Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course, Trump versus Democracy. Donald Trump's speeches of late are chock full of warnings about the threat from within posed by his myriad opponents, those he decries as vermin how to destroy the US and the American dream. He routinely promises to crush his critics and make America great again. As always with Trump, there's a
method to his madness. A history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country's perfect time is a key tool of authoritarians, notes historian Heathercox Richardson in her new book Democracy Awakening. It allows them to characterize anyone who opposes them as an enemy of the country's great destiny.
Richardson is a professor at Boston College specializing in the Civil War era, and she's the author of a popular newsletter, Letters from an American, which closely monitors and ponders Trump's intersection with US politics. Like all forms of authoritarianism, she argues, trump Ism clause at American democracy's true roots, at what she describes as the idea that a nation can be based not in land or religion, or race or hierarchies,
but rather in the concept of human equality. Richardson joins Crash Course today to discuss the lessons from her new book, Democracy Awakening, which already sits happily and handily as top bestseller lists. Welcome to the show, Heather.
It's such a pleasure to be here, Tim.
I'm just very stoked that you're with us today. We've got so much to talk about, and I don't know that we can contain it in this little narrow package we have, but let's give it a shot. Tell me why this book? What was the germinating kind of motive behind this one?
This book was intended to be a series of short essays that explained all the questions that people ask me every single day, like how did the parties switch sides? And you know, what was the Southern strategy? But I realized pretty early on that the question people ask me most is how did we get here? What on earth is going on? And how do we get out of it?
So quickly it became thirty short chapters that take us from how we got to this particular moment in the Republican Party that gave us Donald Trump, and how Donald Trump took that moment and turned it into an authoritarian movement, and then finally how we get out and it actually grew quite a bit from what I initially had intended it to be.
And what do you think a historian brings to the table that other analysts don't when taking on a project, and the kind of questions you just brought up.
That's a really important question because a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that I am a journalist and I am not. I'm trained very differently than journalists are. What historians do is we try to explain how societies change. So we become very well verse in looking at actual facts on the ground, looking at documents, looking at speeches, looking at events, at things that happen and how they happen.
But crucially, although there's overlap there between historians and journalists, what historians then go on to do is look at the patterns try and say this is what is happening and how it is changing society. So in this particular moment, there's so much coming at us all the time, which by the way, is partly by design from people who
are trying to undermine our democracy. But there's so much coming at us all the time that it's somebody like me who can say, you need to pay attention to this, maybe not so much to this, because these things show patterns and they show how society is changing. That other stuff is just noise.
Yeah, you mentioned that magic word patterns. I often think that pattern recognition is one of the highest forms of insight, whether it's in the arts or in history or in journalism. That you know, weaving together connected events to them into an understandable whole for your readers or your audience or whoever, is a huge public service. It's I think an animating force in your newsletter for sure, and it's certainly very vibrant in this wonderful book that you've written.
Well, you can find patterns that are false. I mean, that's one of the things that historians will do, is we are not q you know, we are actually looking for patterns that have establishment in history and that have shown us how they play out. And that's an important distinction as well.
So let's talk about that a little bit in the context of this book, because I find it very important and it's fascinating. I think one of the things in your work, at least from my standpoint, is the development and evolution of Republican ideology. And there's a sort of classic Lincoln era republican ideology which is very different from
republicanism today. But in your book, I think, as a departure point, you begin with the New Deal in the nineteen thirties, this federal response to horrors in the downturn of a massive economic dislocation, and the very fact of how the Roosevelt administration responded to that crisis raised a number of threats to conservatives around how they believe the world should work and what was happening to the world
they inhabited. That it set in motion a series of responses that have led to where we are right now, and I was wondering if you could kind of delineate some of those for us.
Sure, But first let's start with the idea that the word conservative was picked up very deliberately in nineteen thirty seven by those people who opposed the New Deal. They weren't embracing conservative ideology, they were using that term politically, and let me explain what I mean by that. So, the reason that the book starts in nineteen thirty seven.
