America’s Branding Crisis — with Heather Cox Richardson

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Speaker 3 Episode 356. 356 is the country code from Malta.
In 1956, Elvis Presley released his first hit single, Heartbreak Hotel. Choose to Someone asked me to do an impression of Elvis, and I said, sure.

Speaker 3 And I pretended to be dead on the crapper.

Speaker 3 Go, go, go!

Speaker 3 Welcome to the 356th episode of The Prop G-Pod. What's happening? I am still in Abitha.
I just think Abitha is fascinating.

Speaker 3 One, they've managed to maintain this point of differentiation and this sort of singular ownership of island life and DJ culture. And the result is incredible margins.

Speaker 3 Specifically, I am staying at the Sixth Census, which is this new raft of six-star priced hotels with four-star service. It's just, it's nice.

Speaker 3 It's lovely, but it's not worth the money we're paying, quite frankly. And part of that is AOBiza draws a tremendous crowd with lots of money and has this sort of singular feel.

Speaker 3 What do you want to do? What is all strategy? What can we do that is really hard? Becoming known for a great island that has the world's best DJs and residents, that is really hard to do.

Speaker 3 And then figuring out a way to price discriminate such you get enough people to create a vibe, but also monetize the people here who are in their 50s who still want to see Calvin Harris and figure out a way to charge them a crazy amount of money.

Speaker 3 That's just not easy. Speaking of the super wealthy getting even wealthier, the tax bill passed last week, which I find incredibly disturbing.
One, because

Speaker 3 I can't understand how America has not basically decided it's the hunger games. And that is they weren't fooled.
I think people want to think, oh, they don't realize what's in the bill.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, I think Americans do realize what's in the bill. And I think the lower 90 realize that they're now nutrition for the top 10%,

Speaker 3 but believe that someday they'll be in the top 10 and also conflate masculinity with cruelty.

Speaker 3 When they see ICE agents holding people down and putting a knee on their head as a, you know, a 16-year-old screams to let his mother go, they find that those are hard decisions and that's masculinity and that's leadership.

Speaker 3 And they're so angry. They want to see that type of persecution.

Speaker 3 You want to protect jobs, people. Get your head out of your ass and start figuring out vocational training and some sort of, I don't know, upskilling around AI.
You know who's taking our jobs?

Speaker 3 It's not some lady wiping your grandma's ass or collecting or picking your crops.

Speaker 3 What does it mean when you have ICE agents who find that the most fruitful ways to find these quote-unquote undocumented workers is at schools, churches, and Home Depot?

Speaker 3 Are those really the people we want to be deporting? Anyways, by the way, this is totally re-imagine Gestapo. Full stop.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, by the way, in case you're asking, in case you just got your conservative irritant of TDS and say, oh, what, you're comparing, you're comparing him to Hitler? Yeah, I am. 100%.

Speaker 3 100%.

Speaker 3 But it's clear, this isn't just an accident. The American people have not been fooled here.
They've decided this is what they want. They want a certain level of harshness.

Speaker 3 They want a certain level of cruelty. They've conflated that with leadership and masculinity.
I think that is what is most frightening and most disappointing here.

Speaker 3 But by the way, I've loaded my taxes into ChatGPT, and I'm going to get this, save about between $400,000 and $1.4 million a year over the next five years based on what I'm hoping I make and the impact of this tax bill.

Speaker 3 This is nothing but a transfer of wealth, again, from the poor to the rich.

Speaker 3 And the poor will see most of that transfer in the form of incredible erosion in health care and the social safety net, and the wealthy will just get continued goodies in terms of tax cuts.

Speaker 3 And then we'll throw in some authoritarianism and wrapped in bureaucratic language such that the senior administrative officials, administration officials can't be subpoenaed or aren't subject to

Speaker 3 certain checks or safeguards. This is absolutely a move towards authoritarianism.
And what's the most disturbing thing about it is it doesn't feel like the American public has been fooled.

Speaker 3 It appears that that is, in fact,

Speaker 3 what they want. I look at at when I'm on a vacation like this, I have time to slow down.

Speaker 3 And I think, like most people, when you're on vacation with your family, you do kind of count your blessings and have some time to reflect. And I immediately reverse engineer my prosperity.

Speaker 3 This is what happens when you're under the age of 40, or this is what happened to me, and maybe I was just less thoughtful than most people, but under the age of 40, when I reverse engineered my success to pillars, I credited my grit and my character.

Speaker 3 Like, check my shit out. I'm just so fucking impressive.
And this is, and all the panels I was on. Well, this is how I, I, I did this X, Y, and Z.

Speaker 3 And then as you get older, you realize, and I think this is part of maturing, that a lot of your success is not your fault. And that has become so strikingly clear to me as I've gotten older.

Speaker 3 And then when I reverse engineer my prosperity and blessings to pillars upon which those, uh, that prosperity and those blessings were built on, I go all the way back to the fourth grade when I got assisted lunch.

Speaker 3 That is my family. My mom made $800 a month as a secretary, and so we qualified for assisted lunch.

Speaker 3 And the wonderful thing about this program, the wonderful, the really generous thing that reflected so well on America about this program, I didn't know about it.

Speaker 3 I didn't know about it till later in life. Why?

Speaker 3 Because the good taxpayers of California and our wonderful federal government said it's important that nine-year-olds don't feel stigmatized. So my mom would send in paperwork.

Speaker 3 I would get the same lunch and breakfast coupons that every other kid had. So there was no stigma attached.

Speaker 3 Isn't that, I think that says something so nice about American values, or at least what used to be American values. And then I got to high school when I was 17, and I've spoken very openly about this.

Speaker 3 My mom told me she was going to have to spend the night in the hospital because she was getting something called a DNC, which I later found out meant she was getting an abortion.

Speaker 3 She'd become pregnant at the age of 47. And had we lived in America, in deep, dark red country, we just weren't very sophisticated or knowledgeable.
We probably would have had an unwanted pregnancy.

Speaker 3 And at the age of 17, I had a job installing shelving. I was making good money.
I probably most definitely would not have gone to UCLA.

Speaker 3 And that would have not created this upward spiral of prosperity that I've enjoyed because of the generosity of California taxpayers and the great University of California system.

Speaker 3 When I got to UCLA, the only way I got through was with Pell Grants. I just couldn't afford to be there.

Speaker 3 Oh, and by the way, the fact that it had a 74% admissions rate, but Pell Grants got me through college.

Speaker 3 and I qualified for those because, see, above, I came from an upper, lower, middle-class household. A third of Pell Grant recipients will either have their grants reduced or eliminated.

Speaker 3 When I graduated from college, I got to start companies and raise tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars. All of my companies were built on the Internet.

Speaker 3 Oh, by the way, who funded the Internet? The federal government. Why? Because we had the capital to make these big forward-leaning investments in technology.

Speaker 3 We're about to have a trillion dollars in debt service payments, which will crowd out all types of forward-leaning technology investments because we are massively funding with future prosperity these tax cuts.

Speaker 3 So, are we going to have the money to invent or invest in these deep, deep technologies that the private sector won't invest in? Oh, I was able to raise capital. Why?

Speaker 3 Because there was $5 million to every startup in the United States versus $1 million in Europe. Why? Because of rule of law.
Who built my companies?

Speaker 3 Well, one, I'd like to think I had a role on it, but Jawad Mohammed, my first programmer, Red Envelope, an immigrant from Pakistan, Claude DeJokas, probably our most talented consultant, ran our CPG group, was an immigrant from Canada who, by the way, was almost kicked out of America.

Speaker 3 But because I have money, I was able to lawyer up and make sure she could stay and build a great American company that seven years later we sold for $160 million and made a bunch of Americans and some immigrants rich.

