AI transcript
0:00:02 There’s a lot nobody tells you about running a small business,
0:00:06 like the pricing, the marketing, the budgeting,
0:00:10 the accidents, the panicking, and the things,
0:00:13 and the things, and the non-stop things.
0:00:17 But having the right insurance can help protect you from many things.
0:00:20 Customize your coverage to get the protection you need
0:00:22 with BCAA Small Business Insurance.
0:00:28 Use promo code PROTECT to receive $50 off at bcaa.com slash smallbusiness.
0:00:34 In 2023, a 54-year-old man named William Woods
0:00:37 told police that his identity had been stolen.
0:00:39 But there was a problem.
0:00:42 Another man said that he was the real William Woods,
0:00:45 and it was his identity that had been stolen.
0:00:50 There’s no way that two human beings could have the same name,
0:00:52 the same date of birth, the same social security number.
0:00:56 So someone clearly was not telling the truth.
0:00:59 Listen to our latest episode on Criminal,
0:01:01 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:09 I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
0:01:12 One of the wonderful things about this business
0:01:16 is occasionally you stumble upon someone who is just so impressive.
0:01:19 Professor Heather Cox Richardson,
0:01:22 a historian of American history, is one of those people.
0:01:25 Here are some of Professor Richardson’s views
0:01:28 on the crisis facing American democracy.
0:01:32 Resist, as read by George Hahn.
0:01:44 My go-to historical frame of reference is World War II.
0:01:48 At a staggering global cost of 85 million lives,
0:01:52 the Second World War was the crucible of the 20th century.
0:01:56 An explosion of unfathomable destruction,
0:02:02 followed by an unparalleled period of unevenly distributed peace and prosperity.
0:02:10 As I’m a catastrophist, I’m hardwired to dwell on the first part and take the second part for granted.
0:02:15 Also, World War II, specifically the European theater, is personal.
0:02:20 As a kid, my father and his friends kept tabs on people with foreign accents,
0:02:24 believing they were tracking Nazi spies in their hometown of Glasgow.
0:02:30 When the war ended, Dad was 15, three years away from being deployed to the front.
0:02:34 My Jewish mother narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust.
0:02:39 She found relative safety sheltering in the London Tube during the Blitz.
0:02:42 Had the Allies not stood their ground,
0:02:45 my mom’s life could have ended with a train ride,
0:02:47 and you’d be listening to something else.
0:02:54 So many of us don’t appreciate how much of our success isn’t our fault.
0:03:02 Last week, I wrote that masked agents in fatigues,
0:03:05 raiding churches, schools, and workplaces,
0:03:07 and separating families without due process,
0:03:11 is not modern America, but 1930s Europe.
0:03:13 We’ve seen this movie before.
0:03:15 It doesn’t end well.
0:03:19 History, however, isn’t a single-screen theater,
0:03:21 but a multiplex of outcomes.
0:03:26 I recently spoke with historian Heather Cox Richardson,
0:03:27 who is remarkable.
0:03:31 While we share a diagnosis of the present,
0:03:34 Professor Richardson is an optimist and an Americanist.
0:03:36 Comparing the present,
0:03:40 what I call our slow burn into fascism,
0:03:43 to previous periods of instability in American history,
0:03:44 Richardson says,
0:04:01 The question isn’t whether she is correct,
0:04:02 but rather,
0:04:04 what can we learn from American history,
0:04:09 specifically the 1850s and 1890s?
0:04:13 At the beginning of the 1850s,
0:04:16 American slaveholders were undefeated.
0:04:20 They had the political capital to expand the fugitive slave laws,
0:04:23 requiring law enforcement throughout the U.S.
0:04:25 to aid in the arrest of runaways.
0:04:30 If that sounds like it rhymes with today’s battle over sanctuary cities
0:04:33 and the federalization of the California National Guard,
0:04:34 trust your instincts.
