Being American with Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick reacts to an eventful weekend in politics, including the foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the confirmation hearings of SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett and the failure to pass an economic relief package. Then at 8:40, he interviews Adair Ford Boroughs, a South Carolina native running to unseat Republican Joe “You Lie!” Wilson in Congress, about her perspective on what it means to be American. Adair was raised in a double-wide trailer in a rural town, went on to graduate from Stanford Law and serve in both the Bush and Obama Administrations as a DOJ lawyer. Her experience has given her an unusual perspective on the American Dream, and how best to extend it to communities that don’t usually vote for Democrats.

Anand Giridharadas is the author of, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” Other books are “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,” about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him and “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” about returning to the India his parents left.

Anand is also an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.” He has also written for The Times’s arts, business, and travel pages, and its Book Review, Sunday Review, and magazine—and for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Deval Patrick is leading a national conversation this year, built around a simple question: What does it mean to be American in 2020?