 two o'clock clock with John David Ann on History Lens. Welcome back to the show, John. John is a history professor at Hawaii Pacific University. So glad to have you back. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on. You know, I know it's been a while. I apologize to my viewers out there, but I'm telling you that COVID has changed so much even, you know, the academic side of things has changed so much. So I've got a greater workload now and I just can't do as many history lenses. So but it's good to be back talking to you, Jay. You look good. Well, I'm enjoying myself. I'm learning a lot from guys like you. Our question today is why this election day, I love this question, why this election day is an historical inflection point in American history, maybe global history. And we don't necessarily agree on that, do we? No, I mean, the thing is we don't really know if it's an inflection point yet. And we might not know. It depends. I mean, as we were talking about before the show, it really depends. So if Biden wins the election and it looks like the other polls all show him winning, then this will be not an inflection point so much as what I would argue, and I think the political scientists who studied this and historians who studied this would argue would be a continuation of the Obama coalition, a coalition that consisted more of affluent voters, that pulled affluent voters into the Democratic Party, younger voters, voters of color, emphasis on voters of color, a multicultural coalition, and while retaining some aspects of the old Democratic Party. Now, of course, in 2016, those older aspects of the Democratic Party, the working class people, that didn't work out so well for the Democrats. That's where the Democrats lost the election. So for Biden to, and it looks like he's pulling those people in, you know, he's ahead in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin, those are all places with, you know, working class of Michigan. Those are places with unions with, you know, so that's working class territory there. Kind of the traditional backbone of the Democratic Party. And Biden is kind of a traditional candidate, so it doesn't really surprise that he's been able to pull those folks back into his column, at least that's what the polls indicate. But so if the other thing happens, if we see a second term for the current occupant of the office, then we might say that this is, in fact, a confirmation of the inflection point that took place in 2016. And it could be a very serious inflection point. So, you know, there's a lot of anxiety about the election, you know, my friends, whenever I talk to them, they're just biting their nails right, you know, right down to the end, you know, their hair is coming out. It's scary. It's a scary time because, you know, one of the kind of, one of the kind of consequences of living with Trump for four years is that you don't really know is the guy going to just tear up the Constitution. Is he going to just, you know, rule by dictate and just ignore the Congress completely? That hasn't quite happened, although it seems that when he gets an inch, he takes a mile. So when, for instance, during the controversy over building the wall, right, he got a little bit of an opening and then he took that and he, you know, with the, with the reappropriation of money that Congress had already appropriated, reappropriating it to build the wall, then he violated the Constitution. Very clear that he violated the Constitution. By the way, this case will be coming before the Supreme Court very soon, once again, and they'll get a, we'll get a final ruling on it. And they, anyway, so we don't really know, and this is, you know, historians, we need time. We need distance and time to have passed in order to really do substantial evaluations of this. But there is a, there is a field of historical studies and in political science that does what we call party systems, the very old kind of traditional approach to studying politics. But it is, I think, effective in its clarity because what it does is identifies party systems over time. And we've had six of them so far, the, the conservative party system of the, of the Republicans, which Reagan brought into being in, you know, in the 1980s, then that might have reached its, its gain, new moi in the George W. Bush administration, then Obama was elected with a mandate for change, right? He ran on change. And that could mean that we're, we are now in the seventh party system, in the seventh party system, but could be a system in which the Democrats are slightly favored because of the demographic changes in the United States, more Hispanics, more blacks. You look at the demographic situation in, in Texas as of 2020, it looks like you have about 40% Hispanic, 10% African American. That's the majority. And that means whites are close or even may be, depending upon the census, it might be a minority just like in California. So there's a lot of demographic changes that, that, that accumulate to cause kind of these structural changes in politics. And the Democrats are well positioned for that. Now, of course, you know, Trump and the Republicans have nailed down rural areas and, and, you