Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You shouldn’t think about these things as a backlash so much as a front lash, if you will. That is, I think if I look at American history, I would say that fast change actually works much better usually than slower change.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Heather Cox Richardson. She’s the author of the new book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She’s also just finished an amazing run hosting the Cafe History Show, Now and Then, with Joanne Freeman. Heather, a history professor at Boston College, has taken the political world by storm with her Letters from an American, a daily concise summary of political news that uses history to provide meaningful context. Her newest book argues that a small group of Americans have made war on American democracy and offers a historical roadmap for how the nation can move on from the polarization and chaos of the Trump years. Heather and I also discussed the historical origins of the terms liberal and conservative, a pesky 1937 anti-FDR manifesto, and the ongoing cultural debates over how to teach American history. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Exciting news, folks, Stay tuned with Preet is on the docket again. We’re up for a Signal Award in the News and Politics category. The Signal Awards recognize the best in podcasting and we need you in the jury box. Please head to cafe.com/signal to cast your vote and help the Cafe team get a winning verdict. That’s cafe.com/signal. You can also find the link in the episode show notes. Remember, polls close on October 5th. Thank you as always for your support.

Q&A

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions.

Hey, folks. I’m on the road this week. I’m actually in my hotel room at this moment at the Code Conference in Central California, but there’s too much news to ignore, so I thought I’d talk about some of the big items that happened over the last number of days, and I got a lot of questions about them. This question comes in an email from Bruce, “Can you comment on the Senator Menendez indictment? What’s your reaction both as a former prosecutor and as a new Jerseyan?”

Well, as both, I’m appalled, not ultimately super surprised. People will recall this is the second time for Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. He was charged several years ago with federal crimes. Those charges he fought vigorously, ended up in a hung jury, and the Department of Justice decided not to proceed. You might think that after being charged federally, even though you survived that ordeal, you might want to stay in the slow and narrow after that, but doesn’t appear so far based on the allegations that are pretty strong in the indictment that that is Senator Menendez’s way.

So essentially, the indictment charges a lot of things, but at the essence of it, they allege a scheme between Bob Menendez, the senator, and his wife and three business people with ties to Egypt. It’s essentially a bribery scheme consisting of a quid pro quo, which is that Latin phrase that comes up from time to time in criminal proceedings in federal court. Essentially, what the government has to prove is that someone who had public authority or public responsibility was paid something of value in exchange for taking some official action or official actions. That’s the quid pro quo.

Now, the evidence in the indictment, if you’ve been paying attention to the news at all, relating to the quid, to something of value, is fairly overwhelming and interesting and eyebrow raising. Among other things, prosecutors allege that in a search of Menendez’s house, they found $480,000 in cash, a bit more than most people keep in their house, in envelopes and hidden in clothing and other areas surreptitiously. I think most remarkably, some of those envelopes according to the indictment, contain the DNA and fingerprints of one or more of the people who allegedly paid the bribes.

I never got that lucky. I don’t recall in any case that I ever brought. We brought a lot of bribery cases. There’s also the matter of the Mercedes-Benz that Menendez’s wife took control of. There’s also significant evidence of the quo, official actions, that Menendez took on behalf of the three businessmen. There are allegations that he acted on legislation relating to funding that would aid Egypt. Now, we’d caution people because there had been cases before that have gone all the way up to the Supreme Court that have narrowed the basis on what could be considered official action. So the Supreme Court has held in a somewhat controversial case, McDonald, named after the former governor of Virginia some years ago, that the mirror arranging of meetings by the public official in exchange for something of value doesn’t necessarily constitute an official act. We’ll have to see how that evidence plays out, but I still think it’s pretty strong both with respect to the quid and with respect to the quo.

The other thing people sometimes forget is it’s a three word phrase, quid pro quo. You have to also prove the pro, meaning that the thing of value was given for the purpose of the official act and the official act was taken at least in part because of the thing of value that was provided, and I think here, just by way of inference, you have a huge amount of dollars given, you have official action taken, and you also have something about the state of mind of Bob Menendez. The argument that the prosecutors will make is if this was legitimate money that he claims he took out of legitimate bank accounts over a period of time, the prosecutors will argue that this is a lot of money for someone who’s been on a senator’s salary for a number of years, and also, if it’s legitimate income from some other source, why wasn’t that listed in his financial disclosure forms? The indictment says that it was not.

Now, does Bob Menendez have any defense at all? Yeah, there’s always some defense. You can mount a defense. As I said, he might take the position that Supreme Court precedent and other court precedent allowed him to take the official actions that he took and he might argue also, although this has fallen short in cases that I myself have overseen, that he voted in ways that other people in his caucus voted and other people across the aisle voted consistent with his conscience and his public record, and it wasn’t because of the money he’d received, which will probably deny even receiving at all, although I don’t know how he does that, as I mentioned, given the DNA and the fingerprints.

He also might have some argument. I’ve seen this argued, but I think it falls at the end of the day given the evidence that appears to be at the government’s disposal that official actions he took are protected by the speech or debate clause in the Constitution, and he can’t be held liable for that. I think that comes up against the bribery statute, but we’ll have to see.

I have two more observations about the fact of the indictment and the ensuing discussion. There’s, of course, in the system, our system, a presumption of innocence, but many, many senators in the Democratic side as of the time of this recording, about half the Democratic caucus have said basically they’ve seen enough and have called for his resignation, their fellow senator, including among other people, his fellow senator from the state of New Jersey, Corey Booker. Now, Republicans will say that’s political, not principled because they think that given that Menendez is on the ballot in 2024, if he’s hobbled by a federal indictment hanging over his head, the Democrats want to get rid of him quick so that the Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, can substitute someone else in the seat who’d have a better chance of prevailing in 2024 and help the Democrats keep the Senate.

Politics certainly enters into it, probably a little bit, maybe for some people significantly, but I also think there’s a principle involved, and that is when someone has been alleged of this kind of misconduct, whether or not at the end of the day, there’s a conviction. If there’s enough evidence that he violated his oath as a senator, there’s enough evidence that he didn’t disclose things about his finances to the Senate as he’s required to in financial disclosure forms. I think at the end of the day, it’s someone who’s not fit to hold office.

The second point I’ll make is whatever happens at the end of this case, the fact that you have Joe Biden as a president, his appointee as the US Attorney General in Washington, someone who’s been accused of a lot of things by Republicans, and they saw fit and appropriate, my former office led by Damian Williams in the Southern District of New York, to charge a sitting senator, which is not something you do lightly, to me gives the lie to the constant refrain by Republicans that the Department of Justice had become weaponized for partisan democratic interests.

