The view from inside the United States has many wondering if the days of democracy are numbered, but that’s not the story everywhere. In spite of a global surge in far-right politics, many countries are still making progressive strides and demonstrating the problems facing the US have real, proven solutions. Natasha Hakimi Zapata, author of Another World is Possible, joins Marc Steiner for a globetrotting discussion from Estonia to Costa Rica about where democracy is actually thriving—and why.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
I am Marc Steiner and welcome. Good to have you all with us on this very special podcast. We’re going to talk today with Natasha Ha about that and she’s an award-winning journalist translator. Her book that we’re going to talk about is called Another World is Possible Lessons from America From Around the World. That’s from New Press. She’s written for the nation. We’ll send a few books times many, many, many, many publications and joins us here today in studio in Baltimore. And she’s going to be speaking tonight at Red Emmas, which is a local bookstore here, which brings her here to the studio. And it’s good to meet you and good to have you here.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Hi Marc. Thanks so much for having me.
Marc Steiner:
This is great. This is an amazing book. Just to give people perspective, you traveled to what, eight countries over the course of
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
About five years? Yeah, so the book includes nine countries, nine policies, but I’ve lived in a couple of them. I didn’t have to travel too far for the UK chapter on the National Health Service since I live in London.
Marc Steiner:
Just take the subway.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Yeah, exactly.
Marc Steiner:
So I’m curious, you can write a book like this looking at systems around the world and what you’ve also done with this book is kind of talk about what is possible. That’s what I think the journey was so interesting to me that you took to say that a different world is possible. We can live a different way, governments can take care of people, people will be actively be part of a government, and we have a different kind of democratic future if we only pay attention.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I’ve been in progressive media for about 15 years now as you were noting. And during that time I’ve also lived in a number of other countries and I was reporting and writing on all of these issues that in the US seemed intractable and then experiencing firsthand how they were actually pretty much solve problems in a lot of the places I was living. And I really wanted to share those stories and go and look for more stories to share with the left here in the US as we try to re-envision what kind of country we want to live in, what kind of society we want to live in.
Marc Steiner:
I was thinking about this when we talked a little earlier before we jump into the book completely. This book comes out about hope and possibilities and what we could be and what societies could be, how we can rebuild society for people across the globe. And we’re doing it now in the time of the rise of the right, this book comes out right in the midst of the most right-wing regime ever to be elected in this country. Right-wing regimes all over the planet, being elected or taking power. One could look at it as a contradiction, but also just might be also why this book is so timely and important now in the face of what we see in the world. When this came out, all this is happening now your book is out. I’m really curious how you felt about the kind of very positive, powerful nature of what you wrote about and then seeing this mass of the right taking over.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I wasn’t expecting to be talking about hope in a second Trump administration truly, and I am disappointed for that to be the case. But I do think that a really important lesson and at the end of the book, starting at the end of the book, there are lessons that I’ve collected from all of the countries that I went to, not just based on their policies, but just from what I was seeing everywhere. And one of the most important lessons for me, especially now, is that we can make the best out of the worst times. And if it’s okay, I’ll read a little bit from that.
Marc Steiner:
Please do.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Yeah. So lesson one, we can make the best out of the worst times profound societal change is often rooted in moments of deep crisis in Britain. The National Health Service was born from the bloodstain devastation of World War ii. Portugal’s radical drug reforms arose from the desperation of dual epidemics. Unlike any of the country had seen, Estonia, Finland, Singapore, and Norway all designed their own policies in the midst of financial crises that required them to reimagine the very foundations of their economies. Faced with environmental devastation, Uruguay and Costa Rica found different but connected ways to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises head on. All these historically difficult periods had one thing in common. They forced their citizens not just to hope for better but to work toward better. And they all took it upon themselves to do so rather than raise our hands in surrender as we face this avalanche of problems, we must look to examples in this book and take heart.
The lesson is crystal clear. Some of the most effective and longest lasting solutions are forged in the darkest times. As we look up from the pits of despair and envision how to get out of the abyss, we find ourselves in more importantly, it’s at times like these that we learn how not to fall back in. And so like I said, I didn’t imagine going on tour and throughout the US and talking about this darkness that I really feel is consuming our political life, our daily lives. But I am able to go to all of these cities and really talk about hope from a place of understanding that it is possible even in moments of despair.
Marc Steiner:
So when you did these travels, I mean you went to all these countries over several periods of years and kind of brought their stories out about the battle for freedom, battle for Democracy Building society that’s built for the people. And before we get into specifics of some of the places you went, I’m curious, given what’s happened in the last year or two, have you been back in touch with these people talking about what’s actually they’re confronting given the rise of the right in the world?
