Leah Hunt-Hendrix
Leah Hunt-Hendrix frames solidarity as a movement that can shift culture, reshape politics, and empower marginalized communities. She is a political theorist and activist, and the co-author of "Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea."
Transcripción
Leah Hunt Hendrix
At the heart of politics, the heart of like any of these topics is the question of power. And who has it? How is it created? Who gets to use it? And towards what ends? And we live in a world where a lot of people don't have a lot of power. And solidarity is the way they can.
Ted Roosevelt V
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Federal Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today, my guest is Leah Hunt Hendrix. She's the co-author of Solidarity, the past, present, and future of a world-changing idea. You know, all of us know the ideas that are used to knit our country together. Ideas like equality, freedom, patriotism. Leah's book introduces a new one, Solidarity. And what it does is it links individual well-being to the health of the community at large. Leah also happens to be the granddaughter of the late HL Hunt. An oil tycoon who once I didn't realize this was the richest man in America. And she's taken that legacy and flipped it. She's channeled her own resources into tackling climate change and wealth inequality. Naturally, we found ourselves connecting on the tensions and responsibilities that come with a famous family name. And I really enjoyed this conversation and hope it resonates with you too.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
Definitely like family influence moved me in certain directions. It's like when you carry a name that bears some weight, people have certain expectations. And I don't know, did that influence? Were you vented up?
Ted Roosevelt V
Yes. And I think it's impossible for not to, particularly if your name is the exact same as the family legacy. And I did notice you have managed to not always sort of enter the room with your grandfather kind of tailing you necessarily. That's a little bit more of a challenge for me. The common responses I think people are surprised to learn that I am related. They're like, oh, your parents must have been big fans of Theodore Roosevelt. But the dynamic changes very quickly when they realize that you are. And that's something that's sort of been tough to navigate. Because you want to come in as not that person. Because you have the more human interactions as a result of that.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
Yeah, and you want to be yourself and differentiate it and not necessarily carry the baggage of someone who you may or may not have even known.
Ted Roosevelt V
Sí.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
I never met my grandfather. For me, it was my mom is the legacy that I was really following. And I vented up following her more than I could have expected. And she was a rebel against her dad. So for people who don't know her dad, a tail hunt, he was an oil man, Texas Tycoon. But he was also a very anti-communist and had a radio program that he required his kids to listen to at the dinner table every night. And it was all about fighting the communists and fighting for liberty. And he would rewrite the words to songs, like, take me out for the ballgame. But it would become about fighting communists. And it was also a very patriarchal man. And my mom moved to New York, joined the women's movement, Gotten O'Goury, a Steinem. They came part of creating the New York Women's Foundation and the Miz Foundation. And just like, threw into the women's movement, fighting for equal rights. So growing up in New York, I left for college and graduate school. But when I came back, it was interesting how much people were like your Helen Hunts daughter. And I did have to kind of figure out what to do with that. Fortunately, I really admire her. And she was a great role model to have. So I feel really lucky in that way.
Ted Roosevelt V
Do you feel like you're following much more in her footsteps than anyone else's?
Leah Hunt Hendrix
Well, I'm also very close to my aunt, my mom's sister, Swani Hunt, who went a slightly more political route than my mom. She got involved in Colorado politics. She was living out there and then ended up becoming an ambassador to Austria under Bill Clinton. In many ways, we're kind of a pair in the family. And my mom is the peacemaker personality type. And likes to bring everyone together and build bridges. And Swani is a bit more the firebrand. And I think I went a little bit more in the firebrand direction. But I also, I hope I'm also a bridge builder. I do try to do that.
Ted Roosevelt V
So at a certain point, it sounds like during your college years, you start to grapple with kind of experience of coming from a very wealthy background and recognizing the weight of that privilege, but not being satisfied with philanthropy alone as sort of a tool to give back. One is that the right framing and two is that the right time frame or whether you start wrestling with that issue.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
Well, I start wrestling with inequality at a really young age. Sometimes there's class differentiations within a family. People might assume just because you're related to a billionaire, that you're a billionaire, but it's not always that way. And so I actually grew up feeling kind of poor. We grew up in Manhattan and I was just surrounded by so much wealth.