If that description were true and it gets bandied about all the time with respect to Donald Trump, there’s no way in hell they’d be indicting a sitting United States democratic senator and for that matter, as we’ve talked about before many times, authorized the indictment of Hunter Biden, the sitting president’s own son.

By the way, just one more incidental remark. What’s getting all the attention in the indictment is the cash found in the home, the gold bars, and Mercedes. Some of the stuff at the end of the indictment, maybe for parochial reasons, really strikes me and I find to be disgusting if true. There are allegations that during the US attorney selection process under Joe Biden, Bob Menendez as a senator, in the same way that Senator Schumer recommended me, Bob Menendez as the senior senator had some role in recommending who the US attorney should be in the District of New Jersey. Asked during the interviews, during the screening process, a particular candidate as outlined in the indictment, whether or not he would take a look at the case of a particular target who’s one of the indicted figures in the current indictment, and that Bob Menendez, in the interview process for someone to become the chief federal law enforcement officer of his state, was asking because allegedly he was receiving bribes, was asking about a particular case and looked to be interfering in that case.

When the candidate that he was interviewing said, “Well, it seems that my firm has some interaction with that defendant and I would have to recuse myself from consideration of that case,” what did Bob Menendez do according to the indictment? He didn’t recommend that candidate, he picked someone else. The bottom line is if someone breaks the law, whether it’s a quid pro quo or interferes with the justice process as Bob Menendez seems to have done, although he gets his day in court and we’ll see, it should be called out and it should be criticized whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican.

This question comes in an email from Michelle who asks, “Dear Preet, what was your reaction to the judge’s ruling in the New York AG’s case against Trump?” Mine was simply, “Wow, were you expecting that? What happens now?” You’re, of course, referring to the bombshell opinion by a judge in New York state. It’s a state court, not federal court. In a case that’s been pending for a while, it’s been overshadowed, understandably and for many reasons by the four pending indictments that come every couple of months against Donald Trump. This case brought by Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, has been gradually unfolding in the court system quietly, more quietly than the criminal cases.

As you’ll recall, it’s a case that the Attorney General in New York brought alleging that Donald Trump and his companies were greatly inflating and exaggerating the value of his assets. Who is he making those misrepresentations to? Well, banks and insurance companies in various transactions and loans. Now, normally, allegations like that, civil or criminal, in this case it’s civil, they’re resolved by a jury at the end of the day, but there’s a procedure known in the law that can be taken advantage of by both sides and was in this matter, which is a summary judgment motion, meaning that on some issues, it might be so clear that a judge can make a legal decision and narrow the case that ultimately goes before the jury, and in this matter, Trump and his team made a summary judgment motion in their favor that was denied, but the AG’s office also made a partial summary judgment motion on the ground that the judge could decide that fraud was clear and the judge basically agreed with that.

As set forth in detail in the opinion, in matter after matter, Donald Trump exaggerated the value of, among other things, his properties. There’s an example that’s fairly famous and that people are talking about, and it goes to his triplex apartment in Trump Tower, a place, by the way, he’s lived for years and years and years, and he made a representation that it was 30,000 square feet rather than just about 11,000 square feet. The judge said, “A little bit of discrepancy can be understandable, maybe 10% or maybe 20%, but not 30,000 compared to 11,000.” In one of my favorite sentences from the opinion, the judge wrote, quote, “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades can only be considered fraud,” end quote. There are other examples like that as well.

In addition, as people have been discussing, the judge ordered a cancellation of certain Trump business certificates that could shut down various Trump entities. We’ll see how that plays out. When you ask the question, what happens next? Well, I think two things. First, there will almost certainly be an appeal by Trump’s lawyer. The second thing that’ll happen if the decision stands and the appeal is denied is there will be a trial, but the trial will not be about whether or not there was fraud that’s been determined by the judge. It’ll be simply about whether or not Donald Trump has to pay a penalty and a disgorgement and how much that’ll be. At this point, it’s looking like it’ll be a lot of money. Stay tuned.

I’ll be right back with Heather Cox Richardson after this.

THE INTERVIEW

Preet Bharara:

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian of American political history who has a new book tracing the Triumphs and travails of our experiment with Democracy. We discuss how our past can provide an inspiring roadmap to a more perfect union.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson, welcome back to the show.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s such a pleasure to be here, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Heather, it’s so great to have you. Congratulations on the new book, which we’ll spend some time talking about, but before we get to the book, I wanted to both congratulate you and thank you for the amazing run on our podcast, Now and Then with Joanne Freeman. What a treat it was to have you as part of the Cafe family.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, wasn’t that fun?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

When we were in the thick of it, it was a little hard to realize what a great product it was, and then when we looked back over, it’s like, “Wow, we did a lot of really good work,” and the team was spectacular. It was such a pleasure to work with the Cafe team.

Preet Bharara:

Great team, great content. Let me ask you a question. If you did a pie chart, maybe this is an unfair question, that depicted how much you think you taught people in the podcast and also depicted how much you learned in preparing for each podcast, what would that pie chart look like?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s a little hard to tell what you’re teaching other people. It’s at least 50/50, and the reason for that, I mean from my perspective, one of the key reasons for that is that even though there was new factual material, the magic, I think, was talking with the producers and Joanne about the meaning of what we were doing. So we’d cover stuff that I thought I knew and it would turn out to be a much larger discussion about the nature of presidential power in foreign affairs, for example. So the conceptual side of it was actually really sophisticated.

Preet Bharara:

As a general matter, you write books and you do some other things. Did the audio medium cause you to think about how to impart history lessons a little bit differently?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Not necessarily differently because remember, I’m a college professor first, and so we’re very used to operating in an oral setting. I will say that is my favorite medium. I like radio, I like podcasts. I’m not so keen on television, which is much shorter, much more expensive, and seems far less immediate to me. One of the things that the pandemic did for a lot of us, I think, was that it gave us the space and the new technologies to create a much more direct relationship with an audience that feels a great deal like a college classroom. So I don’t think it necessarily made me rethink the way I was going to teach history or talk about history, but it gave me a lot more tools to do that.

Of course, it enabled Joanne and me to work together. People thought we’d been friends forever and we really hadn’t. We got to know each other. We knew who each other was because of what we do, but we got to know each other during the pandemic doing a bunch of other podcasts together, and then we ended up, at your suggestion, making a podcast of our own, which was that’s how I got to know Joanne. We had a great time getting to know each other through history and through the technology on a podcast.

