MT: A theme that runs through your book is how you found partisan labels confining…
Dennis Kucinich: I did.
MT: I ask because in recent years, there have been multiple profiles of you that have taken the angle, “Dennis Kucinich was proven right.” The Washington Post says you were the “future of American politics,” we just didn’t know it at the time. The question I’m getting at: is there something predictive in this book, too, that people don’t realize yet about that lack of partisan distinction? Because it feels like the country is moving in this direction of being less interested in labels.
Dennis Kucinich: When I stood on that presidential platform, when you covered me in the campaign, most people weren’t aware of where I’d been, because I didn’t wear it on my sleeve. But I knew I had to tell the story.
When I was campaigning nationally, I detected something that was different than I was reading about in terms of the public. I detected an underlying unity. Now, that’s not where the attention is today. Because the polarization’s been so extreme and pile-driven into the bedrock of American politics, that we come to believe that you’re either left or right or liberal or conservative. But I still think that there are a lot of Americans who see their country in a more gentle way, in a way that they connect to the heart of the country, that they feel the country in a different way. It’s a sense of sadness about where America is at the moment, and it’s turmoil that we’re in.
But I don’t think that really reflects who we are as a nation. I think there’s another America waiting to be evoked, and part of it is an America that is not partisan, that is not saying that the fount of all truth, love, and mercy rests in one political party or the other.
When you move away from this inelegant Punch and Judy show called the national political scene, with Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other, hey, it becomes this incestuous, internal game that is largely irrelevant to the concerns of people.
In this book, I write where the Democratic party was pushing for the sale of the light system, that the Democratic party was criticizing me for going after the banks, for challenging the banks. I was made to appear to be un-American for raising questions about the right of banks to redline communities. And I don’t forget for a minute that it was the Democratic party that chopped up the 10th District, which I had the privilege of serving for 16 years.
MT: No monopoly on gerrymandering, apparently.
Dennis Kucinich: Look, my feeling is that there’s a point at which partisan politics becomes its own game apart from the reality that most people have to live with, and that causes people to just tune out. And so, do I think that a new form is emerging? Yeah, I think so. It is, but where it’s going to go when it appears, I don’t know. But I do know that there is another America out there that is not always heard from, and that could end up becoming decisive at some point in the future.