Ted Roosevelt V
Sí.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
But then we moved to New Mexico and I realized, oh my gosh, we are very rich. And then we moved back to New York and I realized, oh, I'm actually much happier in a place that's not all about money and status and material wealth, not to romanticize like the much more kind of impoverish situation in New Mexico. But there was more community. There was more nature, I thought to say I was already kind of like attuned to class and its impact on both wealthy people and just all parts of the spectrum from young age. And so then I think I spent college trying to figure out what to do about economic inequality and did begin to feel like philanthropy, at least traditionally has not played a significant role in addressing inequality. Like there's more and more philanthropy in the United States, but also more and more inequality. Like it's and it doesn't seem like most people in philanthropy are trying to solve that problem. And so I became critical of philanthropy. My mom was a full-time philanthropist, focused on women's issues and she did have a class analysis. She always had grantees on the board of her foundation and made sure that I was always volunteering. I mean, I volunteered at Rikers Island when I was in high school. But a lot of the women's space was sometimes disconnected from specific solutions to economic inequality, which just became my like almost obsession. Like I just really wanted to figure out how do you how do you reverse this trend of fewer and fewer people having more and more of the pie.
Ted Roosevelt V
And so you're working on this issue of inequality and you discover this word solidarity. Not that it's not a word in the lexicon, but you discovered the word has maybe power and meaning beyond what the rest of us are thinking about. How do you find the word solidarity and then what is it about it that sort of lit you up and said, oh, this might be kind of a keystone concept that we're missing.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
Yeah. At Princeton, I was in a program called Religion Ethics and Politics. It was interdisciplinary and I would take a lot of classes in the political theory department where you know we think about questions like what is freedom, like what is equality. And I just like went to the library and was like, what about solidarity? Like is that a topic, a concept that has gotten this kind of attention and there were just like a handful of books where there's like shelves on Liberty and Justice. And so I realized it's just a concept that has been neglected and I found a lot on it in French. Actually, when I started doing like digging around in France, there was a whole solidarist movement and solidarity was a is still I think a hugely popular concept around the world. But here, freedom and liberty are some of the more, you know, focal concepts that we that drive American thought. So I just decided to dig into it, figure out its history, like what it actually means because it's a bit of a slippery concept.
Ted Roosevelt V
One thing that just comes to mind very quickly is just like how powerful these concept, you sort of just the description you describe like it's solid areas of concept that is very informative in French society where liberty and freedom are very informative in American society. And how much influence those concepts end up having on the social structures and the political structures in a country, even though they're amorphous, they're very hard to pin down. They mean, you know, it's your point. They're literally volumes written on these topics. So they mean different things to different people. And yet once they get codified into a society into the culture, they become hugely powerful. My question then is what is solidarity?
Leah Hunt Hendrix
I found people to be using it historically as a way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the community. The well being and flourishing of an individual is connected to the flourishing of a community rather than those being an opposition, which is a different kind of framework and a whole different political theory follows from which of those roads you take. If you see the individual and community as potentially aligned or as in conflict. And I think from the most part, we've seen them as in conflict. But so the history of solidarity is around seeing them as very interrelated. People would also use the term to talk about our interrelationship in the sense of like the head is in solidarity with the arm and the leg and the stomach. Like we're all we're actually all part of the same body. These are organic metaphors that were used a lot in the history of the writing that I read about a concept. I think that leads to a kind of definition of interdependence that solidarity is about the fact that like individuals are not just atomistic units, but are interdependent, but are different. So there's diversity. It's not sameness, but there's a diversity that can function together.
