Berkeley Talks: Heather Cox Richardson on the evolution of the Republican Party and what gives her hope for America

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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(Applause)

Vince Resh: Good afternoon or good evening. My name is Vince Resh, and I’m the chair of the Hitchcock Professorship Committee. We’re very pleased to be along with the graduate school and the Cal Performances to present Professor Heather Cox Richardson in a conversation with Dylan Penningroth as part of our Charles and Martha Hitchcock Lecture series. How this endowment came to Berkeley is really a story that exemplifies how our campus is linked to the history of California and to the Bay Area. 

Dr. Charles Hitchcock was originally a physician in the U.S. Army. He came to San Francisco and started a very, very successful practice. In 1885, he established a professorship at Berkeley as an expression of his long-held interest in education. Hitchcock’s daughter, Lillian Hitchcock Coit, a name we are familiar with, greatly expanded her father’s original gift. Their generosity has made possible for us to present a series of lectures, including one tonight.

Scores of speakers have come to Berkeley under this lecture series. Some names that you’ll recognize, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Deborah Tanner, Stephen Hawking, and scores of others that have given very fascinating presentations. This evening’s lecture along with past lectures will be recorded and be posted on the website of the Hitchcock Lecture series, so you all will be able to watch that and the other lectures.

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College. She’s written about the Civil War, the Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in her award-winning books. The topics of these books range from European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. She’s the author of the recent best-selling book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. A reviewer called this book a vibrant and essential history of America’s unending, engaging, and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals. Heather Cox Richardson’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and many, many other outlets. Her nightly newsletter Letters from an American reaches over three … Her newsletter reaches over 3 million readers every night.

Dylan Penningroth is professor of law and Morrison Professor of History at our university. He specializes in African American history and legal history. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the 19th Century South, won the 2004 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award from the organization of American Historians. His recent book, Before The Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, was recently published in 2023. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and Time magazine.

I’m honored to introduce Heather Cox Richardson and Dylan Penningroth for their presentation, “Forging a New Political System, 2024 and Beyond.” Thank you all for joining us this evening, and please give our guests a warm welcome from the campus.

(Long applause and cheering)

Dylan Penningroth: Welcome everyone. It is truly a privilege and an honor and a blessing to be here with you today. I first want to thank a few people who made all this possible. I want to thank especially Jane Fink, Jeremy Geffen, the whole Cal Performances staff, Vince Resh for that wonderful introduction and Heather Cox Richardson.

Heather Cox Richardson: And I will second all of that. It is a real joy to be here and to point out that I requested to be on stage with this man over here whose first book was prize Winning, whose second book seems to be pulling down prizes as if they were somebody were picking them off of a fruit tree. And everything is that he writes is worth reading, but that’s not why I wanted to be on the stage with him. We many, many, many … Well no, I’m sorry, just a month or two ago ended up in Cambridge, England together when he was I think just a graduate student and had such a lovely time. I thought, “You know what? If I’m going to be at Berkeley, I’m going to see if I can be on a stage with Dylan Penningroth.” So thank you for doing this.

Dylan Penningroth: I want to just ask, can I get patriotic for just a minute here? We are right here in Zellerbach Hall enjoying one of the blessings of liberty that the Constitution secures for we the people. I want to thank all of you for being here with us peacefully assembled, and we’re going to have a good conversation about political parties. I want to ask you just a really simple beginning question. You started Letters from an American in 2019. What has changed since 2019 about your experience, not about the country, your experience of writing Letters?

Heather Cox Richardson: So that’s a really good question and nobody’s ever asked that before. When I started writing the letters, of course, I didn’t intend to start writing the letters at all. I was simply writing my normal weekly essay that I hadn’t written for a while that I usually put on Facebook. And what I did on that Sept. 15 day was to write about a letter that at the time Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff had written to then Acting Director of National Intelligence saying, “There has been a whistleblower. We know there’s been a whistleblower. By law you have to give us that whistleblower’s report and you have not.” And I wrote about that and why that was important because it was a member of the legislative branch accusing a member of the executive branch of explicitly breaking a certain law, which is the first time that had happened.

Well I mean they talked about emoluments. They sort of vaguely saying, you can’t do that, but in this case, he said, “Here’s the statute, you have to hand this over and you’re not.” There was even bold face in some of it. And so I started to write and people started to ask me questions. And if you remember, that’s what led to Trump’s first impeachment. And so I was writing about Trump and the impeachment really. There was a little stuff around the edges and somebody wrote to me and said, “We really need to know about more than Trump. Can you broaden this and talk more about America in general?” And I said, “No, nobody could do that.” And it grew and grew and grew until now I find that I am every day studying not just America, but you people don’t know this because I don’t write about it. I don’t have time to write about it, but I read virtually every day on what’s happening in Sudan and what’s happening in Gaza and what’s happening all around the world to try and find inroads to share those things as well.

