Heather Cox Richardson On What History Teaches Us About Fighting The Dark Energy Of The Human Soul

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2:17Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

3:07Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Obviously, you understand by listening to this that I'm a believer in sort of the daily ritual of reading and learning things. That's what the Daily Stoic is, of course, built on. That's what some of my favorite daily books are built around, right? That's what a calendar of wisdom is built around. And even, you know, going back to Epictetus, he says, you know, every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand, write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them. So there's a handful of emails that I read every day.

3:44I think at this point I've had most of those people on the podcast. And so I was very excited about today's guest because she is the writer of something that I check almost every single day. It arrives in my inbox. It's one of the few sub stacks that I subscribe to. And I am by no means in the minority on this. It is not just a big sub stack. It is the biggest substack, as she tells me at the beginning of the interview. It's over a million people every single day get Heather Cox Richardson's notes about America. She's a professor of history at Boston College. She's written a number of great books about the Civil War and the Gilded Age and the American West.

4:23I read her book, How the South Won the Civil War a few years ago, just so you know, that's not like some sort of lost cause BS. Her point is actually that the lost cause and some of the movements that came out, that came to be in the South after the Civil War, were the sort of reverse of Clausewitz's dictum, that war is the extension of politics by other means. Basically, this sort of lost cause, the Confederate cause, she's arguing, sort of loses the battle, the war, and wins the war, which is sort of lodging itself in the cultural consciousness. Anyways, I loved that book. And I love her newsletter, which always has interesting thoughts on current events.

5:03She's looking at the events of the news from a historical perspective. And then sometimes there's just, you know, great pictures of her life and her dogs where she lives in rural Maine. Anyways, I was very much looking forward to this conversation. So when I saw she had a new book out, it's called Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America, which is out now. I reached out and I wondered if she might come on the podcast. I was hoping she'd come out to Austin. We did it remotely, but I think it was a great interview. She was one of USA Today's Women of the Year in 2022. She's taught at MIT in the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

5:39Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, and she has her own podcast on Vox called Now and Then. So very impressive woman, a great writer, a great thinker, a great historian, and a great purveyor of a daily newsletter, which you can grab at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com. and in the meantime you can just listen to our conversation about history about learning from history and and one of my favorite topics which is fighting what i call the dark energy the human soul here is heather cox richardson you can follow her on instagram at heather cox richardson on twitter at hc underscore richardson enjoy

6:24it. Podcasts can kind of spoil you because you have this, you know, you have so much time to answer your thing. And then if you do any kind of sort of legacy meeting, they're like, all right, we want to go through your whole book and we have six and a half minutes for you. That's right. That's right. But now we're off. I do love that about the newsletter format. Also, I think you and I are sort of kindred spirits in the sense that we both have very large daily emails about things that people are not supposed to be interested in and somehow people are interested in. Well, you know what has jumped out to me about it is that it's very much not in my newsletter, not in content, but in style as some of the really epic Civil War diaries in the sense that I never intend to have a storyline, but there are many things that become storylines and characters who continue to reappear.

7:22And I find that absolutely fascinating. It's like a soap opera. I mean, in many ways, it is a soap opera. It just happens to be real. When it's a different way of reading and studying history too, or philosophy in my case, you know, obviously we both love books. There's something very special and powerful about books, but the idea of sitting down and reading something over the course of a week or a couple hours, however much cumulative time you put into a book. It's great. And it's one of the most powerful inventions of the human species. But the process of reading either in a loop, like people do with the Daily Stoic, sort of one page a day, or reading indefinitely as part of an email, like they do with yours or with mine, there's something about returning and getting a little bit every single day that I think is actually much more conducive to a deeper understanding of what's happening than just reading a lot of books about something one time.

8:19I think that's right. I also am fascinated by the degree to which it feels to me anyway that what I do is really kaleidoscopic. So I can focus on essentially one theme a day. And in a way that kind of mirrors the human experience that you don't, you know, you're not like Emerson's naked eyeball, right? You can't take everything in and it drives you bonkers the same way it did Edgar Allan Poe. Instead, you can see a little bit at a time. And when you see enough of it, you start to see a world. And that's kind of what life is like, really. Yeah. I likened it in one of my books as sort of holding up like a gem.

8:58There's all these different cuts on it. And you're kind of looking at it from these different angles. And each time you're getting a better sense of either the beauty or the ugliness of the whole thing by looking at it from all of these different angles. I like that. I like that image. I've never thought of that. And it's better than a kaleidoscope because a kaleidoscope falls into different positions all the time. And the gem is always just exactly what it is, but you see it differently. That's a much better image. I do love kaleidoscopes, but I think, yeah, one of the problems with that metaphor is that fundamentally what you see in a kaleidoscope is confusing and it's beautiful and absurd, but you don't go, oh, it's a picture of a duck or whatever.

9:40You know, you don't actually get what's going on. That's, you're absolutely right. I'm going to use the gem from now on instead. Steal it shamelessly. So how many, how many people get your newsletter each day? Because I think it's just the sheer size of it, I think is worth pointing out. I've subscribed for a long time. I've always loved it. But how many people are getting these letters from an American every day? So they're about, I'm not great at numbers. There are about 1.2 million who get it mailed to them. Many more go to the website. And then of course there are people who get it on Facebook as well.

10:13I've got about 1.7 million followers on Facebook as well. And you know, the thing that's interesting about that is it's not, it strikes me, I keep speaking of metaphors, thinking of myself as the coffee pot around which people gather, because it is far more what people bring to the newsletter than what the newsletter brings to them that makes it what it is. And I think it's really indicative of this particular moment in American society that people are finding these new nodes, if you will, these new coffee pots to gather around and think of new ideas. It's actually really exciting. It's incredibly exciting.

