 Hello everyone. I am here with Dr. Harvey J. K. He is a professor of democracy and justice at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay And he is also the author of a fantastic book called take hold of our history Make America radical again, and he's here to talk about it I just finished the book on Monday, and it's phenomenal. So professor. Thank you so much for coming on the program No, thank you for having me on this. This is great. It's great opportunity And also I've been really eager to meet you because I've watched some of your stuff And I like your spirit. Oh, thank you so much. That means so much, you know I found out about you from the Michael Brooks show shout out to Michael Brooks he always brings on these fantastic guests and that's where I saw your book and I bought the book and It was so great because it kind of reaffirms Everything that I've been thinking because there's this conversation in mainstream media currently about whether or not People in the Democratic Party namely AOC Rashida Tlaib are going too far left and basically what you Demonstrated in this book is that people who say that social Democrats are too far left They're kind of a historical because we have a history of being radical FTR called on a generation to be radical or on people To be radical for a generation So can you talk about our history as basically radicals because I think that people here in mainstream media that you can't be too far Left in America because we are a conservative country and sure people identify as conservative But political labels don't necessarily mean that much because when you look at the policies We are very progressive and now when you look at our history, there's no question. We're a radical nation So can you talk through our history and how we are actually radical? And I know that that's a really huge, you know topic, but can you give us the rundown? Well, okay, so the high points. How's that? There you go high points begin with my childhood hero Thomas Payne and in his pamphlet common sense Which was a pamphlet in which he put into words what Americans were already thinking in the course of their rebellion of 90 I'm sorry of 1774 and 1775 But they hadn't themselves gotten to the point of seeing the possibility of not only declaring their independence and creating this new radical nation But also creating a democratic republic and it was Payne who basically brought brought forth Their sentiments and their ideas that they had yet to articulate and Payne says something in that in that pamphlet common sense of January 76 which I think it's in one sense It seems so utopian and another sense. It's so absolutely true He says we have it in our power to begin the world over again Now it's utopian because of course we can't just you know Stop history and start all over again, but it's but it's true in the sense of what he's saying is history is made by human action and Therefore we have a possibility of truly radically transforming our Relationship to the world and he was trying to get Americans to realize that they were in fact Americans not Britons they should that and thus they should not think of themselves as British subjects and what might they accomplish in those terms But think of themselves as American citizens and he also asked them to consider It's like the what they used to say during the late 60s The whole world is watching the humanity was waiting for that kind of Revolutionary moment that Americans themselves were able to to create and provide for all of for all of the Americans Faults and failings at the time and all of that comes to be in some ways expressed in the Declaration of Independence All men are created equal and endowed by their created with certain inalienable, you know, unalienable rights life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness now those words now to move ahead in radical terms and social Democratic terms those words actually did provide the basis for in every generation both pains words and you know Jefferson's own you might say Provided so that in every generation of American history the most progressive elements whether they were liberals or progressives or radicals Or indeed eventually socialists when they reached back to late claim to the American Revolution They laid hold of common sense and the declaration to say look we are What America is about America is a grand experiment in democracy and basically look let's face it any experiment Requires constant testing and pushing at the limits. So, you know, whether they were free thinkers or abolitionists or women's rights activists also known as suffragists eventually or whether they were labor unionists Populists of the late 19th century Progressives with a capital P Socialist anarchists in every one of those generations they reached all the way through to the civil rights movement and even to today this kind of they this reaching back took place and this Reminding of themselves of what America is meant to be again We have a history of exploitation and oppression and enough tragedy and irony that we could go on forever on that subject But it's also the case that through the course of those confrontations and those struggles and those Aspirations that created movements. We actually did create a far freer more equal and more democratic America And then if I could take it in another direction, which people often find surprising is that if we actually think about Social democracy itself. It's rooted in the same Pen and I say pen that actually sparks that or turns the American rebellion into a revolution Because in 20 years later in the 1790s Thomas Payne writes rights of man in the midst of the French Revolution and then he writes a pamphlet called agrarian justice Which is which is the pamphlet that first envisioned Social democracy in this pamphlet he called for taxing the landed rich in order to provide Stakes S.T.A. K.E.S. To young people so that you could combat poverty Okay, at the end that when they reach maturity they should be given a certain amount of money in order to go out and make something of themselves in the world and Prevent poverty from becoming the norm of their lives But it also included this very radical idea which later cut we come to call social security He actually said there should be universal old-age pensions for for