And what was really in two hours where I tried to decide if I needed medical attention for a bee sting, which was why I sat and wrote that on the Sept. 15 has become a more than full-time job. I am at it 24 hours. I do sleep, but I go to bed. The last thing I do before I go to bed is to check everything. And the first thing I do when I wake up is to reach for my phone. So it has become a huge project for me, but most magically it has become a community around the world of people who are trying to reestablish a reality-based politics. And that has been really wonderful.

Dylan Penningroth: Yours is not just a reality-based politics, it’s also historically grounded. You’re a historian and in particular your early work was about the Republican Party. So I want to ask you a question about the Republican …

Heather Cox Richardson: How freaking ironic was that? And nobody was studying the Republican Party. It was me and Mike Green who was working with Eric Foner at Columbia.

Dylan Penningroth: Who I just met at UNLV. He says, hello.

Heather Cox Richardson: Isn’t he great, isn’t he? So you know how sometimes I have those notes where I’m like, “Well, Abraham Lincoln said such and such and such and such.” Mike’s the guy I check those with because he’s in Las Vegas. And so he’s awake and I’m like, “Mike, didn’t Lincoln say something about frogs?” And he’ll say, “Well, yes, in fact, he had a discussion about frogs.” So because we were the two people studying the Republican Party back in when we were in graduate school at different universities, but we wrote similar books.

Dylan Penningroth: I want to ask you a question about the Republican Party way back when. So broadly speaking, in 1860, you might say that the Republican Party stood for free soil, free labor, free men. Stops slavery from expanding to the territories into free states. Each person has the right to reap the fruits of his own labor and free men, they have the right to contract and be employed as they wish. In 1980, though a hundred years later, 120 years later, you might say that the Republican Party stood for something like deregulation, anti-communism, maybe stand against abortion. Today, you could arguably say that it’s not even a party at all. It is a personalist organization. How did the Republicans go from being the party of concentrated wealth, corporate power, evangelical Christianity to something that looks a bit like authoritarianism?

Heather Cox Richardson: Do you mean in the present or the pendulum swing that’s gone through all the years?

Dylan Penningroth: Through all the years.

Heather Cox Richardson: OK, so free soil, free labor for men. I’m smiling because that was Eric Foner’s major book and one of the two books that really influenced how I decided to become a historian. The other was Richard White’s Middle Ground. And I would say that the Party in 1860 was more than just free soil, free labor, free men. One of the things that Lincoln did that was so brilliant was that with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, when it was clear that the elite enslavers had taken over not only the White House and not only the Supreme Court, and not only the Senate, but also the House of Representatives, there’s this movement across the North, members of all former belonging to all the parties saying, listen, “We don’t agree about immigration and we don’t agree about finance and we don’t agree about all these different aspects of American life, but by God we can agree that we don’t want to be an oligarchy. We can agree that we don’t like those guys.”

And if you ever take a look at Charles Sumner’s Crime Against Kansas speech, which you can look at in Wikipedia Commons and you search for oligarchy or oligarch, it comes up all the time. So they knew that they didn’t want that, but they didn’t know what they did want. And one of the things that Lincoln does when he becomes part of the party in 1856 is by 1859, he begins to identify and to articulate a new vision for American politics. And what that is, is a government that acts for the good of the common man as opposed to the elite enslavers. So he wants an active government that is going to, first of all, make sure people are treated equally before the law, but secondly have equal access to resources. So education, the land-grant colleges, the Department of Agriculture so that poor guys can get seeds because in most of the elite planter families, dads hand down the seeds to their kids. But if you’re an immigrant, you don’t have anybody to hand you seeds. This is why we get the Department of Agriculture.

The railroads to get people across the country. The Homestead Act to put people on the land and so on. That articulation of a government that works for common people is really what Lincoln brings to the party. But it’s going to spark a backlash and it’s going to spark a backlash that’s possible because of the fact that one of the things that the Republicans do during the war is they invent America’s national taxation system. So our income taxes, our progressive income taxes, I don’t know if you remember Orrin Hatch, but Orrin Hatch from Utah always would get on the TV and he would say, “Well, when the Democrats invented income taxes in 1913,” and every time he said that, I would say, “That’s not true. It was the Republicans in 1861.” And do you know? He never heard me.