Is because after FDR I reelection in nineteen thirty six, a lot of the people who really opposed what he was doing thought that he was going to flame out, that in fact, he was an aberration, and as soon as he was thrown out of office in nineteen thirty six, we would go back to the kind of government that we had had in the nineteen twenties, which is the
one that they liked. FDR when he took office, began to use the government in an entirely new way, doing what he called offering a New Deal to the American people. That's how it gets the name it has. And that New Deal was a government that worked for the people, and it did so by regulating business, providing a basic
social safety net like social security, for example. That's when that gets instituted, promoting infrastructures, so the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, which brings electricity, among other things, to regions that had not previously had it, and that works on our roads, and that works on our public installations like post offices and customs houses and hospitals and railroads and schools.
That was all part of the New Deal. And finally the New Deal began to protect civil rights in the States, not anywhere nearly as fully as it would beginning in the nineteen forties, but all of those aspects of government are new to the New Deal. A number of people look at that new government and they consider it anathema.
They want to go back to the nineteen twenties. And those people are led both by Republicans who don't want business regulation because they insist that that takes a man's property and interferes with his ability to run his affairs as he wishes, and Southern Democrats who are virulently racist and want to maintain their Jim Crow systems in the
American South. So those two groups come together in nineteen thirty seven and they put together a document that they call the Conservative Manifesto, and it says that the government should not regulate business for the reasons I just said. It should not provide a basic social safety net because that belongs to the churches. It should not promote infrastructure because that should be done by private enterprise, which can then pocket the profits. And it certainly should not interfere
with civil rights. It calls for something called home rule, which means that Southern states get to keep whatever racial codes that they have. The Conservative Manifesto disappears really quickly for a number of reasons, but it gets reprinted in Chamber of Commerce newspapers and newspapers around the country, and that set of principles becomes the centerpiece of a faction of the Republican Party that becomes known as movement Conservatives.
And that's why I just drew the distinction about the word conservative, because they are not embracing the ideals of conservatism so much as they are a political movement. And that political movement gradually comes to take over the Republican Party.
And we could walk through all the pieces of that if you would like, But what it means is that it begins to assault this idea that is shared by both Republicans and Democrats after World War Two, that the government should do all the things that FDR and later Truman and Eisenhower begin to use it to do. Americans like that, They've always liked that. But the movement conservatives.
Just interrupt you for just a second, right there. You know, when you were talking about the development of the Conservative Manifesto and the response to the New Deal, I recently finished David Nassau's biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, and Kennedy was essentially co opted by FDR to be an ambassador to that very community. Kennedy was one of the few sort of titans of business at the time who said,
you know, the world has changed. I consider myself a conservative, but I also know now there's going to be a permanent role for government in the life of the country in a way that had existed before. And I'm ready to sort of advocate for that. But most of the business class he came out of, and certainly most of the Republican Party where he had one foot in, didn't
agree with him at all around that. And that sort of tension that began in that period that you've identified really then gets to be this war over whether or not the government itself is a valuable presence in American life becomes this political football in the year that you were about to talk about.
Well, and I'm happy to talk about them, but this is a really interesting rabbit hole that you just opened up, and that is that it is no accident that it comes from somebody like Kennedy, because a lot of the ideas behind the New Deal come from the Democratic Party. Obviously, that has its roots in the urban areas in the East, especially in places like New York, where local governments had in fact been taking on these roles since the eighteen eighties.
And in many ways you can look at the New Deal as the application of those lessons from the Gilded Age in the cities to the national government. So having somebody like Kennedy in there, who knew, of course, the histories of those urban areas, had lived in those cities, is a really nice bridge between that old urban machine and the idea of bringing that kind of a government to the national level.
So let me get you back on track again, since I bought you to the Kennedy rabbit hole. You know, we have this post World War two consensus, as you noted that both the New Deal and World War two spending had created an economy and a high tide that lifted many boats, and there was more or less a consensus that that kind of an economy created a broad middle class and was good for a broad swath of
Americans who had access to the economy. But that didn't really survive the post World War two years intact, did it.
