Hope for American Democracy, According to Heather Cox Richardson 01:06:32

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on! It's on!

Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, my guest is Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College and the writer of the Substack Letters from an American, where over one million subscribers wait for her to put daily political news into historical context.

Mostly, we'll discuss how we got here, here being the age of Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarianism in America. It feels scary to many, and by that, I mean me, but this is a moment decades in the making, according to Richardson's latest book, which came out last fall called Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America. It lays out how we got here and what we might do to turn it around, although the Let It Burn folks might like what is happening a lot. Well,

Well, I have a lot of questions for Richardson. I also solicited this week's expert query from Adam Kinzinger. For those who don't know, Kinzinger was one of the 10 House Republicans who crossed the aisle in voting to impeach Trump for the incitement of an insurrection. He also served on the House committee investigating January 6th with Liz Cheney. Neither of them are in Congress any longer. They've been drummed out of the body and also pretty much out of the GOP by MAGA.

We know that every generation faces their own version of an aspiring authoritarian who preys on the fears and insecurities of people they use in their rise to power. 1930s Germany had Hitler, 1920s Italy had Mussolini, and in 2016 America had Donald Trump. We know that history typically doesn't repeat exactly, but it does rhyme.

Human behavior remains consistent, and if we want indicators for how the future will be for any civilization, we just have to study the past. So my question is, why Trump and why now? More specifically, why was America more vulnerable to the rise of Trump in 2016 than after a national crisis like September 11th? When considering the historical context, it would seem...

Americans would be more vulnerable to an authoritarian movement in the wake of a collective trauma like the one we endured on that day and in the immediate years following. Do you have any particular instances like these that may come to mind when a relatively affluent and stable country made a sudden turn towards authoritarianism? Is this something we've seen before or did America make its own history?

We hear the usual comments about economic anxiety contributing to his rise, but it's hard to compare the conditions of 2016 to other moments in history when the stakes have certainly been much higher for all demographics in America. Good question from Kinzinger. Is this time different or just more of the same American experience? I'll be back with Heather Koch Richardson to talk about that in a minute. ♪

Professor Richardson, it's nice to be talking to another professor who is not Scott Galloway. So thank you for joining us. And I hope you'll be 100% less.

It's okay, but you can if you need to be. I'm used to it from professors. Hey, well, I will do my best, but thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. No problem. So I'm going to go all across the map here. The day we're taping this is the Iowa caucuses for the Republicans, and we'll get to that. But I want to start, in your book that came out last fall, this past fall, you wrote, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint. Right.

Let's start with that big idea, since that is exactly where we are. While many fear and feel the potential for political violence, nascent fascism, and perhaps more dramatically, the end of democracy, it looks like Donald Trump is doing rather well with voters, including the college-educated he was supposed to have repelled. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why that is and that idea of more democracies die through the ballot box than at gunpoint.

Okay, but those are almost different questions because the idea of democracy dying at the ballot box rather than at gunpoint, I think is an important one for Americans now because we tend to think about the idea of dictatorships coming in tanks, for example, or with people goose-stepping. And the reality is in this moment that more often people vote down a democracy, that is they vote into power people who are pushing toward authoritarianism. And a great example of that, of course, is

Hungary under Viktor Orban and his destruction of democracy there and replacement with an authoritarian movement, people voted him in. And so the idea that people can be manipulated to vote against the continuation of a democracy, I think is a really important one in this moment. And we can unpack that. But Trump is a really different situation in a sense here in 2024. And that is that, you know,

You know, he remains popular with his base. And yet, if you think about the way he is approaching the election of 2024, one of the things that fascinates me is he is not trying to appeal to undecided voters. He's really not trying to expand that base at all. In fact, he's doubling down on the extremism that attracts that very small group of people who are fervently loyal to him. He is admitting he wants to be a dictator. He is saying that he will be a dictator from day one. He is talking about rounding up

putting in camps and deporting 10 million people who are here in the United States, including citizens, citizens under birthright, citizenship, which he says he's going to get rid of. He is openly talking about staying in power longer than one more term. I mean, he's talked about weaponizing the Department of Justice. He's talking about weaponizing the military.

He's saying all of these things. So signaling it. He's signaling it. And that is not what one does to appeal to the suburban moms, which are sort of that vague group that you need to have behind you to win an election in this era. So my interest right now in him is what is he doing?

Like he is signaling that he has no intention of increasing his share of the vote. He is perfectly happy to stay with his base, which is not a majority and on which he has repeatedly lost elections. It's not small. And will it work? Well, but so what's interesting to me about that is the base, the fervent right-wing base is between 25 and 33%. But you can't win elections on those people. That's not enough people. So how do you get enough people behind you to win an election? Well, you either intimidate others into not showing up

which is what happens in Reconstruction in the American South, or you manipulate the system. And I think we're seeing both of that happening going into 2024. And in either case, that can make a minority become the acting majority. The tyranny of the minority, you know.

Speaking of dramatic, while the Washington Post uses the phrase democracy dies in darkness, it really doesn't in American history. It's more like full glare. It feels like the Salem witch trials, very showy. The Whiskey Rebellion, which everyone forgets but me. McCarthy and the Red Scare. None of it was hidden, really. Talk a little bit about this darker and very bright DNA of the U.S.,

And in lockstep is this ability to forget and move on. Our country does that a lot, forgets what happened, including the insurrection of January 6th. This is sometimes an outset and sometimes not. Talk about these moments where we seem incredibly on the edge of something.

Well, one of the things that Americans respond to are stories. I mean, all people do. But the American story, I think, is particularly malleable for dictators or for those who wish this country ill to use to get into power. And you can see that. I mean, you mentioned a number of things. And the Whiskey Rebellion is cool, but it's a little bit different because of the difference in the transmission of information that early in our history. But think of somebody like

Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, who manages, you know, when he stands up and says to a group of women voters that he has a list of card-carrying members of the Communist Party who are working in the State Department, he's making that up. You know, that absolutely doesn't exist. And

He recognizes, you know, at first it's just sort of shock value. He's giving it in Wheeling, West Virginia. I don't think he really expects the rubber to hit the road the way it does when he says that. And of course, he's running for reelection and he's done nothing to distinguish himself. But he recognizes that this is a story, the idea that America is being undermined from within by the same forces that have recently taken over China at that point, for example, or the rise of the USSR, although it's China really that people are looking at when he makes that speech.

