Pivot Extra: America at 250 — with Heather Cox Richardson

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1:38And for more conversations like this one, listen and follow the Prof G Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 401. 401 is the area code covering the entire state of Rhode Island. In 2001, the first generation iPod went on sale. True story, my son asked me what it was like to be married, and I said, just delete every song but one off of your iPod. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 401st episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we're sharing our live conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. We commemorated our nation's 250th birthday and discussed power, institutions, technology, and the future of American democracy. And if you don't want to miss our next live stream or other content exclusive to Substack,

2:34you can subscribe at profgmedia.com. Anyway, we hope you enjoy our conversation with the one and only Heather Cox Richardson. Heather, thanks so much for being with us today. It's always a pleasure, Professor Galloway. How are you doing? You know, I'm doing all right. I guess I'm in a constant state of anxiety. I would call it low-level anxiety. How are you feeling? Same. And one of the things that really jumps out to me is how many different stories are coming at us from so many different places where you not only have to read what is in front of you, but also guess what is really happening. And that's just a lot of mental work. And you and I devote our lives to it. But for people who are trying to pay half attention, I just don't know how they're getting through their days.

3:29Yeah, it's sort of which story to focus on and where to allocate your attention and your, not your outrage, but your concern, if you will. So let's start with something you wrote in the past week. It's been sort of a masterclass in two of Trump's defining moves, cheating the system and spectacle. The reflecting pool renovation cost $16 million, 10x what he claimed, and is now fouled with green algae. The Kennedy Center tarp is still up. The UFC fight, sponsored by his own family's crypto company. In your view, talk a little bit, is the cheating getting more brazen, or are we just more aware and sensitive to it? I think probably both. And the fact that we're getting more aware of it is interesting, and I'd love to pick that back up. But the thing that really jumped out to me

4:13in the last week was the members of the Kennedy Center board being really clear about the fact that they had fulfilled the court order to take Trump's name off the building, which they may or may not have done. And we assume it's been done because they certified to the court they had fulfilled the court order to take Trump's name off the building, which they may or may not have done. And we assume it's been done because they certified to the court they had done it. But then they covered it with a tarp. Obviously now, a tarp that's designed to stay there for a long time because they've actually cut pieces through it to access the doors of the Kennedy Center. And that just jumped out to me that literally they said, we did what you told us to. But obviously, while they filled the letter of it, they did not fill the spirit of the Trump family business and certainly Trump himself

5:06to always find a workaround, always find a way to cheat the system. And it's not just being a con man, which is something else. It's I am cheating the system. And that to me, I think, illuminates not only Trump, but also many of the people who follow him because they're like, yeah, he's just a smart businessman. This is the way you're supposed to do business. And in a way, that's a real denigration and destruction of what the system is, which is the American people trying to make rules under which to govern themselves. So I actually thought that TARP was a really big deal in terms of illuminating the way that Trump thinks. Yeah, I wonder sometimes if those of us who follow this stuff, it occupies a decent amount of our bandwidth,

5:50whereas the majority of Americans are just freaked out about the cost of eggs. You know, it's another example of how weird the guy is. And I felt like when he put his name up, it was the equivalent of a spray painting or initials on a monument. You know, I thought, I was fairly when he put his name up, it was the equivalent of a spray painting or initials on a monument. You know, I thought, I was fairly confident it was going to come off. But does he, do you think he plans this, knowing it's eventually going to come off, but it's a distraction from the real work of governance, which is not, you know, where he does not acquit himself well? Is this a purposeful distraction? Oh, yeah. You know, I think what is really going on with him, and again,

6:30not a psychologist here at all, somebody who studies people in power, I think he can't move backward. He always has to be testing the limits. He always has to find a new way forward. And I remember, you know, back when O.J. Simpson was in his white van trying to get away from the cops and talking to a friend who was in L.A. at the the time and saying, oh my God, this is it. This is the end. And the guy said to me, no, you don't understand this kind of a personality. He will never stop moving forward. There is no way for him to say he's sorry to move backward or to try and work within the lines because he's always got to push that envelope until he has stopped. And I think that's Trump to a T. You know, if you say to him, you can't do this, he's going to find a workaround

7:08and do it some other way until, you know, the system really does finally stop him. I want to put forward a thesis that my co-hosts at Pivot, Kara Swisher, and Rachel Modest, Jess Tarloff, have pushed back on. I want to get your response, and that is, I think that we have a tendency in the media, or the people that we, or at least my bubble, who I hear from a lot, are fairly progressive and have embraced or have not embraced what I'll call a more aspirational vision of masculinity. Or interested in it, quite frankly. And I love what David Frum said about the border, that if progressives want to enforce the border fascists will. And when I think about the UFC fight, I actually believe that it was a win for Trump. And that is, if Democrats can't come up or progressives can't come up with

7:57some sort of aspirational form of masculinity around strength and service, that Republicans or Trump is happy to fill that void with misogyny and violence. But I would argue that the UFC fight was at a minimum a distraction from Iran and most likely a win for a large portion of his base. What are your thoughts? I'm going to disagree with the first and partially agree with the second. And that is one of the things that jumps out to me that I find fascinating right now is the degree to which new rising Democrats are embracing the American military. And the Republicans are walking away from the military. They're really treating them, you know, really in sometimes I think inadvertently in really poor ways.

