 Please welcome Heather Cox Richardson and Mark Lawrence. Wow, what a reception. You had some fans. I just have to say, I am so thrilled to be here, both in Texas, which I love, and which has a lot in common with the state of Maine, just saying. And because if you haven't been to this library before, I've been here a lot actually. It's got a phenomenal collection. But it's of documents and stuff, but it's also got LBJ's Cadillac. So if you have never been here before, come again sometime and go look at the artifacts they have because they have a great collection. So I'm really thrilled to be here. And thank you for coming to hear what we have to say. Well, thank you all so much for being here. It is so fantastic to look out at this capacity crowd. And I suspect that Letters from an American has something to do with that. Yeah, no one reads that. 1.3 million subscribers and then some. Truly impressive. Heather Cox Richardson, welcome to Austin. Welcome to the LBJ Library. It is such an honor to have you here. Well, it's great to be here. I know you're a very busy person. I think you woke up this morning in Michigan and tomorrow you're on your way to Houston. And you're, of course, touring the country, talking about your very important book and also, by the way, writing those letters from an American that appear every morning in our inboxes, which can't be an easy thing to juggle. So thank you for making time. Well, again, I was never going to stop writing the letters for this tour because that's such the heart of what I do. But I did hope that the news would slow down just a little. And I said to somebody early on in this tour, like, you have me to thank for the fact that Kevin McCarthy is no longer the speaker of the house because clearly nobody got the memo that they were not supposed to do anything. And they thought, oh, Richardson's on tour. Let's see how much we can do. And then I thought, we're good. We're good because what more could happen, right? The house is in chaos. And then apparently Hamas didn't get the message either. And I'm like, oh, great. Now I got to figure that one out. So I'm a little tired, but I have to say I'm really enjoying being out and talking to people. Well, absolutely wonderful to have you. And of course, I want to talk about democracy awakening. But before we get there, I want to talk to you just for a couple of minutes about your really extraordinary career. You began your career as an academic historian, writing very well regarded books. But about what, four or five years ago now, you made the transition into being a true public intellectual. One of the most powerful voices I would even say in the public square today. How did you pull that off? So I'm laughing a little bit because I started writing for all the major papers many years ago. But what made a really big difference, and I appreciate this because nobody's ever asked and I've never told this story, although I tell it to my students, a dear friend of mine asked me to write for Cobblestone Magazine, which is a children's magazine about history. And I did not have tenure at the time. And I said, I'd love to do that. I'd love to write for a children's magazine. And everybody said, why on earth would anybody do that? And I'm like, why wouldn't you? Like you get to write about a bunch of cool topics for people in really simple ways. And I loved doing that to the point that in addition to doing the other stuff I was doing, I actually started a history magazine that's still online and it's fabulous, but I didn't write most of it. I actually edited with the idea I would help more academics learn to write for a popular audience. So I edited that, which ended up being an incredible amount of work, but it's called We're History as in gentlemen, we're history. And it's available online and they're short, wonderful pieces about every aspect of American history only. And it really, I think, gave me the, at one point I edited more than 100,000 pages in 10 months for that. And in addition to my day job and my own writing, and it taught me how to write. So there was a backstory to that. And then of course I started the letter simply because I had, after I wrote the Republican book, the history of the Republican Party, I was posting about once a week on Facebook just a general essay for people. Not necessarily about history, sometimes about my life, sometimes whatever. And I hadn't written for a while and people were worried about me because I'd been on the professor watch list and stuff. And I got stung by a yellow jacket and thought I didn't have my app a pen and I'm allergic. And I thought, well, I can't go anywhere because I gotta see if I'm gonna die. And I figured I might as well write to people and talk about, write an essay. And I decided to write an essay about what the United States looked like to me on that day. And that was September 15th, 2019. And comments came pouring in, questions, what's happening? Because of course that's right when we learned that there had been a whistleblower complaint against someone. And the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, had written to the Acting Director of National Security and said, a Director of National Intelligence and said, we know you're withholding a whistleblower complaint and by law you have to give it to us. And we suspect it's somebody big. And of course, that's the first time we had a member of the legislative branch accusing a member of the executive branch of breaking a specific law. So people were asking me all these questions and I thought, well, I'm not gonna flood the zone and write two nights in a row, because people get bored. So I took a night off and I wrote on September 17th and I've written every night since. Wow. Yeah. At first for Facebook, and then you transition to the substock point. Yeah, by October, by the beginning of October, it was very clear something had happened because I went from about 22,000 followers to probably a half a million in the space of a couple of weeks. And my readers kept asking for a newsletter and I remember running down the hall in Sainton, one of my graduate students, what on earth is a newsletter? Because I remember the mimeograph machines of the PTO and I'm thinking, I can't do that. And right then we were looking and the biggest email distributors at the time could handle about 10,000 emails and I was already so far beyond that, it wasn't an option. So substack happened to call me, they were just starting and they said, you do not have to take money and I didn't until I needed an assistant. So for more than a year, I did them for free. And we can handle any number of emails you send out and I gotta say, they send out, it goes out now in at least two batches and sometimes three but in under a minute they send more than a million emails which people are like, why are you on substack when they have all these other people and all that? And I'm like, you show me somebody else who can send out a million emails in under a minute and we can talk. What do you think it is about the letters from an American that has enabled you to reach such a vast audience? What is it about your voice or maybe it's the method of delivery? What's your explanation? It's not me. It is a conversation between my readers and me and what they wanna know and what I think is important. And I think it does a couple of things. I think first of all, what I am doing is I am modeling a reality-based community. I'm saying facts matter and I don't care what you think about those facts. I don't, so often, sometimes I break a story which is cool but sometimes I won't get into a story because I don't think the sources are good enough yet because I'm not pushing a position so much as I'm pushing the idea that you need to have your feet in reality. And I personally, when the news happens and I think, who is that? Or how does that work or whatever? I feel like other people wanna know that too. So sometimes I go down a rabbit hole and it's not the letter I intended