Chapter 1: What are the historical parallels to current political frustrations in America?
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. It is March 31st. We are on the lamb side of March moving into April. And other than that, though, I would say I am I'm having a feeling of I don't know what it's like to be on a bobsled course or on a luge course. But that's what it feels like right now in this country. We appear to be careening towards something.
And you're not quite sure if we are going to stay on the track or fly off and explode in midair. And when I have feelings like this, when the complexities of the world and the velocity of world events seem to be speeding towards a frightening conclusion, I reach to those, as Mr. Rogers would say, I reach for the helpers. I reach for the helpers, those that can help put this in perspective.
And our guest today is just one of my favorites who I just, I love her Substack. I love everything that she does. But her ability to sort of create frameworks around all these things that are so difficult for all of us to process is what makes her such a valuable voice in this current moment. So I'm just going to get on in and bring on our guest, the fabulous Heather Cox Richardson.
So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure and honor to welcome back once again the great Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College. Heather, thank you so much for being here.
Always a pleasure, John. Heather. John.
First of all, let me apologize to you that in times of trouble, I hate to treat you like a salve that I reach for in times of need, a bottle of Valium. Your experience and your knowledge of the arc of history and the narratives of history always bring me a comfort.
in that the things that we're experiencing are not necessarily unprecedented, and that there are historical analogs, which we don't want to use as a crutch necessarily. But Heather, I'm wondering in this moment, I wanted to reach out to you because it feels there is...
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Chapter 2: How have citizens historically overcome failing government systems?
a toxicity that seems to be building to some kind of volcanic eruption. And I can't shake that feeling of impending catastrophic. So I wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit about how you're processing this moment, knowing how well you're able to see the landscapes of the past and lay them into the present.
So let's start with the place it's always important to start, and that's that the future is unwritten. We are writing this story, and we are doing it. And one of the reasons that I think people like you and me reach for the people around us is because ultimately this is an extraordinarily – human process. The people in the past did the same thing.
Yes, though, I feel as if, like you seem to feel, that we are heading toward some kind of a cataclysm soon. And that, I think we should maybe unpack a little bit about what's going on there. But Again, to reach back into history, we are not the first people who are approaching a catastrophe without really being able to understand what is going to happen or what it looks like.
And I always think of the fact that years ago, I went to write a piece on the great crash of 29. And I thought, you know, everybody's done the, you know, the economics and everybody's done this and everyone's done that. What am I going to do? So I went back to a newspaper from the time and read the night before to see what it looked like on the verge of it.
And it's really interesting because it was the opening night of the opera in New York City. And so you had all these stories about the people in there. you know, beautiful coaches and the, you know, the guys with the uniforms and the people wearing diamonds and going in and going to see the opera.
And there was a really small note about a man who had died by suicide that night because his business had gone under and he was distraught and he couldn't face the fact that he was the only failure in this entire city, country, world, right, in his mind. And that's always stuck in my mind because I just, you know, I kept saying to the little piece of paper, dude, hang on, hang on 12 more hours.
Because if you hang on 12 more hours, there's going to be a whole lot of people who are there with you and who might like to hear your perspective on things. So every time it feels to me like, oh man, I'm not sure what we're facing in the morning. I think of that poor man who, if he had just...
managed to hang on for 12 more hours would have realized that he was not a failure, that the system had failed and that together they could rebuild it.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from past American crises?
That's a beautiful way of putting it. And there's also something within that kind of tableau that seems really appropriate, which is the cataclysm always seems to occur. the night before, Cataclysm Eve, if you will, always seems to be draped in finery.
You know, you sort of, you almost get that sense of using the Titanic as that's, you know, and what's happening, the band is playing in the grand ballroom and people are draped in there and they're riding in luxury on what appears to be a kind of portend for this glorious and future of riches. And then there's one dude who's like, hey, what's that?
What's that shadow of an iceberg that's over there? And it feels that way a little bit here. And I'll tell you why this moment for me is the world faces those challenges and potential cataclysms and all those things and navigating these difficult waters. The difference for me now is the captain of our ship seems utterly disinterested
In where the icebergs seem to be, in when the crash may happen, he just wants to get out. He wants to stand on his plane with a giant poster board of his ballroom. It's the lack of interest in the consequences of his powerful actions. is I think what's got me on such shaky ground.
