- [Announcer] This program was funded by the following, Laura and John Beckworth, BP America, Joe Latimer and Joni Hartgraves, and also by (no audio) and by.

(no audio) A complete list of funders, is available at aptonline.org and live from lbj.org.

- We all have to work for democr You can call it a fight.

You can call it a struggle, but it requires care.

And so that's what I've realized that I am a continuation of this 125 years of history in trying to leave this place better than I found it.

(majestic music) (inquisitive music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidentia Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's ri and the pressing issues of our t Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Our guest is Ali Velshi, journalist, MSNBC anchor, and author of "Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance "and the Fight for Democracy".

I talked to him about his family's background as immigrant to North America, his perspectiv on how our changing economy has affected our politics and the state of American democr Ali Velshi, welcome.

- Thank you, it's great to be he - So your latest book is titled "Small Acts of Courage: "A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy" which chronicles your family's m throughout the world, ultimately to Canada.

- Right.

- And you coming to America.

But I wanna start with something that really surprised me, and that is that your great grandfather and your grandfather knew Mohandas and then Mahatma G - Right.

- In South Africa.

How did that come about?

- Well, my family's from Gujarat which is where Gandhi's from.

They didn't know each other.

They weren't even from the same sort of economic statio Gandhi was, his family was prosp They sent him to England to be e My family were merchants.

And in the 1800s, India experienced a lot of droughts.

So that was when the Indian diaspora began.

People started leaving to make m It was under colonialism.

It had gone from 22% of global GDP to about 2% by the time the British left in 1948.

So it couldn't withstand these d So the people started looking at migration patterns.

My family got to South Africa, and my grandfather, my great-grandfather, lived in P That's where my family had settl Gandhi had settled in Johannesbu He had gone to South Africa to fight a legal battle and had stayed to fight the racial injustice that would subsequently become a What they shared in common, my great-grandfather and Gandhi, as Gujarati speaking people in South Africa who needed an accountant, they shared an accountant.

There was a Gujarati speaking accountant who said, I think you two should get to know each other.

And what would happen is when Gandhi would protest, eventually he'd be called in to talk to the government in Pretoria, which today is about a 45 minute drive, but back then you'd have to go by horse and cart.

So he would stay with my great-grandfather.

He'd do his business in the day and at night they'd be sitting and talking like we would be.

So in 1907, he says to my great-grandfather, "Indians here are weak.

"They don't have what it takes to fight the injustices.

"So I'm gonna start an ashram, a commune in which I am going "to toughen them up," basically to go to jail for the 'cause Gandhi's view is, you can't want something to change if you're not prepared to give something up.

So he opened this commune called Tolstoy Farm in Johannesburg and there was no running water.

There was no meat, there were no You got two blankets, one you sl one you had on top of you.

The point was to go, to be able to go to prison when you protested, because they would arrest you and they would offer you a fine or 30 days in jail.

And Gandhi's acolytes would take 30 days in jail.

So he says to my great-grandfather, I want your s to come to my ashram.

My great-grandfather was not pol They were business people like many Indians in the diaspora.

So his first take, I'm sure I don't have a record of the conversation, was, we're not interested in this kind of stuff.

But he didn't know how to say this to Gandhi.

So he said, "We are Muslims.

"You're a Hindu.

"I can't send my 7-year-old son to your Hindu ashram."

To which Gandhi said, "I'll learn your religion "to teach it to him."

So now my great-grandfather was out of arguments and his 7-year-old son, my grandfather went to be the youngest student at Gandhi's school in South Africa and it sort of, it was a turning point for my family who had been business people who were trying to do, you know, better for them and future generations into people who started fighting for justice and freedom and liberty and equality and ultimately democracy.

- And your grandfather literally rode on Gandhi's shoulders.

- Yes 'cause he was the smallest There were 70 people in that ash and he was the youngest, he was 7 years old.

But Gandhi didn't allow anybody to use any kind of public transp It was all, everything in Gandhi was some sort of a protest.

So there was a train that was ri to get into Johannesburg, which is about 20 miles away.

But they couldn't do it.

