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Hey everybody! Welcome to the weekly show. I'm John Stewart. How's your week? How's it? Anything going on? You having a pleasant week? I'm going to say how was your Wednesday? I'm not going to say how was your Tuesday. I was going to say. Yeah, welcome to season 2 of America Presents The Shit Show. I have to say, that I don't have a ton of pronouncements based on this. You know, 2016, I really felt like that was a gut punch in a way because it felt like such a fate of
a complete, that the Democrats were going to win. You were going to feel good about it. There were things that maybe you weren't going to like policy wise, but you felt good. So it felt like an anomaly. This feels different because it is a democratic victory. It was a win.
I feel like we were prepared for all scenarios. In each one of those scenarios, it was, how is Donald Trump going to finagle his way back into the way? How is he going to use undemocratic principles? What measure of intimidation and underhanded shenaniganery will this man use to worm his way back into the Oval Office? And it turned out he used our electoral system.
As it is designed. And in that moment, I thought, well, fuck, we didn't have, I don't not sure we have a team of lawyers for that. I don't know if we have a team of canvassers for that. Which by the way, I don't ever in my life want to hear about our vaunted ground game will put us over the top. It's a 50 50 toss up race. We're sure of it, but the vaunted ground game turns out that.
People knocking on other people's doors doesn't get them to do what you want them to do. As I believe vacuum and Bible salesman probably have known for many, many centuries. Fuck us, fuck me. I was wrong. We'll continue to be wrong. I love to sit back and think about the autopsy and where you move from there. But I think I still feel as though I'm in that. That moment of vertigo to some extent. You know, in the same way that I, you know, when I decided to stop drinking, I didn't do it.
While the room was still spinning. I didn't stop doing, you know, booze and drugs. You know, in that moment of, of lying on the floor, face down, trying to wonder if I just move my hand here, will the room stop?
And I think, I think that's a wise way of looking at it. I think you have to be more clear-eyed, have your balance and your feet underneath you before you can start really thinking about just what it was that made what you think your world view is and the things that you were certain about, not certain. But I will tell you this, that man, I still believe in in in this country. And I still believe in individuals and I still believe in the power of change and organization and goodness, competence.
I mean, for God's sakes, the Mets made the playoffs if that can happen with the injuries that they, it's probably not the time. There are very few people that I want to talk to right now, but one of them has been gracious enough to join us today. And I'm delighted. So I'm just going to get right to that before I continue to babble. So let's go.
All right. So we're just going to get right to it. There is an individual that I delighted could join us today. Her knowledge and insight into our system into the context of it into all those intricacies is unparalleled. And we're delighted she can join us. Professor Heather Cox Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America. Professor, thank you for joining us.
That's a pleasure to be here. Oh, is it a pleasure to do anything right now? Does even ice cream taste good in this current scenario that we are experiencing? Well, to be honest, I haven't eaten since Tuesday. So I would say not on that front, but it is important to reinforce community. And it is always a pleasure to talk to you.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Heather. Well, how did you experience a election night? Was this something that caught you off guard? Was it something that was expected? What was your experience on the night?
You know, I don't think it was unexpected. I think it was, I think we all had hopes that Americans had heard just how bad things would be under Donald Trump and would decide even if they didn't like the policies of Harrison walls that they would go that direction. And that's not what happened. And I think there are lessons to be taken from that.
The most important for me being that we're in a swirl of disinformation in this country so that a lot of people who voted for Trump really truly voted for things that were the opposite of what they say they wanted. And that's, that's a real problem going forward.
In terms of what exactly because it's almost if I'm thinking about kind of an I boil it down to the commercials that I was watching for all the candidates. It feels in some respect that what they told you to be afraid of was better than what we told you to be afraid of.
You know, they were basically selling a migrant invasion, a trans invasion. I mean, almost every commercial touched on either one of those. And it seemed as though from the left it was we are selling you that democracy is going to be over. And it seems like the people went, I'm more afraid of the migrants than I am of our system being eradicated. Does that feel accurate?
Maybe accurate, but one of the things that I think we're going to have to grapple with going forward is that there has always been so much wiggle room in the strength of the United States that it was okay to backslide a little bit because the guardrails were there to keep us on track.
And I think a lot of people can't imagine a world in which those guardrails aren't there, but they really aren't. I mean, what we have done is we have voted to get rid of the ones that are left because they have been so eroded over the past 40 years really. What would those guardrails be Heather, if I could well, I'll get there, but I do want to speak to what you just said about the things to fear.
I think that's really important that the right wing emphasized things that ordinary Americans had to fear that were not real. Right. And they erase the things that are real. I mean, objectively our economy is fabulous. One of the best economies over the best economy we had since the 1960s. Real wages for 80% of Americans have gone up income for the top 20% has gone down in that period.
Those are generally things that most voters would like, but they don't know that they think the economy is terrible. It's a failing economy and that Trump is going to come in with his tariffs and save that and every economist will say that's exactly backward.
So I think you have to grapple with the fact that people have been have really been put into a position of something that political theorists, especially coming out of Russia called political technology, which is that you can get people to vote away their democracy or to vote for the people that they are told to vote for so long as you create a false world for them to believe in. And I think that that's really what we have seen right here.
