Sarah Baxter
Is There Still an American Dream?
Sarah Baxter - Is There Still an American Dream?
- Well, I’d like you to say good evening and welcome back to those of you who are with us earlier this evening. Tonight, it’s my great pleasure to have Sarah Baxter with us. Sarah will be discussing: Is There Still an American Dream? Sarah Baxter is Oxford-educated and has had a glittery career in both broadcasting and journalism. She began as a News Reporter, then later became News Editor for Time Out Magazine. She has been the Political Editor at the New Statesman Magazine and Senior Editor at The Observer for both Arts and Culture. Switching to The Sunday Times, she has been both the New York Correspondent and Washington Bureau Chief. She became the Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, and then Deputy Editor for The Sunday Times. Now living in America, tonight, she will discuss: Is There Still an American Dream? Sarah, very warm welcome. Thanks for joining us tonight, and we are looking forward to your presentation. Thanks, over to you.
- Thank you so much, and thank you everybody for joining me from all over the place. I love the idea of Lockdown University and it’s great to be speaking to you from Pennsylvania where I am at the moment at Wilkes University. Anyway, so lovely to have so many of you here. I’m absolutely thrilled. And I’m going to start with a little bit of family history because I’m a great believer in the American dream, and I would really have to be because it was the motto of my own family. And I’ve started here with a family portrait. I hope you don’t mind and you’ll indulge me for a bit, because it’s my mother to the left of your screens as a young woman. Her brother, looking very all-American in his baseball cap. My Uncle Jack’s still alive today. Her mother, Josephine, my sister on her lap. I wasn’t born yet. And next to my grandmother, Josephine, my grandfather, Ralph, and my aunt Marge, and that’s the portrait of a family that wasn’t prosperous, but was comfortable and comfortable in their own skin as well. They just sort of felt at home in America. They’ve made a decent life here, very, what the Americans would call, middle-class, which is not super prosperous, but enough to have a home, an education, and a regular income. My mother was born in 1929, so they did go through the Depression and had some tough times. But it’s the story that everybody wanted to share is that you come to America and you get a little slice of that pursuit of happiness.
I wanted to talk particularly about a tale of two sisters and homing on my grandmother there at the centre of the picture. Grandma Josephine was born in what is now Slovakia in a town called Zilina, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a Jewish-German-speaking family. And she was seven when she left in 1902 and came through Ellis Island. And this was a… The family was deeply poor. Her father, Max April, my middle name is April, had come before the rest of his family to work as a furrier in Bleecker Street, which is now a grand address in Greenwich Village, but was then pretty slummy. And then as soon as he could, he sent for his family. But that was tricky. So the first people to arrive, I’m going to just draw your attention to the name a few lines up here, Fanny April, age 16. That was my grandmother’s sister and a bit older than her. And the younger children came later with their mother. And Fanny and Florida there came on their own 16, 15. And this is the ship’s manifest in the entry to Ellis Island. This was 1901, very much turn of the last century. They were poor. I’ve seen records of Fanny working as a servant and seamstress, and there was really… And they had a very difficult life because my great-grandfather, Max, actually turned out to be the black sheep of the family. And it’s a story that’s not often told, but I will divulge, which is that he found it hard to make it in America. It wasn’t easy for that first generation of immigrants.
And he actually deserted his family and nobody knows what happened to him. It could have been anything. There were rumours that he felt so unhappy he returned to Europe. That seems unlikely because he kind of disappeared without trace. He’s not on the ship’s manifests. Really, nobody knows, so this was a huge struggle. There were six children and they had very hard times. And without the support of Jewish organisations in New York, they would’ve found it so difficult to get going. But the American dream was very powerful thing. And I’m talking about Fanny because my own family went on to have a decent, solid existence. But for Fanny’s family, it was almost miraculous what could happen in that century. So her son, she married somebody called Herzka. And her son, Lloyd Herzka, was the pride of the family because he became… He was a lawyer who became a Supreme Court Judge in Brooklyn. Very tragically, he died at the age of 49, so this is a little death notice for him. He had a heart attack. To go from one generation of Fanny as seamstress to somebody who was on the Supreme Court in Brooklyn was considered little short of miraculous. And then you’ll see at the bottom, there’s something highlighted there, not by me, but more because I did a search on Fanny. You can see above it, Ms. Dorothy Herzka, above his mother, Fanny. And Dorothy Herzka. Well, I just wanted to say, I’m now going to show you a picture, which, you’d probably guess, is by Roy Lichtenstein. And you’re like, “Well, what happened to Dorothy, and what connection could it possibly have to Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings?” Well, wham, blow me down.
