The Fight to Save American Democracy — with Heather Cox Richardson

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0:01:29 Episode 370.
0:01:32 370 is the country code for Lithuania.
0:01:37 In 1970, the Boeing 747 entered commercial service as the world’s first jumbo jet.
0:01:38 Choose to it.
0:01:40 I like to sleep naked.
0:01:42 And for some reason, flight attendants have a problem with that.
0:01:44 Okay, I can do better than that.
0:01:47 The vulture boards a plane holding two dead raccoons.
0:01:48 The flight attendant stops.
0:01:50 The vulture, before boarding it, says,
0:01:53 Sorry, only one carry-on per passenger.
0:01:53 Get it?
0:01:54 Carry-on?
0:01:55 Carry-on?
0:01:57 Things are getting desperate here.
0:01:59 Go!
0:02:00 Go!
0:02:00 Go!
0:02:00 Go!
0:02:11 Welcome to the 370 episode of the Prop G-Pod.
0:02:11 What’s happening?
0:02:16 I’m currently in London, and I have a quick trip to Paris this week for a speaking event.
0:02:20 You know, I’m at the point, I don’t even know what I’m speaking at.
0:02:22 I just show up, I don’t even know what I’m speaking on.
0:02:25 I generally have, just let’s bring this back to me.
0:02:30 I have three or four speaking decks, and I give them sort of a melange.
0:02:32 I say, you tell me what you want to hear.
0:02:34 I have the AI Optimist, where I talk about AI.
0:02:38 I have Predictions, where I talk about what predictions I think are coming in the next year.
0:02:40 And I review my predictions from last year.
0:02:44 And probably the most, the favorite one is Algebra of Happiness.
0:02:48 A lot of these conferences I speak at bring spouses, and so they want something to sort
0:02:49 of feel good and nice.
0:02:52 And I kind of summarize my book, Algebra of Happiness.
0:02:57 And this is a big week for me, or it’s coming up.
0:02:59 I’m planning my tour, my book tour.
0:03:04 I have my book, Notes on Being a Man, coming out.
0:03:08 And I think there’s a, there was a real pivot, and I think it’s sort
0:03:08 of interesting.
0:03:12 I was, I’ve always wanted to write, I was thinking about writing kind of this Algebra
0:03:13 of series.
0:03:20 And I wrote, I struck a book deal with Simon & Schuster, my old book publisher, Penguin
0:03:22 Portfolio Random House, who’s done the last five books.
0:03:24 I like them nice people.
0:03:25 I had a really good relationship with them.
0:03:31 And Simon & Schuster, quite frankly, just came in and blew them out of the water and wrote
0:03:32 me a much bigger check.
0:03:37 And essentially, what you hope from an editor is what you hope from a venture capitalist.
0:03:39 And that is, you hope they just don’t add negative value.
0:03:43 I think if you expect almost nothing from your publisher, this is going to get me in the good
0:03:43 graces.
0:03:45 They won’t let you down.
0:03:51 Anyways, I have a, this book coming out, and my agent, Jim Levine, had the kind of gangster
0:03:52 idea.
0:03:57 And that was, originally it was going to be a book about kind of a history of maleness and
0:04:00 coming of age and masculinity in different cultures.
0:04:05 My first chapter was on testosterone, and I spent a ton of time trying to figure out the
0:04:09 surges in testosterone, whether it’s in utero, right after you’re born, and then when you’re
0:04:09 17 again.
0:04:14 And my book agent had literally the insight that changed the pivot of the book.
0:04:18 He said, look, you’re opening yourself up for criticism because you’re not an adolescent
0:04:23 psychiatrist, and you’re not an endocrinologist, and you’re kind of talking to people around
0:04:24 what maleness and masculinity is.
0:04:29 And what you should do, Scott, is you’ve written a lot about your upbringing and your relationship
0:04:34 with your mom and your dad and other relationships and where you’ve gotten it right, and more
0:04:35 importantly, where you’ve gotten it wrong.
0:04:40 And that’s more informative, insightful, and it will open people’s hearts to listening to
0:04:44 you and recognizing that you’re trying to just talk about your learnings from your failures
0:04:48 and successes, as opposed to trying to position yourself as an expert on the topic, because
0:04:50 let’s be honest, you don’t have any domain expertise.
0:04:56 And just that pivot, it kind of turned the book more autobiographical, which makes me feel
0:04:58 self-conscious in some ways, but it’s rewarding in other ways, because I’m a bit
0:05:01 of a narcissist and a megalomaniac.
0:05:08 But that one insight, turning it into trying to say, okay, I’m not an expert here, but this
0:05:11 is my view, I think is really interesting.
0:05:16 And a bit of a bridge, but something that’s been a real insight and an unlock for me recently
0:05:19 is the No Kings protest over the weekend.
0:05:23 And I immediately got stressed out because I’m like, okay, I’ve got to weigh in on this and
0:05:24 provide a viewpoint.
0:05:30 And then I realized, and something I’ve finally gotten comfortable with, and it’s been so powerful
0:05:37 every issue does not demand your judgment.
0:05:41 You do not have to have an opinion on everything.
0:05:47 And by the way, I thought the No Kings movement was entirely inspiring, really exciting.
0:05:49 I just, it kind of made my weekend.
0:05:50 I was so happy about it.
0:05:55 I love watching all the videos, but I don’t have to weigh in with a thoughtful analysis
0:05:57 of it and repost stuff.
0:06:01 And it’s just not every, everything does not demand your judgment.
0:06:04 You do not have to have an opinion on everything.
0:06:04 It is okay.
0:06:09 And it has taken me so long to figure this out, to say, to listen to a question or listen
0:06:13 to an issue and say, I don’t have the domain expertise here, or here’s an idea.
0:06:14 I don’t know.
0:06:18 I don’t think, I think kind of from the age of 18 to 40, I never got comfortable with the
0:06:19 term, I don’t know.
0:06:24 And I think it’s very powerful because when you say, I don’t know a lot or highlight that
0:06:28 you don’t have the domain expertise there, it makes the things that you do opine on or
0:06:30 makes the viewpoints you have much more credible.
0:06:36 So speaking as someone who does have a lot of domain expertise, in today’s episode, we speak
0:06:42 with Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College, author in the voice of the newsletter,
0:06:43 Letters from an American.
0:06:46 She’s built a huge business on Substack.
0:06:47 She puts out about a thousand words a day.
0:06:48 She’s really prolific.
0:06:54 And she’s kind of having a moment because she talks a lot about American history.
0:06:57 and democracy and patriotism.
0:07:01 And she is absolutely, occasionally the moons line up and having someone like Heather Cox
0:07:08 Richardson for the pod, given what’s happened over the weekend, it’s just, oh my God, finally,
0:07:09 finally.
0:07:14 We discussed with Professor Richardson, the No Kings protest, what patriotism means in a polarized
0:07:18 America and how military and economic power are reshaping democracy at home and abroad.
0:07:25 So with that, here’s our conversation with Professor Heather Cox Richardson.
0:07:35 Professor, where does this podcast find you?
0:07:37 Coast to Maine.
0:07:38 Oh, nice, as always.
0:07:39 That’s right.
0:07:43 We were joking off, Mike, that I can’t imagine how busy you must be.
0:07:46 It feels like this is sort of your sweet spot.
0:07:50 I imagine you’re getting a lot of requests for interviews, so very much appreciate your time
0:07:51 today.
0:07:55 Yeah, but you know, I was thinking about this, knowing I was going to talk to you today.
0:07:59 One of the things that I find really interesting about this moment is there is so much coming
0:08:01 at us all the time.
0:08:05 It’s kind of like being in a really big crowd where everybody is mumbling, and you’re trying
0:08:09 to pick out the storyline, and you can’t quite tell if you’re getting it or not.
0:08:14 And that’s really how I feel this morning, where there’s been so much information coming
0:08:15 at us over the last three days.
0:08:23 Trying to make sense of, for example, the extraordinary use of energy, the rise of cryptocurrency, what’s
0:08:27 happening in Venezuela, what’s happening in Colombia, what’s happening in the Middle East,
0:08:31 what’s happening in Washington, D.C., what’s happening in the streets all over the country,
0:08:33 and trying to pick out a story.
0:08:37 I see why people get tired and why people are just, you know, starting to tune out.
0:08:42 You just summarized our editorial call for all the content we push out.
0:08:48 And the thing that gives me comfort is, I forget who said it, but I’ve been trying to be better
0:08:52 at practicing it, and that is not everything demands your judgment.
0:08:54 You don’t have to have an opinion on everything.
0:08:57 And I found myself over the weekend, so this is your wheelhouse.