men and women when they reach a certain age of You know, we'll call the L and a seniority age So so here is Thomas Payne the American Revolutionary and and radical founder Who's also 20 years later seeing the consequences in Europe, especially of what we would call capitalism He would call civilization and he said it's imperative that we recognize that the earth was created for all of us and Property has been monopolized by a lot of people. He didn't call for dispossessing the property But he said they owe all of us a tax to provide for the makings of what we think of as social democracy And then if you if you move through history, and I could go on and on But let's go right to one of the greatest names in American history Abraham Lincoln Even as Lincoln led the Union in the Civil War To sustain the Union and in and truly when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in response to all of those southern slaves seeking Freedom in the north and seeking a role in the in the Civil War against slavery Lincoln also signed two other very significant bills one of which is the Homestead Act Which was the transformation of the Midwest in the Plain States into family farming Okay, affording federal federal lands to family farms That's social democracy and it's best in many ways enabling people to make to make their way with To secure aware with all for themselves But then he also signed another social Democratic bill the Morrill Act, which was the land grant Act Which provided federal lands to states to create state colleges and universities So that now in every state of the Union there are state universities and state university systems Which are rooted in the 1862 Morrill Act that Lincoln signed so here we have The the the greatest president of the 19th century some people the greatest president ever who has known of course as the great Emancipator though he himself fully appreciated that there was no way that he could sign it the Emancipation Proclamation Had it not been for slaves rising up in the south and northern farmers and workers in the Union army Realizing the imperative of ending slavery here He is advancing the idea of equality to include social democracy and then of course the great social Democratic president Though he never used the term is Franklin Roosevelt and you know, it's the New Deal. It's it's the creation of Social Security It's the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act I mean over and over again our greatest moments in American history are moments of radicalism and social Democratic advance And I love the way that you talk about that in the book because the way that you frame it is There's there's no endpoint to democracy this is an ongoing project where we're constantly trying to push the envelope and Radicalism is in our DNA as Americans so to suggest, you know as we often see in the mainstream media that actually, you know We're more conservative Ideologically we're not radical we can't be too far left that is a historical and I love the way that you lay this out now one narrative that I think is really interesting just in general with regard to American politics is There's there's always like a conservative will say something right and then all of a sudden you see a hundred conservatives parading that same thing in mainstream media and that narrative catches on and it has led to the left essentially losing any type of battle political battle ideological battle in a way because they're so good at You know Retaking back whatever narrative or reframing a narrative and I think it's because you kind of diagnosed this problem And I want to see if I could find that line So this is what you say Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama offer no real challenge to the right wing storytelling They are so good at storytelling. They are able to take whatever we're talking about and flip it and have that catch on I mean one example that stands out to me is when we were discussing the Affordable Care Act Which was right wing healthcare reform. It was milk toast. It was cooked up by the Heritage Foundation We were talking about death panels all of a sudden and the mainstream media Had to you know, assume that that was an idea that was credible or at least, you know, respond to it So can you talk a little bit about storytelling and why that's so important because I kind of see you Doing storytelling in the sense that you're telling us about our actual history and not allowing them to capture that narrative and not let go of it Yeah, well, there's a moment I can there's a moment I think it's really very telling in those terms and it's in the late 1970s when Ronald Reagan well in 76 he lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford and I think a lot of people figured Reagan was out of the picture, but he makes a combat a comeback and he was far smarter than most people on the left appreciated and Literally the connections he was making in the course of the 60s and 70s as the leader of the of what we come to know as the new Right enabled him to win the nomination from the Republicans in 1980 but here's the key thing so Winning the Republican nomination was by no means a guarantee He would have won the presidency though the chances were good given the fact that Jimmy Carter was such an abysmal president and most Americans were Utterly working people utterly fed up with his presidency But here's the thing he knew from his own early days as a liberal Democrat an FDR and a Truman Democrat That most working people were not going to respond to the kinds of things that he was known for having promoted back in the 60s into the 70s Like an attack on Social Security, you know, or for that matter ending farm subsidies I mean you the panoply the whole thing that FDR had put into place in the New Deal so he completely shifts his ground in many ways and drops those sort of attacks on on On the New Deal legacy he continues to sort of campaign against liberalism undeniably But in his acceptance speech, which is of course going to be watched by the vast majority of Americans back in those days Conventions mattered even more than they do today and people watch them to see what the political Atmosphere of the day would become and he stands before the Republican convention and shocks the hell out of conservatives Even as he's literally