Right. Let me ask you about that because I that's fascinating to me because I do think they created an emotional reality. But there is a hint of it in there and that's and that's this. You know, we look objectively at the markers for the economy in terms of GDP or wages or infrastructure investment and all those things as being the envy of the world. Our country right now is is thriving in a way that other countries are not.
But if in your house, you're still struggling is the sense that okay, maybe the system that we're selling to people no longer feels valid to them. In other words, if our economic system we look at and say this is thriving, but people don't feel it, do they start to begin to say, well, maybe the system itself isn't delivering in a way that we need.
So then when you say this is to protect the system, they think, why would I protect something that's not delivering for me even when it's working properly. Well, yes, except I think it's important to recognize that the system under which we live from 1981 to 2021 neo liberalism, the idea that you were going to rely on markets and let all the money go to the top because people at the top would invest more efficiently than if the government got involved either through regulation or taxes.
That system, Joe Biden very deliberately deconstructed and replaced with the system we had had before that that did work for everybody. He invested in ordinary Americans, he stood for unions, he used the FTC to break up monopolies and to get rid of junk fees and to try and make it easier for people to start businesses.
All the things that should have made ordinary Americans say, hey, yeah, this is pretty good. We had inflation, but we just went up faster than inflation and yeah, eggs were more expensive, but that's because there was a bird flu. And then there was price gouging all of these things that people like you and me tried to get out there, but that is not what voters heard what they heard is exer more expensive products are more expensive.
Joe Biden's fault instead of the people who had really ruled from 1981 to 2021 and instead what have they done, they have elected somebody who is vowed to put those old things back into place and make their lives more expensive and then turn around and blame the what they call the liberals who they think are responsible for the cost of things because of their policies and because they have been welcoming to immigrants who are also important to our economy.
Heather, you brought up a really interesting point, which is people are voting to return to a system that they seem to be rejecting, but what was so interesting to me when you talked about neoliberalism and supply side, the Democrats have embraced that in similar ways.
I mean, Clinton famously deregulated financial institutions, which you could point to as the 2008 crisis, Genesis, I don't know what you just described to me about the economic policies of the Biden administration is the first time I heard it framed that way.
Which is just killing me because while what you're saying is exactly true, you know, after the Reagan revolution, the Democrats made a decision that they were going to try and go after the vote, the Reagan voters. And so yes, they did purge from their ranks, all of the people who were arguing to go back to that sort of liberal consensus of the period after World War II, but Biden has been every day he's been out there saying this is exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
And you know, literally he's even comparing some of his policies to those of FDR and it just never cracked into the media. There was somebody who was out there yesterday saying an economics reporter that I won't name saying, you know, people want to get rid of neoliberalism. And I'm like, we did we did and nobody knows it and you voted to go back to it. And instead of going back to neoliberalism, what we're going to go to is autocracy, which is a different thing.
Because it will not be governed by the rule of law, it will be governed by cronism and the kind of corruption that we've seen in other autocracies. That's not what people think they're voting for. They think they're voting for the ideas that Biden embraced investing in the middle class, investing in creating a new economy. And in fact, they've just voted that away in favor of a system of autocracy.
And so, I think that's the reason why Biden's economic policy in the sense that the consensus in the media was that that caused the inflation. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've heard, oh, we it was just that last bit of stimulus that kept people in their houses and fed that made it so that the inflation is so unbearable.
And so, the way reckoning with the complexity of inflation or the complexity of our economy. And in some ways, I think locking in that feeling that if you stimulate the economy on the demand side, you will necessarily drive inflation.
And that's actually the way it was portrayed, but I think you're making a bigger point. And that is what this rejection of the Biden economic plan has shown to future politicians is that there is no upside in trying to invest in ordinary Americans that you will not get rewarded for it.
And so, there's no reason to do that. And that's a really big lesson that is, I think, going to end up really coming back to bite the people who voted for it. You've just said to any future politicians do not bother actually to try and do things for the middle class, because they won't appreciate it. Instead, you should go ahead and simply continue to, you know, to pervert their information base so that they think you're doing something even though you're not.
Invest more in the strategies of distortion, reality distortion fields and create those. It was so interesting because in this election, it did seem to be a populist competition, you know. But the Democrats kind of abandoned that. I think Bernie Sanders, quite eloquently and angrily, put it recently. But I can remember tuning in. There was one specific day where I thought I don't know where I live anymore.
Donald Trump was in a barber shop talking to guys sitting around getting their haircut and Kamala Harris was on the road, kind of hugging Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney. And I thought, well, now I don't I don't even really know what we're what what are these coalitions anymore.
Well, I think that that's a really interesting observation and it is worth pointing out that Trump did not tell the people in that barber shop that he was going to be using as a photo opportunity and the person owned a barber shop.
Complain about that said, you know, yeah, deception, right. But I think what I saw and what I thought was really hopeful. I really thought we were looking at a new political moment in the United States, because what Harris did is she moved very deliberately to a bipartisan center.
That looked a lot like an Eisenhower coalition or like a Teddy Roosevelt coalition and bringing to walls on board who was, of course, he's a democratic governor of Minnesota, but his approach to the kinds of progressive politics he put in place in Minnesota is very, very much like traditional Republican progressiveism from the early 20th century, which was enormously popular.
So to bring him on board with the democratic vision for an economic recovery for ordinary people and to jettison the identity politics that had been associated with the Democrats, I really thought was an attempt to go back to this centrist coalition that really could have power lasting power for generations.