They had to walk.

And my 7-year-old grandfather was too, you know, he would get tired.

So Gandhi would put him on his s and walk him into town to do their shopping or whatever.

They get the provisions they nee - A remarkable bit of family lor - Yeah.

- Tell us about your family.

How did your family shape you, A - Well, you know, it's clearer t and as a result of writing the b But what I didn't understand is I knew my family's history.

I knew that they were adventurer They were people who had left India for a better life.

And then ultimately because of the experience with Gandhi, they were freedom fighters in South Africa.

And they had sought out a better life in which they could enjoy democracy in Kenya.

They were there when the British flag came down and the independent Kenyan flag They voted in the first elections in Kenya, but then there was an anti-Asian that had spread through Africa at the time.

So they were just constantly in struggle of a home.

And they finally made it to Cana I got there when I was, I was one and a half years old.

So I fully grew up in Canada, never experiencing overt racism or never thinking that there was something I couldn't achieve by virtue of the color of my skin or my ethnicity.

But everybody else in my family They had all, they were all double immigrants.

They were born, my father and my mother and my sister were born in South Africa and had immigrated to Kenya.

My great, my maternal, my paternal grandmother who was still alive, was born in and immigrated to South Africa, then to Kenya, then to Canada.

So I was the standout.

I was just an immigrant to Canad and I didn't grow up, I grew up with privilege, let's call it privilege.

It was the idea that as long as I worked hard, I'd probably achieve what I needed to achieve.

So I didn't think of their fight as my fight.

I didn't think of a fight for de being important to me.

I was a citizen.

I had the right to vote.

And I figured there are very few obligations to being a citizen, but it was all gonna work out for me.

And only in recent years have I realized that we all have to work for democracy.

You can call it a fight, you can call it a struggle, but it requires care and nurturi It's not a cactus, it might be a but you can't even leave a cactus in the closet and hope it'll flourish.

And so that's what I've realized that I am a continuation of this 125 years of history in trying to leave this place better than I found it.

- So growing up in Canada, what was your view of America and your view of the world?

- Well, my view of America was, as a kid, was formed by TV because in, we're in the Buffalo for American channels.

Toronto is a place that was built with brick houses.

Buffalo has got wood houses.

So the news every night led with a five alarm fire, which made me think America was There were also a lot of murders in Buffalo and Canada didn't have guns, generally speaking, certainly not handguns.

Things have changed now because it's a porous border.

So there are shootings and murde in Toronto in greater numbers.

But back then, I thought of Amer as this remarkably violent place that was on fire all the time, but had really good ice cream 'cause there were ads for Carvel which we didn't have in Canada.

Canada was a place that right around when we arrived, the man who became the Prime Min who had been the Justice Minister before, Pierre Trudeau, and the Prime Minister at the time, Lester Pearson, had done the math and realized that there's a negative replacement rate in C so they needed immigration, but most immigrants, particularly English speaking immigrants were going to the United States, or the United Kingdom.

Canada was at best a distant thi And so how were they gonna goose immigration?

And what they found is that peop who come from other countries, non-English speaking countries, are most alarmed by the idea that if they move to a place that's English speaking, they'll lose their language and hence their culture.

So Trudeau implemented a policy of multiculturalism, which was very complicated and multifaceted.

But fundamentally, at its heart, it's said that if you, if there are 25 people in your public school who all have a different, a native language in common, the government will pay for afterschool language lessons for them, which was very relieving to a lot of Italians and Portuguese and various immigrants who would say, "All right, we can go to Canada "and we're not gonna lose our cu Ultimately what it did is it was training wheels for immigration.

What you ended up with was immigrants who wanted to be as Canadian as they could be.

They could learn their language, but they didn't want to keep sep and you got a Canada that saw these immigrants as saving them from economic rui because without immigration, Canada would've just shrunk as all Western democracies will, because we don't have enough children in these places.

So Canada has always been substantially more welcoming to immigrants than the moment that we've been going through for the last 15 years in America It's the same math, it's the same math everywhere.

