Heather Cox Richardson

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167 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

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

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Here's the Scoop · Historian Heather Cox Richardson on American self-determination, division and optimism · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

So I would take a step back from that and say that what it represents is that this is a country where if you work hard, you can attain what it is that you care about.

The trick there is that we have the guardrails up to enable people to realize the life that they want.

And for many people, that means working their way to a place where they have food and they have shelter and they have education and they have the space to build what I would call wealth.

family, friends, church, education, and so on.

And one of the things that has really hurt that in the modern era, I think, is first of all, the abandonment by the government of policies that protect people's right to be treated equally before the law, but also that have tended to concentrate wealth among a very small group of people.

And once you have the inability to provide for your family through a 40-hour-a-week job or through doing something that you really care about, you lose the sense that you, in fact, are going to leave your people better off than they were.

And that is central to the American dream.

So if you think about why people feel it's out of reach now, I don't think you have to look much further than the legislation that we have started to put in place today.

beginning in about 1981 to at least the beginning of the Biden administration that had concentrated more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

100%.

I mean, we call this the second Gilded Age for a reason.

If you look at people from about 1888 till about, let's give it 1905, what you see are people taking to the streets to say that they can no longer provide for their families, that they're working extraordinary hours on the steel mill floors, for example, and they're not making enough money to guarantee that their children aren't going to have to be in the streets.

And from that, what you got was people from all different walks of life coming together around a whole new set of ideas and languages and art and literature and music coming together to think of new political ways to address that inequality.

And from that, of course, we get the progressive era.

So and that was, you know, a complete reworking of our political system.

Yes, and one of the things that we have always had to do, and that is curiously marked in some ways by the 26, 76 dates we have been identifying, is...

The concepts of American democracy, those principles that were articulated by the founders, however imperfectly they lived them, have always had to adapt to new circumstances.

So in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, they've got to figure out how to adapt to westward migration, right?

And then in 1876, they have to figure out how to deal with industrialization.

Then in 1926, they're going to have to figure out how to deal with a global economy.

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