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I have been in touch and in Costa Rica especially, I’ve seen how the right wing government there has tried to get rid of their biodiversity law or at least weaken it or weaken the institutions that I created. And what heartens me is that those same people that I interviewed are still fighting and they’re not going anywhere. And what’s great in the case of Costa Rica, for example, as someone told me when I was interviewing them, this idea that the biodiversity of Costa Rica belongs to the people is so ingrained now in everyone there that it’s impossible to take that away now. And I think that that’s a really important lesson too. The National Health Service is another one in the UK is another good example of how once you have these amazing policies that really change people’s lives for the better, it’s so hard to roll them back, try as they may.
I mean, I’ve reported for the nation on how the right, and actually also Tony Blair’s Labor Party over the years have tried and often succeeded to defund or privatize certain aspects of the National Health Service, but it is still free at the point of delivery. I think if that were not the case, more Britains would be up in arms about it because they love their national health service so much. There’s this really great quote that I paraphrase by Nire Bevin, who was the founder of the National Health Service, who was the health minister in the first labor government, and again paraphrasing, but he says something like the NHS is about to become so popular that even our enemies are going to take credit for it. And I think that that’s a really good starting point to know that we have to fight to implement these things and that eventually we will have to fight to keep them. But when they are rooted in a society, it is so hard to unroot them.
Marc Steiner:
So when you go to countries like Estonia, and I was really fascinated. I never knew what was happening there in terms of trying to do direct democracy online, something the United States should be able to do since we began it. It’s this huge network here, we can’t seem to get it together. Talk a bit about that. I mean the model of Estonia for a digital democracy, it just blew me away when I read it. I had no idea what was going on.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Estonia is such an interesting example of how you can build public digital infrastructure and how that can build trust in people, that their government will work for them and that also that they can engage with their government directly. As you said, there are all of these direct democracy kind of initiatives online where you can talk to your representatives, you can talk to your local city officials and ask them questions and they’ll be able to answer. And it really is rooted in this idea that internet is a human right and that there were solutions to many problems that the country was facing as against its independence that they could maybe turn to these new technologies for. And now we see one of the interesting things I’ve been seeing recently with Elon Musk and this among many things with doge or dodgy as some people call it,
Marc Steiner:
We supposed to say it. Yes, right.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
This incursion into the heart of government and all of this private data. I mean there are many problems with what they’re doing, but one of the fascinating things I saw was this data grab, this private data grab that could affect millions of American citizens. Things like your social security number, your address, all of this personal information. And I was thinking about how in Estonia he just would not be able to do this for a number of reasons because of the publicly owned digital infrastructure that they’ve put in place. And there are a few reasons that he wouldn’t be able to, but if he did, there is a really great part of the citizen portal. So every Estonian has access to a citizen portal where they can access all government services online and they’re making it as easy as possible for people to sign up for things like paid parental leave or to renew their driver’s license all in one place. But importantly, there’s also a page where you can see what agency or who or when your private data was accessed and you can query why. And we just don’t have any sort of mechanisms like that to really fight against these kind of data grabs that we’re seeing now.
Marc Steiner:
It made me think when you wrote about Estonia, and I was thinking about when you wrote about Portugal and the incredible work they do in Portugal when people are addicted and not criminalizing and I put people in prison but wrapping their arms around people and helping them find a new way to live. And then I think about this country we live in and why it’s so hard. And you touch on that throughout the book. I mean why it’s so hard for us to get it right for us to be able to do the simplest of things to make society better for everybody in it.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I’m a big believer in universal programs and I came out of writing this book an even bigger believer in universal programs. There’s this problem at the core of American society that if you are among the wealthy few, you have access to all of the best of everything, the best healthcare, the best childcare, the best housing. But the majority of Americans, despite living in the wealthiest country in the history of the planet, have very little to no access to the same things. And so these off-ramps built into our system for wealthy Americans, and that means that they’re not invested in actually making things better for the rest of us along with themselves because they don’t need to. So I really think that universal programs are an answer, not only because they are more equitable, they’re less wasteful as well, but they also create more social solidarity. And I think when we ask what are we getting wrong, I think that’s it. We don’t have the sense of social solidarity because we don’t have these shared services or programs.