know, religious conservatives, we'll see. Actually, there's, I read some material that suggests that religious conservatives are not as excited about Trump as they were. Some of them are not going to vote for him. So it's a, it's a complicated situation. And I'm, I'm fascinated with the notion of, of the, of the historian looking back as 2020 now, let's say he looks back in 2025 or better yet 2030. And he looks back down the field because he wants to examine what is really happening to our country, say 10 years ago. And there's a couple of thoughts there's a lot of variables that go into that. For example, this historian, John, I hate to tell you this, could be younger than both you and me. He could be a recent graduate. He could have very little personal involvement in the events that shake us up right now over the past four years. And he has to look back and see, you know, what, what the sources say. I'm not a historian, but, but I imagine from you that an historian would go and look at, you know, newspaper articles. He'd look at the books of the time. He tried to get original material in some way, presidential papers, what have you. And, and he would try to make his decision or make his examination, you know, with those materials. But, but I think that given this president, if he's reelected, we're going to see alternative facts on everything. And so that makes it very hard for the historian 10 years from now to get a clear picture. This, this creates a real problem for, you know, the retrospective approach to history. I don't, I don't think it's that's true for historians. When we have a very high bar of, of integrity and kind of truth telling, when maybe distance or objectivity, whatever you want to call it. So I don't think that's a concern for how the history is written. Well, anybody read the history that's written. That's another issue. Well, what about hidden things, you know? I mean, one thing that has occurred to me over the past four years is that what Trump does, he tries to dazzle us with shiny objects. And he, he tries to, you know, control the agenda for the, for the media. And then behind his back, he's doing something else. And it's, it's caustic. It's, it's destructive. And it's hard to get a beat on it because that is not what he's talking about. He's distracting you with other things. And therefore, you know, and then of course you have the lies. And therefore the historian, the young historian, who looks back 10 years from now, he may not, he may not be able to find out what Trump, in fact, we don't know either. We don't know what really happened in the Ukraine, do we? We don't know. He's kept that a big secret. We don't know, you know, how well he did in the University of Pennsylvania. We don't know anything, well, we know a little about his finances, but nothing much, and so forth. And so he's, he's made an effort to keep the things that he doesn't want to be shiny objects, secret, even his health condition. And so I think it's hard to find out what happened if you look back when the guy at the moment in time was trying to hide it. Historians are good at that, though, I think. They, they find out, they triangulate, they find out, don't they? Right. So, so like I said, I don't think this is that much of an issue for historians. I mean, let me give you an example. I have my students, in fact, right now, they're beginning to think about their topics. I have my students in my American history class do a paper on fake news. They need to identify a fake news topic, and then write a paper on it, you know, tell me why it's fake news. What's true about it? What's false about it? So, so for critical thinkers like historians, this is not going to be, because, because our country's still open up, we're still getting good information, you know, the mainline newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, even the, you know, the Chicago Tribune, which is a conservative newspaper, you know, when they, when they report stuff, you know, they report the stuff they know, and then they'll say, well, this other thing is a conspiracy theory, or we don't really know what happened. So, there's still, there's still enough integrity in our, in our, our, our newspaper system, our media system that, that, you know, we don't have a state television, we don't have a state newspaper, we don't have, we have Fox News, don't we? State, that's sorry, not even Fox News meets the test of being state run. They've had some very negative things to say about Donald Trump, and you look at some of the polls and polling that they've done, and Trump is done. So, no, I think we still have enough, we're still an open enough society that those things would not get past the historian, that the historian could account for those and talk, in fact, I'm writing a book right now about, in which I have a chapter called The Irrational Style of Politics, you know, and you can call it Trump's Irrational Style of Politics, in which I talk about, you know, the history of conspiracy theories and, and other kind of irrational moments such as secessionism in 1860 and 1861, and, and so, and the, in the red, the red scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s, and by the way, that