After 250 years, do US citizens still believe in the American Dream?

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0:36Heather Cox Graham:Hello, it's Anthony, and you're about to hear AmeriCast. We're delighted to have you with us. And if you enjoy what you hear, please do consider subscribing to the podcast. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Now, on with today.

0:50Anthony:It is 250 years since that pivotal year, that year that 13 American colonies declared independence from Great Britain. 1776, the year that everything changed. Everything changed for them, for the actual people doing the signing. Everything changed, of course, on that continent, but also everything changed, you could argue, for the whole world. So here is the question. Has it been a success? Has the American experiment succeeded or failed? Or is the jury out? Welcome to AmeriCast.

1:27Anthony:americast americast from bbc news you hear that sound oh i think when i hear that sound it reminds

1:34Heather Cox Graham:me of money we didn't start this war but under president trump we are finishing it this is a big cover-up and this administration is engaged in it this guy has trump arrangement syndrome i have four words for you turn the volume up

1:54Anthony:Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England.

1:58Heather Cox Graham:And it's Anthony in the American headquarters of AmeriCast here at the BBC Bureau in Washington, D.C.

2:03Anthony:And we can get straight to our subject because listening to us and on the line is Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College, used to teach at MIT. She's published a load of books about American history. She's got a sub stack. She's been a very prolific person on Substack for many years. She's got 3 million subscribers, which is going something. She's also got this 250 to 250 project. So this is a series of YouTube videos that look at specific moments, characters in the history of the US. So, Heather, thank you for talking to us. Welcome to AmeriCast.

2:42Justin:It's a pleasure to be here.

2:44Anthony:Can I start with a really simple question and a positive question? Because I think we need to be positive. I want to be positive about America on its 250th birthday. And it's this question. What is there to celebrate? What should be celebrated? What can be celebrated?

2:59Justin:Well, what can be celebrated today is what we have always celebrated, is the ability of individual people to determine their future and to determine the government under which they live. And for all the terrible things that are happening in the United States right now, what you are seeing is a rebirth of that sense of agency and the desire to create a better nation.

3:17Heather Cox Graham:There was something that Barack Obama, a quote he liked to always cite, and that was about the arc of history bending towards justice. And I think there are a lot of people on the left when Obama was elected president who felt that was true. Some of you who had been covering my campaigns know this is one of my favorite expressions, was Dr. King's expression that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We have to believe that ultimately justice will prevail. Do you think now at the 250th anniversary with Donald Trump in office that people on the left still feel that?

3:52Heather Cox Graham:Or do you think that there's a disillusionment with the direction of the country?

3:57Justin:Well, a couple of things. First of all, I'm really careful about the way we use the term the left here, because, of course, the left actually is an embrace of a kind of political economy that would destroy liberal democracy. And the United States of America really has never had a lot of people who are firmly in that camp. So what you're really talking about are those people who we used to refer to as the liberal consensus, those people who are trying to shore up American democracy. And what's interesting, I think, and I can't speak for other people, I'm speaking as an observer of what's happening in American politics.

4:31Justin:What is interesting in this moment are certainly the people who say, that's it, we're done, it's time to, you know, to hang up our spurs. And the people who say, you know, we're in a really hard moment, but we understand that we have the agency to change that moment. And one of the things that you are seeing is the rise of a reexamination of people like Barbara Jordan, who in 1974 was one of the people who really held the Republicans' feet to the fire to impeach Richard Nixon. or you're seeing the real celebration of those people who stepped forward in hard times in a way that we haven't for a long time.

5:11Justin:And part of that as well, I think, speaks to how many people are interested in history again in a way that they haven't been for a long time.

5:20Anthony:I'm fascinated when you talk about the idea of those who are on the left being still supporters of the liberal project that is the United States. Because one of the suggestions, and this was made some time ago by Richard Rorty, the wonderful philosopher who I think is now dead. But he wrote this book called Achieving Our Country, quote from James Baldwin. The idea was, the Baldwin idea, Baldwin, of course, an African-American, gay in a time when that wasn't allowed either. or certainly wasn't socially acceptable, and at a time when Jim Crow still existed, still suggesting to Americans that the country was achievable.