It didn't, and it didn't because of the May nineteen fifty four Brown Versus Board of Education decision, by which the Supreme Court began to defend civil rights in the States. It said that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. And with that, the next year you get the establishment of the National Review under William F. Buckley Junior, in which he vows to tell, as he says, the violated businessman's
side of the story. But immediately he begins to make the argument and his writers begin to make the argument that all along, while people had liked this large federal government that was protecting their economic rights, that what was really going to happen was you would start to see the redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers people of wealth
to undeserving black Americans. And this was a trope right out of Reconstruction, and it's one that they deploy really effectively from nineteen fifty five on that In nineteen fifty seven, of course, Eisenhower is going to send the troops to Little Rock to integrate Little Rock Central High School. That simply adds gasoline too the fire. By nineteen sixty you have the rise of somebody like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who argues that he will take the government back to
the nineteen twenties. Sixty four, he becomes the Republican candidate for president and picks up in that election his home state of Arizona and the five deep Southern states that want to maintain segregation. By sixty eight, Nixon's going to have to make a decision about whether or not he's going to go down that same route or try to pick up the new black voters who have been empowered
by the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He doubles down on the Southern strategy, telling strom Thurmond of South Carolina, for example, that he would not use the federal government to enforce desegregation. And that line keeps on going. You see Reagan picking it up with the Welfare Queen and giving one of his important speeches in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered very famously in
nineteen sixty four. And that thread that a government that works for all the American people is simply redistributing wealth from white people to black people, is a form of socialism, which you are still hearing today from the Republican Party, becomes more and more and more central to that party's message and becomes more and more and more exaggerated.
It also, you know, the idea that states' rights are getting trampled at the expense of a muscular and overweening federal government is part of this as well, and it informs the federal ear of society. It informs this legal push into creating a bulwark around the notion of states rights and any other right that gets federalized, whether it's access to reproductive rights, it's access to voting, etc. Et cetera,
et cetera, amounts to a trampling of states rights. So in addition to everything that you've just charted here on the political and socioeconomic side of the ledger, you get this very powerful push on the legal side as well to enshrine state rights as an argument against federalism.
Essentially, yes, and that's precisely what they are doing. They begin to argue that these Supreme Court decisions, which by the way of course, are decided under a Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren had been a Republican governor of California, and they are unanimous decisions. Sings
like Brown versus Board is a unanimous decision. But those decisions of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, those opponents of those decisions begin to argue that this is judicial activism, that is, judges are deciding something on which voters never agreed, and so they begin to defend states' rights on the idea that this is a way to return power to the people. But of course there is within that a poison pill, and that is that states also decide who
gets to vote. So by throwing everything back to the states, you're throwing them to a body that gets to decide who gets to vote in those states. And this was always the problem with the concept of states rights, that until you protect universal voting in the states very quickly, what you see in the states is a few people manipulating who gets to vote in those states and therefore
determining their outcome. And the very concept of states rights, when Andrew Jackson first really began to embrace it ideologically in the late eighteen twenties, was tied up in this idea, and in the nineteenth century, that idea of states rights actually gets to the point that you have people arguing that the whole idea of a human enslavement is actually pro democracy because voters in states have decided to enslave their neighbors, and because they have decided to do that,
it's just fine. And you see that right throughout the late nineteenth century.
As long as the state wants to do it and it's residents vote for it, even if those districts sort of been jerrymandered, it's okay. You can do anything you want under the umbrella of states rights. And we're living with that now. We'll explore some of that as we go forward. All of these concepts that you and I are talking about, politicians and people on the ground, over time became more and more adept at exploiting them. You began with Barry Goldwater. You mentioned Richard Nixon. You get
to Ronald Reagan. You get from Ronald Reagan, I think, to Nuton Gingrich. You get from Nuton Gingrich to Sarah Palin. You get from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump. And Trump is sort of the apotheosis of all of this, because I don't think he's probably ever read a single book of history. He certainly hasn't read yours, But in his sort of reptilian brain, he does have this street smart
apprehension about what moves people emotionally. He's got a salesman's understanding of how to pluck at people's heartstrings around certain issues and certainly around the issues that divide them. And that's what I want to get into as we continue this conversation after the break, Heather, We're back with historian Heather Cox Richardson, and we're exploring creeping authoritarianism in American
life and politics. So, whether we've been discussing the roots of our current wrestling match with authoritarianism personified by Donald Trump, I probably gave short shrift to all of that. I think your book gives anybody who's got the time to read Democracy Awakening, you can explore that at greater length. Do you want to bring us up to the president?
