 like what you see, then give generously. All right, I like that, too, absolutely. Because we have to say, we're on the air, we have to keep going. I'm Jay Fidel. This is saying, take it's 2 o'clock, 2 o'clock, block with John David Ann from HPU, his professor. Mr. Rans, we're talking about it. And we're trying to examine some very difficult issues. What's that old saying, vote early, vote often? Yes. We're talking about giving, give early, give often. OK. No gerrymandering. You just have to do it. Just do it. So John, this is a very difficult topic to try to get a handle on what's happening now, and what it reveals about what has happened before. As I said before the show, history professors know things that most mortal people do not know. They can help elucidate. That'll take that. It seems so simple and wrong. Now we can try to make them right by looking at history. Yeah. They at least make them understand them. Make them understand them. I think that's the goal, right? We look through the lens of history and see if we can make the situation in the present day look a little more normal? Maybe normal. There's no surprises in 2018. Yeah, that's some surprise. A lot of movement. Give people comfort too, because, of course, the current times are quite disturbing. I mean, people are anxious. You know, they're sweating this stuff, and it should be sweated. We live in interesting times, dare I say. But so to look at the past and see the past is a place that can give us insights, give us understanding, give us lessons. That, to me, is a very exciting part of our history. Could you introduce me to lessons which may or may not apply to our future? Well, it's up to humans to implement the lessons. This is why it's so important for historians to get out there and to talk about history, because humans, if they don't know much about history, they're not going to know the lessons to learn, right? Isn't there a song by that name? History and geography. I don't know the song. I'm going to sing now, Jerry. Never mind. Start to frighten me here. OK, so what does this bring to mind? You know, the revolution, if you will, that's too heavy a term in the election of 2018. What does that bring to mind in the mind of an historian? Right. So what's interesting is that the election of 2018 showed some cracks in the Republican coalition, and it showed some gains for the Democratic Party because of those cracks in the coalition. When we think about the current political coalitions, we have to look at the 1960s, because that's when these coalitions reformed. On the 1960s, the Democratic Party was the party of the South. The Democratic Party was the party of the working class. The Democratic Party was beginning to be the party of African-Americans, although that was just a fairly new situation itself. Because, of course, African-Americans, up until the 1930s, had voted solidly for Republican candidates because of Abraham Lincoln. He was the great emancipator. Reconstruction, all that. Exactly, exactly. So what we see is that the political coalitions of the 1960s fell apart. The Republicans gained in the suburbs. They gained almost totally in the South, although that's not completely true. I mean, the elections in the South are also very contested between Republicans and Democrats. They gained ground in suburbs. They gained ground in the Southwestern part of the country. This was a period when you and I were both alive. Absolutely. And I believe I was 70s to the present day. So the question is, big question, why? What can we learn about that shift in terms of causation? Right, right. So in that particular shift, Richard Nixon made a concerted effort in the election of 1972 to try to win over what he called the silent majority. These were suburban voters. So when you think about cities and you think about voting, the inner city of cities today is solidly democratic. It's that the first ring, and especially the second ring of suburbs, that has been Republican since Nixon made his appeal to the silent majority. And by saying silent majority, of course, there's always a vociferous or vocal minority. The vocal minority, this was the hippies, the leftists, the student protesters. Nixon was running against the hippies. The student protesters in 1972. And so, and he won big, actually. This was very effective for him. And the Republican Party has been running with a variation of this strategy for a long time, the party of law and order, the party of limited government, so on. And so they've been very successful at pigeonholing Democrats as leftists, liberals, kind of crazy people, and portraying themselves as the kind of solid of, if you don't know who to vote for, if you already have hesitations about the liberalism of them. I agree. I certainly agree. A Democrat should vote Republican, right? I remember. Right. I'm a witness. Well, it was Nixon more than anything. Now, Nixon had very good advisors who saw Kevin Phillips was one of those advisors, wrote some important books on this, who saw in the electorate that changes in demographics, for one thing. Keeps snowbirds from the Midwest were moving to Arizona and New Mexico. And then they were staying there. They were older. They were on fixed incomes. They didn't want taxation. They wanted more of their own kind of personal freedom. They didn't have kids anymore. They didn't care about the education system as much. So it was a recipe for Republicans to take over in the Southwestern part of the country. So the demographics, so you had snowbirds going to the