Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

As you may have heard, we have a very exciting event on the horizon. Next week, we’re hosting another Now and Then live taping, and we’re bringing along a good friend of ours, the absolutely brilliant Emory professor, Carol Anderson. Her work is focused on race and voting, and most recently on the Second Amendment.

Joanne Freeman:

Tune in on Zoom or Cafe, or on Heather’s Facebook page on Thursday, October 21st at 6:30 PM Eastern time. We’ll also release the audio version as an episode of Now and Then. RSVP at cafe.com/live.

And one other housekeeping note from the team at Cafe, you can now binge the entirety of Elie Honig’s, Up Against the Mob Podcast. Just search, Up Against the Mob, wherever you get your podcasts.

Joanne Freeman:

Today, Heather and I want to talk about something, which in one way or another has been in the news, some of it on the national stage, actually some of it locally as well, the way in which we’ve been talking about it to each other is dominance politics or bullying as politics. In one way or another, we’re talking about a style of politic that is really in mode right now, particularly among the Republican Party. What we want to talk about today is what that means, how that works, what can we learn from its use in history about the dynamics of it working and about ways into it and out of the dilemmas that it causes. And part of what set us off this week has to do with something that Senate Majority Leader, Charles Schumer said just a few days ago, I think that caused an interesting reaction.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This really jumped out to me, because if you remember last week, what was at stake in the country was whether or not the United States Congress would vote to raise the debt ceiling, which would enable us to pay for spending that had been accumulated in the past, including about 7.8 trillion that had been run up under the Trump administration. And the debt ceiling was put in place in 1917 as a way to make it easier to borrow. And it’s been raised dozens of times since then, including three times during the previous administration

Joanne Freeman:

And bipartisan in most of those cases, right? It’s been raised in a bipartisan matter.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because defaulting on that debt is essentially for the country to commit financial suicide, and all the things we’ve talked about in the past that would come from that. But what was really interesting about the way that the media talked about it and the way that pundits talked about it was they talked about it as if it was a Democratic problem. When in fact the Republicans were simply saying, “No, we’re not getting anything to do with this. We’re just not going to play.”

And so, the Democrats finally said, “Okay, we’ll do it on our own, even though you people ran up almost eight trillion of this in a 28 trillion debt. We’ll go ahead and do it ourselves.” And then the Republicans filibustered it, and said, “No, no, you can’t do it that way, either.” The Democrats go ahead and on a straight party line that is only Democrats vote to raise that debt ceiling, they go ahead and they buy the country until about December 3rd, to go ahead and figure out a way to raise the debt ceiling more permanently. And so, what happens?

Joanne Freeman:

So, following the agreement on raising the debt ceiling, Majority Leader Schumer gave a speech on the House floor, and he basically criticizes the Republicans for the brinkmanship, the game playing that they showed on this issue. And these are his words, Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans insisted they wanted a solution to the debt selling, but said-

Charles Schumer (archival):

Republicans played a dangerous and risky partisan game. And I am glad that their brinkmanship did not work. For the good of America’s families, for the good of our economy, Republicans must recognize in the future that they should approach fixing the debt limit in a bipartisan way.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, I will point out that’s a statement of fact. Schumer says, this is what the Republicans did. They had this risky reconciliation process that put a lot of things at risk and the brinkmanship didn’t work. So Heather, what was the response to that statement?

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is what made us want to do this episode. The response was that McConnell came out absolutely swinging. And now there’s a number of reasons he might have done that. He’s actually not operating from a position of strength right now in a number of different ways. But he says, “Last night in a bizarre spectacle, Senator Schumer exploded in a rant that was so partisan, angry and corrosive, that even Democratic senators were visibly embarrassed by him and for him. This tantrum encapsulated and escalated a pattern of angry incompetence from Senator Schumer.”

And then he goes on to say, this is in a letter to President Biden, “I am writing to make it clear that in light of Senator Schumer’s hysterics.” Important word there. “And my grave concerns about the ways that another vast, reckless, partisan spending bill would hurt Americans and help China, I will not be party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement.”

Now, what jumps out at you there is that the Republicans did everything they possibly could to make it almost impossible to pass the raising of the debt ceiling and to throw the country into default. That’s not negotiable. That’s actually what happened. Schumer said, “Hey, this is what happened.”