0:09:00 I would imagine people really want to know what you thought about what happened over the
0:09:06 weekend, but I thought, this isn’t my wheelhouse, and I don’t need to be online 24 by 7 over
0:09:09 the weekend trying to provide insight or moments of inspiration.
0:09:15 Maybe I should just let this play out, realizing that just as I don’t need my DJ to comment
0:09:20 on AI strategy, I’m not sure that I need to comment on everything.
0:09:25 So I find some solace in that, but you don’t get off the hook here, because this is your
0:09:25 wheelhouse.
0:09:26 So we’ll start there.
0:09:33 Trying to find what, with respect to the protests over the weekend, 2,700 protests across the
0:09:36 country, 7 million people, about, I think it’s about 2% of the population.
0:09:43 Any observations or anything you think the media is getting wrong about the protests this weekend?
0:09:48 Well, first of all, there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of the protests in a lot of legacy
0:09:52 media, which itself is interesting. Missing that is a big thing, because, of course, this
0:09:56 is a huge deal. If you remember when the Tea Party protests, which were organized in a very
0:10:02 different way, first hit the news, you know, a lot of the then legacy media thought that this
0:10:07 was a huge game changer. And of course, the No Kings protests were even larger, and they’re
0:10:12 not getting that kind of attention, which I think is a reflection on the state of the media in
0:10:17 the United States, for one thing, which is a much larger picture as well. But there’s a couple of
0:10:22 things that I think really matter about the No Kings movements and the protests over the weekend.
0:10:30 The first was the degree to which they went back into our history and championed our historical
0:10:36 traditions of democracy, free speech, separation of church and state, and so on. I mean, it’s always
0:10:42 interesting when a movement goes to the touchstones, not just of the imagery of our past, but also of
0:10:48 the ideas. But it was also interesting that they were joyful. That actually really matters, because
0:10:56 that suggests they’re charting a course forward. They indicated the idea of we, the people, coming
0:11:02 together against a cabal, taking over the country, as opposed to us versus them, which is what the radical
0:11:07 right has been trying to do. And crucially, I think it really matters that they were older,
0:11:14 and they were very visibly older and white. And that, I think, both harks back to the fact that
0:11:19 it’s those of us who are over 55 at this point who can remember a democracy that worked much more
0:11:24 effectively than the one we’ve had for the last 40 years. But it also makes it extraordinarily difficult
0:11:31 difficult for the radical right to look at, you know, an 85-year-old woman using a walker and say,
0:11:37 this person is posing an existential threat to your democracy. And that all of those things, I think,
0:11:37 matter.
0:11:42 It’s a really interesting observation. I want to take it forward to a couple of theses, and you can push
0:11:49 back or validate them. And that is, when I think about the Women’s March, or better yet, maybe more
0:11:55 apt analogies for the comparison would be Black Lives Matter or the Me Too movement, that I don’t want to
0:12:01 say these were fueled by anger, but there was a sense of injustice, and they attracted a greater
0:12:09 non-white and younger participation. And I wonder if, just in general, this is almost like a sentimental
0:12:15 rally, that we remember how wonderful America is, and one out of two people our age feel good about
0:12:21 America. It’s something like one out of eight or one out of ten younger people. So this was, and you’re
0:12:27 helping me connect the dots there, this is more like a sentimental celebration, missing what America
0:12:33 was and how wonderful it is, and recognizing that. And also, it was peaceful. And maybe some of the
0:12:38 recent protests have been, I don’t want to say, call them anger, but do you think this reflects that
0:12:44 generally as you go older, people are maybe a little bit less angry or more sentimental for the old
0:12:48 days of America? No, actually, I don’t think that’s what’s going on at all. I think that’s one of the
0:12:53 reasons we can recognize the moment that we’re in. But this looks very much, and I can go through a
0:12:58 whole bunch of movements, but let’s start with the abolitionist movement. What really makes the
0:13:04 abolitionist movement take off in the 1830s and the 1840s, you know, it’s very, very small. People forget
0:13:10 how small that movement is. People sign petitions and so on, but it really doesn’t get a lot of
0:13:15 traction until John Quincy Adams, who has gone from being in the presidency to being back in the House
0:13:21 of Representatives, really hammers on the idea that the abolitionists who are making it impossible for
0:13:28 people to introduce petitions into Congress are losing their rights. Because the elite Southern
0:13:35 enslavers said to the House of Representatives, we will not entertain petitions of people who are
0:13:40 demanding abolition. And of course, we have the right to petition from the First Amendment. And
0:13:45 John Quincy Adams on Petition Day Monday, every Monday, would try and introduce those petitions,
0:13:51 and he would be forbidden. And what that did is it enabled the people who cared about abolition to go
0:13:55 back to districts and to go back to their neighbors and say, hey, you might not care about Black Americans
0:14:02 or enslaved people at the time, but you do care about your right to petition. And similarly,
0:14:07 when elite enslavers stopped allowing the males to be delivered in the American South, if they had
0:14:12 abolitionist petitions in them, what the abolitionists did is they went to their neighbors and said,
0:14:18 hey, now you’re not allowed to use the males. And I think that when you see a movement that goes from
0:14:26 the reality that an ethnic or a gender minority group is being oppressed, that often tends to get
0:14:32 marginalized. But when you can turn that movement into one that says, hey, you know, this isn’t really
0:14:37 about, in the case of the abolitionists, the enslaved Americans in the South, this is about your right to
0:14:42 petition. This is about your right to use the males. This is about your right to have a senator not getting
0:14:48 beaten up on the floor of the Senate. This is about, you know, getting over that hurdle to say to people
0:14:52 who were not previously involved in protests, especially those who thought the world was going
0:14:56 along pretty well, hey, you need to pay attention because this government’s coming after you.
0:14:59 That’s when you get a movement that changes society.
0:15:08 And I was sort of struck by, I think, the White House spokesperson saying that this protest was made up
0:15:14 of violent criminals, illegal immigrants, and Hamas. And by process of elimination, that means I’m Hamas.
0:15:20 Do you think, how would you describe the administration’s approach to this? We’ve seen
0:15:27 some memes of Trump dropping feces from an aircraft. How do you think the administration’s response
0:15:31 has been to this? Has it been effective? And try and provide some historical context for
0:15:35 when the incumbents have responded to this type of protest.
0:15:38 First of all, can you believe what you just said?
0:15:39 Unfortunately, I can now. Yeah.
0:15:45 That conversation should have ended right there, right? I mean, again, this is all the murmuring
0:15:48 in the room right there. I think there’s a lot of things going on with the administration. I don’t,
0:15:53 I think it’s a real problem to think of it as monolithic. I think that there are a number of
0:15:58 different forces going into what comes out of the Oval Office, and they are not always working
0:16:04 together. So one of the things I think you’re seeing with the social media accounts of the White
0:16:09 White House and the people associated with the White House is a deliberate attempt to draw eyeballs no
0:16:14 matter what. And that we have certainly heard that this is the goal of Susie Wiles, the White House
0:16:20 chief of staff, and certainly of the media directors, that what they care about is essentially running a
0:16:26 reality TV show. And of course, the problem with that, aside from all the principled problems with
0:16:32 that, is that you have to continue to escalate your content or people look away. And we’re seeing
0:16:39 that constant escalation. But I think we’re also seeing the recognition that the material that the
0:16:45 White House is putting out is not real, is increasingly divorced from what people’s lives look like.
0:16:50 So I think that when they do something like the videos that we saw, not only the one to which you’re
0:16:56 referring in which Trump goes into the air in what appears to be a fighter jet that says King Trump
0:17:02 on the side, and, you know, the videos in which both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are wearing
0:17:08 crowns, and, you know, they’re putting their political opponents in Mexican sombreros, you know,
0:17:15 all of those things. They’re playing to a base. But there is a difference, I think, between the sort
0:17:21 of noir films that the Department of Homeland Security was putting out early on portraying
0:17:30 undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals and videos about potty stuff. You know, there’s a
0:17:37 difference between those menacing, dark films that look like, you know, a horror movie, not a horror movie,
0:17:44 a, you know, a crime movie, and the President of the United States making a visual poop joke,
0:17:50 which is so second grade. And I thought that was a really interesting shift because it’s become
0:17:56 almost cartoonish. Certainly it must appeal to part of their base, but I don’t think it appeals to the
0:18:01 middle part of the country that is facing crazy prices at the grocery store, their rising premiums
0:18:08 of their health care. An increasing sense that their businesses are going off the rails, that the
0:18:15 President is a loose cannon. And I thought that was a really interesting shift over the weekend and one
0:18:23 that I often play with for fun. If I were writing the President’s speeches or if I were writing articles,
0:18:29 you know, priming the President to look as if he is doing great stuff, what would I do? And I promise
0:18:35 you, poop jokes were a thousand percent never going to make my list. So I thought that was really
0:18:36 interesting that they did that.