We have a low unemployment rate with increasing wages, which means the nonsense about immigrants driving your wages down is simply not tr Immigrants, particularly recent immigrants or refugees, have a remarkable disincentive to commit crimes because you'll get thrown out.

But Canada seems to have come to this realization early, and Canada is an economic success today by virtue of the fact that they accepted t that we will only grow if we embrace immigrants more.

- You followed your ancestors tradition of migrating.

- [Ali] Yep.

- And you moved to America.

- Yeah.

- Do you subscribe to the notion of American exceptionalism?

- It's a tricky one that I've struggled with over the years.

I think there are things about America that are unique, particularly as an economics jou There are incentives that exist that don't exist anywhere.

So the whole world is full of remarkable, talented people with nothing but potential.

The difference in America is you a little bit more opportunity.

If you're one of these people loaded with potential, there's more opportunity to succeed and go farther.

Now, the trade off in a lot of countries is you can't make the same money in Canada or in Norway, or whatever it may be, but you can have a go Your healthcare is paid for, your kids' education will be pai and generally speaking, things a America's got higher highs and l I think America is a different c It is truly unusual.

And I think Americans do better when they think of themselves as citizens of the and perhaps leaders in this world, because the world needs the leadership that America prov One thing we've seen is when America steps back from the international sphere, things go wrong.

So a lot of people who think America doesn't, shouldn't muscle into everything But what we realize is that when we're not a traffic cop, sometimes cars crash into each o So I think there's an unusual role for America to play in the world that is unlike almost any other country in the world.

But American exceptionalism has a connotation to it that I'm not fully sure that I e - So you've not only written about your family, you've written about business, you've covered business- - [Ali] Yep.

- As a reporter.

How has our economy changed in the last generation and how has that affected our po - Well, we are fundamentally, not just in America, but more in America than anywher more on the unequal than we've e Whatever metric you want to use, how much the average CEO makes versus the average worker.

We are in a society where 50 years ago you could have had a high school education, ended up in a good civil service job, sent your kid, bought a house, sent your kid to a state university, and have your kid succeed quite Now we've got competition in education that is, you know, pricing people out of being able to get degrees.

We've got no ability to pay for that education.

So we are certainly the richest and most accomplished nation in the world, bar none in terms of science, in terms of medicine, in terms of business achievement, in terms of stock market wealth.

But we are not distributing the spoils of that equally, and it's becoming less equal by And that's, there are mechanisms for doing this.

People think of that as being redistribution of wealth and not being fairly, you know, taking away from people who've earned whatever they've e The distinction is in other countries like ours, we have things that make up for inequalities in earning.

- Right, right.

- It's not an unfixable problem, but we have to accept that it's actually just the function of society to have a system that takes into account the inequalities in our economy, - That feels fundamentally un-American in some respects.

So why do we accept it?

Why do we accept that the wealthy in this country are taxed far less- - Yeah.

- Than teachers and firefighters and other members of society.

- We've come to accept, because we're a meritocracy, we've come to accept the fact that if you do well, that must be because you qualified to do well, because we're a meritocracy.

And if you haven't done well, you must have done something wro And so we have spent literally 50 years making people who have not done as well seem like they have failed.

And if we're charitable, we can help them out a bit.

But fundamentally, if you do anything for them, you're creating an incentive, a moral hazard, if you will- - Right.

- To exist in poverty.

It was a concept of welfare quee this idea that people would prefer to not work and just get handouts from the g I don't subscribe to that.

I subscribe to the idea that we are all born with potential and we need to all be given oppo Not all be given a job, not all be given a handout, but all be given real opportunit That's a role for government too to take on.

It's not, it's not ideological.

It's neither liberal nor conservative to do that.

It is simply a government is there to do the things that the market and individuals can't do for themselves.

Right, we accept that we don't pave our own roads, generally speaking.

- Right.

- We don't put up our own traffi That's what government is for.

One of the things government has to do is say, there are market failures that are causing us to have a very large population of unemployable people, people who do not earn a wage that you can live on.

I mean, we have a federal minimum wage of $7 and 25 cents.

It's $15,000 a year.

