Heather Cox Richardson

speaker

126 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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What A Day · Amending The Constitution For The 21st Century With Heather Cox Richardson · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

One of the things that I think about now, though, is actually two periods that jump out to me for different reasons. voice-verified

And the first is the 1850s, because what we saw in the 1850s was the breakdown of two established political parties in the face of the takeover of what was then the Democratic Party by a small group of elite Southern enslavers. voice-verified

And when it was clear that they were running the tables, not only in the Senate and in the presidency and in the Supreme Court and also in the House of Representatives, people who did not want to lose their democracy to a really small group of people who thought that everybody else should create wealth that would then funnel upward to them, voice-verified

came together and they said to each other, you know, we don't agree about immigration, we don't agree about financing, we don't agree about whether we should have internal improvements or not, we don't agree about education, but by God, we can agree we don't think those people should control everything. voice-verified

And they came together in a whole bunch of different ways, a whole bunch of new political organizations that eventually became the Republican Party that elected Abraham Lincoln and stood behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. voice-verified

I feel very much like we're in a political moment like that. voice-verified

But in an economic moment, we are looking a lot like the Gilded Age, the first Gilded Age. voice-verified

You can make an argument we're in the second Gilded Age, where money has concentrated again among a small group of people. voice-verified

And once again, you saw a whole bunch of individuals coming together in new ways to push back against that. voice-verified

And I like that comparison in many ways because what we remember from that period is the politics, of course, and the strikes and the labor unrest. voice-verified

But we also remember the new music and the new art and the new literature and the people who are participating in American society and American politics, even without having the right to vote. voice-verified

People like women, for example, Indigenous Americans, Black and Brown Americans. voice-verified

And I love that idea that by getting behind the idea of democracy in whatever way is your signature, what you do best, people moved the needle pretty dramatically toward the progressive era. voice-verified

The whole idea that we are divided, bitterly divided right now, more so than they were in the past, I think is really problematic. voice-verified

Because if you think about things like the idea of universal health care, Americans are behind that to the tune of like 80% of us, which is huge numbers. voice-verified

Similarly, the people who want to see common sense gun safety regulation, over 70%. voice-verified

You know, many of the things that the... voice-verified

traditional media is reporting as being progressive or far left is in fact squarely in the center of where Americans are right now, and by the way, where they were in the 1950s in terms of things like economic power and so on. voice-verified

So I don't think we are especially divided right now. voice-verified

I think it benefits a certain group of politicians to keep us divided. voice-verified

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