0:18:43 What common elements of successful protests result in some sort of tangible change? What do they have
0:18:45 in common and compare that against this protest?
0:18:54 Nonviolence, key in America. Nonviolence is so key in America. And that was really distinctive about these
0:18:59 protests. And I think you’ve got to give credit to Indivisible and people like Ezra Levin, who’s one of
0:19:06 the leaders of Indivisible, the degree to which they emphasized nonviolence, joy, artistic expression,
0:19:13 and crucially made sure the protests happened during daylight. If you think about the other protests you
0:19:17 talked about, the times when they got violent from the perspective of the people on the streets who
0:19:24 were not necessarily the first protesters out there, was everything happened after dark. And the
0:19:30 Indivisible folks got people off onto and off the streets before dark. And that was really, really
0:19:38 crucial. So that is the first thing that makes a difference. But as I said before, what matters in
0:19:45 protest is that people can see themselves in it. And I mean, lots of people can see themselves in it.
0:19:53 And that’s, in this case, a reflection not only of the faces that you saw there, but the art. So one of
0:19:58 the things about protest movements, and one of the reasons I think that this administration is in real
0:20:03 trouble, is because you want to have a movement in which everybody can see themselves. And to some degree,
0:20:09 the MAGA Republicans did that as well. That was part of their rise. Trump promised everything to
0:20:13 everyone. And so you could say, well, I don’t like him on these 10 things, but boy, I love him on these
0:20:22 four. In this case, the sort of amorphous nature of we don’t want a king, and here’s what we care about
0:20:28 enables virtually everybody to see themselves in that or to have to take a stand saying, yeah, I want a
0:20:33 dictator. And that’s not really an American position. I mean, one of the things you can see is people
0:20:39 taking it as an LOL form, you know, ha ha, yeah, I want a dictator. But the truth is Americans generally
0:20:46 don’t want dictators. So that ability to create a space in which many, many people could see themselves
0:20:53 and crucially demonstrate that there are a lot of people who do not like this administration,
0:20:57 that really matters because that translates not necessarily to the people who are currently in
0:21:03 office, but to the people who are trying to get into office and to people who are trying to find
0:21:08 their constituencies. Well, there were, you know, about 7 million people on the streets waiting to be
0:21:14 a constituency on Saturday. And that demonstrates not only to people going into politics, but also to
0:21:20 businesses who in the past might have thought, hey, maybe I really do need to cater to MAGA Republicans
0:21:25 because they’re an important purchasing block, for example, an important consumer block.
0:21:29 You look at that and you think, hey, on the other hand, maybe I really shouldn’t. And I actually would
0:21:38 date this protest and the momentum of the protest back to Jimmy Kimmel and the getting Jimmy Kimmel back
0:21:45 on the air, because that was a case in which I think I said to you before, it seemed to me a lot of
0:21:51 important pillars of American society were not necessarily kowtowing to Trump. They were buying
0:21:58 time. For example, you know, they didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel. They suspended his show and they were kind of
0:22:02 waiting to see what would happen. And when what happened was there was such extraordinary popular
0:22:10 pressure to get him back on the air that even the Sinclair and I think it was Nexstar systems put him
0:22:17 back on. That is a real message to people producing things that the people who are standing against this
0:22:24 administration are stronger than the people standing for it. And that momentum seems, at least for now,
0:22:26 to be building. Now, we’ll see what happens going forward.
0:22:33 Have you given any thought to the idea of a national economic strike or, and there’s different forms,
0:22:38 what I think was so powerful about Kimmel was it was very specific against a specific company. It was
0:22:43 frictionless in terms of your ability to cancel Disney Plus, take a screenshot of it. It didn’t ask
0:22:50 consumers to do a lot. And it was targeted with a specific required action. Any thoughts on the idea
0:22:54 of some sort of national economic strike or strike against individual companies?
0:22:59 So, yeah, I have a take on that. And it’s informed by American history. And again,
0:23:07 we’re in a new moment. So who knows? It is my understanding of American strikes that targeting
0:23:13 strikes work incredibly well. Targeted boycotts work incredibly well, exactly as you say. Look at
0:23:19 what happened to Tesla, Jimmy Kimmel. But we could go on. I mean, target. You could go and versus what
0:23:26 happened with Costco, where because of the way that they handled diversity, equity, inclusion issues,
0:23:31 their stock has gone way up. People are all shopping there. But general strikes in the United States
0:23:38 do not historically tend to work well for the simple reason that we are so interconnected that
0:23:45 when you start to issue a general strike, that means that people don’t get their medicine or people
0:23:53 don’t get food or whatever. And it’s really difficult, especially in such a large country where people
0:24:02 have so many different interests, to say to somebody whose kid needs an operation or to somebody who needs
0:24:09 food, well, this is for the greater good. And so when the country has tried national strikes, weirdly, it has
0:24:14 turned against, had people turn against them that you would think would have been on their side.
0:24:21 For example, in the late 1890s, there was an attempt at a general strike. It wasn’t really called a general
0:24:26 strike, but a lot of stuff got shut down. The railroads essentially got shut down. And one of the people
0:24:32 who came out against that was Jada Adams, who was really strongly in favor of workers’ rights. But she’s
0:24:38 like, I’m watching kids not have food around me. I can’t be part of this. So I tend not to support the idea
0:24:42 of a general strike. People look at it and they say, oh, you’re going to show how important we are to the
0:24:47 economy. But you’re also going to show people who should be on your side that you can’t be trusted
0:24:53 because you don’t care about their need for basic necessities. So I tend to be against that and for
0:25:01 very much for targeted boycotts, targeted strikes, because that enables people to have a workaround for
0:25:08 those sorts of emergency situations. Now, like I say, I am not a specialist in where strikes pressure
0:25:15 people. But I know in our past, general strikes have tended to split the movement rather than to create
0:25:16 unity behind it.
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0:28:51 The last time we had you on the pod, you struck sort of an optimistic tone and said that, look,
0:28:57 America’s faced, while this might feel dark, it’s not the darkest it’s been. And that oftentimes,
0:29:03 the America we know and love has bounced back even stronger, that its resilience, its elasticity
0:29:10 has stood the test of time, and that we’ve been in darker moments, and that we should be hopeful
0:29:16 and realize the power of pushing back. Has your mood or your optimism changed at all since we last
0:29:22 talked? No. And I can tell you what’s wrong. I can tell you what’s right. I do want to reiterate
0:29:31 that my big disappointment in all of this has been the degree to which the lawmakers in Congress,
0:29:42 especially in the Senate, have abdicated the prerogatives of the legislative branch. They have
0:29:49 walked away from the separation of powers. And every morning I get up and think, really? Is this really
0:29:54 what you’re going to do to the Constitution and to the people who elected you? That sense has only gotten
0:30:00 stronger. But no, I don’t want to be—look, none of us wants to be in this position. But I continue
0:30:06 to have faith in the American people and the recovery of our democracy. What do you think?
0:30:13 This is your trick. You did this to me the last time. You asked me what I think. I have been,
0:30:21 well, one, flummoxed and disappointed by Republicans who—I mean, everything from the people that,
0:30:27 you know, the Second Amendment was meant to guard against this type of thing, a National Guard being
0:30:33 sent into cities to violate people’s rights. That’s the whole point, that the fear of a tyrannical
0:30:39 government rising up against citizens, ignoring the co-equal branches of government. The thing that
0:30:44 has been the most disappointing to me, and I want to get your take on this, is that I know many of the
0:30:49 tech titans, and I ask myself, what’s the point of being worth billions of dollars? These guys are
0:30:54 pretty bulletproof. Imagine the worst. Imagine that the DOJ has weapon against them. They can peace out
0:31:00 to Dubai or Milan and have a really nice life. They have very little downside at this point.
0:31:07 And it has just been—it is just shocking to me. The way I would describe the Trump administration’s
0:31:13 tactics is shocking but not surprising. Like, what they—the things they do really upset me and shock me.
