Eddie Glaude: For democracy to work, we must become better people

The Princeton scholar on the advice he gave President Biden, why Gen Z is the “catastrophic generation,” and how this moment is actually full of possibility

Eddie Glaude, Jr., is a rarity: both a serious scholar, as a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and a television pundit with a gift for translating complexity into deeply resonant mini-sermons that routinely explode online.

He is someone who burrows deep into the American past to mine for wisdom and answers to our present conundrums, and he always comes back with much to share.

We talked to him the other day about the bigger picture, the stepped-back view, of this moment: why he believes we are living through the end of a 50-year era, and what could come next; what he believes students are really telling us when they protest; what he makes of President Biden as a historical and transitional figure, and the advice he was invited to give him; his disagreement with his friend and mentor Cornel West about West’s campaign for president, and Glaude’s own regrets about his third-party vote in 2016; why the idea of whiteness must end for all of us to be free; and what real multiracial democracy will look like and feel like in your daily life.

Be sure to check out Glaude’s new book, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, which collects a series of lectures he gave at Harvard on some of these questions.

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With the election looming, and these wars at play, and protests erupting, how do you understand the moment we're in?

For the last 50 years, we've been living under an economic and political philosophy that has in some ways transformed us from citizens into self-interested persons in competition and rivalry with each other. And you could describe it as Reaganism, as Thatcherism, as neoliberalism. As we see that it's collapsing right in front of us — and it's collapsing in the midst of climate crisis, in the midst of these existential realities — young people are growing up in a society that for them feels like it's broken. I mean, we can talk about Gen Z as the catastrophic generation.

And they know it's broken, so it's a conjunctural moment, to use the old Marxist language, a crisis where the consensus is collapsing, but then there's all of this possibility. And so you’ve got these conflicting forces, people who are nostalgic for a sense of what was, people who are insisting on order in light of the chaos and so they're reaching for old autocratic languages. They're lurching in the face of all of this chaos to the language of fascism, to the language of order. We've seen it before. We see it all across Europe. And then there are those who are trying to imagine what the future will look like.

As someone who teaches people around 20 years old and knows them and sees what they're writing in their papers and what their ideas are before they hit the world, do you think this moment of crisis is actually a moment of possibility? 

I think that it's both. I see the emergent, as it were. When we look at the protests across the country around the war in Gaza, it signals a profound shift in the way young people view Israel, the way young people understand their political power. We see in our political discourse something that we couldn't fathom five years ago, ten years ago. People talk about raising the corporate tax rate. We see so many different things seeping into our politics as young folk have concluded that the way we've lived our lives up to this point has brought us to this tipping point, to this moment where it seems as if the polity might not survive. 

And so what I see are young people reaching for ways of thinking about how to be together differently. Sometimes it takes the form of mimicry, an imitation of older ways of organizing and struggle. Other times it's much more imaginative. But what I see in their papers and what I see in their actions is this almost desperate attempt to break free from the stranglehold of our current arrangements, if that makes sense.

One of the consequences of this 50-year ideology is that it has changed how we are, how we live, how we conceive of our lives, how we relate to each other, and so there's an individual brokenness that flows from the structural brokenness. How do you see who we've become in the dog days of this era?

This is something I learned from writing about Baldwin, that the moral question has to always be the beating heart of the work. And that moral question is, “Who do we take ourselves to be?”

Madison and others insisted on the importance of character, that we had to be certain kinds of persons in order for democracy to work. And this 50-year run has exacerbated some of the distortions in what makes us who we are. We've always dealt with the dangerous and disfiguring effects of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of class ideology. But over the last 50 years, they've congealed in a particular sort of way.

For democracy to work, we have to admit that we have to become better people. If we are the leaders that we've been looking for, then we have to become better people. And if we're going to be better people, we have to build a more just world, because the world as it's currently organized actually distorts our sense of self, our relationship with each other.

When I think about why fascism gets 40-something percent of the vote in any open survey, my most generous understanding is that we've made a ton of progress for women, progress for Black people and people of color. But we're not as good at helping people who’ve experienced that change as a headwind, whether that's white people in the case of race, or men in the case of gender. What do we need to do to help people cope with change, even if the change is good?