8:37You know, when Trump kept saying that only losing 13 people in Iran was not that many people. Well, you know, it mattered a lot to the 13 people and all their friends and family and the people who recognize the service that that entailed, but also in the ways that they're like undercutting them, the VA, and the many ways in which they are not treating service members well. And the Democrats, in contrast, are supporting them, are stepping up, and are articulating the idea of an American military that not only protects America, but that also contributes to this larger civic body. So, I think that's a really big difference in terms of the way you approach masculinity in that case. Now, in terms of the UFC fight, I agree with you. I think it was designed to be

9:21not only a distraction, but also an embrace of that kind of violence at the heart of— Macho, yeah. But is it macho? I mean, that's the interesting thing about it, that a lot of—if you look at the number of people who approved it, the idea of there being a cage match at the White House, which is different than a sport elsewhere. Only about 16% thought it was a good idea to have it at the White House. And that idea that masculinity involves simply beating the crap out of each other, I'm not sure flies with an awful lot of people. So is it a win in general because he managed to grab it? Maybe, but more than that, the fact that it was at the White House and for me, the real thing about what happened with the UFC match was the fact that they were openly selling branding at the White House.

10:12You know, and somebody made the comparison between it and, well, you know, there have been a lot of cellists, and, you know, we had to suck that up. You have to suck up the UFC fight. Seafight. I'm like, yeah, but a cellist, and I'm, you know, I don't, I'm not really real up on a lot of cellists, but I don't remember them saying, you know, here's an ad for whoever the cellist's company is. And that commercialization of not only the White House, but also the United States of America, I think is deeply off-putting to an awful lot of people who recognize that it's our country, and somebody else is cashing in on that. And at the end of the day, there's going to be somebody holding the bag, and it sure looks increasingly like it's going to be the American taxpayer.

10:56And that's something that I think, to go back to your comment about eggs, I don't think people are real keen on that idea that we seem to be spending money like water while ordinary people can't make rent. That's a good segue into what is the kind of the dominant story in the news right now, and that's Iran. And Trump announced the Iran deal. I think he's taking license with the term deal. had a memo of understanding from his birthday cage match, posting that he was fully authorizing the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz and that ships of the world start your engines. National security scholar Tom Nichols wrote that Iran leaves the conflict stronger than before. Government attacked, now controlled by the IRGC,

11:39missile stocks preserved. Heather, give us your take on this quote-unquote deal. Well, of course, we don't know what's in it. We do know that what is being signed in Geneva on Friday is a memorandum of understanding. That being said, both Iran and the United States have gone in the media to talk about what they say is in it. It's already being picked up in right-wing media as well as across the spectrum that if, in fact, it's such a great deal for the United States of America, why aren't they releasing at least the terms as they are understood? And just this morning, J.D. Vance was sort of backtracking and trying to say that people's criticisms of it were because that was Iranian disinformation. But if that's the case, let's see

12:20it, right? That being said, you know, from the beginning, when this conflict that clearly Trump designed to look a great deal like Venezuela, he always, even still, continues to compare the two. When it didn't work out as he planned, he didn't have a lot of options, and he doesn't have a lot of options now. I mean, Iran has figured out that it can use the Strait of Hormuz for real as leverage, and there's not a lot of things that people can use the Strait of Hormuz for real as leverage, and there's not a lot of things that people can do about it. The United States has not turned out looking real good against a mediocre power. It certainly looks as if the United States is a lot weaker than Iran

12:57and, you know, coming out of this. And, you know, I actually sat around on more than one occasion thinking, how does the United States get out of this in a way that ends up with something that looks at least like February 27th, 2026, the day before Trump began the airstrikes along with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel? And, you know, I'm not a negotiator for sure, but I did not see a way to come out of this in any way that looked like a win. And I think that's just where he is. And all the criticism, which I think is quite warranted, we shouldn't have gone in there. I don't see a good deal coming out of this. What do you think? Well, I go to the term memo of understanding. It's a business term, and I've received and have written several memos of understanding. It's a business term, and I've received and have written several memos of understanding. What they are is typically in an M&A environment where someone gives you a memo

13:50of understanding saying, all right, Heather, you have a really robust sub-stack and newsletter business, and we'd like to acquire it. And this is our understanding of the business, the revenues, mutual NDAs, and this is kind of a valuation range, and now we're going to do the hard work to see if we can get to a deal. And I would bet somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of memos of understanding actually result in a deal. And it strikes me that to position this as a deal is disingenuous. It's an agreement to pursue an agreement. So, to celebrate seems premature. And my general read of the situation, and I want to get yours, is that every day this is extended without a very, very definitive deal.

14:33Advantage and leverage is ceded from America to Iran and that they are just playing delay and obfuscate, recognizing the American people have no appetite to go back into Iran. And so memo of understanding, stop bombing us, more and more reticence to get re-engaged militarily in Iran. And we are going to, the IRGC will, if they want, have control of the Strait of Hormuz, start to rebuild and enrich uranium. This, to me, feels like we have the most expensive boomerang in history, and that is we have essentially paid a ton of money and credibility in terms of U.S. brand equities such that we could get a worse deal than we had with the JCPOA. I apologize for the word salad there. Your thoughts? I agree with you. I agree across the board on that. I do wonder about

15:21two things, though. One is that if you look at the timing of the announcements of understandings, which have been 39 of them, I think, at this point, it certainly seems to be designed at least in part to affect the market. And that idea is, you know, again, there's a lot to untangle there, but somebody's making money off this deal, and it's not just the Iranians. And that, I think, is also something to factor in here. But I agree with you. You know, the United States can't withstand the oil pressures the way that the Iranians can right now. And that, you know, if you look at the declining stocks in or reserves of oil across the United States, and I thought it was really interesting a few days ago