0:04:39 In 1855, free staters and pro-slavery forces,
0:04:42 egged on by national political leaders,
0:04:46 clashed in a Civil War sneak preview called Bleeding Kansas.
0:04:49 A year later,
0:04:53 a pro-slavery senator attacked an abolitionist one,
0:04:54 Charles Sumner,
0:04:55 with a cane,
0:04:58 nearly beating him to death on the Senate floor.
0:05:03 If rhetoric leading to political violence reminds you of what currently passes
0:05:05 for presidential leadership,
0:05:05 again,
0:05:07 trust your instincts.
0:05:10 And for contemporary parallels of political violence,
0:05:12 see January 6th,
0:05:13 Charlottesville,
0:05:14 Gretchen Whitmer,
0:05:16 Josh Shapiro,
0:05:17 Paul Pelosi,
0:05:18 Steve Scalise,
0:05:21 the attacks on state legislators in Minnesota,
0:05:24 and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
0:05:29 As Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski recently said,
0:05:31 we are all afraid.
0:05:33 Given our history,
0:05:35 that’s common sense.
0:05:39 As the 1850s neared their end,
0:05:41 slaveholders appeared invincible.
0:05:46 In a distant echo of today’s court battles over birthright citizenship,
0:05:51 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that black Americans,
0:05:53 whether free or slaves,
0:05:55 couldn’t be U.S. citizens.
0:05:57 Two years later,
0:06:04 abolitionist John Brown led a Hail Mary raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry,
0:06:07 intending to ignite a nationwide slave revolt.
0:06:11 Federal military forces under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee
0:06:15 put down what contemporary accounts called an insurrection.
0:06:17 At the time,
0:06:21 Brown’s failed raid was a low point for abolitionists,
0:06:22 but in retrospect,
0:06:26 it may have represented a high watermark of pro-slave power in U.S. politics.
0:06:29 Within a few years,
0:06:33 a previously unthinkable coalition of unionists,
0:06:36 many of whom held deeply racist views,
0:06:38 and abolitionists,
0:06:41 had formed around Lincoln’s Republican Party,
0:06:45 won a war to preserve the Union,
0:06:46 freed the slaves,
0:06:47 freed the slaves,
0:06:48 launched Reconstruction,
0:06:52 and set America on the path of industrialization.
0:07:00 There’s a reason many contemporary scholars are talking about a new gilded age.
0:07:04 The period between 1870 and 1900,
0:07:06 similar to our era,
0:07:09 was defined by extreme inequality,
0:07:11 the corporate capture of government,
0:07:12 corruption,
0:07:15 and widespread distrust in institutions.
0:07:17 Today,
0:07:19 the robber barons have rebranded as tech bros.
0:07:25 Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine have been reborn as Trump’s meme coin,
0:07:29 a pay-for-play crypto scheme operating out of the Oval Office.
0:07:37 The fear that Congress and the courts work for corporations and the wealthy remains a constant.
0:07:41 Reformers offer another parallel.
0:07:45 The trustbusters of the gilded age had Teddy Roosevelt,
0:07:49 who took on monopolies in railroads, sugar, and oil.
0:07:52 We have Lena Kahn,
0:07:56 working to regulate digital monopolies that dictate the terms of commerce
0:08:00 and preside over a broken information ecosystem.
0:08:04 Leveraging distrust of Republicans and Democrats,
0:08:10 the short-lived populist party of the 1890s demanded the direct election of senators,
0:08:14 progressive taxation, and labor protections.
0:08:19 Andrew Yang, who consistently loses elections but wins arguments,
0:08:25 has championed reforms, notably the universal basic income and ranked choice voting.
0:08:31 Zoran Mamdani, a progressive beneficiary of ranked choice voting,
0:08:34 echoes William Jennings Bryan’s slogan,
0:08:40 Plutocracy is abhorrent to the Republic when he talks about halalflation.
