Astead Herndon

Thank you for coming.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

I appreciate that.

I mean, I wanted to kind of start by looking at your work.

As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you've argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years, from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal.

I wondered how you thought about those reinventions.

What forces shaped them?

And are we in a reinvention period right now?

Now, what forces shape these kind of shifts in the country?

I don't know if it's reinvention is the right word, but if we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity?

And what are the seeds that we should be looking for right now?

asked about today, you know, the premise of this show is kind of to try to take Trump out of the center, to see the country beyond the lens of him.

But kind of baked into that question is whether he is like an aberrant, malign piece in American politics or is reflective of a system.

And we're going to have to live with Trumpism for maybe longer than even the individual person.

Personalist autocracy.

Because the immigrants are taking your job, because folks are coming in and represent a kind of imminent threat.

Artificial intelligence, things like that.

I mean, I think your point is very important because it lays out that, you know, Donald Trump may not have been inevitable, but he did kind of he was succeeding on the ground.

The Republicans have been telling for a long time.

I wanted to ask about nationalism specifically.