Preet Bharara:

Amazing. Thanks again. So you’re here in part to talk about your new book. Congratulations.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Thank you very much.

Preet Bharara:

It’s called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. I remember talking to you about this book when you were beginning to write it and conceptualize about it because I know a lot of people wanted to be your editor. Explain to folks why this book and why now.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s interesting that you mentioned early on because, originally, the thought behind this book was to bring together essays that covered the questions that people were asking me every day, “How did the parties switch sides? What does liberal mean? What was the Southern strategy? How does the electoral college work?” It was designed to be a series of short essays that covered all those things, but what happened was that the more I thought about it and the more I conceptualized the book, I recognized that it was a book about how we got here, where here is, and how we get out of here.

I still kept the essay format and I wrote 30 short chapters that took us from the 1930s to the election of Donald Trump, the Trump presidency, and then reconceptualized the period since then. When I left the book for about three months to go off and get married and stuff, I came back and I read it and I recognized that the book was telling a story I had never intended for it to that felt as if it had grown from everything I had talked about and learned from my readers, from people like the Cafe producers and Joanne, from feedback that I got on the letters I write every night.

What I recognized was that the book was making a much larger argument about the use of language and history to either protect democracy or to destroy it. So I ended up throwing out that initial draft and rewriting about 80% of the book to get what is, I hope now in your hands, I just got my copies yesterday, that tells the story about where we are here in America at this moment, but also talks about the history of America, the history of democracy in America, and the history of how people have tried to destroy that democracy, and then also the story of how we can reclaim it.

So it became a really different book than I originally envisioned, and in a funny way, it really doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like I was the person holding the pen while there was this conversation going on around me. To that degree, I feel like a parent with a child who ended up doing something really smart that had nothing to do with me and thinking, “Wow, where did that even come from?” but that’s the story of how it got here and why it got here I think maybe is part of that whole idea that it’s just a reflection of the where we are in this moment and how we really would like to use this moment to move forward and get out of it.

Preet Bharara:

Have your other books all had some version of this that it morphs into something different as you engage in the writing and the research process or is this different from the other books in that regard?

Heather Cox Richardson:

This feels very different than the other books because my other books with perhaps the exception of how the South won the Civil War, which until literally it was getting reviewed, I kept writing to a friend of mine and saying, “Is it a book, Michael? Michael, is it really a book?” This one, unlike the ones that are really heavily empirically based where the wounded knee massacre happened in a certain way and that was the way it was going to have to be told or reconstruction happened in a certain way, this book is much more conceptual.

My joke was for years or for the years I was working on it, that the title was all I know because it’s much more conceptual. I think what was in my head, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a book write itself in that last iteration, and once I could see it, once I could see what the book was going to be, the actual writing of that second draft was very quick, but the getting there took a long time.

Preet Bharara:

Who’s the audience for the book?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s funny, the initial audience was intended to be my readers and people who just wanted to know about American history and wanted to know about how we got to this moment in American history and just wanted basic stuff explained. I think it does that. What is the Constitution and how does it work in, I don’t know, is it seven pages? Where did the American Revolution come from? How did we get to this moment in history? Somebody early on called it American History for Dummies as part of that series, but I actually think that other people will find it interesting, not just people who want to have a sense of how we got to where we are.

There’s actually a fairly sophisticated historical theory now running through it. Also, there’s a lot about politics that just people may not have seen in, for example, the middle section of the book, which is about the Trump years, the stripping out of the noise in that period because so much was happening all the time. When you strip out, he got fired, she said, this letter got sent, when you strip that out, you end up with a really chilling portrait of an attempt to create an authoritarian America. So that political side of it, I think, will be of interest to a different group of people. So my audience was my readers, and yet at the end of the day, I think it’s probably got broader reach than that.

Preet Bharara:

Well, hopefully the entire Stay Tuned listenership are potential readers as well. So let’s start at the beginning. First sentence, first paragraph of chapter one, you write, “Today’s crisis began in the 1930s,” and I’m paraphrasing as I continue. When Republicans who were opposed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s new deal contemplated an alliance with other people and used the word conservative to signify their opposition, what do you mean by that?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Very deliberately, those people who hated FDR’s use of the government to regulate business and those people who hated FDR’s use of the government to begin, only begin to level the racial playing field in America began to think about an alliance, and they start to think it after FDR gets reelected in 1936 when they recognize that he’s not just a blip, that this is a real sea change in the American government. So in 1937, they begin to contemplate working together officially, and they write a document that’s known as the Conservative Manifesto. That document gets leaked to the newspapers and, instantly, everybody backs away from it. Everybody in elected office backs away from it because the racist Democrats who don’t like the civil rights side of FDR don’t want to be seen as criticizing their own president, and the Republicans who hate the business regulations of the New Deal feel like they can criticize FDR more effectively from outside the party.

So people back away from that Conservative Manifesto, and what they meant by that, the Conservative Manifesto, was that it was an attempt to get rid of the New Deal, and it’s really specific. We’re going to get rid of business regulation, we’re going to get rid of a basic social safety net that should be done by churches, we’re going to get rid of government promotion of infrastructure because that should be handled by private industries, there’s really money to be made there, and we should rely on states rights and home rule, the idea of getting rid of any attempt of the federal government to protect civil rights.

They back away from that, but they keep that concept that to get rid of the New Deal is conservative. One of the things, the points I wanted to make in that first chapter was that conservatism, the ideological concept of conservatism as it was really formulated by Edmund Burke during the French Revolution was nothing like that at all. It was in fact the opposite in which it said you should never try to legislate according to an ideology because pretty soon you’re trying to make the people fit the ideology rather than the government fit the people.

That concept that this idea of getting rid of this New Deal government that actually worked incredibly well from 1933 to 1981 is conservative, is a misnomer that comes from that particular moment. What I went on to talk about was the use of the word conservative by Abraham Lincoln to say, “Wait a minute. What we do as conservatives, in his understanding of the word, is to preserve the best of what is in our past, and I’m trying to preserve the Declaration of Independence. So doesn’t a quest to have people be equal before the law and to have a say in their government as promised in the Declaration of Independence, that’s what’s really conservative in America.” So it was that first chapter is an attempt to reclaim the word conservative, to contrast with those movement conservatives as they became known once they became a political movement in the 1950s and take it back for people who want to protect American principles.

