Anand Giridharadas

What is the story?

Because everybody sees the story once it's in history.

Once it's in your eighth grade history textbook, you're like, man, those were some suckers believing that narrative.

It's real easy to look at 150 years ago and be like, man, people were real idiots back then.

They just believed whatever the elites wanted them to believe.

The more interesting question is, what are you believing right now that your great-grandchildren will be like, can't believe my ancestors believed that?

And I began the project that became Winners Take All with that question of like, what is that for now?

Because as you say,

starting in the early 80s, there was this...

Reagan policy regime, tax cuts, spending cuts, cut what government does, help people less, trust people to pursue the American dream on their own devices, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, whether or not you have shoes or even feet.

Let's see what happens.

So what started to happen was the obvious, predictable thing.

People were suffering, people were hurt, people were not getting the help they need, people were not able, in fact, to pull themselves up when they didn't have the right education, didn't have the right healthcare, and so on and so forth.

And in that environment, as government pulled back, as inequality started to yawn wider and wider and wider, it became important to do what elites have always done, which is continue to articulate a story.

But

This particular elite in our era needed to invent a story suited to our time.

If they had said, you know, well, we're rich because we're white, like that might have worked in 1850.

People don't love that narrative today.

If they had said, you know, we're rich because my grandfather inherited this land, as you might have said in Downton Abbey kind of world, people don't really like that story anymore.

So the story sometimes has to evolve.