to write but I'm like, oh wait, if you understand that, then you understand that. So I think it's partly that but I also think that it is a recognition that we care about democracy and that we want to be part of what has been a long-standing movement in this country to preserve the idea that we should be treated equally before the law and we have a right to a say in our government. That's it. Woo! There's a fascinating story, I think, behind the title, Letters from an American. Tell that story. That's a fascinating story. Once again, I'm running down the hall with my two of my best graduate students and I'm like, we gotta have a name. I mean, we can't just, what are we gonna name it? And there's a very famous document in American history and my PhD's in American, was called the History of American Civilization at the time. Now it's called American Studies in a slightly different flavor. And there's a very famous foundational work called Letters from an American Farmer from the late 18th century in which somebody who had come to America and was trying to figure out what it meant to live in a democracy, because this was really novel, wrote a book called Letters from an American Farmer in which he asks, what is this American, this new man? So it was partly a takeoff on that, Letters from an American, not I just cut off Farmer, but it was also a reference to Alistair Cook's Letters from America because he would take a snapshot of the country on that week and it could be anything from a tattoo artist to Harry Truman, but he would say in a very short piece, this is what America looks like to me today. So it became Letters from an American based on that. Okay, the book, Democracy Awakening. I want to begin where you begin and read. He's getting really serious. Read the first, I can't read it without these. Here are the first two lines from the book. America is at a crossroads, a country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. So as we watch which way the United States will go facing this crossroads, how important is what's going to play out next year in 2024? The most important and what I'm saying is, and somebody's asked this more directly, if former President Donald Trump or a Trump-like figure, and I can explain why I would say that, is elected president or takes the presidency in 2024, we will lose American democracy for our lifetimes. Not forever, because strongmen always fall, but they do a lot of damage before that happens. And I would like to make sure that doesn't happen. And we can talk more about that. But the reason I say that is not, it's not a present day political view. It is a longer look at first of all American politics, but also the nature of authoritarian movements. And I would, for a short term pieces of evidence about why I would say that, the first and the most alarming thing to me to happen in the last two months was the former president's declaration that former, although he was at the time the current, Chief, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, had been guilty of something that he said was like treason. He didn't exactly say it was treason, but that treason used to be punished by death, by execution. Clearly, the former president was suggesting that because Milley had acted in a way that he had done, with by the way the approval of Trump appointees in the Defense Department, about 12 of them, because he was not loyal to the president, he could be killed. And I am shocked that that was not headline news for weeks, because Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the most powerful military leader of the most powerful military in the world. And to have anyone say he needs to be loyal to me or suffer death is so far outside the realm of acceptable behavior in a democracy. It was not just a red flag, it was olfactory of red flags, but not just that. And then of course, Milley went on to say that if in fact Trump were reelected, he expects to be arrested. I mean, that's a big statement. Milley is nobody's fool. But then also there is the 2025 plan, the 1,000 page document in which a number of people who are hoping for a Trump figure or a Trump-like figure in 2024, have outlined the ways in which they will get rid of our nonpartisan civil service that we've had since 1883 and turn it instead into a group of people who are loyal to the president. And the different ways in which they will implement that. And those things right there, even in the small ways that they could be done, are over the edge because they replace the idea of being loyal to a country with the idea of being loyal to an individual. And we know how that goes. So I think you're already giving us some parts of a definition of what you mean by authoritarianism, but unpack that term a little bit more. What does authoritarianism mean? What might it look like in the future? Authoritarianism is the idea of rule by a single man or a group of, I suppose it could be a woman, it tends to be men, who are, or a group of people, and who, well, you can look, for example, at Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban in Hungary who have removed the guardrails of democracy, not necessarily through violence. In fact, it's often and usually done nowadays through voting, and that's kind of a cool story. But they have replaced the idea that we get to consent to our government with the idea that they get to tell us how we are going to behave and how the system, both the economic system, the political system, the social system, the cultural systems, the religious systems are going to operate. But one of the ways that I think it's most useful to think about it, because people sort of sometimes feel like it's something of this moment and there's no great long history of it, at least in the United States. So the way I tend to look at it is, I think there's two ways to look at the world. On the one hand are people who think that we should be treated equally before the law, and we have a right to a say on our government. And that's what's outlined in the Declaration of Independence for all the fact that the founders of that document were basically thinking about themselves and no one else. Those principles are solid principles. And that stands in contrast to those people who believe that really people aren't all the same. Some people are better than others, and those people who are better than others are the ones who have a right and probably a duty to direct the behaviors of the rest of us, to amass wealth, to amass power, and to move the world or our country in such a way that they feel that it is moving forward. And everybody has to get on board that. And it's had many incarnations in the United States through our history from the elite southern enslavers in the early years through the robber barons at the end of the 19th century, the Jim Crow laws about the same time going forward into the 20th century. But at the end of the day, you're really looking at the idea that if some people are better than others, obviously there should be one person who's better than everybody else. And that's exactly how you get concepts like Benito Mussolini played with in 1920. And it's worth remembering when we talk about if this is homegrown or comes from overseas that when Hitler, of course, was inspired by Mussolini and tried to create his own system in which some people were better than others, he looked for inspiration to the Jim and Juan Crow laws of the United States and the indigenous reservations. So it's not that there's a political uniqueness to this in our moment today. And I wanna ask you about the international context in just a minute, but sticking for the moment just with American history, what is the period in the American past that most resembles the current moment in your mind? In my mind, the 1850s. And everybody always goes, uh-oh, we're in trouble. But I think of it as the 1850s for both the negative reasons you think about the partisanship and the fact that the Southern white voters got isolated