Preet Bharara:

I guess I want to talk about that dynamic a little bit because if part of what conservatism is to preserve the status quo, it happens to be the case that we lived in a time in the 1920s before the New Deal of little regulation and regulations were being struck down by the Supreme Court and the New Deal as implied, actually, definitionally by its name was new. So wasn’t it utterly predictable both in the United States or anywhere else where suddenly you had sweeping regulation, which I think has proven to be a very good thing for the country and very good thing for capitalism, but in the wake of a slew of new regulations being passed, isn’t it only natural and probable that you’re going to get a conservative movement that wants to turn that back? Doesn’t it actually conform with one of the basic understandings and definitions of conservative?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it could, yes, but FDR really very carefully ties what he does with the New Deal into traditional American patterns. So for example, really careful to talk a lot about his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, who is using the government in an progressive way. He’s part of the Progressive Party a generation or two before, and TR tied very carefully into Abraham Lincoln, who was the one who said, truly conservatism in this country is protecting equal rights and a right to have a say in your society. So we actually get the rise of an expanded government using the government to protect equal rights in the United States and trying to help people at the very bottom through things like new financial measures and new economic measures. We get that actually in the 1860s with Abraham Lincoln.

So while FDR calls it a New Deal, he’s really using that term as a political term to talk about, “We’re not going to give you the same old deal that people like Herbert Hoover are giving you or saying to you. Actually, you’re going to be fine even though you’re starving in the streets. We’re going to give you a New Deal, but that new deal is patterned on our past,” and they did that really deliberately.

Preet Bharara:

I want to play devil’s advocate further for another minute. Some might say it’s odd to locate the origin of the crisis in the 1930s when some small subset of political figures and business figures wrote this manifesto because the New Deal won, right? The Supreme Court backed down. It became very popular in America. President Roosevelt was elected four times, and it took a very, very long period of time as you trace the history of in your book for the origins in the 1930s to come anywhere close to being a dominant or powerful political force. One might argue, given the initial success of the New Deal and the persuasiveness of the New Deal, was there some failure on the part of New Deal Democrats or Progressives generally that allowed this small group of people who had this manifesto back in the 1930s to gain power?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I actually really like that line of questioning because while the New Deal was extraordinarily successful until 1981, of course, the next generation or two since then has been really designed to tear that apart. The reason I started in ’37 with that particular document was because the principles that are outlined in that document are exactly those that we saw until recently in the Republican party. Now, once we got the rise of Trump, we got the Republican Party morphed into something that is very different based if, for example, in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which is the use of a strong federal government to impose an ideological set of religious values on states like Florida, for example, but that rise of the idea that what would make America great again, if you will, which is a line from Reagan, is to tear down the New Deal rather than trying to build on it or trying to adjust it. That comes straight from that 1937 document. You really could impose it in the present and people would say, “Oh, yes, I absolutely recognize that.”

The question about why we got to a point where it was possible for them to gain the traction that they have I think is a really interesting one. To me, it comes from the fact that that idea of a liberal democratic government, the idea that the government should do those things, regulate business, protect the basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, that became so widely shared in the United States, it became known as the liberal consensus, and that was not a reflection of the Democratic Party. The liberal consensus was embraced by people on both sides of the political aisle, and it was so widely shared that in 1960, a political scientist actually advised political candidates to stop focusing on the principles of democracy the way people had been doing so assiduously since FDR to stop talking about that because everybody agreed. There was no way to win elections if you kept harping on these things that everybody agreed about.

The way to win elections, he argued, was to hammer together coalitions that felt that they would get more out of that consensus than the other leader would give if you voted for that person. So what we saw in the 1960s was a real backing away on the part of the Democrats of articulating their values and the values of democracy. You saw it among traditional Republicans as well, but what that did is it opened a pathway for these movement conservatives to articulate a vision of the United States that was coherent.

It was a great story of a little guy against an empire that was destroying it through taxation, and it was a story that a lot of people wanted to be part of because they wanted to believe that their votes meant something and meant something not only for themselves but for a larger story, and that changing use of ideology and language in the 1960s into the 1970s I think really mattered. We get Nixon out of that and Nixon’s 1968 campaign where he deliberately does exactly what that political theorist talked about. Then by 1977, we have Star Wars and the idea of the individual taking on the empire and Reagan rises to the presidency just three years later.

Preet Bharara:

I wonder if there’s any parallel between this history that you describe, where, again, as I understand it, a small group of people don’t like the New Deal and they create this manifesto that takes some time to take root over the course of many decades. Similarly, a couple of decades after the New Deal, you have a great Democratic majority. You have John F. Kennedy getting elected president when he passes after his assassination. You have Lyndon Johnson takeover, and you have the Great Society, and you have a guy who gets very few votes named Barry Goldwater, who some also say is the father of modern conservatism. How do you place him in the arc from the ’30s to today, Barry Goldwater and his ideas about conservatism?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m going to back up a little bit with Barry Goldwater because Goldwater, of course, is famous for his articulation of The Conscience of A Conservative in 1960, but he didn’t write that. That was written by L. Brent Bozell, and L. Brent Bozell, of course, is the close friend and brother-in-law of William F. Buckley, Jr., who is in 1955 is going to start national review on the heels of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision. So having set that up, I want to go start right there with the Brown versus Board of Education decision because those movement conservatives really couldn’t get a foothold in the 1950s because Americans liked the liberal consensus. They liked their new highways. They liked their homes in the post-war period. They liked their cars. They liked their union jobs. They liked all those things. When people liked William F. Buckley, Jr., kept trying to get them to get rid of the New deal and get rid of that liberal consensus, they thought he was bonkers. They wanted no part of it.

So in 1951, of course, William F. Buckley, Jr. writes God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom in which he says, “Listen, we got to stop trying to persuade voters based on arguments for why the New Deal is a bad thing.” We need to indoctrinate people with concepts of Christianity and what he called the free markets, individualism. It’s ’51. Again, that book doesn’t really get much traction at all in ’51, but then in ’54, we get the Brown versus Board of Education decision.

With that, the Supreme Court under former governor of California, Earl Warren, who is a Republican, by the way, the Supreme Court argues that the federal government must use its power under the 14th Amendment to protect civil rights in the States. With that, Buckley and his ilk have the ability to reach back to a different American history, and that different American history is reconstruction where after the Civil War, when the federal government began to use its power through the 14th Amendment and also through the establishment of the Department of Justice in 1870 to protect the rights of Black Americans in the States, when that happened, and especially after the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, when that happened, unreconstructed White racist Southerners insisted that they hadn’t objected to the idea of Black voting or Black rights on racial grounds, which, of course, at that point was unconstitutional and could land them in jail.