Marc Steiner:
The more I read when we jumped into Uwe for a minute, which is a really interesting country that’s gone back and forth within the tuba hours and the gorillas and fighting the revolution and the right, right-wing government in place. But you all see there, you found this kernel of hope built around clean energy, built around a different kind of world that you can do that could be happening right here. The same thing could be happening here, but talk a bit about that one, what you found in Uruguay.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I loved going toay because it was a really good example of how even, or maybe I shouldn’t say even that energy policy can be redistributive. So they have a publicly owned utility at the heart of everything. And again, this came from a moment of crisis. Their decision to transition to green energy came from the fact that they don’t have any naturally occurring fossil fuels in ua. And what would happen is that they would have rolling blackouts and power cuts and it would be incredibly disruptive not just to civilian life or political life, but also to businesses. I went to a factory where they said every time that the lights would go out, we would just have to stop making cloth, which is what they did. And so PE moca with F, he gets elected after tha Vasquez around 2009 I think. And even before he comes into government, he decides we’re not going to be able to tackle these really thorny issues at the heart of Wai without building some sort of cross party agreements that ensure that what we start will be finished by other political parties.
And so they did. They hammered out four cross-party agreements on four key issues. And one of those was energy because of these rolling blackouts and this issue that they had where because so much of the energy was based on hydroelectric as well, they would every time there was a drought and these droughts became increasingly more common because of the climate crisis more severe, you had a situation where the government would go into a financial crisis because they would have to import fossil fuels from neighboring Argentina and Brazil exorbitant prices. And so green energy seemed to be the solution to that issue. And they proved in under 10 years, despite having so few resources, especially compared to a country like the us,
Marc Steiner:
It’s a very small place.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
It’s a very small place. But also, I mean what I like about it is that it’s a small place, but it had to be scrappy. They didn’t have these huge resources. And so they proved that in under 10 years you can green a grid and almost a hundred percent and that it can be stable, that you can look at a number of different renewable energy sources and that will stabilize a grid. And so the other thing that happened was that they went from spending millions of dollars every time they had a drought in order to import fossil fuels to actually saving that money, being able to spend it on social programs and on top of it, making money from exporting their excess renewable energy to neighboring Argentina and Bris Brazil, the same countries that they used to import from. And so it’s just again a great example about how sometimes there’s an economic incentive and it has all of these ripple effects across society
Marc Steiner:
Given the rise of the right that we’re facing in this world today in some of the countries that you went to and visited as well, and the stories you tell of hope and organizing and fighting back and building a different kind of world. So I’m curious in your own travels and how you think this fight back is being organized and what hope these kinds of stories give us for what our future could be rather than letting this kind of authoritarian manage the world.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I really believe that now is the time for really bold ideas and that we need to get inspired and point to the pragmatism of these radical ideas. I wanted to include countries that were so different from one another. I didn’t just go to Scandinavia even though obviously they do have good ideas. And I went to Norway and I went to Finland, but I wanted to go somewhere like Singapore, which is this hyper capitalist context,
Marc Steiner:
Hyper capitalist
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
It’s, and that is so different, again, not just from Norway, Finland, but also from the US and show that even though we see these as ideas from the left, and they probably come from the left still, that you don’t necessarily need the left to implement them. And that actually what’s more important to me is that we build out coalitions to ensure like Ika did in Wai, that these things are carried out long term. I really think right now we have to re-envision how we look towards the future, build out those coalitions, hopefully point to some of these stories to people who maybe don’t feel identified by movements we have currently or the political parties we have and say, Hey, it’s working for other people, why can’t it work for us?
Marc Steiner:
So pick any country you want that you went to right now, two of them, whatever you like. I want you to talk a bit about the coalitions that were built and how they were built across these lines that made these incredible changes inside their countries.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
A few that come to mind about building coalitions are Wai as I just explained. And again, that was from a moment of crisis. And so there was no denying that something had to be done to address the energy crisis that they were facing if they were ever going to stabilize their country, their economy, anything. Portugal was another really good example in which you had one in every hundred Portuguese people was suffering from some sort of problematic addiction as they called it. And it touched everyone’s lives. And again, it really inspired and moved people from all parts of the political spectrum to do something radical. I think that that is really the key to those policies. Then you had something like Norway where you had a labor party in charge and in the 1970s there was this real push from the labor party to kind of re-envision how families were supported because they wanted to bring women into the formal, they wanted to have sort of full employment in the country.