16:02when leaders of some of the major oil companies actually went to the press and said, we have told the White House that we're running low on stocks and something has to happen. I thought it was interesting that they were concerned enough that rather than simply quietly saying it, they actually went to major outlets to make sure the American people saw that. I think you're right. The U.S., like I say, is, I hate to say it, and I'm really sorry, over a barrel. Yeah, yeah. As a historian— Can I ask really sorry, over a barrel. Yeah, yeah. As a historian— Can I ask you a question, though? Sure, go ahead. So, when you talk about the language of the memorandum of understanding, one of the things that I'm really curious about is the times in which Trump writes at the bottom of his social media posts,

16:42Thank you for your attention to this matter. Is that, am I correct that that tends to be associated with dunning somebody for bills that have not been paid? Yeah, that feels like, that's really interesting. It does feel like a collection notice. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah, or an attempt to collect a debt, right? But it's not, well, I'll put forward another thesis that when you value fealty over competence, these agreements have nothing to do typically with the leaders of the IRGC and the president. These agreements have to do with 150 to 250 well-trained, deep, experienced diplomats, of which we have gutted our diplomatic corps. And the level of incompetence or opting for fealty over competence is bubbling

17:32up with agreements that are built on very tenuous sands that ultimately, I don't believe this is going to result in anything close to an enforceable agreement. Your thoughts? So, my thoughts are that this raises the next question. I agree with you, by the way. I think that he's, like I say, that I don't see a clean way out. And, you know, you've seen this. He says there's an agreement issue, things within it leak, there's an outcry, especially from the right outcry, and then he backs off and he blows the whole thing up. And I don't see any reason to think that this should be different except for that pressure of the rising prices that are going to be hitting with the reduction of oil stocks. But it does raise a larger question,

18:14I think, about where the United States is in this moment. And that is, obviously, this is hitting consumers incredibly hard. They were already hurting from the tariffs. Now they're going to be hurting even more from the rising cost of diesel and the cost of what that's going to do to food and gasoline and so on. But to what degree is the corruption and the incompetence and the self-dealing among Trump and his inner circle affecting the way that ordinary Americans who are not paying a lot of attention to that because they're working three jobs to put food on the table, you know, to what degree do those things speak to each other? And I have an idea about that, but I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. This is your trick. You asked me what I think. Oh, you know, but this

19:01is the problem because I know what I think and that's not interesting. So, I'm always interested in what other people are. No, quite frankly, I think it's a lot more interesting than what I think. But as someone who loves to hear the sound of their own voice, I'll answer. I think in America, it has become a national pastime of being critical of our government. And I would argue our government is the best performing organization in history. And I think we have just taken for granted at every level how thoughtful and credentialed people in the CDC are and the diplomats who try and hammer out and cross the T's and dot the I's of the best organization in the world. And Americans have taken for granted believing that these things just operate on some sort of autopilot.

19:51And I think we're about to figure out in a very painful way that, no, there were very smart people working at the TSA. There were very smart people working in the IRS, the CDC. Those people were there for a reason. And when we decide to take out our entire Iranian diplomatic corps, staff our intelligence agencies and our security apparatus with loyalists as opposed to people who have any background, that eventually you end up with poor execution. And I think a lot of this is our fault. I think a lot of Americans have taken for granted the commitment and expertise that is resident in our government. And I think that those chickens are coming home to roost. I agree with you. The question is whether or not people

20:35are going to recognize that. And I would say a couple of things about it, if you wanted to hear stuff coming out of my head on this. The first is that one of the things that really has jumped out to me lately in the last week or so, so maybe it's fleeting, is what happened after the Great Crash in 29 was that if you think about the 20s, they were times in which the production increased dramatically, but the benefits of that really stayed in a very small group of people. And yet the popular imagery of that time, especially coming out of World War I with all of its advertising, for example, and all that new technology, was one in which people who read the popular magazines and paid attention to the radio and

21:20did all those sort of newfangled things thought that the world, the United States, was really this incredibly prosperous place. And they didn't pay a lot of attention to farmers and to wage workers and to marginalized Americans, especially racial minorities, saying, hey, things aren't so great over here. But what happened after 29 was that with that crash, when the entire economic facade just came tumbling down, all of a sudden Americans, especially white Americans who had previously disagreed with the idea that there was anything wrong with the economy, started to look at their former bank accounts and started to look at the people who had ripped them off. And their fury at that point was overwhelming. And that's how we go

22:03from the 28 election, which is a landslide for we go from the 28 election, which is a landslide for Hoover, to the 32 election, which is a landslide for FDR. And I wonder, you know, there was a story that came out the other day about how when he was governor of Ohio, John Kasich had done this deal with tech companies absolving them from a need to contribute to Ohio state taxes for, I think it was up to 40 years, so long as they met certain standards. And, you know, it didn't really make a lot of waves until all of a sudden people are now discovering it with the advent of data centers and they're outraged. And that just seemed to me like that sort of backward look that looked a lot like the backward look of the early 1930s before FDR comes in,