They began to say what they really were worried about was the fact that if you let Black people vote and Black men vote, was the way it would be in this period, what they would do is they would vote for politicians who would give them stuff, roads and highways and schools and hospitals, and if you did that, the only way that those things could be paid for was with White tax dollars.

What that meant then was that Black voting was essentially a redistribution of wealth from White people to Black people. So Black voting was essentially socialism. The reason I went back to that was because in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr. picks that argument up in National Review, which he starts that year. He promises to tell the, as he said, violated businessman’s side of the story, but one of the first things he does is he picks up a writer who constantly hammers on this idea that Black rights means socialism.

So what happens in that period is we get a whole new embrace of the other concept from reconstruction, and that is the idea that a real American is a man who doesn’t want anything from the government, he just wants to work hard and make his own way. In 1866-1867 in that early period of reconstruction, that argument took physical shape in the form of the American cowboy. So the cowboy starts to stand against this idea of the government working to protect individuals in the states, especially Black individuals, but also after the New Deal working for regular Americans.

It’s that idea that what America really needs to stand up against communism is a cowboy that gives us not only things like bonanza and rawhide and the Lone Ranger, but also gives us the rise of Barry Goldwater as the symbol of somebody who stands against communism or socialism in the 1950s and into the 1960s. So Goldwater is a fascinating and really complicated figure because in so many ways, he represents the different definitions of what the American government should be.

Preet Bharara:

How important was he or was William F. Buckley much more important?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think Goldwater was he enormously important.

Preet Bharara:

To the conservative movement?

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, I think he was very important, first of all, because of how well he symbolized the cowboy. He was a handsome man in that cowboy hat, and he got a lot of press because of that, but also because his political supporters recognized that they had to do an end run around what even by then they were calling the Eastern establishment, and they started direct marketing. So they bring into that movement conservative fold a lot of Southern and Western transplants during the New Deal who had gone to those regions to work for the war industries. They bring into movement conservatism a lot of people who otherwise would’ve been apathetic or might’ve continued to be Democrats. So he’s a really important transitional figure, I think.

Preet Bharara:

I’m very fascinated as we talk about this, about the dynamic of backlash in American politics, and I wonder if there’s any historical evidence or support for the proposition or that addresses the issue, let me put it that way, that this debate between arguing for and implementing incremental change versus very substantial and indeed perhaps even radical change, if you do incremental change, you’re less likely to get a backlash that undoes that change. Whereas if you do radical change and some might argue that the New deal was like that, you’re far more likely to provoke a very, very strong unified response. Does history teach us anything about the pace of change and what kind of backlash ensues?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I would say that if it teaches us anything, it’s that you shouldn’t think about these things as a backlash so much as a front lash, if you will. That is, I think if I look at American history, I would say that fast change actually works much better usually than slower change. The problem with it is-

Preet Bharara:

Because they don’t know what hit them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I think partly because they don’t know what hit them, but more that people get excited by it and they begin to see that this new system is going to work really well for them. The problem is when it comes out on the other side and it has worked well, people get really complacent. I’m not even talking just about the stuff that I talk about in the book, but you think for example of the Western plains in the Great Cattle period, and it seemed as if the cattle rush in about 1866 and 1886 was going to just be this incredible gold rush, and it was in the early years, but very quickly, the resources get overgrazed. There were way too many cows or beefs on the plains, and then there’s a terrible, terrible winter in the mid 1880s that just decimate the herds, especially the herds in the north.

When that happens, the rangers are really happy to turn to the federal government and to have the federal government help them figure the whole system out. As soon as that happens though, they’re like, “Okay. We got it now. We’re going to do it our way again,” and they take over and once again, start to abuse the resources in the Great Plains. That happens in American history over and over and over again.

Speaker 4:

Stay tuned. There’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

So we talked about the manifesto. We talked about Barry Goldwater. You’ve mentioned him in passing already, but in this arc of conservatism in America, where does Ronald Reagan stand?

Heather Cox Richardson:

If Barry Goldwater is an important symbol of that movement, Ronald Reagan is the one who makes the movement conservative ideology palatable to ordinary Americans, and he is deeply, deeply problematic for a number of reasons. The most, I think, because he is the one who takes the language that Nixon had developed, the idea of us versus them and adds to it a genteel appearance, a calm voice, and introduces the idea that we now call political technology, the idea that you can make people act based on a false image rather than on reality.

So one of the things that I find really interesting about Reagan is that he rises to power in California and reporters just can’t believe what they’re seeing. They laugh at him because he makes everything up. He just makes it up, and they’re like, “This is so funny. How could anybody ever take this guy seriously?” The great example of that is he used to talk all the time about all the people he saved as a lifeguard, and the other lifeguards on the beach were like, “Nobody ever starts to drown on our watch. How is it that you’re saving these dozens of people all the time?” but it was a story, and it was a story people really liked.

Once that ball got rolling, the problem with it was that when Reagan put some of the principles of movement conservatism into action as president, from the very beginning, it was clear to his budget director, David Stockman, that this was not going to work. When he fed all the numbers into the computers at the Office of Management and Budget, rather than saying that cutting all of the social programs and cutting taxes and cutting regulations to move money upward for supply side economics, the idea that if you concentrated money at the top, people would invest in the economy and they would provide a lot more jobs and all the boats would rise together, when he put those numbers into the computers at the Office of Management and Budget, the computers said, “Whoa, you’re going to blow out the deficit.”

So what they did is they just reprogrammed the computers. Quickly, the idea that supply side economics worked, when in fact it never did, became such an article of faith among those people wedded to it and wedded to all the things that brought with it, the racism, the sexism, that the Republican Party increasingly doubled down on telling that great story even though it didn’t reflect reality. We’re in this moment now, I mean, obviously, we’ve gotten through to a period in which the Republican Party is simply divorced from reality. You get people like Marsha Blackburn, a senator from Tennessee who has a Twitter feed that is just pure fantasy. I think this moment is incredibly fascinating because what happens when the theorists of creating a false political world and getting people to act on that have never, that I have seen, gone to the next step?