And that meant making work that was traditionally unpaid and done by women paid and within usually the public sector. Part of that meant that they needed to find a way to support families if people were still going to have children, which they wanted them to. And you saw this really interesting thing where the left wanted paid parental leave and subsidized childcare for the reasons I just explained for economic reasons, largely of course some feminist ideologies as well. But then you had the Christian Democrats who wanted it to support traditional family values and for people to keep having children and they came together and passed it. And now again, it’s one of these policies that’s so beloved that no one on the right or left, even though the center right wasn’t in agreement at the time, no one would try and take it away. And you have one year in which both parents can split the time as they see fit to stay home with their newborns at a hundred percent of their salaries backed by the
Marc Steiner:
States, a
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Hundred percent of those, a hundred percent of their salaries. And what I really also really loved about Norway is that they were the, and the reason I went there, they were the first country to have what’s called a papa perm or daddy quota where it was this, now it’s three months, that’s use it or lose it. That dad or co-parent, a progressive country has to stay home and be a caregiver, a primary caregiver on their own. And what’s really key to that is that it means that co-parent is no longer assistant to mom or other co-parent. They’re really a primary caregiver. And the impact that that’s had on the rest of society is fascinating because you have a situation in which not only are homes changing the way that people see what the role traditional gender roles, whether we should have them or not, has shifted. But then you also see how in the workforce there’s less discrimination towards women because both people of all genders will be able to take the same amount of leave if they want to if they have children and also go home with their child if they’re sick, they have a number of sick days that are specifically if your child is sick. And that’s split between parents as well.
There’s just a broader understanding throughout society about what it takes to raise a family. Not to mention they have great high quality, subsidized, very subsidized childcare after age one.
Marc Steiner:
That does make a difference huge. When you don’t have to worry about where your kids are going to go, it’s there, it’s well done. Professionals are taking care of your children and you go off and do what you have to do and come back and collect them at the end of the day.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Exactly right. Exactly. And what I loved as well is I would ask, go to all of these daycares across the country. I tend to go around each country as much as possible over the course of almost a month in each place. And I would ask, who’s coming to pick up the kids? And they were without fail always 50 50 moms and dads. I was like, great. It’s working somehow.
Marc Steiner:
So when you look at what you discovered, I’m thinking about also for some reason New Zealand, let’s talk about that for a minute. Popped in my head and their whole battle around retirement, how they changed the whole nature of retirement for people. Well, let me start there then I’ll have a follow up. I mean, just talk a bit about what they did there because actually New Zealand is more diverse than people realize. It’s not just an old white man’s country. Many people think of it, but they built something very different and unique there.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
They have universal non-contributory flat rate pensions for everyone over a certain age at around 40% of the average wage. And the real requirement is you have to be 65 and you have to be a resident of New Zealand for a number of years. And that’s shifted a bit over the years. But what’s fascinating about it is that by making it non-contributory that it’s not based on your wages or your taxes over your lifetime. It’s just so much more fair for women and groups that have been oppressed throughout their lives because it doesn’t discriminate based on income. It doesn’t discriminate based on what you’ve put into this pot over time. And I don’t want to be too mean about social security because I do think that it’s one of these things that we have still left over from the New Deal that is beloved and it’s we
Marc Steiner:
Do have it, it’s great, but it doesn’t give you that much.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
It doesn’t give you that much. It doesn’t give you that much needs to be better. It needs to be improved. And one of the problems that I see with it, despite all of these different ways that they’re trying to make it better for everyone who’s left out of it, is that it still kind of entrenches these inequalities that people experience throughout their lifetime rather than ensuring that people when they get to old age will have the ability to have a dignified life. And that’s really what I want to see. I mean, our elderly poverty rates are terrible. And one of the striking stories that I saw in New Zealand is there was this woman who I met who was a victim of domestic abuse and had no income for years and she was telling me how much she was looking forward to. She was a few years off of getting the NZ super as they call it, the super superannuation. And she was just so looking forward to that stable income after having so many different jobs and not being able to work at different periods. And you can see from a life like that, if she had not been able to contribute in certain systems, she would not be able to look forward to that level of security in her old age.
Marc Steiner:
What was the word? Superannuation?
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Superannuation
Marc Steiner:
A new word for me when I read your book. I’m curious, as you travel the world, seeing people struggle some stories and you watch the reality that around us, we talked about in the beginning where conversation with the right wing kind of really moving and taking power in so many parts of the globe and these stories, if people heard these stories, if people who were involved in political struggle to build a more equitable society, you stories like this to say, this is who we are, this is what we could be. I mean, it’s amazing that this is not part of the dynamic. You know what I’m saying? I mean that tiny New Zealand, if these other countries can ensure that when you get old, you’re taken care of, ensure that your kids are taking care of biodiversity programs that save the land, give people work, it’s right there. But we don’t seem to be able to tell the story in a way that makes people say, we can build a political movement around this.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Often the way that we talk about policy can be so alienating for people. And I really feel that sometimes people ask me who I want to read this book and obviously I want everyone to read this book as much as possible really. But I often think of my ideal reader as someone like my mom who didn’t finish high school, who was undocumented in the US for many years, who never really felt identified by politics or political movements or anything like that. But of course policies impacted her life. So one of the personal drivers behind this book was a healthcare incident that had to do with my mom talk about it in the introduction. So my mom couldn’t afford a healthcare health insurance really in the US for many years and ended up having undiagnosed untreated diabetes and had her right foot amputated because of this. And a number of other complications since then that I didn’t even mention kidney failure dialysis three days a week, all of these very difficult things and
Marc Steiner:
This is why you were growing up.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I was about 2020 something when this happened. And at the time I had been fortunate enough to be able to study abroad with scholarships. I was the first in my family to get a college degree. We were these I call my brothers and I these little American dreams that my parents had. And really at that moment I started to feel like the American dream that my parents had both from different countries had come for, was really more possible in other places that I had been, that I had studied abroad and I had lived in places like the UK and Spain that have universal healthcare. So while I was worrying about my mom’s wellbeing and whether she’d be able to survive this disease, she had the amputation, all of these things, I also had this other concern, how were we going to be able to afford the care she needed, the insulin she needed to keep her alive.