Speaker 3 Christine Dang at Red Envelope, our chief merchant, immigrant from Vietnam. The talent pool to build these great companies was because we, in fact, we in fact loved immigrants.

Speaker 3 So let's go even further back.

Speaker 3 America welcomed my mother and father.

Speaker 3 Had they run the risk of having their phone absconded or being shipped to some sort of detention center in a swampland or being tracked down at work or something like that?

Speaker 3 Or even if they got in here legally, they think, do I really need to be here? Fucking another great immigrant, Maria Petrova, who in her fifth language edits my books and newsletters. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we don't want that kind of talent coming here anymore.

Speaker 3 So even if they're not worried about having being run down and basically physically abused by ICE mass ICE agents, do they really want to come here?

Speaker 3 Universities, I got to go create an amazing platform at universities.

Speaker 3 Why? Because corporations love working with academics.

Speaker 3 There was incredible deep research funded by the government that gave us the resources to pursue the truth, which the private sector absolutely loves and benefits from.

Speaker 3 now that's under attack back to mom and dad i don't think they'd be here i don't think i would have been able to make the best decision i've ever made the best decision i've ever made would not have been afforded to me specifically to be born in america because i don't think my parents would have come and put up and endure to risk this bullshit right now let's go even further back even further back my mother was a four-year-old sleeping in the tube in london as hitler bombed the shit out of london in the blitzkrieg and the thing that saved my mother from her last memory being a train ride to some camp, and the reason yours truly is here doing this fucking podcast from a $4,000 room night in a Biza is because we decided that fascism was unacceptable.

Speaker 3 History is rhyming. It sounds like a bad cover band right now.
Would I be here? Would my mom have survived if America hadn't immediately decided that fascism was unacceptable?

Speaker 3 So everything

Speaker 3 that I think I am blessed with, or many things that have created just what is an exceptional life around

Speaker 3 economic opportunity, loving the middle class, giving people merit and opportunity, a certain rule of fair play, a love of immigrants, and a love of the unremarkable, an appreciation that with a little bit of money, you can invest in young people and they will be able to pay that money back.

Speaker 3 And that will be a good return on investment, making sure kids have nutrition, making sure people have access to some sort of dignity, making sure that women have some sort of bodily autonomy.

Speaker 3 All the things my success is built on, all of those foundations are under attack right now.

Speaker 3 And if you look through your history and your blessings, and most of us are a lot more blessed than we want to believe because social media has made us angry at everybody and angry at ourselves, but the majority of you listening to this podcast have exceptional prosperity.

Speaker 3 And if you reverse engineer it to many of the core things that weren't your fault, that really led to your success, many of them, many of them, if not most of them in my case, are under attack.

Speaker 3 This is a direct

Speaker 3 insult to all of the people who made huge sacrifices to ensure that we lived in a free, democratic society that loved unremarkable people.

Speaker 3 Okay, moving on.

Speaker 3 In today's episode, we speak with Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston college historian and author who connects American history to to today's politics in her best-selling books and popular newsletter, Letters from an American.

Speaker 3 We discuss with Professor Richardson the evolution of the Republican Party, Trump's mega-bill, and what still gives her hope for America.

Speaker 3 So, with that, here's our conversation with Heather Cox Richardson.

Speaker 3 Professor Richardson, where does this podcast find you?

Speaker 4 I am in Midcoast, Maine, much hotter than I have been in the last nine months up here.

Speaker 3 Nice. Well, let's bust right into it here.
How has patriotism been redefined in recent years? And

Speaker 3 what would it look like to reclaim it in service of democracy rather than authoritarianism?

Speaker 4 Well, the second half of that is easy, but let's start with the first half of it.

Speaker 4 You know, one of the things that the Republicans did pretty effectively, really starting in the 1950s with the scare about communism, but certainly after the 1960s and the 1970s, was to identify membership in the Republican Party as being the heart of patriotism.

Speaker 4 And you really see this taking off under Nixon and Spiro Agnew when they deliberately polarized the country.

Speaker 4 They called it positive polarization, meaning that it was positive for them because people would vote Republican. And you see it really taking off under Ronald Reagan and

Speaker 4 his construction of the other people like welfare queens.

Speaker 4 And once you got into talk radio in the mid-80s and then into the Fox News channel, the deliberate division of the country into two groups, one

Speaker 4 assumed to be pro-America and the other assumed to be anti-American. And that picked up a lot of themes like the fight against the Vietnam War and so on.

Speaker 4 But that idea that patriotism belongs to a certain party has turned out to be really quite poisonous. And you see now the elevation of partisanship over country

Speaker 4 in

Speaker 4 even in things as recently as the budget reconciliation bill. So there is a perversion of patriotism that we see going on around us.

Speaker 4 But reclaiming a broader patriotism that shows an allegiance to the country rather than to a political party.

Speaker 4 You know, we've done that repeatedly in the past, and the answer to that is simply to return to the foundational principles of the American democracy, the idea that we should be treated equally before the law, we have a right to a say in our government, and we have a right to equal access to resources.

Speaker 4 Those aren't difficult concepts, and they're the ones that have managed to create broad-based political movements throughout our history.

Speaker 3 What do you think Americans get wrong about how authoritarian regimes come into power?

Speaker 3 And does this, what other moment in history would you most equate this one to in terms of a rise of authoritarianism?

Speaker 4 You know, I think a lot of Americans in the past, and I don't think this is necessarily true any longer, but a lot of Americans in the past thought of authoritarians as people who arrived with the fanfare of the military behind them.

Speaker 4 And the truth is that the military comes later.

Speaker 4 The rise of an authoritarian comes from within established systems, often democratic systems where people vote into power somebody never who has a majority.

Speaker 3 Hitler was democratically elected, no?

Speaker 4 Well, yes, but. Well, those authoritarians never have a majority of the population.
They are able to use the systems in order to turn a very small minority into a governing body.

Speaker 4 So, and I think we're seeing the same thing around us now.

Speaker 4 And what looks like this in the past to me is one of two things: either the 1850s and the ability of a few elite slave owners to monopolize the political system to take over the government in their own interest,

Speaker 4 or the 1890s, when we saw something very similar among the

Speaker 4 giant industrialists. And that, in a way, makes it easier easier to see ways to get out of it.

Speaker 3 I often draw parallels between America now and 1930s Germany.

Speaker 3 Do you think that's a fitting comparison? Both the examples you gave were from American history.

Speaker 4 Well, remember, I'm an Americanist. So, you know, I can speak with authority on America.
Any other country that I talk about is ill-informed. You know, what historians do is we understand

Speaker 4 our body of work. And what I do is America.
And my

Speaker 4 background is only partly in history. You know, my master's is in literature.
My degree is in American civilization.

Speaker 4 So I've been trained in a very different way than a historian who could do comparative history, for example.

Speaker 4 So yeah, I can read the same books that Germanists read, but I don't have the theoretical background to speak authoritatively about them.

Speaker 4 What I can do is look at people like Hannah Arendt and Eric Hoffer and George Orwell and all those people who looked at the moment after the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and made broad generalizations about the kinds of populations that are susceptible to a rising authoritarian.

Speaker 4 And, you know, that's really your field, that idea of how do you market and to what population do you market, the idea of giving up your rights and your privileges in order to support one guy.

Speaker 3 So Finnika, it's just as you said that, I was immediately very self-conscious about Dunning-Kruger, and that is because I've had some success in some areas.

Speaker 3 I feel it gives me license to speak about things I don't know that much about.