becoming they're not just champion, but there's their standard holder there You know their flag bearer he quotes in the course of his acceptance speech three figures left should have Thomas Payne Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. He's so shocked conservatives that George will I believe wrote a column almost immediately after the Convention lamenting the fact that that Reagan had quoted Thomas Payne the Revolutionary as opposed to Burke Edmund Burke the conservative Yeah, so they're really good conservatives in terms of first of all asking questions about American history and then suppressing the story that that most Americans carry with them, but appropriating ripping off hijacking figures and events in the past and Inserting them into an utterly alien narrative that they would I mean who could have imagined Thomas Payne ever being quoted by a conservative for 200 years Conservatives did everything to suppress Thomas Payne's memory Who could have imagined the Republicans any time after say 1932 really wanting to embrace Lincoln? Because here's Lincoln, you know the man who brings an end to slavery who becomes the social Democrat Well, here's the thing what has happened What happens is that in the course of the 70s the Democrats retreated they retreated from the Roosevelt story and legacy figures like Gary Hart, I don't know if everyone will remember Gary Hart, but Gary Hart the senator from Oregon Well, it becomes senator from Oregon and Jimmy Carter these kind of figures they turn their backs on not just the FDR Legacy and the FDR tradition they turn their backs on American working people Seriously turn their backs in American working people more over There was this they sought out the money power as the populace might have called them the money power That is they were they wanted to fill their coffers with the money of the rich and the corporate Entities instead of thinking about mobilizing Americans and it helped no to seek of the American story The American story that would have been Thomas Payne Lincoln Franklin Roosevelt But rather they sort of retreated and what happens is whether it was liberals Inside the Democratic Party or leftist outside of it If you look over and over again The story that they're responding to of the conservatives leads them in a knee-jerk way to reject the American story in other words the left literally turned its back on its own story and its own powerful claim To America to the United States now we should never turn our back and forever forget the stories of Exploitation and oppression. I mean I mean the struggles emerge out of those experiences But it's also the case if we're not going to remember the if the the American promise of life liberty in the pursuit of happiness which Lincoln readily used to advance his cause which FDR readily used if we're gonna forget those things then we're basically handing over American history full-time to the conservatives now It's all the more imperative that we not continue to do that because Americans themselves Yearn for that story. They they they feel it in them. You called it the American DNA We feel it in a deep cultural memory like way and the fact is the Democrats and the left Failed to articulate the story that Americans were yearning to hear and that conservatives Appropriated or hijacked and ultimately corrupted in terrible ways and in fact one of the beauties to go, you know, you mentioned I can't remember was during our conversation at beforehand, you know the squad You know AOC and and her comrades One of the things that really struck me is very early on after she won election to the Congress AOC was interviewed I think was the on TV by one of the you know the sort of mainstream media types and she actually laid claim To the American story, you know of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt And but the surprising was that there were people on the left who said what is she doing? You know, why is she doing that and I thought are they kidding? I mean she's out ahead of a whole couple of generations of left intellectuals by laying claim to that and Bernie Sanders Even more than he had done in 2015, which he did smartly on one occasion, but then failed to continue this time around He is laying claim to that Roosevelt legacy. So I mean, I think there's reason to be hopeful But here's the thing it isn't only that we do that in order to win an election I mean, there's no guarantees of winning elections But we need to cultivate the narrative that conservatives for 45 years have over and over again Tried to you know, pervert and corrupt and tell it as a sort of god-given divine story America as opposed to a story of struggles from the bottom up And so so in essence what we need to do is we have to break through the kind of nostalgia renditions of American history and Remind Americans of who they are and they want to be reminded. That's the thing I mean like there are surveys and polls that show that two good examples The whole phenomena with that was called Founder's chic or Founder's fever back in the 70s when all of a sudden everybody was talking about the Founding Fathers Okay, similarly the greatest generation phenomena. Everybody was celebrating the World War two generation The conservatives immediately glonde on to those two things as if those are conservative stories And everyone thought because the vast majority of Americans seemed interested in hearing those stories that they were doing so because they were somehow Fooled by the conservatives or that they themselves are conservative what the left and by the way the left scorned a lot of that talk And what they utterly failed to do is delay claim to Thomas Payne or reclaim Thomas Payne or for that matter to realize The greatest generation is the generation that actually made the new deal happen The generation that pushed FDR to go even further towards social democracy than he himself might have gone so It it was astounding to me and frustrating as hell that when I would speak sometimes of these things people on the left would get angry with me You know like I was like I was some kind of nationalist a patriot. Yes a nationalist That's another story. Okay, and I think we we need to reclaim the American story Not simply for the sake of remembering them, but for the sake of remembering who we are Yeah, and