I don't think, I feel like we've never been at the, you know, at the peril of a leader so disinterested in the damage of his own actions.
You're far more charitable than I am. I think the dude is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. I was trying to be nice. So I'm going to push that further. To me, the elephant, not only just in the room, but in the whole house and in the whole mansion, whatever, is that he is not mentally okay.
And, you know, we have Captain Ahab in the charge of the ship of state, which, you know, would be a lovely thing to dive into some other conversation. But he, um, no, I think it's more than he doesn't care because certainly we have had presidents in the past who had an ideology in their head and acted according to that ideology, even as the country began to burn down around them.
I mean, just don't even start me on Benjamin Harrison, but we could get into Calvin Coolidge, for example. But in this case, the man does not know if he's a foot or horseback. And so, you know, things are changing every second.
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Chapter 4: How does the disinterest of leadership affect national stability?
And the more destruction he causes, the more he is inclined to lash out and cause more destruction. So watching that and what that has gotten us into with the destruction of world trade and with the destruction of our security alliances and with the destruction of our allies and with the support – the fact we're supporting oligarchs, especially petro-oligarchs around the world.
I mean what he has done is he has really slashed into ribbons the post-World War II order that has brought us peace and prosperity for 80 freaking years. So – That is entirely new. And certainly there are parallels in the past where the American people have stepped up and said to those individuals who were advancing ideologies, hey, dude, this doesn't work. We got to try something else.
But what that has also done is it has opened a window, I think.
into possibilities for moving the world forward in the ways that it will need to in the 21st century to do things like address climate change and to address the migration that's going to come from climate change and to address the fact that in that post-World War II order, you really had more even than the vestiges, I think, of colonialism, but the kind of colonialist ideas that said that, you know, Africa doesn't get a seat at the G20 until...
President Joe Biden is in office. So one of the things I think about steering that Titanic past the iceberg, or maybe at least guaranteeing that people get in the lifeboats, is people keeping a steady hand on, I'm sorry to really push that metaphor, but the ship of state to try and make sure that it can at least keep
afloat long enough that we are there in lifeboats when we get the next way to look at the world.
Right, right. Yeah, the problem almost seems to be that Trump is destroying it faster than we can react to it. That the squandering, it really is like, you know, this 80-year world order that you speak of was designed and maintained by the United States. We created... this stable world. That's where our leverage and power is coming from.
And to see him piss it away with such velocity, I think it's, is our system up for being able to grab the wheel? Are we all just still trying to gain our bearings?
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What role do citizens play in shaping their government?
No worries.
One of the things that does seem to be developing is a number of people in other countries who at first had their jaws on their chests watching what was happening in the United States are now sort of standing up and saying, well, actually, we don't want to go down the route of going back to the 1890s the way Donald Trump wants to because let's think about what that did. Oh, I know, world wars.
So, you know, in places like Italy, for example, Italy this morning said that it would not permit U.S. planes to land in Italy on their way to Iran. Well, what does that say about the importance and the ways in which the Trump administration and the way it's behaving is hurting the far right in Italy? You know, they don't want to be aligned with him.
And take a look at what happened to the rising right-wing parties in Canada and the emergence of Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada. I mean, he's an incredibly smart man anyway, but his reworking of that international order in order to make sure that what he calls the middle countries, the middling countries, are able to maintain some kind of global stability is
You know, what's happened to the United States is heart-wrenching over the last 40 years at least. Maybe in part because we have been so powerful, it's enabled us to get away with all kinds of crap because, you know, we didn't have to pay taxes. We could simply borrow. We didn't have to worry about our safety because we were the United States.
What we are seeing happen to us and our role in the world is heart-wrenching for those of us who remember a period in which we were really a force for good or at least tried to be. But maybe what we will see coming out of this is a fairer order around the world thanks to people in other countries. A little hard to be thrown into the backwater yourselves, but, you know, we did it to ourselves.
Right. It's so interesting to think of it that way, as Trump as almost a vaccination against far-right populism, that they see how it operates. But maybe that's the difficulty we have in processing him because we look at it, you know, you mentioned Benjamin Harrison, you mentioned Calvin Coolidge, and we process him through our own system of constitutional republic, right?
But he's kind of thrown our lot in with a different form of government. It's hard to compare him to American presidents. It's almost easier to compare him to strongmen. I mean, I don't know if you saw they unveiled the Trump library But it's not a library.