Speaker 3 And I very much appreciate how measured measured you are in acknowledging that you're not an expert in certain fields and somewhat remiss to speak about it.

Speaker 3 And that is so that is so rare in today's age. So I do appreciate that.

Speaker 3 And I think it represents one of the wonderful things about academia, that that is a standard in academia, that you are supposed to stay in your own lane.

Speaker 3 So look, I'd be curious.

Speaker 3 From an American viewpoint, or based on your background and domain expertise, I'll flip the question back to you. Who do you think has done the best job of marketing political parties?

Speaker 3 Or let me frame it this way.

Speaker 3 I think the Democratic Party right now, my understanding is if the election were held today, that Trump would still win handily over Vice President Harris, and that the Democratic Party is less popular right now than Trump or the Republican Party.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I would argue that a lot of that is marketing, that the Democratic Party is seen primarily as weak.

Speaker 3 as a party of identity politics and a party that doesn't really understand

Speaker 3 how to improve the material and psychological well-being of ordinary Americans. But I'd love to get your view of what parties and why have been successful at marketing their own brand of politics.

Speaker 4 You know, let's start with what you just said about the Democrats, because I don't disagree with you about the way that Democrats are perceived, but that's in part because defining the Democrats has been the business of the Republican Party.

Speaker 4 And that's, you know, through a media system that elevates the Republican Republican voices through a construction of a certain kind of politics on the Republican side, they have managed to define their opponents in ways that are completely inaccurate.

Speaker 4 And the Democrats, I think, have not been able to push back against that successfully.

Speaker 4 Now, you just, you started by asking who has successfully marketed the kind of political positions that are the political parties

Speaker 4 that...

Speaker 4 in our history.

Speaker 4 And one of those groups is today's modern Republican Party, who since at least the 1980s has billed itself as a party that's going to dramatically increase economic growth and enable all boats to rise.

Speaker 4 Remember Reagan talking about the fact that this, by cutting taxes and cutting regulations, there would be such investment in the economy that it would enable everybody to do better and we would be able to have increasing services, not less services, but increasing services because of the increase in tax revenue.

Speaker 4 That quite literally never paid off.

Speaker 4 And you're still seeing it, again, with the budget reconciliation bill of just a week ago, where, you know, you had Trump out there saying this is going to cause such extraordinary growth. It doesn't.

Speaker 4 That simply does not work.

Speaker 4 But I think they were able to sell it in part by tapping into an extraordinarily powerful mythology and a mythology that is not only part of American history, but part of sort of human literature.

Speaker 4 And that was the idea of the little guy fighting back against the empire.

Speaker 4 And that idea that Ronald Reagan pushed so effectively in 1980, when in his campaign in 1980, but certainly people had been doing from you before Reagan, you could go back to Barry Goldwater and back to William F.

Speaker 4 Buckley Jr. and back even into the years before the New Deal, into fundamentalist Christianity, for example, and into all these different roots in the United States.

Speaker 4 That idea of the individual fighting back against the empire is a powerful enough myth that if you think about it in 1977, it was the heart of Star Wars.

Speaker 4 That idea of the cowboy and the independent individual and so on. That's something that a lot of Americans believed that they embodied.

Speaker 4 And I think one of the things that I was just, I just had to walk over here.

Speaker 4 Like I say, I really am a mid-coast Maine and I don't have cell coverage or cable at my house. So I have to, somebody lends me this place to work from.

Speaker 4 And I was walking over here and I was thinking, you know, we're seeing this now play out, where a lot of people who believed that they didn't need the government, they didn't need taxes, they could do it all on their own, are watching all the pieces of the government on which they depended being slashed and suddenly reaching a reckoning.

Speaker 4 And one of the things that to me is intellectually interesting is what happens when people recognize that, in fact, they do need a community, they do need each other.

Speaker 4 Well, in the past, what we've gotten is the kind of cultural moment where you celebrate buddy movies or community movies.

Speaker 4 You know, during World War II, Hollywood made zero Westerns and they made all those sort of world, you know, war two buddy movies or platoon movies and other things that celebrated towns and loyalties to each other.

Speaker 4 Maybe we get a moment like that. Maybe we get a lot of people who withdraw from politics.
Maybe we get an extraordinarily angry reactionary politics that supports authoritarianism.

Speaker 4 But that branding of the Republican Party as the cowboy party, as the individual party, as the party of guys who can make it on their own, was extraordinarily effective.

Speaker 4 And between 1981 and 2021, it moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

Speaker 4 So I think you have to look at that as a pretty, pretty amazing branding moment. What would you do for the Democrats now?

Speaker 3 Let me just say I love this conversation.

Speaker 3 So when people ask, what is the strategy of America? I would say if you had to distill it down to one very basic thing, since the 1980s, the strategy has been to cut taxes.

Speaker 3 That it's intoxicating to believe that the private sector, which is incredible in the United States, best private sector arguably in the world, that it's when it's unbridled and just let to run flat out, that it'll create so much prosperity,

Speaker 3 so much growth that that will ultimately, quote unquote, trickle down.

Speaker 3 I think that it's just impossible, if you have any reverence for data, for numbers, and the pursuit of truth, to not acknowledge at this point that that strategy has not worked.

Speaker 3 I would argue what you're calling the cowboy mentality is that we have embraced or conflated masculinity and strength with cruelty and coarseness.

Speaker 3 That there is a certain level of sensors being tickled by people who are so angry, felt like they've been so lied to, and that anger gets speedballed by algorithms that have a profit incentive in convincing us that your neighbor isn't a Russian soldier pouring across the Ukrainian border or that your enemy isn't

Speaker 3 an Islamic republic that is threatening, you know, has a gender apartheid or that your enemy isn't

Speaker 3 climate change. Your enemy is the guy or gal next door that doesn't share your beliefs and that you have every right to be angry at them.
And that when these individuals see massed ICE agents

Speaker 3 putting their knees on the head of immigrants, that unfortunately, and I think this is terrible, there are a lot of Americans that conflate that with leadership and strength.

Speaker 3 And that I'd love to lay this all at the feet of Republicans who are engaging in this slow burn towards fascism and our combined cruelty and stupidity, which adds up to depravity.

Speaker 3 But I'm worried, and I want to get your thought here, and then I'll answer the question that I think the Democrats need to do.

Speaker 3 I worry that this represents a deeper sickness in American society, that Americans are so anxious, depressed, and angry that they are acting out and they sort of appreciate or conflate this cruelty with strengths and with leadership.

Speaker 3 And it represents a deeper sickness in our society that is going to be tougher to fix. Your thoughts?

Speaker 4 Well, I agree with that. And the piece that you didn't mention is misogyny.
I mean, a large part of this, that what you're talking about is dominance, is demonstrating dominance.

Speaker 4 And one of the ways it's been easiest to demonstrate dominance in the U.S. since the 1980s is to dominate women.

Speaker 4 And that, I think, is way under talked about because that the conflation of women's rights and the modern American government is,

Speaker 4 I think, terribly underexplored.

Speaker 4 Now, that being said, one of the things that I need to lay on the table where I think you and I have a real confluence is that I am an idealist in that, you know, as I said, what historians study is how and why societies change, and different people have different ideas about it.

Speaker 4 It could be the economy, or mass movements, or great men, or religion. I believe ideas change society.
So,

Speaker 4 and everything is subordinate to that. Now, that's just my position.
You know, I'm not willing to go to the death for that, you know, against somebody who believes something else.

Speaker 4 But if that's the case, then what you are identifying, and I'm not going to disagree with you about that, is not a constant.

Speaker 4 It is something that has been created by a certain kind of language, which is how we communicate ideas, and by a certain kind of political system that encourages that sort of anger and hatred.