from the media community in which they were getting anything, but the story that was being given to them by the elite enslavers and in which there's voter suppression and the attempt to control what people can learn. You know, all those sorts of parallels are there and the idea of the extraordinary racism that really gets heated after the 1830s to convince white voters to vote against their economic interests in order to stay with the elite enslavers. There's that whole story, but there is also another story. And that's that if you were around in 1853, and I have to say it's kind of killing me because I love early Texas history. And we could kind of get rid of all the book and just talk about early Texas history because you have like the coolest history. You in Missouri and North Carolina have the coolest histories in Maine, in the country. But if you lived in the United States in 1853, you would think that the elite enslavers were going to get rid of the concept of democracy and replace it with the idea that some people, that is them, are better than everybody else because they had taken over the Supreme Court, the presidency, the Senate, and they were making inroads on the House of Representatives. And nobody was really paying much attention. And then in 1854, they get through the House of Representatives, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that guarantees that enslavement can spread into the American West. And what that's gonna mean is there's gonna be the Southern slave states, there's also gonna be all the states in the West are gonna be slave states. And that's gonna mean that the North is gonna be overawed in the Senate and the House of Representatives. And the North too is going to become a slave dominated, a region dominated by the system of human enslavement. And the Southern leaders are really articulate about this. They're like, this is great. We have figured out how to put labor and race together. And this new system, which is concentrating extraordinarily well, extraordinary wealth at the top of our economic system and enabling us to have educations and famous paintings on the walls and olive oil in America, which is crazy. We're gonna spread this system overseas. And they get this law through the House of Representatives and Northern people, including in those days, the white men who are the only ones who can vote, start to look at each other and say, listen, we don't agree with each other about immigration or about internal improvements or about finances, but we can agree that a country that is dominated by a small oligarchy is going to destroy democracy. And we can't abide by that. By 1856, they're a new political party, the Republican Party. By 1859, a rising lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, has articulated a new vision of the American government that works not for a few wealthy people, but for everybody, for ordinary Americans. By 1860, voters have put him in the White House. By 1863, he has signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending human enslavement as a system in the United States. By November of 1863, he has given the Gettysburg Address calling for a new birth of freedom and the idea that government should be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In less than 10 years, this country went from, we're handing it all to the elite enslavers to spread the system around the world, to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And the thing is, we tend to look at Abraham Lincoln and say, oh my God, he did it. He certainly was a genius. But it wasn't Lincoln who did that. It was people like you and me who stood up and said, no, this democracy belongs to us, not to a few people telling us how to live our lives. And that's what I see today, and that's why this book is called Democracy Awakening. So my inner history professor can't resist the opportunity to ask you, what about the 1890s? Is there, particularly in connection with an important point you just mentioned, which is the concentration of wealth, widening disparities of wealth. It seems to me the Gilded Age is the place to go for the most egregious disparities of wealth. And, no coincidence, democracy was in crisis in that period as well. Perhaps the big question here is, what is the relationship between inequalities of wealth and the state of democracy at various points perhaps throughout American history? So, I love the 1890s, but we could also go back to the late 1700s because one of the problems with the initial, is this interesting or should we stay in the 1890s? Maybe we should stay in the 1890s. Democracy is a problem. If you basically turn everybody loose as the founders and the framers did in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the Constitution, what they do is they hop over to the western part of Virginia into Kentucky and they think, well, this is gonna be great because there's all this land that's got indigenous people on it, but they're not really concerned about that. And they figure that democracy is always going to be rejuvenating because there's so much free land. But what they discover quickly in Kentucky is that the wealthy men get the better tracts of land. And when they do that, they amass wealth, they amass power, they get themselves elected to the legislature, they write laws that benefit themselves and they take everybody else's land. And so, when the founders and the framers see that, this is why we get the Northwest Ordinance because the Northwest Ordinance says we're not gonna have enslavement and we're not gonna have primogeniture, which is the idea that the oldest son gets everything because what that does is it destroys democracy by concentrating wealth among a very few people. So, to jump from that to the 1890s, we get the same problem in the 1890s because once you get the concentration of wealth, you get the ability of wealthy men to garner political support. And I don't mean that necessarily by paying people off, although there's a lot of that in the 1890s. More by being part of a system in which, your friends are the legislators and can you just help me with this? And it would be better if we had a higher tariff. And you and your family need to go out west here. Go on my railroad. And that idea of power through money and political power becomes really dominant in the 1890s. And what that does is it translates both to an ideology that says that concentrating wealth is good because you get these large economies of scale in the Homestead plant, for example, that Carnegie owns. But what it means is that workers end up with incredibly low wages and basically can't survive. And at first they buy into the idea that if they just work harder, they can get somewhere. But they figure out pretty quickly that that's not in fact the case that because the state legislatures and the federal government are really run by these industrialists, they really can't get a foothold. So they begin to organize politically in a number of different ways. And those who can't vote organize in other ways, which actually I talk about in this book through, it doesn't matter, they organize politically, they organize in a bunch of different ways. And they managed to convince enough people to back that that the Democratic Party ends up picking up those arguments and many of the things that workers want and that farmers want end up becoming part of the Democratic platform. And we get both the Democrats pushing that idea. And then of course, Theodore Roosevelt picking it up at the turn of the century. And by 1912, we have every major political figure, both for the Republicans and Democrats and Gene Debs, who's running as a socialist, all running with the idea that we need to restore fairness to the American government. It's fascinating. So many echoes of the current dilemma in a number of different places in American history. But you know, the reason I love the 1890s is because, I mean, everybody does, right? But you know, I didn't, my first books on