0:08:44 Reformers and their demands change throughout our history,
0:08:50 but they share a common theme of fighting for the little guy against moneyed interests.
0:08:56 American history is a competition between two visions of governance,
0:08:58 according to Professor Richardson.
0:09:02 Either we’re a society where people are equal under the law
0:09:04 and have a say in their government,
0:09:10 or we’re a society where elites have the right to rule and concentrate wealth,
0:09:13 as they’re simply better than everyone else.
0:09:20 At this moment, I’d argue that the 1% are protected by the law but not bound by it,
0:09:26 and the bottom 99% are bound by the law but not protected by it.
0:09:31 In the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie personified the elite.
0:09:37 An immigrant who made his fortune in steel during the early years of American industrialization,
0:09:42 Carnegie initially credited his adopted country with his success.
0:09:46 Later, however, Carnegie argued he was self-made,
0:09:50 insisting he had a right to concentrate wealth in his hands,
0:09:53 as he was the best steward for society.
0:10:01 Elon Musk, also an immigrant, built his fortune on internet infrastructure financed by American taxpayers.
0:10:06 He built his second fortune jump-starting the electric car industry,
0:10:10 financed once again by billions in subsidies.
0:10:15 Somewhere along the way, he became convinced he was humanity’s savior.
0:10:22 For Musk, anyone who stands in the way of anointing him first friend and or unelected president
0:10:24 is an enemy of the state.
0:10:30 The most fortunate among us have replaced patriotism with technocarionism.
0:10:34 Daniel Kahneman found that, above a certain threshold,
0:10:38 money offers no incremental increase in one’s happiness.
0:10:45 However, there’s evidence everywhere that men who aggregate billions from technology firms
0:10:50 become infected by an inexplicable sense of a grievance.
0:10:57 Our idolatry of wealth makes Americans vulnerable to men like Carnegie and Musk.
0:11:02 As the citizens of a country predicated on the dream of economic prosperity,
0:11:06 Americans conflate wealth with leadership.
0:11:12 The bottom 90% tolerate, even celebrate, a Hunger Games economy,
0:11:17 where the rich live long, remarkable lives, and everyone else dies a slow death.
0:11:18 Why?
0:11:22 Because each of us believes we’ll eventually reach the top.
0:11:26 That belief isn’t optimism, but opium.
0:11:33 And it keeps the bottom 90% from realizing they’re essentially nutrition for the top 10%.
0:11:39 Private jet owners can now accelerate the depreciation on their planes,
0:11:43 but we’re stripping health care from millions of people.
0:11:45 Does that make any fucking sense?
0:11:51 One common protest slogan in the Trump era is,
0:11:53 This is not who we are.
0:11:58 I agree, but as a student of history, I know that’s incomplete.
0:12:00 A more accurate slogan?
0:12:03 This isn’t who we want to be.
0:12:07 Richardson says our model should be Abraham Lincoln,
0:12:12 who navigated through a period of political instability and violence
0:12:19 and renewed American democracy by appealing to the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
0:12:25 This Independence Day, Richardson wrote about the men who signed America’s founding document.
0:12:30 They risked everything they had to defend the idea of human equality,
0:12:37 an idea that’s been America’s work in progress since 1776.
0:12:38 Quote,
0:12:48 Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives for that principle.
0:12:55 Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to, quote,
0:13:01 take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
0:13:07 That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,
0:13:12 that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom,
0:13:19 and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
0:13:21 Unquote.
0:13:23 Unquote.
0:13:28 I find it difficult to see optimism in Lincoln’s story.
0:13:30 See, catastrophist.
0:13:34 After he won the bloodiest war in American history,
0:13:38 an assassin’s bullet robbed him of the opportunity to shape the peace.
0:13:41 But at Gettysburg,
0:13:44 just a few months after a pivotal battle
0:13:48 where tens of thousands of Americans gave the last full measure of devotion,
0:13:53 Lincoln appealed to American values as well as the American people.