Speaker 4 Because I'm going to throw back at you here that if you actually look at polls on substance, not on things that are political, but if you look at how Americans feel about abortion rights, for example, or

Speaker 4 by a lot.

Speaker 4 But the point is not that they agree with Democrats, but they agree with each other.

Speaker 4 And that disconnect between the American people and what they believe and what they want and what they are being fed by their, I would say, national rather than state leaders primarily, that seems to me to be the place that is the fulcrum for where we are and where those of us who want to change that really should be focusing.

Speaker 4 And that comes down to, I hate to say it, marketing.

Speaker 3 We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Speaker 3 Two weeks ago, I was asked to address what was called the Young Democratic Caucus, which is representatives in Congress under the age of 50.

Speaker 3 And I think it's hilarious and telling that they would identify any group as young if you're under the age of 50. And this was the entire topic.

Speaker 3 And I feel as if I'm kind of like, I don't know, Luke Skywalker and you're a Yoda. So I want you to correct me and edit me where you think I get this wrong.

Speaker 3 But they said, how do we rebrand the Democratic Party? And I said, I think the three pillars are one, restoring our alliances, alliances with our great trading partners and other democracies.

Speaker 3 And the notion that somehow we've been taken advantage of is insane. They sell us Mercedes at five points of gross margin.

Speaker 3 And they get eight times EBITDA on it or they get 40 cents in value. We sell them NVIDIA chips at 50 points of gross margin of which get a 30 PE, so we get $15.

Speaker 3 Global trade and these unbelievable alliances, pushing back on fascism in the middle of the 20th century, creating unbelievable prosperity, pushing back on Russia, pushing back on China, pushing back promoting civil rights, women's rights.

Speaker 3 This has just been amazing.

Speaker 3 These alliances have been a reflection of what it means to be human, our advantage as a species, what it means to be mammal, and we need to restore alliances, most specifically in America, restore alliances between republicans and democrats restore alliances between men and women the genders have done an amazing job of convincing themselves that it's the other gender's fault young men believe that their descent is a function of women's assent couldn't be more wrong and that we need to restore the greatest alliance in history and that men and men and women need to stop believing that it's the other gender's fault.

Speaker 3 Young men believe, or a lot of women, unfortunately, I think, believe that men don't have problems. Young men don't have problems.
They are the problem. I don't think that's productive either.

Speaker 3 The greatest alliance in history is the history between men and women. Men should celebrate, promote, and protect their daughters, their wives, other women.

Speaker 3 And women need to realize that their incredible progress, they will not continue to flourish if men are, young men, are floundering.

Speaker 3 So my first kind of touchstone or pillar is alliances and the importance of alliances and coming together. The second is inequality.
You lose nothing above $10 million.

Speaker 3 There's no reason we shouldn't have a 60, 70%

Speaker 3 alternative minimum tax above $10 million. Daniel Kahneman and every psychologist has shown that above a certain amount of money, it brings you no incremental happiness.

Speaker 3 Restore corporate tax rates to a reasonable rate. Corporations are paying the lowest tax rate since 1929.
Collect the taxes owed, the tax gap. It's not about tax rates.
It's about the tax code.

Speaker 3 Reduce the deficit, lower interest rates, which will bring down our costs on our interest rate, restore fiscal responsibility.

Speaker 3 And then finally, something that I may not have the right word here, but rather than calling it health, fitness, 70% of America is overweight or obese, places a huge burden on us economically in terms of a health care system,

Speaker 3 better lunch, better nutrition, put in place incentives that do away with food deserts, encourage the industrial food system to produce healthy food, and some alliances,

Speaker 3 addressing income inequality, and becoming the fittest, strongest nation in the world, both mentally and physically.

Speaker 3 Those are kind of the three sort of policy pillars, but I am very open to coaching here because I was flying on instruments trying to tell these 50 or 60 representatives which messaging I think they need to embrace.

Speaker 3 Your thoughts.

Speaker 4 So let me dig in a little bit to what you have suggested.

Speaker 4 When you are talking about fitness, One of the problems there, of course, is our transportation systems and indeed what you're talking about with food deserts and the way food is distributed.

Speaker 4 You know, one of the things about our food systems in the U.S.

Speaker 4 since World War II has been to provide as many calories as it is possible to provide as quickly as they can be provided, because that was the crisis that they were designed to address after the Depression.

Speaker 4 So we do have these perverse incentives set up in the way that we manage, for example, surpluses. But if you look at fitness, you're not, I think, talking just about muscles.

Speaker 4 You're talking about once again, and I'm pushing you on this because this is kind of my American studies background. I think you are talking about once again, celebrating working hard at something.

Speaker 4 That is, rather than simply having it, you work for it. So, you know, being in good shape and caring about nutrition and cooking and so on, that takes work.
That takes effort.

Speaker 4 And that's about more than physical fitness. And you mentioned in one word mental fitness, but I would suggest it also celebrates the idea that it's a positive good to invest

Speaker 4 work in something.

Speaker 4 And one of the things that really jumps out at me in this administration is the degree to which they sort of seem to say, well, we're elevating those people who would otherwise be elevated if we hadn't had to deal with civil rights initiatives, what they're calling DEI initiatives.

Speaker 4 And what that has done is we now have in place a bunch of people who have no freaking clue what they're doing.

Speaker 4 You know, the idea that they should just have these positions rather than working their way really hard to get up to them. You look at somebody like Mark Milley versus Pete Hegseth.

Speaker 4 And Milley, you know, is very, very, you know, very well educated, works very hard at what he does, worked his way up. And then you have Hegseth, who came from the Fox News Channel.

Speaker 4 That idea of culturally

Speaker 4 once again, celebrating hard work, education, the idea of taking control of your life, not by attacking your neighbor, but by investing in yourself.

Speaker 4 That's really very classic America that if you think about it, was uppermost until at least the 1970s.

Speaker 3 I started with something much more corny, and that was I started with the word love, and that is anything that gets in between

Speaker 3 two people being able to get married such that they can look after each other and have a rational passion for each other's well-being, such that they don't end up on social services.

Speaker 3 Anything that inhibits a family's ability to take care of their children and creates so much economic stress that they're more likely than not to end up in a single parent home.

Speaker 3 And I think you can reverse engineer a lot of single parent homes to economic stress. Anything that gets in the way of people being

Speaker 3 in an ICU or an emergency room because, or being insured because they're of sexual orientation, but anything that gets in the way of a parent's ability to stay married.

Speaker 3 to have some dignity around their children, to not have medical debt such that they have to make a choice between food for their children and diabetes.

Speaker 3 but anything that gets in the way of this term love.

Speaker 3 And that kind of got laughed out of the room because they thought you're falling into the trap of the femininization of the democratic brand, which they believe has not been helpful.

Speaker 3 Any thoughts around this notion of love or empathy being a touchstone for a political movement?

Speaker 4 Yes, but I have to point out to you that what you have just done is you have modernized the concept of conservatism.

Speaker 4 What you are suggesting there echoes almost precisely what Edmund Burke was talking about during the French Revolution when he said that government should not be concerned about ideologies, because pretty soon leaders are busy trying to fit people into their ideologies rather than the other way around.

Speaker 4 What he said was that government should focus on stability, because when you have a stable government and a stable society, there is less impetus to overturn it.

Speaker 4 And this is one of the reasons in his era, of course, he was interested in supporting aristocracy and the church and the family and so on.

Speaker 4 But that, what you just outlined is a conservative, small C and not Republican and certainly not mega Republican, but a conservative Rockefeller Republican.

