The New Yorker Radio Hour

The filmmaker Ava DuVernay has a reputation for tackling challenging material about America’s troubled past. She depicted the bloody fight to achieve equal voting rights for African Americans in her 2014 film “Selma”; examined the prison-industrial complex in her 2016 Peabody Award-winning documentary “13th”; and portrayed the wrongful conviction of five teen-age boys of color in the miniseries “When They See Us.” But “Origin,” her first narrative feature film in five years, may be her most ambitious work to date. “This breaks every screenwriting rule, every rule of filmmaking that I know,” DuVernay tells David Remnick. “Origin” is an adaptation of the journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s best-seller “Caste,” a complex analysis of racism and social structures. “Caste” lacks a cinematic narrative structure, and so “Origin” positions Wilkerson as its subject as she navigates the intellectual journey of the book. DuVernay felt compelled to make this movie now, in part because she thought that its message would be vital for audiences in a Presidential election year when the understanding of America’s past is very much at issue. “We have to wake up and focus—focus on what is happening,” DuVernay says. “And I want this film to contribute to that conversation.”

American voters have elected a President with broadly, overtly authoritarian aims. It’s hardly the first time that the democratic process has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who both teach at Harvard, assert that we shouldn’t be shocked by the Presidential result. “It's not up to voters to defend a democracy,” Levitsky says. “That’s asking far, far too much of voters, to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstract principles or procedures.” He adds, “With the exception of a handful of cases, voters never, ever—in any society, in any culture—prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to élites and institutions to protect democracy—not voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” during Donald Trump’s first Administration, but they argue that what’s ailing our democracy runs much deeper—and it didn’t start with Trump. “We’re the only advanced, old, rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we’ve experienced.... So we need to kind of step back and say, ‘What has gone wrong here?’ If we don’t ask those kinds of hard questions, we’re going to continue to be in this roiling crisis,” Ziblatt says.

In 2018, at the midpoint of the Trump Presidency, the journalist and historian Jon Meacham wrote a book called “The Soul of America,” warning of the gravity of Trump’s threat to democracy. This was hardly a unique point of view, but Meacham’s particular way of putting things, steeped in a critical reverence for American history, hit home with one reader in particular: Joe Biden. In the years since, Meacham became an informal adviser to Biden, helping him recently with the State of the Union address. Meacham, who has written biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George H. W. Bush, John Lewis, and, now, Abraham Lincoln, reflects on the vulnerability of American democracy in the current moment, with an overt autocrat as the leading Republican contender for the next Presidential election. “Having a dictatorial figure is not new either in human experience or American history. What is new is that so many people are willing to suspend their better judgment to support him,” he says. “I am flummoxed to some extent at the durability of partisan feeling.” Plus, the music critic Kelefa Sanneh on a fleet of artists bringing fresh sounds to what has become the least cool genre: mainstream rock. He shares tracks by HARDY, Giovannie & the Hired Guns, AVOID, and Jelly Roll.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of a former Attorney General and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has announced that he’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He is nearly seventy years old, and has never held public office. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and then Senate second,or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,” he tells David Remnick. With no prominent elected Democrat challenging President Biden, Kennedy is polling around ten to twenty per cent among Democratic primary voters—enough to cause at least some alarm for Biden. He is best known as an influential purveyor of disinformation: that vaccines cause autism; that SSRIs and common anxiety medication might be causing the increase in school shootings; that “toxic chemicals” in the water supply might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. He wrote a book accusing Anthony Fauci of helping to “orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” He seems not at all concerned that Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones—all of whom would like to see Biden bruised in a primary challenge—have praised him. “I'm trying to unite the country,” he says to Remnick. “You keep wanting to focus on why don't I hate this guy more? Why don't I hate on this person more?” Kennedy, who regularly attends recovery meetings for addiction to drugs including heroin, says that “the recovery program is an important part of my life, is an important part of keeping me mentally and physically and spiritually fit. . . . And my program tells me not to do that. I’m not supposed to be doing that.”

“I wanted to do a French movie, and I had this idea of wanting to do a New Yorker movie,” Wes Anderson explains. “Somehow, I also wanted to do one of those omnibus-type things where it was a collection of short stories.” The result is the new film “The French Dispatch.” Anderson describes his interest in The New Yorker as “almost fetishistic.” Each of the movie’s four story lines was inspired by a work from the magazine or by one of its writers, though Anderson has played freely with biography. Jeffrey Wright, for example, plays Roebuck Wright, an amalgam of James Baldwin, a Black American expatriate in provincial France, and A. J. Liebling, a beloved writer on food and much else from The New Yorker’s early years. “Even in exile,” the actor says, his character “realizes that he’s only at home within himself, that there is no home for him. And maybe there is no home for anyone, really, other than within one’s own body and one’s own soul.” Anderson and Wright join David Remnick to discuss “The French Dispatch” and the classic New Yorker essays that inspired it.