22:48when people are so mad at the head of the stock exchange and people around Hoover and Mellon and so on, that they decide that when Herbert Hoover walks down the street, flowers die when he walks by. And I wonder if maybe we're going to see, as this economy gets more and more stringent, a furious look back at how we got here over the past couple of decades. We'll be right back after a quick break. Thank you. You got this. What will you visualize, design, brand, animate, create, generate? What will you translate, pour your heart into, or have a laugh doing? Whatever you want to make, it's possible. So what will you Canva today? Support for this show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

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25:00Explore how Constellation is advancing reliable energy for America's future at constellationenergy.com. The word I keep returning to is, there needs to be a reckoning. And just as, so for example, in 29, my understanding is the policy response was exactly wrong. They tightened the purse strings thinking that they needed fiscal discipline when they absolutely should have flooded the market with stimulus. And if you look at 08, you have to, in my opinion, give credit to the Fed chair and banks and the central bank for a response that was overwhelming. Everyone talks about, catastrophizes about AI. We've been to this movie before. There was a 25% destruction in labor in the first few months of COVID.

25:50And the response was swift. And some people argue we overdid it. But Janet Yellen said the risk of underdoing it was much greater than overdoing it. And the government response was, I would argue, was outstanding in terms of the economy. We never really had a full recession. I would hope that what we're seeing now on a lot of levels would inspire reckoning. The issue is whether or not the incumbents or the Republican Party is able to frame the primary signal of prosperity as the stock market versus affordability or inflation or generally how people feel that they're doing. But that brings up a question in that as you brought up a reference to the late 20s, in terms of Trump's approach to foreign policy, what is the analog in terms of another president or leadership in terms of a

26:38similar approach? And also you referenced this time maybe being somewhat like the late 20s. Are there other periods you can look at domestically in our history that feel very 2026? Yeah, the Gilded Age for sure, but also the entire late 19th century, really. So, you know, one of the things that we're looking at right now is the upcoming midterm elections and whether or not they're going to be free and fair. And people often say, especially those of us who came of age after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, you know, this has never happened before where our vote has been endangered. And the answer to that is, you know, let's take a look at the American South from about 1874 to about 1965, but certainly from 74 into the early 20th century when, you know, quite literally at the time the parties were reversed and the Democrats actually held shooting contests on the people that we often now call robber barons,

27:45the industrialists of that period, literally buying up senators. You know, the senators would say, I'm the senator for the sugar trust, for example, and the consolidation of wealth and power. That only goes so far, though, with the idea that at least in that period, and I would argue right up until the post-war period, the Andrew Carnegies of the world, the J.D. Rockefellers of the world, still maintained the idea of social responsibility and a commitment to democracy. Now, their version of democracy might not have looked the same as yours and mine, but they believed in the United States of America and in the separation of powers, for example, and so on, even if they were trying to stack it toward themselves. I think in this moment, we have a group of people in power who no longer have any faith in democracy and are really actively trying to destroy it and to destroy the post-World War II rules-based international order in part so they can carve up the globe again in a

28:46way that looks very much like that late 19th, early 20th century period when countries were jockeying to carve up Africa, for example, or to carve up Asia. And the United States was part of that, not to the same degree that some other countries were, but the idea that what you were really doing was building a strong country at home by taking the resources out of countries that really couldn't fend off the military power of those superpowers at the time. I think one of the wonderful things about America is we have a tendency to pick different. You know, the next one, I always feel like every president is pretty distinctly different from the previous president, that we have a tendency to want different.

29:28And regardless of the reality of how we're doing in terms of prosperity or well-being, the American public does not feel as if we're doing well. It feels like it's setting itself up for a change, both in terms of the midterms and maybe in terms of the election, the presidential election in 28. When you look historically at this type of situation and you look at the candidates that range on the Democratic side from the moderate side to the very progressive, do we have a tendency in this type of situation to swing hard left? What type of candidate usually comes after a situation like this? So you're going to hate this answer because it starts with the premises. If you look at where the Democrats are right now, from those you would call the more moderate ones to the progressive

30:18ones, they still are extraordinarily centrist to the point that most of them are to the right of Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Republican, of course. And what I'm referring to especially there is with Eisenhower's upper tax bracket at 91 or 92 percent, with his call for universal health care, with all these things that coming out of World War II were absolutely centrist positions. So when I say to you that normally what we do is a reaction to this kind of concentration of wealth, I'm going to talk about it less in terms of political parties and more in terms of where the American people are. So if you look at a moment like this, you should see a backlash that people on the right will say is a wildly leftist sort of thing, the way FDR did in 1933 and going forward.

31:14But as FDR said, what he was really trying to do was preserve democracy and capitalism, because if he didn't do the sorts of things he did, we were going to lose it all together with the rise of either fascism or communism. And so what I would kind of expect to see in this moment is a reassertion of, first of all, the recognition that the system is not working for the vast majority of Americans, which, you know, we've moved at least $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% since 1975, that it's not working for the majority of Americans. And at this point, it is being gamed by a very few people. And, you know, people like Elon Musk are helping that argument a lot. And if you recognize that and then you say, this is not what America is supposed to be,

32:01this is the moment when you go back to, and I'm thinking FDR here, when he would honor Theodore Roosevelt, his relative, or Abraham Lincoln, you know, sort of talk about the luminaries in our past and the things that they had called for. The truth is, really, since Lincoln, those people who represent the American people have championed the same principles. And I would expect to see more and more of that. And you're already seeing it. You're seeing it out of John Ossoff in Georgia, who's using that formula exactly. And that, I suspect you will see people coalescing around, not only on the Democratic side, but honestly, if I were an up-and-coming Republican right now, and for fun, sometimes I

