David Greenberg On John Lewis And Civil Rights

David is a historian, a journalist, and an old friend. He was managing editor and acting editor of The New Republic, a history columnist in the early days of Slate, and a contributing editor to Politico Magazine. He’s currently a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers. The author of many books, including Republic of Spin and Nixon’s Shadow, his new one is John Lewis: A Life.

For two clips of our convo — on Lewis defending MLK from a sucker-punch by a white thug, and Lewis getting into an ugly political race against a friend — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: David and me in the old TNR days; Rick Hertzberg; Freud’s theories on homosexuality; conversion therapy and Bill Kristol’s conference on it; how David’s new book isn’t a hagiography; Lewis’ poor upbringing in rural Alabama; his boyhood obsession with books and religion; preaching to chickens; inspired by a radio sermon by MLK; experiencing Jim Crow up-close; respectability politics; the CRA of 1964; Lewis as head of SNCC; getting to know JFK, RFK, and LBJ at a young age; non-violence as a core value; the voting rights campaign in Selma; the violent clash with cops at the bridge; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Black Power movement; BLM and George Floyd; Lewis’ wife giving him the confidence to run for office; Marion Barry; Julian Bond and his cocaine habit; colorism; how Lewis was “shockingly early” to support gay rights; his bond with Bayard Rustin; staying vigilant on voting rights in the 1990s; their evolving nature in the 21st Century; his campaign for the African-American History Museum; skepticism toward the Congressional Black Caucus; the flawed documentary Good Trouble; AOC and Ayanna Pressley; Lewis the Big Tent Democrat; switching his ‘08 support from Hillary to Barack; his viral moments of dancing and crowd-surfing; and keeping his integrity over a long career in politics.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, Brianna Wu on trans lives and politics, Mary Matalin on anything but politics, Nick Denton, Adam Kirsch on his book On Settler Colonialism, and John Gray on the state of liberal democracy. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On our latest episode, with Reihan Salam, a listener writes:

Wonderful conversation. The musical themes I hear beneath your words, gents, is what American cultural philosopher Albert Murray called “Omni-American.” Our nation’s motto sums it up beautifully: E Pluribus Unum — “Out of Many, One.” The “many” are the bountiful tributaries of peoples who comprise our pluralistic mosaic and melting pot. The “one” is the superordinate American-ness to which we aspire — grounded in what Ralph Ellison called our sacred founding documents.

Another melody line I hear in your conversation is what philosophers Anthony Appiah and Danielle Allen called “rooted cosmopolitanism.” Omni-Americans have the capacity to be grounded in particular identities — ethnic, religious, political — while also being citizens of the world, as it were, embracing the universal through the particular, as well as the global and local. Thanks for playing the chords that need to be heard in these times of confusion and deep polarization.

Always happy to bring Albert Murray into the convo. Another fan writes, “I enjoyed your conversation with Reihan Salam, and I can see why you liked him as a young blogger.” On another recent episode, with Musa al-Gharbi, a listener writes:

I’d taken a holiday from listening to your podcast because I simply couldn’t bring myself to listen to guests like Michelle Goldberg. I’d never heard of Musa al-Gharbi, so I figured I’d listen to him — and I’m glad I did. He was particularly good on the fallacy of assuming that simply by putting minority people in power, you are going to get a more compassionate order. I was struck by his arguing that you might wind up with the opposite.

Also, he was good on minority voting preferences. Why minorities are supposed to vote for other minority people when they don’t agree with them is a bit of a mystery. Yet that is precisely what the Obamas were banging on about. That worked out well!

Musa also acknowledged something I’ve noticed: that a really large percentage of Black leaders and spokespeople are multi-racial or children of immigrants. They are not descended exclusively from the American ex-slave class. That’s interesting.

Lastly, you bought into something that you should have realized was not true. Musa comes from a military family and his twin was killed in Afghanistan. At one point you chimed in something along the lines of, “Well that proves you’re not some kind of anti-American Islamist.” But his background and family history are not proof of anything. His brother’s death could have had a radicalizing effect on him. Military experience at times turns certain vets into anti-institutional radicals. It happened with Vietnam. Thankfully it didn’t happen to him, but background is no guarantee.

Fair. I was referring rather to ways in which others could try to dismiss his arguments. Another listener has a question “prompted by the terrific episode with Musa al-Gharbi”:

You said at one point that you wished you could be an atheist, but you don’t know how not to believe. I feel the opposite; I’m an atheist who wishes I could believe. So I’m curious: what made you say that? (I believe you have the better end of the bargain!)

That’s a very long answer. I’m going to try and explore it in the book I’m working on. I can’t begin to summarize it here.