the Civil War because I didn't want to deal with reconstruction because I couldn't figure it out and it was so dark and it was so miserable. But you know, when you get these periods of extraordinary tension, there are also periods of extraordinary creativity. People thinking of new inventions and new art and new music and new ways to organize society and new religions and all sorts of new things. And that's one of the things that really jumps out to me in this moment as well. If you look around us, think of how many new and interesting and exciting and creative things people are doing. And for all that it's a moment of terror and violence and all the things that were true then and are still true now, it's also a period of extraordinary creativity and of great joy. And that's the piece I kind of wish people grabbed hold of more because it was there in the 1890s. I think it's also here in the present. As exemplified by your work, if I may say. Oh, I never thought about that. Back to the international scene for a moment. Your book obviously deals with the United States and fair enough it sweeps across a very long period of time but it's hard not to see the parallels between what's happening within the borders of the United States and what's happening elsewhere. Democracy is clearly receded in many places. It's under direct military threat in democratic states such as Ukraine and Israel at this moment. To what extent is the situation confronting the United States part of a set of global trends that we should also be taking account of? Well, I would have loved to hear what you have to say about this actually. He's a specialist in foreign affairs. I think they're deeply entwined. And one of the things that honestly keeps me up at night is what would have happened in late February 2022 if the former president, Donald Trump, had been in the White House when Russia invaded Ukraine. Because what Russia wanted, of course, and there's something really interesting in this book and that's that before the 2016 election, Russian operatives were already talking about taking those oblasts in Ukraine, turning them into essentially what Russia has tried to do since the invasion and making those oblasts part of Ukraine because that's where you have the phenomenal harbors and a lot of the really good land in Ukraine, which is called the world's bread basket for a reason. It's phenomenally rich land. And it would have made Putin much stronger at home and given him a great deal more land and very, very nice ports as well. So he would have gotten much stronger. But imagine if we had pulled out of NATO, which is what Trump said he would do in his second term. So NATO doesn't hold. Putin manages to take Ukraine, NATO doesn't hold. Well, if you remember right before that invasion, she from China and Putin had made an alliance that was supposed to be incredibly firm. Now, of course, she has backed off from that now because Russia is in huge trouble economically and trouble internationally as a pariah and that doesn't help she right now. But you have those two working together. If we had backed off on NATO and Biden and Blinken had not managed to nail NATO together and all the many alliances and partnerships across the Indo-Pacific, for example, and across Europe and across all these different regions, what would the world look like if Russia were far stronger today than it was two years ago? China was far stronger today than two years ago. That means Belarus is now much stronger on Putin's side and so is Turkey. So is, I said Belarus, Hungary. I feel like we would be on the ropes. Do you feel like that's fair? I do. It's a terrifying counterfactual to rerun in my head. I think you're absolutely right that a lot depended on the president, not being Donald Trump, but being Joe Biden as we were talking about earlier, I think the record in connection with foreign policy is really extraordinary. And I have to confess, when we went into that election, I'm like, who cares about his foreign policy experience? It's not gonna matter for this next four years. And I just wanna say, I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong. But one of the things that I think is really interesting, and I'm gonna take advantage of the fact there's a foreign policy guy here to talk about it because no one ever asks about the foreign policy stuff, is that when the USSR fell in 1991, I think that the United States made the mistake of deciding that democracy and capitalism were the same thing. So long as you moved capitalism forward, it would move democracy forward. And what we ended up doing was moving capitalism forward and creating a situation in which the former Soviet republics got rid of their democracy and you got the rise of oligarchs there. But then there's this wonderful study out of this place in Europe called Chatham House that does a lot of great foreign policy stuff that says that the oligarchs then invested their money in the UK and in the United States, where the money laundering capital of the world, by the way. And what that did was they wanted to invest here because in democracies, your money is safe because the rules apply equally to everybody and they didn't wanna do that in their own homes where that wasn't the case. But then they began to invest in politicians who wanted to preserve the rights of property rather than do what was good for the public good because then they would lose money at it. So I think we really didn't pay attention to that from the 1990s on and ended up with this sort of ways in which the international corruption of oligarchy came to America without us being aware that it was here. And you can see this in a number of the political consultants for the Republican party going from Reagan on, Paul Manafort and his partner were political consultants to most of the Republican presidents and the Republican National Committee, which is, and by the way, I don't think the Russians were specializing in Republicans. I think they were equal opportunity partners, but because the Democrats were more interested in social welfare programs and not in protecting property, they tended to gravitate more toward Republicans. But that bleeding over between those two things seems to me that somebody ought to write a book about it and it's not going to be me, but there's a foreign policy guy right here. I'm on it. I appreciate the suggestion. Thank you. Before you ask me more hard questions, I'm going to go back to the domestic context. Isn't that cool though? Like nobody talks about that. Did you remember when we first learned about Paul Manafort? And I anyway was like, who is Paul Manafort? And then you start looking into it and it's like, oh my God, he was in every major political pie and unless you were really following it, and I wasn't a slouch before I started the letters, but unless you were really following it, you just didn't know how much he and Roger Stone were doing and they're everywhere. I want to circle back to Trump in a little bit, but let me take you back in time again and now not quite as far as my favorite decade, the 1890s, but to the 1930s and 40s, that era that plays a very important role in your argument in the book, it seems to me, you write, as many historians do, about a liberal consensus that emerged in those crucial years, 40s, 50s, 60s, the Johnson period in some ways was the culmination, I think, of that period of liberal consensus. Talk about what the hallmarks of American society were in that period so that we can then talk about what's changed, because I think you, like many people, look at those years, not as a perfect period in American history, but as a period when greater respect for rights, expansion of opportunity was much more a matter of consensus among Americans across a very broad part of the political spectrum. So let me frame that by saying, I began this book to answer the basic questions people ask me all the time. How do the parties switch sides? What is a Southern strategy? Do we live in a