Southwest, and you had an older, stable population there that wanted less government, less taxes, and less. I get two things out of that. One is, they were middle class who made some money. And so that they could think differently. They don't have to be active. They don't have to be Democrats anymore. All of a sudden, they're interested in protecting their stash. Yes, right. And the second thing is, they're getting older and more conservative. So we have an increase in life expectancy. No, that's right. So they still wanted a social security. They wanted their retirement benefits. Of course, those were things they carried very deeply about, and the Republicans didn't mess with that. Nixon didn't touch social security. He didn't touch their retirement. He was smart that way. So yeah, so he didn't actually, you know, he didn't alienate this group in any way. So that's part of what's going on there, in the suburbs and in the Southwestern part of the country. Can you apply the same sort of rules into other previous historical shifts of the same nature? In other words, people moving around the country, the economic distribution changing, and the age distribution changing. Absolutely. Now, the age distribution is more difficult. But if we project back to the 1850s, now, I know that's a long way from 1972, where we're merely inquiring, OK, we're going back. Let's go back in the time machine. But so we're going back to 1856, because 1856 is the year in which the Republican Party was founded. Now, you asked about demographic shifts of migration. Well, what you have in the 1850s is a huge migration of Midwestern farmers into disputed territories, into Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota. You have our pioneers coming into those areas, and they're mostly not coming from the South. A little bit in the southern part of Ohio, southern part of Indiana, southern part of Illinois, those are Southerners. Other than that, these are mostly Northerners who are moving to the West. These Northerners are predisposed to be more anti-slavery than they are pro-slavery by the 1850s. And they start a movement. It's called the Free Soil Movement. They found a political party called the Free Soil Political Party. And this political party becomes the basis for gathering around the issue of anti-slavery. And so the party develops around that, and then Free Soil is not enough because many abolitionists, they have their own political party called the Liberty Party. That party is the party of New England, by and large. And the abolitionists are a little bit suspicious of the Free Soil because the Free Soilers are composed of people who don't like immigrants, who really don't like African-Americans, who not only want no slavery, but they don't want any African-Americans at all. So the Free Soil Party is not enough. And so in the mid-1850s, then many anti-slavery folks move from the Free Soil Party into the Republican Party. And the Republican Party becomes an amalgam of Free Soil, of the abolitionist Liberty Party, even the Whig Party, which is the party of economic development, even a few know-nothings from the American Party or the Native American Party join the Republican Party. And the Republican Party then becomes the product of all those things. It becomes the party of economic development. During the Civil War, then you have the Lincoln administration establishes the greenback for the first time the issue currency. They also establish the transcontinental railroad. They build that. They establish the Homestead Act, which allows pioneers going out to the West, 60 acres, and you have to stand in the land for five years to get the land. But they pay nothing for it, then. And so the party of economic development, the Republican Party becomes the party of abolitionism. And eventually, Lincoln and the Republicans go forward during the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, they abolish slavery. So you can see. It sounded like a consolidation. There was a little sprinter group of parties disappearing into the larger Republican Party. And that suggests, and let's see if this is another thread, that we can go forward. That's overshifts, yeah. That suggests leadership. Somebody was thinking this thought. Somebody was trying to cause the consolidation. Somebody was saying, follow me, boys. Follow me to the Republican Party. Sure, you had to have good leadership. And I suggest to you, the leadership factor is always in play. It's in play now, in terms of who's joining what party. Yeah, but it's complicated. So the Republican Party, it's the party of Lincoln, right? Guess who founded it? Not Lincoln. Not Lincoln. No. Lincoln was a holdout. He stayed in the Wake Party right till the bitter end. He joined the Republican Party only after the Wake Party actually failed in his home state of Illinois. So yes, it definitely takes leadership. And so it takes a certain kind of leadership. You have to have organizational leadership. You have to have politically savvy leadership. And so there are, I mean, Salman Chase is deeply involved in the founding of the Republican Party. William Seward, they're both lawyers, and they have political experience and organizational experience. So there's definitely leadership involved, but it's surrounded by issues. There's nothing if they don't have the issue of anti-slavery. Right. But then leaders and issues are connected. In other words, if I want to do consolidation, I have to figure out what appeals to people. Yes. I have to pick my issues. I have to run with