Journalist and author Anand Giridharadas’ new book, Man in the Mirror, is a deeply researched exploration of what happened when two Americans from different worlds confronted each other in a New York subway car—and why their encounter ended tragically. This is a story of moral complexity, in which a wide variety of narratives emerged to try and explain both the specific deadly incident and, more broadly, our broken society.
Consider several of Anand’s over-arching insights which he shared with me in this new episode of Six Questions:
One, “So many systems are not responsive to the needs of Americans,” he said, which creates “the sense of abandonment,” that “no one is listening, no one is coming.” And two, addressing the need for belonging is critical to address what he describes as our “stressed out, fractious, insecure, authoritarian age.”
“I think our crisis of belonging is universal,” Anand explained, and that means answering “the fundamental questions about ‘Who belongs? How do we define American? Who is worthy of humanity in our culture and who is deemed unworthy of it?…And how do we grow the circle of belonging in a moment like this?’”
We explore these and other questions, including how and why Donald Trump has succeeded in building a culture for his supporters, how our politics need to change to counteract the growth of violence and cruelty, and why he believes that the American character is “infinitely stronger than Donald Trump.”
I hope you’ll give the conversation a listen. I promise you’ll learn something if you do.
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