Speaker 4 That's right. Eisenhower Republican, which, which just, again, what you just outlined in this modern world sounds radical.
It sounds like a radical left position.

Speaker 4 And this always, whenever, ever anybody tells me I'm a leftist, I just laugh because quite literally, the policies that you are outlining and which now would be called wildly progressive were in fact Eisenhower values.

Speaker 4 And he was a Republican and

Speaker 4 not a conservative Republican, but certainly a center right, not center to center left.

Speaker 4 So my thoughts are that, first of all, that this is a conversation that really, really needs to be in the public sphere again, because it's just common sense.

Speaker 4 And it's something that, again, the nation was united around until there was a deliberate decision to divide the party, to divide people along party lines.

Speaker 4 And I don't disagree with you on any of the idea that single-family homes are often economic.

Speaker 4 I mean, the other thing that I find really interesting is during the Biden administration, there was a great deal of talk about how crime rates were plummeting.

Speaker 4 And I thought what was interesting about that is that even the members of the administration pointed to the increased police officers that they had, in which they had invested in order to make those crime rates come down.

Speaker 4 But nobody that I read anyway, and I'm not a criminologist, but I did read around in this because I was very interested in it, looked at the fact that we had record low unemployment.

Speaker 4 People had jobs, and those jobs in the bottom 20, 20, you know, 20%

Speaker 4 were paying a much greater rate than they had before Biden was in office. So you're looking at that and you're thinking, you know, if you got money, you commit fewer crimes, which is sort of logical.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to disagree with that at all in that concept, in your concept of fitness. In the concept of inequality, yeah, you know, this is a no-brainer.

Speaker 4 You know, people say if I could be emperor, what would I do? And the answer is I would start with getting rid of the Bush tax cuts and the Trump tax cuts and work on

Speaker 4 recreating

Speaker 4 the great compression that economists talk about, where there is less of a gap both in income and in wealth between the bottom of American society and the top of American society, not just for economic reasons, but because I think that does a whole heck of a lot more societally when there is a less of a gap between people, less of an educational gap, less of a wealth gap, less of a cultural gap, and so on.

Speaker 4 And I agree with you also in terms of restoring alliances for sure. And it always jumps out at me, of course, that the United States was a driving factor in the

Speaker 4 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And here we are, sending now people to,

Speaker 4 you know, a gulag in the Epperglades. But what I would say is that these are really difficult concepts to put into a package that can win an election.

Speaker 4 I think people feel on vibes that these are right.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 what I think about packaging, not the Democrats necessarily, because we're in this really interesting moment where the political parties are breaking down.

Speaker 4 Certainly the names may remain, but what they look, what the internals look like are going to be very different.

Speaker 4 And that's what I'm interested in: watching these conversations take place all over the country among people who are not necessarily in elected office or aiming for elected office, where they are redefining what they would like America to be.

Speaker 4 One of the things that jumps out to me when you define America is less the idea of alliances or less the idea of love, and more the idea that what America has stood for historically is the idea that if you are willing to work hard, you can create a better life for yourself and your children.

Speaker 4 And everything flows from that.

Speaker 4 Now, the way that you talk about that, though, and again, that we have done historically, notably in the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, the late 1890s, early 2000s, and in the 1870s, and before that, is by saying we're in this together.

Speaker 4 We are a community that works together and that we are not divided. And again, you used to see that in the 1940s, 1950s, and so on in movies, for example, in Superman, in

Speaker 4 Frank Sinatra's

Speaker 4 The House Where I Live, the film about how he was dead set against religious discrimination in the United States.

Speaker 4 That is something that strikes me as being marketable, not least because you can plug into it our greatest moments in our history.

Speaker 3 So just along the lines of magic wand and being an emperor,

Speaker 3 some of the lowest levels of young adult and teen depression are in Israel, despite all the existential threats surrounding them, and amongst young Mormons.

Speaker 3 And the thing I find that's true among both those groups, and again, I might be backfilling a narrative here, is I think restoring mandatory national service.

Speaker 3 You talked about how people kind of saw themselves as Americans first before Republicans or Democrats, or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth in the 60s or 70s, but I think a lot of that was because they'd served in the same uniform.

Speaker 3 What do you think of the idea of mandatory national service where Americans from different ethnic, demographic, and income and sexual orientation backgrounds could see each other?

Speaker 3 And I'm not just talking about the military, I'm talking about senior care, smoke jumpers, you know, forest reclamation, whatever it might be.

Speaker 3 But you're going to spend 12 to 24 months working alongside a group of random Americans realizing that you need to work in the agency of something bigger than yourself, and that thing is the United States.

Speaker 4 100%.

Speaker 4 But I'm going to add a reason for that. And that is, of course, having come to

Speaker 4 come through a university system, in modern America, a lot of

Speaker 4 young people are not really ready to make adult decisions when they leave home.

Speaker 4 They need to spend time literally just learning how to live with other people or learning how to be on their own and managing their schedules and crucially, figuring out what they want to do, which is not.

Speaker 3 Especially boys. I'm going to be a sexist, especially boys.
Do you have kids, Professor?

Speaker 4 Three of them.

Speaker 3 Biologically, 18-year-old boys are 18 months behind their prefrontal cortex development.

Speaker 3 When my 14 and 17-year-olds have friends over, the boys are dopes, and some of the girls look like they could be the junior senator from Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 I think this would be especially important for young men.

Speaker 3 And it's easy to be sexist when you're favoring the female gender, but I really do think there is a marked difference between the maturity levels of boys coming out of high school and girls coming out of high school.

Speaker 4 Well, and just the opportunity to work in different ways with different people would open up i think a lot of uh of people to professions that they might not otherwise have considered and that um you know i i always think back on a student i had who was in college um i'm trying to be vague here because of his extraordinary sport ability and which was great i'm sure but He discovered his senior year that he was actually really, really good at history is how he came across my screen.

Speaker 4 And he was just really starting to get it. And

Speaker 4 I said to him, you know, we talked about this, and he really had gone to school to play sports. And he was planning to go back to work in construction where he had come from.

Speaker 4 And yet, had he had a couple of years, he might have discovered that he was as good as he was at history before he was graduating.

Speaker 4 And it always has kind of stuck with me that he's somebody who could have really benefited from a, from a, not a gap year, because it's going to take people six months just to get their feet under them as it does in college, but a gap two years seems to me to be simply a no-brainer.

Speaker 4 Lots of other countries do it. My nephews who live in Europe did it.

Speaker 4 And I would love to see that, both for the reasons you suggest, but also because developmentally, it just seems like it makes such good sense.

Speaker 3 You were generous asking my thoughts on how to rebrand or brand the Democratic Party. I'll flip the question back to you.
What do you think would be the right messaging or platform for Democrats?

Speaker 4 So this is a little hard for me because, as I say, I don't really think in this moment as Republicans versus Democrats. I actually think in this moment of the mega Republican.

Speaker 3 We're up against the rope and quite frankly, we're getting the shit kicked out of us. So

Speaker 3 to the best of your ability, if you were

Speaker 3 channeling Democrats, what would you suggest is the real opportunity or wide space for Democrats right now?

Speaker 4 Okay, so where I was going with that is that I will tell you the branding that I would do, and it seems to me something the Democrats could jump on, should jump on, but it's not saying, here's a party I want to market, because I think in this moment, it's going to be important to recognize that the anti-MAGA party is not just Democrats, including in the way people think about certain issues.

Speaker 4 They are, some people still vote Republican because it is ingrained in them to have an R after their name, but they are, in fact, quite open to the idea of the kinds of things you and I are talking about.

Speaker 4 So, here's what I would say.

