Heather Cox Richardson

Oh, that's interesting.

I'm not sure I've ever used the words reinvention because the way I think about it is that any country has to deal with new challenges all the time.

And because we had set out at our foundation a series of principles that at the time were quite limited by who they covered but were expansive in terms of what they could cover.

We have managed through our history to address new challenges like westward expansion, like industrialization, like globalization, like the advent of nuclear weapons, to expand American democracy to more closely adhere to those foundational documents, but to expand as they took on new issues.

So are we in a moment like this now?

Absolutely.

So there's a whole lot embedded in that question.

And one of the places that I want to start with that is that the seeds for reinvention, I think, come from the arts.

They come from music.

They come from art.

They come from new languages and new clothing styles and sculpture and all sorts of new ways to envision the world through our imaginations.

And we could talk about the late 19th century, for example, and how extraordinarily creative that time was and so forth.

But

Those ideas, I think, come from there, but that's not enough.

I think when you see reinvention, you see Americans reaching back for their stories, for their traditional history, and the places that they can see other Americans having exercised their agency to make those traditions our best traditions ever.

come into law or at least come into practice.

And, you know, it's an especially poignant time for us to be talking about this.

On April 12th, Hungarian voters put a supermajority of opposition figures to Viktor Orban into power in their parliament.

And they will, of course, have a different prime minister.

One of the things that they appear to have done is to have reached back to Hungarian history and said, listen,