That is, once you have used that false reality to garner power, what happens when the people recognize that you’ve lied to them? It appears to me, I’m watching this play out in realtime now, and it appears to me what I’m seeing is some of those people who have bought into that false world simply give up on the idea of government is anything other than a way to punish the people they hate. So they don’t care if their own lifestyle gets destroyed, they just want to hurt somebody.

What happens to the other people? Do they turn on the people who lied to them? Do they become apathetic again, which is what political theorists suspect is going to happen or do they take over the government? It’s just a fascinating moment to see the ultimate end of Reagan’s turn toward fantasy play out and to see what the next phase is going to be. I don’t think we know.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s interesting when you talk about that aspect of Reaganism and his bearing as president and before he was president because it’s not talked about as much as his policies and the way in which people think he didn’t care about folks who were downtrodden, et cetera, and minorities. So I was going to ask you then, how do you explain this arc from manifesto to Barry Goldwater, to Reagan, to the Trump Republican Party? Is there a real through line that you can plot or was there a jumping of the shark?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, no, I think there’s absolutely a through line. Anybody who thinks that where we are right now is because of Trump has simply missed the previous three generations of history. The through line, I think, from Goldwater or from the manifesto to Goldwater is very clear. I think if you look at, this is really in the weeds, but I think if you look at Bozell’s Conscience of A Conservative that gets published in 1960 over Barry Goldwater’s name, I think you can see he had the Conservative Manifesto in front of him. The points are bang, bang, bang, the same, and I’m speculating about that. I’m just looking at the way they’re presented. They look like they’re the same. So I think you can see that pretty clearly, and I think you can see, obviously, the link between that and Goldwater and then the link between Goldwater and Reagan, the emphasis on individual power-

Preet Bharara:

That I will follow. So to get from Reagan to Trump, one reason I’m asking the question, and I may not be thinking about all the aspects of this, but as you talked about Reagan and as I remember Reagan when I was young, as you said, he advocated for things, but in a language that was for the time at least inclusive. Yes, he said, “Make America great,” but he also talked about mourning in America, his ads were gauzy. He was trying to get a lot of people to vote for him outside of the normal groups and categories. He got 49 states. As far as I can tell, Trump makes no attempt to be inclusive, and his rhetoric is much more angry than soothing. That’s why I wonder about the disconnect between Reagan conservatism and Trump conservatism.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so far, we’ve really only talked about ideology, and we haven’t talked about how that translated to legislation. So immediately after the first set of Reagan tax cuts in 1981, there’s going to be two sets, 1981 and 1986. The tax cuts don’t deliver the way they’re supposed to. People remember that they do, but that’s because the Reagan administration tripled the national debt, right? It threw a ton of money into deficit spending, and that helped to bring the country back. At the same time, we had interest rates coming down because of Volcker who’d been appointed by Carter.

So people remember that Reaganism worked. It actually didn’t. What happened with the tax cuts, the cuts and regulations and the cuts to social services, is that we began to see the hollowing out of the middle class and that, of course, is going to get worse and worse and worse as we move forward from Reagan until the present. So what we see is something that really clearly tracks with what theorists of the rise of authoritarianism or totalitarianism always point to, and that is the construction of an underclass, if you will, a group of people, a large group of people who feel that they have been left behind either economically or socially or culturally.

Those people can, in fact, be picked up in a later generation by a strong man who promises not to address the actual conditions that created their misery, make new laws that treat them better, bring back manufacturing, for example, have better healthcare. Rather than doing that, they promised that the reason that those people feel that they are no longer important is because of those people, and who those people are doesn’t really matter. It matters that you use the idea of an enemy to weld your people into a movement and promise that you are the only person who can bring them back to a period in which they are important again, and you’re going to do that by grabbing hold of laws that are either divine or are somehow universal and timeless that your enemies, those people are ignoring.

So Trump tapped into that, but the setup for that actually comes from this attempt that Reagan embraced to get rid of those New Deal regulation, social safety net, infrastructure and protection of civil rights. So you see the setup with Reagan, the construction of this disaffected population, and then Trump being able later on to tap into that.

Preet Bharara:

So in my view, Barry Goldwater had an ideology, Ronald Reagan had an ideology. I don’t believe that Trump has an ideology. Fair?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right.

Preet Bharara:

If he has no ideology, in some way, he doesn’t belong on that arc, does he?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I think he does exactly belong on that arc because he is a mirror to that population that supply side economics created. So he mirrors them in 2016, and he mirrors them in a really interesting way because not only does he pick up the racism and sexism, which obviously became the driving force behind his presidency, but he also calls for infrastructure. He calls for better healthcare. He calls for fair taxes. People forget that aspect of him, but he really calls for things that reflect that disaffected population and where they hope they’re going to be.

So he mirrors them in a way that I always felt like he was a snapshot of that population and what that population had been created. Now then during his presidency, he changes that. He turns them into this movement that it really mirrors what everybody sees as the root of an authoritarian movement, which is somebody who is interested in hurting others and in regaining the upper hand in a society. So he’s a really transformative figure in a way for taking that Republican thread from really 1937 forward or at least from Reagan forward, mirroring it and then turning it into a movement. So it’s a really interesting period. That’s why in this book, his four to six years got their whole section to themselves.

Preet Bharara:

No, right, that’s a very important part of the book. You write in the book also, you say, “This book is about how a small group of people have tried to make us believe that our fundamental principles aren’t true,” and you also say they have made war on American democracy by using language that served their interests, then led us toward authoritarianism by creating a disaffected population, et cetera.” Who’s the small group and how small is it, and how in a democracy does a small group have that much power?

Heather Cox Richardson:

The original small group really truly was small. It was those few established large businessmen who really didn’t like the regulations of business that were inherent in the New Deal. I want to emphasize that that’s not all businessmen because if you look at things like the establishment of securities and exchange, that doesn’t come from people who were starving in the streets. They didn’t even know what was going on with that. That came from entrepreneurs and businessmen who recognized that if there wasn’t transparency and the rule of law even in Wall Street, they weren’t going to be able to make a go of their businesses. They call that out pretty early on.

So this is a small group of people who don’t like that, and they begin to make common cause with Southern Democrats especially, but with racists who don’t like the idea of reorganizing racial hierarchies in the United States along the lines that the Republicans wanted to after the Civil War. So that initial group, the racists and the traditional religious figures as well, the religious leaders who don’t like the idea of women starting to take roles outside of the home in society as they do especially during World War II, that original group is actually quite small, and you can see that reflected in the votes, the votes that go to Eisenhower, who’s Republican who buys into this idea of the liberal consensus or the votes that went to FDR.