Speaker 4 And my model is Abraham Lincoln, who was living through a very similar moment when two older parties were falling apart, and you had the rise of a reactionary right elite that was trying to get rid of American democracy and create a system in which the government answered only to them.

Speaker 4 And this is, of course, the elite enslavers who wanted to spread human enslavement across the American West.

Speaker 4 They're establishing slave states that could work with the southern slave states to get rid of free states all over the country?

Speaker 4 So, what happened in that moment, and you have to remember here always that the people who could vote in the United States in that period were all white men, almost all of whom were virulently racist and didn't really care at all about black rights.

Speaker 4 The way Lincoln managed to create a coalition that could restore American democracy was continually to go back to the Declaration of Independence and to say repeatedly, either we are all created equal or we are not.

Speaker 4 And if we are not, we need to tear up the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 4 And when he did that, even in the southern parts of Illinois, for example, during the Lincoln Douglas debates, even Democrats who were virulently racist would say, no, no, no, that's what we stand for.

Speaker 4 And I think one of the things that is important to do in this moment is continually to highlight the principles on which people who live in the United States States have stood on democracy and expanded democracy.

Speaker 4 And what is so exciting about that for someone like me is that while I just invoked Lincoln because he was very, very self-conscious about what he was doing, and often if I can't figure out how to address something, I will think, what would Lincoln have done in terms of principles?

Speaker 4 But if you think about someone like Fannie Lou Hamer or Dolores Huerta or Hector, Dr. Hector Garcia, or Dr.
King, or any of these people who were parts of marginalized populations

Speaker 4 used those concepts to expand

Speaker 4 rights in the United States and bring more people under the umbrella of the idea that they could have control over their destinies.

Speaker 4 And I think that's a touchstone that resonates with all American populations, and one that we have not taken sufficient advantage of in the years that we have really stopped teaching the real meat of American history.

Speaker 4 And I would argue that the popularity of the stuff I write is in part indicative of an extraordinary hunger for people to feel that they are part of that larger story of human self-determination and of the United States of America.

Speaker 4 I see more and more people now starting to do it, starting to talk about it, more politicians doing it.

Speaker 4 But I think that is crucial to building a mass movement that can overawe the kind of rising fascism that you're seeing among MAGA Republicans.

Speaker 3 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 We're back with more from Heather Cox Richardson.

Speaker 3 So let's bring it to present day. You've called Trump's MEGA bill the capstone of MAGA's six-month transformation of the U.S.
government. Do you think we're witnessing the cementing of illiberalism?

Speaker 3 And you've also said this was sort of the signature Republican legislation of this millennium thus far.

Speaker 3 Your thoughts.

Speaker 4 Well, I will answer that, but let me ask you, what do you think of that budget reconciliation bill?

Speaker 3 I think it's the largest transfer of wealth in history from the future to the past, from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old.

Speaker 3 I think it's not to be too dramatic here, but when I look at my success, professor, it's built on these pillars of access to family planning for my mother,

Speaker 3 assisted lunch programs when I was in elementary school, access to deep pools of capital to start companies based on the rule of law,

Speaker 3 access to wonderful, talented immigrants who built my companies.

Speaker 3 You know, the fact that my mother was able to survive in

Speaker 3 Britain sleeping as a four-year-old Jew in a bomb shelter, that America decided to convert its car factories to tank factories to push back on fascism.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm so personally, quite frankly,

Speaker 3 and you can probably hear the emotion in my voice, just so rattled by this because I feel it

Speaker 3 is setting on fire all the pillars of my prosperity and success. So not a fan.

Speaker 4 Well, and that I think is what I was getting at with the idea that this was the capstone of the past six years.

Speaker 4 It's also the capstone in many ways of the Republican project since Reagan, which is to blow up the social safety net.

Speaker 4 But it's not, well, I call it a capstone in part because, of course, that's what the Department of Government Efficiency was also designed to do.

Speaker 4 And that the idea of the rescissions, the clawing back of the money that has already been appropriated, the impoundments, and so on. The idea is to shred the modern American state.

Speaker 4 But what interests, I mean, what is, interests me, it's the wrong way to put it,

Speaker 4 but

Speaker 4 what is replacing it, as I say, is the idea that somehow we're going to go back to a better past, which by the way is a very fascist concept.

Speaker 4 But there doesn't seem to be any real idea of what that looks like. So, for example, these Trump tariffs, the idea that this is suddenly going to make everybody rich is just a complete fantasy.

Speaker 4 It is a complete fantasy.

Speaker 4 Or the fact that Brooke Rollins, the head of U.S., of the agriculture department today said that when we get rid of the undocumented immigrants who are actually working in the agricultural field, that we can simply replace them with the people who are on Medicaid.

Speaker 4 You know, that's just such a far-fetched

Speaker 4 image of what the future could look like in a country that has, has, since the very development of Western agriculture in the 1880s and 1890s, depended on migrant labor.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's just, there's nothing on the other side that suggests the survival of American democracy.

Speaker 4 And so I think what you're looking at is the rise, as I say, of authoritarianism, one guy to run everything. But

Speaker 4 as we're looking at that, and as I alluded to earlier, will 334 million Americans say, oh, I was conned, it's okay.

Speaker 4 Or will they say, This is not the country I wanted?

Speaker 4 And this is one of the reasons that conservatism developed, actually, to go back to that theme, because what they are creating is extraordinary instability, just extraordinary instability.

Speaker 4 And of course, with that bill, we now have a massively expanded ICE and border patrol system that is, in fact, a standing army in the U.S., a militarized state in the U.S.

Speaker 4 But is that going to be enough to maintain a dictator or a quasi-dictator from the MAGA wing in power going forward?

Speaker 4 I think I have too much faith in the American people to believe that's going to be the case. What do you think?

Speaker 3 Well, I'm a bit of a catastrophist and a glass half-empty kind of guys who probably figured out. So I immediately draw conclusions or parallels with

Speaker 3 the Gestapo that was 32,000 people. I think ICE is 22.
They spent 2 billion. We're spending 12 billion.
It was meant to be an administrative body focusing on documentation and border forms.

Speaker 3 And instead, it's turned into what I, as far as I can tell, is a series of pageantry and fear meant to

Speaker 3 exhibit strength and also scare people. And my father always used to say to me when I would compare Trump to Hitler, you got to keep in mind, Scott, Trump had his own private army.

Speaker 3 And as far as I can tell, ICE is a private army for the current administration. So

Speaker 3 I find it frightening. And when I think of just taking out the moral argument and the historical parallels,

Speaker 3 you know, the notion somehow that we need to get rid of these immigrants such that more Americans have better jobs and higher paid, it's just so, it's just so stupid.

Speaker 3 If you want to talk about, imagine that millions of immigrants pouring over the border right now, it's called AI.

Speaker 3 AI is a much bigger threat to people's livelihoods than the person taking care of your aging mother or serving, you know, or working at the Chick-fil-A.

Speaker 3 And the notion somehow that American wages are going to go up, all that's going to happen is our expenses are going to go up.

Speaker 3 And what I find most telling about these raids is they're raiding Home Depot, churches, and schools. And maybe that's an indication that these are the kind of people we want here.

Speaker 3 And then just being very unemotional about it.

Speaker 3 Immigration people are often very comfortable saying immigration is the lifeblood of our success.

Speaker 3 What I don't think they're in touch with is that the most profitable part of immigration has been undocumented immigration because they're a flexible workforce that pays taxes and then doesn't stick around for social services and melts back sometimes to their original host country when the crops are picked or the work dries up.

Speaker 3 And the reason why we have put up with this or tolerated it is because we recognize it's an incredible economic advantage to have this flexible workforce.