connects quite directly, possibly quite directly to Donald Trump. We don't know this, this is, this is one of these things like, okay, we need to find this out, but it's hard to get information. But we think, we think Donald Trump's father was a member of the John Birch Society, and, and maybe, and, and he was friendly with Robert Welch, Jr., who was, who was the founder of the, the John Birch Society, John Birch Society, and so the John Birch Society became the conspiracy theorist of the 1950s and 60s, and then declined in importance in the 1970s, but some have argued that the John Birch Society laid an intellectual seedbed for Donald Trump, for this kind of this ratcheting out these conspiracy theories and, and, and just like so, so dissociated from anything that's true. That's kind of the astonishment. That's one, one reporter talked about this at the last debate, that it's like Trump's claims are like, just like the outer space sometimes. Where did you get that? But, but this is not without precedent, actually. I mean, Welch, in the 1950s, he argued that, that Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his brother, Milton, in fact, he argued Dwight was working for Milton and Milton, Milton Eisenhower, his brother, who was the head of a university, a forgotten witch university, that Milton was actually a reporting directly to Moscow, that he was an agent of the Soviet Union, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was working for Milton. And then Kennedy, it gets more interesting. Kennedy was assassinated. Why? He was assassinated by the Soviet Union. Why? Because he wasn't moving the United States into a position of a communist power quickly. So it's crazy stuff. And yet there it is. And, you know, so, so there are these connections, there are these precedents for, so, for what I call an irrational style of politics. And we've never had a president before who engaged in this kind of, this kind of, you know, crazy. That's the thing, you know, if you watch the news or the books, you know, that so many books, a book comes out every day, seems like, about life in the White House or why Trump is extraordinary. But they all say the same thing, unprecedented. And that's euphemistic, because it's worse than that. But unprecedented, never seen this before, no president ever done this, no White House has ever done this, and so forth. And so I say to you, John, take off your your academic garb for a minute. Take off the mantle of your history professorship just for a minute. Follow with this button, Jay. Okay. Under that black robe, there is actually a person who is willing to make predictions and speculations. So I'm asking, I'm asking for you, not as a history professor, but as an ordinary human being, you know, puts his pants on one leg at a time, that kind of person, you know, why this election day is a historical is an historical inflection point. Because on the one hand, if Trump wins, you know, we can, we can pretty much guess what he's going to do, where he's going to take the country, and it'll be into the rat hole. And the world order, the same thing, he's already doing that. If Biden wins, we'll have a reasonable chance at a reasonable life and a reasonable recovery from the damage. But doesn't that, doesn't that, you know, invite the notion that this is a completely historical election, one path this way, one path the other way, 180? Yeah, I mean, well, again, we don't know what's going to happen. But what I can say is so, so Trump's appeal to to unreason his appeal to emotion, that is not impressive. That's got a long history in American society. What is different is that the person who's doing this is now sitting in the White House. You know, in the 1950s, we had McCarthy, who was a senator. And it was a really dangerous demagogue. And the president, Eisenhower, let him go for a while. He privately thought this guy really nuts and dangerous. But he never criticized him until Edward R. Murrow began to criticize him and his news programs. And then the Congress started moving against McCarthy. And then Eisenhower said, Yeah, this is a bad guy. So, so yeah, we've never had a president who's a demagogue. And that is that is new territory. And it's a very dangerous moment for our democracy and for our republic. One may be linking into the other, right? Can can we survive as a non democratic republic? I'm not sure that we could survive. I think you might see a breakup at that point. And I don't want you know, who knows, you know, I don't want to go there. But, but I think that's, you know, we've already seen what happens when you you're no longer operating under the rule of law or decency. And when the Constitution gets shredded on a daily basis. So assuming those things continue, this is a really good question for an historian. Where does it go without the rule of law? On a personality cult? It goes to Jonestown somewhere. Where does it go without a Congress that it operates and consistent with the Constitution? Where does it go with Supreme Court and multiple judges all over the country who are really not qualified to make legal decisions who make political decisions based on their expectations of what their appointing president