And I knew having lived in other places, that just wasn’t something that people had to think about there. And I wanted to do better and I to understand why we weren’t doing better by our citizens. And so part of the way that I’ve structured the book, going back to this idea of who should read it and how we should tell these stories, is really to pass the mic on to people who are impacted by these policies, not just policymakers and activists and academics and industry leaders, which I do interview in the book, but really just everyday people who live with these policies and talk about how they have benefited from them so that these people feel real, as real as they were to me when I was sitting in front of them. I wanted them to feel real to my readers and I wanted people to be able to share these stories in that way that felt like it was something that you were telling someone over dinner or before you went to the movies or something.
Marc Steiner:
As I read the book, I was taking these crazy notes that I have here. I thought that these are the things that people need to understand of what could be. I mean, the title of your book, another World is possible that when I watched the Democrats in this country in this last election, and they just need to read this book first to understand, to say, look, we can have a different world. This is what we could do. This is what’s happening across the globe. We don’t have, we can have medical care, you can have housing, we can have a biodiverse world that’s safe for all of us to live in. And that to me was just, it was a point of frustration but of hope that what you write about in this book is what it could be.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Thank you for saying that. I like you. I’m so frustrated with Democrats sort of constantly trying to tell us what we can’t have rather than actually having a bold vision for what we can accomplish. And they’ve seeded that ground and it’s incredibly frustrating to me. To see Kamala Harris’s campaign I think was a huge failure. Well, it was a huge failure she lost. But to me the biggest failing even before she lost, was that they weren’t talking about real policies that would have a material impact on people’s daily lives. There was no talk of things like universal healthcare, things that Bernie Sanders was so good about, their universal paid parental leave and highly subsidized childcare. They just have completely seeded that ground to the right. And then the right is just offering culture wars and chaos.
Marc Steiner:
And what you describe here as we close out is just that the countries diverse group of countries have found answers to the problems that we face right here in the United States that we refuse to take. We refuse to look at and go, yes, we can solve this. Yes, we can have healthcare. Yes, we can have housing.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
I’m hopeful because of something that did happen in November as well. During the general election, you saw a number of states increase the minimum wage and at the same time you saw what we would consider deep red states like Missouri, Nebraska, and Alaska Pass paid sick leave on their ballots, on their state ballots with huge majorities. And Nebraska was 74% of the vote. This to me shows exactly what I’m trying to show in this book that beyond left or right politics beyond what we consider the political spectrum, these ideas are taking root. These are ideas that we would consider incredibly progressive, and yet you have them being passed in states like Mississippi and Alaska and Nebraska. And so somehow they’re getting through. Even if we have someone in the White House who would never want something like that,
Marc Steiner:
You would not. But since this is a wonderful book and I want to encourage all the people listening to us today to just get a copy of another world as possible, Natasha Hami Zapata, I’ll be right here on the site. You can see it yourself. Really important stories from across the globe of people fighting for justice, getting justice and building a new world, the kind of world we all want to see happen. So Natasha, I’m glad you took a moment to come by the studio today on your way to red Ems to talk. It’s good to have you here and it’s good to have met you.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata:
Thank you so much practices.
Marc Steiner:
Thank you for the work. Thank you. Once again, thank you to Natasha Hami Zapata for joining us today in studio and for her book Another World as Possible. And thanks to Cameron Grino for running the program today, audio editor Alida Anek and producer Roset Ali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at [email protected] and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Natasha Hato for joining us today. And I seriously encourage all of you to read another world as possible, lessons for America from around the globe, really well done, wonderfully written, and a powerfully important book. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner, stand involved. Keep listening and take care.
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