Heather Cox Richardson

is, you know, if everything's going fine, basically no one's paying much attention to politics.

And then there are a few people who are complaining, but their kind of voice is crying in the wilderness and you're like, yeah, whatever, you know, have a Cheeto, you know?

But then as people get more and more upset

More and more people are like, hey, did you hear what that person has to say?

And they start to make a community of people who are upset about one thing or another.

And once again, those are people who are not necessarily in power yet.

So the thing that had me thinking for a long time is where is the relationship, literally the relationship, between people on the ground and leadership?

That is, you know, there's a lot of people who think leaders just tell people at the bottom who to think, and there's people who think that it's the other way around.

But where, for me, was the connection?

And where I came to think the connection lies is in this.

The more people recognize that there's a problem with their government, the more they start to formulate a way to think about that.

And if you are trying to get elected, either are elected or trying to get elected as a leader, you need to be able to speak to those people.

So the connection between those two things are the storytellers, the ones who take that inchoate frustration and say, this is not our society.

Storytellers like Abraham Lincoln, for example, who say, this is not the way our society should be.

But now there's another piece to that, I think, and that is obviously somebody like Lincoln, but we could pick on many other people as well, is able to articulate what

the frustrated Americans would like their society to look like.

But one of the things that they have to do is they have to be able to reach a lot of people.

And in Lincoln's era, you got the rise of a new kind of newspaper.

People forget this, but the New York Daily Tribune, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer was actually older, but it switches its orientation in this period.

You start to see a new media amplifying that sort of story.