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m glad it didn’t work. That’s the extent of that statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And McConnell comes back with, “This is a bizarre spectacle. It is hysterics. Look at how we had this moment.” And this is actually how a lot of the media portrayed it. We had this moment in which we were all getting along so nicely. And now he’s gone ahead and thrown a monkey wrench into that, “And I’m not going to play anymore.”

Joanne Freeman:

The striking thing about that then is, if you’re talking about ranting and hysterics, and pumping up the emotion, that’s coming out of McConnell’s statement, that’s really not coming out of what Schumer is saying. So, he’s basically very upset that Schumer just made a blunt basic statement a fact about what happened. He doesn’t like that they were called out.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This reminded me overwhelmingly of the kind of material that Joanne has studied in the 1850s, because what we have at stake here is a kind of bullying politics, violent politics, dominant politics in which there are rhetorical roles that come to mirror actual political roles in our society. And they’re characterized, first of all, by this bullying and bluster saying, “I’m going to act in a certain way.” And the expectation that the people on the other side will in fact apologize for things like stating basic facts.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. So, there’s one side that rants and rages, and wave their fists around, and plays the political game by those rules. They do so in a sense, because they can rely on the fact that the other side is going to uphold the rules and be shocked by it, and do all of the things that will keep an institution at least semi-functional, and will allow the people who are doing the bullying to perform as they wish. So, there’s an imbalance of power that becomes a balance of power. But one side is flaunting that power. And the other side is tap dancing to keep things going.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And part of that is, first of all, what we have come to know as gas-lighting. And I want to pick that up again, the idea that you’re misrepresent something that actually happened. So, who are you going to believe, me or Schumer? Who are you going to believe, me or your lion eyes? That old statement, that old joke.

But there is also here a reversal of the victim and the offenders. So, in this telling, Mitch McConnell becomes the victim here, even though it was Mitch McConnell and the Republicans, who were in fact, the people who were trying, essentially, to drive the country over a cliff.

And what’s interesting about this particular moment is the degree to which this flew. It flew in the media. It flew in a number of pundits. Even some Democrats were like, “Oh, Charles Schumer shouldn’t have spoken up and talked that way.” He was literally stating facts.

So, that made us think about, not only the 1850s that I want to come back to, because I think Joanne can tell us a lot about how you get past that moment and what happens in a moment like this, but it does raise the obvious question. When did this kind of dominance politics or bullying politics start in modern America? And there was one swinging neon flag over when that happened.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed. And it had to do with Ronald Reagan.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s your shocked face, Heather. I can see it. Right. And so, that in a sense, lays out what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about this kind of bullying politics, this politics of dominance that Reagan helped promote. We want to talk about the dynamics of it and how looking further into the past in the 1850s really shows how it works and what happens when different paths are chosen in response to it. And then we want to come back to the present and talk a little bit about what all of this suggests about the place we are today.

One thing that Heather and I thought was interesting is we were discussing how we wanted approach this topic, is the fact that we are two women historians who are approaching this topic, and that in some ways this dominance politics or bullying politics is something that women and people of color are particularly sensitive to, that they pick up on in a really kind of guttural deep kind of a way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In part because we’ve seen it in our lifetimes and our work relationships. And so, we certainly saw it coming on and there’s no accident, I think, that it’s with the election of Reagan, that we start to see a gender gap in the way women versus men vote for or against Republican candidate. I also think you’re being modest here. There is one of these two women historians, actually wrote a book on this as I recall.

Joanne Freeman:

The book is about physical violence and threats in the US Congress and the decades leading up to the Civil War. It’s called The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress, and the Road to Civil War. But the dynamic of the book, what it really talks about is Southern members of Congress, both in the House and Senate using threats and intimidation and violence to silence their opposition. And sometimes that’s in a party mode and more often than not, and particularly over the course of the first half of the 19th century, that means that Southerners are silencing Northerners often on the topic of slavery. And it’s outright bullying. In their arm, they’re carrying knives and guns. And they’re using the logic of standing up and trying to humiliate Northerners into not standing up at all or backing down, backpedaling and sitting down, rather than objecting to what’s going on. And they parade that kind of behavior. Some of them are elected based on that kind of behavior.

