Heather Cox Richardson

Well, who does that benefit?

People who have a ton of money.

You get the gerrymandering, the extraordinary gerrymandering that makes it almost impossible for Democrats to win.

So you've got in certain states.

Right.

So one of the things that that has done is it's skewed the system in a certain direction, but it's also, I think, encouraged Americans to feel like they don't have agency in their government.

And one of the things that you have seen since Trump was elected the second time was people saying, hey, wait, if we turn up at Tesla parking lots, Tesla dealerships, we can actually hurt the

And when Jimmy Kimmel got knocked off the air, you had people saying, OK, then we're not going to buy your product.

And all of a sudden, he's back on the air.

And people are learning that they do have agency and that muscle is strengthening in a way that it did in the 1890s, for example, in a very similar period that led to the progressive era or the 1930s.

Well, once again, future is unwritten.

We can make whatever decisions we want going forward.

I think it's a multifaceted answer that I'm going to give you.

One is that even in the darkest periods, one of the things that carries us through is art and music.

and the communities that those things create.

So we tend to forget that in that period of the robber barons in the 1880s and the 1890s, it's also a period of extraordinary innovation in terms of technology, for example, but also in terms of art and music.

And you think about the new kinds of literature and the new kinds of music coming out of the American South and so on in that period and the artwork in that period.

So those kinds of nurturing of the human spirit really matter.

And that's one of the things I don't think we necessarily pay enough attention to.

But one of the ways that political change happens is, and I thought a lot about this,