a position. Exactly. I learned everything I need to know from Veep, you know. Oh, yeah, sure. Veep tells me everything about how you run a political party. So issues are always important. And they're important in other places, too. But this is how American political systems hang together and then get torn apart. Is the issues of the days and good kind of political guidance or even manipulation leads to these fundamental shifts in parties. You spoke about the Republican Party being consolidated during and after Civil War. And a moment ago, you spoke about Nixon, a leader of sorts. And he says, oh, we're going to make the Republican Party on the side of the suburbanites. The ones with some money, some age. And we are going to try to connect that with them and distance ourselves from the activists and the young liberals. OK, so it wasn't that different, was it? And the party you described as the Republican Party's in the middle of the 19th century. Oh, well. It's business. Right, right. But so OK, so the Republican Party of the mid-19th century, for one thing, it's a solidly northern party. Lincoln is not even on the ballot in most southern states. It's a sectional party. And by this time, so is the Democratic Party. And this is so this is this this sectional party organizations lasts until the 1890s. You figure from 1856 till 18, that's 40 years when Americans voted almost completely on where they live, what part of the country they lived in. So that's a huge issue for that time. The Republican Party today is not a it's not a sectional party, at least at this point. National for sure. Yeah, it's a national party. So you have a very big difference there. The Republican Party has continued to value the idea that Lincoln put forward that the worth of an individual depends on how hard that individual works and that that individual can raise him or herself up and build themselves up from poverty and become anything they want to be right. This kind of the ideology of the self-made man is really it's both parties, but it's more Republican than it is Democrat. Yeah, but the dark side of the Republican view today is if he doesn't choose to raise himself up, that's his problem. Right, right. And that's this is a product of another time that we will probably talk more about this later. But of course, there is a time in the late 19th century when this idea that people are connected to their own initiative and their own work habits and everything, and the individual can make it happen no matter what the odds. This idea is really challenged in the early 20th century by what we call the progressives. And the progressives are actually both Republicans. They're probably more Republicans than Democrats. People like Jane Adams, whose father was a solid Republican and had a letter from Abraham Lincoln in his house that he had framed. So this idea that the individual can raise him or herself up is an idea that sticks in American politics. It doesn't necessarily just stick with the Republican Party. And there are Republicans who deny this because Jane Adams argues, look, it's not just about your own initiative. It's about where you live. It's about how much food you have. It's about whether your employer mistreats you. So the progressive movement was all about, look, it's about these environmental circumstances that you grew up in that you live in. And that really shapes to a great extent how successful you're going to be. Well, you know, it sounds to me like it's always dynamic. It's always changing. You can't really say that anything that happened along the way is, except by nomenclature, which nomenclature is only nomenclature, that under the hood, things were always changing. And if you say that about the 19th century and the first, I don't know, 60 years or more of the 20th century, then you have to say it about now. And the only difference would be now, it moves even faster because of communications and transportation. I'm not so sure about that. If I have social media and I can do Twitter to 327 million Americans all in the same moment, I can have an effect on things more than they could in 1850. That's true, that's true, but the way that political coalitions cohere around particular issues, I still think takes quite some time to either succeed with those coalitions or to unlock those coalitions and begin to pick apart those coalitions. So in the present day politics then, what has happened is Trump has led the Republican Party in a radically new direction, right? It's anti-emigrant now, it's kind of insular nationalist, it's against globalism, right? He's criticized and made fun of globalism in a variety of forms, so it's not necessarily free trade anymore. And so I think there are a lot of confused Republicans out there actually who think that, well maybe because I'm a Republican, I still like Donald Trump, but I'm not quite sure about the issues anymore. I think Trump has really muddied the water for the Republican Party, which had a very sort of, from the 70s to at least the early 2000s had a pretty clear idea of what they stood for, Lincoln's idea of freedom-only economic freedom, the freedom to fail, the freedom to not have to have limited government and government staying out of business, and the freedom to trade worldwide, right? Where these were kind of the main themes of the Republican Party. Trump, I think in some ways inadvertently, is now beginning to pick apart some of that. He seems to be in isolation. He's willing to put in place tariffs, and Republicans are following him, but