Be as excited about expanding freedom Anand Giridharadas presents a video conversation about what inpired “The Persuaders” at The Ink : A year from now, America will face a defining choice between authoritarianism and freedom, hatred and love, exclusion and inclusion, and, as of now, it’s a dead heat. It shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be. Early in the conversation, Giridharadas says: In a moment in American life in which the contest is not small government versus big government, blue versus red, left versus right, high taxes versus low taxes, in which the contest is really pro-democracy versus anti-democracy, some of us versus all of us … it was a dead heat. And sometimes we do well in the dead heat. And that means 49-46. A couple states more than that, and sometimes we lose the dead heat. But as a writer, as opposed to being a campaigner who has to eke out these narrow victories, I have the luxury of stepping back a little bit and saying, hold on. We are going to the American people in this era and saying, “Here is fascism, and here is freedom.” And before you get to gerrymandering, just polling, just asking people what they want, it’s 50-50 … ish. I’m not saying all the rigging stuff is not happening, and it magnifies the problem, but I think I started from the premise of we’re being a little bit easy on ourselves when we blame the rigging. The honest truth is we…