This is Dorothy, the beautiful daughter of Judge Herzka, the granddaughter of Fanny, the great niece of my grandmother, who ends up married to the artist Roy Lichtenstein. And today, Dorothy’s still alive. This was a picture of her taken a year ago. She runs the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation really well. She’s fabulous. Some of our relatives were selling hot dogs on Coney Island and are still pretty economically challenged, shall we say. Dorothy, of course, is absolutely loaded, but also just has been a keeper of the flame for Roy Lichtenstein. We’re all just very proud of what she did has done to make sure that… I mean, he died quite young-ish in his early 70s, and she’s really been keeping that flame alive. And she’s now dispersing, she’s now in her early 80s and dispersing the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to galleries like the Whitney has just acquired a very important collection, thanks to the foundation and all the rest. And we’re talking here three generations. I mean, Dorothy is Fanny’s granddaughter, I’m Josephine’s granddaughter. And it was just amazing what you could do. I mean, that is on the sort of miraculous level. My own family was more on the normal level, but it felt that everybody had shared aspirations. And Dorothy always says, “Well, it’s the luck of the draw.” But it was also something about coming to America that no matter how hard your beginnings, and they were very hard, that if you really worked hard and you tried to make a go of it, you could succeed, really, beyond your wildest dreams.
And we can think of… I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger once saying he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. And ain’t that the truth? A bodybuilder from Austria who becomes governor of California, married to Kennedy, okay, they divorced, but it’s an astonishing trajectory. And that’s that kind of only-in-America kind of spirit. However, there is a darker side of America. The dream was never perfect. Even as you can tell from my great-grandfather’s day, it was very, very tough going. Not all families made it. And at the same time as Dorothy was living it up with Roy, in the heyday of Manhattan art world in the ‘60s. They met at an exhibition, which Dorothy was a young woman. She was assistant art, curating an exhibition called “The American Supermarket,” which showcased Andy Warhol’s work. And Roy Lichtenstein just did some of the carrier bags, but it was really Andy Warhol’s soup show. He had those cans of famous soup on display. And so from then on, it was a life, a really glamorous life of parties, the swinging '60s, et cetera, et cetera. But, my mother actually, in a slight betrayal of the American dream, she might think she sometimes regretted it. She actually had gone to Paris to learn French and she’d fallen in love with a half-British, half-French chap, my father, who worked for the RAF. And so she became… She never gave up her citizenship. She became effectively a British RAF wife. And we were sent in the late '60s, when I was a very young girl, to Montgomery, Alabama, which has a massive air force base. And the contrast between the two Americans were huge. So this was the world of Alabama in the 1960s.
I’ve shown you pictures here from 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, just the year before “The American Supermarket” show. And this was famously the police chief of Birmingham, Alabama was a man called Eugene “Bull” Connor. It was the days when Governor Wallace was notorious racist in charge of the state, and Black people were peacefully protesting their civil rights, and this is how they were rewarded. I actually arrived in Alabama as a very young girl in 1966 in Montgomery, a year after the Selma marches. And while I was there in '68, Martin Luther King was shot. So one thing that I think we lose sight of sometimes is just how divided America was in the past. It could have that glitzy, glamorous, aspirational world of New York arts, and it could have this really low underbelly what was going on in the south. But something about the '60s also had to do with progress. There was that sense that things were moving forward and bad as things were in the '60s, there was the Civil Rights Act that the dignity of Black people was finally becoming respected and that there was a chance to move forward towards… what Martin Luther King called living out the true meaning of the creed about all people being created equal. So that’s a little bit of history delving into my family.
I’ve been living back in America for a year now, just over a year. And I started to cover the Trump elections and the Trump v. Biden race. And one of the things that I wanted to do was when I heard that Donald Trump was going to be debating Joe Biden in Cleveland, Ohio, which was the town that my mother grew up in and where that picture that you saw at the beginning was shot, I thought, “Well, I’m going to go to Cleveland and just take a look at my grandmother’s neighbourhood. I hadn’t been there for a while. See my uncle, see my cousins.” I’d just arrived back in New York, it was in America. It was then September 2020, a couple months before the election. And I thought, “Well, I’ll talk to some Trump supporters.” Now, my husband’s a photographer. And we thought we’d go and have a look at one of these Trump truck parades where they’d get on the backs… People would be driving through town on the backs of pickup trucks, loudly affirming their support for Trump. And my husband really wanted to capture the visuals, and I thought I’d speak to some Trump supporters. Anyway, my husband has a good eye for what’s going on. And at the end of this rally, he suddenly suggested to me, and he said, “Sarah, we’re in Cleveland.” It’s still two days to go before the debate. He said, “The proud boys are here, come and see.” And sure enough, we discovered their bus and we talked to them. They didn’t really like the media, but my husband’s very good at talking people into posing. And here they are on the inside of a converted school bus posing with these assault weapons that are all too common now in America, which thank God they weren’t in the days of the civil rights movement because the way that people are now carrying assault rifles openly on the streets.
You probably heard of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial recently, where this young boy of 17 was wandering around a Black Lives Matter protest with an assault rifle that looked very like that. It was just shocking. These people, they say they’re not racist, but they’re very much talking the language of white supremacy. And one of the things that worried me, if you look at the inside of this bus, if you look down below the eye line here, there are the windows, there are little gun placements just under the windows on all sides of the bus. And you feel like… They always said, “Oh, we’re only here to fight antifa, et cetera.” But there’s that nasty feeling that if things get out of hand, they could just be firing out of the window at people because that’s where those guns are placed. Anyway, I sort of came back to think, “Wow, this isn’t quite the American dream that I had imagined.” And one of the turning points I was here for as well, which was 9/11, I’m not sharing pictures with you of that. I could do, I suppose. But when I came to New York for The Sunday Times, it was 2001. And about six weeks after I arrived, the Twin Towers fell, and I was actually there and had to run for my life.