I really thought that was going to happen and I still think if you think about the way Americans think about issues that is the sweet spot for American politics, but I also think in this moment what we have just learned is that that realistic approach to politics cannot stand against the modern techniques of propaganda that are that are enabled by social media.
And that I think is going to force a real reckoning with the meaning of American politics going forward, although I have to say Heather, the way you're framing it is a lot more concise and digestible for me than what I have heard on the media or even from the campaign itself. I wouldn't have minded a kind of explicit statement of that because I think that is more persuasive in towards that end, I think it that feels like a pretty persuasive kind of coalition to build.
All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back. Now streaming on Paramount Plus, you do have a lot going on. I'm fine. You got a brand new baby and unemployed wife. You got no money. Okay, okay. Georgie and Mandy's first marriage new series now streaming on Paramount Plus new episodes CBS Thursday 8 7 Central. Don't miss the epic return of Yellowstone from hearing tonight at eight only on Paramount that work. You're destroying me. You destroy yourself.
And like you, I keep my promises. The epic return of Yellowstone tonight at eight on Paramount Network. Okay, we are back. Let's think about this. You know, Steve Bannon is famously the strategist for. He was a strategist for Donald Trump and for whatever else you think what he envisioned is kind of what came true. He thought, let's go after the white working class populist center that was the Democrats strength.
Combine that with our evangelicals and all the other things and we'll create this durable voting coalition that's kind of a Trojan horse. Is that a lot of power for these autocratic tendencies? Yes. Yes, but I think you're looking at it in a very different way than I am. And I think you're looking at it much more of the way that modern politicians look at it as they're trying to build coalition.
So that's actually if you care very post 1960 when there was a real revolution in the way people did did politics. But what I'm suggesting is that the heart of politics is the way people think about the world. And what Steve Bannon has said and been part of really since Andrew Breitbart died and he took over Breitbart. Remember that? Sure. He actually changed Breitbart a lot. You know, Breitbart had been a certain kind of thinker. Bannon came in and really turned Breitbart.
And this is a long time ago now for a lot of people and maybe it's worth thinking about him more generally. But he really started bashing women and people of color and talking about them is really inferior. And that was part of an ideology. And it's an ideology that I think we have seen come to the four.
And that is the ideology that we need to reject democracy because democracy insists that we treat everybody equally before the law. LGBTQ plus people women minorities ethnic and racial and religious minorities. And that that equality flies in the face of paternalism, especially Christian paternalism run by white men. And Bannon could say, for example, as he was bashing black Americans or women that he was not actually prejudiced against them or biased against them.
He was actually trying to help them because they would do better in a system where they were subordinate to white male leaders. And I think what you have seen here in this election is the coming together of the tech bros who want to get rid of the kinds of regulations that our government has put in place to make sure we treat people equally before the law and that you don't treat some people as if they are able to go do whatever.
They want to get rid of those regulations and they have come together with those Christian nationalists who also want to return to a white male Christian patriarchy. And now with autocrats who would love simply to get rid of regulations so that they can run the economy and put money into their own pockets. And that difference in ideology between people who believe that some people are better than others and have the right to rule.
And people like me who actually believe that people should be treated equally before the law and have a right to a say in their government is fundamentally the struggle that we've had throughout our history and that we are seeing now. I really on Tuesday looks like the democracy side lost.
The old battle that I think most people maybe my age and maybe a little bit older, slightly younger saw was it was our form of liberal democracy, freedom, individual rights versus communism versus authoritarian states. Capitalism versus communism, it was freedom versus authoritarianism, this seems like a realignment of to put it, you know, in current parlance, woke versus unwoke.
And it's an alignment that brings paradoxically this group draped in we the people and symbolic American iconography in line with the illiberal Russia and Hungary because what you're suggesting is the common cause through this protection of classic western civilization, which is as you said sort of a more white Christian male leadership.
But if that's the case, how do we explain inroads into black communities and Latino communities, are they voting on something different, did they not believe that did they, did they view it as a worry in that club now, how do you, how would you explain that?
Well, first of all, there's a reason that the Trump people carry Confederate flags, you know, that's you cannot forget that there is there is an and carry Nazi flags. I mean, that's that's not to say they embrace all the different aspects of those different political movements, but all of those movements are ones that talk about a small group of people exercising their will and power over a majority over people who are not like them.
And if you think about the ways in which Hispanic voters, the Hispanic male voters switched to Trump and and some black voters did as well, fewer than I think the holsters suggested would happen, but also that white women, although female female Latino voters as well. And white women, I mean, the real thing, you know, we can talk about the different groups of minority voters, but this is white people who put Trump in power. Let's not forget that.
Including white women who will die from lack of medical care going forward. And you know, the way I think about it is rather than thinking about politics as being, you know, sort of coalitions is really politics should be about governance, but it can be about power. And the way I think about it is if you have, you know, 10 people in a room, eight of them just want to get by, you know, they just want to put food on the table and have a good time and have their friends and have a nice life.
But there are two people who want to control everybody else and the way that they get that power is to get six people to turn against the two at the bottom. And the way that you use the way that you do that is through the stories you tell. So if you can tell those people in the middle that those two people at the bottom and you can pick them at random, you know, because of the clothes they wear or the color of their eyes or the skin or whatever, then you can get power from those other six.