Ted Roosevelt V
So I guess when I think of solidarity, there's one version of it that sort of is of a group, an outgroup or an in group and their solidarity of the outgroup fighting the in group or the in group having solidarity fighting the outgroup. And the body is one way of framing it, but how does solidarity necessarily become sort of all inclusive?
Leah Hunt Hendrix
The way that my co-author and I began to think about this as we kind of struggled with it while we were writing the book is that solidarity is a neutral term like it can be good or bad. It's not always a good thing. There can be negative forms of solidarity that become really reactionary and exclusive. So we call that reactionary solidarity and we see patriarchy, white supremacy, different things like this are examples. But we talk about transformative solidarity as a kind of solidarity that like strife towards a common good that is more inclusive. You still have to recognize that there are people and systems and reasons why we don't live in a world where everyone is just like doing great. Like we have enough resources wherever one in the world could be living a good life and we don't distribute them in a way that would be most beneficial. We should explore what are the reasons that resources get hoarded and transformative solidarity sort of is driven by that question. Like how do we transform the systems that keep us apart? It's different from reactionary solidarity and that it doesn't like essentialize like oh it's that group of people that's keeping us apart or it's that person that's responsible for all of this. It has like a vision of a future where more people would be better off.
Ted Roosevelt V
It reminds me I was also I was a politics major at Princeton full disclosure here and the book that sort of blew my mind open at one point was John Rawls theory of justice and his central thesis is imagine a world where we are spirits outside of the world and we do not know who we are going to be in a society and then design society and that sort of the the framing for which you would design a just in fair society. When you don't know who you are in advance would have read about your work on solidarities. It strikes me as potentially a bit of a response to that which is like okay we don't live in that world and how do we then get closer to living in that world and solidarities maybe the bridge concept that helps create that. Does that resonate with you?
Leah Hunt Hendrix
That definitely resonates I sort of loved that like Rawlsian thought experiment I think you know one of them and critiques it is that it is such an abstraction and it's and it doesn't really recognize all the power and balances that already exist and who's getting to decide the rules at the heart of politics at the heart of like any of these topics is the question of power and who has it how is it created who gets to use it. And towards what ends and we live in a world where a lot of people don't have a lot of power and solidarities the way they can solidarities like the key word for how the world gets changed by groups of people who who might start with not that much power but end up being able to make big changes.
Ted Roosevelt V
My kids go to a progressive school in New York City and they've been really working hard on how to address issues like power dynamics racial dynamics in this country in incorporating it into the curriculum and it's obviously extremely complicated but. It was on the margins I did see instances where it certainly felt like they pushed certain groups down in order to lift other groups up and I don't necessarily blame them for that but it had some negative consequences and I think. Kind of work counter current to what they were trying to do and I wonder if solidarity the idea of solidarity helps address some of those power dynamic challenges.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
I would hope so I think that that is one of the big lessons of the past decade of social movements was an emphasis on difference without the kind of like pulling back together like who can we be together. Sometimes you need a period of like kind of rectification of past harms and like we do have to sit with that but I think it did lead to a really strong backlash and so. I think there's a lot there to learn from and figure out like we're do men sit in the and we're do white men sit and white people in general what role do they have in a and creating kind of a shared future like obviously it's a question I've always grappled with as someone coming from this wealthy family and being a part of progressive social movements like what role do I have. I think we're just in a time of a lot of transition and I hope that the baby doesn't get thrown out with the bath water and that we do recognize there's so much ongoing racism and classism and sexism in our society and I I don't think that we should back away from. Technology that we do have to figure out how to talk about it and ways that don't feel like an attack and to be clear I think it's totally fine and necessary part of the process particularly like people that have come from power and privilege to be uncomfortable for a period of time and just sort of have to sit in that discomfort it's not to say that it has to be a wonderful experience for everybody throughout but I'm mindful of the last election and the sort of like massive increases across like all.