that that reminds me of what you talked about basically us taking back that narrative of American exceptionalism Because now it has very negative connotations if you're a lefty, you know, we think about I think about us imperialism us supremacy, but really that wasn't necessarily always the case It was another narrative and story if you will that conservatives had reclaimed So you you talked about you know 45 years of the Republican Party doing deregulation austerity You know shifting the tax burden from the working class or away from elites to the working class And now I think that there is reason to be optimistic when we know about the history and basically know what to look for Like you mentioned occupy popping up, you know the success of Bernie in 2015 and now you know 2019 And even though necessarily electoral politics in and of itself might not be what catalyzes the shift, you know to greater democratization You know it always comes from the bottom up and I think that that this book is a reminder that real change does come from the bottom up When we are reminded that we have always pushed further, you know, we've always pushed the envelope And real change never comes from the top down. It's always the bottom up Now one portion of this book and we talked about this before going on that really stood out to me that I loved because it irritated me Was back in 2015 we were talking about social democracy finally and Claire McCaskill was interviewed on MSNBC And she kind of scoffed at this idea of Bernie Sanders being the nominee and she said oh he's too liberal Now I love a line like your response to this basically was and I'm paraphrasing Well we know that Republicans lost their minds so now we have to worry about Democrats losing their mind too And you made a point that social democracy is American. This is not a foreign concept. We're not talking about European democracy We're talking about American in American concept social democracy is American Can you kind of speak a little bit to that because I think it's something that's really fascinating And I think that even myself like I think I do a disservice because when I talk about social democracy I use Scandinavia as an example. I always point there a point elsewhere as basically you know legitimizing my argument using empirical data But we don't even have to do that because social democracy is American. Can you speak to that? Well I said before so Thomas Paine is the godfather of Social Security and Social Democracy Okay, this American Revolutionary that's first of all Abraham Lincoln is in many ways the first of the sort of proto Call it social democratic or proto social democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt the New Deal or the empowerment of labor But here's the other thing let's go to something very very basically American which has been under siege these last 45 years Especially under siege from the right public education the first nation to truly create public education as a right for young people Okay, it's not in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights but it is in state constitutions and we accept it as a fundamental right the right to be educated Well public education is the great social democratic beginning where you're saying we're all in this together we need an educated citizenry A concept that goes back to even the elite of the founding fathers who believe that in order to sustain a republic you need an educated informed citizenry So we pioneer public education right even the and then if you think about it think about it this way the whole idea of a national park system Not a royal park system as in European nations but national parks national parks were this late 19th century American development They have actually originate as a concept in the link in the progressive era Teddy Roosevelt of course but even beyond that Franklin Roosevelt's attention to all of that But the national park system is this great social democratic idea that we can all have access for recreation and refreshment of ourselves and that we don't have to pay for it Okay, I mean that's social democracy similarly you know social security and so on two things I want to point out in those terms one I'll jump ahead Michael Moore did a film a few years ago where to invade next something like that does that you remember that yeah it wasn't what I thought it was going to be No, it's like you know as he goes to Europe and he checks out all of their social democratic innovations but the point of the film wasn't Scandinavia or the continent of Europe The point was that these are all American innovations that the Europeans adopted and that somehow we've forgotten or we fail to advance because we've been under siege in this class war from above that Republicans have championed these last 4045 years So okay so here's the here's another here's the other thought so Bernie Sanders as I said before in 2015 he actually gave a speech at Georgetown University to explain democratic socialism Which is just another term for social democracy basically and and in that speech he what he does is he recalls Franklin Roosevelt's idea of the economic bill of rights Roosevelt himself in 32 proposed an economic declaration of rights in 1941 he actually called for Americans to envision and pursue for freedoms I did a book on the fight for the four freedoms freedom of speech freedom of worship freedom from want and freedom from fear and then in 1944 in a state of the Union message FDR calls for the creation and enactment of an economic bill of rights Which is believe me the radical presentation of social democracy so it never comes to fruition as he envisioned but it is present it is developed in terms of what was called the GI Bill of Rights that and in which a whole generation of veterans 12 million of them literally make something of themselves with the educational and other kinds of opportunities that the GI Bill of Rights afforded and they remake the nation they rebuild the nation and everybody today with any kind of historical sensibility So what I would imagine is as Bernie has begun to do more effectively is that the Democrats if you're not a social Democrat you can't be a Democrat Clare McCaskill had the audacity to say that well in 2015 we have these extremist Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders And I thought to myself how dare she how dare she she was she was like she was a Republican not a Democrat right how dare she utterly reject the greatest moments of the Democrats capital D and small D Democratic story The struggles of the New Deal years which were both top down and bottom up the advancements that even took place during World War two and then think about the 1960s I mean for all you know he was a Southern Democrat LBJ but he was an old FDR Democrat and Medicare Medicaid The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of course the Environmental Protection Agency the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Consumer Rights all of these developments of the 60s which were if you like the advancement of the Social Democratic ideal that FDR had truly put on the agenda And this pseudo Democrat Clare McCaskill says Bernie's an extremist and that's when I said yeah the Democrats must be losing their minds they clearly lost their memories their amnesiacs but our task must be to make sure not just that we you know talk about social democracy But that we remind Americans that social democracy as you said or as I as Bill Moyers who really was the source of the idea from my writing that said social democracy is 100% American Bill and I were supposed to co-author that piece but something came up and I ended up doing it and he wouldn't put his name on it because he said you wrote it you take the credit and I can tell you that piece is probably the most liked piece I've ever written in the sense on Twitter and on Facebook The response was tremendous so I was convinced Americans wanted to hear the truth of history not that kind of crap that the Republicans were spewing and surely not the kind of crap that Clare McCaskill was spewing Yeah I love that you brought that up in the book because that clip there was something about it like the way that she said it to it just it irked me and it really stuck you know it stuck by me and it's been on my mind and when I read that in the book I just thought oh this is this is so good So the book itself to me like this is a reminder that we are on the right path and I don't know that we're gonna get there in this generation but we certainly are doing the right thing and I think that there's this you can correct me if I'm wrong I think that there's this instinct on the left for us to kind of self censor because Republicans are so good at storytelling and capturing that narrative you know we don't want to go too far left because that could turn off voters but in actuality we're just basically returning to our roots and I think that that is incredibly important so my pitch for the book is everyone who is a believer in you know Bernie's presidency and campaign and social democracy has got to read this because it basically it tells you that you're on the right track but before we go I want to allow you to make your pitch for the book it's phenomenal we'll have links on screen and down below for people to order it but tell us what you think that we haven't discussed people need to know about the book Well okay I want to give credit to the people who've inspired me to think in those terms okay so we need to remember that we're like the children of Thomas Payne the revolutionary okay we carried with us he made us radicals then and we're radicals to this day I wrote an earlier book Thomas Payne and the promise of America but this book okay so that was one then I wrote this book titled the fight for the four freedoms about FDR and the greatest generation man those books are highly political as much as they're historical but this book if I can then hold it up again myself this take hold of our history make America radical again this this book is says this it's not just a matter of making sense of why we feel the way we do why we why it is that we saw these movements emerge like the fight for 15 black lives matter the the the eventually the march the the women's march the moral Monday movement the teacher strikes I mean those are a mark all of these things indicate that we are we yearn to in Langston Hughes great poetic terms we want to make America America the America that has never been but that's the story of progressivism and radicalism and democratic socialism that we are seeking to make America the America that is that is part of our promise but as yet has never been now I just I'd like to there's a quote that I love using I probably use it all my writing I was Henry Demers Lloyd a journalist of around 1900 it was a depending on who claims to be either a populist or progressive or a socialist doesn't matter he said basically and he drew on Wendell Phillips the 19th century radical when he said this he said you know liberty requires more than perpetual vigilance if we're going to sustain liberty or democracy and freedom and equality we not only have to defend and protect the rights that our parents gave us we need to create new rights for our children and that's the point with there's a radical imperative in American life we feel it we don't always act upon it but what that imperative is trying to tell us is if you believe in democracy then you don't simply defend democracy to sustain democracy you have to extend and deepen it I can't make that point strongly enough and the best evidence of that is that when Americans have been in the face of mortal crises the 1770s the 1860s the 1930s the 1940s maybe even the 1960s in the Cold War what we found is that the only way whether we liked it or not in fact the only way to confront and transcend the crisis and our enemies whether they were far and domestic was to make America rather create a democratic public and slavery empower working people and you know civil rights and voting rights and enabling people to transcend the poverty of their lives that's what America's meant to be and that's that's the struggle ahead of us so I'll go back to something you said it's not a matter of going too far left it's how American do we want to be I love that and we can't possibly end stronger than that's a great note to end on thank you so much professor K once again the book is take hold of our history make America radical again there will be links in the description box if you'd like to read it yourself thank you so much for coming on thank you Mike it's been a pleasure talking with you