10:49And I think, you know, like when I went to my publisher in 2000, I guess it was 11. And I said, Hey, I want to write, you know, a series of books about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. They were not like super excited. And I can imagine, you know, if you had pitched letters from an American, and had even predicted even one 10th of the reach that it had, people would have said, that's insane. That's impossible. And, and we can see that assumption baked into most of the, even the media institutions in this country, which is like, you have a larger audience than most of the big cable television shows, right?

11:29On a daily basis. And yet those shows are fundamentally built around the idea that information must be entertainment. It must be conflict oriented, right? It must be soundbites. It must be largely opinion. And yet somehow you've got over a million people tuning in for what is, I think, although I can definitely tell your views, largely dispassionate, largely historical, even though you're talking about what's happening right now, you're trying to root it in the larger context of what it means from a historian's perspective. Again, like that's not supposed to be viable and yet it is. It's not supposed to be viable, but I think it makes sense in a lot of different ways.

12:14So, you know, one of the books I have found profoundly moving in terms of my own work is Story by McKee about screenwriting. I've interviewed him. He's great. Have you? Oh, what's he like? Have you seen the movie Adaptation? Okay, so here's the funny part about it. I've read the script, but I don't have a lot. I mean, I guess I have access to film, but I don't really have time to do film. And I am, because of the way I grew up, I'm like a second grader at best when it comes to film. So I've seen virtually nothing. So tell, I mean, I've read adaptation. I know the story, but I've never seen the movie.

12:52It's worth looking at like the two minute clip of him on YouTube, the character who plays him, because it's pretty much exactly who Robert McKee is. I think he's such a brilliant thinker. And I've been to one of his seminars. I don't want to, I feel like it's a little condescending and dismissive to say sort of crotchety old man. But he is a no guff, no bullshit, tells you how it is, sort of workman-like thinker about story and craft and just a character. Let's put it that way. So it's so funny you say that because in my mind, and of course I know nothing about him except what he is on paper, I thought of him as a very young man.

13:35Interesting. No, I went to one of his seminars 10 years ago or so. And I mean, he was old compared to me then. But no, he's he's he's more or less retired. I think he just did his last series of of public talks. But like when I I'll give you an example. I went to his talk and, you know, it was it was not cheap as a few thousand dollars. And, you know, it was like him in a lectern. And he's like, get out your notebooks. And he just sort of yells at you like a college professor. that type of college professor. There was no special effects. There was no drama. He gets up there and he's like, I know what I'm talking about.

14:14You're going to listen to me. I'm the expert. And let us begin. Do you know his background? I think he was just like sort of a film teacher or film critic who tried to sort of come up with a theory about how all this stuff works. But there's a couple of figures like that where they sort of come up outside of academia, but then manage to do what academia is supposed to be doing, you know, better than the academics. So I think it's kind of an outsider in the Hollywood system, like not a famous producer or screenwriter or anything like that, just a guy who got an interesting take on things and then filled a niche that needed to be filled.

14:58Well, his emphasis on obviously story, but on the idea that what people are really looking for is an emotional connection to reality. And the way that you deliver that is by a very close view of reality, whether you're doing it on a sweeping scale or a small scale. I, you know, I found, I got the, I first read the book and was so blown away by it. One of my kids who at the time was pretty young, got it for me for a holiday because he was like, you know, mommy loves this. And I started taking notes. And then I thought, this is stupid because I'm taking so many notes on every single page. I might as well just reread the book.

15:34And it made me think a lot about what we do as historians and what our role is as historians and about the way we approach history and to what ends. So, you know, I think that you started out by saying that nobody would have ever thought that Letters from an American, for example, would have become as popular as it is or your work or other people as well out there that are not mainstream names, but have enormous followings. And I think the answer to that might be in part that rather than thinking of what we do as entertainment, God knows I'm not entertaining, but as a way of illuminating the human condition, that people like McKee saw as being central to sort of human connections, which sounds really sort of metaphysical and all that, but essentially isn't that what we're all doing here on this planet?

16:27So I think that maybe that's something that the new media technologies have made possible because we can do it, because we have this reach, because we don't have to go through really expensive TV studios, and that we're in this incredible flowering not only of history and politics, but also of art because of the new technologies that are available to us. Maybe a guess anyway. And it's kind of that thing of like, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same where, you know, when you read ancient history, whether you read Herodotus or Thucydides or Plutarch, you know, they're not as concerned, strictly speaking, with accuracy the way that a modern historian is.

17:10But in another sense, they get to the essence of what was happening and why it was happening and what it means. And as you said, what it what humans do and why at a level that has made their work endure for thousands of years in a way that I think, unfortunately, a lot of modern history misses. You know, they're much more accurate. They can, they're much more factual. And yet you could read this, the average person could read this history and not know what they're supposed to do with it or what it means. So because the nature of this podcast, I'm going to throw something at you that has fascinated me since I read McKee.

17:56And I spent a lot of time really grappling with that and what that meant. And, you know, one of the issues with the way and I'm only going to speak. Well, I guess I can speak for historians of other countries. I can't speak for other countries' histories, but I can speak for historians of other countries. And that is really beginning at the beginning of the 20th century, but taking off after World War II. There was this real sense that if you told a history like that with a narrative through line, you were by definition privileging a certain group of people. And those people, for the most part, were wealthy and white men, powerful men.

18:28And so there was a real move to get away from having a narrative embedded in a history and instead looking at sort of social history, for example, where you're finding out really cool things about the lives of people who didn't leave the sorts of records that those powerful men did. You know, they didn't work in foreign affairs. They weren't presidents. They weren't kings. But they were the peasants who had sort of these longstanding social traditions. But the problem with that is that they don't have a storyline. And if you think about humanity, the thing that distinguishes us from other species is that we make sense of the passage of time by telling stories about it.

19:08Like other species make sense of the passage of time through scent, for example. There's a lot of studies about dogs. but the way that humans do it is we tell stories and that's what makes sense our past, our present and our future. So if you strip that out of a history, you have by definition made it inhuman. So how do you, one of the things that I was really grappling with when I was talking, thinking about all this and that perhaps comes through in this new book, which theoretically we're supposed to be talking about, but this is much more fun is to try and make the case. and I did actually write a theoretical piece on this that I've never published, but someday will, that you can, in fact, tell a narrative.

19:49You can have a story that doesn't privilege a person or a group of people so much as it privileges an idea or some subaltern group that you want to privilege. So if that's the case, you think about, for example, the Lord of the Rings and the fact that the central character of that is a freaking ring, right? But that ring has all kinds of meaning. So if you can do that, you can create new histories, I think, that have a narrative, but they don't, by definition, privilege a certain powerful group of people. They can privilege an idea. They can privilege, you know, marginalized groups. They can privilege any sorts of things that speak to the human condition.

20:35So long as, going back to McKee, you make sure that those narratives tie into basic human emotions, love, hate, fear, all those things that make people feel they're connected to it. I'm really glad you brought that up. There's another sort of outside of the academy figure who has a huge following, Nassim Taleb. And he talks about how fundamentally what humans do is we make up stories. there's a sort of, many of these stories are not true. They're subject to our human biases and all this. He says, the problem is you can't displace a story without a story, right? So you can't just point out that this story has these flaws in it because the human mind doesn't work that way.

21:21You have to replace it with a different story. And I feel like that's something that's great in your work and then is problematic in a lot of modern history, which is, you know, the lost cause is a myth and is not true, but it is a very seductive and explanatory story that's been there a long time. So you can't just poke holes in it. You have to create an alternative story, right? History is biased, as you said, towards certain groups, but you can't displace that by just telling disparate, disconnected facts about the unacknowledged groups, you have to build a cohesive story. And I think when people do this well, you know, whether it's, what is it, 1491 is a good example of that, or a people's history of the United States.

22:15These are not perfect works of scholarship by any means, but they did reach a mass audience showing a different side of the story by showing a different story that's equally compelling to the sort of dominant myth or story. I like that a lot. Obviously, Lincoln did that very well. And we can go back to that. But one of the ways I think about it as if all you were doing is debunking somebody else's story, you're still in the same box. And if you're trying to get out of that box, you need to get rid of it altogether and find a different story, find a story that is outside that box. And one of the things that just makes me bonkers is the idea that the civil, that reconstruction ended in 1877.

22:58It didn't. Nothing happened in 1877, or what did was so really minor that nobody cared when it happened. But that's a box that was built in the 1890s by a bunch of white supremacist Southern Democratic Congress critters who were really deliberately trying to lock in a certain view of reconstruction. So even nowadays, when people are fighting back against that and saying, oh, that's not, you know, that's not really what happened during reconstruction. So long as they take that 1877, it makes my head explode because it's like, you're still playing their game. You have to change the whole game. You can't simply say, well, I'm going to fight it out on your, on your turf.

23:38You have to find a new game, which is kind of the moment we're in new people, new ideas. No, you make a point that I've tried to raise several times that I think is under, like I've said this, the moral legitimacy and superiority of, say, the civil rights protesters, Martin Luther King, it's so overwhelming that we sort of don't fully appreciate everything that they were doing. Same with Lincoln. What Lincoln and King both have in common is their ability to go backwards in time, retcon, as they say in the filmmaking community, and rejigger what certain things meant to create a comprehensive, compelling narrative about what the events of the present mean and the potential trajectory that the country is going.

24:34Lincoln sort of going back and basically rebuild, rewriting the founding story about the particular line that all men are created equal. And then King going, hey, that Lincoln was right and you owe us now. Like we're here to cash a check, he famously said. The idea of, hey, I'm going to decide what I'm going to emphasize and what I'm going to make true. And I'm going to tell stories around that. in both cases, they managed to convince millions of people, that's the story that I want to be true. That's the story that I want to be a part of. And that that is, that's an incredibly difficult thing to do, but is essential.

25:19Absolutely. I mean, Lincoln's use of the Declaration of Independence, especially in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was masterful. You know, he is literally speaking to a group of white men about why they should expand their definition of democracy to include black men who most of them don't even like. Right. They don't care what's happening to African-Americans in the South. And to say, listen, this is what we're about, because if it's not if it's not just if you let this happen to them, next is going to happen to you. That was brilliant. I love King's use of that whole imagery of cashing a check, because it always jumps out to me that in that moment, the 1950s and the 1960s, when so many white men were newly rising into the middle class because of the GI Bill and because of their experiences after World War II, that was something they really cared about.

26:12They really cared about contracts and about their ability to cash checks. And I always thought that was absolutely brilliant because he used their language in a way against them and it totally worked. I will add though, one of the things that my advisor said to me about King and about Robert Kennedy, and I think he would have said the same about Lincoln, he was a biographer of Lincoln, is that all three of those men were special not only because they were brilliant, but because they had the capacity to grow. And I thought, I've always thought that was interesting. When I look at people in the public sphere, looking at seeing people who have the capacity to grow because, you know, not everybody does.

26:54And to say, yeah, I was wrong then and I've changed and now I'm in a different place. And to be willing to own that in public is, I think, also something that holds them different than other people.

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29:07I totally agree. I'm writing about Truman now in the book that I'm doing. And one of his advisors says, you know, that was the amazing thing about Truman was his capacity to grow. And you look at a guy whose grandparents on both sides are slave owners. His mom won't even stay in the Lincoln bedroom. She's such an unreconstructed racist. And so he's basically raised by racists to be a racist, briefly joins the Ku Klux Klan as though it's any number of the social clubs available to a person at that time. And then here you have the man who really starts the civil rights movement, as far as the presidential side of things goes with a series of moves.

29:50And he grows. I don't know if his sort of sweep of history and understanding changes that much, but as a decent human being who is made to see that the status quo is disproportionately painful and unfair and cruel to a group of people, Truman manages to grow by leaps and bounds. And that's what you want from a leader. Do you think that was the Isaac Woodard case, or is there something else that swings him behind the idea of civil rights? I think there's a handful of them. I think what's underrated, and I write about this in the book too, is, you know, you know, the Blacks weren't the only people discriminated against in the American South, right?

30:35And so Truman meets this guy, Eddie Jacobson, as a young man, his Jewish best friend. They serve in World War I together. They open that failed haberdashery together. And I think watching his friend be discriminated against, watching anti-Semitism. Ultimately, it's Eddie Jacobson who gets Truman to recognize the state of Israel. I think a big part of it was just meeting somebody, you know, being friends with a Jew would have been easier in Missouri than being friends with a black man, but it would have had a similar eye-opening effect to see what discrimination and bigotry does to a person. And so I think fundamentally Truman just had a sense of like decency and justice.

31:23And to him, racism and segregation ultimately offended that more than it was a legal case for him. Like it was just the cruelty of blinding a black U.S. veteran was unconscionable to him more than just, you know, hey, these people aren't allowed to vote and they should be allowed to vote. You know what I mean? So where did he meet Jacobson? Like in high school or just just as a kid in Missouri, they meet it relatively young and then they reconnect because they're both in the same regiment in World War One. Oh, okay. So I got a question for you. Do you think some of why we are where we are is because we have not, we've had a voluntary military for so long?

32:15I mean, because if you - I do suspect. If you talk to World War II vets or people who've been, who were in the non-voluntary military, they always talk about friends across racial, racial, not gender lines at that point, but racial or ethnic or wealth lines. It's a great story up here. I interviewed a bunch of World War II veterans. And of course, I live in the country. Me too. Where are you? I live in rural Texas, about an hour outside Austin. Oh, cool. Beautiful state. Well, I'm up in Maine. I love it. We could compare Maine and Texas because we have a lot in common. But I had a wonderful interview with a guy who was in the Navy.

32:58He was actually at D-Day and he, his brother was too, but on a different ship. But he was saying that, you know, I asked him about integration in the military and dealing with, you know, black people who we'd really pretty much never seen in Maine, maybe a few. And he said, oh, I had no problem with the black guys. They were just like me. They were from the country. You know, they love their mamas. I mean, we got along fine. He goes, And then his voice lowers and he goes, but those Italians from New York City, I was terrified of them. Absolutely terrified of them. They always carry knives. I didn't know what they were going to do next.

33:31And I just loved it because it was like a whole different layering of relationships and fear. He's like, you know, I didn't mind the guys from, you know, rural Mississippi. They were just like me. But those people from the city, man, they were dangerous. is. I think one of the most sort of beautiful and haunting anecdotes from the American Civil War that I get sort of goosebumps and tear up a little bit just hearing about, it's after, maybe it's after Shiloh or it's after Chickamauga, I forget. But somebody goes to General Thomas and they say, you know, okay, what do we want to do with the battlefield dead?

34:08Should we organize them by state? And he says, I'm sick and tired of states' rights. Mix them up, mix them up. And his point was, you know, this idea that the states are different, that we're not part of this large whole north, south, but also Indiana and Illinois being somehow different countries was this incredibly destructive and ultimately toxic idea that, you know, is rendered very insignificant when people are laid out side by side, you know, in the carnage of a battlefield. field. And I, so there probably was something incredibly powerful about these people being mixed up. Although obviously a lot of the regiments were sort of locally set up, but I think about, you know, the, the first time, and then the first time for many years that Truman, and we don't need to belabor Truman because he's not a big character in your books, but you know, he goes to Europe, like that's his first overseas experience.

35:09You know it, it wasn't just that it, it connected people inside the United States together, but then it forced them to realize that the world was bigger and more complicated than they might've assumed. And it sort of disabused them of some of their provincialism and, you know, all of that. So I would agree. I think we'd probably suffer for a lack of that. It's also great to live in a country where you don't have to be compelled to learn how to shoot weapons and go to war. There's something positive about that too, I think, but we probably do lack a sort of a unity as a result of it. Well, I was just thinking the other day about the fact that it is really possible now for more than two generations never to have left your small town.

35:57And that's really something that wasn't possible for my parents. I'm 60. So, you know, the World War II generation, like you say, They were all over and really into the 1970s, where people were at least in the military moving around in the Peace Corps and all that. And it does strike me that, you know, it's it's it's not a common thing, really, in the 20th century for people not to have moved around, perhaps not everybody. Obviously, a lot of people move, but to be able not to move for as long as some people have been able to stay at home and never cross the, to move south, as people around here might say, which means to cross the bridge into New Hampshire.

36:39I will say about the land, though, and the burials, one of the things I think we miss in the modern world is the degree to which the land really matters. and the land matters in part because of the fact that you get everything from it you know your food from it and your shelter from it but also because you're buried in it and there are a number of cases in the in the united states in the 19th century where people talk about that you come from the land you go back to the land and one of the reasons that ashes to ashes dust to dust that's right quite literally and and you know every every landscape is oh well that's where my brother you know, got chased by the pig.

37:22And that's, you know, literally, I still live where my family is from. And there's a rock in the harbor named for my grandmother, which is where she learned to swim at the end of the 19th century. And one of the things that made Reconstruction really hard was the insistence of white Southerners that Black Southerners were going to replace them in the cemeteries. And, you know, you look at it now and you're like, really, who cares? You're dead, right? That's what I looked at when I first saw this. But they really make this argument that if Black Americans are allowed to be buried in the same cemeteries, which is right up there with schools, by the way, for them in the 19th century, they're literally going to displace the ground that white people are in.

38:09And that ownership, the physical ownership, and I don't mean like on a deed. I mean, my blood is in this soil, therefore it is mine. On both sides had a poignancy and a power, I think, that in the 20th and the 21st century, Americans anyway, who move around, after you're just saying that nobody moves around, but who have moved around a great deal and very few of them live where their grandparents did. I don't think we realized just how visceral that was for people in the late 19th century. Well, I was driving into Austin yesterday, And as you sort of come into Austin, there's all these different freeways and highways that connect.

38:46A lot of them are FM 969 or FM 183 because they're farm-to-market roads that have gone from one lane to two lanes to three lanes to four lanes or whatever. But there's this little patch as all these ones crisscross. And I pointed it out to my six-year-old. There's a little cemetery in the middle of this sort of island of freeways. And you realize it's not like a named cemetery. This is clearly a family plot from when this was all a large ranch. And there's about 10 tombstones there, probably, you know, 1880s, 1890s. But you go, this was their worst nightmare. Like this was the land that they lived on for generations and generations.

39:27And now it's an island, like the home of their loved ones for eternity is an island in a series of freeway interchanges and off ramps. you sort of get where that energy, that pushing back against modernization and the future and, you know, what the North came to represent. I kind of felt, I felt the chills of it when I was driving by this freeway off-ramp cemetery yesterday. Oh, wow. That'd be a cool picture. I'd like to see that. Well, I want to go back to Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence real fast, because I think it does connect to the ideas in the book, which I really liked and I want to talk about.

40:05But I think we glossed over the sleight of hand there, right? Which is the Declaration of Independence is not a legally binding document, right? The country was put in motion by the Declaration of Independence, but that's not the law of the land. And what Lincoln so brilliantly did was, hey, the Declaration of Independence is more generous to human beings and has a higher notion of equality than the constitution did, which was quite emphatic about slavery. And he sort of, he, he, he brings one in to enhance the other. And I thought of this, and I think you may have written an email about it, but I thought it was so illustrative of why this, how this happens and then why some people resent it.

40:53Do you remember this is, I think during the Muslim ban or one of the immigration bans during the early days of the Trump administration. And some reporter is speaking to Stephen Miller, who seems like a ghoulish troll, if you ask me, but is saying something about, you know, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. They're reading that famous poem on the Statue of Liberty. And he goes, you know, that's not a legally binding document, something like that. He's like, that's not in the Constitution. And he's right in the sense that that's just a poem that a lady wrote as a fundraising drive to help build the Statue of liberty.

41:32And yet what brilliant politicians, and I think are better angels, to borrow Lincoln's expression, has done is kind of incorporated that into our national story and held people and our leaders and our laws to the standard that that's trying to raise. But if you have someone who disagrees with that story or is so greedy and selfish and cold-hearted that they don't want those ideas to bind them, you run into an issue because now you have a disagreement that's not based in the law, but is based on what parts of our story do we agree on and what parts do we dispense with. It's not based on the law, it's based in principle.

42:18It's a truism in American history that if you have rights, you plead the constitution. If you want rights, you plead the Declaration. And you're right. Well, because think about it, the Declaration of Independence was an attempt on the part of the founders to explain to other nations why what they were doing was legitimate. Lots of people who haven't read it recently forget that most of it is a list of complaints about the king. It reads pretty dryly, actually, you know, you know, he has a lot of them aren't very true. Yeah. And they're they're they're Jefferson sort of being in a hurry and cribbing from a lot of other places and putting this together in the heat of a Philadelphia summer.

43:00But the principles laid out in that, that people should be treated equally before the law, and that they should have a right to consent to their government, are unbelievable principles, if you think about it. Even nowadays, they are radical principles. And in 1776, to say, hey, you know what, we've got a great idea. We're going to throw off the idea of governments based in kings or governments based on tradition. We're going to throw off the idea of governments based in religion because, oh boy, we've seen what that leads to with blood in the streets. We're going to throw off the idea of nations based in national boundaries, but instead we're going to create a vision of a government based on the consent of the governed.

43:44And we're going to make sure that they're all treated equally before the law. No more of this discrimination against certain members of certain religions, for example, or against people from other countries. And that idea is incredibly powerful, I think, even still, because the idea that everybody is equal stands up against the idea that some people are better than others. And that's a really easy way to define what has essentially been American history since the beginning. And those two different concepts are still locked, not only in the United States, but also at a global level in a quest for dominance.

44:22And I'm firmly on the side of the concept of human self-determination, not only as a political proposition, but also as a deeply human proposition. You know, the idea that we really need to be able to control our own destinies in order to achieve our full realization as human beings strikes me as being the ultimate goal of humanity, not only of any political system. So I think that what the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution, which is in fact a document that begins to set out those laws, is one that runs really deeply in America, but also in human history. Well, I have a theory about American history and I guess the human race as a whole.

45:08And I think it's partly derived from your work. I really loved your book on how the South won the Civil War. But basically, my understanding of America is, OK, you have those high principles from Jefferson. You have these ideas, which are a huge breakthrough in human thought and government. And then you have this other part. I sort of call it like a dark energy. Right. So you have this sort of oligarchic, what they would later call the slave power. You have this sort of oligarchic power that says, that's all well and good as long as we remain in charge and we have control of the government and no one interferes with that in any way.

45:54Right. And so ultimately, Lincoln interferes with this. That's why the Civil War starts before Lincoln has even done anything. It's basically the first election that this oligarchic slave power loses, having rigged from the very beginning the system of government with the three-fifths clause. So then we have the Civil War. You have this brief moment of reconstruction, which sort of gets incredible pushback, ultimately falls apart. And then that oligarchic slave power, by suppressing the votes of black people, regains the levers of power, illegitimately now controls what can and can't happen in American government.

46:36And I thought it was interesting. Most people might go, oh, it stops there. But you sort of trace this then towards how the United States responds to the Great Depression, the idea of social services, that the government is there to help people not die of starvation, that we're in this together. And then and then that sort of dark energy, like I see that same dark energy, you know, jeering at Ruby Bridges on her way to school. That's the same energy, you know, that's, you know, that's the same energy that gets itself all together and passes Prop 8 in California, not, you know, 15 years ago. and then is today trying to strip books out of libraries because they say this or that or that said, hey, we should just let her rip in the middle of a pandemic that's killing millions of people.

47:29There's this sort of energy that says, I should get to do whatever I want. No one should be able to interfere with me making as much money as I want. No one should have to be able to make me care about another person. And this kind of dark energy is there always and it moves from issue to issue. And so sometimes, you know, you see it as being these distinct things. Sometimes it's slavery. And then sometimes it's arguing, you know, whether people should have to send their kids to public school or not. But it is fundamentally this same sort of anti-social, anti-collective energy that we have been battling against since basically the very beginnings of America.

48:15So I'm going to disagree with you a little bit because I'm going to separate your dark energy into two groups. So I'm going to suggest that what you are talking about is the quest of a minority for power. There's always those people who want power. But the question is, in a democracy, how do you get power when you're supposed to appeal to a majority? And so the answer to that, I think, is that you start to convince your followers that they need to be on your team because there's somebody else to hate more. And that's really crucial when you think of American history. So you think, for example, about the United States since 1981.

48:59Every single chart in every single way says that wealth has dramatically moved up to the very wealthy. I mean, right now we've got three men in America who have as much wealth as the bottom 60%. This is, you know, we're in this period in which the extremes of wealth mirror those, or perhaps even worse than those of the 1920s and the 1890s and the 1850s. All periods in which a lot of, a very small group of people got very rich and everybody else was somewhere falling behind. So how do you convince those people that you're hurting, that they need to back you? Will you do it by convincing them that those other guys are the ones who are responsible for them falling behind?

49:43So there's both the people who are using the rhetoric and their use of American history to garner their own power and to become wealthy. And it's not just about money, I think. I think that image of power, the other thing I did after McKee was think about power, but the image of power in the United States is often associated with wealth, but it doesn't have to be wealth. It could be anything you're using to garner whatever is powerful in your own society and different societies value different things. But the way to get people behind you on that is to convince them that you must be on their team or else you are going to be harmed by those other people.

50:23So you have the leaders and they're very, a very small group. And then you have the followers who simply want to be on that team, partly as a reflection of that power that they at least can bask in the glow of, and partly because they have learned to hate and fear someone else. So it's a dark power, but there are a lot of people, I think, who are seduced by it, who are not benefiting from it, and who, left to a different sort of narrative, would, in fact, be happy to switch to a different vision. So how do you keep them from seeing that vision, you stifle what they have access to. And while it's really easy to look in the present and some of the places in the Republican dominated states that are very careful to make sure that you can't have, for example, books that introduce topics that state legislatures don't like, the place that really jumps out to me is in the 1850s.

51:17There is a book, a deeply racist book written by a man from North Carolina called, his name is Hinton Rowan Helper, and the book is called The Impending Crisis and How to Stop It, I think it's called, in which he says to the white people of the South, hey, listen, you know, I'm as racist as you are, but your real problem here is not the slaves. Your real problem is the enslavers because they've set up the system so they're taking everything. So what you really want to do is push back against them and have a much fairer redistribution of wealth in this country. And that's the book. I mean, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a really big deal in the early 1850s, but the Hinton Helper's book, that was one of the key roads that led to the Civil War, the key elements that led to the Civil War, because Southern elite politicians just went ballistic over that book.

52:05They stopped it being able to circulate. Anybody who signed on to supporting it, they blackballed. And there's some wonderful speeches in Congress where Southern elite enslavers who represent South Carolina, for example, in the Senate, you know, talk about damn statistics and damn lies and statistics because this book was full of statistics saying, look, North Carolina is poor and it shouldn't be because we got all this stuff, but the rich guys are taking everything. So I think that Biden talks about how evil doesn't ever go away, it just goes underground. And I think that's true, but I think it's also important to recognize that it's possible for politicians and people in power to manipulate those whom they are hurting to vote against their own interests and to stay with them based on a different set of values of fear and of hatred than those at the top of that dark energy are employed.

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56:06Yeah, what's that famous quote? It's like from a Republican strategist where he's like, you used to say the N-word, and now you say states' rights, and then you don't say states' rights anymore. You say, I'm opposed to busing. You know, like to me, that was such a sort of a Rosetta Stone of a quote, because you realize how the energy, which is fundamentally fear, hatred, bigotry, supremacy, whatever it is. And sometimes it's race based. Sometimes it's just it's had different motivations. But the idea that it just kind of goes from issue to issue and that that's the controversy of the day. And Fox News is, of course, the most clear example of the sort of outrage engine that's sort of serving up.

56:51You know, you think of these good, hardworking people. I think about it like my dad getting home, turning on Fox News and someone is telling him what to be upset about today. I think there's a great comedian who has a line about this, but it's basically just telling them some obscure, outlying, unrepresentative thing to be upset about today to kind of keep that energy simmering so that it doesn't look at a larger picture like we're talking about. It doesn't see what is right in front of you. Rage farming, they call it. And the one that always jumps out to me is the idea that Sharia law was coming to Oklahoma.

57:30I was a waitress in Oklahoma in the 1980s. I promise you, Sharia law was not coming to Oklahoma anytime soon. But you did say something about how it's often race-based. I think, again, because of the sort of work you do, it is worth pointing out, at least in my view, that it is often race-based. It's also gender-based. It can be class-based. But it is, crucially, in my opinion, it is not exclusively white and black-based. That is, depending on the makeup of your community, you can fire up people to hate whoever the people are that have moved in. And it doesn't necessarily have to be black people.

58:15It can be Cambodians or Somalians or, you know, women or whomever that you can say they're the ones taking your rights. And that piece of rage farming and that piece of the power structure really matters to understand that it's much broader than simply saying, well, white people can fire up voters against black people. That's true. But you can also fire up, you know, this band of voters against those people by using really similar techniques. And that that's much more comprehensive view, I think, and a much more inclusive view in recognizing the problem. Well, that's, I think, one of the things that you get from the study of history is you go, oh, we've been doing this for far longer than America has ever existed.

59:04I mean, obviously, the Jews being the example of the sort of perpetual other, the perpetual scapegoat that an in-group uses to either solidify power that they already have or to come to power by sort of railing against this, what's statistically an unthreatening minority, but can be contorted into this dire existential threat. threat or just sort of cathartic enemy. We, you know, we've been doing that for as long as there have been people and institutions, tragically. It's a perpetual virus of human civilization, antisemitism specifically. I think that's absolutely right. And I think it goes back to what you were saying earlier about displacing one story with another story.

59:57Because when you say that, what really jumps out to me is the real power of Superman in the years after World War II and the deploying of Superman on posters in high schools, for example, to say, if anybody says that somebody of a different religion doesn't belong in your high school, that's un-American, and you push back against that. And there's that really famous short clip with Frank Sinatra, which is on YouTube, by the way, called In Our House or In My House, in which there's a kid running down an alley. And I think he's Jewish. He might be Catholic. But he is being chased because of his religion.

1:00:40And Frank Sinatra, of course, being all blue eyes and incredibly famous in that era, gives the kids a lecture. And that story, not saying don't do that, kids, but saying that's not the world that I live in. Here's my world. And I live over here with Superman and with Frank Sinatra and with other people who are offering a different vision of this country. That was really powerful in the 1950s and the 1960s. And was it perfect? Absolutely not. But if you look at the public conversation then, as opposed to what it had been in the 1920s, when the Nazis had managed to fill Madison Square Garden to celebrate George Washington's birthday, it was a real change.

1:01:26And it was a real change because a lot of leaders who mattered replaced an old, nasty, dark energy story, if you will, with a much more powerful one that people really wanted to be part of. Yeah, that's something that kind of keeps me up at night. I get that you know, some of the political correctness of our time could be a little bit extra. You know, some of it's a bit holier than thou. Virtue signaling is definitely a thing. Some of these companies that are just, you know, pretending to be pro this or that, you know, it's obviously very sort of pandering. And yet the sort of instinct to tear that down or tearing it down is one thing.

1:02:09Poking holes in it is one thing. But then celebrating or reveling in the opposite of that, like this sort of like reactive energy against, say, virtue signaling, you know, it really scares me because I think we're taking what is at least a well-intentioned story. And in some sectors, particularly sort of, I think, male internet-based culture is sort of replacing that story with a story that gets very quickly to a very dark, nasty place and is the kind of energy that, you know, once it gets unlocked, we know where that story goes, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. And that's worth being concerned about, especially with the new prevalence of handguns and of, you know, Armolite rifles and things like that in our society, but, or Armolite style rifles.

1:03:00But I always think of it like fifth grade, you know, Now, remember in fifth grade, and it sounds like you have kids around that age now, there were those bullies. Remember them? And they got away with as much as they could get away with. And they were shocking. That was the point. They were mean. Their way to garner power was essentially to cow everybody into thinking they were powerful, even though they weren't very smart. If they were smart, they wouldn't be behaving that way. And they really weren't good in fights. They were just mean. Sure. And then there was always that moment when somebody stood up to them and all sorts of people who had sort of weakly gone along with them were like, yeah, they're right.

1:03:45You know, you're a bully. I'm not going to have any part of that. And I feel like in many ways society in the United States right now is that writ large, that the rest of the fifth grade, which is enormously insulting to all of us, of course, across America, but the rest of us are sort of standing up and saying, no, we don't want to be mean to people. Like, that lifestyle is not my lifestyle, whatever that is, but go ahead and live it. Go for it. And the more we find that language, the more we are writing a new narrative to say to those people, no, in our class, we're going to be nice to each other.

1:04:20And I feel like we've all seen that happen. And you see it in so many different ways in human dynamics, where somebody who has been completely cowed, and you think of domestic abuse, for example, or you think of terrible bosses. You think of all those things that we've lived through in some way or another. And finally, often people stand up and say, no, I'm not going to be treated that way. This is my world. And it's a much more pleasant world to live in than yours. And it feels to me like increasingly that's happening around the United States. Now, the issue is that our larger fifth grade bullies have wormed their way into nodes of power.

1:04:59So they hold far more power than they should if this were really a classroom with somebody overseeing it. They have, in fact, taken teachers, whatever modes the teacher has of restoring equality. So that worries me more than a little bit. But I don't think, given the opportunity, that people in the United States are willingly going to stay behind what is a minority and a very bullying position. I think most of us are like, yeah, live your life. Yeah, that's true. Although I guess historically, those periods, those people's moments in the sun or at the wheel have sometimes been measured in decades, if not centuries, right?

1:05:49So they do ultimately lose, but you never know how long it's going to take to beat them back. And it is a constant process of beating that energy back, I feel like. I think that's right. And one of the things that is on the table today is that, yes, strongmen always lose. But the question is, how long does it take them to lose? And one of the things that jumps out to me about the present moment, and everybody makes these comparisons to the coming of the Civil War, and of course there has been really since at least 2015 a number of bots, especially Russian bots, pushing the idea of civil war in the United States.

1:06:30And that's been picked up by the radical right, and you've got people like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia saying on 9-11 that we should entertain secession again, which was, you know, whatever. I'm going to stop on that one. But yes, but one of the things that really jumps out to people who study the Civil War is that what made that possible and what made secession possible in that moment was speed. You know, if you think about it, Lincoln's elected in November, right before Christmas. That's going to matter in a second. And the the South Carolina legislature is still in session because it whole in South Carolina, it's the only state that does it in that period.

1:07:09The state decides who the electors, the electors are going to be. So they're in session when Lincoln is elected and they instantly say, that's it, we're out of the union. Before Lincoln's, you know, done anything. I mean, he's not going to be inaugurated in March. And then a number of states follow before Lincoln, again, is even inaugurated in part because of the timing. It's Christmas. It's the South. All these elite southerners are going to Christmas parties and they're drinking and they're wearing their fine clothes and they're boasting to each other. And they're saying, we're going to start our own country.

1:07:41Right. And they're making, you know, they're doing this whole, exactly what, I mean, you can imagine what I'm pumping up here, the whole idea of, you know, we're going to be the great heroes here. And one of the reasons - We're going to make America great again. Exactly, exactly. And one of the reasons we get the firing on Fort Sumter in April is because it's planting season. And all of a sudden people are going to be going back to work. And it's pretty clear on the part of these leaders that it's all going to fizzle. It's all going to fall apart. So they, in fact, go ahead, they fire on Fort Sumter and we get that war.

1:08:10That did not happen during the Trump administration. Certainly the Steves that you mentioned, Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, tried to make that happen with the travel ban, which threw the country into chaos almost immediately after Trump took office. That was really early on. And certainly they pushed a lot of things that they tried to get through. And finally, and many things, of course, they did get through, but certain guardrails did hold. Those guardrails, by the way, largely are gone now. So we're in a different area in different ways as well. But then January 6th was the moment that that had to happen.

1:08:44And if you think about what could have happened on January 6th, if the crowd had in fact gotten Mike Pence, if they'd gotten Nancy Pelosi, if they had gotten Chuck Schumer, if there had been even pushback from counter protesters in front of the Capitol, if Trump had gone ahead and been able to put in place the Insurrection Act, we would be in a really different place right now. But here we are two and a half years later, we've had more than a thousand people charged with their behavior on January 6th. We've got two and a half years of government that actually appears to work and get stuff done.

1:09:18People are a long way beyond that. It's not clear to me now for all that that radical minority keeps screaming about civil war, that in fact, there is the will to go ahead and do that. That moment passed. And now people who might otherwise be inclined to follow that dark energy, as you say, look at it and say, you know, I don't really feel like going to federal prison for 22 years. So that timing, I think, really mattered. And if they weren't going to do that and go forward with that, when Trump actually had the military behind him and actually had all those pieces in power, it's a little hard to imagine it happening now when he's no longer in power and is under 91 indictments.

1:10:00And that missed moment, I think, is part of what we're seeing behind us or behind them with the incredible fury you're seeing now from the radical right. They're going to shut down the government on all the different things they're doing because it's all they've got right now. They don't have a popular movement. It's very clear they don't have a popular movement. It's clear they're rocking back on their heels with the fact that the Democrats have overperformed by eight points in every special election that's been held since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. So so I see that I worry about this.

1:10:39I worry about the moment we're in. But I don't think the parallels to the 1850s and 1860 really hold up because of the quirk of timing. No, that's good to hear. And as we wrap up, I think, because I love the book, and obviously it's called Democracy Awakening, which is sort of a positive word there, awakening. and I've heard you describe yourself as an optimist. Is that what gives you some hope or what makes you hopeful given the dark energy that you have studied in your work from the American founding to today and the not always so positive things that you have to touch on in the newsletter, which again, everyone should subscribe to.

1:11:24Where do you find optimism? What keeps you going? You know the answer to this. I believe in humanity. I believe in people. And I believe that people at the end of the day generally do the right thing. Not all of them. People always say to me, you know, how can I convince my uncle not to be a mega Trumper? I'm like, you can't. You're never going to get 100 % of people, but you sure are going to get the majority. And, you know, my experience has been that people in all walks of life, because I've had a really wide experience in my life, are basically good people. And so I have faith in the American people that at the end of the day, what do they say?

1:11:59that the Americans always do the right thing after they've tried everything else. Yes. I love that. Yeah. I hope so. I hope so. I hope, you know, it's what's that idea. It's a republic if you can keep it, whether he said it or not. You know, I do. We've done we've done we've done the work. We've we've we've made the sacrifices. And yeah, I think ultimately. after enough being pushed around, the good guys find the will to beat back the bad guys. It's just a reminder also that the sooner you do that, the better, and the less costly it is when you ultimately have to wage those battles. Absolutely.

1:12:44Absolutely. The sooner, the better. Well, this was lovely. Thank you for all the work that you do, and thank you for your fantastic books and I hope we can talk again sometime. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for this.

1:13:05Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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