Because Trump is such a litmus test and sort of the approve I think of the dangerous outcomes that come from a lot of the things we've been exploring, and you bookend, I guess I'll refer to it as round
one of the Trump era. Because Trump has had one tour through the White House, he's positioned, it would seem, at the time of this podcast to be setting himself up possibly for a second tour, so you sort of bookend round one of the Trump era with his election as president November twenty sixteen, and then the insurrection he fomented at the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one. I think it's obvious why you chose those two things.
They're vibrant and useful and disturbing. But talk to me a little bit about how you, as a historian, think about both of those events.
Well, let's start with something you just said, and that's that Trump is a salesman. And I think it's important to recognize that we would not have Donald Trump had we not had the previous forty years of Republican leaders dividing the nation into quite deliberately and convincing their voters that those people who did not vote for a Republican not necessarily just Democrats, but those other parties who didn't vote for a Republican were people who were trying to
replace American capitalism with socialism. They demonized these people as being increasingly anti American. And what Trump did was he held up a mirror to those people and said, listen, I can fix the economic stuff that you don't like. People forget in twenty sixteen, he was the most moderate Republican in terms of economics on the debate stages. You know, he called for fixing tax loopholes, he called for better and cheaper healthcare, he called for infrastructure, he called for
bringing back manufacturing. But he also promised that he would actually hurt those people that the Republican Party had so demonized with his sexism and his racism and his an attacks on a disabled reporter, and all of the ways in which he seemed to body the idea of getting rid of those bad people. So his election, I think was a picture of a certain part of the American
population in that moment in twenty sixteen. And I also obviously talk about the disinformation campaign that really helped him, and the different pieces of that election that were unusual because there was an attempt to disrupt American democracy from places like Russia, for example. But what Trump does that is so important is he takes that disaffected population and
he turns him into a movement. And that welding of those people into a movement are what gives us that moment in twenty twenty one where his followers are willing to destroy America. In order to recreate their own version of a new kind of America in which they are better than everybody else.
It's deeply seated cult of personality. Essentially, you start with people sort of throwing their vote to Donald Trump. You end with people being willing to do whatever he tells them to do because they think, in a world full of mixed messages on social media and countervailing facts, that he's a lens for both authenticity and value, and therefore if he tells them to march, they'll march.
Yes. But this is a place where historians are helpful historians and scholars of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, because there's a really central question there. How do people go from oh, yeah, I'll cast a vote for this guy to yes, I will follow him to the point that I'm going to end up either dead or in prison for very long
periods of time. And his scholars began to study that after World War II, and people like Hannah arent who was a great theorist of totalitarianism, or Eric Hoffer, who was a long shoreman in San Francisco, had a great insight into what makes people follow an authoritarian and those two ideas put together, I think tell us a lot
about Donald Trump's following. So, first of all, in twenty seventeen, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he does something very important and just by the way it changes the way he approaches the presidency. Although I don't really talk a lot about that in the book, but he gives authority to those militia movements, those far right movements, those fringe movements that have been percolating through American society really since at least the nineteen nineties, at least in
the Clinton administration and even before that. He says to them, you are good people. You don't have to live on the fringes any longer. And that matters because one of the ways that you create a movement out of those disparate fringe elements is by making them feel like they are a team and that they are working with each other to fight back against something. Once they have that sense of unity, you can convince them to follow an ideology that they were not necessarily that involved with to
begin with. They might have just been there with their friends to throw some punches. By the time that they are coming out of something like the Unite the right rally, though, which is obviously more than throwing punches. But the idea is the same. The ones they have come out of that, they are very susceptible to a strong man taking them
to yet more extreme levels going forward from that. So once they've done that, once they have started to go down a violent path, a path in which they are fighting people that they believe to be their enemies, there's something interesting paradoxical that happens. And Eric Hoffer points to this in his nineteen fifty one book True Believers. The worse the leader behaves, the tighter they cling to him, because they have become psychologically committed to the idea that
their enemies deserve to be treated badly. If they break away from that, they have to admit that they were the ones who were in the wrong, They were the ones who deserved to be treated badly, and that's a psychological leap that very few people can do. So Paradoxically, once a strong man has them on the hook, the worse he behaves, the more tightly they cling to him. And my great example of this, I mean, I think people can see it certainly with Donald Trump, but also
with other authoritarian leaders in the past. You know, you think people in twenty fifteen who followed Trump could not imagine themselves now following somebody who calls his opponents vermin and needs to get rid of them. You can see
how that transgression happened in our society. But lots of people have read the Harry Potter books and Narcissa in that is a classic example of somebody who follows Voldemort no matter how badly he treats her, her compatriots, and her family, because she is so psychologically committed to him. And I think that comparison is a good one. If you can't see what's happening to you in the United States, to see it in this fictional world, because that's exactly what Eric Hoffer described.