And that would explain to me anyway why why people of color will turn against other groups of color or why white women will vote against their own interests or, you know, because they are hearing stories that say, you must turn against those two people at the bottom or we're going to turn against you. And it's why I do what I do is because I think the stories we tell about who we are in the communities we are are the way that you garner power.
Then have we had there if it's about the stories we tell have we been lying to ourselves is this is this idea of American exceptionalism or this idea of a more perfect union or this idea of, you know, the arc of the moral universe, but we're not against towards justice are these mythologies as well that that we've told ourselves are a birthright of the enlightenment of our of our early thinkers.
Is it that the system that we designed that was written with quill pens on parchment? Is no match for the realities of a modern digital age.
They are questions. They are. Hey, I'm both have I would say and I've thought believe me, I've been spending a couple of, you know, I've just been thinking, you know, because that's what I do when something goes wrong because I do think this moment forces us to reconsider the meaning of American democracy and whether in fact it is possible to have a democracy of 332 million people, which we can get to and I think that that's really important.
Multicultural democracy of 332 people or just a democracy of that many people just a democracy, just a democracy and I would like to talk about that because I've given a lot of thought and I think I have ideas, but in terms of the stories we tell,
I do want to point out that we are not in the same place we were in 1776 that in fact things have gotten better for a lot of people and the reason that they have gotten better for a lot of people is because a lot of people working together build a strong economy and we have access to resources and so on and so forth, right.
But the stories we tell about how we got there need to be inclusive stories and my take on them is that we have gotten to where we are because of the agency of individual human beings working to make the world better for everybody and that does that's not the 1776 project that says we've always been great and anybody says otherwise is wrong. That's authoritarianism because it says you want to get back to a perfect past and you can do it so long as you get rid of these people in the way. Right.
And it is not the kind of critiques that you get from the American left or have in the past that say that our system is so corrupted by racism and sexism that it needs to be torn down. What my version of history has always said is that people are going to people you know we have an America no great difference than anybody else we do really great things and we do really crappy things because we're people.
But that our story if it is predicated on the idea that everybody should be treated equally before the law and should have equal access to education and opportunity and a say in their government will in fact do what is best for the majority of the majority of the people. That's not to say we're not going to screw up and we'll also do brilliant things but mostly it will be stable and it will continue to be prosperous and and just. I don't think that's a fantasy.
I think you can think about America that way and honor people like Fannie Lou Hamer for expanding the vote. Well also recognizing that she was beaten almost to death. I mean those two things are not either one of them lies. So I think that that's one of the stories that we need to tell and have not told for a long time right no that's and to the second part of that question.
So about American democracy in this moment you know it's not a question whether or not democracy for such a large area of land would survive. And we have we've squeaked it out again and again and again now I'm an institutionalist and that means I really think that one of the things that has protected us in the past is our institutions the rule of law above all. And what we did on Tuesday was we put in place somebody who has made it clear he does not intend to honor the rule of law.
And he is enabled by a Supreme Court that says he does not have to honor the honor the rule of law and what that in the short term I think what that means it and I think people are going to be very surprised. We just ended the American century which was the idea after World War II that liberal democracy and the guard rails that had established around the world.
We're going to stabilize the globe and they have stabilized the globe we've had freedom of the seas we've had far fewer wars and we had before that establishment of those smaller smaller pockets of right but not world wars. Yes. That's gone. I mean we just we just walked away from that but it does raise the question of whether democracy is viable across this many across 332 million people that aside from even the fact that there are so many different kinds of people.
And that I think is a real question that we have to grapple with and I would maintain I think that we have just demonstrated that it's not that we need to figure out ways to make our system more responsive to the American people in a way that it really hasn't been since 1929 when we when we capped the House of representatives so that now an average representative district is over half a million people.
And so many different ways but but this is a theoretical crisis as well as an on the ground crisis and solving either one of those two things is going to have to be married to each other but also this isn't a question of saying I can just get one more voter.
It's a question of figuring out if in fact democracy continues to be viable in the 21st century because you know Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and Victor Burban say it's not and now the Republicans say it's not and the question is will the rest of us say yes it is and here's how we're going to show that it's viable.
So you brought up a to me you've hit upon the absolute crux of of everything that this election spoke about and I'm in no position certainly and in this moment to say you know here's what went wrong and here's what we should do but I think you hit upon the crux of something which is a feeling that the American democracy is no longer responsive to the needs of its people to me that then means that Donald Trump is not going to be able to do that.
So that means that Donald Trump is a symptom of a much deeper corruption in the democratic system that needs to be addressed because if it is not we will forever be more vulnerable to these types of demagogues or this type of disruption so then the question becomes
a system for 320 million people by the way a diverse group of people and you know those lines of class gender and race will always be present I think the Republicans have decided I think I'm going to try and pick off class coalitions to get us to our finish line but when you look at that how do you then you know create a system where democracy seems more resilient and responsive and agile and not as vulnerable to that.
Well you are identifying the reality that really since 1986 which was a very deliberate project of the Reagan administration we have begun to lose the guard rails of our democracy and that was that that was a deliberate project that we could talk about you know the suppression of the vote the attempt to create a strong president.
Well that that's even more I mean that's been the project all along hasn't it I mean if you look at Jim Crow laws if you look at the Southern strategy mean suppression of the votes of the people that will erode the status quo power that's been a project all along.
