Although Chris Hayes' career has had a meteoric rise in recent years, he stubbed his toe on national television last month.
On his weekend MSNBC program Up w/Chris Hayes on the day before Memorial Day, the 33-year-old Hayes discussed his discomfort with the word “heroes,” saying that it is marshaled “in a way that is problematic," in reference to the men and women who die in military conflicts. His remarks touched off a frenzy of outrage, leading him to make a sincere apology the following week on air.
That contretemps came just a week before the publication of his first book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, was published by Crown.
CL spoke to Hayes, the editor-at-large for The Nation magazine, earlier this week. We began by asking him about a column written Tuesday in the New York Times by columnist David Brooks. Brooks wrote that he didn't know if America had a leadership problem, but it certainly had a "followership problem," agreeing with Hayes' main contention in his book that large majorities of Americans don't trust their institutions. But he breaks with Hayes when he writes that's not because our institutions are performing worse than they did 90 years ago or 50 years ago — it' s because "more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them."
Needless to say, Mr. Hayes takes exception to those comments.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2012.