There’s a Virginia Congressman, who at one point is threatened with expulsion. Someone says, “You should be expelled. You should be thrown out of here.” His name is Henry Wise of Virginia, for this kind of behavior. And Wise says, “Yeah, go ahead, because I’m going to be reelected and put right back here, because I am here to do this. This is why they put me here. And I will keep on picking fights. And I will keep on behaving this way because it’s what I was elected to do.”

And on the other side, you have often Northerners who are doing all that they can to keep things in balance. They’re talking about the rules. They’re sitting down rather than speaking up. They’re backing away. They’re refusing to make conflict. They’re avoiding topics that might cause trouble. They’re doing everything that they can do to keep things functional and balanced.

And what you see in these decades before the Civil War is very similar to what Heather and I just, you and I just started talking about in the current day, is that one side takes on this role of bullying and swaggering, and acting victimized, right? Because they’re only behaving that way, because they’re being forced to behave that way by the other side. And the other side ends up being responsible for keeping things on track.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The dynamic of, if only you would behave, I wouldn’t have to hit you. Right?

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly. Precisely like, “Look what you made me do. You have made me behave this way.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that in the context you’re talking about in the 1850s, it’s really interesting that dynamic where the North keeps hammering on. No, no, this is the way Congress here, we pass laws, so that we didn’t have to behave this way. And we pass laws, so that the South couldn’t spread into the Louisiana Purchase. And all those things get overturned. And the more often the Southerners overturn them, the more they say, “We are the ones who really get to define what this country is all about.” And the North seems to continue to take it.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. For quite some time until-

Heather Cox Richardson:

It doesn’t.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. They stop. And that’s the rise of the Republican Party in the second half of the 1850s. Those are people, many of whom are elected to Congress, running on this idea that they are going to, and this is their slogan, fight the slave power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Finally, they’re going to stand up.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. And some of them mean the word fight in a literal kind of a sense. Some of them come to Washington with guns, not necessarily waving them around, but making it clear that they have them, that they’re going to fight the slave power. They’re not going to be pushed around anymore. They’re actually going to stand up for what they are there to do. As they put it, “We’re a different kind of Congressman. We’ve been put here to stand up and not to down.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s not just standup for what we think. It’s also, we are literally going to protect our system. We’re going to protect our democratic system that you people are stomping all over. And that’s the dynamic that I think is so interesting in our current moment, because we can now go back to 1980 and how we started to get, at least where you and I identified, we started to get this idea of this bullying politics during the Reagan Revolution, how that morphed into popular culture. And now perhaps why people are finally saying, “No, no, we need actually to protect the concept of democracy in a level playing field.”

Joanne Freeman:

And that that might require a more aggressive mode of politics, so that the Northerners in the 1850s are not necessarily running at people with knives and canes, and guns, but they’re making it clear in a slightly threatening manner.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, that when the northerners insist on reestablishing a level playing field, they want no part of it. They say, “We can’t have equity because we have developed a system where we are in control.”

Joanne Freeman:

“Where we’re in control and by your acting that way, you are humiliating us. How dare you treat us that way?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

How dare you? How dare you? How dare you have hysterical-

Joanne Freeman:

Hysterics. So, he used the word hysterics, which to me, the thing about that word is like, that’s generations of men have yelled at women when they get upset about something like, “You’re hysterical. You’re a hysterical woman.” It’s like, “No, actually I’m just angry.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s a great segue into the 1980 election, because that bullying politics always had a deeply embedded within it, a gender dynamic. And it starts to become clear in 1980.

So, first, let’s lay out for people who don’t remember, the people who were operating in the 1980 election, and that is, there were three major candidates. There were a ton of people running initially, but the election falls down to three major candidates, and they are Ronald Reagan, who’s going to win the election, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic president at the time was running for reelection, and John Anderson. And I want to throw John Anderson in here, who runs as an independent, because a lot of people have now forgotten about Anderson, but he’s a really important foil for what we’re going to be talking about, because Anderson runs as a very traditional Eisenhower, Republican.

Joanne Freeman:

Moderate.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, they call him a moderate, but he’s actually the heart of the Republican Party.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh yeah, but in that context.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And Reagan comes as a wrecking ball from the right. And although he becomes Mr. Republican, in fact, he, and the kind of politics and the kind of language that he embraces are really quite counter to what the Republicans have been since World War II. So, Anderson is the much more traditional Republican candidate. I mean, I suspect, I even know people who probably voted for him. I’m sorry. I’m such a jerk.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, no, but I thought I was being so strategic. I really did. It was like, I dislike Reagan so much. I’m going to register Republican and vote for Anderson, which in so many levels makes no sense, but I thought I was being so savvy, so politically smart.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You’re being very gracious and not throwing back at me that I didn’t even vote in that election, because I thought nobody ever, I mean the election was so obvious that nobody would ever need my vote, because of course, nobody would elect Ronald Reagan, which shows exactly that I went into the right profession. Didn’t I?