He manages to tap into the idea that we need to protect this country, and we need to protect this country from those others. And one of the things that I think is interesting about the way we shape American stories, especially American political stories, is who we make those others that are dangerous. So really, dramatically, in 1936,

When he's running for re-election, and it looks a little iffy, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt begins to say, hey, you know, the things that we're fighting against here are not necessarily poverty the way I talked about it in 1932. The real enemies here are the rich people. Right.

who are making sure that people like you and me don't get, not him in that case, but the workers don't get paid right. And that, you know, one of the things that I watch for is who we characterize as our enemies. So right now, of course, Trump and the Republican Party are insisting that it's immigrants who are the enemies, which is really... And China still. You know, but that's a

little fuzzy because, you know, within days of the time you and I are talking, Trump came out and said, well, of course I took $8 million from China. I did stuff for them. And it's like, now hang on a minute here. You're playing it both ways. But who, you know, who are the people that you put in that position of being the ones who are destroying American society? So you talked about that. What is happening now actually begins in the 1930s after FDR's New Deal. Explain that. It's

Isn't that a cool story? So the reason I started the book in 1937 is that people wanted me to write a book explaining the questions that people ask me every day. You know, how did the parties switch sides? What is a Southern strategy? But I realized that the question people ask me most often is, how did we get here? What on earth is going on? And how do we get out of it? And Trump is both a continuation and something new, and we could talk about that. But the reason I started where I did in 1937 is because

Many people thought that when FDR was elected in 1932, he was a flesh in the pan. And he was, you know, the American people were going to repudiate him in 1936 and everything was going to go back to the way it was in the 1920s when business people ran the country. And okay, yeah, they drove us into the ditch with the Great Depression, but, you know, oopsie poopsie, they won't do that again, right?

Is oopsie-poopsie a historical term? It is absolutely what everybody said in that era. No, I'm making that up. Ducky is, just ducky is the one that they used at the time. But anyway, so when he is reelected in 1937, there's two groups of people who really, really, really hate Ducky.

the New Deal. And the New Deal is the new form of government that uses the power of the federal government to regulate business and to provide a basic social safety net and to promote infrastructure and to protect civil rights. Although it's not really doing much of that in '36. It's doing enough of it that it infuriates

white Southern Democrats who are adamant that they want to keep segregation. So they're mad about the New Deal, and the Republican pro-business wing, especially in the North, but also largely in the West, recognize that they can make common cause against the New Deal.

And so in 1937, these two groups of people, lawmakers, get together and they write what they call the Conservative Manifesto. And the Conservative Manifesto repudiates all those pieces of the New Deal. It says the government should not regulate business.

Because that means that a businessman can't run his business the way he wants to, can't accumulate wealth, and this is antithetical, they think, to the meaning of America, as it was embraced at least in the 1920s. The government should not provide a basic social safety net because that's up to the churches. The government should not promote infrastructure because that too should be private. And it sure as shootin' should not have anything to do with civil rights.

Well, if you think about that, they put this in a manifesto. It gets leaked to the press and that sort of kills it really quickly because the Democrats don't want to be criticizing their own president and the Republicans recognize that they can criticize him more effectively from outside rather than from inside. But the conservative manifesto spreads across the country through chambers of commerce, through pro-business organizations. And if you think about what's in that manifesto,

Isn't that exactly what the Republicans- That's correct. Yeah. Embraced until 2015. But it wasn't effective. You call the liberal consensus that those Republicans opposed, and it remained popular with voters for decades, so much so that in 1960, political scientist Philip Converse advised candidates to run on the promises of government spending, that government's here to help you. But then you argue the federal government's support of civil rights did change things. That was the-

The moment too far, correct? People like this idea of big government and spending and the government in charge, which FDR obviously pushed. Well, and they still do. The breaking point for Americans, for white Americans, was Brown v. Board of Education in May of 1954 when that big federal government was being used to protect civil rights in the states.

saying you cannot, as a state, discriminate against anybody, any American citizen within your borders because the 14th Amendment makes it clear that you cannot do that. And from 54, and actually it was used before that, but 54 is what we really point to. From 54 into the 1970s, the 14th Amendment is what expanded civil rights, not only for Black Americans, but also for brown Americans and for women.

And once you could argue that a big federal government was forcing your traditional society to change, that's when the people who oppose the liberal consensus could get enough power together to begin to challenge it.

That was the hook that they had. They tried for different hooks, right? Race was first, and then the women's movement, the second women's movement in the 1960s and the 1970s really engaged what were known as the traditionalists, those Christians who become evangelical Christians who really object to the idea of women having equal rights in American society.

And that misogyny, I think, is really important to remember as part of this, not only race, but also gender, because if you're looking around America right now, you see it playing out in so many ways. But the idea that women should not have access to abortion, which is 1973. Abortion and trans issues, trans and gay and lesbian issues. Well, yes, and then...

Then now it is taking shape in these extraordinary attacks on LGBTQ plus people, which is another manifestation of this. And, you know, that's the piece that has enabled those who really initially were interested in simply getting rid of business regulation to break that.

liberal consensus that called for it. So in a lot of ways, you're experiencing the same political conflict that's played out again and again in American history. But let's talk about what's new to this moment. And what I do now every week is I get an expert to call in and put a question. And this week, it's Adam Kinzinger. I've asked him for something to play for you. This is what he sent me.