32:43write speeches in my head, and I could write these speeches. That's exactly what I would do. And frankly, it's exactly what Theodore Roosevelt did. He essentially repackaged Grover Cleveland's ideas in language that would appeal to Republicans and therefore became the leader of the progressive movement. But that's what I expect to see. We'll hear about how this is left-wing or, you know, crazy progressive and so on when it's really common sense. as a deliberate decades-long project to delegitimize Democratic opposition. That was the diagnosis. What's your prognosis for the Republican Party right now? Is it reformable or has it crossed some sort of Rubicon where it'll take a time to come back into what I'd call

33:37a more traditional American fold, if you will? I think the MAGA movement has really corrupted the association of the Republican Party, the name. I mean, because one of the things about the name Republican and Democrat is that their names and their organizations, but their principles have changed really profoundly in both of their histories, which is itself a really interesting story. By the way, when I started the letters, which take almost all my time, I was writing history of the Democrats because I'd written the Republicans and I was writing the Democrats. And someday I will actually finish that book. It they are baked into our DNA and were baked into our DNA by the Civil War, and that we will get those principles

34:30back, whether the name is Republican or Democratic or something entirely different. We can't live without those principles again. Now, who's going to do it is another question. And I know there are already candidates running in, especially in the Midwest, which is interesting, who are trying to call back the Republican word and to go back to the idea of the sort of Eisenhower Republicans, the Republicans who were read out of the party in the 1990s as being Republicans in name only, but who in fact were the ideological heirs of people like Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Now, there's something, though, that you said earlier that I would love to pick up on. You talked about the destruction of the idea of expertise and, you know, what was really this amazing and amazingly talented set of people in the American government really since World War II when the government got as big as it did. And I want to throw out to you that there has always been a strand in American

35:30history of the idea that by virtue of your connection to something else, usually God, coming out of the Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century, there has always been this idea that the person of the people, because he or she, because a lot of religious revivals are going to center around women, have a hotline to God, and therefore their concerns or their ideas about governance or about life are more valuable than people who went to Harvard. That has always been a strand in our history. And one of the things that jumps out to me about the people in power right now is the degree to which they have simply said, well, I'm going to put the best people in charge. Or I read a book. I then can go in and I can negotiate Middle East

36:21peace in a way that nobody who's studied this and been trained and so on has been able to do for 40 years. And the thing about that is we have never put those people at the highest levels of our government before. The idea that you just have a hotline to the universe or God or to intelligence. And in this moment, it seems to me that that idea overlaps strongly with Trump's sort of fascist traditional ideas about some people being better than others. And that, I think, is interesting because I think that's one of the reasons that evangelicals adhere to him as closely as they do. And I don't really know how to grapple with that. What do you think about that? Well, it's interesting you say that because I don't know if you've seen J.D. Vance's new book.

37:09I haven't read it. The playbook around, if you're running for president, you put out a book, right? Newsom just put out his book. And no one reads it. Sorry. And they're usually not very good because they're starched of anything that can come back to haunt you. I will give Governor Newsom some credit. I thought his was more authentic and vulnerable than most of these books. But J.D. Vance's is called Communion, and he states that his conversion to, I think it's Catholicism, has reshaped his view towards politics. And I find that in and among itself really frightening. I was disturbed when Justice Kavanaugh in her confirmation said that ultimately she serves in the kingdom of God. My question was, well, which God is that? And the fact that we have a tendency to describe our enemies oftentimes and say to them, say that they're theocratic, it feels to me like we're becoming much more theocratic. And that the fact that a candidate who's clearly running for president feels comfortable talking about his faith shaping his viewpoint on politics, that

38:10that is exactly contrary to what the founding fathers had envisioned around a separation of church and stage. Are we increasingly becoming normalizing that the U.S. is in fact becoming a bit more theocratic? Well, certainly that was what was behind Project 2025, and Russell Vogt, who's the director of the Office of Management and Budget and was part of Project 2025, has been very clear about that's exactly what he intends to do. And certainly J.D. Vance has said that, and a number of the Supreme Court justices have said that it remains unpopular in the United States of America. But that goes back to the suggestion I was making about what does one do when one puts those people in power? And I shouldn't say they've never been in power because they certainly were with the Puritans, and it didn't go real well in a lot of ways. It went very well in others. Defense Department the other day got rid of about 180 faith traditions that it was no longer going

39:05to recognize. Mike Lee, the Mormon from Utah who is a staunch supporter of MAGA, he spent the entire weekend fighting desperately to say, wait, wait, wait, Mormons are Christians, Mormons are Christians. And this just goes back to one of the reasons that the framers didn't want to have in power people who believed that they had some version of the force with them, because then you have to decide which religion is the one that you're going to adhere to. And in a way, that theme, which I know about because my master's is in literature, and it really heavily runs through American literature and also American art and film. In a way, you can also argue it's a real excuse to say, I don't actually have to learn anything.