0:31:18 But then I look at the pattern, and I think, well, it’s not surprising. What has been both shocking and
0:31:24 surprising to me is the lack of backbone, the cowardice, the Neville Chamberlain and cashmere sweaters minus the
0:31:33 dignity. It is our S&P 500 business leaders who, many of whom, I would argue 490 to 499 of them,
0:31:38 wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and say, hello, Mr. President. All of them believe that they
0:31:43 are natural-born leaders who should probably someday be president. And leadership, in my view, is doing
0:31:49 the right thing when it’s really hard. And none of them are doing that. And I get text messages from some
0:31:53 of these people saying, I hate myself. And my general response is, well, boss, that really doesn’t do us any
0:31:59 good. And they’re showing up to what could best be described as these sycophantic, bend the knee,
0:32:06 give you a plaque from Apple. That has been the most surprising to me. I asked myself, what is the
0:32:13 point of having all this money and power if you don’t show any fidelity to the very principles,
0:32:21 the Constitution, free markets, capitalism, that have given you this fortune, and yet you just absolutely
0:32:27 ignore it, you desecrate it. That, to me, has been the most surprising thing. And also, I think it’s a
0:32:32 commercial opportunity. You talked about Costco. I think the first company that weaponizes media and
0:32:36 comes out with, you don’t even have to say Trump, Nike comes out, talks about the importance of
0:32:40 immigrants, the importance of competition, the importance of free play in sports. And we’ll know
0:32:46 what they’re talking about. And I think the majority of people who have disposable income probably tend to
0:32:51 think more like us than the administration. And I think it would be an enormous boom. I think it’s an
0:32:57 enormous commercial opportunity. So I’m shocked that there has been, the silence has been deafening
0:33:00 from our corporate leadership. What are your thoughts?
0:33:08 So this is why I, like you say, it’s my trick to ask questions. I know what I think. And I don’t think it’s
0:33:14 really very interesting to listen to me talk. But what you just said opens up whole, you know, whole areas that
0:33:20 nobody ever talks to me about, nobody ever asks about. So this is, these are two great directions to go. Before I talk
0:33:27 about the tech stuff and throw that back at you, I think what you said about the Second Amendment, and that
0:33:33 was the whole point, don’t tread on me and so on, I think now you have to look at that and say, was it? Was that
0:33:42 really the point? Or were they saying, we don’t like the way that this country is going in terms of
0:33:48 multiculturalism, in terms of its economy, and so on. So we’re going to say that what we really care about
0:33:52 is an overweening government. But the truth is, now that we have an overweening government that we
0:33:58 think is ours, hey, we’re cool with it. So for what it’s worth, if you think about the philosophy of
0:34:04 history, a lot of people don’t necessarily. But if you think of, you know, one of my favorite books ever
0:34:11 is Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner, because the whole point of that book is that the present changes
0:34:16 the past. That is, the way that you are in the present makes you look back at what happened in the
0:34:21 past and reevaluate it. And in this case, I don’t think you could write a book about the tea party and
0:34:25 say, oh yeah, it was about taxes. Not that you would have done that anyway. I just pulled that out of my
0:34:30 head. But you know, the idea of this don’t tread on me thing. But the thing about the tech bros is really
0:34:35 interesting, because I’ve actually spent a lot of time, I don’t know any of them, but I spend a lot of
0:34:43 time reading what they write and what they talk about. And what I see is, not knowing any of them in the
0:34:49 modern era, is the kind of ideology that we saw in the late 19th century with the rise of the robber
0:34:57 barons. And that is perhaps a natural human tendency, or perhaps a natural human tendency among people
0:35:04 who have been lucky enough to make fortunes. The idea that you must be better than everybody else.
0:35:10 Not that it was chance, as we know it was, because of the eras in which they lived and the ways in which
0:35:16 the economy worked. So it enabled somebody like Andrew Carnegie, who came over and, you know, as a
0:35:21 day laborer, to amass these extraordinary fortunes. And they start to think they’re better than people,
0:35:27 they’re smarter than people, and they’re really the ones who should run everything. And that’s an idea
0:35:36 that translates into, like you say, yeah, I should be president. And it’s interesting, I would love to see
0:35:44 the actual breakdown of those people who have come from nothing and moved up, who think that way, and
0:35:49 those who don’t. In the sense that it is also possible, as you say, to wake up in the morning and
0:35:55 look in the mirror and say, I have been so blessed, I must give back. And the difference between the
0:35:58 people who do the one and who do the other, what is that?
0:36:06 The robber barons, in my sense is, they got very philanthropic and civic-minded after they made their
0:36:09 billions, right? About the point they thought, is that not true?
0:36:15 Well, yeah, they did, except they gave away fractions. Not all of them did, but they gave away fractions of
0:36:19 what they had made. But that’s an interesting question. What induces somebody in that position
0:36:26 to either give it away or to amass power? And I would argue that’s the pressure of popular opinion.
0:36:31 So in the late 19th century, people like Andrew Carnegie, when he wrote what we know as the Gospel
0:36:37 of Wealth, which was known as just wealth, what he was really angry about was not just the workers who
0:36:42 wanted to have higher pay and better living conditions. He was mad at the other robber barons who
0:36:47 weren’t building opera houses and libraries. He’s like, you guys got to give this back. If you think about
0:36:54 the present era, how many of our extraordinarily wealthy people actually are pouring their fortunes
0:37:00 into making the world a better place? Some of them certainly are, but I’m not seeing a lot of
0:37:01 Elon Musk universities.
0:37:12 I think back then, your prestige, your relevance, your ability to have a larger selection set of mates,
0:37:15 have more interesting friends, be invited to more interesting things,
0:37:20 was not only a function of what you had and your money, it was a function of your perceived character,
0:37:24 your perceived citizenship, your perceived strength physically, your military service.
0:37:27 Whereas I think America has basically come,
0:37:33 all of those things roll up to one thing, how much shit you have, or simply put, how rich you are.
0:37:37 I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, my dad was, we were squarely middle class,
0:37:42 and we knew his boss. And his boss had a nicer house, but it was in the same neighborhood.
0:37:49 We were all members of the same country club. The delta between the middle class and sort of the
0:37:59 wealthy was afoot. Now it’s a billion miles. The difference in services, relationships, power,
0:38:04 the life you lead. It’s like that Jerry Maguire film, you know, business class used to be a bigger
0:38:09 seat, now it’s a better life. The delta’s become so enormous that America really just evaluates
0:38:16 someone’s character entirely on their wealth. And so the temptation of these individuals just to be
0:38:20 focused on their wealth and then use the excuse of, well, I’m a fiduciary for all shareholders,
0:38:23 leads to this incremental rationalization of just terrible decisions.
0:38:28 And I think a lot of them are thinking, well, I just got to get through the next three and a half
0:38:32 years of this, and then I’ll go back to being a good American. We just have to wait this guy out.
0:38:39 Do you see a difference in the way people are rewarded with prestige and relevance and a kind
0:38:43 of citizenship award versus those awards and that judgment now?
0:38:49 100%. And I would add more to that that I think you and I talked about in July. And that is one of the
0:38:57 things that the United States used to stand for, was working hard and prospering. That anybody who came
0:39:03 here got to work hard and to build a better life for themselves and their families. And that idea of
0:39:10 achieving things through hard work has really, you know, as a cultural value, really, I think, has fallen
0:39:17 by the wayside since the 1980s. And I remember strongly when Reagan started talking about how you didn’t really
0:39:22 have to work that hard in school, because look at him, he was a C student from Eureka College,
0:39:27 and he was President of the United States. And it was really much more about, if you will, and I’m sorry,
0:39:34 this is a cultural leap, but I hope it makes sense. You know, so long as the force was talking to you,
0:39:40 you were going to go very far in the universe. And, you know, the same area, you also get a real
0:39:45 doubling down on the idea of evangelical Christianity, which God’s grace is freely given.
0:39:52 And one of the things that that has culturally turned into, I think, is this idea of instant fame,
0:40:00 the idea that you don’t have to actually put in any effort so long as you are successful in the end.
0:40:07 And that, I think, has been culturally a real problem for the United States. It’s been a problem
0:40:13 politically, but I think it’s also been a problem for individuals who, you know, don’t value the—and this is a
0:40:19 really broad brush. But, you know, as I keep saying, there is joy in the work. You know, learning to do
0:40:27 something really well by hours and hours and hours and hours of failure has a human payoff as well as
0:40:34 potentially a financial payoff. And that loss of America is the land of hard work in our cultural
0:40:39 system, because I think individuals still 100 percent believe it, many of them. I think that that’s been
0:40:44 a real cultural loss and one that I would certainly love to see brought back.
0:40:51 It kind of feeds into what you write a lot about, and that is, what is the idea of what it means to be
0:40:58 an American? And the Wright’s fascination with heritage Americans, those whose roots go back to the Civil War,
0:41:06 seems to recast patriotism as lineage. How do we trace this shift from ideals, including the loyalty to the
0:41:09 Constitution and the Declaration, to something more ancestral or exclusionary?
