Van Jones: 'Joe Biden is a romantic idealist in the age of cynicism and snark'
When the US presidential election was finally called for Joe Biden on 7 November, the CNN commentator Van Jones made a tearful speech live on air that captured in two minutes the frayed emotions of a contest that had dragged on for days. A regular on CNN over the past decade, Jones trained as a lawyer at Yale and has spent more than 25 years fighting for criminal justice reform. A special adviser for green jobs in the early days of the Obama administration, he crossed party lines to work with the Trump administration in 2018, helping to draft the First Step Act and drawing criticism from fellow progressives in the process. Jones, who is 52 and was born in Tennessee, lives in Los Angeles and has two sons with his ex-wife Jana Carter.
Tell me about the lead-up to that CNN speech and the state of your nerves.We were all just exhausted. We had been doing 17-hour days, for five days. We knew that it was going to be a long, slow count, but that doesn’t mean that your body and heart and soul can endure it with perfect equipoise. When it was finally called, my phone started blowing up with text messages from Muslim friends, friends from immigrant communities. One guy said, “I’m not crying, you’re crying,” just as a little a joke about how emotional everybody was. And it just hit me what a burden we’ve all been carrying, especially people who are in harm’s way of the president’s rhetoric. When they switched over to our panel, and Anderson [Cooper] asked me how I was doing, I couldn’t see my notes – you see me looking down trying to read them but my eyes are full of tears. So I just started free associating. I just had to speak from the heart.
Did you have a sense of the reaction it would cause?Listen, when Michelle Obama and LeBron James and Madonna are retweeting you, that’s not anything you expect. You’re just trying to get through that moment. You’re just trying to speak honestly to what you’re feeling.
You talked about the outcome “making it easier to tell your kids that character… telling the truth [and] being a good person matters”. What kind of conversations did you have with your own kids after Biden won?Well, first of all, they saw it on TV – my boys are 12 and 16 – so they were already a part of the conversation from the moment I spoke it out of my mouth. It’s very hard to raise boys. You want them to be men of good character. And when you have someone like Donald Trump, who – whatever positive things he has tried to represent in terms of American pride – lies all the time, does stuff that is just completely despicable, he’s setting a terrible example for our kids. I could not help feeling that way, despite having worked with his administration on some very important things, and having some affection for a lot of the people in that building.
You worked with the Trump administration on criminal justice reform and got a lot of flak for it. What did you learn?What I learned is that, even when there are serious battleground issues – attacking Muslims, snatching babies away from their mothers at the border, all the horrific things – as a progressive, I can’t back down. There are still common ground issues that can bring people together. For the people at the very bottom of our society – in prison, or suffering from opioid addiction – neither political party does that much anyway. And so, if you can see a moment where you could get something done to help the people at the very bottom, I felt the responsibility to do it. I worked with the Trump administration on criminal justice reform. We got a bill passed and signed by President Trump, and I was in the Oval Office when he signed it – he handed me one of the pens. That bill has helped people behind bars. One hundred and eighty thousand people in federal prison, none of those people get a chance to vote. They had no say in whether it was going to be Hillary or Bernie or Trump. I didn’t want to abandon them for four years or eight years, just because I didn’t like the majority of the president’s agenda. As a result, I learned that you can get things done. I also have a very different view on the administration than people who just stood back. I saw Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump trying to get something very hard done against the objectives of many in their own party, and came to admire their role and the strength they showed in that fight quite a bit. And it doesn’t mean I agree with them on many other things. But on the issues that I saw them working on, I saw them doing some things that a lot of liberals and progressives didn’t want to give them credit for.
Some people felt you were playing both sides. Do you buy that criticism? There are people who feel that if you’re a Democrat or Republican, your side is always right and the other side is always wrong. I’m not subscribing to that point of view. I try to look at the issues, the opportunities, the bills and the candidates with more or less fresh eyes. With Jared Kushner I got 99 problems but prisons ain’t one. Jared’s dad went to prison. He understands. And so I’ll fight till the last dog barks. That used to be the way it worked in American politics. It’s only been very recently that, if you say one positive thing about the other side, you are a traitor. If you work with them on one issue, even an issue I spent 25 years of my life on, you are a traitor, and anything else you say can be dismissed. That is a new phenomenon. And I just don’t subscribe to it.
What are your hopes for the next four years?I worked for Joe Biden in the Obama White House. I know his heart, I also know his skill as a legislative champion. If anybody can bring some healing to the country and get anything done, it’s Joe Biden. He’s going to need a lot of help. And now the shoe is on the other foot. The same liberals that attacked me for reaching out to work with Trump are going to insist that Republicans do what they attack people for doing. They’re going to say: “Why don’t you reach out? Joe Biden’s not that bad. You guys are terrible.” But when the shoe was on the other foot, they were just as partisan and recalcitrant and unwilling to deal with nuance. And so we are in a situation where we go back and forth between big chunks of the American public not accepting the president. Trump, of course, led the big effort against Obama trying to delegitimise his presidency. If anybody gets us out of it, it’s Joe Biden. He is a romantic idealist in the age of cynicism and snark.
What do you make of Donald Trump’s attempts to disrupt the election?I think what Donald Trump is doing is very dangerous, it is completely reckless and irresponsible. And unsurprising, unfortunately, and frankly ineffective. It’s kind of a clown-car pseudo-coup attempt going on. But it shows you if you had an authoritarian with more discipline, and a better team, how much damage could be done.
What impact do you think the Black Lives Matter protests this year have had on American politics and society?In January this year, if you had asked the majority of white Americans, even well intentioned white Americans, is antiblack racism a big issue for you, is fixing the police a major issue for you, most of them would have said no. But if you look at the polling data over the course of this year, 20 to 30 million white Americans alone changed their mind. Dr King never had a summer where he picked up 20 to 30 million white Americans. That gives you a sense of the magnitude of the breakthrough. How you change it into laws and sustain it, as Dr King did? That remains to be seen. I don’t think we’ll be able to properly assess what it means for a decade or more.
What are your hopes for 2021?I’m a strong progressive Democrat – frankly I’m probably too far left for most Democrats on the level of policy – but my prayer for next year is that we enter the Biden era where people on both sides can have strong convictions but put the country first. Have convictions, but put people at the bottom, who need something from America, first, and not be beaten up for it and called traitors and hypocrites for it.
With Jared Kushner I got 99 problems but prisons ain’t one