wanted? This is pretty scary stuff. What happens to the country? You know, and I nobody thinks about this, but I think you and I should think about this. Does it affect us? Are they coming for us in some way? Will they affect our lives? And what is the answer? The answer is yes. I mean, history has shown that so many times. If you have the degradation of a of a reasonable light in the society into something else, it affects everybody in the society and it isn't good. Am I right? Yeah, I mean, that's Jay, that's pretty dark. I mean, it's a tough time. I'm not sure it's, I'm not sure where, you know, I'm not sure. Well, just take a small thing. It's not so small. Let's take health care. Okay. Not sure. 20 million people are going to lose health care if he has his way. So that's good. You know, it's he's coming for them. Yeah, coming for them. I think I wouldn't paint quite so dark a picture. I do agree that the Constitution and kind of democratic values and democratic process are at stake in this election. I think Biden got it right when he said this election is about the soul of our democracy. Do we want to move into a kind of Eastern European Russian style of pseudo democracy where you elect somebody every four years and then they don't they just ignore other elected bodies and they rule by decree? Do we want that or, you know, or do we want to actually have a have a real democracy where and where the where laws are respected as you, you know, mentioned and where the Constitution is reinstituted, you know, where the Constitution is taken more seriously. And I think this is the Constitution at that. That to me is such a baseline issue that that's a huge concern to me. I recently did a forum on the United States Constitution for students and it was a very interesting discussion. At some point the students, few of the students wanted to divert it into a discussion about this, you know, the Second Amendment. And I just said, look, we, we, we could talk all day about the Second Amendment, but I don't think that's the biggest problem we have. I think the biggest problem we have is is the rest of the Constitution. Article one, Article two, these are basic, you know, the separation of powers and legislative prerogative of the Congress. I mean, Trump has violated this again and again by his decrees. And it has led to a situation where he hasn't, I mean, we'll see what the election, but in reality, these recent proclamations he did when Congress couldn't agree upon a package in like when it was August, I think, and Trump made all these decrees, these executive orders about, you know, evictions and payroll tax and being suspended, all the rest of that. You know, people have not paid a whole lot of attention to that. No corporation that I know has actually suspended its payroll tax. That hasn't happened. That's a presidential decree that they're ignoring. And the reason why they're ignoring, well, so this is what happens then, right? You've got overreach and you also got erosion of the respect of the office of the president and even the power of the presidency is damaged because he makes all of these claims that are way beyond the Constitution. And then people go, well, he doesn't have the power to do that. I'm just going to ignore it. So that's where the centripetal forces, right? The forces, that's the right word, that's either one, either centripetal or centripetal. The forces pulling apart this country could continue to exert force is if Trump's presidency has been, even though he seems like a hegemon, in some ways, well, it's clearly been a weakening of the status of the country. I think you could argue that the United States is a declining power in the world. But it's also been a weakening of the authority and the legitimacy of the presidency. I think people don't, they're not talking about this. They don't really talk about this at all. They're so afraid of him that they're afraid to talk about the ways that he's really not really got much real power at all. And, you know, he's got the power to instill fear. But beyond that, you know, he's kind of the master of not just distraction, but fear monitoring, right? But beyond that, what has he done and what real power does he have? He can't remember from day to day moment to moment what he wants to do or his mission or his plan. But you know, I wanted to ask you one really important question here. You know, you and I have talked so many times about the Civil War. We talked about the unresolved issues that flow out of the Civil War and continue to flow out of the Civil War. And there are some people, and Trump has made comments on this point, that believe the Civil War is not over. You know, think of all those Confederate statues in the South. Think of those people who run around with Confederate flags on their cars, all that. And then, of course, they're kissing cousins with the militia and the skinheads. And, you know, the conservatives with the assault rifles and all that, you know, because it's their the constitutional right to have those things and even march around in state capitals with them. So, you know, there's a fair chance in my view, or at least in the view of so many journalists who are writing articles