We know that every generation faces their own version of an aspiring authoritarian who preys on the fears and insecurities of people they use in their rise to power. 1930s Germany had Hitler, 1920s Italy had Mussolini, and in 2016 America had Donald Trump. We know that history typically doesn't repeat exactly, but it does rhyme.

Human behavior remains consistent, and if we want indicators for how the future will be for any civilization, we just have to study the past. So my question is, why Trump and why now? More specifically, why was America more vulnerable to the rise of Trump in 2016 than after a national crisis like September 11th? When considering the historical context, it would seem that

Americans would be more vulnerable to an authoritarian movement in the wake of a collective trauma like the one we endured on that day and in the immediate years following. Do you have any particular instances like these that may come to mind when a relatively affluent and stable country made a sudden turn towards authoritarianism? Is this something we've seen before or did America make its own history?

We hear the usual comments about economic anxiety contributing to his rise, but it's hard to compare the conditions of 2016 to other moments in history when the stakes have certainly been much higher for all demographics in America.

Oh, wow. He should run for Congress. I was going to say, I hope that wasn't off the top of his head because, man. He's really good. He speaks in full paragraphs. If this has been brewing since the 1930s or even the Civil War, why 2016? Answer his questions. Any one of them you want to answer. Sure.

I'll answer at least a couple of them. So he's identified something that's really important. In 1951, a longshoreman in San Francisco named Eric Hoffer contemplated this very question. And he said something that was deeply revelatory to me and I think it became a really profound base for a lot of what I do. And that's, you know, everybody is running around after World War II going, how do we get a Hitler? How do we get a Mussolini? And what Hoffer said is he said,

It doesn't matter. Stop worrying about Hitler and Mussolini because every generation has Hitlers and Mussolinis and they don't go anywhere. The people to study are the ones who followed him. Why do you get a population and how do you get a population that is willing to follow a strong man? Which flips the script.

if you will. And what he said, I think, and this is not, I'm not, you know, I have built on him with people like Hannah Arendt and some of my own ideas about earlier American history. So I'm not trying to put words in his mouth, but I think he's a very important place to start. What he said is that

the way you get the rise of an authoritarian is you take a population that feels disaffected. It feels disaffected either politically or socially or religiously, and it feels that it has lost ground in society. And after that has been accomplished, then you get the rise of somebody who says, you know, I know you feel like things are really bad. And the reason that you feel like things are really bad are not

anything to do with what's actually happening around you. The reason you feel like things are bad is because of those people. Again, those people. And who those people are doesn't matter. But once you have convinced them that the enemy is the one that is keeping them from being relevant in today's society, you start to treat that group badly.

either legally at first, and then you look the other way when there's violence against them, and then you start to pass laws against them that discriminate against them, and then eventually it goes to a very dark place. And the more, Hoffer said, that somebody has bought into that sort of behavior, the more psychologically committed they are to maintaining their relationship with that authority figure, because if they don't,

They have to admit that that person was wrong and that they are the ones who've been complicit rather than the other way around.

So what does that mean for the present? How did we get here? If you think about the legislation that the Republican Party began to push in the 1980s, it created an economically dislocated population. It simply did. We know there's not a statistic in the world that doesn't say that wealth moved dramatically upward after 1981 when Ronald Reagan takes office. And there's a lot of people who were in the American middle class, especially white Americans, but not exclusively white Americans,

who recognize that economically they have fallen dramatically behind in their lifetimes. This is the hollowing out of the middle class. The hollowing out of the middle class. And what happened in that period, and we could talk more about this, but what happened in that period is in order to continue to get elected, Republican officials, Republican lawmakers, Republican politicians increased their rhetoric against that other.

And that other, as we talked about before, were those people that they insisted were taking advantage of the federal government to get benefits that they had not earned. They were Reagan's welfare queen, for example. They were, you know, by the time you get to Mitt Romney's campaign, they were the takers rather than the makers. Remember the makers versus the takers. Yep.

But, you know, that idea, and you see it amplified in talk radio after 1987. You see it amplified on things like the right-wing Fox News channel. The idea that there are these good Americans who work hard and don't want anything from the government, which is ridiculous, by the way, and all their money is being taken away. They are being, you know, they are being scrunched by the government in favor of undeserving Black, you

you know, or women grabbers who are taking stuff from the government. So what happens with that, I think, is when you get Donald Trump rising in 2015, 2016, people forget that

That while Trump really doubled down on the racism and the sexism and all that horrible side of what he was offering people in 2016, he was also the most economically moderate of any Republican on that stage. He called for better and cheaper health care. He called for closing tax loopholes. He called for bringing back manufacturing. And he called for infrastructure. I mean, the reason Infrastructure Week became such a joke is that's one of the things that he said he would fix.

So I think what happened and why we are where we are in the United States today is that Trump actually sort of held up a mirror to the people who had been created by the Republican Party and gave them what they thought they wanted in that period. Now, what's important, though, to recognize is that the Trump that we had in 2016 was

as a candidate, was not the Trump that ended up in office, who gives us a travel ban within weeks of taking office, which is obviously an explicit attempt to say, there's the enemy, you know, we're going to go after them. The wing of the Republican Party that wants to get rid of business regulation are happy as little clams at high tide until 2017 when they get that dramatic tax cut for corporations and for the very wealthy.

But after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Trump begins to turn those people who were rhetorically behind him into a movement. That's new in American society. Okay, so let's talk about it because one of the things that's being used is the Hitler comparison, which has been used a lot with him. And that was, of course, torches, the whole thing. The Jews will not replace us, etc. Has that Nazi metaphor been overused recently?

And then it fails to shock. And why is it appropriate here? As you said, he started out more moderate, but then he used these tools of engagement to create enragement and fear to paint himself as savior and to stoke this discontent. Is this an apt comparison now? Because people do overuse it for, oh, you don't act like a Nazi, whatever. You know, people throw it around a lot on Twitter, everywhere else, and it loses its power.

Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, you absolutely can make those comparisons now. He is very deliberately using Nazi imagery. And by the way, he was doing the same thing in 2020. He was. I mean, there was one period when Melania Trump very deliberately showed up at the Republican National Convention. And by the way, that was itself a travesty because of the way that was handled. And she is wearing a dress that is evocative of Trump.

SS troops and quite deliberately. It was a provocative dress and she knows what she's doing. I mean, this is her living is understanding clothing and poses and all that. So he'd been doing that before. But I think for me, anyway, one of the things that's very important to remember is, you know, the Nazis don't come from nowhere. You know, when I look at the way societies work, to me, it's very simple.

There are some people who think that some people are better than others and have the right and maybe the duty to rule over the rest of us because we are not competent to control our own lives. And then there are people who believe that, no, in fact, that the way society should work is we should all have an equal right to have a say in the government under which we live. If you think about the rise of the Nazis, when...

Hitler's people try and write laws to figure out how to discriminate against different groups in their society. There's a lot of discussion about how you write these laws. And where do they look? They look to the United States, to the Jim Crow laws and the Juan Crow laws and the indigenous reservations.

And so, you know, and if you think about the Jim Crow laws and the Juan Crow laws, where do they come from? They come from the Black Codes. And the Black Codes come from the pre-Civil War laws. And the pre-Civil, you know, you can go back and you can recognize that the Americans don't have to look to the Nazis.

to find the roots of this kind of behavior because we can take it all the way back to the first anchor dropped off the coast of North America by a European. So we don't need to borrow from the Nazis since we gave them the material. Yeah, I mean, they perfected a lot of stuff for sure. But if you sort of think, well, this is just about the 1920s and the 1930s, I think it's a much harder fit with the United States than it is to say, for example, this looks like the 1850s.

Different language, but the same meaning behind that language. Or this looks like, you know, and you can take it all the way back. Sure. You know, in those cases, whether it was the end of the Civil War, whether it was the Red Scare or different periods where sort of fascists tried to take control, they've always been unsuccessful. You know, they get close, but not really that close. And they always end up sort of eating themselves. Why does that happen here?

Because just there's dozens of examples of these groups, whether it's Charles Lindbergh or those groups that were in the Midwest for a while. They tend to burn out in this country until Trump.

Well, I think there's a lot of factors that make the present different. One, we have social media, which spreads not only alternative voices, but also amplifies those voices. And we have this very large population that is economically disaffected. And they are a specific population coming out of World War II and the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.

So I think those two things are there, but I also think that one of the things that I work with, remember, I'm an idealist, so I believe that ideas change society, is that in all the periods that you're talking about, there was a fervent defense of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, not only among people who were in office, often they were not defending those principles, but among marginalized Americans who stood on those principles with the argument that if we're really going to be this country, by God, we ought to act like we're part of this country. But

But the fact that we have not been articulating what democracy means because we assumed it was a given, I think has been a real problem for us. And now you're seeing people begin to pick that up. Yeah. Let's talk about the future of the Republican Party. To return to your theme in the book, you write about how our major political parties have changed over long history. People, again, forget about that. And everyone knows that Lincoln was a Republican. Right.

Is significant party change happening and related? I've interviewed Kinzinger and recently Liz Cheney for both. It was political suicide to go against Trump. Can there be significant party change happening right now? And then how do you deal with figures like Cheney or a Kinzinger candidate?

and their fate? Well, I would like to clarify, first of all, that I don't think it's been political suicide for either one of those two. I think that that jury is still out because what we are seeing right now, and I find it fascinating, as an American citizen, I find it terrifying, but as a historian, especially a historian of the Republican Party, I find this moment incredibly fascinating because what's happened really since 2021 in the Republican Party is it has quite deliberately

switched from being that, which was underway during the Trump administration, switched from being that party that I originally described, the party of a number of elite leaders who are interested in getting rid of business regulation and taxes and who are using the votes of that underclass, if you will, of those racist, sexists, you know, people who want to control society again, using those votes with the idea that they would never actually give them any power. Right.

And one of the things Trump does, especially after the Unite the Right rally, is he starts to rely on those people for different reasons. And eventually he gives them what they want, which is, for example, three Supreme Court justices who do go ahead and overturn Roe versus Wade, which is enormously unpopular around the country. And certainly the elite people going into 2016 recognized that it would be incredibly unpopular. That is not news to anybody who actually looks at the numbers. That was never a surprise.

but that's not what the base wanted. So what you've seen really since 2021 is an extraordinary change in the Republican Party. So while in 2015, 2016, as Trump is rising, they're really emphasizing the idea of lower taxes and getting rid of regulation, which is still there.

But now they have switched from the idea of a small government that doesn't regulate taxes, doesn't protect civil rights, doesn't do all of these things, to the idea of a very strong government that, in fact, imposes Christian nationalism on a country that doesn't want it. And so one of the people to watch, I think, is Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has very deliberately embraced some of the exact same laws that were pioneered in Hungary under Viktor Orban.

which are using a very strong government to say, for example, to a business like Disney or to the cruise ships, for example, I don't care what the markets want. I no longer care about a market economy, which is exactly what the Republicans had stood for between 1980 and 2016. Yeah, forever.

I care about you enforcing my moral strictures on the people who come to Disney. That is antithetical to anything the Republicans have ever stood for, really, in their history. And it goes from being a small government pro-business

to being a big government pro-religion. And that's an entirely new moment in American history. We've never had that before. And, you know, watching the Republican Party do that and knowing that that is extraordinarily unpopular around the country. I said after Nikki Haley refused the other day to talk about slavery and the coming of the Civil War, that the party was dead. And people have said to me for years, the party's dying, the party's dying, the party's dying. And I kept saying, no, it's not.

The party always rebuilds itself because the ideology behind the Republican Party is as central to our DNA as the Democratic ideology. And those two things dance together. They rise, they fall, but essentially we will always have that ideology. And I maintain that. We will always have the ideology at the true heart of the Republican Party that gave us Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower and all those moments.

