Heather Cox Richardson

And so if you jump ahead to the 1890s, once again, you're seeing people like Theodore Roosevelt articulating a new kind of way to contextualize and imagine a new government.

But crucial to him is the rise of the new newspapers in the populist period, for example, most of which don't exist anymore.

All the copies were destroyed.

But they grew up across the American plains and in the American South like mushrooms after the rain.

And

The idea of being able to make sure more people get access to that narrative becomes incredibly important.

So if you fast forward to this moment, one of the huge changes that you have seen really since – and it was before there too, but really since –

Trump was elected the second time is this proliferation of podcasts and new local newspapers and writing campaigns that look like the committees of correspondence from the American Revolution.

You are seeing the population of our intellectual space in this country

with a new slash old narrative that says the government should work for us.

It should not be beholden to kings, for example, and we need to take that back.

So that was a really long answer to say there's a lot of different things that happen.

These things are all crucial.

And in each of the periods that we have identified, there was in fact a major economic crash that made people say,

okay, I can't identify with J.D.

Rockefeller any longer because I am literally having to walk from South Dakota to Missouri to find work.

And when that, that was in the, after the panic of 1893, from 1893 to about 1897.

So when that final thing happens where people say, I can't live this way any longer, more and more people jump on that narrative and we rewrite the country.

It's certainly possible, sure.

But again, one of the things you need to see there is enough people unhappy enough that they would not, for example, embrace the reaction to Obama that powered the Tea Party movement and all those sort of –