Speaker 3 So, you know, again, I go back to Germany, the demonization of immigrants.

Speaker 3 It economically makes no sense. It's morally reprehensible.
And I am uncomfortable with a private army,

Speaker 3 an army that will have a greater funding budget than at the FBI, who is responsible for white-collar crimes and terrorism.

Speaker 3 We've decided to allocate more resources to a private army of people who have to wear masks. You know,

Speaker 3 they're not only wearing a certain color shirt or insignias as armbands. They're wearing masks because of what they're doing is so,

Speaker 3 in my view, un-American. So I find ICE another, you know,

Speaker 3 incredibly disturbing. Your thoughts?

Speaker 4 I agree. I totally agree with that.

Speaker 4 Well, my point was just, I'm not entirely sure that in a country of this size, they are going to be able to get the kind of control that somebody could in a smaller country like Germany was in 1933.

Speaker 4 So, you know, I think you're right that this is pageantry, that a lot of it so far is pageantry designed, first of all, to terrorize immigrants, but also to terrorize other Americans into not speaking up.

Speaker 4 And that's the piece that I am not convinced is necessarily going to work.

Speaker 4 And by the way, I didn't mean in any way to downplay the terror and the damage and the torture, even that immigrants and migrants are going through in this.

Speaker 4 I'm trying to look at the larger picture here and what the Trump administration is trying to do.

Speaker 4 So I don't disagree with you at all on that, but I'm just saying I'm not entirely sure it's going to work.

Speaker 4 This is an extraordinarily unstable administration. Trump himself is not in good shape.
J.D. Vance, the heir apparent,

Speaker 4 commands no

Speaker 4 real voting base.

Speaker 4 Increasingly, the wheels are coming off the bus as FEMA can't respond to things, as the tariffs are starting to kick in, as prices are going up. You know,

Speaker 4 it is, you know, I guess what I keep saying is I think we're going into a period of extraordinary instability. And I am not convinced that the outcome of that is going to be a dictatorship.

Speaker 4 It could just as easily be that the outcome of it is a renewed American democracy. But it's going to be messy, messy, messy either way.

Speaker 3 I love your vision. I always jokingly say in my companies, there's been all these people that are kind of invisible until they fuck up.

Speaker 3 And that is the person running the accounting, the person running the events, that they're not appreciated until something goes wrong.

Speaker 3 And I feel that a lot of Americans are coming to grips with the fact that there's a lot of people, hydrologists, meteorologists, the TSA working who are invisible until there's a disaster.

Speaker 3 And that some of this long-term thinking and investment and boring jobs are actually really important.

Speaker 3 And that they're going to learn very painfully that these things matter and that immigrants play a key role and that an autocracy is stronger. I love your vision.

Speaker 3 I'm worried that this is the first step towards a darker period where we have a lot of young men who are struggling, don't have a lot of economic or romantic prospects, are looking for

Speaker 3 scapegoats to justify

Speaker 3 their problems, and that we're one economic shock away from an authoritarian government that gets even uglier. And we already have,

Speaker 3 you called it a gulag. I call them concentration camps.
Concentration camps,

Speaker 3 one of the definitions is a camp outside of the host territory such that the individuals shipped to these places don't have the rights they would in their own domestic environment.

Speaker 3 We're already there. We have demonization of immigrants.
We have militarization of civil agencies. We have a disrespect for some of the institutions.
They always attack the academics. Why?

Speaker 3 Because you and I, you're what I'd call a hardcore, real, legitimate academic. I'm sort of showing up and doing a rich little version of academics in that as I teach.
But you,

Speaker 3 quite frankly, you just have much deeper domain expertise than me. And I find that common across all moves towards fascism is to attack universities.
Why?

Speaker 3 Because at the end of the day, you especially, but also I'll include myself in this crowd, we teach young people to ask why.

Speaker 3 And they don't want young people and intelligent people asking why. They want them feeling things.

Speaker 3 And so I worry that there's a fork in the road here, but one

Speaker 3 potential left turn here could be much darker.

Speaker 3 And I look back at Germany again in the 30s, an incredibly progressive society, pro-gay, civil rights, appreciation for immigrants, appreciation for academics, and then a descent into darkness.

Speaker 3 And I worry that that same opportunity for darkness is available to us. And then everyone talks about institutions, the courts, the universities.

Speaker 3 And what I like about what you're saying is it's beyond institutions, it's people.

Speaker 3 The judges got to stand up. Academics got to be fearless, such as you have been, and smart and thoughtful.
People, employers have to stand up for their employees.

Speaker 3 I'm very disappointed in the technology community.

Speaker 3 Some of the people I hang out with who are incredibly blessed, not speaking up about their blessings, that we keep talking about institutions under attack.

Speaker 3 I think that's true. What I find so disappointing about this, Professor, is that not more people are speaking up.
When you have billionaire owners of media companies

Speaker 3 paying off the administration under the threat of a legal case that they would win, when you have legal firms saying we will provide basically bending a knee and ignoring all the principles of our basic judicial system, I worry that not enough individuals are standing up.

Speaker 3 Because at the end of the day, these institutions are made up of people. So I'm more worried about a darker fork in the road here.

Speaker 4 Well, I'm worried about that darker fork in the road, but I also recognize that there is no way forward except

Speaker 4 doing it. There's no way through but

Speaker 4 going forward. And so one of the things I'm trying to do is find a way to get people on the brighter path rather than the darker path.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, the thing is, as a historian, we know how this plays out. We know exactly how this plays out.
And

Speaker 4 one of the things that just gobspacks me is that knowing what we know and how these situations play out,

Speaker 4 that people in the administration would be trying it yet again and people would be getting behind them. Because again, I can write that script.
I really can write that script.

Speaker 4 But I can also write the other script in which people reject that version of our future and pick a different one. And

Speaker 4 that's the one that I'm working for. I do have a question for you.

Speaker 4 You mentioned something a second ago that sparked an idea for me that I would love to hear you expand on a little bit more.

Speaker 4 I have been sitting here looking at the reduced numbers of undocumented and documented migrants in the United States and saying to myself,

Speaker 4 where are they going to find ways to replace them? And I'm looking at child labor, for example, or now this idea that people on Medicaid aren't going to work in the fields or whatever.

Speaker 4 Do you think that what they are doing,

Speaker 4 that the administration, to be clear, is doing is recognizing that AI is going to wipe out a ton of jobs and setting up the idea that those jobs are not the fault of those people pushing AI,

Speaker 4 which is a problematic, and maybe someday we can talk about what AI entails for the United States. But that rather than saying

Speaker 4 this billionaire put you out of business, they're trying to convince a lot of people who will be unemployed that their problem is the gardener or is the woman doing health care.

Speaker 4 Is that, do you think, a deliberate sleight of hand?

Speaker 3 For me, the logic just isn't sequential or doesn't add up because the people they're going after are exactly the kinds of jobs that AI, some of the few sectors that AI can't replace.

Speaker 3 AI still hasn't figured out a way to

Speaker 3 wake your grandmother up and bring her her medication. AI still can't give you physical therapy.
AI still can't, you still need people on construction sites. You still need people harvesting crops.

Speaker 3 I just don't,

Speaker 3 you know, I mean, AI could potentially replace a lot of Uber drivers and a lot of truck drivers, but what I see

Speaker 3 is that who AI is replacing is my kids. When I say my kids, my second year MBA graduates, I was, my first job out of college was at Morgan Stanley as an analyst.
They hired 80 analysts.

Speaker 3 I'm convinced all the work I did in two years in fixed income as an analyst at Morgan Stanley could be done in about six weeks now with AI.

