Heather Cox Richardson

And by that, I mean that it was a government that recognized the worth of individuals and

It didn't necessarily protect individuals the way the principles of that government suggested they should, but it recognized their worth in a way that the government before 1965 and before the Great Society under LBJ had not done.

And so for a lot of people, they thought, oh, we're on this trajectory toward a liberal democracy that is in fact going to recognize the worth of democracy.

disabled Americans and elderly Americans and so on.

And as a result, we stopped focusing on the importance of democracy and of liberal democracy.

But what that did is it enabled the radical right to step in and give people a sense of a national narrative that made their agency feel deeply important to them.

They were the ones protecting America in a way that people like me weren't.

That's right.

And, you know, one of the things that always jumps out to me is Lauren Boebert, the representative from Colorado, on the morning of January 6th, 2021, texting to people, this is 1776.

Yeah.

was to make it clear that our democracy and the guardrails of our democracy that so many people believed couldn't be challenged.

And Trump just tore them up.

And with that, a lot of people who sort of assumed the guardrails were there are stepping into the fray and saying, okay, I didn't think I was going to have to get involved in politics.

Yeah.

But clearly I do, and here I am.

And that kind of engagement in protecting American democracy is the sort of thing that, as I say, we've seen in the past, the 1850s, 1890s, and so on, to reclaim that democracy and, crucially, make it adjust to new conditions that are currently challenging it, like in our lifetimes, the internet, climate change.

Okay, that's too broad a brush, I think, and I want to be careful with the word Democrats because in this moment, of course, when as many Americans identify as being independents as identifies Republicans or Democrats, it's important, I think, to look at the American population as a whole.

Yep.

And in that case, I think one of the things that you are identifying is the 1960s and early 1970s and the broad-based opposition to the Vietnam War meant for a lot of people that the trappings of that war, the American flag and so on, had taken on negative connotations.

And that was something, by the way, that the radical right grabbed hold of and really ran with.