You know. Another dynamic in this is that I think that Trump learned his authoritarianism on the job. He was certainly prepped to sort of glide into this moment. But you know, I think he always wants to please who's
ever in front of him. He rode tests messages, and then as he gets amplified responses, he doubles down on those because he doesn't really care intellectually about the content of the messages and He certainly doesn't care from a public service standpoint, you know, whether or not he's delivering effective policy or solutions to his voters. But he does care about an emotional connection. He loves being affirmed. He
loves seeing people believe that he's affirming them. And I think throughout his presidency he kept finding these moments where he could pull more and more people in with increasingly divisive and ugly messaging. And you know, like when you mentioned him cultivating these small militia groups, I think they began showing up at his rallies. I don't think he really had knowledge and advance in the early stages of his presidency that these crews would be rolling into his rallies,
But they showed up. He realized they were responding to something that he was saying, and then he doubled down again on that message. And what he was doubling down on is someone's trying to steal your candy. That may be a brown person from Mexico, it may be an ambitious woman, it may be the Chinese. But there are a lot of people out there who are trying to take things from you. And I'm going to be your defender.
I'm going to stand in the way of that. And that's essentially the sort of scene quann of who Trump is. And I think he has learned as authoritarianism on the job, though he was certainly also I think morally and intellectually craven enough to just enjoy embracing that. But that brings me to a question I want to ask you about,
which is why Trump. You know, we've traced this line of Goldwater forward, but I don't think Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan would have been so deeply anti institutional and so deeply unmoored as to deploy a lot of the things Donald Trump has to just sort of wallow in division and hatred, to have a willy nilly approach to anti institutionalism, to publicly inveigh in such extreme and dangerous ways against the rule of law and sitting judges and
anyone really who opposes him. You may disagree with me about that, but I did want to use that as a departure point for sort of exploring why Trump and why now?
So one of the words you didn't use when you were describing Trump was the word power. That everything is designed, of course for him to get approval, but also power, and I think the anti institutionalism you point to is crucially important, but it speaks to authoritarians, and it certainly speaks to his quest for power, and that is that one of the key ways in which an authoritarian works is by cultivating those people who would not have power, who would not be able to to enter an administration
for example, that required actual ability, that required you know, lots of hard work. And the degree to which he and his people are anti institutionalists, I think is in part because they are not capable of running the institutions. So the way that they're trying to garner power is to say that they are going to tear down those institutions. And for comparison, for example, think about the people that
President Joe Biden has put into office. They have resumes as long as your arm, and some of them, Gina Ramando, for example, at Commerce. You look at her CV and you think she must be one hundred years old because she has so many degrees and so many really high plaudits for how much work she has done and how
good she is at it. And you compare that with somebody like Chad Wolf that Trump had illegally in as an acting Homeland Security secretary, you know he had no qualifications at all, or Johnny mcintee for exatra.
Jared and Ivanka, the veterans of public policy and government service exactly.
So, if you are not able to join a merit based system, you, I think default to this idea that you have something in you by virtue of being anointed in some fashion by someone to do it without that kind of support, institutional and intellectual support to do that. And you see that, I think with a response to the coronavirus crisis, where you know, Jared Kushner gets put in charge and he goes out and he says, you know, we know the best people. We're going to take care
of this without working through the systems. But then of course it ended up completely being a mess because they didn't understand the different requirements for the hospitals, they didn't understand supply chains, they didn't understand any kind of systems of delivery. The whole thing just blows up in their faces. And what they end up saying is, well, it's not
our fault that this happened. It's the deep state. And that I think you're seeing again now as we're hearing about ideas for a second Trump presidency, in which they are already talking about finding people who pass loyalty tests
rather than necessarily passing any tests of ability. And to the degree that the Trump administration was just a complete mess in terms of getting anything done, it's worth remembering that that was when there were still people around him who did know the ropes, who did understand the law, and those will be gone if there is a second Trump term.