6:03Anthony:The things that were promised originally 250 years ago could be achieved by everyone in it. And Richard Rorty's point being a decade or so ago, I'm not sure that people on the left are fully signed up to the Liberal project anymore. In other words, they don't believe anymore that the country is achievable. And when you hear the rhetoric of some on the progressive left, as they style themselves now, he's got a point, hasn't he?

6:31Justin:Yes, but those people don't speak for a majority of the American people. And one of the reasons that I make that distinction between the left and the liberal consensus is because the American political project has swung so far to the right that one of the points I like to make in this moment is those people in the United States, for the most part. Now, of course, because of the way our primaries work and because of the fact we're in this moment of political transition, everybody on both sides occasionally tosses up somebody that I know professionally as wackadoodles. So, you know, we're going to put those out of the picture.

7:05Justin:But if you think about those people who are currently being called the progressive left or even Democratic Socialists and calling themselves Democratic Socialists, their policies are actually to the right of the Republican Party in 1956. So this idea that somehow they are this radical left, when in fact, in the post-World War II era, they would not have even been really, I mean, I guess you could say they would have been mainstream Republicans, but they would have been on the right of the Republican Party in the 1950s. So I just like to make that distinction because some of the things that they are calling for or standing behind are actually really quite centrist in terms of the sweep of American history.

7:49Anthony:So just to drill down on that, what are the, you're talking about, I don't know, universal health care then or attitudes to racial equality?

7:59Justin:Both of those things. Universal health care, of course, is proposed in the United States at first by Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s. We're not talking this is something modern and crazy. And, you know, we could talk about the history of that, but certainly Dwight Eisenhower was the president who gave us a cabinet level health and human services department. So that idea of universal health care, but even more than that, I'm always very interested in economics. Do you know what the top tax bracket was in the 1950s in America?

8:33Heather Cox Graham:I can't imagine. 90 %? Yeah.

8:36Justin:92. 92%.

8:38Heather Cox Graham:There you go.

8:38Justin:But I'm not hearing anybody say we need to go to a tax policy where the upper tax income bracket is 92%. So, you know, but also there are more things that the Republicans stood for in 56. The expansion of Social Security, the expansion of employment protections, the expansion of the social safety net, you know, more making it easier for women and disabled Americans to work for comparable wages, for the same wages as men. I mean, there's like all of these things that were in the 1956 Republican platform. The Democratic platform had even more suggestions, but the Republican platform that now are simply not on the table in the United States.

9:24Heather Cox Graham:One of the things we've seen over the last 20 years or so is these big swings back and forth between Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, Republican Congresses, Democratic Congresses, and a kind of a sense by voters on both sides that the system isn't working. They're frustrated. They throw the bums out. They bring in new people. They get frustrated with them. They throw them out. There are historic parallels over the past 250 years where there has been that kind of thing where it seems like people are fed up with the whole system and neither party is doing enough to address their concerns.

9:57Justin:Yeah, we look a lot like the first Gilded Age in this moment, but there is a real difference between the first Gilded Age in the 1880s, 1890s, and 19 aughts and this moment. And the real difference there is that we are seeing the endgame of a project to overturn the New Deal, the New Deal government that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in in the 1930s and that then Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower expanded. And what that did, of course, is it made the modern American government much more active. And so since the beginning, actually since the beginning, but really taking off in 1937, there was a project to overturn that New Deal government, to get rid of business regulation, to get rid of the basic social safety net it established, to stop government investment in infrastructure, to stop government protection of civil rights, and to make the United States walk away from the international rules-based order.

10:54Heather Cox Graham:Is this movement away from the power of Congress and to the presidency and kind of Congress becoming a dysfunctional body that isn't able to address people's concerns doesn't really pass. Legislature is mired in gridlock. Is that part of what's contributing to American disaffection with their government now? Is it essentially Congress's fault to some extent?

11:15Justin:Is this a particularly ineffective Congress? Yes, this is historic. We have had at least one other Congress that was really not very, didn't get very much done. It was under the Truman administration. But this one makes that one look superhuman compared to the fact that, you know, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, keeps sending everybody home because he can't even get the Republicans on board to do anything because he's got that far right rump that simply says no to everything. So we are in that moment where Congress is particularly ineffective. But I don't think it's the fault of Congress per se or the system per se, so much as it is the abandonment by the Republican Party of this idea of checks and balances.

11:58Justin:And you can see that really dramatically in the Republicans in the Senate. What you see is them saying, we may not like this guy, but we're sure not going to let a Democrat get into office because they're going to regulate us and they're going to make us pay taxes. So that's really the surprise there is the refutation of the central tenets of American democracy because of this ideology that has taken over the Republican Party since the 1990s, but really getting established in the 1980s.

12:31Anthony:Cards on the table, Heather. I really like America. I lived there for a decade. I have a child who's a US citizen. I felt when I lived there, I felt nothing particular about it. And to be perfectly honest, I came to America initially, not because I was particularly interested in it, but because I lived in Brussels and it rained a lot and I wanted to go somewhere for the BBC that was a pleasanter place to live. But I developed such an affection for it because there is something away from the politics, it seems to me, something in the air, something in the water, America's can-do spirit, that just does seem to me to differentiate you from pretty much anywhere else I've ever lived or visited.

13:12Justin:That's lovely to hear. I mean, as a historian, I could refute that in any number of ways. I will say I think that the American people, with all our exceptions, are pretty decent people and are pretty decent to the people that they consider within their community. And therein lies both a brilliant achievement and a terrible weakness because of the ability to manipulate that to create a political enemy. But we could talk again about the great history of how Americans developed that idea, as you say, that can-do spirit. But, of course, Tocqueville put it in Democracy in America, that that's the heart of America.

13:57Justin:I'm not entirely sure I buy it, but I'm glad you found it.

14:00Anthony:Interesting that you don't entirely buy it, because why in that case? So you're a skeptic on that. Why in that case? And I was asked this question the other day by someone, and I wasn't fully able to answer. I gave a very weedy answer that you will be able to give a much better one, or possibly you'll disagree with it completely. The question that I was asked is, why has America been so successful? Why is it so mighty? Why is it so incredible as a force in the world? Whereas, I mean, they were making a distinction between America and Canada or Australia or other kind of English-speaking places around the world, or indeed other nations, actually.

14:36Anthony:What is it about America that allowed it to dominate the last century and to a very great extent to dominate this century as well? What is the secret sauce?

14:47Justin:Well, so we have to start with resources, right? This continent has had extraordinary resources and people who live in the United States of America have been excellent at exploiting those resources. I mean, that I think has to be the bottom line. But I do think that one of the key aspects of America and the people who live in the United States of America, and I keep making that distinction because I'm talking about a political entity versus the geographic space, because of course, indigenous Americans have been part of that polity or have not been part of that polity in different times. But there is inherent in the United States a really powerful and profound tension.

15:29Justin:And that is the tension on the one hand between people who believe that some people are better than others and that the power of the government should be used to protect property, and those people who believe that everybody is created equal and the government should be used to make it possible for those people to be treated equally before the law, to have a say in their government, and to have equal access to resources. And that tension, which maps over gender, it maps over race, it obviously maps over class, has meant that America, and obviously I can't speak for any other countries I study America, but that has meant that the tensions that have made this country a terribly dark country at times, you know, our lynching, our massacres of indigenous Americans, I mean, you and I could make this list go on and on, is balanced by the opposite.

16:22Justin:Americans saying, you know, getting the upper hand when they want to promote equality and standing up for the right to vote, standing up for the expansion of rights. And to me, that's what the United States really is defined by, that tension between these groups of people, those who have rights and those who want rights, and how they jockey to create a government. And that means that American democracy will never be finished. It also means that American democracy will never be perfect because, as I like to say, people are going to people, right? We have good people and we have bad people. But what that has done, I think, is it has opened up an avenue for new languages and new ideas and new music and new innovation, new ways of living together, new philosophies in that tension that perhaps are less possible in places that have less fundamental tensions in their society.