how long and how far will they follow him? I'm just not convinced that the Republican Party can relabel itself in such a dramatic way and actually not lose a lot of voters, and not have people beginning to shave off, and I think that's part of my point about the 2018 election, and the current election environment is there's not only new demographics in the Southwest with a rapidly growing Hispanic population, but there's also people who are saying, you know, I was a Republican, but I'm not very excited about where the party's going. That's another factor. The variation between the historic, conventional issues and position of the party versus what people are saying for the party, about the party now, and I agree certainly that it's a huge difference now. Delta factor is huge, and the problem is, I'm gonna tell you something you didn't know, John, not everybody understands history. In fact, most people don't understand history, so they don't see the Delta factor. They don't realize that it wasn't too many years ago the Republican Party was really different than it is now. That's exactly right. So the shifts are really hard to understand. And I mean, they're not hard to understand if you map them out and you study them, but if you're not interested in studying them and you really have no idea of what they are, for one thing, and what they represent to the larger picture of American politics, then it's very difficult. Okay, now I always like to ask the question you hate. Historians hate to make predictions about the future. This always makes them nervous. You can watch John's face. I'm really scared. I'm gonna ask him this. So, what is this teachers going forward? We have a total dynamic. It sort of changes depending on how many hamburgers he had for breakfast. And so, where is this all going? Is that Delta factor gonna be bigger? Are people gonna leave the Republican Party or join the Democratic Party or vice versa? Everything is in play. Yeah, it's, well, we're certainly at a fungible moment. That's absolutely true. I think the Republican Party actually is in danger of splits. They seem to be holding together right now, but I think Mitt Romney is still, at the back of his mind, considering a run against Trump. I think he, you know, he said, at the New Year, he said Trump has failed the test of leadership. So, how long can Trump kind of keep these other people in line with kind of fear and intimidation, which is his main game. I'm not sure about it. I think, so I predicted in the 2016 election that there would be a split. And true enough, Mitt Romney almost ran as an independent. So, it almost happened. But it's still there, the possibility of the Republican Party splitting over issues that Trump has raised, especially the pre-trade and the role of government. I mean, Trump has, he can say whatever he wants about limited government and free trade, but he has done damage to the Republican brand in those regards. So- How would you see that split happening? Which, what are the two factions? Let's assume there are two. Yeah, yeah, so- Could be more, but let's assume there are two. Sure, sure. Well, I suppose it's sort of a Bush as in, you know, Bush senior and Bush junior and Romney faction that would like to go back to the Republican Party as a party of immigrants, not an anti-immigrant party, but a party in favor of immigrants and but still security of course, but which is not explicitly anti-immigrant because to me there's grave danger in that because we're a country of immigrants and if there's really not a national security crisis at the border, which there is not, then how can you sustain this anti-immigrant stuff when there's not, you know, we don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of immigrants coming into our land like Europe had in the, you know, in 2015 with that great migration from the Middle East, from Syria. So we don't have a situation like that. And so to me that's one issue where the Republican Party might want to rethink post-Trump or maybe even in the 2020 election, the issue of free trade, okay? Now Trump has really kind of dabbled in tariffs but he's made it very clear that he doesn't like American globalism with drew troops from Syria in the face of firm opposition from the Warhawks and the Republican Party. So there are some issues there and even Mitch McConnell has criticized this withdrawal from Syria. So there's two issues, American trade, that's three issues actually, immigration, American trade and then American kind of military and global preeminence in the world. Trump is doing damage to those things. Other Republicans think we don't like this. We're going to criticize Trump for that. So it's a global group. You got a global group. It could be. It could be a kind of global group. A global group. All those things you mentioned are all sort of global awareness. That's true. Transnational, yeah. Okay, now the other group, the ones that's left behind when this happens, they're the anti-global group, right? Is that the vision you see? It's not that simple, but there's certainly a group that is, they're concerned about their own living. Right? They're greatly concerned. And so you saw last week, Trump actually, Trump announced he was going to run against Obamacare, right? He was going to try to get rid of Obamacare. And then this week, apparently. No support for that. He reversed it. No support for that. Because he finally figured out that he's, you know, he can't change gravity, right? There's no support for that whatsoever. And that would