0:13:55 Then, as now,
0:13:57 the ball is in our court.
0:14:00 Richardson told me,
0:14:01 quote,
0:14:03 I’m not ready to give up on America.
0:14:07 We’ve renewed our democracy in the past,
0:14:10 and we have the tools to do it again.
0:14:11 Unquote.
0:14:16 None of us knows how this moment will turn out.
0:14:19 Perhaps that’s the point.
0:14:22 But previous generations of reformers
0:14:24 who renewed American democracy
0:14:28 didn’t have the luxury of hindsight or guarantees either.
0:14:32 They had only the present moment and a choice.
0:14:35 Retreat into cynicism
0:14:36 or push forward
0:14:40 into the messy, uncertain work of democracy.
0:14:45 Susan B. Anthony faced decades of ridicule and arrest.
0:14:49 Martin Luther King’s dream must have seemed impossible
0:14:51 from his Birmingham jail cell.
0:14:54 Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez
0:14:56 organized immigrant farm workers
0:14:59 who had every reason to believe the system would never change.
0:15:03 Harvey Milk knew visibility meant vulnerability
0:15:05 in a hostile world.
0:15:08 What they shared wasn’t optimism,
0:15:10 but the willingness to act
0:15:13 as if democracy could be renewed
0:15:15 even when the evidence suggested otherwise.
0:15:19 My mother survived the Blitz
0:15:21 because the Allies refused
0:15:24 to give fascists the satisfaction
0:15:25 of her fear.
0:15:28 My father spent his youth
0:15:30 tracking imaginary Nazi spies
0:15:31 and joined the Royal Navy
0:15:34 as freedom felt worth protecting.
0:15:36 Democracy survives
0:15:39 the same way it always has.
0:15:42 Not because the outcome is guaranteed,
0:15:45 but because ordinary people decide
0:15:47 it’s worth the risk.
0:15:50 Resist.
0:15:55 Life is so rich.
0:16:07 Life is so rich.
0:00:06 like the pricing, the marketing, the budgeting,
0:00:10 the accidents, the panicking, and the things,
0:00:13 and the things, and the non-stop things.
0:00:17 But having the right insurance can help protect you from many things.
0:00:20 Customize your coverage to get the protection you need
0:00:22 with BCAA Small Business Insurance.
0:00:28 Use promo code PROTECT to receive $50 off at bcaa.com slash smallbusiness.
0:00:34 In 2023, a 54-year-old man named William Woods
0:00:37 told police that his identity had been stolen.
0:00:39 But there was a problem.
0:00:42 Another man said that he was the real William Woods,
0:00:45 and it was his identity that had been stolen.
0:00:50 There’s no way that two human beings could have the same name,
0:00:52 the same date of birth, the same social security number.
0:00:56 So someone clearly was not telling the truth.
0:00:59 Listen to our latest episode on Criminal,
0:01:01 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:09 I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
0:01:12 One of the wonderful things about this business
0:01:16 is occasionally you stumble upon someone who is just so impressive.
0:01:19 Professor Heather Cox Richardson,
0:01:22 a historian of American history, is one of those people.
0:01:25 Here are some of Professor Richardson’s views
0:01:28 on the crisis facing American democracy.
0:01:32 Resist, as read by George Hahn.
0:01:44 My go-to historical frame of reference is World War II.
0:01:48 At a staggering global cost of 85 million lives,
0:01:52 the Second World War was the crucible of the 20th century.
0:01:56 An explosion of unfathomable destruction,
0:02:02 followed by an unparalleled period of unevenly distributed peace and prosperity.
0:02:10 As I’m a catastrophist, I’m hardwired to dwell on the first part and take the second part for granted.
0:02:15 Also, World War II, specifically the European theater, is personal.
0:02:20 As a kid, my father and his friends kept tabs on people with foreign accents,
0:02:24 believing they were tracking Nazi spies in their hometown of Glasgow.