democracy or a republic, which makes every historian's head explode? And I was just trying to answer those questions. Please don't have to be that one. Well, see, it's like saying, I don't have a dog, I have a golden retriever. But what I realized quickly when I began writing is that what everybody asks me all the time is how did we get here? And then where is here? And how do we get out? So the overarching argument starts with how do we get here? And the book starts in 1937 when a group of anti-business repub, I'm sorry, anti-business regulation Republicans joined together with racist Democrats to write a document called The Conservative Manifesto. They wrote it in 1937 and it calls for an attack on the New Deal programs that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was putting through Congress. And they wanted to go back to the 1920s to get rid of the New Deal. And they called for an end to government regulation of business because it intruded on the way that businessmen could do their jobs. It called for getting rid of social security insurance because they believed that welfare should be taken care of by churches. It called for getting rid of infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority because they said that that was better done by individuals and that the money that was to be made there should go to private enterprise. And it's certainly called for getting rid of they wanted to go back to what they called home rule. They wanted to get rid of the civil rights pieces of the New Deal that were slowly going into place. Well, if you look at those four items, couldn't we pretty much impose them on today's radical right, which is now running the Republican Party. And I have a real soft spot for the Republican Party having written its history. What is happening today is not your mother's Republican Party. So I started in 1937 and with the idea that these people wanted to get rid of the New Deal, but that is going to become a process of getting rid of what becomes after World War II known as the liberal consensus. And what the liberal consensus is, is the idea that the government has a role to play in regulating business because they looked at the depression and said, hey, you know, we got a problem here because you guys were like cheating on a bunch of stuff. I paraphrase that we needed to, the government needed to have a basic social safety net like social security and the programs that came after. By the way, Johnson comes across quite well in this book. It needed to promote infrastructure because private enterprise wasn't doing things for places like Appalachia and it needed to protect civil rights in the States. And those ideas are shared not just by Democrats but by Republicans as well. Of course, it's gonna be Eisenhower who's really gonna push the idea of the protection of civil rights, although Truman does as well and FDR does to some degree. Truman really takes off under Truman and then Eisenhower is the one who really pushes it. He's a Republican. He's also the one who's gonna put in place the interstate highway system which at the time was the biggest investment in infrastructure in our history. This is an idea that shared by members of both parties and they disagree about the details for sure but they agree that this is what the government is supposed to do. Now that group of people who called themselves conservatives, although they were identified at the time as being radicals because they're trying to tear apart this system that has produced a concentration of wealth in the sense that there's a compression between the people at the bottom and the people at the top so that a CEO in those days, for example, of Ford makes about eight times what a worker does. Now it's over 340 times. This compression would create a prosperous nation and make people more likely to be willing to back civil rights which of course they were. But that idea of smashing that liberal consensus really takes off in the 1950s when William F. Buckley Jr. writes God and Man at Yale, the superstition of academic freedom in which he says, listen, we got a problem because theoretically under the Enlightenment anybody who makes a good argument based in reality is gonna convince people and they're gonna do what that person thinks is right but we keep trying to get people to get rid of the new deal and they keep voting for it. So we gotta stop making arguments based in fact. We're gonna have to start from the premise that this nation should be Christian and it should promote what he calls free enterprise or the idea of get rid of business regulation. It doesn't go anywhere. Everybody thinks that this is a crazy idea. Plus it's a really poorly edited book. I just had to add that. And then in 54, he and his brother and I, Al Brent Pazelle, write McCarthy and his enemies saying McCarthy was a little rough around the edges but what he did was right because socialism is coming to America in the form of this liberal consensus and they give the word liberal a capital L to make it look like it's a communist party like the Communist Party in China and they sweep everybody into that as Republicans and Democrats who both support this liberal consensus are embracing socialism and of course that idea of liberal as being a socialist who's trying to destroy America became a buzzword on the right until now we have people like representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia basically calling anybody she doesn't like a socialist or a communist and that idea of tearing apart that liberal consensus which by the way most of us still want in order to return us to a period in the 1920s is I think at the heart of how we got to this moment we're in now. So how do we get here, right? The big question that you posed and I suppose there are some answers that connects to economics, to growing disparities of wealth and there's a big factor as well that you highlight in your book at least to my reading which is race. Race becomes a way in which many ordinary Americans find the language to turn against the liberal consensus. Do I have that right? Talk about how that actually plays. Race becomes really weaponized after the Brown versus Board of Education decision of 1954 in which the Supreme Court says that public schools can't segregate on racial grounds that's unconstitutional and that's when Buckley starts the national review in 1955 and he says he's gonna tell the violated businessman side of the story and people begin to accept the idea as it's articulated in the national review that a government that does all those things I just talked about is actually redistributing wealth from hardworking white people to undeserving African Americans who want for example to integrate the Little Rock Central High School by virtue of the fact that the government that is large enough to do that is taking tax dollars. So and I talk a lot about that in a lot of places but there's actually something a little bit deeper than that in this book because there's a very simple argument in this book and what historians do is we look at how and why societies change and different people have different ideas about it. Some people think it's religion, some people think it's great men, some people think it's the economy. What I'm arguing in this book is the way you undermine a democracy is through the use of language. You weaponize language and you weaponize history to make people believe things that are not true and people like and I keep picking on Buckley but he was not at all unique in this used race illegitimately and falsely in order to tear apart that liberal consensus for their own ends which was to get rid of business regulation. They weren't, they didn't like taxes but what they really didn't like was business regulation and they use history in such a way that promotes the idea that a strong man can go back to a perfect time in history if only you give him the power to follow certain timeless laws or divine laws and the point that I was trying