0:41:17 Lineage and land. That’s the other piece of what the people like J.D. Vance and the other MAGA Republicans
0:41:23 who are jumping onto that train are talking about. And that is, you know, really quite explicitly the kind of
0:41:31 language that the German Nazis centered around, the idea that being part of a society is about the land
0:41:37 and the heritage. And the United States just simply was never that. And this is really a deliberate attempt
0:41:44 to bring into our system this other kind of idea. The place you might have seen it to some degree
0:41:49 is among the elite Southern enslavers in the American South before the Civil War, where they were literally
0:41:55 trying to take on aristocratic names, for example. But even they knew it was pretentious because that
0:42:04 land was so recently taken under their control after the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. So you don’t really
0:42:10 see that elsewhere in the United States. And it, you know, one of the things, I wish I had more time to
0:42:16 write always, but one of the things that frustrates me to no end is the idea that there was ever a United
0:42:23 States of America that was not multicultural is simply a fantasy. And, you know, we talk in history
0:42:29 about how whiteness is a constructed category. And, you know, that, you know, you get all kinds of
0:42:34 pushback on that. But it is worth remembering that Irish immigrants to the United States were not
0:42:41 considered white. Italian immigrants to the United States were not considered white. So when you think
0:42:48 about whiteness as a category and you look at some of the people with very obviously Irish last names insisting
0:42:53 that they belong to this white heritage, you know, I just sit there and think, okay, we’re just going to make
0:42:59 it up, right? We’re just going to construct our idea of what the past looked like. Because the reality has always
0:43:07 been that the United States was about working together as communities within a very, very broad range of
0:43:13 people. So you said that we’re in a period where partisanship matters more than country and that
0:43:17 politics right now is more about parties and is about advancing national interests. I want to put forward
0:43:26 a concern or a thesis and then an idea. And the thesis is that fascism, you know, nationalism, refusal to
0:43:31 condemn violence against your enemies, demonizing immigrants. But the juice of fascism is convincing people
0:43:37 that it’s the enemy within, that the call is coming from inside of the house. And it strikes me that as
0:43:43 we should be as worried, more worried than ever about Russian soldiers pouring over the border of Ukraine
0:43:50 or income inequality or the CCP and cyber attacks, that the majority of the juice is trying to convince
0:43:56 people that, oh, it’s your neighbor that’s the problem. One, do you agree with that and see the link
0:44:05 with fascism? And then two, is a potential solve for this, a medication, a solution? I want to hear your
0:44:08 views on mandatory national service.
0:44:15 So, yes, the idea of this administration is to turn Americans against each other. And I think that was the
0:44:24 real impetus for the whole push against trans athletes in high schools or in K-12 schools. Because the number
0:44:30 of actual trans Americans is exceedingly small. And one of the things that you want to do is you want
0:44:34 to make sure that the people you’re using as the enemy, that there just aren’t that many of them. So
0:44:41 people can say, oh, you know, those people scare me. And the problem that they’re having trying to
0:44:47 convince Americans that immigrants are a problem is because we’re all immigrants to this country. Virtually
0:44:54 all of us who are not of indigenous heritage have been immigrants. And we are traditionally a nation
0:44:59 of immigrants. So it’s very hard to convince people whose grandparents came from somewhere
0:45:05 that the immigrants are the problem, which is why they’ve gone with, what is it, criminals, rapists,
0:45:11 murderers, the worst of the worst, and so on. But then you see these videos of grandmothers being
0:45:17 taken away and think, really? The worst of the worst. So I’m not entirely sure that that system
0:45:24 of trying to other people is working. I think more what we are seeing is an increasing recognition when
0:45:32 that happens that we really are, we the people, opposed to this group of this cabal that’s trying
0:45:38 to take things over. I’m 100% in favor, and I’m going to be a pull of Donald Trump here. I am
0:45:48 1,500% in favor of national service for everybody after college. And I would say to you, I’m not after
0:45:54 college, I’m sorry, after high school. And here’s why. Not only because I think that national service
0:45:59 mixes up the pool and you get to know people from elsewhere and you recognize that they’re not,
0:46:06 you know, some monster that you’re being told. But also because having been a college professor,
0:46:14 I know that students coming out of high school are really not prepared to settle down into college
0:46:17 for a two- or a four-year term. They need a break.
0:46:19 Especially boys.
0:46:24 Yeah. And, you know, quietly, I always used to think, you’re not allowed to, of course,
0:46:29 but I always sort of thought we should be allowed as professors to have private conversations
0:46:33 with parents, which you’re absolutely not allowed to do. And, of course, nobody would ever do it.
0:46:38 And say, you know, you’re wasting your money. Your kid is coming to class at nine in the morning drunk.
0:46:43 You know, get him a keg of beer and an apartment and let him get it out of his system. And then when I
0:46:48 get him back, I can teach him something. But you’re paying an awful lot of money for me to babysit this
0:46:49 kid.
0:46:56 I showed up to UCLA at 17. I came of age during the space race. And the moment you showed any aptitude,
0:47:00 me and Debbie Brubaker were sent to the fifth grade when we were in the third grade for English and math.
0:47:06 And they wanted to skip me two grades. And my mom refused and only let them skip me one grade.
0:47:12 And I got to UCLA at 17. And there was one of my fraternity brothers was 16. It was insane that
0:47:18 we were put in an uncontrolled environment with alcohol and the opposite sex and trying to figure
0:47:23 out mating and getting along with people and going to school and taking tests. It came so close to
0:47:30 failing out my first year. I love what you said. I just think it would be, I mean, well, let me put
0:47:35 forward this. I’ve always thought in the 50s and 60s, we had this really productive era of national unity and
0:47:40 great legislation. One, because we kind of had an economic monopoly on the world and we could
0:47:47 afford a home and two cars with one person working because of our advantage, because other economic
0:47:52 infrastructures had been leveled. But even more than that, people had served, our leaders had served in
0:47:57 the same uniform. And we need to figure out a way such that at some point, most of us have served in
0:47:59 the same uniform. Would you agree with that?
0:48:05 I would, but I’m going to alter it a little bit in that the 50s were not great times for all
0:48:12 Americans by any stretch of the imagination. But what you are identifying, I think, I saw around
0:48:20 me growing up, I was born in 62, everybody in our, in our, in our, all of the parents, and not just the
0:48:26 fathers, but often the mothers had served in the war in one capacity or another. And there was a very
0:48:32 different sense of what it meant to be a man in the United States of America and a woman in the United
0:48:38 States of America in the 1950s in that what was privileged was not the kind of thing you and I
0:48:44 were just talking about, how much money can I make, but rather, how do I take care of my town? And, you
0:48:50 know, one of the World War II vets, um, was with Patton in Europe, he’s a guy who taught me how to shingle a
0:48:56 roof and how to do electricity and how to fix my car. Wasn’t my father, by the way, who taught me other
0:49:02 things. But there was this sense that you stepped in because the goal was the community, not just
0:49:09 yourself. And I see that, by the way, in the people my age who were in service. Um, I don’t necessarily
0:49:16 see it so much among the younger people who have served, and this is not entirely across the board, but
0:49:23 once we started contracting out to, um, to military contractors, things like fixing the trucks and,
0:49:30 uh, cooking the meals and all that, you lost sort of that sense of there being a closed community in
0:49:35 which everybody needed to do their, their part. And that idea of going back to a system in which
0:49:41 people understood that, yeah, it really matters if you clean the bathrooms as much as it matters if you
0:49:47 shout the orders. Um, that’s not a bad thing for a society as a whole to recognize. And I think,
0:49:53 by the way, it’s something that the, this current administration is doing its damnedest to erase
0:49:59 from our history, the idea that, and our country, the idea that caregivers matter, that elder care
0:50:05 matters, that, you know, making sure that people are differently abled can still participate in our
0:50:11 society. It’s not about them, it’s about us. And I, I think that’s a really important thing to
0:50:16 reclaim and public service would do that. We’ll be right back after a quick break.
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0:53:12 We’re back with more from Heather Cox Richardson.
0:53:21 He said something, a couple questions. One, how would you assess the difference between how people or what
0:53:26 people believe it is to be American when we were growing up versus how young people probably perceive,
0:53:32 or just the general population, how they perceive what it is to be American today? And then you threw
0:53:37 out something that I can’t resist. And one of the things I really appreciate you is you’re willing to
0:53:43 say that’s not my area of expertise. But you said what it meant to be a man in America and what it meant
0:53:49 to be a woman. I would love to know any thoughts you might have around how that has evolved over the last
0:53:52 several decades. I kind of threw that out because I knew you’d like it.
0:53:55 Yeah, 100%.
0:54:01 So, listen, I can’t speak for young people in this country because I’m not one of them.
0:54:08 I can tell you what I read, but, you know, it’s not the same when you don’t have the references.