I'm glad that you reminded me that I had left power out of the conversation, because I think one of the truths of the Donald Trump moment is that trump Ism will survive him whether or not he gets into the White House again, because he's demonstrated to members of his party and fellow travelers that trump Ism is an effective path to power. It is a convenient and efficient way to sort of grab power by the throat in
the US. And I think that's why Project twenty twenty five, the Trump team's sort of playbook for what they would institute an American life if Trump gets into office again, doesn't necessarily have to be just a Trump document. It's a trump Ism. It's a form of trump Ism distilled, and I was wondering what kind of longevity you think trump Ism is going to have.
Well, you've identified something that is definitely out there and to be concerned about. But I'm going to suggest something different.
I find this concept really intellectually interesting. That is, we got Trump in large part because of a political theory called virtual politics or political technology, and the idea was that you could destroy democracies not with heavy handed tactics, by limiting anything that people can see in the media, or by overt violence, but rather by creating an information sphere in which people were being fed disinformation, which is
different than misinformation. Misinformation is when I make a mistake and correct myself. Disinformation is when I am deliberately lying to you.
You know.
Gaslighting is what we call it now. You get it by throwing so much stuff at people that they become apathetic and they figure they can't understand what's happening, so it's fine for a strong man to take over. You get it by running false candidates who either switch parties after they're elected, or have names similar to an opponent on a ballot, so that the opponent's votes get split between the real candidate and the false candidate. You get it in all of these ways, and we know it works.
You can see it worked in places like Victor Orbon's Hungary, which was a democracy and now is coming together as an autocracy under Victor Orbon. You saw it where it was first really articulated, not necessarily conceived, but articulated in Vladimir Putin's Russia, which destroyed the concept of democracy for the post Soviet republics, and now, of course is very much strong man rule, and certainly that was the intent
here in the United States. In fact, some of the characters are the same in the places that I've just talked about. But what's interesting to me about that is we know how it works, but we are just now learning what happens when it doesn't manage entirely to destroy that democracy. That is what happens when people wake up and say, hey, wait a minute, I am being manipulated here. And what it seems to me we are saying is that people take a number of different routes, and they
can take a number of roots. First of all, you have people who are previously apathetic that were energized by somebody like Trump probably dropping back and saying, ah, they're all corrupt, I'm not going to play any longer. So you get some people who are apathetic. You also get some people who just don't care. They're going to burn it all down because they can't admit they were wrong. And I think we're seeing that as well with Trump.
But then there's another group, and they're the ones that interests me and I think we are seeing nowadays in the United States, and those are the people who say not on my watch. I've watched people manipulate us to give up our democracy, and I'm going to use those same tools that they used, social media, making sure that we have accurate information, mobilizing voters, telling stories that people
can get behind but that are based in truth. I'm going to use those same tools to take democracy back.
And that I think is just as real an option as the idea that we're going to be living with the poison of Donald Trump and his movement for our lifetimes anyway, because we can see it in things like the overturning of Father Coughlin in the nineteen thirties, who tried to put together an anti Semitic, far right Christian organization to take over American government, or Huey Long or some of the other.
Authoritarians Joe McCarthy.
Joe McCarthy, some of the other budding authoritarians who got incredibly powerful until they weren't anymore. And I think that's as possible as what you are describing.
I want to come back to that thought after we take a break here, Heather, because that's a note of optimism in a dreary, dreary landscape. So let's hear from a sponsor and then we'll come right back. We're back, and we're talking about strong men, history and threats to
the American experiment with Heather Cox Richardson. Heather, you were just talking right at the end of our last segment about ways in which some of the very dynamics that have given rise to Trump and authoritarianism various strong men around the planet these days can also be used by people who want other forms of representation and who want to affect positive change themselves. You call it. I think in the end of your book you talk about reclaiming America.
Talk to me a little bit about that, Like, what are the tools that you see average citizens able to take advantage of in an era in which power seems unfettered. Media is a wash in disinformation. People don't trust facts, people don't trust institutions. What is the avenue out as you see it.