But the modern-day Republican Party has driven itself off a cliff. They have gone into authoritarianism, Christianity, white nationalism, and that will die. There's going to be a new party, as I say, and I don't know if it's going to be called Republican or whatever, but it's going to embrace those older values, and those older values may very well have a place in them for the Kinzingers and Cheneys. I think they're called no labels. I think they're called no labels. At least they're...

There's versions of it. That's that group. So one of the people you just mentioned, President Biden, has been trying to use this as well. It's obviously in the speeches he made. And we'll get into that. You had called him in a recent interview transformative. And at first you were not a supporter in 2020, I think. Correct. That's correct.

Why and what changed from your perspective? And why do you call him transformative? Because a lot of people think he's a caregiver, a gatekeeper, you know what I mean? A transitional figure rather than transformative. Well, that's why I didn't like him. I shouldn't say didn't like him. That's why I was not a big supporter is I thought he was going to be a babysitter. And I was like, we do not need a babysitter in this moment. And I got to say, I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

If you are watching that administration as closely as I am, which of course I am on a really tight basis every single day, what you see is the utter rejection of the supply-side economics or trickle-down economics that Reagan and succeeding presidents have put into place.

He has really dramatically changed the way that the federal government interacts with the economy, taking us back to essentially the kind of modified Keynesian economics that we had before Ronald Reagan. And it's interesting because when he kept saying, this is going to work, this is going to work, this is going to work, and I kept looking at the numbers and writing every night, this is going to work, this is going to work, I kept thinking, what if I'm wrong? Because everybody else was writing, this is all going to hell in a handbasket. And I thought...

am I saying? Of course it's going to work. We know it works because it worked from 1933 to 1981. So, you know, he's not inventing this. So the economy has changed dramatically. The inclusion of previously marginalized populations in the United States into our government is transformational, both obviously in his White House, but also in the many things he's done with the judiciary, with the way he has remade, for example, the Democratic

nominating process has changed. I mean, we could go on in that. But also in foreign affairs. What this country has done in foreign affairs under Biden, I will confess, I said, you know, who cares that he knows a lot about foreign affairs because in this moment we need domestic attention. And I could not have been more wrong. And

I always say to people, one of the things that literally keeps me up at night is imagining what would have happened if Putin had invaded Ukraine for the second time in February 2022 if Donald Trump were in power. They would own Ukraine. They would own Ukraine, but they would also be, think how weak Europe would be. NATO would have dissolved, Europe would be on the ropes, and I think the world would be an extraordinarily different place right now. Interesting. We'll be back in a minute.

So you recently interviewed President Biden for the second time. You also did so in 2022. Explain how you approach these interviews, because as you noted in your newsletter, you're not a journalist covering a politician, you're a historian. How do you approach that differently when you're asking him that? Because he like sort of has that avuncular thing going on.

What you're talking about is a very muscular chief executive. So it's interesting. And I actually quite like interviewing people like him because I am not looking for a scoop. It doesn't seem to me to be any good to sit there and go, well, tell me about why you're doing X. It's either out there or he's not going to tell me.

But what, as a historian, I want to know is what does it mean to him? Like, how is he thinking about things? Because that, we have no way to get that otherwise. So to be able to, one of the things that has always frustrated me in this latest interview I got to ask him, he always says, I have more faith in Americans than I ever have. And I'm like, what does that mean? And I fully expected him

to echo what I kind of set up. We're in a community, we all help each other out, you know, and I fully expected that, and I threw that at him, and he goes, "Nah, Americans don't want to be told what they can't do." And I was like, "Where did that come from?" And it kind of makes me have to rethink the way that I think about him, because what I'm really trying to do when I write every night is, you know, explain things to people for sure, but what I'm really trying to do is write the history of this moment for somebody in 150 years.

And that means that, honestly, that really kind of shook up the way I think about him. That was the answer that surprised you. Yes. Oh, totally. And I think that, honestly, you could sit there and say, well, who cares? It doesn't matter what this policy is toward the border. But

To me, it really matters if you think about the way that he is approaching issues of civil rights. Honest to God, I thought he was doing it because it felt like we should all be part of the same community. And it really sounded, when he gave that answer, like he's like, no, that interferes with an individual's ability to do what they can accomplish. And of course, that makes total sense when you think about it, because he had to overcome the issue of his stuttering, which certainly in my era usually was interpreted as you're stupid, right?

And and I just you know, to me, I'm going to have to rethink the way that I have approached Tim. All right. You also had lunch. You and other historians had lunch with the president early January, just days where he was heading off to Valley Forge to kick off this year's campaigning with a strong message about the danger of Trump and the danger to democracy. Talk about that meeting and what you all imparted to the president or what questions he had for you.

Well, the meeting was off the record, of course. And I have to say— I don't care, but go ahead. I think what—well, you'll know why I say that. I think that it is significant that when you get a bunch of academics together, the plural word for a bunch of academics in the same room is argument. Right.

And I think that that, you know, I think what was most impressive about that was his very clear interest in understanding what we all thought about this moment in the United States and what that meant. And that's what you argued about? Yes.

Well, actually, to be honest, academics will argue about absolutely everything. And we do. And we did. Because that's what we do. And that's fun for us. That's not because we hate each other. But yeah, it was really, you know, I think we're all kind of wondering where we are in this country right now. And it's, you know, to have that set of brains in one room with very, very different perspectives, very different political leanings. I think that showed a lot of intellectual curiosity. Yeah.

Let's, after that lunch, Biden went on to a historic site, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where George Washington camped with his troops during the Revolutionary War, a very critical time. Let's hear a clip of the speech there just weeks ago. In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge. General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks.

to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire that existed in the world at the time. His mission was clear: liberty, not conquest; freedom, not domination; national independence, not individual glory. America made a vow: never again would we bow down to a king.

Now, why do you think he chose this place to reference the start of his campaign? And is it an apt one from a historic, or would you pick a different moment in history? I actually loved that he chose Valley Forge, and that's one of the things I asked him because it was a surprise. I mean, presidents generally have their list of things they invoke, and Valley Forge is not one of them.