Later on, you look at presidents right through Nixon and beyond, really, right through Carter, you’re seeing people vote for that idea of that liberal consensus and doing it pretty handily. We don’t remember Nixon that way because Nixon’s presidency changes pretty dramatically after 1970 and after Kent State in May of 1970 when he loses a lot of his supporters because of the way he handles the shooting, but there’s a long period when the people who are trying to unwind the New Deal and unwind the liberal consensus just really can’t get much traction.

So initially, that’s very small. Now, what happens is once the Republican Party under Reagan begins to embrace that idea of movement conservatism and the story that they tell about it, it feels as if the numbers who support that movement conservatism are a great deal larger than they really are because they begin to dominate popular media. Certainly, politicians begin to talk as if that’s the vision that people want. People elect Republicans, although again, they’re not electing Republicans at the national level nearly so much as people tend to remember, but crucially, the point that I always like to make about this is if you look at what people actually want, even though Nixon begins to talk, for example, against abortion in 1972, by the way, before the Roe versus Wade decision, he actually … This is what I mean when I was talking about the backlash should be thought of as a pre-flash, if you will. He begins to outline that before Roe versus Wade in ’72.

Even over issues of abortion, Americans have tended to be about two-thirds in favor of abortion rights, and they were in 1972, they were in 1973, and they still are. That’s true over many of our hot button issues. What people think is a deeply polarized society is in fact a number of politicians saying we’re a polarized society, when in fact we’re really actually in agreement about gun safety regulations, for example, business regulations, for example, taxing higher incomes at a much higher rate than we do now. Those things were actually in agreement on.

One of the things I find really interesting in this moment is that if you look at the things that Gretchen Whitmer is doing, for example, in Michigan with was people point out a very thin Democratic majority, and they’re saying that as if it is somehow that she’s using that small majority to force through things the way Republicans have done in the past. In fact, what she’s implementing is extraordinarily popular, not only among Democrats but also among Republicans.

Similarly, when Biden took office and people paid attention to the fact he was using executive orders at a high rate in those early weeks, one of the things that blew me away was that he was using executive orders, but he was doing it to implement things that were extraordinarily popular unlike Trump, for example, and other Republican presidents who had used executive orders to push through things that were unpopular. So how that is going to play out, the use of small majorities to implement things that are very popular as opposed to unpopular, I just don’t think we’ve grappled with yet, but that idea that the movement conservative ideology has grown, I actually think is not the case. I think it is still a small population that embraces that, but it’s been weaponized by a certain group of politicians who recognize that they can’t stay in power by appealing to people’s interests and by being honest about what they’re going to do. So instead, they’re deliberately using the language of polarization to try and keep voters behind them.

Preet Bharara:

Part of what you talk about is, obviously, the threat of autocracy and in connection with your new book, you were asked this question in the last few days. Question, “In your new book, you provide historical context on how democracies can become autocracies. So are we closer to being an autocracy than we’ve ever been before?” You, Heather, said the answer to that I think is an unequivocal yes. Can some people say, “Well, how can that be if a Democrat is in the White House, Democrats hold the Senate, there’s a very close divided House of Representatives. Is the threat that the Trump comes back or even if Trump were to fade from the scene? Do you really think we have an autocracy problem?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

I do, but just for the record here, after that I said but, and we could talk about the but part.

Preet Bharara:

You said, “Yes.” I have it here, you said, “But it’s important to remember that at certain times in the United States we have had authoritarian governments, and that really is the American South from about 1874-1875 through to 1965, and when people say, ‘Oh, it can’t happen here,’ my answer is always it has.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Then I went on to talk about how there are also very hopeful signs right now, but that being said, what really concerns me is that really since 1986, and we could walk through the different pieces of that, those who are interested in getting rid of the New Deal state have captured key nodes of our system. The Supreme Court, for example, the use of the electoral college, which is going to … We’ve had a number of presidents lately, which is unusual, who have been elected without getting a popular vote, but have instead been elected by the electoral college. That had happened twice in our past, but it’s happened twice in our recent past. So that’s four times, once somewhat randomly in the past, and one of those times was because of a fiddling around in the counting of the electoral college itself, but now, that’s happening more and more, and it’s obviously something that we’re looking at when it’s possible once again for someone like Trump.

What he has done is he has set up not only the … The Republican Party set up the taking over a number of those nodes, but Trump’s people then, and I think we don’t pay enough attention to this, quite deliberately took over the apparatus of Republican-dominated states at the state level, and you saw that, for example, recently with the acquittal of Ken Paxton in Texas, the AG of Texas. Even though a number of Republicans voted to impeach him, the Senate refused to convict. Only two people would convict him in part because of the direction that the state government is going in Texas.

That taking over the state government’s matters because they’re the people who are going to determine, for example, how states are redistricted and who gets to count election results in the states and all the state apparatus of our electoral system. So what worries me is not at all that the American people want an authoritarian leader. I don’t think they do. I don’t even think most Republicans do. What worries me is that those people who are embracing the ideology that was first articulated by the movement conservatives and then changed to an authoritarian set of principles or a Christian nationalism set of principles in the last four to six years are now in charge of the minutiae and the mechanics of our elections and have the power then to force a minority government on the majority. If that happens, I think all bets are off.

Preet Bharara:

I want to strike another optimistic note. Is there some possibility that 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now when our successors are having this conversation on podcasts or in a classroom, that someone will say, “There was that moment back in 2022, 2023 when the Republicans who seemed out of touch with the mainstream of their party at that time like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, who were basically drummed out of office, one was beaten in an election, the other decided to retire as Mitt Romney has announced that he will, that that will have planted some seed for some revival of a more mainstream and traditional conservatism a few decades hence or not?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, yes, I think absolutely. One of the things that the Republican Party has always done is it’s always gone through these pendulum swings. It goes from advocating the idea of a government that supports people at the bottom of the economic ladder so that they can work hard and rise and they will in turn employ others and so on. They’ve always gone from that to the idea that what really creates jobs for those people at the bottom is by concentrating wealth at the top, and they’ve done this, they did this between the 1860s and the 1890s. They did it between the 1890s and the 1920s. They did it between the 1950s and the 1980s. They’ve always done that.