But so you got these three people running. Anderson running is a traditional Republican. Reagan coming in from the right. And Carter going ahead and trying to argue for a continuation of what was essentially a bit of a paired down, but a kind of a new deal Democrat position. All right.

So, really interestingly right from the get go, Reagan is going to employ this kind of bullying politics that we’ve been talking about. I think we need to preface that by saying that very shortly after he got the nomination in July of 1980, the Ku Klux Klan endorsed him.

So, what we’re going to be talking about now is not coming out of the blue. And in its own newspaper, the Klan said that the Republican platform, and this is a quote, “Reads as if it were written by a Klansman.” All right. So, that’s backdrop to the very famous speech that Reagan gave at the Neshoba County Fair, outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi on August 3rd, 1980. And the speech itself is important, but you have to understand the context, because in the context of where he was, that is right near where three voting registration workers in the Freedom Summer of 1964 were murdered.

So, the Freedom Summer of 1964 was when a number of local Mississippians joined with young, idealistic people coming from Northern towns and cities, came down to help register black Mississippians to vote, because the Mississippi at the time had the lowest percentage of black people registered in the country. So, they go down to Mississippi and they start to organize to vote, led by Bob Moses, to go ahead and try and get black people to vote. And just as they are organizing to do that, three of the workers who come down, disappear. And it’s a big deal in the summer, of course, if you’re going to register to vote, where did these three guys go?

And in August, these three men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner are found in an earthen dam that had been under construction about the time they were murdered. And it turns out that they were assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan. And some of the members of the Ku Klux Klan were actually members of law enforcement, including the local sheriff, a guy named Lawrence Rainey.

So, when Reagan is speaking in 1980, he is speaking 16 years after this moment that completely tore up the civil rights movement, terrified people who thought they were going to die, highlighted the idea of states’ rights as being a ticket to white supremacy. And this is where Reagan chooses to give a speech in which he says, “I believe in states rights.” I mean, that’s just this glaring red flag. And then he goes on to say, “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.” As perhaps the man who assassinated the three civil rights workers believed.

And I believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. I mean, in retrospect, it doesn’t even look like a dog whistle. It looks like a bore horn. But look at how that played out.

Joanne Freeman:

So, the Carter campaign immediately responded to that state’s rights speech. Carter’s only African American cabinet member, who was health and human services secretary, Patricia Harris said that within Reagan’s comments, she said, she saw a quote, a specter of white sheets. The Carter surrogate, Andrew Young also weighed in on this. In an op-ed on August 11th in the Washington Post, he wrote, “Traditionally, these code words within the electoral language of Wallace Goldwater and the Nixon Southern strategy. So, one must add ask, is Reagan saying that he intends to do everything he can to turn the clock back to the Mississippi justice of 1964? Do the powers of the state and local governments include the right to end the voting rights of black citizens? Would Reagan dare to commission directly or indirectly the Sheriff Raineys and the vigilantes to ride once again, poisoning the political process with hatred and violence?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then Carter went on. First of all, he tried to criticize him gently. And then finally he goes in front of a meeting of black Southern leaders at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which is where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been a minister. And he was speaking actually there with the Reverend King’s father in attendance, along with Dr. King’s widow.

And against the advice of his team, he actually said what he thought. And he said, “You’ve seen in this campaign, the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states right in a speech in Mississippi, in a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the south. That is a message that creates a cloud on the political horizon. Hatred has no place in this country. Racism has no place in this country. Daddy King says in his book, “Nothing that a man does makes him lower than when he allows himself to hate anyone.” Hatred is not needed, he says, to stamp out evil. Despite what some people have taught, people can accomplish all things God wills in this world. Hate cannot.”

And yet, what we basically just saw there is what really would’ve passed, I mean, aside from Reagan’s comments, passed for an even handed political give and take. And yet, three days later, the press Corps weighs in.