to make in this book was that the way we get rid of that is by insisting on a fact-based public discourse and reclaiming that language and reclaiming our history to recognize that there was never a perfect moment in the past you know like February 23rd like 1702 was the perfect time. Remember when the Puritans came to the United States before they even put their feet on the soil they were already saying they had screwed the country up so the idea that there was something perfect back there is like a mindset, it's not reality but the real democracy is recognizing that there's never been a perfect past the democracy's never gonna be perfect it's always gonna move forward and it's always gonna move back but it is not a spectator sport and if we get in there and we demand the basics of it that were equal before the law and we have a right to a say in our government that we as a country can preserve those values in our present and make things better for more people so what I was really talking about was not simply the way people use race or sex or class or the many different things that can be weaponized and not just between black people and white people between any number of different gradations of people in our society what we really need to do is recognize the use of language as the movement conservatives and the Republicans did they literally had charts of the words they were supposed to use and take that language back and embrace a society that is inclusive and protects everybody's rights so there is a strong tendency I would say right now to see the Trump presidency as this anomalous thing in American history but the upshot of your book and I think of a lot of good commentary is that no, there's a lot of continuity here and the way I think I would pose this question to you is let's say we're having this conversation 50 or 75 years from now when we look back over this period in history will we see a lot of continuity between the 19 the way conservatism develops in the 1970s and 1980s and what we see in the Trump presidency? So yes but I don't use the word conservatism for those people because I think they're radical extremists they use the conservatism for people like me who say we need to embrace what Lincoln embraced and the idea that I keep saying we all should be treated so and that is a little bit slimy in a way that's exactly what Lincoln did he said you people who are trying to spread enslavement are radicals we're the ones who are conservatives because we're trying to protect the principles of the Declaration of Independence so I'm kind of just echoing Lincoln on that not maybe a little bit tongue in cheek but I think it's a really important distinction so the question is one that everybody's fighting about is Trump part of a continuum or is he an anomaly and I'm a Libra so I say he's both but that matters because certainly what happened in the years between the rise of former president Ronald Reagan and his taking office in 1981 and 2015 was the extraordinary concentration of wealth among a very small group of people and what that did is it hollered out the middle class and the way that they managed to continue to get elected to office was twofold one was through this use of language that we've talked about those other undeserving people the takers versus the makers I mean it's all through that language which by the way I don't think is in this book it's more of it's in my Republican book but the language and also choosing your voters so we're gonna get the voter suppression the idea of ballot integrity beginning in 1986 people forget it was that early the use of gerrymandering especially after what was called Operation Red Map in 2010 so that Republicans could take over state legislatures in places like Wisconsin and North Carolina and Kansas and some of the other big states where still it's impossible for a Democrat to be elected or Democrats to take over the state houses even if they win significant majorities because of that gerrymandering so that set the stage for a strong man and one of the things that I think is interesting about the way politics works in the United States is that both parties have their primary seasons and one of the things that the Republicans did when they arranged their early primaries and caucuses is they arranged for them to be held in low information voter states with the idea that people would respond to name recognition so it was a way to control who was gonna be nominated without saying you people are morons we're gonna do it for you and what that meant was of course going into 2016 they fully expected that Jeb Bush was gonna win the nomination but then like a wrecking ball Trump comes in and he's got more name recognition and so he gets early momentum and then they play around a lot with the votes in the nominated conventions it's a huge fight over that most people weren't paying attention to and they end up with Trump people forget though that Trump was the most moderate Republican on the stage in 2016 people don't remember that cause they remember the sexism and the racism but he also called for fairer taxes to close the loopholes for the wealthy and corporations he called for a cheaper and better healthcare universal healthcare he called for bringing back manufacturing he called for an infrastructure program remember we always made fun of infrastructure week but he actually ran on that and won on that and he was really mirroring back I think for those disaffected people partly their economic concerns and also taking the next step with that litany of those others that they'd been hearing for a generation but then once he was in office you know he began in January of 2017 with the travel ban people again forget how quick that was and I don't think that was necessarily him I think that was the Steve Steve Bannon and Steve Miller trying to throw us into chaos so he could grab more power but after the United Right rally in Charlottesville he took those disaffected people and he welded them into a movement and that's actually something really different backing him in 2016 you could see the start of it but you couldn't see the cult like figure he was going to become that happens after Charlottesville if anybody's interested by the way you can go on Wikipedia and they have broken down every administration on a virtually day by day basis and it's really interesting because after and I didn't write about this in the book either but after 2017 after the United Right rally in 2018 he kind of goes out there that's when you get the statement about being a genius what was it a perfect very stable genius a stable genius that's when he stops you know at first he actually held a state dinner he actually he stops all that he stops going to events and he starts to kind of pull the crazies to himself in 2018 it's a really funny fallow year and then of course by 2019 that all the craziness really starts but what he does then is he really doubles down on the ways in which strong men rise in the United States and that's by fomenting street violence and getting people to bond over street violence and then feeding to them an ideology and there's a psychology to that once you have followed a strong man and done bad things for that strong man usually against other people you are wedded to that person because otherwise you have to admit you're the person who was bad rather than the person you attacked and you see that increasingly in 2019 and 2020 especially in places like the people who were screaming at Gretchen Whitmer the governor of Michigan you see them being more and more wedded to him and one of the psychological pieces of strong men is the worst they behave the tighter people cling to them because they've bought in and they can't walk away from that and then my comparison is always Narcissa and Harry Potter the worst Voldemort acts toward her family the more tightly she clings to him because he's got to be right or she has betrayed everything she believes in and you see him doing that