So the avenue out starts with where you started, which is the idea of a perfect past in which our American democracy sprang fully formed out of the brain of George Washington, for example, is ex authoritarian with the idea that we could get back to that if only we elected leaders who would follow a predetermined route back to there, either a route that's determined either by religion or by tradition, or by some specific plan that would take us back
to that perfect past. And the only thing that an authoritarian needs to do is to get rid of those people who would stop him from doing that, with, for example, these unfortunate laws that are making him unable to do that. That idea of a past that is stuck back in some golden era and will only require an authoritarian to unearth it again is very counter to the real history of the United States, which is one that I'm calling
a small deed democratic history. The idea that people, ordinary people, have agency, and that the world has never been perfect, and that America has never been perfect. It has always been burdened with sexism and racism and classism and all sorts of things that made it impossible for everybody to live their best life. But that in all of those circumstances, ordinary Americans use their agency to change the future going forward.
And that's something that's really important in this moment when so many people feel like they don't have control over the world around them, and I think that is a learned lack of control because of that sort of history that has been fed to so many people for so long. Once they take back their agency, though, there are a number of critical things that people can do. So I'm an idealist, which means that I believe ideas change the world.
And the way you change ideas is by changing the way you talk about democracy, talk about the world, and talk about the issues that are at stake in this moment. And you can see how important it is to change those ideas if you look at things like the fact that Clarence Thomas re accused himself from a case involving the January sixth attack on the US Capitol, which he
never would have done. Did he not feel that he were under pressure from people who are concerned about his ethicsandals, So the idea of taking up oxygen, of changing the way people talk about things is number one. There are other, much more instrumental things, though, and that is the people who object to the authoritarian takeover of this country need to contest elections at every single level to some degree.
And we haven't talked about the Democrats at all for obvious reasons, but for a lot of people, I think they have come to the place where they think that just electing their president is going to be enough, and the president will do magical things. In fact, it's at the local and the state levels that so many of the laws that affect our lives are being determined, like, for example, redistricting that has led to such extreme gerrymandering
in places like North Carolina. That happened at the state level, and at the local level. Of course, you're also looking at school boards and at local ordinances, things that really affect people at the day to day level.
And state legislatures that are dominated by one party that are no longer by cameral in any meaningful way exactly.
And they got there not only by people vote at that level, but also by the redistricting that gave the Republicans such extraordinary legs up. Just a side note here, jerrymandering benefits democrats in one state in the top ten of gerrymandered states, but the other nine are all republican gerrymandered states, so it's really kind of a republican problem there. So there are lots of things that people can do to affect the future going forward.
You note in the book that and I quote, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint. So is the contra to that idea true as well, that democracies are reinvigorated at the ballot box more than any other form.
Yes, I think it is, but I would say before you get to the ballot box. You know, one of the things about the last section of the book that I think was subtle and maybe too subtle, is that each section that takes the country from its inception through the present looks at a different way that groups mobilized people to expand liberal democracy. So it looks at, you know, using organizations dramatically to change the way people understand what
their rights are. It shows how the NAACP, for example, use that organization to bring transparency to the ways in which laws were crushing individuals primarily in the Southern States. It looks at ways in which people who did not have access to the vote claimed places in the United States by virtue of the way that they act and
the books that they published. So it looks at a lot of different ways that people can affect their futures in and expanding liberal democracy without limiting that simply to voting, or even simply to taking up oxygen the way that I've talked about.
So being as active as possible in your community, even if that's a micro community, organizing with local groups, voting, paying attention and being discerning. Is that too simplistic?
No, I don't think it is. I mean one of the things that political scientists will tell you that there is literally nothing you can do that's more effective to change somebody's opinions about things and to change the way they vote. It's something that they put a very fancy name on they call it relational organizing. But all it means is talk to your friends, you know, make sure your friends understand what's at stake when they vote, and
help them get to the polls. And that makes a huge difference in turnout and in the makeup of the ultimate votes. So We see this all the way back, of course, but really dramatically. The John Birch Society did this in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties to try and turn out a right wing constituency. There's no law at all that says that liberals can't do the same thing.