Well remember we have the 1965 voting rights act which address that and of course since then and this is a big project of John Roberts throughout his career was to to chip back away at that the idea that this was a bad idea to open the vote to so many people.
To people of color people of color by the way because you know so there are a lot of things in our democracy that have not worked for a long time that is accurate and you know again one of the things that I was point to is the capping of the House of Representatives in 1929 because of the recognition after the census of 1920 that there were more people living in cities than there were in the country and there was an attempt really to make sure that rural populations would continue to be open.
And so if you were to have rural populations would continue to be over represented if in fact we had continued to expand representation at the rate that it had been until then we would have more than a thousand people in the House of Representatives. So and what that did is it meant that you're instead of your representative being somebody you saw in the street.
The representative becomes somebody that you never hear from most people don't even know who their representatives are in some regards that makes some representatives. And so they're in the state I mean they're almost representing fewer people sometimes in the Senate than they are in the House. That's right. Those are statewide offices. Yeah that's right. But structurally and this is something I as urged people to do is to play the other side of the table.
Okay structurally what interest do the Republicans have right now in fixing that they have said they have demonstrated they don't want democracy. Why would they fix the institutions that have enabled them to amass the power they have. We are going to take a quick break and we will come right back. The NFL on CBS streams live on Paramount Plus all season long. Oh my goodness! Catch your local CBS game every Sunday on Paramount Plus right through the AFC Championship game.
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With Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman. And Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman. Everyone's watching on this one and I do mean everyone. Linus, new season now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. All right, we're back. But in this case, so I would have said that in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote probably by 3 or 4 million. I think they said maybe more. I don't recall exactly.
But the electoral college, which I think is what you're sort of referring to as affirmative action for rural areas in the early form of the government that allowed those less populous states to remain powerful and viable. But if you look at this election, I can't even say this is an autocratic. He won the popular vote projected to win the popular vote. This was a democratic victory for them. That's right. And like I say, why would you want to fix that if it's working for you?
And again, I think that what you're going to see is the same thing that we saw happen in Hungary. The taking over of media especially so that you cannot have the kinds of independent media that would urge people to vote against things that are actually not working for them. But one of the things that I think is interesting about this moment and about of reconceiving the concept of governance because I think you got to think about America is different than a democracy now is the states.
You know, one of the things that really jumps out to me is if you, you know, we have a federal system. It's a federal system that during in different periods, different people have wanted to get rid of. I've always liked it because it enabled there to be a check on whichever group wasn't behaving terribly well.
And one of the things about focusing on the states right now, we know a lot of the Marjorie Manderd and so on. But if you think about state governance, there's a place where people can make a difference. Where people can feel more represented. And one of the things that then jumps out to me is if you look at New England, for example, which is one of the models that Abraham Lincoln used when he thought about how the American West would look.
Those states tend to have democratic system small D as well as big D and they have very prosperous economies Massachusetts has health care, you know, people in those states are feeling pretty good about democracy and about their states. And one of the things that jumps out to me again is a historical theorist as well as somebody who deals with the actual this happened this happened is that those systems are based in economies of small producers, if you will, not so much now, but in the past.
And I think the structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies. And by that, I mean that if you look at economies, there are states that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was versus states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mine.
Or oil or water or agribusiness those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those rich guys right and that I'm not sure is compatible in terms of governance.
Without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that supports the community education, health care, you know, and that may be the future of democracy, if not, if not a national democracy. Dear Lord Heather and so now you can see the vertigo on the left, which is the prescription for this moment is states rights.
Well, yes, you kind of have this vertigo of wait, I don't I don't know where my footing is, but I think your, your pointing out of checks and balances exist within the system that aren't just what we would traditionally think of the founders checks and balances the legislative will check the judicial will check the executive will all that.
That there are checks within the structure of the entire republic that also work, which is local governments and state governments being checks on federalism and other things, which is a really I think hopeful and optimistic in which may sound in converse at this moment, but that feels like like we have some remedies there are places to go and in some ways it's what they're doing.
And so in some ways it's what the right did in the tea party movement, which was I am the federal government has abandoned us, I don't want anything to do that, but you know what hasn't our school board. And I'm going, we're going to take that over and is that now a playbook that you're talking.
I am, I do think that there's a difference in that the government that the tea party movement dislike was not going to come marching into the states to try and force adherence to their policies, but, but I do want to point out that the new deal government that has been at the heart of the reactionary movement since it went into place in the 1930s began in the states, you know, quite literally what happens is that in the late 19th century, the democratic party recognizes that it's got a toss over board.
The white Confederate leaders because they're basically, you know, they're losing constantly. And so they turn in the 1880s to urban governments, the urban governments that are directly answering the needs of their people and those would be the machine governments, especially Tammy Hall in New York City. Oh wow boss tweet in the like that's correct, although he's gone by then it's somebody else by then and the first guys, the guy that they're really turning to he's corrupt.
He has to flee to Ireland and the guy replaces him is not corrupt. So he's got to find out some way to get votes of the people and he actually does something really interesting.
He goes to the settlement house workers, those are the women who have without votes, who have begun to try and take the heart edges off of industrial capitalism by living in areas that are inhabited primarily by immigrants and by working to reinforce social webs and to, you know, to help, you know, new mothers and all that sort of thing. And he goes to them because they're the ones who are part of the voting community and they say he says, you know, what do people need?
