“This Country Kicks My Ass All the Time”

Cory Booker on the politics of fear, the politics of hope, and how to split the difference.

Cory Booker, the senior senator from New Jersey, told me about a woman he met on an airplane. He said he was a U.S. senator; she asked him which party he belonged to, and he told her he’s a Democrat.

And she looked at me angrily, crossed her arms and said, “Well, I should have brought my Trump hat,” and swiveled away from me. And I said, “Ma’am, Donald Trump signed two of the biggest bills I’ve ever written into law.” By the time we landed, we were talking and laughing and sharing stories, and I was affirming to her the truth that we all in this nation have so much in common.

For a good while now, we’ve been living in a time of violent political attacks and outright assassinations. Talking politics with a stranger on a plane isn’t the norm anymore (if it ever was), but Cory Booker seems to believe what he says about how much we have in common. I say “seems” because it can be hard to tell how real someone’s enthusiasm is. Booker’s enthusiasm certainly feels real, and it is definitely abundant. In Washington, he is widely thought of as a bridge-builder. On the other hand, he recently gave the longest speech in the history of the U.S. Senate, 25 straight hours, to warn about the “grave and urgent” danger posed by the second Trump administration.

The speech got Booker an enormous amount of attention — and this is someone who already draws plenty of attention in Washington. But what was that 25-hour speech, exactly? A heartfelt defense of the defenseless? A call to action for everyone who believes that U.S. democracy is in trouble? The unofficial launch of Cory Booker’s own presidential campaign? Yes, yes, and probably yes.

Booker likes to cite a famous speech that Franklin Roosevelt gave in 1941, less than a year before the U.S. entered World War II. It has come to be known as the “Four Freedoms” speech. Roosevelt said that people everywhere deserve freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Cory Booker is one of the most prominent voices saying that a lot of Americans right now — a lot of different kinds of Americans — do not feel free from fear. But he believes that might open up some room for a different kind of politics:

Because of Donald Trump and his darkness and his crassness and his cruelty, I think he is making a way for people that are yearning for a politics that reminds us that we belong to each other, that reminds us that we’re one nation, that we actually do better, we get richer, we are — as he would say — greater when we come together, not when we cut each other down.

I asked Booker if this eternally hopeful mindset comes naturally to him.

No, God, this country kicks my ass all the time. If you are not broken by the state of America right now, I question your humanity. Hope is — it’s not a nice Pollyannish feeling. Hope is rugged, hope is wounded, hope has to be resurrected time and time again. Hope is a determination to say that no matter how bad it is, despair is not going to have the last word.

On this week's Freakonomics Radio: Cory Booker talks about the politics of fear, the politics of hope, and how to split the difference. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “This Country Kicks My Ass All the Time,” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

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