But that’s important because what that idea of national taxation, when combined with the idea, first of all of the end of human enslavement, except as punishment for crime and with the idea that the federal government would protect Black rights, that enabled the former Confederates by 1871 to start to argue that they didn’t object to Black rights on the basis of race, which by 1870 had the Department of Justice breathing down your neck. That’s when we get the Department of Justice. They said, “We never cared about race,” which is a complete rewriting of history by the way. “We cared about not having poor people voting,” because you’re taking these Black guys right out of the fields and you’re letting them have the opportunity to decide how tax dollars are spent. And they’re putting in roads and they’re putting in schools, and they’re putting in hospitals. And artificial limbs, by the way, is a really big deal in the South after the war, and they’re paying for those things with tax dollars. And it’s us, the white guys who have property who are paying those things. So that’s a redistribution of wealth. You might even call it socialism.

If you have access to The New York Times for 1871, if you’re a subscriber, search for the word socialism because it goes off the charts in 1871. Of course, we’re not going to get the Bolsheviks, the Bolshevik Revolution until 1917. But what that does is it enables us to have a language that says, “We need to get rid of this government that does things for ordinary people because it is a redistribution of wealth from white people to Black people, from rich people to poor people.” That enables the rise of the robber barons, the rise of a group of people who say, “Anytime the government works for ordinary people, it’s a form of socialism.” Wealth begins to concentrate at the top, and then there is an inevitable crash in which people have to rethink the way they do business, the way the party works.

Well, the Republican Party did that repeatedly, and we are with the modern day Republican Party until 2016. We were really on track for another robber baron, another oligarchical period. We were there, and those are the people I call the establishment Republicans under those like Mitch McConnell, the Senator from Kentucky, and now John Thune, the senator who is the majority leader in the Senate now. But then Donald Trump came and Donald Trump did something different. And that’s that Trump is not a politician. Trump is a salesman. He’s a very good salesman, or he was, I mean, he’s mentally not OK anymore, but if you think of him … I mean, if you watch him, which I’m not urging you to do. You can trust me to do it, he’s mentally not OK anymore. But when he was even as late as 2016, because in the nineties he was OK. You listen to him on the old talk shows, he’s engaging, he’s funny. He wasn’t that in 2016.

But what he did then is he took that language that the oligarchs had used to say that the government doing things like supporting the EPA or social security or whatever is socialism. And he stripped away the veneer and went straight to the racism and the sexism. And that empowered a different group of people that the establishment Republicans never expected would get control. They never really expected that they were going to hand over control of the party to them. And then after the August 26th, 2017, unite the right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump turned to those people to create a movement. And he did it very deliberately by encouraging violence at the street level, by encouraging them to turn on figures of authority, by encouraging them to turn on objects of their hatred, which we know is a way you create brown shirts essentially. And he forged them into a movement.

So to call it the Republican Party. The Republican Party has gone from this swing three times now from, we’re here for the people, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Abraham Lincoln, to uh-oh, we can’t do things for the people because that’s socialism. That’s a redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to minorities, either racial or gender or religious minorities and women. And then to the robber barons, the oligarchs, the Mitch McConnells. But now we’ve jumped into a new place based on that. Now, you don’t have to read at least three of my books.

Dylan Penningroth: Start with this one.

Heather Cox Richardson: I don’t think it’s in that one. Is it?

Dylan Penningroth: The pendulum swing?

Heather Cox Richardson: Oh, OK.

Dylan Penningroth: Yeah. I mean, what you’re saying is absolutely fascinating, and this idea of continuity and change over very long periods of history, there’s so much there to unpack. One thing that stands out for me in partly what you said, but something also that came up in what used to be called Twitter. I think it’s now called X, something like that. But the President posted recently the following, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And I have heard Republicans say that Trump’s expression, his desire to exercise executive power is not extreme. And that Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama did similar things. How would you respond to that claim?

Heather Cox Richardson:

The way that same person laughing back there did. So I have heard that argument, and first of all, when you’re arguing on the side of Andrew Jackson, you’re already in trouble. But I do think it’s fair to say that every president tests the limits. By virtue of the office, by virtue of the people who hold the office and so on, I think that that is reasonable. We have in power now a president and a sidekick, and I don’t quite know what to call him, who are deliberately destroying the independence of the three branches of government. And this is not some historian going, “Oh, I believe I see something.” They literally say, this is what we are doing. They do not believe the Impoundment Act is constitutional. That’s the idea of clawing back all the money that Congress has appropriated for certain things and was not only obviously unconstitutional under the Constitution. In the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, after Nixon tried that, Congress explicitly said, “You can’t do this.”