I challenge anybody to be able to live on $15,000 a year.

We have maternal mortality rates and infant mortality rates that on average rival certain developing countries.

No reason for that.

But it's not that your risk of maternal mortality is high, it's that if you are in a particular demographic, your risk is abnormally high.

These are all things that can be but we have to decide we wanna s - Why is democracy in a state of - Democracy's in a state of decline around the world.

Now, there are exceptions to thi We have seen various elections.

2024 was the most election-y year in the world that the world, on record.

And we saw a lot of places in which voters did things that were unusual to try and get democracy back.

We saw it in the United Kingdom, we saw it in France, we saw it in India.

Which looked like a bit of a lost cause for a while.

We saw it in South Africa.

So as this economic inequality exists and permeates around the world, you have people who legitimately feel lik their identity or their promise is under attack, and they are susceptible, as they always have been in history, to leaders who will manipulate that.

And around the world, they have caused people to say, "The reason you're not doing as economically well "as you are has nothing to do wi "It's got to do with them."

- It's conducive to demagoguery.

- Correct.

- Right.

- It's fair to say you may not be doing well because of reasons that you didn That it's not to do with you.

But the extra step is it's them, and the them is immigrants, gay women, refugee, you name it.

The list is long, as long as it' And it's very comforting to hear that I'm not doing well because I didn't do anything wrong.

The truth is, lots of people didn't do anything wrong and they're not doing well.

But we've made it a zero sum gam Instead of thinking about this a how do we improve society?

How do we give everybody more op We've, there are some leaders in the world who are saying, it's them and not you.

And I'm the one who can stop thi I can put it down.

And that's, it's taken root around the world.

It's not a uniquely American pro This has taken root around the w We are more polarized.

We are, we see the political opponent as the enemy.

More and more people are not und They are firmly on one side or t And we're seeing this as existen And that's what part of the prob that people are thinking if they win, I'm finished.

- We are a pluralist democracy.

And America has had a very capricious relationship with pluralism.

- Yeah.

- As we get more plural as a soc is democracy more in jeopardy?

- Well, we're going to get more plural one way or the other, right?

That's the nature of migration t and the way things are going in with having negative replacement rates in the West means that we're going to have to have more immigrants.

Some people would, like, for ins in America immigration to come from Northern European white countries.

But most people in Norway or France are not looking to come to America.

So we're getting our immigrants and our refugees from other countries, generally people looking for more economic opportunity here in the United States.

I don't know that there's any reason why becoming a more plural country should make this worse.

I would argue that it could, if handled properly, make it better.

So the comparison I use with Canada is it is a more pluralistic country.

By virtue of multicultural policy, it grew into that where the average Canadian my age sort of looks at immigration, looks at how Toronto has changed in the decades and says, "That wouldn't have happened without immigration, "without the needs of Chinese im "to have multifamily apartment d "four and five bedroom things."

It didn't exist in the Toronto in which I grew up.

They understand that Canada is a country that punches above its weight by virtue of the fact that it's got a vibrant and growing population from around the world.

I don't think it needs to polarize because when I grew up in Canada, my father ran for office and he was a liberal.

And he got support from lots of immigrant communities, all of whom were liberals because the idea was they had come in under a liberal prime minister that happens in many countries.

You vote for the government that brought you in.

Now you see an election in Toron or in America where you'll see a constituency where there's a large ethnic concentration, there might be three candidates or two candidates running against each other, one's conservative and one's one's liberal.

That is, I think, the way pluralism works, right?

You occupy all the space.

Immigrants don't have to occupy a particular space or a particular set of ideologie We're seeing that in America.

We're seeing it with black voter We're seeing it with Hispanic vo They don't occupy one space and everybody tears their hair out, oh why is this happening?

Well, because we're not homogeno We're not a monolith.

And that, I think pluralism allows more of that because what it says is that you and I are not the same and that is something to be cele Let's enjoy, let's explore why we're not the same.

Let me really be able to have a meaningful conversation with you because it's based on respect about who you're voting for and why, or why your ideology is the way it is.