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Chapter 6: How can art and music influence political change?
It's the Freedom Tower as if the only tenant was Kim Jong-un. Like it's twice the size of a height of any building in Miami. And then in it are just gold statues of Donald Trump and his plane. So how do we process an American president that has so much more in common with the illiberal strongmen of today and the past?
Well, so first of all, I think it's important to realize that he was not just breaking the law in his first year in office. He was acting – not acting unconstitutionally, although it was that too, both of those things. He was acting as if there wasn't a constitution.
Right.
which is one of the things sort of extra constitutionally, which is one of the things that's been hard to chase down. Because, you know, normally if somebody breaks the law, you say, OK, I'm going to bring in lawyers. I'm going to sue you and we're going to get to the bottom of this. But think about the Department of Government Efficiency, for example.
We still don't know who was in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency. How do you sue anybody if you literally do not know who was in charge of it? So there are many ways in which the way he undertook to undermine the Constitution, in fact, puts him in line with those autocrats who operate without any check by the people.
So I think it took a long time for people to get their heads around that and to figure out how to fight back against it. And we can talk more about that. But that library, I think, is really interesting, along with the arch and along with, you know.
The arc to triumph.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, and you know, when they build it, they're going to drop the I, and it's just going to be the arc to Trump.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of storytelling in politics?
So one of the things that I find fascinating, and would love to hear you talk about this, because this is your medium and not mine, is the degree to which what Trump is doing is sort of the idea of virtual technology, that Russian concept of convincing people in the political realm of something that does not exist, that exists only in their minds and in the technology of television and radio and the internet.
To to base their lives on that, the degree to which we are looking at, you know, basically Trump running the country like a television show.
No question. And an ADHD. I think what you find now is and the only thing I can think about it is I'm trying to, again, be charitable is. if you don't think of him as a dictator, but you think of him as, all right, he believes the United States is really just a subsidiary of the Trump organization. And so he's running it.
if you don't think of it in terms of Putin, you think of it in terms of a businessman running a company that's not public. So all the decision-making that occurs, he is, in essence, it's monarchy, but through a capitalist monarchy. That would be the charitable definition of it. And I think what you see is he's able to move using those processes much faster than we're able to contain it.
I think his first term struck me as he was testing the limits of our constitution. Where are the holes? Where are the weaknesses? The second term, he's just exploiting them. And he's doing it at such a pace. I mean, I think the real analog to that is what happened to the East Wing. where I'm going to build a ballroom, but I'm never going to touch the East wing. And then it's just gone.
And rather than face the consequences, he is a, he's not, you know, they always say like, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. The thing about Trump is he doesn't even ask fucking forgiveness. He just moves on. He's a wreck. It's a, he is a wrecking ball that operates simultaneously with a sort of reality distortion field.
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Chapter 8: How can we envision a more equitable future for America?
And he convinces his acolytes, like you say, through the power of narrative. He's one of the better narrative storytellers. But it's butting up against actual reality. And that's what's so fascinating about the Iran situation. It's the first time I've seen him not be able to just move on.
Well, so that's really interesting, thinking about the United States of America as a subsidiary of the Trump administration. oligarchy, or not even. It's a personalized company. And thinking of it as a media subsidiary. Basically, the United States is a media subsidiary. That is, you just have to tell a good story.
And we know there's been a lot of stories coming out of the White House about how White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is running a daily TV show that Trump has to win at the end of every night. you know, the degree to which he is manipulating reality through his posts on Truth Social and through the things he's saying, which change by the hour.
But there is, it seems like, the way you set that up, it does seem like there has to be a way to think through this that enables people to create their own reality out of things that are actually based in reality, like you say, like the Iran war.
And I, you know, like you, I have said for years that once people woke up and realized what was going to happen, if in fact we put this kind of a presidency in place, that's when we would get our democracy back. And I do think that is happening. But I also think you just identified that it's not happening as quickly as it needs to as Congress is on break until April 13th.
And Trump is in the White House contemplating sending our men and women into a ground war in Iran, which is already a disaster. And that, when we started out by talking, I was a little uncomfortable using the word cataclysm at first, but boy, do these next two weeks look like they're going to be sort of make it or break it weeks for our future.
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