0:02:30 When the war ended, Dad was 15, three years away from being deployed to the front.
0:02:34 My Jewish mother narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust.
0:02:39 She found relative safety sheltering in the London Tube during the Blitz.
0:02:42 Had the Allies not stood their ground,
0:02:45 my mom’s life could have ended with a train ride,
0:02:47 and you’d be listening to something else.
0:02:54 So many of us don’t appreciate how much of our success isn’t our fault.
0:03:02 Last week, I wrote that masked agents in fatigues,
0:03:05 raiding churches, schools, and workplaces,
0:03:07 and separating families without due process,
0:03:11 is not modern America, but 1930s Europe.
0:03:13 We’ve seen this movie before.
0:03:15 It doesn’t end well.
0:03:19 History, however, isn’t a single-screen theater,
0:03:21 but a multiplex of outcomes.
0:03:26 I recently spoke with historian Heather Cox Richardson,
0:03:27 who is remarkable.
0:03:31 While we share a diagnosis of the present,
0:03:34 Professor Richardson is an optimist and an Americanist.
0:03:36 Comparing the present,
0:03:40 what I call our slow burn into fascism,
0:03:43 to previous periods of instability in American history,
0:03:44 Richardson says,
0:04:01 The question isn’t whether she is correct,
0:04:02 but rather,
0:04:04 what can we learn from American history,
0:04:09 specifically the 1850s and 1890s?
0:04:13 At the beginning of the 1850s,
0:04:16 American slaveholders were undefeated.
0:04:20 They had the political capital to expand the fugitive slave laws,
0:04:23 requiring law enforcement throughout the U.S.
0:04:25 to aid in the arrest of runaways.
0:04:30 If that sounds like it rhymes with today’s battle over sanctuary cities
0:04:33 and the federalization of the California National Guard,
0:04:34 trust your instincts.
0:04:39 In 1855, free staters and pro-slavery forces,
0:04:42 egged on by national political leaders,
0:04:46 clashed in a Civil War sneak preview called Bleeding Kansas.
0:04:49 A year later,
0:04:53 a pro-slavery senator attacked an abolitionist one,
0:04:54 Charles Sumner,
0:04:55 with a cane,
0:04:58 nearly beating him to death on the Senate floor.
0:05:03 If rhetoric leading to political violence reminds you of what currently passes
0:05:05 for presidential leadership,
0:05:05 again,
0:05:07 trust your instincts.
0:05:10 And for contemporary parallels of political violence,
0:05:12 see January 6th,
0:05:13 Charlottesville,
0:05:14 Gretchen Whitmer,
0:05:16 Josh Shapiro,
0:05:17 Paul Pelosi,
0:05:18 Steve Scalise,
0:05:21 the attacks on state legislators in Minnesota,
0:05:24 and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
0:05:29 As Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski recently said,
0:05:31 we are all afraid.
0:05:33 Given our history,
0:05:35 that’s common sense.
0:05:39 As the 1850s neared their end,
0:05:41 slaveholders appeared invincible.
0:05:46 In a distant echo of today’s court battles over birthright citizenship,
0:05:51 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that black Americans,
0:05:53 whether free or slaves,
0:05:55 couldn’t be U.S. citizens.
0:05:57 Two years later,
0:06:04 abolitionist John Brown led a Hail Mary raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry,
0:06:07 intending to ignite a nationwide slave revolt.
0:06:11 Federal military forces under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee
0:06:15 put down what contemporary accounts called an insurrection.
0:06:17 At the time,
0:06:21 Brown’s failed raid was a low point for abolitionists,
0:06:22 but in retrospect,
0:06:26 it may have represented a high watermark of pro-slave power in U.S. politics.