0:54:17 And my great example of this is always those of us of a certain age, when you see a red telephone on a desk
0:54:26 in a television show or a movie, you know what it means. It’s the hotline. And it’s the hotline between a
0:54:34 leader and either Russia or something. To people who are below a certain age, it simply has no meaning because
0:54:38 they don’t understand the Cuban Missile Crisis. They don’t understand why we got the hot phone and all
0:54:43 that sort of thing, which was never a telephone, by the way, and so on. So the one thing I would say,
0:54:51 though, from my observations at my age about where the country has been is that for those of us who are
0:54:59 over 55, we do remember a period in which politics was really about negotiation and making sure that
0:55:04 the government was doing the best it could for the most people. Now, you could disagree with what one
0:55:10 president or another was doing, and certainly I suspect both of us did at times, but that was the
0:55:17 idea. And beginning at least by the 1990s, and I think it was at least partly tied into the collapse of the
0:55:22 Soviet Union and the idea that America was top dog and wasn’t going to have to worry any further about
0:55:29 standing off against another country, there was an increasingly powerful drive on the part of the
0:55:35 movement conservatives, that faction that took over the Republican Party, simply to destroy the Democrats,
0:55:40 simply to destroy their political opposition. And the Democrats, by the way, and those Republicans
0:55:45 that people like Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House in the 90s, called rhinos, Republicans in name
0:55:53 only. And by that, the people who embraced that idea put into the same basket anybody who believed that
0:55:57 the government had a role in regulating the economy or providing a basic social safety net, promoting
0:56:04 infrastructure, protecting civil rights, or protecting a rules-based international order. And by doing that,
0:56:11 and by trying to destroy those people who thought that way, gradually that faction of the party, as it took
0:56:18 over the Republican Party, began to treat its opponents as illegitimate. So after the Motor Voter Act
0:56:24 in 1993, you start to see in 1994, the argument on the part of those movement conservative Republicans
0:56:31 that Democrats are only winning by cheating, by ballot fraud, by voter fraud. And, you know, there’s never any
0:56:37 evidence of that. But they hammer on this idea again and again and again. And they, you know, they impeach
0:56:41 Bill Clinton thinking that this is going to be the end. We’ll get rid of all Democratic presidents,
0:56:49 you know, from now and forever. Amen. In the year 2000, you see the Miami-Dade recount in Florida
0:56:57 stop to guarantee that it comes out the way that the Republicans want. And then voters elect Barack Obama
0:57:05 in 2008. And in 2010, we get Operation Red Map, which is the Republican operative attempt to dramatically
0:57:09 gerrymander states, the Republican-dominated states across the nation. So we get these extreme
0:57:15 gerrymanders. We get Citizens United, which opens up the floodgates for dark money to come into our
0:57:20 political system. In 2013, we get the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which is only going to get worse.
0:57:27 And you get right to the fact that you get to January 6, 2021, where a Republican president
0:57:33 literally refuses to leave office with the argument that the election of a Democratic opponent has been
0:57:38 illegitimate. And I think you’re seeing that now with the Trump administration, the attempt to
0:57:45 delegitimize the idea of Democratic opposition and Democratic loyal opposition to what Republicans are
0:57:50 doing. So they’re not seating Adelita Grijalva, the person who was elected on September 23rd to
0:57:56 represent Arizona. They’re not talking to the Democrats about ending the shutdown. They’re simply
0:58:03 saying, your complaints are illegitimate. And that is something entirely new in our political system.
0:58:12 And it utterly negates what that system should be. And it makes it unable to function as a democracy.
0:58:18 Part of that, and part of the way I think that the Republicans got that kind of power,
0:58:26 was through the leveraging of that idea of the cowboy image, the idea that a real American was
0:58:33 a cowboy. And that cowboy image has enormous roots or has its roots in the Reconstruction era when
0:58:39 to stand off against the idea of a federal government that protected Black rights in the American South,
0:58:45 former Confederates especially, and people living in the West began to champion the cowboy
0:58:50 as the true American hero who wanted nothing from the government except to work hard and rise, which was
0:58:55 completely a myth. The West depended more on the federal government than any other region of the country
0:59:02 did. The cowboys were actually analogous to workers in the mills back East. I mean, you could go on and on about
0:59:08 why that was never true. But that idea that to be an American means taking your gun and protecting your
0:59:16 womanfolk and working hard without the government really embedded itself among a certain group of
0:59:21 right-wing Americans. And I think you can see it still. CNN had an article yesterday about the rise,
0:59:28 again, of cowboy imagery and cowboy clothing, because it’s a certain kind of way of thinking about what it
0:59:34 means to be a man in America and a woman, because it’s the same period by 74. You’re going to have
0:59:41 Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie becoming a smash hit on television and the idea of
0:59:47 prairie dresses and women being taken care of in this system in which in that particular show,
0:59:55 literally the cowboy little Joe becomes pa, right? So you’ve got that on the one hand. And I would argue
1:00:03 that that ideology, the idea that you can create your own future, is a crucially important aspect of
1:00:11 American society. But in terms of survive—and I started—well, that’s a rabbit hole. But in order
1:00:19 for a society to survive, the other form of what it means to be a man and a woman in the United States
1:00:24 is one that I think is exemplified, as I was saying, by those people coming out of World War II,
1:00:30 in which they did what they did for the good of everybody. And that I think you saw in our presidents
1:00:36 who had been in the war or who had been close to the war after it. And that, you know, well, you really
1:00:43 got away from that when you got away from political leaders who hadn’t been in the war and who didn’t
1:00:50 have that idea that we have to make sacrifices for the greater good. And that goes as far back in our
1:00:56 history as the other image does. And even farther, that idea that we are here as a community trying to
1:01:03 do the best for the most people, that’s as deeply rooted as the cowboy image or even more because it goes
1:01:10 back further. I want to highlight a couple of recent occurrences and see if you have any historical
1:01:16 references and what what it might mean about these actions moving forward. One, the lethal campaign
1:01:21 against drug smuggling boats coming from Latin America, and two, the refusal or the limiting of
1:01:26 press access to the Pentagon. I’m so glad you mentioned that because I actually wanted to ask you
1:01:30 about that, too. This is one of the things and why I—well, this is why I was thinking about the
1:01:37 murmuring voices. Because let’s look at that attack on alleged drug smuggling boats. Just want to point
1:01:41 out that if you want to stop a small boat with an outboard engine, you shoot the freaking engine.
1:01:47 This is not rocket science, right? Yeah, drugs are a problem. The majority of drugs that are a problem
1:01:54 are fentanyl, illegal fentanyl, coming over the border from Mexico. Not the border, coming into airports
1:02:02 primarily, but coming from Mexico. So theoretically, we’re going after Venezuelan drug boats, small boats
1:02:08 that are looking to go more than 1,000 miles. And now it appears we’ve hit somebody from Colombia.
1:02:14 So who are we really at war with? And we’re not really at war. It’s just that the administration
1:02:23 says we’re at war. And let me just throw that together with some other stuff. And I’m just going to sort of
1:02:31 free associate here and see what you think about it. 1990s, I think it was, when James Comey was the
1:02:37 director of the FBI, he gave a speech about how organized crime was different now. And threats to
1:02:43 national security were different now, because they were a combination of businesses, world leaders,
1:02:48 sometimes religious figures, who were essentially no longer ideological, but were just out for the
1:02:58 money. Okay, so we also seem to be making war on Venezuela, which has a lot of oil. We seem to need
1:03:06 a whole lot of oil, both for AI and for the data centers that also support cryptocurrency mining.
1:03:14 We know that there are fortunes being made from cryptocurrency. We also know that when Trump first
1:03:19 got into office, he began to embrace the argument that Vladimir Putin had been making about dividing
1:03:25 the world into spheres, an Asian sphere, a European sphere dominated by Putin, and an American sphere
1:03:30 dominated by the United States of America. And that’s why he’s talking about taking over Canada
1:03:42 and Greenland and so on. I don’t know what’s really going on in our attacks on small boats coming out of
1:03:50 apparently South American countries. What I do think is that this is not really about drugs at all.
1:03:55 And the reason for that is because, among other things, the recent reporting out of the New York
1:04:03 Times that Secretary of State Marco Rubio destroyed an agreement that the United States had with members
1:04:09 of MS-13 who were going to go on trial in the U.S. who were going to testify against Naive Bukele
1:04:17 about his connections to that gang. You know, we turned him over to Bukele in order to send
1:04:23 undocumented immigrants to El Salvador. Like, that’s not about drugs. What’s that really about?
1:04:29 So I guess my—what I’m thinking about that is I don’t know what to think about it, except it looks
1:04:38 to me like what we’re really up to is not stopping drugs so much as trying to exert American influence
1:04:45 influence in the Caribbean in an extraction of resources that looks a lot to me like Vladimir
1:04:50 Putin’s concepts of imperialism and colonialism. What do you think?