39:57I don't have to go to college. I don't have to learn to be a negotiator. I don't have to work my way up. I can just say that God favors me, and therefore, I can do it all without putting in any hard work, which is really antithetical to what America has stood for until pretty recently. Doesn't even extend beyond our shores. When I think about the prosperity, the unprecedented prosperity of the West post-World War II, a lot of it is from cooperation, right? Global trade brought down the price of everything, security, two-thirds of the world's GDP is on kind of a similar operating system, turning our enemies, Japan and Germany, into our allies. But it was based on, a lot of it was based on this pillar of, we use evidence and argument and history and norms and economics and logic and

40:42science to have a common language, a common understanding. And at the moment we start opting for one of the 5,500 gods and a belief that somehow our values are superior based on the blessing of one of those 5,500 gods, doesn't that, I mean, quite frankly, just risk the entire global social order that's created so much? Even these deeply religious leaders, when they'd come to the table and try and negotiate a nuclear arms treaty or a trade agreement, they deferred to science. They deferred to norms. They deferred to history. They deferred to provable evidence and argument, and they put their own beliefs aside, recognizing that that made the argument or an inability to find bridges of agreement almost impossible. Doesn't, when the world's most powerful nation slides into,

41:39I don't want to say theocracy, but a belief that I've got an invisible friend that's behind me, doesn't that threaten the entire shooting match? I think so, and that's certainly what the framers talked about and the founders talked about because they had the experience not only of wars of religion in Europe, but also of the use of state governments to discriminate against certain people, certain different members of, at the time, Protestant sects in the United States. You know, you could get imprisoned in Virginia for preaching against one of the other established leaders, established religious leaders, and they recognize that, you know, you must have the right of conscience. That's something that

42:20James Madison talks about a lot. People have to be able to pay their debt to their God however they wish, and that's a paraphrase, but that's the idea of it, but that you can create a government that operates within the known world in reaction to natural laws, and that's what they were trying to set up for that very reason, which is, again, one of the reasons that American literature is so interesting, because starting with the Puritan sermons and then moving forward at least through the Civil War, that question of how know, to whom are you loyal? But it's one thing to have it in the realm of humanity and trying to figure out your own position in society. It's another thing to have leaders who

43:16say, well, God told me to do this, and the obvious answer to that is, well, God told me to do the opposite. So, we can't actually go with what God recommended, because God will speak to the two of us very differently. Again, all over early American literature, but it seems to me something we have forgotten, especially since the 1980s, when people like Ronald Reagan really emphasized, you know, I didn't need an education, you know, I'm just, and for him, it wasn't necessarily God. But I remember when he kept saying, and really taking pot shots at Harvard, I remember at the time, my mother saying, of all the legacies he leaves, the attacks on higher education are going to be the most, and the idea that you don't need education are going to be the

44:00most lasting. And here we are almost 50 years later and thinking, you know, she knew where she spoke. So I want to ask you who your favorite candidates are, but given your understanding of history and typically what type of candidates surface and bubble up and do well in this type of moment, or if in fact there is a reckoning, which candidates on both sides of the aisle do you think are giving off the type of energy that is usually successful in this moment? So, once again, I'm going to be annoying. The Democratic bench is incredibly deep, for everything, which is great. And that, I think, in part reflects how many people are getting involved in elections that weren't previously getting involved in them.

44:45And by that, I don't just mean the candidates, because there's a certain type of person who tends to run for office, but I mean the people who support those candidates. So you're getting new ideas in that Democratic bench. And in terms of who I like right now, I don't really like anybody right now, and I don't dislike anybody right now, because again, in a moment like this, with this multiplicity of candidates, I think what you're seeing is a ferment coming from below that's tossing up new people who will begin to coalesce. And my comparison here is always the 1850s. United States in, say, 1854, it was the Whigs and the Democrats, and you probably weren't paying huge attention except when they were having their barbecues before an election because

45:30there didn't seem to be a whole lot of difference between the two of them. But over the course of the 1850s, with the increasing awareness that a very small group of elite Southern enslavers was taking over the national government, you started to pay attention to Sam and Pete Chase and to, you know, a whole realm of people, William Henry Seward in New York. You started to pay attention to a whole bunch of people, and you'll notice I didn't say Abraham Lincoln there, because Lincoln is kind of a late start into this idea of a new party. He was actually very tightly tied to the Whigs, and so he doesn't really start to get out in front with the Republicans until 57, 58. 58, he's in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and beginning to get a real national attention,

46:18and by 59, he has begun to articulate a new ideology for a new party. But I always like to emphasize, we created Lincoln. He didn't come from the gods. The American people created Lincoln. And I think we're looking at something very similar right now. So I mentioned John Ossoff a minute ago. John Ossoff, to me, has sort of come a little bit out of nowhere with this really, we all knew he was running for reelection as a senator, but he's clearly starting to get this sense of what is bubbling up. And he's using this old formula for how one vaults to the top of the political spectrum, using that formula. And all of a sudden people are talking about him as a presidential candidate in a way that they weren't a few years ago

47:03or even a few months ago. And you're seeing different people sort of take the lead briefly and someone else take the lead briefly. I would not take a bet right now on who's going to emerge at the top. What will emerge at the top is a newly articulated ideology. The Republicans have the opposite problem, I think, and that is that because Trump is so dominating the MAGA Republicans right now, he's stifling exactly what they need, which is people articulating ways to identify policies that will address the needs of their voters or of the American people at large. Because if they abandon MAGA, which, you know, it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller, they're going to have to tack back to getting more voters.

47:44And right now, I am not seeing that, except as I say on those people who are basically walking away from MAGA and saying, okay, I'm not going to get any voters right now, but I want to advertise it's possible to be a Republican and a respectable Republican. You know, in the short term, they just don't seem to have much of a bench and they just, you know, their best candidates seem to have abandoned the party and become independents and are challenging the Democrats that way. What do you think? Well, I agree with you. Ossoff is giving off the most Camelot-like energy. The great thing about the primary process, when you let it run, it not only surfaces the right person, but the right person for the moment.