Joanne Freeman:

And they ask, “Mr. President, in Atlanta on Tuesday, you referred to Ronald Reagan’s campaign statements about the Ku Klux Klan and state’s rights. And then you said that hatred and racism have no place in this country. Do you think that Reagan is running a campaign of hatred and racism? And how do you answer allegations that you are running a mean campaign?” Which just the phrase in and of itself. Because racism is bad. Those kinds of comments are racist, that has no place in our country. He’s running a mean campaign.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. That gets turned into this is all about, “You’re being mean to us.” I mean, you’re literally giving a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 16 years after the murder of those three freedom summer workers to register black voters. And when you say, “Hey, you shouldn’t be doing that because you’re raising the specter of what happened to them.” The response is you are being mean.

Joanne Freeman:

Hysterics and mean. I mean, just the vocabulary here is quite something.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And Carter backs down. He says, “No, I don’t think you running a campaign of racism or hatred. And I think my campaign is very moderate in its tone. I did not raise the issue of the Klan, nor did I raise the issue of state’s rights. That’s fair. And I believe that it’s best to leave these words, which are code words to many people in our country who suffer from discrimination in the past, out of the election this year.” And then he says, “I do not think that my opponent is a racist in any degree.”

But a New York political columnist condemned Carter, and said that his criticism of Reagan had crossed a line. “There is a growing feeling that Carter is trying to be too shrewd, too clever and calculating. And that in his confuse of ends and means, he is negating the principles and ideals that helped bring him to the White House in the first place.”

A columnist for Time went on to say, “The wrath that escaped Carter’s lips about racism and hatred when he praise and poses as the epitome of Christian charity, leads even his supporters to protest his…” And there’s that word again, meanness.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s what I was going to say about the earlier New York Times commentator, who’s talking about Carter being too shrewd and too clever, and calculating in that same passage. He says that there are many people who are deeply disappointed by the mean and cunning antics of his campaign. Mean, he’s a meanie. He’s not conducting, in a sense, a morally proper campaign as he is objecting to racism.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, Nancy Reagan also responded saying in a campaign ad-

Nancy Reagan (archival):

I deeply, deeply resent, and am offended by the attacks that President Carter has made on my husband, the personal attacks that he’s made on my husband, his attempt to paint my husband as a ma he is not.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Now again, there you have a classic setup of a, I’m going to say something outrageous. And then when you push back and say, “Hey, what you said was outrageous.” The answer is going to be, “You’re being mean to me.” So, it’s this dynamic of I’m going to bully somebody. And when I’m called out on it, I’m going to play the victim.

Joanne Freeman:

We keep repeating the word mean over and over again, because it’s such a pointed example of what we’re talking about hereof people acting as though they’re victimized for being called out for precisely what they did. Perhaps a strikingly extreme example of this happens during a primetime interview on ABC, when Barbara Walters, and many of us probably remember how much she was famous for getting people to cry and calling people out by various ways in her interviews. She says to Carter, she asks him to answer for the way that he had become, so “mean, vindictive, hysterical, and on the point of desperation.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And by the way, much of the context on this 1980 election comes from Rick Peristein. He wrote a great book on Barry Goldwater, and then a great book on Nixon. This is from his Reaganland: America’s Right Turn. And he’s really good at setting scenes. So, he’s a great person to look for if you’re trying to look at the context of a period. So, all that to me then raises the question of why, why in the 1980s, why did people accept this, well, old as you point out, but new style of bullying politics, and how did it become the norm?

Joanne Freeman:

It’s not surprising to say that politics and culture refract off of each other, reflect each other in one way or another. We’re looking at the sort of swaggering politics of bullying and dominance. When you look at the culture of that time as well, you see so many echoes of the same kinds of values, the same kind of swagger.

I mean, just really briefly to look at some of the biggest money makers in the early eighties, you look at blockbuster films like October 1982, you get the Sylvester Stallone vehicle, First Blood, which has within it, Rambo, the Vietnam veteran, John Rambo, who basically is persecuted by a vindictive sheriff, and then resorts to a kind of one man vigilantism to attack the people who are attacking him. You have The Reprise. You have once again, the Dirty Harry series of movies with Clint Eastwood, as a vigilante, San Francisco policeman. There you have a famous sort of phrase that comes out of this movie, Sudden Impact, in which he aims his 44 magmatic criminal’s head and says.