And there was that sense of foreboding that I remember at the time that maybe this century, the 21st century, was not going to be like the end of the 20th century, which had ended on that note of progress. And particularly in America with that rather triumphant sort of liberal end of history. And as I looked out over the scars of the Twin Towers, I thought, “Oh, maybe from my children’s generation, things are not going to be what they were. But I still loved America, I loved being here.” I not only covered 9/11, but I moved to Washington in 2005 and then covered the election of Barack Obama, the first African American president. And at that point, you had to say, “Wow, America really is capable of reinventing itself.” I returned to Montgomery, Alabama, visited my old school. And on Facebook these days, you can sort of talk to anybody and reconnect with people you haven’t seen for years. And I met so many of my old school friends from when I was seven years old, six years old. And they told me about their experiences and what they thought about how Alabama changed and how they felt about Obama. There were a few warning signs. I remember the bursar of the school telling me, they’re all, “Barack Hussein Obama, that man is a Muslim.” And he said it rather like the N word and it was worrying. And I think of foreshadowing of some of the divisions that we’ve seen today.
It’s not that I think, by any means, that Barack Obama was a perfect president or anything, but I did think that the fact that the first African American president had been elected was just a very positive thing for a girl like me who’d been in Alabama in the '60s. That suggested to me the American dream was alive and well. And, of course, his own story was beyond even Arnie Schwarzenegger’s dreams. So, ah, here we go. Yeah, Bill Clinton, so many presidents from nowhere, from the boy called Hope to President of America. Real log cabin to the presidency stuff. And I’ve talked about my family, but so many people had similar experiences. When I lived in New York, I lived next door to somebody who had been smuggled out of Czechoslovakia as a girl after the 1968 protests because her parents were on the run and they had been university professors involved in the opposition. And you just run into people like that all the time. America is such a haven for people who are looking for a better life. Hang on a minute, I think you’ve got some screen sharing that’s awkward. Can you see some weird email from me?
[Lauren] No, we can just see the slide.
Oh, okay. In that case, I’ll carry on because yeah, I seem to have a triple-E split screen at the moment, which is slightly daunting me. Anyway, I’m going to… Hmm. Oh. Okay, here we go. I’m going to show you a video with.. Hmm, have I skipped a slide? I think I might have. Yeah, I want to… So people still come to America as a beacon of hope. What I found in March earlier this year is I went to the Rio Grande on the southern border with Mexico to report on the growing crisis on that border. Because basically, as soon as Joe Biden was elected, a lot of Latin America started to get on the move in particular countries from the northern triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. And they heard the message that Joe Biden was going to be more liberal, that this was a good time to move. And honestly, I think I’d have done the same as them. I’d have thought, I’d have looked around at my family and said, “Right, this is the optimum moment with a new president who’s talked about undoing Trump’s anti-migrant legislation. Let’s go.” And they’ve come. And now, over 2 million people have entered the United States, mostly illegally, at the southern border. And I just wanted to show you… Unlike my husband, I’m not very good at video or photos. He didn’t come with me on this trip, but I did take my own because when I went to the Rio Grande, I went to a little fly-blown town called Roma, which had really only just started to receive immigrants that week.
And I was quite apprehensive that I might not find anybody, that I wouldn’t know where to go, I wouldn’t know to where to look. I might have to stay up all night to see two families cross, if that. And what I found absolutely amazed me, and it was quite profoundly shocking, slightly different experience from my own grandmother because she did come through Ellis Island legally. This is illegal, but it shows, still, the power and the lure of the American dream. So I went down to a riverbank, a bit out of the town’s way, and this is what I found. This is a family crossing, it’s just a short video. Oh. Hmm. Okay, it’s the circle of doom here. I think I’ll move on rather than wait for it to load, but you get the gist. That’s a little family crossing. That’s one family. This started at about dusk at about 8:30, and I’m now going to see if I can move on to the next one. After an hour, that’s my video of how many people crossed. Well, that’s not going to show you either because the camera pans, and you can see a line that’s about three or four times as long as that. And on the right there you see another line forming of unaccompanied children, mostly about 14 or so, because the message had gone out. If you come with children age seven or below, you’ll be allowed in at least temporarily. And if you come unaccompanied and you’re older, you’ll also be allowed in.
So families were coming with their young children and then their older children. I’m sorry this video isn’t playing. Let’s see if I can just move it along a bit. Oops, nope, that’s just moved to another slide. Sorry. Oops. See if it… No, it’s still getting stuck at the same bit. Sorry about that. The communication is laying me down here. But as I said, I thought I’d be there all night. I watched about 150 people cross in the space of an hour. And that’s just one night in one small fly-bound town in one bit of the 2,000-mile border. Here we go, it’s loading. Well, I’m giving up on that, but I just wanted to show you what I’d seen with my own eyes as a reporter. But they’re coming to a world where, which I think is very difficult for them, unquestionably, just as it was for my grandparents’ generation. But what they don’t have the same hope of, I think, is what my own family had, which is that sense of rising prosperity. The idea that your life is hard, but your children’s life is going to be better. And when it comes to assessing whether or not a dream really works, I think what we all care about is our children. And I just want to show you some graphs taken from a journal called Science, which did some very deep delving into this. And what you can see that if you were born in 1940, that’s actually later than my mother, you had a 90% chance. If you follow my cursor, you had a 90% chance of being better off than your parents. But this gradually was getting harder and harder. And you can see this downward curve here. If you were born around here as I was, you still had a better chance of being better off. But now, it’s barely 50% chance of being better off than your parents.