right now, today, about violence, violence tonight, maybe happening even as we speak, violence tomorrow and violence the day after. And I hesitate to say that it's a Civil War, but it's violence that we have never seen in this country breaking out all over the place. It's the natural conclusion of the divisiveness that Dr. Trump has created for us. There's one thing clear. He's created divisive forces in the country or maybe he's excited. He's excited divisive forces in the country. Well, I think he's created some himself just his personality and his and his way of going about his business as a divided people. He's a natural provider. This is how he ran his business. You pit one guy against another guy. And then the one guy eats the other guy and he gets the job, right? Or he gets the contract. So it's a business practice that's abhorrent to me. But so I don't know. I mean, look, we had lots of violence before the Civil War, but we also had violence, political violence after the Civil War that greatly exceeded the violence we had this summer or that we have right now. I mean, there were thousands of people that were killed, you know, political violence in those time periods. So we're not at that level. But I do as I'm going to go back to this question or this maybe a proposal, the kind of depressing proposal that the United States is in a decline that is decaying as a democracy. And this is not, you know, you study the history of the great powers and they go up and they come down. If we are in a decline, it would be a relatively brief kind of time in the heights of power. We've got an overextended and a bloated military budget that's characteristic of empires that are ready to go into a decline. Our political system is there's less consensus. It's divisive. Our institutions have been weakened by Trump, but they were already, we're already having questions about the public arena and about activity in the public arena. That's one view is that that we could be entering not a death spiral, but a decline is a power in and, you know, certainly if, you know, if we lose some of our democratic institutions, we will be irretrievably damaged as a country. Maybe I shouldn't say irretrievably. Maybe you can get that back, but it would take a long time to get those institutions back. After the Civil War, it took a long time to build institutions in the south that were, you know, that were, that were fair and that were democratic and they never were democratic. Southerners reverted to voter suppression, segregationism, disenfranchisement. So, so if, if, if our democratic institutions, you know, voting and, and separation of powers and all the rest of it, you know, the Congress and the rest of it and the judiciary, all these institutions that we rely on for our democracy are, are damaged enough, then, then you're going to, you're going to see a pretty rapid decline and I don't know what happens then. Does the Civil War break out then? Because we can't hold, you know, these centrifugal forces that pull us apart. Will that be the end game for this place as a country? I don't know. That's, that's another, you speak of a, a kind of tipping point, you know, where these factors are in play and, and, and then we have commentators who will say, don't worry about a thing, Jay, it's going to be fine because the, the spirit of the American people, that exceptional quality about the American people, we will be able to recover. But I think exceptionalism has already been disappointed and disaffected when Europe, you know, treats us with pity and they must know something. And the question really I put to you, which is, you kind of covered it, but we have a tipping point going on. And if we reach a certain point, this is just like COVID, you reach a certain point in COVID, testing and tracking is of no use. And so if, if we reach a certain point in the deterioration of our institutions, of our nation of laws, then it's unrecapturable. So what is that point? But I'm not saying more there yet. I don't think, but, but I will admit, okay, and I was more, I was, you know, I like to be more optimistic, but earlier I didn't, you know, but there's been quite a bit of damage done to our political culture. And that's the, probably the, that's the hardest thing to recover. We have way too many people who don't understand what's in the Constitution. We have way too many people who buy into half truths and lies. We have way too many people who are, who are kind of in an unthinking way, willing to kind of follow, you know, the president right off the cliff. So that's, you know, that's 40% of the population. And that's frightening. It's not enough to win an election, but it's frightening. And, and, you know, within that 40% or 42%, whatever it is, there's a subgroup that's even crazier. I mean, you know, they want to burn down the house and, and, but here's the thing, Jay. There's, there's, we still have a middle class. We still have an economy that's been highly successful and will be successful in the future. And do people, can people calculate that they'll be as successful in their businesses or whatever in a, in a kind of pseudo dictatorship or a, you know, a democracy that's exercised once every