I think pluralism helps rather t - So you are a member of the med How does that fragmented media e affect our democracy?

- I think it may be one of the worst things, and I, you know, I'd like to end my career trying to make up for some of the damage we've probably done by creating circles in which people choose to hear things that they want to hear and ignore the things they don't want to hear.

I think that's unhealthy for dem And then by the way, if we didn't do the damage that we did in cable media, social media came along to, you know, finish the job.

So now you have to go out of you to hear other perspectives.

Now, in fairness, let's just, yo I don't wanna paint the past as such a rosy picture.

Back in the days of network news we weren't getting a whole lot of breadth and depth to a whole lot of stories.

- Right.

- But they were consistent then they were fair, and they were honest.

We now have the ability to learn about many more people and about different parts of the But you get what you choose to l And if you don't choose to liste if you don't think there's something wrong with your, the diet that you're taking in of news, you won't fix it.

And it's not easy to fix.

Now, if I told you that the water, the City of Austin said, "The water coming outta the taps is dirty."

You will do everything possible not to give that water to your kids.

- Right.

- You'll boil it, you'll get a water filter, you'll get bottled water, whatev But we don't do that for the new I can tell you with certainty that on balance, the news you get is dirty.

It's polluted.

What are ya gonna do about it?

Unlike water where you know where to get the filter or the city will tell you where to get the filter or get clear, you know, get bett What do you do with the news?

How do you fix for the fact that it is dirty, but you may like it because it's the the dirt you like.

That's the problem.

We have to not like dirty news.

We have to not like it just because it makes us feel better.

We need to consume as more responsible citizens.

I don't think that should be a responsibility of a citizen, but I don't see any other solution at the moment.

- So for those, Ali, who are concerned about the state of our democracy, but don't think that they could do anything aside from show up a - Right.

- What would your advice to them What small acts of courage, to invoke the title of your book, can they undertake in order to ensure that our democracy is strengthen and continues to be vibrant?

- Well, I think accepting the fact that the way we're gonna change things are through small acts, right?

The world seems like a scary place sometimes and it gets overwhelming and sometimes people just turn off the news because it's overwhelmi My point is, you can't boil the ocean, you can't save, you can't do it all at once.

There are problems that seem exi whether it's democracy or the cl I think that you can do what you can do around you.

I've met a woman in Philadelphia who's a block captain.

She, you know, her main job is to sort of make sure there's always someone looking around to see what's going on in the block and everybody's saf But she registers 100% of the people on her block and 100% of the people turn out That's just one block in Philade Not a particularly swingy place from a voting perspective anyway But she takes that responsibility seriously.

My small acts of courage that I talk to people about, not mine, the ones that I interview people about, they all seem awfully small.

They all seem like things that no one's ever gonna get covered in the news for doing it, but they're fighting for something that will make their community better or their library better because they're fighting against the banning of books.

You can move the needle on things like that.

And when you move the needle on things like that, you feel accomplished and you feel like you can take something else on.

And that's something else, may end up like my sister, whom I write about, running for office herself.

You know, my father ran for office in Canada to test the system because he had lived in these places where the color of his skin prev from achieving certain things.

He wanted to test whether it cou My sister didn't do that.

She knew it could work.

She did it because she felt that the system's fundamentally And she had done things to try a the standard of living for people, but she felt she could do it better as an office holder So that's the kind of thing that These incidental people who become office holders or they run for office just to enlarge the political debate.

So it's everything from making sure you get a library card and supporting your public libra to supporting your local news.

You know, local news is our, loc is in dire straits in America.

- Right.

- The idea that you will subscribe to something to keep local reporters there, going to your city council meetings to be able to hold your city councilors to account.

These are the little things I'm talking about.

- The memoir is "Small Acts of C Our guest is Ali Velshi.

Ali, thanks so much for being wi - Thank you for having me.

(majestic music) (majestic music continues) (majestic music continues) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following, Laura and John Beckworth, BP Ame Joe Latimer and Joni Hartgraves.

And also by (no audio) and by.

(no audio) A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and live from lbj.org.

(PBS Jingle) (ATP Jingle)