And this kind of stagnation, I think, underlines a lot of the social angst, and bitterness, and division that we’re seeing today because everybody is feeling under pressure in a way that they’ve never had… It’s that taking away of the hope and expectation, which is so important to the concept of the American dream. Here’s something else interesting. American paychecks are bigger than 40 years ago, but their purchasing power has barely budged. So yes, you are earning more money than you did in the ‘60s, but it’s still hard to have those basics of life and own your own home, own your own car. The sort of underpinnings of the good life haven’t really fundamentally changed. And this is something that is particularly true at the lower end of the income scale. So The New York Times recently did a project, actually, on what they called the “Obituary for The American Dream.” And I’ve just pulled out a couple of quotes from people. “How did the American dream die for you?” They asked. And then they had these short answers. So here’s Lianna Evans in Clovis, California. She grew up in poverty. 1970, she graduated high school, had a child, this is a really tough story, went to college at 21. But then she got a good job. She worked for almost 20 years for state and federal government. But she’s taken out student loans that have crippled her. She doesn’t have any assets, she’s got less than 60K in retirement, five kids, and she’s got a doctorate that plays less than a nursing degree. She said, “How is my dream even a dream at this point? It’s only a wish.”
And I’m talking to you here from Wilkes University. It’s a good university, it’s not Harvard, and yet kids are paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend here. And it’s very less certain, as we know as well in Britain that all these student loans are really going to pay off in terms of higher wages and rewards. The other big thing is income inequality and who’s benefiting. Because one of the things about social media is we all know how the other half lived. I think back to all those Velvet Revolutions in '89 and '90, the collapse in the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War. It was partly, people used to say it was Dallas. It was watching America the life of the rich on Dallas, which was, if you were in East Berlin, you could watch West German television. You was seeing the good life like that and having videotapes smuggled out and things. People thought, “Wow, I want a slice of that good life.” And here, people can see that some people are having a fabulous life beyond their wildest dreams, and they’re not getting what they consider their fair share. So here’s Justin in Iowa talking about how he felt when he saw the wage breakout for his company. “My boss made 400K while the average worker made 35K. The death, though, was the year he decided not to award raises or bonuses to anyone but himself.
He took the entire 300K pool of money that should have been divided between the employees.” Oh, sorry, my graph runs out of there, but basically handed it to himself. So this is another painful aspect of the American dream and why it feels so frayed at the edges. Because there was one thing that I think all those new immigrants to America my grandmother’s day believed in. It was the idea of that there could… They had that idea that prosperity was there to be shared, and now it seems like it’s for some rather than for others. So this is another draught showing the gap between upper-income, middle, and lower-income households. So the upper-income’s rising, the middle-income is falling, the lower-income is stagnated, and that is a recipe for social anxiety. And if you add the way that social media can really fuel and angst, and I’m not just talking about trolling and the lack of civility on the social media, the sort of jeering others that goes on, which I find personally very disappointing and disturbing. But also, that Instagram culture of showing off your wealth, and showing off what you have, and really celebrating your own good fortune, but making everybody else feel like they’re missing out. And so I’m just going to show you one last slide and then I’ll just talk for a bit more before taking questions. But I’m sure we were all very much riveted by the storming of the Capitol on January 6th when it really did seem like democracy was not just social cohesion, but democracy itself was under threat.
And here was a sight that I never expected to see having grown up in Alabama, which is that sight of the Confederate flag being paraded through the halls of Congress. And where I live in Pennsylvania, which is a very… It’s a swing state, very split between Trump devotees and the inner cities very much for the Democrats. I hear people talk all the time about coming Civil War, and I just have to hope that they’re kidding. We’re exaggerating. But they do say that, and a lot of them describe themselves as proud deplorables. These are working-class areas that I’ve lost… We’ve seen this in Britain as well. These are working class areas around me in Pennsylvania, used to be mining areas, very much lost the old identification with heavy industry. Really haven’t found the solution. What’s the new? And have become very anti, what they consider to be liberal elites, who are hogging… They’re the ones who are prospering, leaving behind the deplorables, as they call themselves now. That was the term that Hillary Clinton came up with that they proudly adopted and feel that there’s a culture war going on now. And one just has to hope for the best that that war doesn’t become a violent one. Now, actually, there are hopeful signs. Funnily enough, the Republicans won in Virginia. But I found that, and I found that a pretty hopeful sign, despite all the culture war sort of signifiers behind that. Because what it showed about is that people care about the things they’ve always cared about.