48:24And whoever's leading right now, which Newsom is, usually means they're not going to be. I mean, Herman Cain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, those were all people leading in the polls at this moment. I think America likes someone who comes up and is a new shiny face. And quite frankly, we don't know them well enough to hate them yet or find all their warts. So a Bashir, I think, is someone we're going to hear more from. Pritzker is giving off great dad energy. Governors Moore and Shapiro are very well positioned. I agree with you. I think our bench is really deep. What I want to put forward to you or thesis is when people ask me who I think the Republican nominee is, I say that Trump is the equivalent of political Chernobyl.

49:04Name anybody from his first administration with the exception of Ambassador Haley, who I think will be a formidable candidate, perhaps on the Republican side. No one survives Trump. Everyone gets political leukemia if they're around him long enough. He's the Chernobyl of politics. The person, if I had to pick a nominee for the Republican Party, if I had to bet on anyone, it would be Tucker Carlson. What are your thoughts? I don't think that's unreasonable. I think he's certainly in the running for it. I think there will also be an attempt to keep Trump on the ticket. I think that Trump himself probably would love to see Trump Jr., Don Jr. on the ticket. The question, again, is what the Republican voters will put up with. And Nikki Haley's interesting. I would not have put her

49:50on that list because she so infuriated so many of her voters when she ended up endorsing Trump. I mean, it would have been one thing to walk into the sunset as a never-Trumper, but in that case, she basically managed to piss off both sides. Now, one of the people that I wonder about, about whom we have heard nothing for months and months and months, which could very well be deliberate, is Liz Cheney. That, you know, one of the things, and I'm going to go all historical on you here, one of the ways, and I don't mean to make a comparison except in the timing, not in the people, one of the ways we got James Buchanan in 1856 was he had been in Europe for the years before he was an ambassador to the United Kingdom. So he had been out of the

50:33country for the incredibly heated 1850s. So when he did burst into the scene in 56 for the election of 1856, he could say, I have nothing to do with all that trouble. I'm just here, you know, serving my country. And of course, it turned out to be a disastrous nomination, but he did, you know, his opponents split and he did win the election. So it's entirely possible that on the Republican side, we will see somebody who has been out of the fray. And, you know, Carlson is clearly trying to position himself in that. And I don't think doing a bad job of doing it, but he's got an awful lot of haters as well. So I wonder about somebody who is invisible right now, but may spring back, especially as Trump continues to crumble,

51:17which he is both physically and mentally, and as his movement crumbles as well. We'll be right back after a quick break. Indeed sponsored jobs. You can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now?

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53:17new customers get $700 credit back. Just search Realize Podcast on Google or use the promo code PODCAST26. Ready to get started? Take advantage of this offer while it lasts. Terms apply. We're back with more from Heather Cox Richardson. Let's turn to our audience. We asked our listeners to submit questions in advance, and we pulled a few of the best ones. Nick Driver asks, with America 250 coming, we're about to be flooded with brands performing patriotism. Heather, what's the difference between a company that has generally become part of the American story and one that's just opportunistically renting the flag? Oh, let's both answer that one. That's a great question. I mean, one of the things to look for, of course,

54:08is are the things that that company or corporation doing advancing the principles of American democracy, which is supporting causes that make sure we're treated equally before the law, supporting the idea of everybody having a say in their government, and making sure people have equal access to resources. And, you know, that's one of the, I mean, actually, I'm going to throw this back to you, Scott, because one of the things, again, that fascinates me about branding right now and about corporations right now is that it often seems to me that they are selling less a product for the American people or a service for the American people so much as they are selling themselves. That is, put money

54:51into my company because I'm one of the cool kids, and they don't actually produce much that the rest of us care about. And that's overstated, of course. But there does seem to be an extraordinary divorce right now between the stock market and the companies that are hot and what the American people actually need and the companies that are providing that. Is that unfair? Oh, not at all. vessel to place their frustration that while the market hits new highs and people seem to, we have our first trillionaire, I can't afford gas. And what I do think is fair is that happiness or well-being is not only a function of what you have, because there's a lot of economists who would argue that people at all income levels actually aren't doing as poorly sometimes as the media would portray.

55:48But your happiness and general sense of well-being is the delta between what you have and your expectations. And because of social media vomiting 105 times a day how well everyone else is doing, the expectations, especially amongst young people, is that if they don't have a boyfriend with a six-pack and they haven't made $3 million on the SpaceX IPO, that they're failing. So people are just upset and angry. In terms of branding, wrapping yourself on the flag is as old as time. The difference now is that three-quarters of people of our generation, professor, feel good about America. Only one quarter of younger people feel good about America. So if you're a brand appealing to people our age, if it's insurance or CPAP or MyPillowGuy,

56:33yeah, wrap yourself in the flag. Younger people, not so much. I don't know if going to the kind of America well is the right thing for them to do right now. It does seem to me that one of the things that we are suffering from in this particular moment is the conversion of wealth, that is the things that make a life worth living, you know, family, church, if that's your thing, open spaces, time with friends, education, libraries, whatever, that that is essentially being turned into cash. And that, you know, we're liquidating it and turning it into cash and then giving it to a very few people. And so maybe part of branding is recovering that idea of community and so on. Free and fair elections are very much of concern to everybody here. I mentioned before,