so he is a product of that 40-year span but then he turns that into something I would say unique in American history at that level of politics you can point to Huey Long and maybe Father Coughlin in the 1930s and Ignatius Donnelly in the 1890s but they never had the followings that Trump does Very interesting, very Libra answer, nice Let me ask you about the state of the Republican Party right now in your terrific book, To Make Men Free about the history of the Republican Party in a nutshell, you identify a cyclical pattern in the development of the party so the Republican Party begins with Abraham Lincoln dedicated to providing rights and opportunity for the ordinary person the party drifts away from that by the gilded age, my favorite decade but it comes back in the progressive period and then it drifts away in the 1920s and it comes back when Republicans basically accept the new deal and Dwight Eisenhower is the embodiment of that and then it goes away so where are we right now in that cycle and is there any reason for, I think I can say optimism that maybe the cycle is starting to turn and I think especially of the 2022 midterms and also even maybe of today's vote on the speaker is there enough evidence to say maybe that we're starting to see a turn in the cycle? So I'm hesitant to say that because I've been predicting that turn now for over a decade and I vividly remember the first time I thought it I was on a crosswalk and I'm like this is gonna happen now and there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then so what I would say is this I actually have given up on the Republican Party as it is today I think because of Trump it has become an extremist right wing I mean I guess it's a political party but it no longer embraces democracy they've given up on democracy and believe me I don't say that lightly it's funny when you write a book about somebody and some people, they're like your family even if they might not share your principles or whatever you live with them for so long and that was once such a grand party it did such amazing things and to look at what these people have done to it regardless of whether you're Republican or not I just find it personally offensive because I know those people better than probably anybody in the world and they're my friends Grant and you know and Groves of Elts and anyway I'll stop but I've given up because when you have a party that is not operating in the real world and they are not they're deliberately trying to lie to they are lying, not trying to they're lying to people they're not grounded in reality they do not have realistic answers for our society they are solely interested in power and media hits they're gone that being said the reason that the Republican Party has lasted so long as it has and the Democratic Party has lasted so long as it has and all their incarnations good and bad and they are not yin and yang they are different parties that do different things and they have different ideologies the reason that the Republican Party has stayed around as long as it has is because its ideology which is not just that government should help ordinary people at the bottom but that if you give access to resources equality before the law and opportunity to ordinary people they will produce more value than they and their families can consume and that surplus which early Republicans actually defined as pre-exerted capital a pre-exerted labor that capital will employ the next tier of people and they will do the same thing and they'll employ a very few people at the top who will have factories and invent new kinds of ways to do things that will support people at the bottom and they will rise again and that vision and that's why it's so easy to pervert that because you say oh what we really need to do is help the guys at the top and that's how we get these swings back and forth but that ideology of American society as a web versus that of the Democrats which rose in a very different period and is really a way of seeing the world as the haves versus the have nots and the government should balance between the two I think of them as a line and the Republicans as a circle in my home mind you don't have to do that but that's how I think about it that idea of our society as a web as opposed to a line I think is so deeply ingrained in our DNA that another party will rise and will embrace it and I could write their speeches so I think partly it's that we pick on the government by reaction I think partly it's that it's so much easier and our culture has so much developed the idea that nobody wants to put their heart out there and be taken in you know you don't wanna say yeah I really like that only to have it blow up in your face it's much more easy and it's easier to say it was never I was never I never bought in you know sort of that ultimate cynicism and for what it's worth I think that's one of the reasons that people read me is because it's my heart out there and it gives you permission to put your hearts out there too and that's and by the way my heart is not with the Biden administration although I'm really impressed by them my heart is with American democracy and that's why I'm able to do it and be like I know he's a man he's just a human being he screws up and all that but I also think the third reason four reasons one I think of course we've cut down so much on the money in news now everybody's going for something quick there's no time to really stop and look at things and finally in order to do thorough reporting it takes a lot of time and that takes a lot of money and there's a really dramatic difference when I talk to reporters from Europe who will call me and say I'm thinking about doing a story on something could you walk me through how the committee on finance handles appropriations I mean I may not use this but I just need to know about this and then in the United States they're like I've got a deadline in two hours can you tell me what so and so would do and it's just a really different feel because I think we have not supported our news media the way we should so I think he's doing a great job and I think he's not getting the credit he should and that's actually one of the places that people like you and me come in is we talk about it and we say yeah I was thinking about that today Biden's killing himself out there he just flew to a war zone for the second time in his presidency nobody's ever done that before and you know he's a million years old right and he's out there talking to everybody and doing everything and he's on the phone and he's doing this and he just did a press gaggle in the back of Air Force One which is really unusual and everyone's saying oh he's too old to do anything right and I looked at that and I thought you know aside from anything else I feel like we ought to help the guy out and just say you know I kind of like that he's bothering to fly to a war zone to try and stop slaughter and instead of everybody going what more can you do for me and maybe it's time for us to say hey this is what we can do for you and we can have your back I just felt sorry for him Heather I'm conscious of the fact that we may be standing in the way of your progress on tomorrow's letter to the American people but I want to ask you two questions about young people and the first is is there any reason to believe that generational change will help what do you see in the demographics what do you see in young people that might give you confidence or maybe the opposite that there will be a reinvigoration of democracy coming Okay so just so you know he's a really good interviewer because he's asking really good questions and they're going in a direction you know people don't always call out the interviewers but he's a really good interviewer and that's a question that nobody almost nobody ever asks and the truth is we're in this really weird demographic thing where are the people who are running Congress and our governments are quite old and that's there's a