From an old subscriber who just returned:

I tried to take a bit of a break from politics towards the end of this election season. But I just listened to your episode with Anderson Cooper, so I’m back. That was a beautiful, difficult conversation. Thank you.

Another who appreciated the episode:

I just wanted to send a thank you for sharing the heart-wrenching story about your grief at losing so many friends in the early 1990s. I am currently going through a difficult time with my mother, who has been showing signs of dementia for the past couple of years, and has just recently taken a turn for the (way) worse.

The Mary and Martha story — and your interpretation of to be an affirmation of the commandment to love one another, and more specifically, to be together — has really helped me to transition into this new phase of life. I was grieving the loss of all that my mother was to our family — lamenting all of the family gatherings that would likely never happen again. But your story was a reminder to me that my mom is still here, beneath the cobwebs of delirium, and she still shines through with lucidity from time to time — and the time we have together is a gift that was always meant to be temporary.

You and Anderson have positively changed my life this week. Thank you.

Can’t ask for more than that. Here’s a large portion of our convo on the AIDS days:

Another listener wrote from 35,000 feet:

I listened to your conversation with Anderson at the beginning of a long airplane flight. I listened to it straight through, except for one moment early on when my seat neighbor tapped me to ask if I was alright because I kept making little pathetic gulping noises, and my shirt was getting damp from tears. I mumbled something, and she handed me a Kleenex. Kind soul.

I don’t know how to write to you about this without getting maudlin and ponderous. You made me remember my years as a med student and resident in San Francisco starting in 1992. I feel sheepish at still feeling so wrecked about AIDS before protease inhibitors, because I didn’t suffer anything in my personal life near what you and so many others did. But it fucking wrecks me.

All of the medical stuff was awful, of course. And we had such agonizingly crude treatments. But what my brain reels from — what I still haven’t processed — is the emotions. It feels like a cliche to write this, but so many of the young gay guys I met had escaped from their families and hometowns to live in an exciting place where there was an actual community for them … and now they were dying.

Their parents would visit — or a sister and mom but not the dad, or whatever — and it had been a couple of years since they’d spoken because things were horribly strained and everyone was still mad and hurt … but now there was this horrible beast of death looming over everything. A couple of times I got to witness reconciliations — what fucking miracles those were — but most of these families didn’t have the grace or the tools to get to that. And sometimes the lover — or a couple of supportive friends who had actually been there during the hard times — would be staying at the bedside, and the charge of resentment that passed back and forth between them and the family was palpable.

A couple of the parents still visit my mind at night, one in particular. We had a young mentally ill guy who behaved like a total asshole all the time. He’d clearly been an extremely difficult son, and the mom had had enough and wouldn’t visit. He had no local support network. But the dad drove an RV out from Idaho and lived in it for weeks in the hospital parking lot helping oversee the care of his son. When I spoke to him the morning after his son died, he just looked tired. I’d expected sadness, or relief, or probably both. But instead he was just a shell.

I wrote to you a few months ago asking if you were playing the role in public discourse that you want to be playing. Well, this talk with Anderson Cooper was a wonderful example of what I’d hoped for. I mean, yes, please continue pissing me off on a weekly basis about political crap and culture-war chum, because it’s good for me. But please also keep touching on things that matter in a deeper sense.

My plane’s about to land. Thanks for making this flight pass so quickly.

P.S. I remember picking up copies of what must have been Diseased Pariah News! Wow, blast from the past.

Many of us who went through the plague have buried feelings for years. I guess I do believe that, over all, getting the grief out there, expressing it in words, either in speech or writing, helps. It’s how I cope with things. I put them into words and they scare me less.

Another listener can relate to that episode from a much different vantage point:

I was also oddly comforted by the universality of the grief experience. In particular, listening to you and Anderson talk about walking down the aisles of a grocery store in America and feeling like you’re in some kind of fantasy-land: this is EXACTLY what I felt the morning after my twins and I arrived in America, leaving my husband behind in Israel, a week-and-a-half after October 7.

The babies and I were sick, completely jet-lagged, and I was on my own and unsure when or even whether I would ever see my husband again. At 7 in the morning in Utah, walking down the cookies and crackers aisle, I really felt like I had been shaken upside down off planet Earth and landed on another alien world. It felt like there was a hazy, impassable wall between me and everything and everyone I looked at.

I couldn’t talk about it because it felt like any words I used not only didn’t capture the scope of the horror and grief, but my words actually betrayed the awfulness by how poorly I described it. I try to talk about it more now, but still only with people I trust. (I learned my lesson once, after I spoke about it with someone I went to college with, who then publicly announced to his thousands and thousands of followers that I was an infant killer and and genocidal maniac.)