They care about schools, they care about education, they care about local issues, they care about what’s best for themselves and their family. They weren’t actually thinking about, “Do we want to bring Donald Trump back?” They weren’t thinking about whether democracy was endangered or not. I know Democrats really wanted them to think about those issues, and they are serious issues. But actually, I feel like what the voters were saying in Virginia is, “Let us vote on the issues that matter to us, and that is what’s going on in our families, in our schools, in our local communities, et cetera. And we’ll give more thought to what’s happening more broadly nationally down the line when we consider that relevant.” But we really don’t know what’s going to happen down the line. We don’t know if Donald Trump is going to stand again for election. We know that Joe Biden has been a bit disappointing to his own supporters, more than a bit, I’d say, even. One of the things he vowed to do coming in was to unite the country. Well, it’s a hell of a job to unite it, so I don’t necessarily fault him for that, but it’s indisputably the case that the country’s not united. There are divisions. There was pretty much unity over withdrawal from Afghanistan, but I think people were pretty agasp by the execution of that.
And we’ve seen his poll ratings just plummet at that point and never recover. And we’re entering into a very fragile stage of American politics with a president who is 78 at the moment. If he runs again, he’ll be 81, he’ll be 82 at the time of the inauguration. And he looks pretty frail already. And yet, we’ve got somebody else who wants to run again. Donald Trump, who has, in my view, proved himself to be no friend of democracy and is peddling the lie, in my view, that the election was stolen. And so I think we’ve seen from the numbers of immigrants who still want to come. Funnily enough, among the ranks of Hispanic people who came as immigrants and are moving, in some ways, towards the Republicans, that, to me, suggests as well the American dream is live and well because… It’s not that I think everyone ought to become Republican. In fact, lots of my family remained Democrats ever since the Great Depression. It’s more that sense that they feel like they’re getting ahead now in the way that previous communities got ahead in America. And so they’re voting just as ordinary American citizens vote. They don’t have to be considered one just massive cohort that always votes Democrat. They’re just joining in the American dream where they’re free to do whatever they like. So there are all sorts of hopeful reasons why I still believe in the American dream, but I also think that it’s that sense that it is not what it was, that social anxiety, cultural anxiety, and feeling that America is no longer the leader of the world that it once was. That is leading us into a very uncertain future and a very uncertain electoral landscape in 2024. Anyway, on that note, I’m going to pause. I’d be delighted to take questions. And thank you for listening to me for so long.
- [Wendy] Lauren, are you going to help Sarah?
Q&A and Comments:
[Lauren] Sure. Sarah, the first comment we have is from Lucy who says, “Hello.” Valerie says that you look like Dorothy.
Oh, I wish.
[Lauren] She also says that so many Jews supported the civil rights movement, but one of his close associates, Jesse, somebody, referred to the Hymies in New York.
Jesse Jackson, yeah. I have been very upset by some of the tropes in the African-American community towards Jewish people. In fact, my horror, when I arrived in New York in 2001, I went to hear the Reverend Al Sharpton speak. And again, one of these very inspirational speakers, like Jesse Jackson, but very radical. But what really shocked me, I’m afraid to say, is that on emerging from his talk, there was a book drop outside in Harlem just on the streets. And that’s the first time I’ve ever seen “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” on sale openly on the streets of Harlem like that anywhere. I’d never seen it on sale before. So that suggested to me there was something wrong. And then later talking to Black people, they have some very prejudiced views. I think they felt like they were… Often, it came from, I mean I’m on very delicate ground here, but they’d start to talk about how landlords in Harlem, they always felt in debt to them and there’s some sort of very old animosities there. But there’s also undoubtedly the legacy of things like the Nation of Islam, which actually has moved very much closer to conventional Islam and its own hostility. And some of the hostility of the Jews that we see in the Muslim world. They’ve also adopted. And there are many, many people who would not agree with that at all and would argue that… African Americans have always recognised that part played by Jews in the civil rights movement. But we do know that there are dividers and there are people who like dividing and ruling, and definitely there’s animosity between elements of these communities. I wish that I could say otherwise, but it’s a fact.
[Lauren] Betty says that Donald Trump had Kyle Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago and posed with him with a thumbs-up pose playing to his alt-right base.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s unfortunate the way that Kyle Rittenhouse has been used as a symbol of the gun rights movement. And certainly, Donald Trump is always the kind of person that’s willing to pour petrol on any flame. So to me, Kyle Rittenhouse, I can certainly go along with the verdict that he was not guilty. It looks like strictly speaking in law, he was not guilty, that he did have a genuine fear that his gun was going to be taken off him and that he might be shot with it. But the fact of the matter is, the only people who died that night, after a long night of rioting in Kenosha were the people that Kyle Rittenhouse killed and one wounded. And if he hadn’t gone there age 17 with an assault rifle, that nobody should be allowed to carry on the streets open like that, in my view. He would’ve not faced trial, and his victims would be alive today. So to me, it seems to me pretty obvious, that the right thing for Kyle Rittenhouse to do at the moment is to be grateful that he was found not guilty and to have a period of reflection and silence on the fact that he killed two people and wounded a third, not to go around being celebrated by Donald Trump. And I think that just adds to the whole electrifying divisiveness of the situation. I mean, some congressmen have been wildly irresponsible, competing with each other in their rush to hire him as an intern, et cetera, to prove how gung ho they are in gun rights. I think it’s really, really unfortunate. I can feel sympathetic to the young man who’s still only 18, but I feel very, very hostile to the people who are lionising him. I think that’s grossly irresponsible.