And one of the people who’s talking a lot about this in the Senate is Angus King of Maine, who is a very thoughtful man and not a fire breather, and he has been beside himself. The last speech he gave a few days ago, he turned to his colleagues and was like, “What is it going to take?” I mean, because we are losing our democracy in front of our eyes. And one of the things that he said is that in that speech is that his colleagues seem to think that the courts are going to take care of it. And he literally used the word cop out, that you cannot imagine at this point that the courts are going to take care of it.

So that idea of taking over the power of the, it’s called the unitary executive, and you must deal with the unitary executive and the stuff you do, right? The idea behind the unitary executive is an idea that comes largely out of the Reagan administration. And one of the people who really embraced the idea of concentrating power in the executive was at the time a junior lawyer in the Department of Justice. You might’ve heard of him now. His name is, oh, I know Samuel Alito.

But the idea is because each branch of government is independent that nobody can check the power of the President. And of course that’s complete anathema to anything that the framers thought. So the idea that I am the State, that I can’t do anything wrong as the President is just hair on fire for a historian, because of course, that was the whole point of, I don’t know, the Revolutionary War. And even you think about that, the King George III actually did have to answer to Parliament. So Trump is claiming more power than George III had, and that’s truly never been done.

Even when you had somebody like Andrew Jackson saying, “I’m not going to listen to the Supreme Court.” That’s a little bit of a misnomer. Because he said that allegedly, I’ve read the book it was in, but then he did try and go ahead and get coercively, but did get treaties with the indigenous Americans that he pushed West. So he said it, but he did then at least put a fig leaf over what he was doing.

Dylan Penningroth: What’s fascinating to me is the way in which Trump is invoking history. If any of you have seen the Nixon interviews with David Frost, you’ll remember that Nixon himself just before he says that famous line, “Well, if the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” That’s my Nixon impression. Sorry.

Just before he says those words, he invokes Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Jefferson, as if to place himself in a long line of presidents who have claimed executive power, but what you pointed to is something that I think you may be implying, every president tests the limits.

Are the limits getting wider?

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, so, it’s interesting that you would point to Lincoln, because, of course, Lincoln is very concerned about the Constitution, and this I think is interesting about Lincoln, because he is very concerned about making sure that the Constitution survives this terrible war.

And so, there are a number of things that he would like to do that he will not do, because of the Constitution, and one of the … Do you want to know a lot about Lincoln? Because I don’t have to do this.

1. Lincoln doesn’t come out … There’s a big fight before the war for control of the Republican Party, and William Henry Seward from New York is really the guy that looks like he’s going to take over the Republican Party, and he, basically, says, “Enslavement is morally wrong, and we have to get rid of it,” and Lincoln says, “No,” because he says that, “If you begin to legislate based on morality, whose morality do you chose?”

So, I might think enslavement is wrong, but you might think we need to have more people enslaved. So, if you start to just go with what you think by your gut is right, you got a real problem. And that’s something I try and emphasize these days when so many people, especially, the Christian nationalists are trying to impose their religion on people, that has a Constitutional history as well as a moral history in our country.

But Lincoln was very concerned about that. And so, one of the things he does is he couches everything in terms of what the Constitution allows. So, if you have read the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, people, one historian famously said it was about as inspirational as a bill of lading, that is the list of things that came off a ship.

And he did that for a reason. It is designed to be firmly under the War Powers of the Constitution, and the reason that we have the 13th Amendment of the Constitution is he was very concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation would not hold after the war was over, because he did it under the War Powers.

So, in ’64, 1864 when he ran for election, he said, he demanded … He expected to lose, by the way, and he demanded to do it based on the idea of adding an amendment to the Constitution to stop enslavement, in part, because of how valiantly Black soldiers had fought in that war. He thought it was not fair to remand them back to slavery. So, even though, he did things that seemed to his opponents to be extreme, they were done under the War Powers.

FDR I think is an interesting contrast to that, because FDR said he was going to attack the Depression with the War Powers, and I am, as you probably know, a huge fan of FDR. I would have voted against him in ’32, because you don’t want a peacetime president to use the War Powers, which is after all what Trump is talking about doing to protect the border.