And because those women had been keeping statistics and I've been talking to workers and I've been in the factories, they could say, hey, they really need kindergarten. They really need protection of their food because you can paint candy with lead paint. They really need and so on. And that group of people takes over New York City and is very effective at taking over New York City. And that is literally the group of people from whom we get FDR, you know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And Francis Perkins, who's his secretary of labor, she's there for 12 years, still the longest standing secretary of labor in American history, they literally take that system to the national level and say we're going to do all this on a national level.
We're going to help workers, but what that means is that they begin to bring those benefits to people in the American South and in the American West, where white people are accustomed to ruling essentially over black Americans and brown Americans and women. They also are looking for equal rights for women. And there has always been pushback against that and it appears that on Tuesday that pushback one.
But it's such a, you know, again, your knowledge of the breath of history, putting these things into context tells me something really interesting, hey, the customer is always right. I mean, imagine, you know, this, this idea for government is what if you ask your customers what they need because it does appear right now, if you look at what people pay into that system, they're not getting back in any way, the things that they believe and they feel are vital to their well being.
They're just not the government is not responding in that direct away. But as these women go in there and they develop an idea of what people want and then develop a way to get it to them, that creates this new deal. And you can almost say that that's what creates this reactionary program against it. So let's say the new deal is a reaction to economic urgency and let's say the Civil Rights Act is a reaction to moral urgency.
Each one of those has bred a reactionary movement to tamp down those gains, right. But in this moment, I don't know what it's a reaction to. I don't know it should be a reaction to supply side economics and neoliberalism. But it doesn't appear that way. So why why has that dynamic failed. Well, I think that you said it earlier. I think now we have a propaganda ecosystem that has people angry about things that are not real.
I mean, this is the thing that is so hard to push back against and that people like you and me have tried to do by recreating a reality based community is that people are well, that's a quote, you know, from the George W Bush administration. I recall I recall. And we, by the way, a contemptuous quote. The feeling they had about the reality based community was they were contemptuous of it.
That's right, because they didn't need to have this is the somebody in the George W Bush administration said to journalists Ron Soskind that they no longer they the Republican lawmakers no longer had to live in the reality based community because they could create their own reality.
And I don't know how you politically combat people making decisions based in fiction because fiction can always be changed. And and the only thing that I can see is that if that fiction becomes so destructive that people start to look for real solutions. In that case, they're going to need to look at actual reality and you see that I think in Western North Carolina after the hurricane that just devastated the region. You know, the the Trump people were in there lying about what was happening.
And they were certainly creating a lot of chaos over that, but people who were literally trying to stay alive turn to their neighbors and to trusted neighbors. Right. Real information about where water was available, for example, but that's a pretty grim way of looking at things, I think, in terms of the nation.
But I think even what makes this a maybe a more fraught moment is that the fiction is grounded in a in a reality, which is what we talked about earlier, if the government is no longer responsive in that way to its customers, then that opens the door to fixions as to why.
And I think what has been done here is an exploitation of a real situation framed as resource guarding framed as you would be getting this if it weren't for illegal undocumented people or all the money that goes to trans people or all the money. So they've taken, I think, a reality for people and maybe found a way to exploit that to their end and doesn't that make that a more difficult fight than just battling fantasy.
Well, yes. And the irony is, of course, that they created it. And this has been a part of the Republican playbook since the 1980s. The welfare queen, right? The reason that you're hurting is not because of policies that we're putting in place that are going to help the very wealthy. We know $50 trillion. Move from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021. And yet people, you know, would say, oh, you know, the problem is these these welfare ladies taking our rights.
But the real thing that you have identified is that this is absolutely the authoritarian playbook. And we know how it plays out. We have seen it play out in Rwanda. We have seen it play out in Nazi Germany. The continuing use of the government to benefit a very small group of people. And to get people to stay behind that program by saying the real problem is those people. And what the pattern that we have seen in those other places is, of course, to go after those people.
And, you know, the Nazi said it doesn't matter who those people are because you're really not trying to fix a problem. You're trying to keep your voting block or your support block behind you. So the, you know, we expect that that will continue. And also that one of the key things to get rid of is political opposition. Because so long as there are people saying, hey, we need to minute here, you know, there's only, you know, two of these people, the entire state.
Right. So you get rid of the counter narrative. And then you continue to go after those people. And then you're going to have to expand it because there aren't going to be enough of those people to go after. And you're going to have to continue that.
And so that is, I think, really problematic in terms of where we are now. And one of the things that we have to stand firm on and hope for is that this administration will be so incompetent and flighty that it will not manage to create the kind of juggernaut that the Nazis did who were, who were, you know, deliberately creating a fascist.
And they're of course have said they want to create a fascist state, but they've always, they've always pointed to hungry. I mean, I'm taking two things and then we'll get to some listener questions that I think they really want to ask you as well. I think people are feeling, you know, that vertigo right now, but you bring up two things. One hopeful one not. I think the not hopeful is the intentionality of this plan that you've detailed as a way of capturing that power.
And being able to exercise it in a more autocratic way. They're eating the pets to the delight of the people right there. The reading the pets. They're eating the pets. They're eating the thing. But the second part that you bring up that is hopeful is this idea of the power of individuals motivated to create change and positive growth and the resilience of those things.