Ted Roosevelt V
Ethnic backgrounds that voted for the current president and that felt like a response.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
I do think it was a response I just also want to think about what are the other like structural things that led to that being the response because in 2020 it was the height of the movement for both of us not are that movement started also as a response to the Trump administration and then Biden was elected at the height of that movement. So there wasn't an immediate backlash and there were tens of millions of people involved so there was clearly an openness to having that conversation but I also would want to think about the role of the media propelling really inflammatory misinformation and just riling people up. So who's to say what this would have looked like if we had lived in a world with more media sources you know there weren't just like a few people controlling a lot of the information ecosystem.
Ted Roosevelt V
We struggle a lot on this podcast with the role of social media and the role of media and maybe even the role of money and traditional media in terms of being able to sell advertising dollars there's no question that sort of outrage. Is the thing that gets engagement like I can see how this alienation is happening in this country right now and I think to your point of like you know the Biden was response to Trump Trump was response to Obama like there's a pendulum swing it's not going to perfectly find itself at the center right place you know it's going to have to swing around a little bit until we find a new center and I'm okay with that.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
I've kind of come back to to class as like my focus like I wonder how if all of this would have gone differently if we had had a strong labor movement and strong institutions where working class people had had more voice something I and just thinking about all the time right now is in the 1950s we had the least economic inequality and we had the strongest labor movements that we've had in American history. But America has always had a lot weaker labor movements than other countries but now we have we're down to 10% union density there's projections that it's going to get down to like 5% in this administration because of. Trump's attacks on on unions but I still believe that you know they call it a tripartite system of like corporate power government and labor as three pillars that are necessary and industrialized nation to maintain a democracy so the question I'm thinking a lot about these days is is it possible to rebuild a labor movement what would that take and how would that impact a lot of these conversations.
Ted Roosevelt V
So is a little background for you about me is I spent a lot of time working on climate change issues and I started working with the kind of in the grass roots trying to build the social movement around climate change. And so I think that's a lot of the way I think we're going to be able to change and find it to be extremely difficult because of all the kind of counter pressures that do exactly what we're talking about kind of divide and conquer and misinformation and social media and all these things make it. Make it really difficult and then my thought process will you got to go to the government the government's going to be there's a time has freedman quote that if you care about the climate don't don't change your light bulb change your politician and I spent some time working with the league of conservation voters and I I became kind of equally frustrated with that and believe that the. And so I think that the government at least in probably state governments as well are going to be a lagging indicator of change they're not going to lead change on their own and it led me to the corporate world into the capital markets because I think they're extremely powerful in our country in particular in terms of where you're going to need to see change. It said I don't believe that you make systematic change by asking corporations to do the right thing and it may be taking it out of context but I'm curious I guess about what role you think corporations play in driving change systematic change in our society like the systematic change you're talking about.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
So I'm not like anti corporate like I think corporations make stuff that we need and employ people and like play an important role in society but I but I think that they are like legally the legal structure of a corporation is to deliver profits for their shareholders and so they can actually be sued if they don't do that so. I'm interested in some of the efforts to change that but for the most part I think corporations are like have to be driven by that motive so this is not like my area of expertise but I am interested in how do you change incentives I think that does kind of get back to policy how have you found the role of corporations in your work.
Ted Roosevelt V
Well I have focused on greed as a motivator for corporations so it's not ignoring the fact that corporations are going to do what's in their best fiscal interest as it relates to climate change. I believe the capital markets are not effectively pricing it in right now and that there are some corporations that are thinking about long term capital deployment and thinking about business risk as it relates to climate change in more sophisticated ways. Those are better managed long term companies and that if investors start incorporating that into their analysis that it will drive corporate behavior in a way that is create systematic change you've talked about this idea of not a redistribution of wealth but a prediscribution of wealth can you expound on that.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
That's the idea that we should think not just about taxation as a way to to redistribute wealth and just like where we let the economy kind of function as it is and the few people get really wealthy and then they get highly taxed and that's you know then distributed to people through social programs but actually that we have more corporate regulation so that we don't end up with monopolies and we don't end up with six people having. You know 50% of wealth or whatever it is that to do that we have to like we do have to think about intervening in the concentration of wealth that happens in our current economy. Companies shouldn't be able to just buy up their competitors which companies like Facebook do all the time but like all kinds of companies do all the time like that's kind of the business model right now.
