[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In the last few decades, a combination of drugs, crime, and violence have ravaged certain communities in America. At the same time, we’ve seen a shift of jobs overseas, an erosion of civil society, and an overall decline in economic mobility—with many now feeling the American Dream is just a pipe dream after all, according to Ja’Ron Smith and Chris Pilkerton.
They’re the co-authors of the new book, “Underserved: Harnessing the Principles of Lincoln's Vision for Reconstruction for Today's Forgotten Communities.”
During the Trump administration, Ja’Ron Smith served as deputy director of the Office of American Innovation, and Chris Pilkerton as acting head of the Small Business Administration.
How do we revitalize these forgotten communities? How do we reverse the economic damage caused by pandemic-era policies? And how do we unite the 2 sides of the aisle?
We discuss the matter in this episode of American Thought Leaders.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/ravaged-communities-jaron-smith-and-chris-pilkerton-on-globalization-drugs-and-the-erosion-of-civil-society-5505253
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Ja'Ron Smith, Chris Pilkerton, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Chris Pilkerton: Thank you for having us.
Ja'Ron Smith: Thanks for having us.
Mr. Jekielek: Welcome, and Ja'Ron, it's great to have you back. The last time we had an interview, you were actually heading up the Office of American Innovation in the Trump Administration, and there was some remarkable work done there. You two have written a fascinating book, Underserved: Harnessing the Principles of Lincoln's Vision for Reconstruction for Today's Forgotten Communities. You chart the vision that Lincoln had for the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, and you argue that it ended up being incomplete. Let’s jump in with that.
Mr. Smith: Yes, it was incomplete, mostly because President Lincoln got assassinated. His vice president who took over and became president didn't actualize Lincoln’s vision and actually went in a different direction. Lincoln had a vision for bringing the country together, had a plan for poor blacks and poor whites, and had a plan for reimagining America. He was really thinking about using this opportunity to bring our country together, vs. Andrew Johnson who had his own issues growing up in the South.
Johnson used it as a political opportunity to grant pardons to southern leaders, and set up the tentacles of what ended up being the Jim Crow era. After the Civil War a new America emerged and we never really dealt with some of the issues related to the Negro, except for when Grant took over. We're now talking about immediately after Lincoln passed away.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about some of those issues.
Mr. Pilkerton: Lincoln and his personal vision all started in his youth. He grew up on the prairie and wasn't educated. Everyone's heard the stories about all the books that he read, but the reality was that he was fighting for folks like himself when he was running for Congress and running for elected positions. When he actually went through the Civil War, he saw this as an opportunity to reconstruct America in order to bring economic opportunity for all.
In one of his early campaigns, he talks about this, and it's probably the equivalent of the shining city on the hill. It was an imaginary place he called Huron, a place where there was going to be bustling labor and market activity. That was his vision as he continued down the road.
As Ja'Ron was saying, when President Johnson took over, there was a lot of baggage that he brought to that office. If it wasn't for people like Thaddeus Stevens and others who really held Johnson's feet to the fire and overturned vetoes, then the positive movement that happened during Reconstruction wouldn't have happened. Because essentially, Stevens was reverting back to the southern Democrat that he and many of his colleagues were.
Mr. Smith: After we had this Reconstruction period, you had this whole period of Jim Crow in the South where you had African-Americans who never fully got their rights. They had things like poll taxes, and you still had a robust amount of lynchings in the south. There were a number of different things. Intentionally, they weren't set straight in the beginning right after Reconstruction. It took a civil rights movement to finally give those individuals their rights as citizens, and as a country, we had to participate in forced integration.
To Chris's earlier point, there wasn't a huge focus on the economic piece related to American citizenship, the opportunity piece that we think is so vital. As we moved through the '70s and the '80s and started to be at the end of the industrial movement, labor had changed in a major way. The types of blue collar jobs that pushed people into the middle class in the '30s, '40s, '50s, started to go overseas.
That brings us into where we are now. We've been in an area where economic mobility has continued to slow down for middle class and low income individuals. We haven’t figured out how to bring those individuals into the jobs of the 21st century that pay a living wage and let them pursue the American Dream.
Mr. Jekielek: Certain policies have had an impact on the family, and you could call it the destruction of the family, especially in the black community. There's a huge number of households which are single parent households. Coming from a nuclear family household dramatically increases your likelihood of success. This is one of the very few things everybody agrees on. Then you had globalization and deindustrialization, and at the same time you had these policies that hurt the family unit dramatically.
You end up with these underserved communities, both black and white. The wealth gap is larger, and the upward mobility is very restricted. We just had a series of pandemic policies that were economically devastating, and they affected those communities the most, on top of everything else. It