Q: - [Lauren] James is asking, “Is there not a risk that unlimited immigration and the growth of the woke and cancel culture would provoke a right-wing backlash?”
A: - Oh, not just a danger, it’s happening. For sure. I don’t think anyone can let in 2 million immigrants, as has happened already in a year under Joe Biden. And people not feel anxious about that. Especially as they’re not coming through legal channels, what’s happening is they’re crossing that river, they’re coming here, they are being registered. I mean, in the battle days, not very long ago, they would have to cross the river and then they’d have to go through the desert. That’s a very harsh, punishing thing. And I don’t particularly wish it on anybody, but at one stage, back in the spring, Joe Biden was talking about immigration being a seasonal spike. they’d relieved the pressure from Trump’s lockdown in the… which was COVID-inspired in the main. And then having lifted those gates, he said, “Oh, it’s going to seasonally adjust.” Well, it hasn’t gone down because it used to adjust because nobody would dare cross in June, July, August because they’d have to face the desert. Now, they’re literally being received on the other end by border police officials, being transported to a reception place, given a bed for the night, and being sent on their way with a date to return at some stage in the future to claim the asylum process. Well, the people that I spoke to hadn’t even heard of asylum and was like, “No, they were coming to join their brother in the construction work business or something in New York,” or, “They were travelling to California,” or whatever. They would have relatives that would take them in and they’d try and get jobs on the black market.
The chances of them turning up in an immigration court and risk being sent back because they’re not genuine asylum seekers sort of results in my view. Perhaps some will, but seems more in hope than anything else. We saw… I’ve kind of felt it was moving and rather wonderful when Angela Merkel welcomed a million migrants from Syria and elsewhere a few years ago. And then we saw the backlash in Britain with Brexit and many other things. So I don’t think you can let that number of people in without a proper system and not cause a backlash. And I think one of the problems for Biden that’s really denting his popularity and in the sense that he’s competent, is that so many things appear to have happened to him haphazardly. He talked about withdrawing from Afghanistan, but didn’t appear to have a plan for it. He talked about having more humane immigration system, but didn’t seem to have a plan for it and seemed bemused when people in the developing world heard that message and thought, “Great, let’s come.” And as I say, I’d have done the same. If I was living in Honduras or something, I’d think, “Oh, well, now is our optimum chance of getting in. Let’s go, folks. Gather your kids, let’s do it.” So I don’t blame the migrants themselves, I blame… You have to work out a system, whether it’s a visa system, whether it’s a work visa, guest system as applies in Mexico. There are all kinds of things that you can do. What you can’t do is just say, “Well, we’ll take down your names,” and what people are really calling catch and release programmes.
Q: - [Lauren] Harriet asks, she says, “Irregular immigrants increasingly are using the US as a waste station, continuing on to enter Canada as irregular immigrants through Quebec and Manitoba. Is the US becoming the Belarus of North America?”
A: - Oh, what an interesting idea. I didn’t actually know about that. Certainly, Canada, I was in Canada recently. I went to British Columbia because I was reporting on that terribly tragic story of the Indian residential schools. And one thing I was very struck by is how depopulated Canada is. Quite expensive, it felt more European. But really, after Vancouver, presumably after Toronto, and Montreal, and all that, it kind of falls away pretty fast. And it does get very cold, but there is a lot of land and space and there are also opportunities for work and all the rest. So if what you’re saying is true, I’m not that surprised because I think Canada has a much more welcoming approach to immigrants. But, of course, they have their own issues as well and backlash, too. So we’ll have to… We’ll have to see about that, but you’re intriguing me. I’m going to look into that more. I did not know about that.
Q: - [Lauren] Janet wants to know, “On the trends in mobility chart, did that refer only to children of immigrants or to Americans in general?”
A: - Americans in general. So this could be… Yeah, it’s definitely not children of immigrants, and, of course, hard as it is for immigrant parents, I’ve no doubt that those crossing the Rio Grande, that their children will be better off than them. But it’s just whether those children of the children will be better off or not is a very much open question. They wouldn’t be paying the people smugglers thousands of dollars. They pay about $10,000 to come across. These are not the poorest of the poor families making the moves. They are living in hope that through all their suffering, their children will do well, and this is a story I’ve seen time and again in America. I remember speaking to a nanny when my kids were young from… She’d come from India and she was working as a nanny, but was pretty qualified person, highly educated, but her daughter was going to college now, and was going to have a great education, and was studying to be a doctor. So that family was on the move. These things, these stories, still work for the children of immigrants, but it’s the people who are here, it’s tough to get ahead. And the income stagnation is real.
Q: - [Lauren] Marlena wants to know, “Is the current southern migration to the US not the same as the current flotillas of migrants being shipped from the EU to Britain? People fleeing slavery, poverty, and despotism, and the impact of COVID can impact life around the world. Strange times?”
