Heather Cox Richardson: The Reality Show-ification of the Government
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I couldn't be more delighted to welcome to the Bulwark the professor of history at Boston College, teaching 19th century American history. She also writes the newsletter Letters from an American on Substack with over 1.8 million subscribers. Her books include Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America. It's Heather Cox Richardson. How are you doing?
I'm good and I'm so pleased to be here.
So delightful. Obviously, given the fact that lots of people are reading your newsletter, many are familiar with you. But I kind of just wanted to start, for those who aren't, a little bit about your backstory. And then we'll get into the Elon of it all and what's our new... you know, kind of deputy shadow president. And we'll talk a little bit about that and historical parallels. But, you know, you, at least to me, I just emerged from the ether, right? It's like, hey, there's this professor that has a newsletter everybody reads. And I'm just curious, like how that kind of came to pass and what, you know, got you into all this.
So it's funny because I shouldn't maybe use the past tense, but I will. I was a pretty well-known American history professor. I had a number of books out, very well-received books out in American political and economic history. But you know, in many ways in our country, our different professions are siloed. So while I think you would have been hard-pressed to find an academic historian who didn't know who I was, the crossover to the popular audience had been, you know, the Washington Post, the Guardian, places like that, where again, I wrote a lot. I even had a column for Salon years ago under Dave Daly, which was, you know, a really interesting experience. Yeah, he was a great, really great editor.
But I had a presence on Facebook in part because I'm a teacher and people always ask me questions and that was a good place to answer those questions. And I love to write. So I wrote essays there on any number of things, you know, about once a week. And in 2019, in September of 2019, I said to people what I thought the world looked like at that moment. And I just got flooded with questions. So I started answering questions and one thing led to another. And I think I had a million followers on Facebook within a matter of weeks. And then it turned over into the newsletter as well. So I didn't really come out of nowhere. I just came from a different silo to a more popular audience.
Yeah, it's actually in some ways an important lesson for our politics right now. I think that a lot of times that the Democrats are talking to people in just their silo and not kind of aware of what's happening in other silos, maybe more lowbrow than the American history silo. But, you know, there are other silos out there that it's important to reach.
Well, yeah, and I would say something that I've really learned, and that's that the other part of my story that I think is perhaps one of the things that people find interesting is I really am from a very small town in Maine, and I still live here, and I'm married to a lobsterman. And there is a sense sometimes that people who don't have college degrees, as my husband does not, or that people who work in manual labor, as so many of my friends do, are stupid. And I know that's not the case because this is my world. And so there has never been a sense for me of talking down to people or trying to explain things to people who, you know, maybe don't have the intellectual power to do it because these are the people I've grown up with. I know they're incredibly smart. They just took a different path than some of the rest of us do.
One of the things that I have discovered is not only that writing for a popular audience does not mean dumbing anything down. To the contrary, it usually means smartening it up because there are no shortcuts. But also that if you do something even so simple as putting a click through, so an organization that offers its clients,
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