Clint Eastwood (archival):

Go ahead, make my day.

Joanne Freeman:

You have on TV the A-Team with the ever famous Mr. T, about four Vietnam vets framed for a crime, who become vigilantes. You have Magnum PI starring Tom Selleck as a Vietnam vet and private investigator, who’s investigating crime, again independently. Again and again, and again, you have these swaggering vigilante types, who in these movies are standing up for a very clearly defined all in capital letters, seeing that is right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And they are there because they have been persecuted. One of my favorite things about Rambo is he complains that when he came home from Vietnam, he is spat on by protestors. He says-

Sylvester Stallone (archival):

Nothing is over, nothing. You just don’t turn it off. It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you. And I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport protesting me. They call me a baby killer and all kinds of foul crap. Who are they to protest me? Who are they? Unless they’ve been me, have been there, and know what the hell they’re yelling about.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And what was interesting about that is that this becomes such an article of faith that the returning Vietnam vets were spat on when they came back, and were protested when they came back, that it became part of the popular culture lexicon. And yet it never happened. It actually is talked about in the Rambo movies, but there was not a widespread movement to spit on earning soldiers at all, but it becomes part of those people hate us, and therefore we have to take matters into our own hands.

Joanne Freeman:

We are victimized.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We are victimized.

Joanne Freeman:

And we have to stand up for justice.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That idea of a certain kind of masculinity-

Joanne Freeman:

And a visible representation of it is part of what we’re talking about here. Right? Just as you’re saying, Heather, that example of a kind of masculinity and in all of these movies and TV shows, visibly showing it to people, so that you can watch it and you can see it, and you can feel it. There’s a power to that. And that kind of display, there’s a similar display in modern times that both you and I thought of a lot in that same vein.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes. And I do want to get to that. I do want to point out that this is not the only historical form of American masculinity, this hyper individual, “I’m going to go and take on people with my gun outside of the law.” Is very much a product of a certain kind of time. There are other versions of American masculinity that were about teamwork and building stuff together, and nobody taking the lead. You think about World War II, The GI, the whole point was you couldn’t tell them apart, but they were a team. And now you have this hyper-masculinity in which you have men going out and writing their own way in the world with a gun by bullying.

Joanne Freeman:

They’re defending justice with violence, and it’s all good.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s a myth, of course.

Joanne Freeman:

And it’s an absolute myth.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it does set up this dynamic. It sets up, there’s a personal dynamic in these movies. There’s certainly a personal dynamic that they’re pulling from. But now after the 1980s, there becomes a political dynamic. You can read on this gas-lighting. It’s not what you actually see, it’s what I’m telling you see. You can see the dominance or the bullying politics of a certain kind of politician. In this case, faction of the Republican Party, that’s going to come to dominate the Republican Party over the Democrats. And this begins in the 1980s, and it’s going to continue until we get, and I think what we were going for with the buildup of the dominance, the gender dominance, the extraordinary demonstration of the candidate, Donald Trump, both exerting his dominance over immigrants. When he comes down that escalator in June of 2015, when he’s going to announce that he’s running for president, what does he do? He starts out by denigrating Mexican immigrants. And throughout his campaign, he repeatedly illustrates his dominance over people of color, over handicapped people, and certainly over women.

Joanne Freeman:

And that becomes part of his, and in some ways remains part of his appeal. So, that even as people who are opposed to him step forward and say, “That’s horrible. How can you say that?” People who support him say, “Yeah, he’s kind of a one guy team on his own, standing up for what’s right. And really showing manhood by saying what he believes in that kind of a way.” So, that behavior, that seemingly is not supposed to be just and right becomes very strong political fodder.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, there was that debate in 2016, between candidate, Donald Trump and candidate, Hillary Clinton, and that so thoroughly illustrated the overlap between the interpersonal dynamic and the political dynamic. When he followed her around stage, he breathed behind her. He tried to physically dominate her, as well as politically dominate her. And it was a really, as you say, incredibly visual illustration, of this political dynamic that had been growing for the previous 36 years.