And one of the things that fascinates me is... I'm just curious. I'm going to just ask you, what's the most popular? Where do they tend to go? You know, I don't know what the most popular one is. I tend to think of the Lincoln Memorial. People always hit Washington. They always hit Lincoln, but Lincoln especially. But I was interested in that because, of course, while lawmakers don't usually invoke Valley Forge, popular culture does.

So I thought that was really interesting that they had picked Valley Forge to go to because in our memories of Valley Forge, which are not actually indicative of what actually happened at Valley Forge, but in our memories of Valley Forge, it's a small group of embattled people

who are generally being neglected because the Congress isn't coming up with enough money to deal with the war at that point. And it's not the same Congress we have now, of course, just for your listeners. It's under an earlier governmental system. We remember it as this period of a small group of people overcoming a great obstacle. And that great obstacle enables them to establish the United States of America. And there's a lot compressed into that.

But it's popular enough that one of the points I made in a later letter is that Valley Forge shows up repeatedly in our popular culture, including in Star Trek. I mean, Star Trek uses Valley Forge not infrequently as a symbol of a little group of people who managed to change history.

And so I thought it was interesting that he chose that in this moment. And I think it was an attempt to hearten people who are terrified about where we are, feeling like we can't take this country back and to say, yeah, we actually can. They've done it before at Valley Forge. Although, of course, that's not actually what really happened at Valley Forge. But I thought that was interesting that he chose that. Right. By contrast, Donald Trump hosted his first campaign rally in March 2023 in Waco, Texas.

on a date that fell within the 30th anniversary of the violent standoff between the Branch Davidians, a religious cult in the federal government there in Waco. Let's hear a clip from that. We've been the ones in this fight standing up to the globalists and standing up to the Marxists and communists. That's what they are. We don't even talk about the socialists anymore that train left that station a long time ago.

The Trump campaign denied they were making a connection. Talk about the contrasting symbols. Oh, come on. Come on. I'm just telling you. I have to say it. I'm sorry, but like... Yeah. No, nothing to see here. No dead bodies anywhere. Talk about the contrasting symbolism of those two places, because Waco does have much more of a resonance in some places, you know,

than others. You know, we have forgotten about it, most of us, but many have not. Well, let's not forget that it's Waco that gives Alex Jones his start in talk radio. That's Waco. Let's talk about that in just a second. But I would like to point out that if you wrote a movie lining up this moment and in American history, honest to God, nobody would buy it because it's too obvious. You know, there's absolutely no subtlety any longer at all

certainly on Trump's side, but I would also argue on Biden's side now. He is finally, not finally, because the administration has been talking about democracy all along. It's not been covered, but they've been talking about it all along. But, you know, he's finally really embracing it and going, folks, now's our moment, which is precisely what FDR did in his two first elections as well. And certainly what Abraham Lincoln did in the election of 1860.

But Trump is very deliberately doubling down on those militia gangs that form in the United States after Waco and in the 1990s and forward that manifested the ideology of the Republican Party as it was being rhetorically delivered by lawmakers, especially lawmakers back in Washington, saying this big government is threatening your liberty and

It's making women equal. It's making black people equal. It's taking your hard-earned tax dollars, which, by the way— You can't have your guns. You can't have your guns. Yes, which, by the way, is a bit of a misnomer for the people who are involved in those militias. They don't have a lot of money. And you need to fight back against it. And one of the things that I think is interesting and crucial in this moment is if you think—and let's hop back here to the revolution for a minute. What's the difference between—

between the guys who threw the tea into the harbor in 1773 and Lauren Boebert standing in front of the Congress talking about 1776. Because remember, the people who attacked the Capitol in January of 2021 insisted that they were 1776. You know, that they're... That they are the tea party, so to speak. That they are the people who are reestablishing what they consider to be true American values. And this is a real question.

because there are bad gangs who run around during the revolution as well, people we don't even remember necessarily because of the damage that they did. So is there a difference? Is it just a question of who's telling the story? And I have come to believe that there is a huge difference. That is, it is possible to have mobs, if you will, like the people who attack the tea on those ships, who attack nothing else, by the way. One guy starts to put some tea into his pockets and they drive him off the ship because he's stealing, he's not destroying it.

and they deliberately protected everything else that was being carried on those ships. They are making a political statement, but they are also standing up for the expansion of liberal democracy, not the contraction of it. And I think that's a really important distinction when we think about whether or not

People who are saying, hey, I'm the one protecting America. Well, are you protecting the idea of democracy and its inclusion of more and more people? Or is your America the one that has been embraced, for example, by Donald Trump or by Joe McCarthy when he's trying to exclude people from our society? Or like the elite enslavers who said, yeah, we're protecting what America is really about. Oh, and by the way, that means we get to enslave anybody whose color is different than ours.

That, I think, is a really important distinction to have in this moment. They definitely try to make the comparisons. There's just something Trump is doing right now and has been doing for years. And you brought up the people of the Capitol. Another thing new this moment, though, is Trump's legal baggage. There's a lot of conversation happening right around the 14th Amendment and the term insurrection or rebellion. Now, you're not a lawyer, but can you—

care to weigh in whether January 6th was in terms of an attempted insurrection and what are the implications for Trump of all these legal proceedings? Okay, a difference here. First of all, the implications for the legal proceedings are extreme and that's something that I think we need to focus in. Whenever

He gets in legal trouble. He does take a hit in his polls. And we've got a lot that's gonna happen between now. - Well, it also goes up. - With certain people. But as I say, you don't win an election based on a smaller loyal base. You win elections based on including more people, unless your goal is simply to create enough fear and violence that people don't show up at the polls. I mean, that's just the way it is. That's just the way the equation works. And that has me, it's one of the other things that has me up at night.