You make a point in the book that the US is built on embracing and explicitly democratic history that places the principles of the Declaration of Independence at the forefront of civic life. Do you see that as actually more important than the Constitution? That the Constitution is a blueprint of how a government should work, but the Declaration is sort of a call for what our higher goal should be. Or am I simplifying things again?
Well, there's a saying in history that if you have rights, you stand on the Constitution, and if you want rights, you stand on the Declaration. They're very different documents. One sets out a set of principles to explain to the world why it's an okay thing for the revolutionaries to throw off the government of Great Britain, which of course
was radical, so totally radical thing to do. But in that Declaration of Independence they embrace the idea of what a government of the people should look like, you know, because they don't know, they're really inventing it out of whole cloth. And what they say is that it is possible to construct a government based on the idea that all men are created equal. And of course that's exclusionary in many ways, but the principle that all individuals are
created equal is embedded in that document. And also they say that every individual has a right to a say, and is government of horse is expandable as well. Those principles are I think the rock solid principles on which the expansion of liberal democracy ever since then has stood. That being said, the Constitution is the body of laws that was designed to create a government for that community of equals. Again very limited at the time, but it was a set of laws designed to bring that government
into existence. And as we know, of course, it was a reaction in part to the Articles of Confederation, and so it created a much stronger federal government than at first the framers believed was necessary to have a government that was based in democracy. I think that's a really important distinction. Both of the documents are important, but what the Constitution really does is it sets up the concept of a nation built on a body of laws and
the institutions that will support that body of laws. It also sets up ways for us to amend that constitution, which I think is also very important. But that machine that would go of itself, as a poet later called it, is I think an important basis for our democratic concepts and remains vitally important in this moment when there are people who would tear it down.
Heather, I always like to ask guests what they've learned, what their most recent AHAs are, and I wanted to know what you've learned about the threat of authoritarianism in the United States that you didn't know before embarking on the writing of this book.
What really threw me for an absolute loop was the degree to which foreign money and the use of foreign money in our democracy since the fall of the Soviet Union influenced what happened here in the United States. Absolutely floored me. I had not been paying that much attention to it either here in the UK. That was earth
shattering to me. And also the degree to which the same people who were deeply involved in the elections of Richard Nixon, people like Roger Stone and Paul Maniford, and Rick Gates and Lee Atwater, although he is going to die long before the present, how deeply they have been
involved in Republican politics since the nineteen sixties. And of course we've got Paul Maniport acting briefly as Donald Trump's campaign manager in twenty sixteen and bringing on board the whole Russian oligarchs, So that connection I was not prepared to see, and it really surprised me. It really made me rethink the entire way that we conceive of American democracy.
For what reason, Well, because the interplay I think between the rise of foreign oligarchs and their need to hide their money in democracies, and how that then led them to back political candidates who would focus on the protection of property rather than the expansion of the public good because they didn't want to pay money to do that.
Of course, that really surprised me. I was also really surprised by the degree to which it seemed that the Nixon administration, when it was thwarted at manipulating elections at home, began to test out ways to do it in places like Chile. That is, I knew the Chilean rise of Pinochet, for example, but I didn't put it together with United States democracy to the degree that it was like they're testing stuff out over there to see if it will
work here. And what sparked that, of course, was the the truck convoys that were clearly designed to hurt the economy and thereby hurt democratic governments here, both in the US and in Canada. That was actually one of the tactics that led to Pinochet taking power, and it was backed by the USCIA. And I was like, wait a minute, this was just like a test and probably has something to do with explaining why Trump followers in twenty sixteen were tish sure it celebrating Pinochet.
We're out of time, Heather, Thank you for such a great conversation today.
Thank you for having me. Although I hate to leave on the word Pinochet, so let me just end instead with thank you.
Heather Cox Frigerdson is the author of Democracy Awakening. She's also the author of a popular substack newsletter, Letters from an American. You can find her on Twitter at HC Underscore Richardson Here at crash Course, we believe that collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In today's Crash Course. I learned that of enough of us just hold hands with our neighbors or anyone else we
can find on the block. Maybe, just maybe we can affect some positive change in this otherwise chaotic political era. What did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the
indispensable Anamazarakas and me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Stage Bauman, Jeff Grocott, Mike Nitze and Christine Vanden Bilark. Blake Maples says. Our sound engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Kara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Course