doom Trump immediately. So he backed off on that. So people who voted for Trump are very concerned about their small towns and their livelihoods. They see a way of like dying. And so they're insular. So. They're insular like Trump is arguing. Are they going to leave with the globalists or are they going to stay? No, no, they'll stay because they're insular. They're not globalists. They don't understand this. Right. They probably haven't traveled much. They're resentful that Free Trade has brought all of this business to China. And maybe they lost a job at a factory in their hometown. Got it. And so there's going to be this anti-globalist constituency going forward. And does this pull the Republican Party apart? Let's assume it gets pulled apart. Just for this discussion. It's a very delicious discussion. Jay. What happens? Do we have two parties, Republican one, Republican two? Do we have the Republicans, the global Republicans joining the Democrats? Yeah. It sounds like it's, again, in play. Right, right. But what happens now when you look at, you know, all of American history and you try to figure out what these factors can do? Yeah, right, right. Are we going to see new names? Are we going to see the Whigs again? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, back. Here's the thing is the last time we had a major development of a new political party, of a major party, the Republican Party, it was an issue which eventually tore the country apart. I don't see that issue on the horizon. I don't see that there's an issue that can tear the country apart. Save for maybe if Donald Trump tries to abrogate the 2020 elections, or if he does get rid of the elections, just say, hey, we're not going to have elections. Yeah, so there's an outside chance that there could be this kind of transformative event if Trump acts like a tyrant, I mean, like really like a tyrant, like a dictator. If he tries to become a dictator, then I think that could be the transformative moment that destroys the Republican Party. Save that. I think the Republican, too. Yeah, well, I don't think that's going to happen, but I definitely think it could destroy the Republican Party. In which case what? The party implodes and everybody's running for other parties. Yeah, I mean, I think there would certainly be the Mitt Romney faction would say, hey, come be with us. We don't like dictatorship, but we like limited government. We want global trade, you know, these issues that sell. And he comes up with another name. Well, maybe the new Republican Party, or maybe it's just the Republican Party, and Trump leaves the Republican Party because, you know, Trump has always been about Trump. That's what we've been behind. Maybe if, let's say, Trump loses the election in 2020, maybe Trump says, I've had it. I'm pissed off at the Republican Party. I'm going to form the Trump Party. Yeah. And that could happen. And his place stays well. That will immediately cause a huge reduction in the Republican Party. But the new Republicans, the global aware Republicans, they carry the Republican Party. That's right. One minute left, John. Right. You haven't mentioned the Democratic Party, which has its own schism going on. Yeah. And how does that play in all of this? Right. The thing is the Democratic Party is not in the same situation as the Republican Party because when you look at the Democrats from the left wing to the center to the more conservative side, a lot of conservative Democrats became Republicans in the last 40 years. So that part of the party is not a concern because they're not actually in the party. And the thing is the Democratic Party has already identified three issues that they're going to run on. They're going to run on the issue of health care. They're going to run on the issue of inequity, of growing inequity between rich and poor. And what was the third one? They're going to run on, I think, the tax scam. They're going to try to get rid of that. But so no, I'm sorry. The third one is elections and democracy. Those are such big tech issues. Who can disagree with getting our democracy right? Who's going to disagree with supporting health care, protecting Obamacare and ensuring that people have health care? Who's going to disagree with, well, there might be some people who disagree with the argument that we need to reduce inequality, but very few in the Democrat. I don't think anybody in the Democratic Party is going to argue against that. So in other words, the Democratic Party is not ready for splits, actually. The Democratic Party is quite unified. And I think Trump helped to unify it by clarifying, through opposition, what the Democrats stand for. So he's actually helping the Democrats define themselves. I think so. And creating a force in the Democrats that will take his base away. Typically, somebody in the Republican Party, if they see the Democrats really succeeding on the issue of health care, would go, oh, let's get our own health care bill out there, right? Trump is trying to destroy health care. He doesn't understand this. Typically, you would see somebody in the Republican Party saying, hey, we need to grab ahold of this democracy issue. And actually, we need to point it in our own direction. It's not happening in the Republican Party. So they're losing out on some of these issues. Yeah, yeah. Well, what a fascinating discussion. John, David, and HBU history professor, history lens, it all looks different from the vantage of history. Great to be here. Thank you, John. Great to have you. Oh, hi.