57:23we've come through periods when we have lost free and fair elections, and that's something that everybody should be all over, both at the local level and the state level, reaffirming the idea that our elections are safe and secure and that those people who are attacking them by saying that they are rigged are, in fact, I'm going to go for it here, un-American, and that we have to support those things. I'm very concerned about it, but it's not a done deal. We don't have to sit here and take what comes next. At the end of the day, we retain agency over our country and over our government, and we need to exercise that. Yeah, I like that. And just going back to this notion of about American branding, I just spent time in Northern Europe and that my takeaway there is,

58:06and I just think it's such an important lesson, is that we need to settle the argument. And I think Sweden and I was just in the Netherlands, settle it. You don't have to choose between billionaires and universal healthcare. You can have a society with both. These societies have high tax rates and produce incredible companies. They go on to make billions of dollars in trillion-dollar market caps, and they have billionaires. The two aren't mutually exclusive in America. I worry that some of the incumbents have tried to convince people that you have to pick one, Silicon Valley innovation, and Bernie Sanders-like social policies, and they can peacefully coexist. Isn't that by definition that they can peacefully

58:52coexist? Because if, in fact, you create a healthy, educated workforce, they're able to innovate and do better work. And that's actually how it works. I think you can make an argument that this idea of deliberately creating an undereducated, impoverished population is an attempt to establish an extractive economy over the United States, over all of the United States, so that a very few people get it all, but it actually will create less economic growth than doing the opposite would. It just means that fewer people will be able to monopolize the wealth, and therefore they can say, hey, I'm a trillionaire, and the world is small enough that none of you are ever going to get to be there. I mean, that's the, honest to

59:35God, that's the argument that you heard literally from Abraham Lincoln forward on both Republican and the Democratic sides. And when we talk about language that politicians should be picking up, that's it. As you say, they are not mutually exclusive, that that's how you create a successful economy. Unfortunately, that's pretty much what Biden tried to do and he ended up getting destroyed for it. So whether or not another politician will think it's a good idea is an open question. So we'll do one more question here. Kristen says or asks, 80 million eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. How can we foment some sort of meaningful change here? With whether or not people get involved?

1:00:19This is such a great question, Kristen, because that's the real, you know, when people ask me every day, you know, how can I convince my deeply MAGA uncle to vote for a Democrat? And the answer is you can't. You know, that there are people who are baked into the system in a certain way right now, and they're not going to change. And that's just not the United States. That happens around the world in every political system. People do that for one reason or another. The trick to changing society is to mobilize those people who were either soft voters or who didn't get involved previously. And this is a place where, I'm going to go all historical again, you saw a huge difference in the 1890s. In fact, this is how you get the progressive era when

1:01:00people who were interested in changing the political system actually went into farming districts or into working districts and said, listen, you probably don't know what's going on, and started new newspapers and had picnics and had political rallies and encouraged more people to participate in the political system. And when that happened, especially in the 1890s across the American Plains and the American South, the people who were in charge in Washington, and that would be the Benjamin Harrison administration, which, you know, someday I'll do a deep dive on to vote for us because they always vote for us. And what they discovered in the midterm elections of 1890, which remains one of the biggest shifts in American history, was that once people paid attention to the fact that the policies were unequal and were favoring railroad industries and industrialists over ordinary people, they got out there and voted. And simply showing up made the difference.

1:02:06But what made them show up was being informed about what was really happening by their neighbors. And that I think we're seeing around the country, but that's the way you change American politics is you talk to your neighbors and not say you're an idiot or you need to change the way you vote. You say, hey, are you aware that there is a private prison going in next to our elementary school? And I've got a real issue with that. And that's what makes people show up. And it does work. Yeah, I have one more idea on how to increase turnout. And that is Heather Cox Richardson. I'm not exaggerating. When I just did this live podcast tour, every time we referenced your name or sourced you, the crowd would erupt into applause.

1:02:53I really hope that you hit the campaign trail. You've garnered, your voice is really resonating and you have built so much goodwill. So I hope, not to create too much of an expectation, but I hope that you hit the campaign trail. I think you could have a real meaningful impact. I will, but I just want to point out, when I said that about Lincoln being created by the people, that's all I do. Like, my name is the symbol for this popular movement. I am the most average person you have ever met, I promise you. But I am able to voice what people are feeling because I know how to write and because I was a teacher for 30 years, so I know how to listen. And that, I think, says a lot about where America is right now. And it says a hell of

1:03:36a lot more about that than it says about me. Heather Cox Richardson is a historian at Boston College. By the way, another side note, just finished a college tour with my son, went to eight schools. Hands down, the nicest, warmest vibe was at BC. You guys are doing something right there. Yeah, they totally are. They do a great job. Anyways, Professor Richardson is the author and the voice of the newsletter, Letters from an American. Thanks so much for joining us today, Heather. You're always just such a huge fan, favorite. And to all 6,000 of you tuning in, thanks for joining us. If you'd like to join future live streams, subscribe to the PropG Plus or subscribe to PropG Plus at PropGmedia.com.

1:04:15And if you're not already reading Heather's work, check it out. Check out Letters from an American. Thanks again, Heather. Thanks for having me. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Genere. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario-Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from PropG Media. You've been asked to run the company's social channels, but company content plays by its own set of rules. It needs a logo in the first three seconds, but it can't feel like an ad. It needs subtitles, except when it doesn't. It needs to run at two times speed and deliver a complex message. Simply, of course, within 9 by 16.

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