Because as we look at that, that arc of history, it does churn through errors and it's, it's cold comfort for those living through that bad moment. But it's the difference between weather and climate. And I think you're also pointing to ways that we individuals as Americans as citizens can help change the climate. We are not helpless. And that there is efficacy.
We have been here, you know, everyone keeps saying we've never been here before. But the American South from about 1874 to 1965 was the world that we are looking at nationally now. And black Americans and their white allies in the South and poor whites who were also treated poorly by those state administrations in the South. They lived. They made communities. They kept alive the idea of being treated equally before the law and having a say in the government.
They resisted in domestic ways through communities through art, through literature, through efficacies of their own in terms of determining how they live their lives. We have been here and we will emerge in some fashion from it. But for people like me, you know, you watch what is really the end of a certain kind of American democracy. And it's very sad, you know, the many of us still believe in those dreams. Right.
I think even some of the people who voted for Trump still believe in those dreams. I think so too. I really do. I don't think that, you know, we can talk in apocalyptic terms about, you know, Jim Crow or Nazi Germany. But I never want to jump to, you know, what is the darkest scenario of that. That type of malevolence. You know, we talk about the banality of evil. I guess I'm trying to believe that that is not what what we're living through. So I don't know. I'm grasping, I guess.
But I do want to get to that we had listener questions. And I could talk to you forever because I just think you're fascinating and smart and just have thought all this stuff through so. Well, we'll back at you. Well, thank you. So the first person wanted to ask how similarly or differently do you feel with this election, then 2016, which is the, you know, the analog to it? That's a great question. Yeah.
So I feel that very differently in two ways. The first is that in 2016, our guardrails were still sufficient to get a kind of a leash on what it was possible for a Trump administration to do. And those guardrails are now gone. So I'm much more concerned in that sense, but I'm also much more hopeful as in 2016, we did not have yet or at least I did not have yet any real systems of community and resistance. And those are now millions of people strong and they're not going to go anywhere.
So that, you know, I don't know. I don't know quite what that looks like, but I will say I was distraught in 2016. I mean, distraught is in I don't know what happens next, you know, maybe I'm older and wiser now. I feel like we, we know what happens next. We know how to deal with it. And we it's not what we hoped for, but we're not alone. Right. Well, that's, and we're not. And that's, I think that's a wonderful thing to frame it as the second one.
And I think this one is, you know, could have been asked at any point in the last 50 years. How do we stop the Democrats from learning all the wrong lessons from this loss? Yeah. That now that's a bumper sticker. I want to see on somebody's car. How do we stop the Democrats from learning all the wrong lessons from this loss? Yeah. And yesterday was like, I was like, would you all just stop it? You know, you know, hey, do you want to answer some of these? I want to hear from you. I'm excited.
I will, I'll jump in, but I'm interested to hear what you think. Listen, the thing to remember about the Republicans and the Democrats both is that they're made up a people and that people have agency. So, you know, I actually thought and still think that the coalition that Harrison Walls put together was an extraordinarily strong centrist coalition. I really do. I thought that then I, it is the kind of coalition that we saw as I say in the progressive era.
I really thought we were moving toward a new progressive era because of the strength of that coalition. And, and that's just, just keep on speaking up about how do we stop the Democrats from doing anything we don't? They're going to do what they do, but speak up and be part of it.
So I look at the commercials to see or I look at the, the ways in which I think the Democrats have a generally popular, outlook, and you see that with President Electromp going, I'm the father of IVF or I would never do anything. You see all the ways that they back off of their more draconian policies. The flip side of that is when they say don't talk about that. We have to get elected first. The things they don't want you to know they're going to do.
But what it says to me is there are an awful lot of democratic policies that are broadly popular. Wildly popular. Wildly popular. But if you stick with that, but I think the thing that we do forget sometimes goes back to that original sin that we talked about. A government that is not responsive to its customers, whether that be through callousness or well intentioned over regulation.
And that's the thing that Democrats, I think, have to examine is are we creating roadblocks that are not necessary to government being responsive to its people? I Harris covered that. You know, she even talked about getting rid of, you know, the stuff, especially in Hawaii for making it hard to task with. I will say that you just brought up something really interesting though. And that's that. I mean, I don't have a lot of hopes for the Trump administration. I hope it's great.
If it's great, I will say it's great. But I will point out that theodore Roosevelt, who is associated in the United States with having launched the progressive era picked up most of his policies from the from Democrat Grover Cleveland. Nobody's ever heard of Grover Cleveland, right? Because nobody, well, they have now because the only other guy that went out and then got back in and now Trump has. And technically it's not actually the case he won the popular vote in 1888 as well.
So he was actually elected three times, but lost in the pop in the electoral vote. But because there were some shenanigans that went on in the in the New York delegation. But it is possible. Not probable, but it is possible that the Republicans look at the policies that the Democrats have tried to put in place or that have put in place that are so popular. And say, we want that. We want to do that so that we continue to stay in power.
You know, we want to make sure that women can get reproductive health care. We want to make sure that there's common sense going safety legislation. We want all that stuff because now that we've got a lock on the popular vote, we want to build our coalition. And that's certainly what Roosevelt did. Right. So that is that is certainly a possibility. Fantastic. That's hopeful. Okay, here's another one. How do you want the media to cover Trump over the next four years?
