to demand that they show and share the data rationale behind their spending decisions, because frankly, there isn't any. And so there's an extraordinary opaqueness and lack of accountability and transparency far more in political spending than there is even in Wall Street. You buy a stock, you get quarterly reports and you get access to some set of consistent information. You get none of that. And yet hundreds of millions of dollars are spent. Clearest example is we did a report card of Democracy in Color in 2020 on the Democratic superPACs in 2020. And so we looked at Senate Majority PAC, which was designed to transform the composition of the Senate. As of August 1st, 2020, Senate Majority PAC had spent $7 Million in Iowa and

  zero in Georgia. Now, which state flipped the Senate? It was Georgia. And what was the data rationale? Because if you looked at the prior presidential race, if you looked at the 2018 gubernatorial race, Georgia was closer than Iowa, and yet Iowa got all the money. And so people need to be writing and tweeting and asking and emailing. What's the basis for your decisions? And all, a lot of this information is public information. Get it from the FCC website and how they're actually spending their money. And ask and try to get as much of a drumbeat as possible about are people being accountable, not just accountable, but are they being smart? And then they share the rationale and the data for their spending. That level of accountability will be helpful, I think, to the overall progressive system and applies to foundations in philanthropy as well. All these foundations committing hundreds of millions of dollars after the death of George Floyd to racial justice. Well, what's happened with that money? Where are the reports? Where are the updates around how that's actually flowing? And so, are people asking for it? So that's the second thing I would say is to use whatever platform you have even if it's just emailing somebody in a position of influence to ask them to explain their actions and then to share those explanations with your circle of people.

  Mila Atmos: [00:46:01] All good advice. So here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?

  Steve Phillips: [00:46:09] Well, Arizona makes me very helpful. Well, Georgia does as well. And in looking at those things through the arc of history. Right. So and I mentioned how the South was given back to the slave owners after the Civil War and after Reconstruction. The architect of that was a Georgia senator, John Brown Gordon, who who orchestrated the compromise where the South would concede the White House in exchange for getting the federal troops pulled out of the South so that the slave owners could take control again. That Georgia Senate seat is now held by Raphael Warnock. And so that arc of history I find very gratifying. Dr. Martin Luther King was the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church. His literal successor is Raphael Warnock, who now serves in the United States Senate. And from the arc of history standpoint, all of that, to me is very encouraging. And frankly, all these articles of people now coming to see that Georgia is a... The title of my Georgia chapter is "Georgia, that's not one we expected," which is the quote of what Joe Biden said on election night. "We're ahead in Georgia. That's not one we expected." That's because they didn't invest in Georgia. But now people are starting to see. So this gives me hope that people are starting to finally get

  the message around where the possibility and the potential is. And then it's a similar story in Arizona. Nobody thought we were going to win that gubernatorial election, win the gubernatorial election in terms of Katie Hobbs, Mark Kelly getting reelected to the Senate, and all of that being done on the work of people who were high school and college student activists, women of color, who were outraged by what the state government was doing, got politicized and organized, and stuck with it for a decade to transform that electorate, being hundreds of thousands of Latinos into the voting population. And now we are seeing the results of flipping Arizona. So those trends, particularly now that it's happened twice. Maybe that's the most clear answer. 2020 and now in 2022 that I am more affirmed than ever that we have the numbers and we can and should win if we will do the smart strategies and stick with it.

  Mila Atmos: [00:48:20] Hear, hear. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on.

  Steve Phillips: [00:48:26] I really enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate you inviting me on.

  Mila Atmos: [00:48:29] Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moody, co-hosts of Democracy-Ish.

  Wajahat Ali: [00:48:52] I've always believed that we're in the majority, but we've been gaslit into believing that we are some radical fringe extremists. Like living in the bubble, granola eating like vegan freaks. Nothing wrong with granola eating vegan freaks. Some of my best friends are granola eating vegan freaks.

  Speaker4: [00:49:08] People don't understand the power of democracy and the fact that it doesn't just exist, right? It isn't just like our breath, right. That keeps cycling through our body with us without us actually having to think about it. It is conscious. It is something that is living that we have to pay attention to and be vigilant. And I think that the idea of us hanging on by a thread right now is waking up a lot of people to that fact.

  Mila Atmos: [00:49:36] That's next time. On Future Hindsight.

  Mila Atmos: [00:49:41] Did you know we have a YouTube channel? Seriously, We do. And actually, quite a lot of people listen to the show there. If that's you: Hello! If not, you'll find punchy episode clips, full interviews and more. Subscribe at YouTube.com/FutureHindsight. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.

  The Democracy Group: [00:50:14] This podcast is part of the democracy group.