By Andrea Cleghorn
When the Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden returned to Bedford to deliver the annual Spirit of Democracy talk at First Parish on Bedford Common, she brought a wealth of insight into political divisiveness in the time of President Donald Trump.
Tanden, 48, has degrees from UCLA and Yale Law School, has served as policy advisor for the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton, worked for the (Bill Clinton-Gore campaign, and before that for former governor Mike Dukakis. The Center for American Progress [CAP] is a Washington-based policy think tank for which Tanden is the Chief Executive Officer.
And even before UCLA, she attended Davis, Page, and Bedford High schools. So her visit gave her an opportunity to share CAP’s policy research in her talk titled “Resist, Rebuild, Reclaim,” but also to come home again to the place that made her what she calls “the woman I am today.”
Tanden’s parents were Indian immigrants but Neera was born in Bedford. “It is really moving to be back here. The last time I was here in this particular location was when I was getting married,” she said. She’d been in Washington for a number of years. “Both Ben [Edwards, her husband] and I understood that I would not have made it to UCLA, where I met my husband, or Yale or the White House if it weren’t for this community. That is why I am so honored to be back.”
She talked about a long-running debate in our society about what matters more, the community or the individual. She said when she looks back at her childhood she realizes her mother faced plenty of challenges. Her father left the family when Neera was 5 and her brother was several years older. He was gone for a couple of years and Neera’s mother did the best she could. But she had no work experience.
“We didn’t really know what to do. My mother had to sell the house, we moved, we were lucky to stay in Bedford Village — how could we move into Bedford Village? Because my mother was able to get Section 8 housing, a voucher to live in housing here.”
She credits her mother with being a “tough cookie,” both then and now. But she did not do it alone, she would be the first to say, she did it with the community, with the people, friends, and neighbors who did not know her very well and still came out to help the family of three. Still, she was able to go from the brink of disaster, poverty, a whole series of challenges because of the actions of people who would never know them. Tanden credits the political leaders, the faceless bureaucrats, who she said decided to create programs and ideas that would ensure and work toward the day when every child has the chance she did.
Bedford is a community that invested in good schools, giving her a good public education. Still, the family had trouble affording necessities, so they went on welfare. Tanden remembers vividly waiting through the endless welfare lines with her mother to get food stamps. She didn’t know what was happening at first, but it became clearer.
Tanden went to Davis and then Page School and was the only child who was using a 10-cent voucher for lunch. “I went home to my mom and said, ‘I’m the only one using the funny money.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, we’re having a tough time.’ But it’s really interesting that no one in those schools ever made fun of me for being the one using a voucher.”
After a couple of years the system worked, Tanden’s mother was able to rely on the social safety net and then get a job as a travel agent. Eventually, she got a job at Raytheon and after several years, Tanden said, “we bought a house.” Her mother lived in that house until five years ago and now she lives in Washington.
“My story is what I work for every day, which is to ensure that every kid in the country who faces troubles like that has something, so they are not left behind.”
In the intervening decades since the 1970s, she said there has been a battle of who this country is, attacks on the government, people saying that government is doing too much for people, not too little. Tanden is used to this fight, used to going on TV and arguing to say why funding matters, why we need to cover people and why we have a moral obligation that everyone has health care in our country.
“I have to say this last year has been incredible. We are not even having policy debates, with all the twitter fights, the battles, and the attacks. Who is America, who are Americans, who is America for, whether it is for everyone or just groups that look a certain way, whether it’s going to be open to people or open to people who are different, or closed?
“The future for us is, warfare pitted against each other. Or whether we can return to a community of seeing each other as neighbors and friends. I think this is the most consequential moment of my life, the most consequential moment for the American people in decades. I truly believe the battles we’re having and the fights we are having are as important as the civil rights struggles of the 60s.”
“It’s not that there is terrible news just once a week but there is terrible news five times before 8 a.m. and it’s because the president is tweeting. It is hard to feel always in battle and not become essentially a general in a war. Groups are being attacked, people are being attacked and that is going to hurt the country for the long haul. Don’t get me wrong, we have to win, we have to take political power back to protect the people we all care about.
“When Donald Trump got elected I have to say our national security team came in and we looked at what happens in other countries when right-wing leaders take power.”
Usually, the opposition goes away, she noted, it becomes tired, beleaguered and weak, then the demagogues rise in power, and attack the institution, judiciary, and free press. She pointed out a classic example is [prime minister] Orban in Hungary who is stronger today, after several more years in power than when he took power.
“But what I’m most optimistic about is that in the United States that is not what is happening. That is not happening here. There are people marching. I’ve been in Washington 20 years and there is political marching of such a size and energy than in my entire time combined, three marches with millions of people across this country,” she commented.
Tanden was asked what individuals can do if they want change to happen.
“Start by talking to people whose views differ from yours,” she said. “It is a first step. We all live in bubbles, talk to people who don’t agree with you,” that is the advice of Tanden, to those of us in America who are looking for a way to ameliorate the political divide that seems at times to be insurmountable.
What else? Call your Congressman. “It can be lonely and it’s annoying, but it works, and there are people who do it every single day.”
Another suggestion was to “buy less stuff,” and donate to the campaign of a similar-minded candidate.
At CAP over the past year, the emphasis has been to channel the energy of resistance into the policy battles on health care and taxes.
“I can say with 100 percent confidence that 20 million people would not have health care today if it was not for the resistance actions of people throughout this country. More people made phone calls to protect the ACA and against the Republican health care bill in a one-month period than in the entire last two years of 2015 and 2016.” People mobilized in town halls, not necessarily people who were going to lose their health care but people who had health care but didn’t want their neighbors to lose it. Millions of people organized and called members of Congress.
“I’m so heartened that the resistance is fueled by women. Eighty-four percent of the new activists are women, a lot of them are mothers. They are fueling every single march, they are the backbone of political organizing, policy organizing, of protest movements and if these people stay in politics not just now — not just 2018 and 2020, but in the future — they can reshape this country around beliefs we all thought we had before the deeply psychologically wounding election of 2016.
Tanden was at UCLA in the early 1990s, the time when the state was gearing up for the 1994 governor’s election. The campaign shocked her. The Republican incumbent made immigration the major issue (with commercials of immigrants running over the border) and there was a ballot question that would require students to report undocumented students to their communities. Before that wave, Latinos in California were voting 50-50 Democrats/Republicans.
Tanden recounted the sad result for her that that candidate did win re-election in 1994, the same way Trump won in 2016. “But from that moment, people formed coalitions they never had, other people realized they weren’t engaged in politics the way they should. They saw that their home state of California they knew was at stake.”
This could be a similar moment, but Tanden cautions it will take all of us of us engaged in policy and in politics; this is almost like a virus, a battlefield where people are pitted against each other.
“I see it among my progressive brothers and sisters all the time. They feel attacked and they attack back harder and it is hard not to. But as we move past these battles we have to recognize we have common cause with everybody in this country and it is exactly what the demagogues of hate want, for us to be permanently divided against people who are different from us. That would make America, not America.
“I am optimistic that we won’t get back just what we lost but see this moment of pain for the country, to bring a new level of activism and engagement to change the country to live up to the ideals that permeate this town, this church, and actually the founding of this country — to be there for everyone and create true equality and true dignity for every single person.”
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