Speaker 3 So the notion somehow that this,

Speaker 3 if they really wanted, I see the presidency as just a capital allocator and that his job is to, or her job is to allocate capital to a greater return than another leader who has capital at their disposal.

Speaker 3 And taking $12 billion to round up immigrants who are taxpayers and, you know, during the day at work and on weekends and evenings at school and at church. That makes no sense to me.

Speaker 3 If you really were concerned about employment, you'd be deploying vocational programs and more critical thinking skills such that people could embrace these new technologies and also embrace more self-sufficiency and energy and shovel-ready jobs.

Speaker 3 I mean, we need more healthcare workers, more people who understand how to install energy-efficient HVAC computers, build nuclear power plants. I mean, that to me is where you would help

Speaker 3 with the employment picture. But

Speaker 3 look, you've been so generous with your time. I just want to

Speaker 3 just touch on one thing that's very close to my heart, and that is I work, I think a lot about technology.

Speaker 3 And something that's just so extraordinarily disappointing to me is that these are the most blessed people in the world, as far as I can tell. If you look at the majority of them, you know,

Speaker 3 there's absolutely some great stories of immigrants and people pulling themselves by their bootstraps. 20% of the NASDAQ is not only immigrants by market cap, it's Indian immigrants.

Speaker 3 And there's some wonderful stories. But a lot of these kids came from privileged backgrounds, whether it was Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
They dropped out of Harvard because they could.

Speaker 3 And they got into Harvard because they could.

Speaker 3 And yet it feels like the most blessed among us, specifically these tech billionaires, are the first ones, quite frankly, to shitpost America and talk about some weird techno-libertarian vision that makes absolutely no sense to me.

Speaker 3 And a lot of people draw conclusions with the Gilded Age. And I know you've looked at the Gilded Age.

Speaker 3 And I would just love to get your thoughts on the parallels between the gilded age and kind of this

Speaker 3 uh technotopia or whatever you'd want to call it and what we can learn from it and where you think where you think it goes from here

Speaker 4 i'm actually really glad you asked that because i think a lot about that um including in the the ideology of the modern-day tech people because of the parallels it has with the 1880s and 1890s especially because things were changing by the the the the turn of the actual turn of the century.

Speaker 4 What I think happens is that people begin to internalize their belief that they are better than other people, that they have done something extraordinarily clever.

Speaker 4 And often, I just want to add this here, I will follow that thought, but often there is a generational change inherent there. That is, the first generation will say it, but not really mean it.

Speaker 4 They're saying it either to pump themselves up or for political advantage, but their sons, because it's almost always sons, actually believe it.

Speaker 4 So in the 1890s, for example, you see coming out of the Civil War, a whole bunch of people in the American South talking about how black Americans are inherently not as

Speaker 4 able as white Americans, as Euro-Americans, and therefore they should not have a say in American society. They used it really as a political argument for that first generation.

Speaker 4 The second generation believes that they are better, that white men are better than black men, and certainly than other black people, and they are willing willing to enforce that through lynching.

Speaker 4 So, that generational shift really matters.

Speaker 4 But that being said, I do think there is this idea that as people succeed and as they spend time with other people who succeed, they start to believe that they are, in fact, better than other people.

Speaker 4 And they, especially men, tend to erase the reality of how they got to be where they are.

Speaker 4 And they set out to create a system that they think advantages them in such a way that they will do good for the most people.

Speaker 4 So instead of picking up right there on Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, where I'll get in a second, Andrew Carnegie is a really useful person to look at because he becomes, he's an immigrant who becomes a steel baron.

Speaker 4 And he arrives in the United States at a time when he is able to rise because of the economy, because of the Civil War and the nationalization of that period, because of his connections and so on.

Speaker 4 And by the 1890s, he is no longer talking about, you know, the fortune of America that enabled him to become who he was.

Speaker 4 He is talking about how it was his own hard work that enabled him to become who he was, and that because he was so much better than the people around him, he should be able to concentrate wealth in his own hands.

Speaker 4 And that's the way the society really should work: that wealth should concentrate among those most able to amass it.

Speaker 4 Because what they would do was they would use it as the stewards of society by building libraries or opera houses or public facilities that could not be achieved unless they did concentrate that wealth.

Speaker 4 Because if you left it in the hands of the workers, they would waste it on food or clothing or housing or leisure time.

Speaker 4 Well, if you move that mindset into the present, you can see somebody like Elon Musk, who believes that he will save humanity, or at least alleges he believes that he will save humanity by settling Mars.

Speaker 4 You see that same idea that he has ideas that are only being corrupted by the idea of civil rights, regulations, the idea that, in fact, women and people of color should have equal rights to employment and equal protections in American society.

Speaker 4 That hampers him.

Speaker 4 And that mindset that some people are better than others and have the right to rule for the good of humanity is a thread that runs through American history, not just from the Gilded Age, but the elite and southern enslavers said the same thing in the 1850s, the exact same thing in the 1850s, that they were the ones who had truly figured out society.

Speaker 4 So to me, it's just a continuity. And that in many ways helps me think about ways to combat it because I don't believe that.

Speaker 4 I actually do believe that people are equal and that they do have a right to a say in their government and they do have a right to be treated equally before the law.

Speaker 4 And they should have equal access to resources, including things like healthcare and education.

Speaker 4 So when I think about reinforcing that set of ideological principles, which are the same ones that somebody like Theodore Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or FDR or Lincoln embraced,

Speaker 4 in a way, there's a roadmap there to see how we have succeeded in the past. And I do want to point out that in all of those moments that I just mentioned, the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, the present,

Speaker 4 it didn't

Speaker 4 look at the time as if the idea of equality was going to win. You think of somebody somebody like John Dos Passos in his poem about how they have clubbed us off the streets.

Speaker 4 People thought that the rich elites who wanted to control everything were going to win. It was never an easy fight.
And this fight is not going to be easy either.

Speaker 4 But I am not ready to give up on America.

Speaker 4 We have done it in the past. And in a way, we have the tools to know how to do it again.

Speaker 3 Not ready to give up on America. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history.

Speaker 3 She is the author of seven award-winning books, including her latest, Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America.

Speaker 3 Her widely read newsletter, Letters from an American, synthesizes history and modern political issues. I'm going to ask a favor.

Speaker 3 Most conversations I have, I think I have a certain, I'm not proud of this, level of arrogance. I think, okay, that's interesting, but I have a better take on this.

Speaker 3 I found myself insecure in this conversation because you are so forceful and dignified and have such deep domain expertise. And this is my ask.

Speaker 3 I want to bring more light to your work. I think

Speaker 3 it just shocks me that

Speaker 3 as much praise and influence as you have that I think your work deserves a lot more attention. And

Speaker 3 with your approval and your help, I would like to bring more attention to it. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed enjoyed this conversation.

Speaker 3 I think you are doing great work and are the right voice at the right moment.

Speaker 3 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. True Burris is our technical director.
Thank you for listening to the Prop GPod from the Box Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 11 I'm Eli Patel, Editor and Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Speaker 11 We've talked a lot about generative AI on the show lately, which is a very big idea that is causing quite a few problems.

Speaker 11 And one thing we keep hearing about over and over again is that generative AI is causing a lot of problems in schools.

Speaker 11 There are a lot of people out there, including many of the listeners of the show who email us, who are worried about the obvious problem, students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments.

Speaker 11 But when our team went and poked at the story, they found that the issues in education with AI go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself.

Speaker 10 If this technology becomes more ubiquitous, we'll have courses created by AI, graded by AI, with submissions from students absolutely generated by AI.

Speaker 10 So it begs the question: what are we even doing here in higher ed?

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Salesforce.

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