Heather Cox Richardson

speaker

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

If you want rights, you stand on the Declaration.

So first I'm going to push back against the idea of the progressive left, because as I have pointed out recently, what people are calling the progressive left is not actually left.

You know, the left is the idea of getting rid of liberal democracy altogether and changing the private ownership of the means of production, that is who owns factories, for example, into publicly owned institutions or publicly owned means of production.

Democratic socialism is not socialism.

It's not changing the means of production into public hands.

What it says is we would like a society that looks very much like America did until the 1980s, which is, you know, in the period between 1933 and 1981.

when in fact we did have public ownership of utilities, for example.

So those terms are a little bit problematic.

But to your larger point, one of the things that we are seeing in this period, again, I sound like a broken record on this, is a mirror of the 1850s and the 1890s and the 1930s in that we had a period in which the country became deeply divided and power and wealth really flowed to a very small group of people.

that that works for a while you can whip up your base by talking about those people and you know those people are immigrants are black people are women who want to work outside the home there always those others who threatened to bring socialism to america there's actually history behind that word here that has very little to do with international socialism and that's why the confusion is there

But when people finally wake up and realize that the government is not in fact serving their needs and that there are new issues that they have to address, all political identities tend to go out the window and you get this period of really choppy political water where people make new alliances across the political spectrum.

And the great example of that, it's in all of the periods I identified, but the great example of that

is the 1850s, when it became very clear that the elite Southern enslavers had taken over the American government and were using it to advance their interests against everybody who was not a member of their class.

Lawmakers from Congress gathered together

And they said, listen, we disagree about finance.

We disagree about internal improvements.

We disagree about immigration.

But we can agree that we don't want to lose our democracy to a very small group of elite enslavers.

And they begin to coalesce around a number of leaders, and they begin to articulate a new vision for the country.

And finally, in 1859, rising Illinois lawyer

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