A: - The world is on the move. But I mean, if there’s one thing that the history of America shows is that the world has always been on the move, from the Founding Fathers and, well, from the Mayflower, even Elizabethan time. Yeah, there’s the lure of the new. I sometimes feel it myself, actually, as someone who’s moved around a lot. I think there’s something in my family history or something that makes me want to cross water sometimes and go and just try a new life somewhere. But I’ve been fortunate enough, 'cause I’m a dual citizen of America and Great Britain, to be able to come and go as I please. So this is a luxury that few people have. It’s all thanks to my grandmother and her move age seven from Zilina. But, I realise I’m in that very lucky small percentage, but that aspiration to make a better life for yourself is huge. And I talked about people in America can see social divisions. People all over the world have cell phones with connections to the internet that it used to be, well, you were poor but your neighbour was poor and you figured out a life for yourselves, and you didn’t feel hard done by. Now, when you can see that the opportunities that appear glittering and limitless all over the world. I mean, no wonder people are struggling to make those moves, whether it’s across the channel, across the Rio Grande, or wherever. But, of course, borders exist for a reason and no country wants to feel that its borders are disrespected. And that’s why I feel it’s so important that they are clear systems and that they are properly implemented. But I honestly feel that this is only going to get worse, that there are so many push factors and pull factors to migration. And that basic human desire, it’s an optimistic desire, it’s one of hope. It’s that desire to better yourself. That’s not going to go away and we’re going to have to figure out how to live with it.
Q: - [Lauren] Harriet wants to know, “For the Democrats, are the extreme progressive wing of the party the problem or the solution?”
- Depends which side of the argument you’re on. I tend to see them as a bit of a problem myself. I mean, I think the way that they’re behaving in Congress is if they had a majority… When Congress was 50-50 tied between Democrats and Republicans, the Senate is, and they seem to interpret the election result as a massive thumbs up for radical change when it was far from that. I mean, firstly, Joe Biden was not expected to win the Democratic nomination. In fact, he won the Democratic nomination precisely because it looked like it was going to be going towards Bernie Sanders in terms… Because the Grassroots Party members are always more radical than the general voter. And at that point, loads of people flooded in and decided to get involved in the Democratic primary process precisely to keep the progressives out. Then we can see that the progressives… So the Democrats underperformed in the general election of last year. So Joe Biden performed better against Trump than Democrat lawmakers performed against Republicans. And that’s how you ended up with the tied Senate. So that also tells me that people, that moderates and independents didn’t particularly like Donald Trump and therefore voted for Joe Biden, who they thought was a sensible moderate.
But did not want to entrust Democrats with too much power because they distrusted its progressive wing. And I haven’t even started on the debate about wokeism and… All the cultural wars arguments that the progressives are… all the mistakes that the progressives are making over that. Funnily enough, it’s even… In fact my son, who’s now studying in California, he was a student at the American School in London, which was a wonderful school. It’s literally just ousted its head teacher because she came in in my son’s final year, so only about four years ago, because she kind of overreacted to… I mean, it was important, I think, and good to really act to the Black Lives Matter protest and make sure that people were educated about their own unconscious biases and racism. I think that’s all to the good. But it appears that the way she went about it was so over the top that there’s finally been a parental revolt, and this is the gentlest of schools and she’s out. So I’ve heard other parents here in America, parents I respect and who are Democrats through and through, complain about cultural red guards in schools and things like that. This is a genuine issue. And the more the Democrats try to pretend it isn’t, the more they look foolish.
[Lauren] Just so you know, we have about five more minutes. I’m not sure how much longer you want to take questions for, but I’m happy to stay on and we can take a few more or let me know how you’re feeling.
Well, I can carry on. I mean, it partly depends on the audience. I mean, if you would like another, definitely another five minutes. And if you’d like another 10 minutes, I’m happy.
[Lauren] Great, we’ll keep going then.
I can keep answering questions all day, but I do have some other commitments.
Q: - [Lauren] Sure, we’ll go for another 10 minutes, then. Marlena wants to know, “Did you research antifa and the violent tactics of the left and increasing homelessness cities?”
A: - Yeah, I did not attend… When I arrived at the end of that hot summer of protest, so when most of the Black Lives Matter protests were going on, I was still in the UK, I was still deputy editor of The Sunday Times, and I came over in at the end of August 2020 just as things were beginning to simmer down. So I haven’t attended any of those sort of antifa events, nor have I been to my… My brother lives in Seattle, which has been the scene of a lot of them. And Portland seems to be in a sort of permanent sense of, permanent state of rioting every weekend for any excuse because the antifa presence is so strong. Look, antifa exists. It’s not an organised force. It’s like a sort of anarchist that turn up looking for trouble and causing trouble. I definitely think that they’ve given a wonderful excuse for far right white supremacist groups to mobilise. I find the white supremacists scarier, if I’m honest, because I think that the antifa groups are nasty and lawless and should be arrested, locked up. We definitely don’t believe in defunding the police. I thought Tony Blair’s comment that that was the most unpopular statement and sort of vote losing proposition since the slogan, the dictatorship of the proletariat, I thought that was brilliant and absolute opposite. But honestly, when you see people marching in places like Charlottesville with tiki torches looking like fascists from the 1930s and talking about, “The Jews shall not replace us,” this bizarre replacement theory that they have, that Jews are encouraging mass migration to replace the white population of America, et cetera. I find that more organised and scarier and they’re heavily armed.
