Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Hari Kunzru
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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This most recent American presidential election was the first in which Hari Kunzru voted as a citizen, but not the first he witnessed in person. That, he remembers, was the first win for former President Barack Obama. “I went up to Harlem that night and witnessed this extraordinary outpouring of joy that was way over and above anything to do with the specific candidate,” he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “There was a sense of a long chapter of American history closing. Little did we know that the backlash would be so severe and that its orange avatar would be currently the president-elect.”
Kunzru, a British novelist whose work straddles the Atlantic and themes of globalization, capitalism, identity and race, has spent the intervening years observing and writing on U.S. politics.
“The kind of insecure marginal lives that are lived around the edges of America clearly give the lie to the notion of a universally shared American dream of white picket fence prosperity.”
While much is made of Donald Trump’s iconoclastic approach to American politics, Kunzru notes that his recent Cabinet picks have made it hard to predict elements of his political agenda. Concerning Marco Rubio’s recent pick as Trump’s secretary of state, Kunzru says, “Rubio’s foreign policy positions are much more in line with the traditional Republican neocon positions. One of the promises of the incoming Trump administration was the more nationalist ‘America First’ positions. They’ve positioned themselves as an alternative to the kind of neoliberalism that they felt has entangled the U.S. in various foreign wars.”
Equally, what were once fringe elements of the right-wing movement have become mainstreamed under Trump. “You’d point to figures like [JD] Vance and Stephen Miller, the new deputy chief of staff, as absolutely creatures of an online right which was once known as the alt-right, but there is now nothing alternative about it. It represents quite a major current in American politics,” continues Kunzru.
The fringe of American society was a theme Kunzru wanted to explore with his latest novel, “Blue Ruin,” he tells Al Yafai. “The kind of insecure marginal lives that are lived around the edges of America clearly give the lie to the notion of a universally shared American dream of white-picket-fence prosperity.”
Kamala Harris’ failure to win back the White House comes down in no small part to Democrats’ failure to understand changing priorities for minority voters, says Kunzru. “Perhaps the cohort of black voters who were considered by the Democratic Party to always be part of their coalition because they had such a direct memory of what America was like before the Civil Rights Act, they’ve now aged out and younger black people don’t feel so automatically that they have to look only to the Democratic Party for political possibilities.”
The Democrats’ problems did not stem solely from their failure to persuade black voters, Kunzru thinks. “There’s a lot of social conservatism in immigrant communities as well,” he continues. “That played a part in them choosing Trump over Harris.”
In a new introduction to Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism,” Kunzru has considered how to situate the Palestinian intellectual both in the contemporary moment and his own. “His attempt to have any kind of conversation about Palestine, about Zionism, about the history with the region post-1948, was met with unbelievable derision and opposition,” says Kunzru. “He seems a very unlikely person to be a bogeyman, this urbane New Yorker in his tailored suits listening to Beethoven. And so we see how far the conversation has come.”