0:06:29 Within a few years,
0:06:33 a previously unthinkable coalition of unionists,
0:06:36 many of whom held deeply racist views,
0:06:38 and abolitionists,
0:06:41 had formed around Lincoln’s Republican Party,
0:06:45 won a war to preserve the Union,
0:06:46 freed the slaves,
0:06:47 freed the slaves,
0:06:48 launched Reconstruction,
0:06:52 and set America on the path of industrialization.
0:07:00 There’s a reason many contemporary scholars are talking about a new gilded age.
0:07:04 The period between 1870 and 1900,
0:07:06 similar to our era,
0:07:09 was defined by extreme inequality,
0:07:11 the corporate capture of government,
0:07:12 corruption,
0:07:15 and widespread distrust in institutions.
0:07:17 Today,
0:07:19 the robber barons have rebranded as tech bros.
0:07:25 Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine have been reborn as Trump’s meme coin,
0:07:29 a pay-for-play crypto scheme operating out of the Oval Office.
0:07:37 The fear that Congress and the courts work for corporations and the wealthy remains a constant.
0:07:41 Reformers offer another parallel.
0:07:45 The trustbusters of the gilded age had Teddy Roosevelt,
0:07:49 who took on monopolies in railroads, sugar, and oil.
0:07:52 We have Lena Kahn,
0:07:56 working to regulate digital monopolies that dictate the terms of commerce
0:08:00 and preside over a broken information ecosystem.
0:08:04 Leveraging distrust of Republicans and Democrats,
0:08:10 the short-lived populist party of the 1890s demanded the direct election of senators,
0:08:14 progressive taxation, and labor protections.
0:08:19 Andrew Yang, who consistently loses elections but wins arguments,
0:08:25 has championed reforms, notably the universal basic income and ranked choice voting.
0:08:31 Zoran Mamdani, a progressive beneficiary of ranked choice voting,
0:08:34 echoes William Jennings Bryan’s slogan,
0:08:40 Plutocracy is abhorrent to the Republic when he talks about halalflation.
0:08:44 Reformers and their demands change throughout our history,
0:08:50 but they share a common theme of fighting for the little guy against moneyed interests.
0:08:56 American history is a competition between two visions of governance,
0:08:58 according to Professor Richardson.
0:09:02 Either we’re a society where people are equal under the law
0:09:04 and have a say in their government,
0:09:10 or we’re a society where elites have the right to rule and concentrate wealth,
0:09:13 as they’re simply better than everyone else.
0:09:20 At this moment, I’d argue that the 1% are protected by the law but not bound by it,
0:09:26 and the bottom 99% are bound by the law but not protected by it.
0:09:31 In the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie personified the elite.
0:09:37 An immigrant who made his fortune in steel during the early years of American industrialization,
0:09:42 Carnegie initially credited his adopted country with his success.
0:09:46 Later, however, Carnegie argued he was self-made,
0:09:50 insisting he had a right to concentrate wealth in his hands,
0:09:53 as he was the best steward for society.
0:10:01 Elon Musk, also an immigrant, built his fortune on internet infrastructure financed by American taxpayers.
0:10:06 He built his second fortune jump-starting the electric car industry,
0:10:10 financed once again by billions in subsidies.
0:10:15 Somewhere along the way, he became convinced he was humanity’s savior.
0:10:22 For Musk, anyone who stands in the way of anointing him first friend and or unelected president
0:10:24 is an enemy of the state.
0:10:30 The most fortunate among us have replaced patriotism with technocarionism.
0:10:34 Daniel Kahneman found that, above a certain threshold,
0:10:38 money offers no incremental increase in one’s happiness.
0:10:45 However, there’s evidence everywhere that men who aggregate billions from technology firms
0:10:50 become infected by an inexplicable sense of a grievance.
0:10:57 Our idolatry of wealth makes Americans vulnerable to men like Carnegie and Musk.
0:11:02 As the citizens of a country predicated on the dream of economic prosperity,
0:11:06 Americans conflate wealth with leadership.