Q: - [Lauren] Monty Golden says, “Is America still the home of the braves? Maybe now it’s the home of the nave. Einat Wilf, quoting Igal Ram, called it the Disneyland of Hate.”
A: - Oh. I’m afraid having… I was present at 9/11. I was actually… I was there as the Twin Towers fell. In fact, as a matter of fact, I was about to make a radio programme on Ellis Island and for Radio 4 with the programme eventually got made six months later. And I was going to go on, look up my grandmother’s records for the first time. That’s how I even knew about Granny, about Josephine and Fanny’s records in Ellis Island, et cetera, this was 2001. And the date we’d set for recording this programme for Radio 4 just happened to be September the 11th, 2001. And that was… So I was in Battery Park about to take a ferry to the Ellis Island, the Immigration Centre, which has now got a wonderful museum. And when the towers were struck. So I was right there far too close to the action. And honestly, the New York firemen are called New York’s Bravest, police are called New York’s Finest. New York’s Bravest, they were so brave. There was no worries about their own health and safety and all the things that seemed to have affected our own fire services, and emergency services to do with terrorist incidents. I used to write about that when I was at Sunday Times. As deputy editor, I had a column looking at what was happening at that Manchester Arena and where the emergency services held back. Just terrible. Having seen that fantastic response of New York’s Bravest to 9/11. I think America is the home of the brave, not the home of the nave, that America has core qualities and core strengths that I truly believe in. But it does have a very polarised history, as well as a polarised present, and it does scare me sometimes.
Sarah, I’m going to jump in right there just to say that I actually… I was in Washington, 9/11, and I had a similar experience to you and saw the best and the bravest of America. And what’s going on now is absolutely shocking.
Yeah, it’s heartbreaking really, isn’t it, when you know how noble Americans can be?
Absolutely. And I, too, do believe in the American dream, and America is certainly the land of opportunity. So I really, you can see why immigrants are wanting… have set their sights on the USA and a better future for their children. And then just one last thing before I thank you for this wonderful presentation to say that I bought some doors from Dorothy.
No.
Some doors. Some really cool gold doors, Lichtenstein doors. It was super, super cool. So when you come to New York-
Oh, I’d love to see them. That would be
Yeah, very, very exciting. So wonderful, what an interesting family you come from.
Well, she’s the most interesting member, obviously. We’re just your classic family and we’re all over the place. But yeah, she’s a wonderful person, Dorothy.
Oh, good. Well, I look forward to meeting her.
And all her fortune. Well, I think we can get that together. She loves anyone who loves all that Roy stuff. And the studio there is still operating in Washington Street in the village. And upstairs, she has an apartment store with some of the wonderful furniture that he made. And there’s so much to his art beyond the-
Exactly.
[Sarah] Paintings. Yeah.
Exactly.
Where you got these doors. I think I’ve seen them.
They’re so great. Well, you know what? I have to tell the funniest story. I was leaving Sotheby’s once. It was miserable, it was raining, and I managed to get a cab. So I jumped in the cabin and then there were three other people that were standing in the range. So I opened it when I said, “Do you want to share the cab with me? I’m going uptown.” So they looked at me as if I was completely bonkers. I said, “Get in, it’s raining. You can have a ride up with me.” So anyway, they were very suspicious, but finally they got in. We’re coming from Sotheby’s. And then someone said to me, “Oh, where do you come from?” No, I thought of speaking with them and they said, “Oh, they’re from the…” One was from the Lichtenstein Foundation and there were two others. One was a gallerist and the other was, I would guess, a visitor. And they said, oh, they asked me, “Where’d you come from?” I said, “South Africa.” So the gallerist said, “Do you know Wendy Fisher?”
Wonderful. Funnily enough, I know her intimately, yes.
Actually, yes, I do. and so it all came… It all went just full circle around the doors.
Wonderful.
So yeah, I brought the doors from him.
We’ll come to New York and we’ll-
We’ll continue the discussion. So what a wonderful family, and thank you for sharing your history with us, your family’s history and the possibility. And I’d love to take you up on an offer to discuss workers and just to develop the theme that we started today, which we briefly touched on. And that ultra-right is super terrifying.
Super terrifying. Totally. Yes.
[Wendy] Lawless.
And anybody who believes in America finds it really hard to stomach that there’s been this outgrowth for the far right.
They’ve been-
[Sarah] It feels unAmerican. It feels so unAmerican to me.
It’s the far right, very clear what they stand for. The far left are sort of, “But for everything. But for nothing.”
Yeah. Yeah.
But it’s very, very scary. And let’s hope that we find middle of the ground. I don’t think it’s about hope. I think it’s about the people demanding it, quite frankly.
[Sarah] Hmm. So it’s up to the citizens.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, so on that note, I just want to say thank you very, very much for joining us tonight. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I look forward to us catching up when I’m back in New York.
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been fun to participate in Lockdown University.
Yeah, thanks a million. Take care. Goodnight to all our participants. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, Lauren. Bye-bye!