This is the first time we have swung all the way into authoritarianism for that party, but I will maintain, even now as I always have, that the ideology that Abraham Lincoln articulated in 1859 when he talked about the world as a web in which you wanted a government to do things for people that they couldn’t do for themselves, to enable them to work hard and rise and they would in turn employ other people, shopkeepers and shoemakers and so on with the extra capital that they managed to accumulate through their labor, they would support that second layer and that second layer would in turn employ a few people at the very top who would have factories, for example, that would support people at the bottom again.

That web of interactions is as important to the United States as concept of itself as the Democrat’s vision, which rose in an earlier period and was much more a vision of a society in which there would be haves and have-nots and the government should broker between the two. So even when, when not if, even when the Republican Party as it currently is constructed implodes, which is happening before our very eyes, even when that happens, another party that articulates that other vision, whether it’s called Republican or something entirely different, will reemerge because that’s so much a part of our DNA that we need to have that.

The other thing that nobody really talks about nearly as much as we need to is the fact we’re in the middle of a dramatic demographic change and the younger people coming up live in a very different world than you and I do. They live with the sword of climate change hanging over them. They grew up with shooter drills. Their understanding of communism and of racial and gender issues is just so extraordinarily different than ours. They are going to rebirth some form of that ideology without reference to where the Republican Party is now.

Preet Bharara:

So the bottom line is the courage of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, whatever you think of them, I think they have been courageous, will be remembered and will have consequence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

The most important part of your book perhaps is the last part, which is called Reclaiming America. How do we do that and what is it that we’re trying to reclaim?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m glad we are going to have time to get to that because when I was rereading this book in its final draft, I got about halfway through that second section and I thought, “Crap, I can’t go on. This is just horrible. This is so depressing. I don’t want to know how this comes out.” So my concern is that people won’t make it to the third section because as I said at the beginning of this podcast, what emerged when I wrote the book was the idea that what really drove a population to embrace authoritarianism was the use of a certain language that divides people and the use of a certain history that says there was a perfect past and we can get back to that perfect past if only we follow these divine rules or these eternal rules that are outside those of our constitutional system.

So the third section is designed to reclaim both that language and our history to emphasize that what has always made America great is not some past that we can look to, but instead is the fact that we have always had a population often made up of marginalized Americans who recognize the vital importance of the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we should be treated equally before the law and that we have a right to a say in our government. Those principles, of course, were articulated by founders who couldn’t begin to imagine what that was going to mean all these hundreds of years later, but that idea of human self-determination and the striving for that of ordinary Americans, especially marginalized Americans, is really, I think, the centerpiece of what it means to be an American and the centerpiece of American history.

So that last section takes you through the pieces of how people who believed that managed to expand American liberal democracy consistently to include more people with the push at the end that says, “Hey, there’s no reason we can’t do this again.”

Preet Bharara:

You teach history at a college, which is different from teaching history in grade school or in middle school or in high school. There’s a lot of talk about how history is being taught and how it’s not being taught and what is being taught and what is the view of some people that shouldn’t be taught even though history is history. I had an occasion recently to be at my high school where I graduated and I spent some time at an event with the best teacher I ever had. I mentioned her before in the program, Dr. Barbara Tomlinson, who taught me American history and American literature, and I can’t imagine that I would’ve been as well-formed and as critical a thinker if I didn’t have the example of her teaching. Do you have visibility into how history is being taught in high school and below, and what do you think about it?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I have as much visibility as a college professor who does pay attention to those issues, but obviously, I’m not in a classroom myself. I want to start actually just by saying our public school teachers are fabulous, and it always bothers me when people are harsh on them because students come to your classroom carrying so much baggage that often what you’re really trying to do is simply provide guardrails and enough information that you’re equipping them to go out in the world. So putting teachers in the middle of, “You can’t teach this. You have to teach this,” and all that just seems to me to be an extraordinary burden for which they should be paid one hell of a lot more. All right, that’s off my chest.

So one of the things that really worries me about the curriculum that is being pushed in places like Florida, for example, but also places like Texas, people forget they had a new curriculum recently or Oklahoma, some of the other places that are erasing, for example, Black history, it’s one thing to look at the pieces that are not being taught, but that’s a question of choices because, obviously, you can’t always teach everything. What really concerns me much more about that curricula, and if you look, for example, at the Florida curriculum, it’s a social studies curriculum, it’s not just history. It’s got many prongs to it, including economics, including the law that’s also in there, and what concerns me about that is not only that it pushes a certain political viewpoint. What really worries me is what it strips out is agency.

So if you look at the Florida curriculum, for example, what gets stripped out of that in the incarnation that got published is the ability of people to push back against a repressive government or a restrictive government. So there is Black history in that curriculum. There’s even a teeny bit of indigenous history in that curriculum. There’s even a little bit of women’s history, but what you see is individuals who are making a mark by going along with the status quo. What gets erased is the efforts of people to change that status quo in order to expand rights, and that seems to me to be really insidious and really scary.

So for example, you can’t say you’re teaching the Civil Rights movement by saying, “Oh, I’m teaching Martin Luther King.” I mean, yes, he’s an incredibly important figure in that movement, but what are you teaching? Are you teaching his, “I have the vision of White people and Black children getting along together”? That’s a really different vision than what he was really doing, which was participating in a much larger social movement that included not only Black Americans, but also really obviously Jewish Americans and White Americans in general, as well as the additions of the Chicana movement in California and so on, but that larger vision of people coming together to push back a repressive government is being stripped out of that curriculum, and that’s what concerns me rather than saying, “Hey, wait a minute, you ought to not have cut out studying Red Cloud,” for example, not that it gets studied nearly as much as you should.

What concerns me is teaching a history that, again, reinforces that idea of a magical past in which our founders were heroic. The United States was sprung fully formed from the head of George Washington, for example, and that all we have to do is get back to that magical past, to recreate a present that is just fabulous. In fact, what American history really is about is that struggle to expand our principles, to include all of us instead of just a select few, and that’s what’s being stripped out of the curriculum.

Preet Bharara:

Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much not just for being on the show here, but all your fine work and the learning you gave so many people on the Now and Then podcast. Thanks again. The book, by the way, I should mention the book again. Everyone should buy it and read it, and both of those things are important, buying it and reading it, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Thanks again.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Thank you, Preet. It’s been a real pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Heather Cox Richardson continues from members of the Cafe Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss Heather’s interest in writing a pulpy historical novel about Theodosia Burr.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The fun of trashy novels is you put your characters in historical situations and then they behave on their own, and it’s just fascinating to see whatever they’re going to do next.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Heather Cox Richardson.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24PREET or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy, and the Cafe team is Noa Azulai, David Kurlander, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.