Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher. We're off for the holiday today. So we have an episode of America Actually with Astead Herndon for you in this episode. Astead talks with historian Heather Cox Richardson about America's first 250 years and how the U.S. is facing its biggest stress test since the Civil War. Oh, joy.
So you enjoy.
So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I'd say it's going okay. I'd give us like a C plus. The Declaration of Independence, the women's rights movement, the invention of basketball or the iPhone, all good. Slavery, colonialism, income inequality, unequivocally bad. But what's gonna determine the next 250 years of America?
And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve?
Chapter 2: How has America reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years?
That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in. Joining me now is Heather Cox Richardson. She's a historian and professor at Boston College, but you probably know her from her very popular sub stack, Letters from an American, and her YouTube channel. I am excited that Heather is joining us because she's going to help us think about not only the future, but how the past connects to it.
Thank you for coming. It's such a pleasure to be here. I appreciate that. I mean, I wanted to kind of start by looking at your work. As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you've argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years, from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal. I wondered how you thought about those reinventions.
What forces shaped them? And are we in a reinvention period right now?
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.
Mm-hmm.
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?
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Chapter 3: What challenges are shaping America's future today?
Absolutely.
Now, what forces shape these kind of shifts in the country? I don't know if it's reinvention is the right word, but if we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity? And what are the seeds that we should be looking for right now?
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.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of a new social contract for America?
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,
We might disagree with each other about immigration and about finances and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country rather than tear it down. And that really hit a chord for me because that is precisely what the Republicans did when they formed in the 1850s. It's precisely what the
populists and the Democrats did in the 1890s when they organized against the robber barons and then included the progressive Republicans. It's certainly what we saw in the 1920s and the 1930s, what we saw in the 1950s, and I think what we're seeing in the United States again today.
asked about today, you know, the premise of this show is kind of to try to take Trump out of the center, to see the country beyond the lens of him. But kind of baked into that question is whether he is like an aberrant, malign piece in American politics or is reflective of a system. And we're going to have to live with Trumpism for maybe longer than even the individual person.
So Trump is very clearly the outcome of at least 40 years of right-wing rhetoric that has been adopted by the Republican Party that laid the groundwork for a man to come in and essentially get rid of the dog whistles and call to the sexists and racists who had ended up sliding into the Republican Party really after 1965 and the Voting Rights Act.
Mm-hmm.
To basically create sort of a libertarian, small government elite in the Republican Party that depended on the votes of those racists and sexists to stay in power. But what he did was he sort of flipped the script. He nodded to the establishment Republicans who wanted the tax cuts, but he empowered the racists and the sexists and the American firsters and so on.
And so he is very much a product of that. Mm-hmm. You know, that moment.
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Chapter 5: How do the arts influence societal reinvention?
But he is also something different because by empowering them, what he did is he turned a democracy in not just to an autocracy, but to a personalist autocracy. It's sort of, in a way, a step beyond fascism that we can talk about.
Personalist autocracy.
Yes. So the idea that he wants all the power, but he also wants the power not for his party and not for even his cronies, but for himself. But he's certainly a product of that 40 years. Now, there's a bigger question, as I say, embedded in what you said, and that is, is the United States of America's system so deeply flawed to begin with that we were waiting for a Trump?
And to that, I would say no. I would say that we, many of us, dropped the ball after, really after the 1960s and the 1970s and the idea that we had finally managed to create a new kind of American government that was premised on reality rather than on the previous images of American life. 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.
Because the immigrants are taking your job, because folks are coming in and represent a kind of imminent threat.
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.
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Chapter 6: What role does history play in shaping current political narratives?
But you also, to your pointā Have people who care in the middle of that. Have people who support you in the middle of that. Have people who connect with you across demographic types and differences in individuals that I think often can tell a very positive story about the country as well. So both of those things exist right next to each other.
The last question I want to ask you is really about your work. And as we kick off to a little game I'm going to play after this, you know, when we look back to the founding documents of the last 250 years, is there a piece that you think will have the most relevance for going forward?
Is there something that you look back to and you say, hey, this clause, this thing, this is what I think will be the kind of key for our efforts of perfection moving ahead? Gettysburg Address. Interesting. I'm surprised. Yeah.
Why?
Because the, you know, and I'm having, obviously I'm a big fan of the Declaration because it establishes the foundation of American democracy, even though the country was not a democracy at the time. The idea that you must be treated equally before the law, have a right to equal access to resources, and to have a right to have a senior government, that's what a democracy is, right?
So that is crucially important. But with the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, I think, emphasized, you know, think about it, four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. You know, when the founders put it in the Declaration, they said, these are self-evident truths.
Mm-hmm. By Lincoln's time, he's saying it was a proposition and it's being tested. And that, I think, is really the heart of what it means to be an American is that there is this proposition that it is possible to create a nation that has the principles that the founders put down on paper. But that principle is always going to be a proposition.
And he says, listen, we're here to honor these men who died in this horrible battle to try and make that proposition come true. But there's really nothing we can do more than what they did to make that happen. And the proposition that he actually explains at the end of that speech is that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
That to me is the marching orders. If the declaration is the plan, the Gettysburg Address is the marching orders.
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Chapter 7: How can a new founding document address modern issues?
And so judges used to be young because you didn't want to have to ride around on a horse to do all this stuff. Until we get World War II and the incredible ease of transportation and of really good medical care, both being in national government and being on the Supreme Court was generally a pretty young person's game.
Interesting.
Because you weren't going to fly home to California every night. Right, right, right.
You were constrained by the means of getting around itself.
And by your own health.
Right.
Terms. Let's do terms Supreme Court. We'll all agree on that. Supreme Court's health care. Give me one more for you.
Health care.
Health care. Now, what does that look like? When we think about the government's role in kind of establishing a new social contract, are we talking about universal health care? Are we talking about things that should be guaranteed as a human right?
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