But historically, this was an insurrection. End of discussion. This was an insurrection. It was an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overthrow the will of the voters. So historically, you would compare it to what? Was there anything like that?

No, Kara, there never has been. And I say that as I do because, to me, it was one of the most profoundly heartbreaking things I have ever lived through, and I'm a 61-year-old woman. Because, as I've said elsewhere, you know, the Civil War is sort of viscerally real to me because of what I study and how deeply immersed I've been in it. And during the Civil War, there were troops of soldiers in rings around the

the Capitol protecting it. And that's where we get the battle hymn of the Republic, you know. I have seen him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps. And by God, for four years, in a war that had casualties of 600,000 people, cost $6 billion, that Confederate battle flag never flew in the United States Capitol.

And those people brought it in. And that symbolism itself, to me, is an utter condemnation of what they did. But it also proves what you just asked. Was it an insurrection? Absolutely. That was an attempt to destroy the United States government. And it came bloody close to succeeding. So do you, when you think about where we are now, do

Most people think it's going to be Trump versus Biden. Historically, have we seen something like this where round two is essentially Rocky II, I guess? What are the assets and deficits for each of those candidates from your perspective?

Let's start with Trump, because one of the deficits I see in him that I don't think people are paying enough attention to, but I am because I watch him a lot. I don't think he looks good. I don't think he looks good before the cameras. He wanders. He's very hard to follow. And he is all about grievance. And as I say, that's not picking up more votes. I really have come to believe that he is intending either to steal the election or to create enough violence that people are afraid to show up and vote.

And there are many ways in which he could steal the election, not least the 12th Amendment, which has me much more upset than anybody else seems to be. And that is if there's enough confusion about what happened. And this was actually outlined in the 2020 memo by Eastman. This is John Eastman. John Eastman, yes, the lawyer who comes up with the idea of the alternative electors and all that. If you can create enough confusion...

Mind you, this is not legal, but if you can create enough confusion that you can have the Congress say that they do not know what the outcome of the election was with certain states' electoral votes, then the election goes into the House of Representatives by the 12th Amendment. This is under the 12th Amendment. And in the House of Representatives, each state gets a single vote. If there are more Republican states than Democratic states...

They can put Donald Trump in office even if he gets just a very small percentage of the vote, which is one of the reasons I've been watching really closely the way that states and state Republican parties, which were really packed by Trump while he was in office and Trump's people packed them while they were in office, have been really making sure that the Republicans are going to control those states. And I am very concerned that nobody is really looking at that.

Anyway, he is also, as I say, I think the legal cases are going to hurt quite badly. And you can see his attempt to push them all off, I think, is a concern that once people see things like tapes or hear things like tapes of January 6th, they're going to react the way they did when we had the hearings in Congress. That is, support for him is going to drop profoundly.

Okay, asset? Assets for Trump? He's got that base. It's not going anywhere. And crucially, he's sewn up what I call the pinpoints or the pressure points of the American democracy. He's sewn up state Republican parties. He has sewn up the Supreme Court. He has sewn up

the leadership of the House of Representatives, which is no small thing to have Mike Johnson in there. And the Senate appears to have rolled over and played dead, at least the Republicans in the Senate. So I'm very concerned that he's trying to manipulate the Electoral College in order to put himself in office, even though he loses the popular vote. And then, of course, he does have his legions of people in social media

and the bots in social media, which are pushing his candidacy. So Biden's assets and deficits. Biden's assets are going to be, I'm going to say something different than I think people expect here. One of them, first of all, is that this has been an extraordinarily successful presidency.

The fact that this economy is the strongest in the world right now is nothing short of a miracle. And I think really is one of the reasons you're seeing such extraordinary hostility from the Republicans, because he has proven that this system works, the system that they tried to destroy in 1980. And really, basically, as you say, hollowed out the middle class, the system works. It's actually put a lot of money in people's pockets.

Wages have risen dramatically more quickly than inflation has. Inflation has now come down. Foreign affairs have also worked quite well as well, which that's sort of a longer discussion. But I think it's been an extraordinarily successful presidency. But

I actually think that Biden's strength is not the hat, believe it or not, but is the fact that I see what we saw in the 1850s. And that is that once Americans woke up to recognize that there was a significant attempt to try and destroy American democracy, they made alliances across parties, they made alliances over distance, over any number of differences, and they came together at that period as the Republican Party.

to try and restore American democracy. And that's what I see right now. And one of the touch points of that, I think, has been Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health in June of 2022, which is the moment in which Americans recognized that for all the years in which people have said, they're not coming for Social Security, they're not coming for Medicare, you know, they're not coming for Roe versus Wade. They recognize that, oh, yes, they are.

And I think the fact that Democrats have overperformed by eight points in every special election that has been held regarding abortion since then says that there's a real trend going here. And when you see states where the voters have tried to protect abortion access, Republicans in those state legislatures saying, we don't care what you think, we're going to do it our way. I think

that that, I honestly think there's sort of a quiet movement going on. And the deficit, very quickly? The deficit, I think, is simply that his message is not getting out because he's not getting covered in those major publications. And there is absolutely an attempt to use social media and to use the media to tear apart his presidency. And that is going to be a really hard thing to overcome because I think it's not

to argue that we are in a war for control of the United States, but it's being fought primarily through psychology. And I think people aren't aware of that. Well, speaking of that, I'm going to finish up talking about your business. Your sub stack, as you said, reportedly has over 1 million subscribers. The Press Gazette estimated the newsletter makes at least $5 million a year. Is that correct? You're making money with history? Well, I'm sitting here listening to that last number and thinking, really? I didn't know that. Yeah.

I suppose you could say that, yes. I would also push back, though, and say that I have never been in this for the money. I'm adamant about that. I've never advertised. I've never required subscriptions or anything else because...