Have we learned anything in the way that we cover it? What's been your frustration with the way that the media's covered Trump? Worth pointing out that there is now a new media that stands apart from the legacy media. And I think that's important because we have a lot of fabulous people. And we have fabulous people in the legacy media as well.
Right. And I think what I have found most frustrating about the coverage by legacy media is that there is no larger context of why you're supposed to care about anything. I mean, I know about you. I have to look up with the G7 and the G20 are every freaking time. Right. And that idea that somehow it's all just play by play basketball is I think has contributed to people's lack of understanding of what is really at stake.
Right. And I would love to see people talk, you know, the way the way the people like me do about here's why this particular action really matters. Yes. But you just don't see that because there's so much entertainment and. I think also that they don't have that knowledge base to a large extent because their knowledge base is in sort of the day to day now.
And they kind of they don't look at that larger context, but the other thing that I think you bring up with that that's really interesting is I think the lesson they're going to think they need to learn is where to partisan and we must take out now we have to be umpires, which is exactly what the opposition would like journalism to be. I think they have to understand that journalism is activism.
And it just is in the way that it was with up to and Sinclair and I to be well like these are you have to have a vision for what you think the world of clarity and you have to provide context and my hope for the media is that the lesson they take of it is less moral high Do you do you think that was anti-Semitic is that racist what he said and more litigating the boundaries and parameters of our shared reality we don't live into realities we don't live in three realities we live in reality
And journalism can help to find those boundaries for us and and that's the lesson that I hope that they take I hope they do as well I do want to point out that when you and I just were talking there about the media I think we were talking largely about the White House media the people who come to the president the executive branch you know what that's that's a fair point because the the journals who cover state and who cover defense because I read them all every day they're great I mean they are great literally you're talking the defense people are like.
And print is different than I'm sort of referring to television and social but you're whether that's an absolutely great point. But the defense people just crack me up because they're like we noticed in the last appropriations bill you moved 14 for is from and you know of aluminum from this factory to this factory is that reflection of the fact that there was an election in the house of Lithuania that you're like wow.
You know all this stuff but it get you know course that gets almost no coverage none the for for for you know not even just ordinary people reading the news even I suspect I'm one of the very few people who reads the defense press briefings
in the day the defense press the press briefings now start with dear Heather just about I don't know why they do that but they jump in there but they're really they're so smart they're so smart and that's an excellent point and they're always all of them are designed to hold power to account.
Yes and I think what we see in the in the coverage of other branches of the government is more a sense of how many clicks can I get rather than how can I hold the the people the people's representatives to account to account that's exactly right and here's our our final one and I thank you so much for your for your patience and your time today Heather it's been really wonderful to talk to you. And this is one that man I think everybody is asking each other how do you find the strength.
How do you keep trying to hold people accountable or tell this next generation that human decency matters that all those things are still actionable and that you have real hope for the future.
Well first of all the only way out is through right that's a that's a true is what choice do we have but to keep on going forward that's just going to happen but beyond that you know humans are human and we do I think try to do what's right most of us and we do try to build communities and we take care of the people we love and that's not going to change we're still the same country that we were on Monday we just have changed our form of government.
The reality is that we have a lot of really big things to take on that are going to be hampered by this election I'm very concerned about climate change and I think all we can do is to keep on trying to do the right thing you know one of the thing I wrote a book on the Wounded Knee massacre.
And it's it was horrible I had to take a long break in the middle of it if anybody ever reads it there's all sorts of sort of lyrical passages about flowers and the stuff that grows in the West because I felt like I should be working on the book but I just couldn't deal with the massacre any longer because I knew those people I read their diaries I watched everything they did I can tell you where they were every day and I knew they were marching toward a disaster and there was nothing I could do about it because of course it happened.
In the last century and somebody said to me once are there any heroes in the Wounded Knee massacre and I thought that's a really good question because it's such a dark moment and it's a dark moment not only from the soldiers who shot and from the the indigenous people who did stupid stuff and the politicians who set the whole thing up and I came to think that there were two heroes one was sitting bowl was a Lakota and the other was George.
And the other was George crook who was one of the army officers who died long before the massacre which is funny for me to have those two people be the heroes and that what I came to believe was that a hero is somebody as both of they did who keeps trying to do the right thing even when you know the walls are closing in we can all do that.
We can all do the right thing even sometimes when you feel like the walls are closing in professor Heather Cox Richardson thank you so much what a great note to finish on author of democracy awakening notes on the state of America. Heather it's just so lovely to talk to you today and I always appreciate and I appreciate you so thank you so I supplicio. Wow all right so that is our show I want to thank Heather Cox Richardson for for joining us.
I'm going to say this very rarely does an anecdote about wounded knee leave me with a feeling of hopefulness but I think in some respects that that's what she was able to accomplish by suggesting that they're even in in diaries. Even in in dire times there are heroes that emerge who continue to as the walls are closing in do the right things and maybe. You know those are the instances where the walls fully close in but by doing the right thing.
You know maybe you freeze that advance or even push it back and and that's what I think we all need to keep cognizant of by the way thank you to the listeners for your questions.
I hope that her answers were helpful to everybody and we really do appreciate you interacting with the show and giving us those those questions and queries you can always get a set Twitter at weekly show pod we're on IG which I think is Instagram and threads which I think is useless probably and tick tock that's at weekly show podcast.
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