1:04:56 Yeah, I think you’re onto something. If you look at the supply chain of drugs, there’s the demand side,
1:05:02 people in the U.S. who consume drugs. There’s the supply chain or the supply side. That’s Peru,
1:05:07 Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela. And then there’s the distribution side. And probably the least
1:05:12 effective part of the supply chain to go after to reduce the drug supply chain is the transportation
1:05:17 side. We can’t keep drugs out of prisons because the demand is there and the supply is there. So the
1:05:21 notion that we’re going to keep drugs out of the United States by going after the distribution system
1:05:28 here, it just makes no sense whatsoever. It’s not going to do anything for the drug to decrease drugs
1:05:33 or fentanyl use in the United States. So it’s one, it’s either performative. It’s either like secretary
1:05:39 of war, maybe big, strong man. I do think there’s a lot around. I’m a bit of a conspiracy theorist that
1:05:44 I think the country is being run by a dead man. I think the country, largely, a lot of its activities
1:05:49 in the White House are being driven out of an AI-driven communication strategy that every 74 hours,
1:05:55 they put something into the ecosystem, into the atmosphere that distracts from one word, Epstein,
1:06:01 regardless of how crazy it is, regardless of how damaging it is. Just, we sense Epstein starting
1:06:08 to creep back into the news, 100% tariff on China, just anything, anything, just to keep him out of the
1:06:17 news. The more Machiavellian and intelligent move would be, we’ve decided that the best way to end the
1:06:23 war in Ukraine would be to take oil down to $40 a barrel and to secure new supply lines through
1:06:28 Venezuela that has a lot of oil, but more important, establish strong alliances with Guyana that has
1:06:37 light, sweet crude and potentially take oil. If you want to end the war in Ukraine, take the 17% of
1:06:41 Russia’s oil infrastructure that’s a dam and give them tomahawks and take it up a half a percent a week.
1:06:48 The Russian economy is 50% of GDP is energy. If oil crashes or their ability to refine oil goes down,
1:06:54 all of a sudden Putin starts talking about a real deal. So I don’t know whether this is performative.
1:07:00 I don’t know whether it’s wildly strategic to secure additional supplies of oil and crash the price of oil and
1:07:08 bring Putin to the table or, you know, Dorsey. But what I do know is that, you know, these folks are
1:07:13 strange. They’re not democratic. They have fascist tendencies, but I don’t think they’re stupid.
1:07:18 I don’t think they genuinely believe this is going to solve the drug problem. Any reaction, any of that?
1:07:28 Yes. I will put behind Dorsey the fact that the Trump family was in hard shape financially before
1:07:33 the second term. And we know that the fortune that it is sitting on now is largely thanks to
1:07:39 cryptocurrency, which depends on huge amounts of energy. But just to go back to Epstein, and again,
1:07:42 I’m just playing with these ideas, which is always why I like talking to you is because
1:07:55 we get to play with ideas. I don’t think that Epstein is a sex scandal as much as it is a business
1:08:02 scandal. That is, it is truly horrible what happened to the survivors of Epstein and what the men did to
1:08:09 those girls and so on. But the reason that they’re covering it up, I think, is partly to defend Donald
1:08:15 Trump. But I think when you peel back the layers, you’re going to see exactly what James Comey was
1:08:22 identifying back there whenever he gave that speech, that this was a business that was multinational
1:08:29 and was worth billions of dollars. And if you start to peel back the layers of that business,
1:08:35 you will see that there are a lot of business ties like that. And that, I think, will probably end up
1:08:42 being the defining feature of this era in world history, this sort of multinational,
1:08:49 these multinational criminal enterprises that involve a number of extraordinarily powerful people
1:08:54 and that include increasingly, we will discover, also involved Russian money, which we know the
1:08:56 Epstein files did.
1:09:00 So this is going to be a hard pivot, but we’re running out of time. And I can’t imagine how many
1:09:07 it’s not what networks or news outlets want you on today. It’s which ones don’t. I imagine you are
1:09:11 literally the most in-demand professor in America right now. But I wanted to just, we have a lot of
1:09:17 young people who listen to the show, men and women, who are trying to get their career started. And I
1:09:22 think they look at someone such as yourself and they think, I would love to be Professor Heather Cox
1:09:28 Richardson, because my sense is you’re doing something you love, you have relevance. There’s a
1:09:33 big, big vein of patriotism that runs through it and civic responsibility, but also you’re commercially
1:09:39 really successful. We’re trying to do this sub-stack strategy and everyone keeps bringing up your name
1:09:46 as someone who has just nailed it and is doing really well. I would love, could you provide advice to
1:09:50 someone who says, I would like to be in academia or I’d like to be in thought leadership, but I’m
1:09:56 looking for new channels to have relevance and also to be commercially viable. Like what for you has
1:10:02 worked really well? Because whenever anyone talks specifically about a sub-stack strategy, they
1:10:08 reference just how extraordinarily successful you’ve been. Advice to young entrepreneurs who want to find
1:10:14 new channels for relevance and commercial opportunity. I’m laughing because I don’t have a strategy.
1:10:24 And, and, and I can tell you, well, maybe it is because that’s the, that’s the, the, my answer. And
1:10:33 this, by the way, is, um, individual to me and it’s advice I got from my parents. And what I, what my
1:10:41 parents did is they left careers to do something they loved and took a real hit for it. And they
1:10:47 were my examples as I got older. I, everything that I have done, I have done because it interested me
1:10:53 and I loved it. And that meant I made really unusual choices. The most important, deciding to write for
1:10:58 a children’s magazine while I was a person trying to get tenure. And everybody said, you are crazy. And I’m
1:11:03 like, but it’s interesting. And that’s where I started writing for the public and so on and ended up where I
1:11:09 am. I, I just want to point out though, that once again, absalom, absalom, right? It looks like I’m a
1:11:17 great success. Remember, I was denied tenure at my first job. My career was over. So this idea that,
1:11:25 you know, that you, you hit a great idea and you have smooth sailing is absolutely belied by my career.
1:11:32 And the number of things that I have done that didn’t work, um, the through line is enormous. The
1:11:39 through line is simply that I, I, it’s not even that I made conscious choices. I have zero patience for
1:11:45 things that bore me. I can’t do it. It’s not that I’m unwilling to do it. I can’t do it. And so that
1:11:50 meant that I always seem to be on a track to do things that were important to me. And what was important
1:11:56 to me was writing, teaching and history. And so that’s what I’ve done. And I would suggest that
1:12:03 because each individual is unique, there are people out there who are going to do this so much better
1:12:09 than I ever did it because you’re seeing the world in a completely different way. And again, my strategy
1:12:15 is not to have a strategy. I do what I love and I’m thrilled that people want to do it with me. But I think
1:12:20 the minute you start to try and guess what other people want, you’ve lost what it is that makes you
1:12:27 unique and makes you able to communicate with people from a really raw, authentic place. So I guess just
1:12:33 do what you love and don’t tell your parents that I said that because until I was about 55, it didn’t pay.
1:12:40 Well, I, you, you sort of embody one of my favorite sayings and that is after working my ass off for 30
1:12:47 years I’m an overnight success. And, but there is some, I won’t call it strategy. There’s some tactical
1:12:51 discipline here. My understanding is you put out about a thousand words a day. You have, no?
1:12:53 It’s at least 1,200.
1:12:55 I’m sorry. At least 1,200 words a day.
1:12:56 That matters. It’s a lot.
1:13:04 Yeah, a lot. I, I put out 1,500 words a week in my newsletter and come Thursday morning at 3 a.m.
1:13:09 I’m hating myself every week. I think to write, to put out something fact-checked and credible is really
1:13:16 difficult. And the fact that you do that every day, one, just because I do want to extract something a
1:13:21 little bit more tactical from you, trying to put out 1,200 words a day, do you have any hacks in terms
1:13:26 of timing or how you go about it? And also my understanding is, professor, is that you are making
1:13:34 an exceptional living on Substack. That you have an extraordinary amount of subscribers who see your
1:13:39 content is so valuable, they’re willing to do what few will do, and that is pull out their credit cards.
1:13:44 So specifically, when do you write? How do you, how do you manage to put out 1,200 words? I don’t think
1:13:51 that’s easy for anybody. I don’t care how prolific you are. And, and any thoughts on building a content
1:13:58 strategy, a subscription content strategy? Yeah. Okay. So first of all, it’s very difficult to write
1:14:04 as much as I do. And one of the ways you get there is by habit. Like even the nights when I don’t write,
1:14:10 I actually write because it’s like being an athlete. You got to get in the habit. And if you look back at
1:14:15 my early stuff, it was not like it is now. Now it is incredibly carefully fact-checked. And that’s
1:14:20 what takes the longest amount of time to find out. And I made a big mistake the other day. I said that
1:14:27 a grand jury had indicted John Bolton, and it wasn’t. It was the prosecutors. And I had checked
1:14:34 that, but I’d taken it from a legacy media post, and that was incorrect. But, you know, just chasing
1:14:39 that crap down, that’s what takes all the time. When I write about history, often that’s pretty quick
1:14:43 because I know it really well. But there too, it’s the fact-checking that really does me in.