Joanne Freeman:

What struck me again, as someone who’s interested in cultural history was the way in which you knew what was happening, even if you weren’t really thinking about it. You didn’t necessarily have to be sitting there and thinking, “Well, look what display he’s making on that stage.” It just looked uncomfortable. It was unsettling. And it was very clearly sending a message in such a powerful way that I would bet that most of the people listening to us right now remember what that looked like, because it was so visual and so guttural in its impact.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, here’s though what I would like to get back to, and that’s the 1850s with regard to this dynamic of political rhetoric that we’ve identified. And we really highlighted that one moment in the 1980s, when you had Reagan giving a really obvious speech in retrospect, Carter, going ahead and saying, “Hold on a second there.” And everybody is saying, “You are being mean.” I mean, that was like this red flag of here we go. And you can think of the many, many examples since that, where a politician has looked at a camera and said, “I didn’t do.” Whatever it was that that politician had exactly just then done.

But in the 1850s, when this happened, the situation became such that the white enslavers who were dominating the Democratic Party, basically thought they could get away with everything, with anything, including beating up another Senator from the other side on the floor of the Senate, and that they would get away with it.

Joanne Freeman:

And they did for a very long time, they got away with it. It was seen as sometimes unfortunate, sometimes part of the game, it’s what happens, sometimes as justified, because the person committing the act of violence in some way had been insulted, so that kind of act, even though it violates Congressional protocol and depending on the severity of the attack is against the law, still in one way or another is justified. They thought that they could get away with it because they did get away with it for a very, very long time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And you know the next word I’m going to say, until-

Joanne Freeman:

Until the Northerners basically, partly on their own volition, partly because their constituents were electing people to Congress to stand up and fight in a different kind of a way. There’s an anecdote that’s in my book that just still gives me the chills when I think about it. And it’s a Massachusetts Congressman, who after the canning of Sumner, was headed back to Washington for Massachusetts, and a group of his constituents, meet him at the train station and give him a gift as he’s going back to Washington. And it was a gun, and engraved on the gun were the words, free speech. His constituents were literally telling him to go fight and arming him for that battle.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The reason that I wanted to call that out is because after the fight over the debt ceiling, it’s been interesting to watch people finally calling out this rhetorical pattern that we have lived with now for two generations and people saying, “As we are, wait a minute here, what Schumer was doing was stating a fact. And the idea that somehow that was being mean is itself a power dynamic that it’s time to call out.” And they called it out, not only over the debt ceiling crisis, but over so many of the things that have happened lately, where the Republicans have simply said, “No, we’re not going to have anything to do with that.” And then the press has called out the Democrats for their negotiations saying, “Oh, they’re falling behind on this. They’re doing this.” And it’s like, wait a minute, half of the team is not playing here. They are literally bullying the other half and refusing to play. And finally, you are seeing the press starting to recognize that it’s not always a question of both sides, that that concept of both sides does in fact, let bullies dominate the conversation.

Joanne Freeman:

It makes them perfectly equivalent to the people being bullied. It suggests that there isn’t even handed both sides mode of politics going on right now. And there isn’t. There’s an imbalance. There’s two different kinds of politics being conducted on national and local levels, but still one side is behaving according to different rules. And that matters. And that can’t be both sides. That has to be looked at for what it is. It’s a power dynamic. And it’s a power dynamic that has to be recognized and named for what it is and explained for what it is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s kind of a perfect time for this particular episode to drop. Chuck Schumer is scheduled to bring up the Freedom to Vote Act, which is another great example of an imbalance where the Republican Party is saying, “How dare you go ahead and try and restore a level playing field to voting?” And it’ll be interesting to see how the press responds to that, whether they buy the both sides, “Oh, the Democrats want to pass this law and the Republican don’t.” When in fact, what is actually at stake is the right of Americans to vote. It is not an either or situation here.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s the ultimate bottom line of what we’re talking about here today, is that democracy on a certain fundamental level requires some kind of an even playing field. It requires free and fair elections. And granted you can go throughout American history and see many elections that were not seemingly free and fair, but the system itself is aimed in that direction, if there’s not an entrenched lack of freeness and fairness.

So, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about voting rights is we’re talking about an even playing field. We’re talking about not one side bullying and dominating, and the other side caving, so that things will go along, and there won’t be any conflict. We’re talking about the need for both sides to be able to compete evenly with each other, and for one or the other side to lose. In an even-handed politics, one side does not always win.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And part of that depends on getting away from that rhetoric of bullying politics.

Joanne Freeman:

Bullies count on being able to bully without being called on it. And so, in a way, what matters is how we respond to the bullies.