0:11:12 The bottom 90% tolerate, even celebrate, a Hunger Games economy,
0:11:17 where the rich live long, remarkable lives, and everyone else dies a slow death.
0:11:18 Why?
0:11:22 Because each of us believes we’ll eventually reach the top.
0:11:26 That belief isn’t optimism, but opium.
0:11:33 And it keeps the bottom 90% from realizing they’re essentially nutrition for the top 10%.
0:11:39 Private jet owners can now accelerate the depreciation on their planes,
0:11:43 but we’re stripping health care from millions of people.
0:11:45 Does that make any fucking sense?
0:11:51 One common protest slogan in the Trump era is,
0:11:53 This is not who we are.
0:11:58 I agree, but as a student of history, I know that’s incomplete.
0:12:00 A more accurate slogan?
0:12:03 This isn’t who we want to be.
0:12:07 Richardson says our model should be Abraham Lincoln,
0:12:12 who navigated through a period of political instability and violence
0:12:19 and renewed American democracy by appealing to the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
0:12:25 This Independence Day, Richardson wrote about the men who signed America’s founding document.
0:12:30 They risked everything they had to defend the idea of human equality,
0:12:37 an idea that’s been America’s work in progress since 1776.
0:12:38 Quote,
0:12:48 Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives for that principle.
0:12:55 Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to, quote,
0:13:01 take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
0:13:07 That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,
0:13:12 that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom,
0:13:19 and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
0:13:21 Unquote.
0:13:23 Unquote.
0:13:28 I find it difficult to see optimism in Lincoln’s story.
0:13:30 See, catastrophist.
0:13:34 After he won the bloodiest war in American history,
0:13:38 an assassin’s bullet robbed him of the opportunity to shape the peace.
0:13:41 But at Gettysburg,
0:13:44 just a few months after a pivotal battle
0:13:48 where tens of thousands of Americans gave the last full measure of devotion,
0:13:53 Lincoln appealed to American values as well as the American people.
0:13:55 Then, as now,
0:13:57 the ball is in our court.
0:14:00 Richardson told me,
0:14:01 quote,
0:14:03 I’m not ready to give up on America.
0:14:07 We’ve renewed our democracy in the past,
0:14:10 and we have the tools to do it again.
0:14:11 Unquote.
0:14:16 None of us knows how this moment will turn out.
0:14:19 Perhaps that’s the point.
0:14:22 But previous generations of reformers
0:14:24 who renewed American democracy
0:14:28 didn’t have the luxury of hindsight or guarantees either.
0:14:32 They had only the present moment and a choice.
0:14:35 Retreat into cynicism
0:14:36 or push forward
0:14:40 into the messy, uncertain work of democracy.
0:14:45 Susan B. Anthony faced decades of ridicule and arrest.
0:14:49 Martin Luther King’s dream must have seemed impossible
0:14:51 from his Birmingham jail cell.
0:14:54 Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez
0:14:56 organized immigrant farm workers
0:14:59 who had every reason to believe the system would never change.
0:15:03 Harvey Milk knew visibility meant vulnerability
0:15:05 in a hostile world.
0:15:08 What they shared wasn’t optimism,
0:15:10 but the willingness to act
0:15:13 as if democracy could be renewed
0:15:15 even when the evidence suggested otherwise.
0:15:19 My mother survived the Blitz
0:15:21 because the Allies refused
0:15:24 to give fascists the satisfaction
0:15:25 of her fear.
0:15:28 My father spent his youth
0:15:30 tracking imaginary Nazi spies
0:15:31 and joined the Royal Navy
0:15:34 as freedom felt worth protecting.
0:15:36 Democracy survives
0:15:39 the same way it always has.
0:15:42 Not because the outcome is guaranteed,
0:15:45 but because ordinary people decide
0:15:47 it’s worth the risk.
0:15:50 Resist.
0:15:55 Life is so rich.
0:16:07 Life is so rich.
As read by George Hahn.
Resist
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