1:14:47 So at this point, I’ve written more than three million words, and that means I’m a pretty good writer.
1:14:52 And that helps a lot because in your head, you can hear it. You can hear it sing.
1:14:59 So partly, it’s put your—sorry, put your ass in the chair and work. Now, there’s a difference
1:15:02 between that and writing a book. I’m supposed to be writing a book right now, and I have all the
1:15:06 habits of book writers. Like, I sit down to write the book, and I’m like, you know, I haven’t cleaned
1:15:12 the refrigerator in a while, you know, and that’s a really different thing. So if you have several
1:15:17 million people waiting to see you write, you do it because you know you can’t go to bed without doing
1:15:21 it because you’re not going to be able to sleep if you have, you know, millions of people waiting for
1:15:26 you to write. So partly it’s habit. And I would say if you’re trying to build a following, you must post
1:15:32 every day. I don’t like a lot of things, so I only post once a day. Some people have a different
1:15:40 method. But if you think about the people like Liza Donnelly who posts every day and Joyce White
1:15:47 Vance who posts every day, you expect it. You don’t necessarily read it, but you like that it’s
1:15:52 there. So one of the things for me, I write every day because I need to understand, you can’t miss a
1:15:57 day because then you’re like, who was that? What really happened there? You can tell I’ve already
1:16:02 read about the Bukele issue in MS-13, even though that happened yesterday and I wrote something different
1:16:08 yesterday. So be there every day. Now in terms of strategy and the financing, that’s really interesting
1:16:14 because everything I do is free. I would do what I do for nothing. You do not have to pay me for
1:16:21 anything that I do. And yet people choose to pay. And what I love about that is that I have a much
1:16:28 lower, by the way, conversion of subscribers to paid subscribers. That average is about 10%. Mine’s
1:16:32 significantly lower than that, which is fine. I don’t care. As I say, I’m not here for the money.
1:16:38 But what it has enabled me to do is something that we don’t really talk about a lot. And that’s that
1:16:44 I’m actually running these history videos as well and building out that side of the
1:16:51 teaching stuff, which again, all free. You have to take money on YouTube, which we’ve just started to do
1:16:57 because otherwise they put their own ads on and you can change what you have control over it if you say
1:17:02 you’ll take it. We’ve just started to do that. But we’re building that out as well. So I see it in a
1:17:11 really funny way as being about sort of crowdsourcing our country’s politics and history. And again, it’s
1:17:16 never been a strategy. Not only do I not ask for money, I tell people I will not ask for money because
1:17:26 that’s not the point. It’s really mission driven. And I don’t know how replicable that is, but I do think
1:17:33 that I was extremely lucky in that at a time when everybody was saying, look here, look here, look
1:17:39 here, look here. My take has always been, hey, listen, I’m here if you’re interested, but you don’t have to
1:17:47 look here. I don’t dress well. I don’t, I don’t, you know, say glitzy stuff. I don’t ever do clickbait.
1:17:52 I’m just really interested in the world. And what that has enabled people to do is build a community
1:17:58 of people like us who are just interested in the world. So again, I’m not sure it’s a strategy,
1:18:05 but it’s really for me just about understanding myself and that’s, you know, understanding the
1:18:10 world. And that seems to have an audience. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston
1:18:16 College and an expert on American political and economic history. She’s the author of seven award-winning
1:18:22 books, including her latest Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America. Her widely read
1:18:28 newsletter, Letters from an American, synthesizes history and modern political issues. She joins us
1:18:33 from the coast of Maine, where she continues to write the story of America in real time. Professor,
1:18:38 love our conversations. Thanks so much for your time. It’s always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
1:19:06 How’s it worth happiness? I’ve been struggling lately. I’m having trouble getting my mood to foot to my
1:19:11 blessings. I am pissed off and angry all the time. I think most of it is my body chemistry as I’m getting
1:19:16 older. I don’t know if it’s a mix of THC, alcohol, testosterone, or just general hormonal,
1:19:24 you know, hormonal poor alchemy as I get older, but everything pisses me off. I go out, the waiter is
1:19:29 an idiot. And I know you’re, I know all service people are supposed to be saints, but I’ve gotten so
1:19:35 used to good service that I get a, I get bad service and it just like infuriates me, which is not a quality
1:19:43 I like in myself. Um, people in my company are pissing me off. I’m pissing me off. I’m disappointed
1:19:51 in myself. I get very angry. I get upset at just super stupid, small things. And I get angry and that
1:19:58 anger is like acid in my veins. And then the next day I just feel hollow. I just feel exhausted. And then
1:20:04 any reasonable assessment of my life, and I’m a smart guy and I can disassociate from my mood and say,
1:20:08 all right, let’s do an assessment of your life. And it’s like, okay, a beautiful family, health,
1:20:14 make a shit ton of money doing something I love. People come up to me and are nice to me. I mean,
1:20:22 literally I, I, how incredible is my life? And it hasn’t always been incredible. I’ve been through
1:20:28 periods, not real hardship, but periods where I was very lonely, where I was having trouble finding a
1:20:34 partner, where all the people I liked didn’t seem to like me, where I would work my fucking
1:20:39 ass off and get nowhere or get worse than nowhere, make an investment and lose a shit ton of money
1:20:44 after working at a company for seven years and taking all these risks. I mean, I’ve had dark
1:20:49 moments. And so for the first time, I’m actually thinking about going to therapy and just talking
1:20:54 to someone. I’ve never been to therapy. My therapy is I talk to friends. I’m good at friends. I usually
1:20:59 talk to a friend 30 to 60 minutes a day about different issues. That happens a lot. And I’m being
1:21:04 very honest, honest about it. I’ve been talking to people about it and I’m thinking of just spending
1:21:08 some time with a quote unquote professional. I haven’t done it yet. We’ll see how I feel over
1:21:16 the next week or two weeks, but something is going on with me. And what’s unacceptable is I think a lot
1:21:20 of, I’ve written a lot about end of life. I’m sort of fascinated with death, but I actually find it
1:21:24 quite liberating. And the three biggest regrets of people at the end of their life are one, they wish
1:21:28 they’d stayed in better touch with their friends too. They wish they’d led the life they wanted to
1:21:34 lead, you know, been with who they wanted to be with, be the sexual orientation they wanted to be,
1:21:39 go into the field they want to go into, not what their parents, society, or their own demons were
1:21:44 telling them on it. But the number one regret of the dying is they wish they’d allowed themselves to
1:21:49 be happier. They wish they’d taken stock of their blessings and been less hard on themselves.
1:21:56 And I am, I get angry about my anger because I look at my life and I think if anyone should be
1:22:01 dancing around and singing, the hills are alive with the sound of music, it should be me.
1:22:08 And I’m not, I’m not. And, uh, I also think that a lot of it, quite frankly, is social media.
1:22:15 I think that, uh, 20% of the global equity markets and 40% of the S and P is tied to figuring out a way
1:22:20 to keep you glued to your phone. And the number one way to keep you glued to your phone is to
1:22:26 show men being tripped and hitting their, doing a face plan and bleeding at a, at a no Kings protest,
1:22:31 which I find quite frankly, really disturbing and upsetting. Or seeing all these idiots on
1:22:38 fucking Fox news, just lie after lie or seeing Speaker Johnson say, Oh, we’re not in legislative
1:22:43 session. I can’t swear this woman. And I have problems disassociating. It pisses me off and it ruins,
1:22:49 makes me angry for a good 10 or 15 minutes. And that is a real flaw. That is, I’ve been a
1:22:53 approach about running for office. And one of the reasons I don’t think I’m fit to run for office
1:22:57 is I just take shit to not too personally, but I get angry too much. I just want to, I don’t,
1:23:03 I wouldn’t want to walk around the halls of the state Capitol or, or Congress just fucking angry
1:23:08 all the time. I just don’t need that. I don’t want that. I’m going to try and find something.
1:23:14 I exercise a lot. I eat really well. My sleep’s okay. I probably have, I’ve toned down the alcohol.
1:23:18 I’d still use THC and edibles, but not too much. I’m trying to figure out,
1:23:22 is it something to do with my chemistry? Is it something where I need some sort of medical
1:23:26 or pharmaceutical intervention? I’ve never done that before. And I’m not excited about the idea of it,
1:23:32 but I have gotten to a point in my life where I recognize if the gap between my blessings
1:23:38 and my mood is too great, I need to do something about it. And the key to doing something about it
1:23:43 is to recognize it, to talk about it, and then to pursue help. And I’m going to do all of those things.
1:23:51 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Janair.
1:23:55 Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media.