So thank you. That was a terrific episode to listen to — not because it was pleasant, but because it felt good to be seen and understood by someone whose experiences, while so very different, were in other ways so very similar.

Here’s a guest rec for the pod:

I’m just now listening to your conversation with Walter Kirn, where you talk about coastal condescension. It made me think you could invite Jim and Deb Fallows on to discuss their excellent book, Our Towns. It’s part travel memoir and part argument that, despite the craziness in federal government, local communities all across the US (in red states and blue) are contending with a lot of the same problems and are generating solutions in inspiring ways — both relative to their context but also showing a surprising amount of continuity across settings.

There is a deep pragmatism in these localized approaches that betrays the performativity of what we see in federal governing right now. While Jim and Deb tend towards the left in their own politics, I could see someone like Patrick Deneen finding a lot of wisdom in them looking to local communities to resolve problems in ways that are contextually responsive, rooted in local values and customs, etc. It could be an interesting bookend for your conversation with Deneen, where I know you were struggling with the immediate political relevance of his thinking.

On the big SCOTUS news of the week, an attorney writes:

I confess: When you start writing about trans issues, I tend to zone out. You’ve aired many reader dissents that are similar to my thoughts. I won’t rehash. But earlier today, because I’m a complete nerd with lots of time on my hands right now, I listened to the oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti that challenged Tennessee’s SB1. All I could think about was, “Man, I hope Andrew writes about this on Friday.”

The United States presented what I thought was the correct legal position and a sensible middle ground that I would think you’d appreciate. In essence, the US argues that SB1, on its face, discriminates on the basis of sex: a natal boy takes testosterone to conform to their biological sex (e.g., testosterone to balance a hormone deficiency)? Legal. But a natal girl takes testosterone to conform to their gender contrary to their biological sex (e.g., testosterone to produce secondary sexual characteristics)? Illegal. By its very terms, SB1 treats one gender different than another. (If you think that this sounds similar to the Bostock reasoning, you’re not wrong.)

From there, the United States didn’t argue that SB1 was therefore unconstitutional and bigoted and transphobic. It just argued that the courts should apply “intermediate scrutiny” when considering such laws. (I won’t bore you with the differing legal standards for Equal Protection challenges, though I bet you know them. If you or readers are interested, read the Wikipedia pages for strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational basis review.)

By way of the solicitor general, the United States (1) specifically acknowledged that there are biological differences between sexes, (2) admitted that sex-segregated sports and locker rooms are different cases that have stronger arguments in favor than SB1, (3) conceded that states have a lot of legitimate grounds to regulate in this space, (4) stated that there were those who detransitioned after childhood treatment, and (5) even pointed to another Red State minor-trans-care regime that she said is probably constitutional. West Virginia has a system that requires the sign-off of two physicians, one with a mental health specialty, among other procedures to hinder your (probably imagined) scenario of a kid waltzing into a Planned Parenthood and skipping out with puberty blockers. The United States wasn’t even arguing that SB1 itself had to be struck down, but rather needed to be subjected to more scrutiny — scrutiny that it might well pass.

All in all, it was pure Sully bait. (No reference to loss of orgasm, though. Alas, I was really looking forward to that word making it into the record.)

Aside from wanting to hear your thoughts on this in a future column, I also would like you to keep that measured, methodical, and individualized position of the United States in mind next time you think that mainstream Dems have gone ‘round the gender bend. The official position of the Biden administration via its solicitor general is that there can be legitimate, reasonable restrictions on minor trans care to be sure that it is appropriate and necessary; that there can be commonsense consensus on handling sex and gender in school sports and other settings; and that there are indeed inescapable differences between sexes. When the rubber meets the road and the Biden Justice Department had to stake out a position on these issues, their position was a hell of a lot closer to yours than it is to the imagined position you’ve been ascribing to them for the past several years.

I address this today in the column. My own view is that the model for a human being — a sexless one — that’s required to argue for sex discrimination is a false one, which is why no discrimination is taking place. A boy’s body and a girl’s body are fundamentally different when it comes to the impact of testosterone, and so what might be appropriate for one is not appropriate for the other: a simple, empirical biological point. It has nothing to do with equal protection and everything to do with biology.

I notice that you start your argument by saying that the issue is that the US “discriminates on the basis of sex” but finish it by saying “SB1 treats one gender different than another.” This linguistic confusion has done so much damage. Gender is not the same as sex. Where biological factors are concerned, sex matters, not gender.

Next up, a reader writes, “I couldn’t disagree more with your assessment of Nancy Mace”: