America’s Branding Crisis — with Heather Cox Richardson

25:56I worry that this represents a deeper sickness in American society, that Americans are so anxious, depressed, and angry that they are acting out and they sort of appreciate or conflate this cruelty with strength and with leadership. And it represents a deeper sickness in our society that is going to be tougher to fix. Your thoughts? Well, I agree with that. And the piece that you didn't mention is misogyny. I mean, a lot, a large part of this, uh, that what you're talking about is dominance is demonstrating dominance. And one of the ways it's been easiest to demonstrate dominance in the U.S. since the 1980s is to dominate women.

26:36And that, I think, is way under-talked about, because the conflation of women's rights and the modern American government is, I think, terribly underexplored. Now, that being said, one of the things that I need to lay on the table, where I think you and I have a real confluence, is that I am an idealist in that, you know, as I said, what historians study is how and why societies change, and different people have different ideas about it. It could be the economy or mass movements or great men or religion. I believe ideas change society. So, and everything is subordinate to that. Now, that's just my position.

27:14You know, I'm not willing to go to the death for that, you know, against somebody who believes something else. But if that's the case, then what you are identifying, and I'm not going to disagree with you about that, is not a constant. It is something that has been created by a certain kind of language, which is how we communicate ideas, and by a certain kind of political system that encourages that sort of anger and hatred. Because I'm going to throw back at you here that if you actually look at polls on substance, not on things that are political, but if you look at how Americans feel about abortion rights, for example, or by a lot.

27:54But the point is not that they agree with Democrats, but they agree with each other. And that disconnect between the American people and what they believe and what they want and what they are being fed by their, I would say, national rather than state leaders primarily, that seems to me to be the place that is the fulcrum for where we are and where those of us who want to change that really should be focusing. And that comes down to, I hate to say it, marketing. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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30:35Two weeks ago, I was asked to address what was called the Young Democratic Caucus, which is representatives in Congress under the age of 50. And I think it's hilarious and telling that they would identify any group as young if you're under the age of 50. And this was the entire topic. And I feel as if I'm kind of like, I don't know, Luke Skywalker and you're Yoda. So I want you to correct me and edit me where you think I get this wrong. But they said, how do we rebrand the Democratic Party? And I said, I think the three pillars are one, restoring our alliances, alliances with our great trading partners and other democracies.

31:11And the notion that somehow we've been taken advantage of is insane. They sell us Mercedes at five points of gross margin and they get eight times EBITDA on it. or they get 40 cents in value. We sell them NVIDIA chips at 50 points of gross margin of which get a 30 PE. So we get$15. Global trade and these unbelievable alliances pushing back on fascism in the middle of the 20th century, creating unbelievable prosperity, pushing back on Russia, pushing back on China, pushing back promoting civil rights, women's rights. This has just been amazing. These alliances have been a reflection of what it means to be human, our advantage as a species, what it means to be mammal, and we need to restore alliances, most specifically in America, restore alliances between Republicans and Democrats, restore alliances between men and women.

31:58The genders have done an amazing job of convincing themselves that it's the other gender's fault. Young men believe that their dissent is a function of women's assent, couldn't be more wrong, and that we need to restore the greatest alliance in history and that men and women need to stop believing that it's the other gender's fault. Young men believe, or a lot of women, unfortunately, I think, believe that men don't have problems. Young men don't have problems. They are the problem. I don't think that's productive either. The greatest alliance in history is the history between men and women. Men should celebrate, promote, and protect their daughters, their wives, other women.

32:33And women need to realize that they're incredible progress. They will not continue to flourish if young men are floundering. So my first kind of touchstone or pillar is alliances and the importance of alliances and coming together. The second is inequality. You lose nothing above$10 million. There's no reason we shouldn't have a 60-70 % alternative minimum tax above$10 million. Daniel Kahneman and every psychologist has shown that above a certain amount of money, it brings you no incremental happiness. Restore corporate tax rates to a reasonable rate. Corporations are paying the lowest tax rates since 1929.

33:10Collect the taxes owed, the tax gap. It's not about tax rates. It's about the tax code. Reduce the deficit, lower interest rates, which will bring down our costs on our interest rate, restore fiscal responsibility. And then finally, something that I may not have the right word here, but rather than calling it health, fitness, 70 % of America is overweight or obese, places a huge burden on us economically in terms of a health care system, better lunch, better nutrition, put in place incentives that do away with food deserts, encourage the industrial food system to produce healthy food and some alliances, addressing income inequality and becoming the fittest, strongest nation in the world, both mentally and physically.

33:54Those are kind of the three sort of policy pillars. But I am very open to coaching here because I was flying on instruments trying to tell these 50 or 60 representatives which messaging I think they need to embrace. Your thoughts. So let me dig in a little bit to what you have suggested. When you are talking about fitness. One of the problems there, of course, is our transportation systems and indeed what you're talking about with food deserts and the way food is distributed. You know, one of the things about our food systems in the U.S. since World War II has been to provide as many calories as it is possible to provide as quickly as they can be provided, because that was the crisis that they were designed to address after the Depression.

34:39So we do have these perverse incentives set up in the way that we manage, for example, surpluses. But if you look at fitness, you're not, I think, talking just about muscles. You're talking about once again, and I'm pushing on this because this is kind of my American studies background. I think you are talking about once again, celebrating working hard at something. That is, rather than simply having it, you work for it. So, you know, being in good shape and caring about nutrition and cooking and so on, that takes work, that takes effort. And that's about more than physical fitness. And you mentioned in one word mental fitness, but I would suggest it also celebrates the idea that it's a positive good to invest work in something.

35:29And one of the things that really jumps out at me in this administration is the degree to which they sort of seem to say, well, we're elevating those people who would otherwise be elevated if we hadn't had to deal with civil rights initiatives, what they're calling DEI initiatives. And what that has done is we now have in place a bunch of people who have no freaking clue what they're doing. You know, the idea that they should just have these positions rather than working their way really hard to get up to them. You look at somebody like Mark Milley versus Pete Hegseth, and Milley, you know, is very, very, you know, very well educated, works very hard at what he does, worked his way up.

36:04And then you have Hegseth, who came from the Fox News Channel. That idea of culturally, once again, celebrating hard work, education, the idea of taking control of your life not by attacking your neighbor but by investing in yourself, that's really very classic America. that if you think about it, was uppermost until at least the 1970s. I started with something much more corny, and that was, I started with the word love, and that is anything that gets in between two people being able to get married such that they can look after each other and have a rational passion for each other's well-being such that they don't end up on social services.

36:46Anything that inhibits a family's ability to take care of their children and create so much economic stress that they're more likely than not to end up in a single-parent home. And I think you can reverse engineer a lot of single-parent homes to economic stress. Anything that gets in the way of people being in an ICU or an emergency room because, or being insured because they're of sexual orientation, but anything that gets in the way of a parent's ability to stay married, to have some dignity around their children, to not have medical debt such that they have to make a choice between food for their children and diabetes, but anything that gets in the way of this term love.

37:26And that kind of got laughed out of the room because they thought, you're falling into the trap of the feminization of the democratic brand, which they believe has not been helpful. Any thoughts around this notion of love or empathy being a touchstone for a political movement? Yes, but I have to point out to you that what you have just done is you have modernized the concept of conservatism. What you are suggesting there echoes almost precisely what Edmund Burke was talking about during the French Revolution when he said that governments should not be concerned about ideologies because pretty soon leaders are busy trying to fit people into their ideologies rather than the other way around.

38:08What he said was that government should focus on stability because when you have a stable government and a stable society, there is less impetus to overturn it. And this is one of the reasons in his era, of course, he was interested in supporting aristocracy and the church and the family and so on. But that what you just outlined is a conservative, small C and not Republican and certainly not MAGA Republican, but a conservative. Rockefeller Republican. That's right. Eisenhower Republican, which which just again, what you just outlined in this modern world sounds radical. It sounds like a radical left position.

38:44And this always whenever and ever anybody tells me I'm a leftist, I just laugh because quite literally, the policies that you are outlining and which now would be called wildly progressive were, in fact, Eisenhower values. And he was a Republican and not a conservative Republican, but certainly a center-right, not center to center-left. So my thoughts are that, first of all, that this is a conversation that really, really needs to be in the public sphere again, because it's just common sense. And it's something that, again, the nation was united around until there was a deliberate decision to divide people along party lines.

39:26And I don't disagree with you on any of the idea that single-family homes are often economic. I mean, the other thing that I find really interesting is during the Biden administration, there was a great deal of talk about how crime rates were plummeting. And I thought what was interesting about that is that even the members of the administration pointed to the increased police officers that they had in which they had invested in order to make those crime rates come down. But nobody that I read anyway, and I'm not a criminologist, but I did read around in this because I was very interested in it, looked at the fact that we had record low unemployment.

40:03People had jobs and those jobs in the bottom 20 percent were paying a much greater rate than they had before Biden was in office. So you're looking at that and you're thinking, you know, if you got money, you commit fewer crimes, which is sort of logical. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to disagree with that at all in that concept, in your concept of fitness. In the concept of inequality, yeah, you know, this is a no-brainer. You know, people say, if I could be emperor, what would I do? And the answer is I would start with getting rid of the Bush tax cuts and the Trump tax cuts and work on recreating the Great Compression that economists talk about, where there is less of a gap both in income and in wealth between the bottom of American society and the top of American society, not just for economic reasons, but because I think that does a whole heck of a lot more societally when there is a less of a gap between people, less of an educational gap, less of a wealth gap, less of a cultural gap, and so on.

41:08And I agree with you also in terms of restoring alliances for sure. And it always jumps out at me, of course, that the United States was a driving factor in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And here we are sending now people to, you know, a gulag in the Everglades. But what I would say is that these are really difficult concepts to put into a package that can win an election. I think people feel on vibes that these are right. But what I think about packaging, not the Democrats necessarily, because we're in this really interesting moment where the political parties are breaking down. Certainly the names may remain, but what the internals look like are going to be very different.

41:54And that's what I'm interested in is watching these conversations take place all over the country among people who are not necessarily in elected office or aiming for elected office, where they are redefining what they would like America to be. One of the things that jumps out to me when you define America is less the idea of alliances or less the idea of love, and more the idea that what America has stood for historically is the idea that if you are willing to work hard, you can create a better life for yourself and your children. And everything flows from that. Now, the way that you talk about that, though, and again, that we have done historically, notably in the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, the late 1890s, early 2000 and aughts, and in the 1870s and before that is by saying, we're in this together.

42:44We are a community that works together and that we are not divided. And again, you used to see that in the 1940s, 1950s and so on. In movies, for example, in Superman, in Frank Sinatra's The House Where I Live, the film about how he was dead set against religious discrimination in the United States. That is something that strikes me as being marketable, not least because you can plug into it our greatest moments in our history. So just along the lines of magic wand and being an emperor, some of the lowest levels of young adult and teen depression are in Israel, despite all the existential threats surrounding them and amongst young Mormons.

43:33And the thing I find that's true among both those groups, and again, I might be backfilling a narrative here, is I think restoring mandatory national service. You talked about how people kind of saw themselves as Americans first before Republicans or Democrats, or maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, in the 60s or 70s. But I think a lot of that was because they'd served in the same uniform. What do you think of the idea of mandatory national service where Americans from different ethnic, demographic, and income and sexual orientation backgrounds could see each other? And I'm not just talking about the military.

44:03I'm talking about senior care, smoke jumpers, you know, forest reclamation, whatever it might be. But you're going to spend 12 to 24 months working alongside a group of random Americans realizing that you need to work in the agency of something bigger than yourself and that thing is the United States. A hundred percent. But I'm going to add a reason for that. And that is, of course, having come to come through a university system in modern America, a lot of young young people are not really ready to make adult decisions when they leave home. They have they need to spend time literally just learning how to live with other people or learning how to be on their own and managing, you know, their schedules and crucially figuring out what they want to do, which is not.

44:47Especially boys. I'm going to be a sexist, especially boys. Do you have kids, Professor? Three of them. Biologically, 18-year-old boys are 18 months behind the prefrontal cortex development. When my 14 - and 17-year-olds have friends over, the boys are dopes, and some of the girls look like they could be the junior senator from Pennsylvania. I think this would be especially important for young men. And it's easy to be sexist when you're favoring the female gender, but I really do think there is a marked difference between the maturity levels of boys coming out of high school and girls coming out of high school.

45:20Well, and just the opportunity to work in different ways with different people would open up, I think, a lot of people to professions that they might not otherwise have considered. And that, you know, I always think back on a student I had who was in college, I'm trying to be vague here, because of his extraordinary sport ability, which was great, I'm sure. But he discovered his senior year that he was actually really, really good at history, is how he came across my screen. And he was just really starting to get it. And I said to him, we talked about this, and he really had gone to school to play sports, and he was planning to go back to work in construction where he had come from.

46:15And yet, had he had a couple of years, he might have discovered that he was as good as he was at history before he was graduating. And it always has kind of stuck with me that he's somebody who could have really benefited from a, not a gap year, because it's going to take people six months just to get their feet under them, as it does in college. But a gap two years seems to me to be simply a no-brainer. Lots of other countries do it. My nephews who live in Europe did it. And I would love to see that, both for the reasons you suggest, but also because developmentally, it just seems like it makes such good sense.

46:52You were generous asking my thoughts on how to rebrand or brand the Democratic Party. I'll flip the question back to you. What do you think would be the right messaging or platform for Democrats? So this is a little hard for me, because as I say, I don't really think in this moment as Republicans versus Democrats. I actually think in this moment of the MAGA Republicans. Well, we need your help more, Professor. We're up against the rope, and quite frankly, we're getting the shit kicked out of us. So to the best of your ability, if you were channeling Democrats, what would you suggest is the real opportunity or wide space for Democrats right now?

47:27Okay, so where I was going with that is that I will tell you the branding that I would do, and it seems to me something the Democrats could jump on, should jump on, but it's not saying, here's a party I want to market, because I think in this moment, it's going to be important to recognize that the anti-MAGA party is not just Democrats, including in the way people think about certain issues. Some people still vote Republican because it is ingrained in them to have an R after their name, but they are, in fact, quite open to the idea of the kinds of things you and I are talking about. So here's what I would say, and my model is Abraham Lincoln, who was living through a very similar moment when two older parties were falling apart and you had the rise of a reactionary right elite that was trying to get rid of American democracy and create a system in which the government answered only to them.

48:17And this is, of course, the elite enslavers who wanted to spread human enslavement across the American West. They're establishing slave states that could work with the southern slave states to get rid of free states all over the country. So what happened in that moment, and you have to remember here always that the people who could vote in the United States in that period were all white men, almost all of whom were virulently racist and didn't really care at all about Black rights. The way Lincoln managed to create a coalition that could restore American democracy was continually to go back to the Declaration of Independence and to say repeatedly, either we are all created equal or we are not.

48:59And if we are not, we need to tear up the Declaration of Independence. And when he did that, even in the southern parts of Illinois, for example, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, even Democrats who were virulently racist would say, no, no, no, that's what we stand for. And I think one of the things that is important to do in this moment is continually to highlight the principles on which people who live in the United States have stood on democracy and expanded democracy. And what is so exciting about that for someone like me is that while I just invoked Lincoln because he was very, very self-conscious about what he was doing, and often if I can't figure out how to address something, I will think, what would Lincoln have done in terms of principles?

49:42But if you think about someone like Fannie Lou Hamer or Dolores Huerta or Dr. Hector Garcia or Dr. King or, you know, any of these people who were parts of marginalized populations used those concepts to expand rights in the United States and bring more people under the umbrella of the idea that they could have control over their destinies. And I think that's a touchstone that resonates with all American populations and one that we have not taken sufficient advantage of in the years that We have really stopped teaching the real meat of American history. And I would argue that the popularity of the stuff I write is in part indicative of an extraordinary hunger for people to feel that they are part of that larger story of human self-determination and of the United States of America.

50:36I see more and more people now starting to do it, starting to talk about it, more politicians doing it. But I think that is crucial to building a mass movement that can overaw the kind of rising fascism that you're seeing among MAGA Republicans. We'll be right back.

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53:05We're back with more from Heather Cox Richardson. So let's bring it to present day. You've called Trump's mega bill the capstone of MAGA's six-month transformation of the U.S. government. Do you think we're witnessing the cementing of illiberalism? And you've also said this is sort of the signature Republican legislation of this millennium thus far. Your thoughts? Well, I will answer that. But let me ask you, what do you think of that budget reconciliation bill? I think it's the largest transfer of wealth in history from the future to the past, from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old.

53:43I think it's not to be too dramatic here, but when I look at my success, Professor, it's built on these pillars of access to family planning for my mother, assisted lunch programs when I was in elementary school, access to deep pools of capital to start companies based on rule of law. Access to wonderful, talented immigrants who built my companies. You know, the fact that my mother was able to survive in Britain, sleeping as a four-year-old Jew in a bomb shelter, that America decided to convert its car factories to tank factories to push back on fascism. I mean, I'm so personally, quite frankly, and you can probably hear the emotion in my voice, just so rattled by this because I feel it is setting on fire all the pillars of my prosperity and success.

54:41So not a fan. Well, and that, I think, is what I was getting at with the idea that this was the capstone of the past six years. It's also the capstone in many ways of the Republican project since Reagan, which is to blow up the social safety net. But it's not what I call it a capstone in part, because, of course, that's what the Department of Government Efficiency was also designed to do. And that the idea of the rescissions, the clawing back of the money that has already been appropriated, the impoundments and so on. The idea is to shred the modern American state. But what interests me is the wrong way to put it.

55:21But what is replacing it, as I say, is the idea that somehow we're going to go back to a better past, which, by the way, is a very fascist concept. But there doesn't seem to be any real idea of what that looks like. So, for example, these Trump tariffs, the idea that this is suddenly going to make everybody rich is just a complete fantasy. It is a complete fantasy or the fact that Brooke Rollins, the head of U.S. of the Agriculture Department today, said that when we get rid of the undocumented immigrants who are actually working in the agricultural field, that we can simply replace them with the people who are on Medicaid.

56:05You know, that's just such a far-fetched image of what the future could look like in a country that has, since the very development of Western agriculture in the 1880s and 1890s, depended on migrant labor. I mean, there's nothing on the other side that suggests the survival of American democracy. And so I think what you're looking at is the rise, as I say, of authoritarianism, one guy to run everything. But as we're looking at that, and as I alluded to earlier, will 334 million Americans say, oh, I was conned, it's okay? Or will they say, this is not the country I wanted? And this is one of the reasons that conservatism developed, actually, to go back to that theme, because what they are creating is extraordinary instruments.

56:59instability, just extraordinary instability. And of course, with that bill, we now have a massively expanded ICE and Border Patrol system that is, in fact, a standing army in the U.S., a militarized state in the U.S. But is that going to be enough to maintain a dictator or a quasi-dictator from the MAGA wing in power going forward? I think I have too much faith in the American people to believe that's going to be the case. What do you think? Well, I'm a bit of a catastrophist and a glass half empty kind of guy, as you probably figured out. So I immediately draw conclusions or parallels with the Gestapo that was 32 ,000 people.

57:44I think ISIS is 22. They spent 2 billion. We're spending 12 billion. It was meant to be an administrative body focusing on documentation and border forms. And instead, it's turned into what I, as far as I can tell, is a series of pageantry and fear meant to exhibit strength and also scare people. And my father always used to say to me when I would compare Trump to Hitler, you got to keep in mind, Scott, Trump had his own private army. And as far as I can tell, ICE is a private army for the current administration. So I find it frightening. And when I think of just taking out the moral argument and the historical parallels.

58:23You know, the notion somehow that we need to get rid of these immigrants such that more Americans have better jobs and higher paid, it's just so stupid. If you want to talk about, imagine that millions of immigrants pouring over the border right now, it's called AI. AI is a much bigger threat to people's livelihoods than the person taking care of your aging mother or serving, you know, or working at the Chick-fil-A. And the notion somehow that American wages are going to go up, all that's going to happen is our expenses are going to go up. And what I find most telling about these raids is they're raiding Home Depot churches and schools, and maybe that's an indication that these are the kind of people we want here.

59:02And then just being very unemotional about it. Immigration, people are often very comfortable saying immigration is the lifeblood of our success. What I don't think they're in touch with is that the most profitable part of immigration has been undocumented immigration because they're a flexible workforce that pays taxes and then doesn't stick around for social services and melts back sometimes to their original host country when the crops are picked or that work dries up. And the reason why we have put up with this or tolerated it is because we recognize it's an incredible economic advantage to have this flexible workforce.

59:34So, you know, again, I go back to Germany, the demonization of immigrants. It economically makes no sense. It's morally reprehensible. And I am uncomfortable with a private army, an army that will have a greater funding budget than at the FBI, who is responsible for white collar crimes and terrorism. We've decided to allocate more resources to a private army of people who have to wear masks. You know, they're not only wearing a certain color shirt or insignias as armbands, they're wearing masks because of what they're doing is so, in my view, un-American. So I find ICE another, you know, incredibly disturbing.

1:00:15Your thoughts? I agree. I totally agree with that. Well, my point was just I'm not entirely sure that in a country of this size they are going to be able to get the kind of control that somebody could in a smaller country like Germany was in 1933. So, you know, I think you're right that this is pageantry, that a lot of it so far is pageantry designed, first of all, to terrorize immigrants, but also to terrorize other Americans into not speaking up. And that's the piece that I am not convinced is necessarily going to work. And by the way, I didn't mean in any way to downplay the terror and the damage and the torture even that immigrants and migrants are going through in this.

1:01:00I'm trying to look at the larger picture here and what the Trump administration is trying to do. So I don't disagree with you at all on that, but I'm just saying I'm not entirely sure it's going to work. This is an extraordinarily unstable administration. Trump himself is not in good shape. J.D. Vance, the heir apparent, commands no real voting base. Increasingly, the wheels are coming off the bus as FEMA can't respond to things, as the tariffs are starting to kick in as prices are going up. You know, it is, you know, I guess what I keep saying is I think we're going into a period of extraordinary instability.

1:01:41And I am not convinced that the outcome of that is going to be a dictatorship. It could just as easily be that the outcome of it is a renewed American democracy, but it's going to be messy, messy, messy either way. I love your vision. I always jokingly say in my companies, there's been all these people that are kind of invisible until they fuck up. And that is the person running the accounting, the person running the events, that they're not appreciated until something goes wrong. And I feel that a lot of Americans are coming to grips with the fact that there's a lot of people, hydrologists, meteorologists, the TSA, working who are invisible until there's a disaster.

1:02:18And that some of this long-term thinking and investment and boring jobs are actually really important. And that they're going to learn very painfully that these things matter and that immigrants play a key role and that an autocracy is strong. I love your vision. I'm worried that this is the first step towards a darker period where we have a lot of young men who are struggling, don't have a lot of economic or romantic prospects, are looking for scapegoats to justify their problems. And that we're one economic shock away from an authoritarian government that gets even uglier. And we already have, you called it a gulag.

1:03:01I call them concentration camps. Concentration camps, one of the definitions is a camp outside of the host territory such that the individuals shipped to these places don't have the rights they would in their own domestic environment. We're already there. We have demonization of immigrants. We have militarization of civil agencies. We have a disrespect for some of the institutions. they always attack the academics. Why? Because you and I, you're what I'd call a hardcore, real, legitimate academic. I'm short of showing up and doing a rich little version of academics, and that is I teach. But you, quite frankly, you just have much deeper domain expertise than me.

1:03:40And I find that common across all moves towards fascism is to attack universities. Why? Because at the end of the day, you especially, but also I'll include myself in this crowd, we teach young people to ask why. And they don't want young people and intelligent people asking why. They want them feeling things. And so I worry that there's a fork in the road here, but one potential left turn here could be much darker. And I look back at Germany again in the 30s, an incredibly progressive society, pro-gay, civil rights, appreciation for immigrants, appreciation for academics and then a descent into darkness.

1:04:19And I worry that that same opportunity for darkness is available to us. And then everyone talks about institutions, the courts, the universities. And what I like about what you're saying is it's beyond institutions, it's people. It's the judges got to stand up. Academics got to be fearless, such as you have been smart and thoughtful. People, employers have to stand up for their employees. You know, I'm very disappointed in the technology community, some of the people I hang out with who are incredibly blessed not speaking up about their blessings, that we keep talking about institutions under attack.

1:04:57I think that's true. What I find so disappointing about this, Professor, is that not more people are speaking up when you have billionaire owners of media companies paying off the administration under the threat of a legal case that they would win. When you have legal firms saying we will provide, basically bending a knee and ignoring all the principles of our basic judicial system, I worry that not enough individuals are standing up. Because at the end of the day, these institutions are made up of people. So I'm more worried about a darker fork in the road here. Well, I'm worried about that darker fork in the road, but I also recognize that there is no way forward except doing it.

1:05:38There's no way through but going forward. And so one of the things I'm trying to do is find a way to get people on the brighter path rather than the darker path. Because, you know, the thing is, as a historian, we know how this plays out. We know exactly how this plays out. And one of the things that just gobsmacks me is that knowing what we know and how these situations play out, that people in the administration would be trying it yet again. and people would be getting behind them. Because again, I can write that script. I really can write that script. But I can also write the other script in which people reject that version of our future and pick a different one.

1:06:20And that's the one that I'm working for. I do have a question for you. You mentioned something a second ago that sparked an idea for me that I would love to hear you expand on a little bit more. I have been sitting here looking at the reduced numbers of undocumented and documented migrants in the United States and saying to myself, where are they going to find ways to replace them? And I'm looking at child labor, for example, or now this idea that people on Medicaid are going to have work in the fields or whatever. Do you think that what they are doing, what the administration, to be clear, is doing, is recognizing that AI is going to wipe out a ton of jobs and setting up the idea that those jobs are not the fault of those people pushing AI, which is a problematic, and maybe someday we can talk about what AI entails for the United States, but that rather than saying, this billionaire puts you out of business, they're trying to convince a lot of people who will be unemployed that their problem is the gardener or is the woman doing healthcare.

1:07:26Is that, do you think, a deliberate sleight of hand? For me, the logic just isn't sequential or doesn't add up because the people they're going after are exactly the kinds of jobs that AI, some of the few sectors that AI can't replace. AI still hasn't figured out a way to, you know, wake your grandmother up and bring her her medication. AI still can't give you physical therapy. AI still can't, you still need people on construction sites. You still need people harvesting crops. I just don't, you know, I mean, AI could potentially replace a lot of Uber drivers and a lot of truck drivers, But what I see is that who AI is replacing is my kids.

1:08:07When I say my kids, my second year MBA graduates, I was my first job out of college was at Morgan Stanley as an analyst. They hired 80 analysts. I'm convinced all the work I did in two years in fixed income as an analyst at Morgan Stanley could be done in about six weeks now with AI. So the notion somehow that this, if they really wanted, I see the presidency as just a capital allocator and that his job is to, or her job is to allocate capital to a greater return than another leader who has capital at their disposal. and taking$12 billion to round up immigrants who are taxpayers and, you know, during the day at work and on weekends and evenings at school and at church, that makes no sense to me.

1:08:47If you really were concerned about employment, you'd be deploying vocational programs and more critical thinking skills such that people could embrace these new technologies and also embrace more self-sufficiency and energy and shovel-ready jobs. I mean, we need more healthcare workers, more people who understand how to install energy-efficient HVAC computers, build nuclear power plants. I mean, that to me is where you would help with the employment picture. But look, you've been so generous with your time. I just want to, I want to have, I want you to just touch on one thing that's very close to my heart.

1:09:23And that is, I work, I think a lot about technology. And something that's just so extraordinarily disappointing to me is that these are the most blessed people in the world, as far as I can tell. If you look at the majority of them, you know, there's absolutely some great stories of immigrants and people playing themselves by their bootstraps. 20 % of the NASDAQ is not only immigrants by market cap, it's Indian immigrants. And there's some wonderful stories. But a lot of these kids came from privileged backgrounds, whether it was Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, they dropped out of Harvard because they could.

1:09:54And they got into Harvard because they could. And yet it feels like the most blessed among us, specifically these tech billionaires, are the first ones, quite frankly, to shitpost America and talk about some weird techno-libertarian vision that makes absolutely no sense to me. And a lot of people draw conclusions with the Gilded Age. And I know you've looked at the Gilded Age. And I would just love to get your thoughts on the parallels between the Gilded Age and kind of this technotopia, or whatever you'd want to call it, and what we can learn from it and where you think it goes from here. I'm actually really glad you asked that, because I think a lot about that.

1:10:30including in the ideology of the modern-day tech people, because of the parallels it has with the 1880s and 1890s especially, because things were changing by the actual turn of the century. What I think happens is that people begin to internalize their belief that they are better than other people, that they have done something extraordinarily clever. And often, I just want to add this here, I will follow that thought, but often there is a generational change inherent there. That is, the first generation will say it but not really mean it. They're saying it either to pump themselves up or for political advantage.

1:11:13But their sons, because it's almost always sons, actually believe it. So in the 1890s, for example, you see coming out of the Civil War a whole bunch of people in the American South talking about how Black Americans are inherently not as able as white Americans, as Euro-Americans, and therefore they should not have a say in American society. They used it really as a political argument for that first generation. The second generation believes that they are better, that white men are better than black men and certainly than other black people, and they are willing to enforce that through lynching.

1:11:46So that generational shift really matters. But that being said, I do think there is this idea that as people succeed and as they spend time with other people who succeed, they start to believe that they are, in fact, better than other people. And they, especially men, tend to erase the reality of how they got to be where they are. And they set out to create a system that they think advantages them in such a way that they will do good for the most people. So instead of picking up right there, Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, where I'll get in a second, Andrew Carnegie is a really useful person to look at, because he's an immigrant who becomes a steel baron.

1:12:27And he arrives in the United States at a time when he is able to rise because of the economy, because of the Civil War and the nationalization of that period, because of his connections and so on. And by the 1890s, he is no longer talking about, you know, the fortune of America that enabled him to become who he was. He is talking about how it was his own hard work that enabled him to become who he was. And that because he was so much better than the people around him, he should be able to concentrate wealth in his own hands. And that that's the way the society really should work is that Welsh should concentrate among those most able to amass it.

1:13:07Because what they would do was they would use it as the stewards of society by building libraries or opera houses or public facilities that could not be achieved unless they did concentrate that wealth. because if you left it in the hands of the workers, they would waste it on food or clothing or housing or leisure time. Well, if you move that mindset into the present, you can see somebody like Elon Musk, who believes that he will save humanity, or at least alleges he believes that he will save humanity by settling Mars. You see that same idea that he has ideas that are only being corrupted by the idea of civil rights, regulations, the idea that, in fact, women and people of color should have equal rights to employment and equal protections in American society.

1:13:59That hampers him. And that mindset, that some people are better than others and have the right to rule for the good of humanity, is a thread that runs through American history, not just from the Gilded Age, But the elite and Southern enslavers said the same thing in the 1850s, the exact same thing in the 1850s, that they were the ones who had truly figured out society. So to me, it's just a continuity. And that in many ways helps me think about ways to combat it, because I don't believe that. I actually do believe that people are equal and that they do have a right to a say in their government and they do have a right to be treated equally before the law.

1:14:36And they should have equal access to resources, including things like health care and education. So when I think about reinforcing that set of ideological principles, which are the same ones that somebody like Theodore Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or FDR or Lincoln embraced, in a way there's a roadmap there to see how we have succeeded in the past. And I do want to point out that in all of those moments that I just mentioned, the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, the present, it didn't look at the time as if the idea of equality was going to win. You think of somebody like John Dos Passos and his poem about how they have clubbed us off the streets.

1:15:19People thought that the rich elites who wanted to control everything were going to win. It was never an easy fight. And this fight is not going to be easy either. But I am not ready to give up on America. We have done it in the past. And in a way, we have the tools to know how to do it again. Not ready to give up on America. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history. She is the author of seven award-winning books, including her latest, Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America. Her widely read newsletter, Letters from an American, synthesizes history and modern political issues.

1:16:01I'm going to ask a favor. Most conversations I have, I think I have a certain, I'm not proud of this, level of arrogance. I think, okay, that's interesting, but I have a better take on this. I found myself insecure in this conversation because you are so forceful and dignified and have such deep domain expertise. And this is my ask. I want to bring more light to your work. I think it just shocks me that as much praise and influence as you have, that I think your work deserves a lot more attention. and with your approval and your help, I would like to bring more attention to it. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation.

1:16:44I think you are doing great work and are the right voice at the right moment.

1:16:52This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:17:31Thank you. work with the all-new adobe acrobat studio with lpl financial we provide the services to help push you forward when it comes to your finances your business your future the only question should be what if you could paid advertisement annie kendrick is not a client of lpl financial llc and receives compensation to promote lpl investing involves risk including potential loss of principal lpl financial llc member finra sipc the pumpkin spice latte is back at starbucks crafted with our signature espresso and real pumpkin sauce then topped with whipped cream cinnamon and nutmeg The PSL. Get it while it's hot or iced.

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