I'm trying to get American history out there. I would say that what I have identified, not deliberately, I never intended to go into this at all, I was simply answering questions on my Facebook page. I think what we're identifying is an extraordinary hunger among the American people, not

Not only to understand their history, although that's there too, but also to feel like they have a part in this society. And what I am doing is offering a story, if you will, the story of America in which we have all participated and people are really eager to be part of that. So speaking about you discussing the different platforms, you started on Facebook and are still there, but now the Substack controversy. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about it. The company has come under fire for tolerating Nazis and white supremacists.

Tech reporter Casey Newton, who's a very close friend of mine, recently announced he was taking, and we talked about this a lot over the last couple of weeks, his popular newsletter platformer to ghost as a result. What do you think of the current controversy? Because there's been several at Substack, as you know. And have you had conversations with them about the issue?

So I always like to emphasize that for me, Substack was always a technology platform. You know, I was never part of the cultural movement that they were trying to create around there.

And the fact that it is a cultural, they're attempting to create a certain kind of... They're doing editorial no matter how they slice it. They're doing it. Yeah. And that, I think, has always been a problem. I don't think it's a new problem. Now, the problem that I have is whether or not there's another platform that can handle the volume that I do. And the reason that that matters is because we've got this big election coming up.

And I've watched what happened to Twitter. Once Twitter got taken over by the Nazis, Twitter was an extraordinary—I'm sorry, maybe they're not just not—you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Twitter was a site of resistance.

And it is no longer. And the other platforms, and I'm on a lot of other platforms, are good for different reasons, but they are not what Twitter was before Musk took it over. And so one of the things that I am grappling with is that if I move elsewhere, if I am able to move elsewhere with the volume I'm doing...

Am I destroying Substack as the center of resistance it is? Because it's not just me. There's Joyce White Vance. There's, I mean, like there's Kevin. You're the main. I'm the big dog in the fight for sure. You are the Taylor Swift of Substack. So I think if you can read between the lines, you will be able to hear whether or not I'm exploring other options. Have I put pressure on Substack behind the scenes? Yes. And what is the reaction? You can see how well it worked.

Yeah, yeah, it didn't. It worked. We're talking to five Nazis. We're going to kick off five Nazis. That was helpful.

But I think that's really facile because it's not just this particular issue of these six people. There are issues about public discourse and that they were violating their own principles, but also...

In what way do you get to shape that cultural discourse? And I want a tech platform. I don't want to be part of somebody else's experiment. But they're not doing that. They're doing that. No, that's right. They're doing moderation in some fashion and editorial with their social network. What do you think? Do you think I should stay or go? I think you should leave. Go. You think I should leave? Yes. I think it would send a big signal.

Well, but just to play this out a little bit. You've got the power to make changes. Yes, but again, you know I do my research, but it is going to be imperative that somebody else can pick up the other voices that I would like to preserve. So if I leave, Substack's got itself a major problem, I would guess. I'm not part privy to their numbers, but I think they've got a major problem. But if that takes down the site, what happens to Joyce White Vance?

You bring her with you. You have a big boat, Heather. If somebody else can handle that volume. Right. See what I'm saying? Yeah. So we're in the midst of this, as you can see. I don't know if it's going to bring down the site necessarily, but that's the way things work. People walk with their feet. You know, I've done it many times.

Last question. I'm going to end on a high note. There's a scene that comes up again and again in the book, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which happens to be one of my favorite pieces of writing. 272 words. And the piece herself was not that well received at the time, yet it remains, I think, one of the most enduring speeches in American history. Everyone knows the famous line, four scores and seven years ago, which refers to the Declaration of Independence. But its final line, the kicker, is profound. That

That we, that I'm only reading the back part of it, that we hear highly resolved these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and the government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth. So what's your best historical guess of how we can have that new birth of freedom?

Great question, because one of the points that I made in Democracy Awakening was that we have expanded American liberal democracy since the beginning. And one of the things that it feels to me that we are in right now is the birth process of expanding that liberal democracy yet again.

And the way we get that new birth of freedom and what that looks like is, for me anyway, taking the ideas of the New Deal that expanded liberal democracy so dramatically when it was enacted and de-centering what was then at the center of that New Deal, which was heteronormative white men, essentially. The New Deal was designed the same way that FDR's

remaking of American government was designed in the same way that Lincoln's remaking of America was designed to enable men to be able to support a nuclear family or to be able to support their families. And it seems to me that decentering white heteronormative men from the center of American society and putting in place children, which is ultimately the end goal of societies anyways, to protect their children,

creates the opportunity for there to be both economic, social, cultural patterns that really do enable us to re-envision what it means to live in a liberal democracy. And I see what is happening around us, and I see the sorts of things that, for example, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden are trying to put in place. And it looks to me like a real move in our society away from, you know, centering economic

heteronormative white men, which I, you know, think is the next step of where a liberal democracy on this continent goes. And chances? Where are you putting chances? So I am putting the chances of restoring American democracy with heteronormative white men at the center of it excellent. Although I do worry that Trump has sewn up the nodes of American democracy. I am putting the chances of what I just suggested in

as being very good in the next generation. I think it's gonna be a harder sell for people who are, let's say, over 40. But, you know, one of the things that Tom Nichols of The Atlantic always points out is that by 2028, the American demographic that votes is gonna be extraordinarily different. The baby boomers are going to be moved offstage.

And the younger generations are going to be the primary voters in the United States. And I think that they're going to have a very different view of liberal democracy than people like you and me do. I would agree. I would agree. Presser, this has been fantastic.

And not one terrible joke. I'm so happy. Except oopsie doopsie, which, you know, but I'll accept it. I'll accept it. This has been wonderful. I am of a believer that the world spins forward, like Tony Kushner wrote. So we'll just have to see. But I agree with you about young people, for sure. Well, here's to it.

On with Kara Swisher is produced by Naeem Araza, Christian Castro-Rossell, Kateri Yochum, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis, Kate Gallagher, and Andrea Lopez Cruzado. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics.

If you're already following the show, you too could be the Taylor Swift of Substack. If not, history will not look kindly on you. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back on Thursday with more.