number of reasons for that but one of the ones I always like to mention is transportation because you know the idea that you clung for example to the Supreme Court until you were a million years old wasn't a thing when you had to ride a horse to it you know or when you if you think about it I mean people laugh but really it was a young man's game right you if you had to be in a carriage and a boat and all that you know by the time you hit 55 or so you're like I'm done like and and I always thought of that I adored Ruth Bader Ginsburg but I was thought she would not have done well on a horse you know and and and of course also modern medicine because people are living much longer much healthier much much more vibrant lives which has another demographic issue and that's that there are a lot of older women now who have you know 30 year periods after their children have left home or after they've retired in which they have skills and connections and friends and voices and money and they're using it now for democracy which is something people are not paying attention to but but those people are ushering off stage and the young people who are coming up are a really different kettle of fish they have grown up with active shooter drills which is life-changing for them they are deeply concerned about the climate crisis as they should be they don't have any hope that under our current financial system they're going to be able to have homes and have lives and they're carrying that forward into politics I will also say that in the United States anyway many of them have grown up on a certain kind of fiction and I even noticed this when my kids my own kids who are hovering around 30 when they were young think of the books on which they grew up the Harry Potter books are about the rise of an authoritarian and how he is taken down by children who can see things clearly the you guys laugh but what's the one the Hunger Games the Percy Jackson books the even the Holes was like that they grew up there's more of them I've missed another big series but they have grown up with the idea that they must stand up for what's right and when I look at the Tennessee three Gloria Johnson of course and the Justins you know they have thrown a spanner in the works down there and they're doing it and for all that I'm making fun of the older politicians as being a million years old they're like 12 right and I'm exaggerating they're in their 20s but they're very young men who are simply refusing to sit down and shut up and I do not think they're unique so I think it's gonna I think one of the things we're seeing now is this ushering of one generation offstage and then a new one coming in and there one of the things that's so exciting for me is their reality is so different than my reality I can't imagine what they're gonna do but I know it's gonna be exciting and I know I'm not gonna like all of it but I think it's gonna fit much better with the modern day globe than my version did in your title democracy awakening obviously indicates a certain degree of optimism right we can manage this problem and bring about another awakening as you pointed out there have been periodically throughout American history what advice would you give to all of us but I think especially to younger Americans about things that we can do in our ordinary lives to make sure this all turns out to have a happy ending well won't have a happy ending there's no such thing as a happy ending but there'll be maybe a good ending what I like to emphasize to people and you need to remember that I'm an idealist which is I like to say doesn't mean that I hunt ducks with a rake it means that I believe that I that's main humor sorry that I believe ideas change societies and of course there's many things everybody can do they can run for office themselves they can vote they can support candidates that they care about they can do all those things that people talk about but what I can tell people to do is to talk about the things you care about to insist on reality and to talk about things call your legislators but also go to school board meetings and talk to their state representatives because they don't hear enough from the people who want to restore democracy and to restore a fact based public discourse and if you don't think speaking up matters look at the fact that Clarence Thomas just recused himself from a January 6th case and he had not done that he had not done that before that but even more than that look at the fact that after the Supreme Court ceased to recognize a constitutional right that had been established in 1973 the Roe versus Wade by the Roe versus Wade decision when they overturned that in June of 2022 with the Jackson versus women's health decision at first a radical right extremists in state legislatures and in governor's offices and to some degree even at the federal level were boasting about the draconian anti-choice laws they were putting into place they had big public signing statements and they gave out pens and they boasted about how their laws were more draconian than the neighboring laws and the pushback from that from newspapers as well but also from ordinary Americans saying you are making war on people who need often desperately medical care though they are no longer boasting about those laws when they sign them they're doing it in the middle of the night without press conferences and they're trying to change the language that they're using when they are talking about anti-abortion legislation and they are doing that because after that Supreme Court decision and after those laws went into place Democrats were outperforming expectations by eight points when most elections of course are won by less than a point in the special elections that were held after that that concerned reproductive rights so the idea that we can't do anything is dead wrong but in order to do it we have to make our voices heard and when people say well I'm only one person what am I gonna do? I say find someone else and then there are two of you and one of the things that always jumps out to me is when we talk about book banning the majority of the challenges to books that have gone into libraries and into schools are by handfuls of people in one state there's two people two, not 200, not 2,000 not 20,000, not 200,000, two look at how many people we have in this auditorium the trick is to recognize that we're a majority and that we're not gonna agree about a lot of stuff but that we do agree about democracy and about the fact we should have a right to be treated equally before the law and have a say in our government and that we need to fight for those things and that we need to advocate for those things and if we do that that's when we will end up like those people in the 1850s who reclaimed their democracy and reestablished a government of the people by the people and for the people and that's what I'm here for. Some of you will know that there is a concert going on at the Moody Center just down the road. Peter Gabriel is in town. Oh man, what are you guys doing here? I know, right? But I wanna suggest that we have heard a true rock star, a historian rock star here tonight. Thank you. I would like to say something. As you know, I have sat in my storage room at the back of my house for the last four years writing to you all and I wanna thank you because this is, I had no idea it was happening across the country, I will confess. I simply had no idea that everybody was as interested in this project as I was and I wanna thank you for all you have done for me, the questions you have asked, the ways you've pushed me, the ways you've supported me on those nights when I'm asleep on my desk. I am very aware every single day that I am the luckiest woman in the world and I am keeping the record for the future and I never forget for a minute ever that I'm here because of you all. So thank you for that. Thank you for coming tonight but thank you for being there for me every single night. So thank you.