four or eight years instead of on a, you know, on a daily basis? Do they think that these businesses of their, well, they think that the United States can, can remain a prosperous nation. This is another part of the equation that I think people, well, we'll see from this election, I think you might see responses based on that the concern that, that the decline of politics will induce a decline of the economy in ways that we can. I mean, look at Russia, right? It's the economy's terrible. China, different situation, great economy, and a, and a clear dictatorship, but they have a much different history than ours. Our history, our democratic institutions are embedded as, as poor and flawed as they are. They, they have been embedded in our history from a very early time. And so can we survive without democratic institutions? I'm very skeptical that we can. So, so there you go. So, okay. I have one more. Oh, we have a question. Oh, was there ever a time in history where people tried so hard to throw away votes as now that is Texas, for example, trying to dismiss a hundred and I think it's a hundred and twenty thousand votes from curbside voting? Do we ever have a time when people were trying to suppress and, you know, undermine voting rights as we have right now today? Yes. In 1877, in the election of 1876, there was significant voter fraud in Oregon, in Florida, in one other state. I forgot the state, but there was a significant kind of dumping of ballots. And, you know, so yes, we've had, you know, we've had a lot of voter fraud in our history in the 19th century. There was no such thing as a secret ballot. So it was very easy to, to vote twice, to get rid of ballots. I mean, they were just in a wooden box. You take the wooden box out and you dump it in the river. There they go, the ballot. So yeah, it's, you know, the election of 1960 when Kennedy won, he had the Kennedy campaign had money flown into West Virginia and they handed out five bucks a person to vote for Kennedy. So, you know, this is, this is an old, old story, this idea of voter suppression and voter fraud. It's a shame that it has to happen today, but there's actually a long precedent for it. And mostly it's happened in, in the South where segregation in them and, you know, policy of disenfranchisement existed. And so, you know, that's nothing new. Unfortunately, voter suppression has been with us for a long time. That's, you know, it's, we're a flawed democracy. We're not a great democracy. Maybe every democracy is flawed in some ways. So I only have one time, time for one more question for you, John. And that is from all that we've discussed and you know, all of the things that have, you know, crossed our bow on the issue of this election. Looking forward to it tomorrow, I'm not sure I'm looking forward, but I am looking forward, yes. And looking forward as a, as a historian, what advice would you give to people on what they should be thinking about, you know, in terms of caring about the country, in terms of caring about their own welfare, the welfare of their families? How should they see this? How should they see this against the background of what might happen? Okay. Whoever wins, look, we need to recover from damage to our democratic institution. The average citizen needs to learn more about what's in the Constitution. The average citizen needs to have a better understanding of, of what's the differences between, you know, some sort of lie and, and the facts on the ground. The average citizen needs to rely on, on sources that are more legitimate. And, you know, we need to, we need to police our, I mean, you know, this is all about free speech, right? The right wing now has got onto this free speech idea so they can lie in its free speech. So there's nothing you can do about it. Well, that's, that's very dangerous. But if you look at the German model, there's limits to free speech. If you tell lies and lies that are damaging, we do have along the books about hate speech, right? So, so let's, let's, let's clean up this stuff, this, this lying and this, you know, these conspiracy theories that are rampant right now. We need to clean that up and you can do that with a legal framework and with the cooperation of the social media companies and the rest of it. You know, you can make a big dent in that, there's always going to be some of that out there. But so, you know, let's, let's, let's do the things that strengthen our democracy. We have, we have an, in some ways we have an opportunity because we've got a record number of voters coming to the polls, right? They're going to break all the records. So we've got a lot of new voters out there. And these folks need to be educated about what it is. It's not just about voting. That's important, but they're, they're more important civic responsibilities in this democracy than just voting. And we need to impress upon our citizenry that these things are there that they need to learn about. So, yeah. It's why you have to come back soon, John. Yay. All right. You can run, but you can't hide, John. We'll be, we'll be following you wherever you go. Thank you so much for coming down today. Great talking to you today. Best of loha. Aloha. Thank you, John.