Ted Roosevelt V
I'm wondering what role capitalism plays in all this because on the one hand I think defenders of capitalism will say listen it's been the most powerful tool to lifting people out of poverty that that we have on this planet on the other hand there are bounds to capitalism as you just describe monopolies are problematic for capitalism there public goods that get abused by certain companies corporations where the cost is born by society. But the benefits are accrued to that company. How do you think about the capitalistic structure and its benefits and shortcomings.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
That is a big question. I think that capitalism also can be kind of an unhelpful word and the same as sort of left and right it can be capitalism versus socialism is also a little bit too dimensional like there are a lot of people who are not interested in capitalism. There are all kinds of mixed economies and markets can play an important role but not in everything like it seems to me that markets don't deliver the best healthcare not in terms of outcomes for everyone or for education or for childcare that there are just things that people need that are not like profit centers and so we should figure out what those are and protect those and make sure that people have access to those things and then we should. Let markets do their thing where they can create competition and lead to innovation and drive growth and I'm sort of looking for that sort of next economy movement that I think is interesting sort of trying to figure out what's we're still sort of using terms that they were created in the 17 and 1800s and what's the next way we should think about structuring the economy especially in the age of AI and you know. Things might look really different and I think it's an important time for creativity.
Ted Roosevelt V
You at the beginning describe your mother as a philanthropist you have that I mean it's sort of a hat that you were it's not the only hat that you were where are you focusing those efforts at this point and how are you focusing those efforts that are maybe different than kind of traditional philanthropy.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
Two of the things I'm really excited about right now are on the federal union this network which is a network of federal workers who are trying to fight back against the doge cuts and articulate what public services should look like and what the public sector the federal sector should look like and there's a similar. Labor for higher ed is doing that on campuses trying to bring together professors and students and capture workers and janitors bringing more people into campus based unions and fighting for funding for higher ed and funding for research and fighting against the cuts so both of these are trying to build unions that might look different than they did in the 20th century. But I think we just I think we need to rebuild the labor movement we can't rely on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector because the nonprofit sector like the way we talked about the corporate sector has to deliver profits the nonprofit sector is always dependent on on philanthropy like so on wealthy donors and we need a sector that's not doesn't have that kind of dependency and it's really driven and owned by by working people. We have to defend the idea that there has to be like government should be about the common good it should be the institution that is run by the people and for the people and it's not a business it's not a for profit business it provides public services and so what are those what should they look like that's something that this federal worker effort is trying to do trying to tell those stories and articulate the importance of government in our lives. There's been a decades long attack on the idea of government because it can it is one of the only powers that can constrain corporations so I think that's that's part of the fight that we're in right now.
Ted Roosevelt V
The final question that we have is we ask everybody on the podcast is what makes a good citizen.
Leah Hunt Hendrix
The value I was raised with was think about the responsibilities in leaving the world just a little bit better than the way you found it you can do that in your neighborhood or with your family or at any scale or any sector industry but just trying to have a positive impact on the people around you.
Ted Roosevelt V
Thank you so much for joining us today I really appreciate the conversation so thank you very very much thank you I had a great time it was really nice to be here. Thank you Leah I mean these kind of discussions are the ones that I could have for hours and I really respect the work that you're doing to help lift up labor movements it's clearly meaningful work and it really emphasizes the power of an idea like solidarity. Listeners please check out Leah's book co-written by Astartaler Solidarity the past president future of a world changing idea. Good citizen is produced by the Federal Roosevelt presidential library in collaboration with the future of storytelling and charts and leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