And FDR ended up not really having to do that, but I wouldn’t want anyone even to threaten that. So, I do think people push, every president pushes by definition, or else they’re not really necessarily pushing as hard as they should be, but they do try and stay within the Constitution, and when the Supreme Court says, “Oh, come on, dude, you can’t do that, they back off.”

This one is at this moment not backing off. Just today they said they were not going to be able to start the funding for programs they had cut, because it was too complicated to do that.

Dylan Penningroth: We’ll get to the DOGE boys. We’ll get there. So, Congress, according to Angus King, is counting on the courts to check the ambition of the executive power.

We talked a little bit ago about Lincoln, and there’s a famous case Ex parte Milligan where a man named Landon Milligan is tried by a military tribunal when the civilian courts were open in Indiana.

So, the question for the courts is, “Is this Constitutional?” It’s not until 1866 that the court hands down a ruling, but there was a really pessimistic takeaway from Justice Davis who wrote the opinion, and I’ll just quote it briefly. He says, “The nation has “No rigt to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power with hatred of liberty and contempt of law may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”

So, this raises a question …

Heather Cox Richardson: Wait. Wait. Don’t stop there. What did he …

Dylan Penningroth: That’s what I copied down.

Heather Cox Richardson: What did he say was the way we take care of it?

Dylan Penningroth: Ambition checking ambition.

Heather Cox Richardson: Right. OK.

Dylan Penningroth: So, thinking back to Mr. Lucker’s class, my high school, central Jersey, I think it was 1988, Mr. Lucker taught us how the Constitution is supposed to work. We have this thing called checks and balances, and Madison in Federalist No. 51 says that, “Each branch of the government will be ambitious to protect its own power.” Right?

And so, that’s why the founders divide power across three branches, and that’s what protects democracy, but it’s interesting. I wonder, first of all, do you think that that system ever really worked? And second, there is an argument that’s been in law world, which I’m partly of, which is that what matters, what has mattered historically is not loyalty of branches, but party loyalties.

Heather Cox Richardson: And that’s the key issue right there is the framers did not anticipate the rise of parties. And when they split up the power amongst the branches, they expected that individuals would …

When I was learning this stuff, someone said, “It’s like a faculty meeting.” Like, “If you have a big enough faculty, you can govern pretty easily, because everybody makes little groups of four, or five, but if you’re in a small department, they divide half and half and then you can’t do anything,” which I liked.

But the idea was that you would have factions over certain issues, but that you would not get the rise of political parties, and that’s Andrew Jackson, and parties actually do a lot of good for our country in many ways. They enable individuals to feel as if they’re part of the system, because when the framers wrote the Constitution, they wrote a machine. It’s a brilliant machine in a lot of ways until they get to Article Three, which is the judiciary, and they’re like, “Man, we’re bored and we’re hungry. Let’s just have some judges.” And then they go home. So, we don’t really know what the judges are supposed to do.

But it’s a machine, but there are no people in it. If you think about it, how is … There are voters out there, but how do they get involved in the machine? How does this matter to them? And that’s what Andrew Jackson does is he recognizes for his own personal reasons that you need people to feel like this matters to them, or you’re simply going to get the rise of a group of bureaucrats who don’t pay any attention to anyone.

So, parties do a lot for us, but one of the things that they have destroyed is the idea that you need to protect the prerogatives of your particular piece of the government.

And you’ve seen that a number of times throughout the impeachments in our history, but you saw that most dramatically, of course, in Donald Trump’s two impeachments when in 2020, Ted Cruz gave that very famous quote where he said, “We all thought he was guilty. We all knew that he had been trying to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine when he said, “I’m not going to let this money go until you smear Joe Biden.”

But Mitch McConnell said to us, “It’s not about Donald Trump, it’s about the 2020 election.” And so, that gave him a pass, and the same thing happened after the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol when, once again, if you remember that they were I think it was seven votes short of the two-thirds majority. Don’t quote me on that.

And Mitch McConnell then gave that speech in which he said, “Oh, the courts are going to take care of him. This really wasn’t our problem, the courts are going to take care of him,” after he had delayed it in such a way that it gave him an excuse to say that, “Trump’s not in office so we can’t impeach him.”

And now here we are, and one of the things that I really hit, if you read the letters you will know, I hit really hard at the in-between the election and the cabinet confirmations, “The prerogative is with the Senate.” I kept saying, “You’ve got to protect the Senate,” because in the past people have done that.

When you had … The three branches are a lovely idea, but often one, or another is weak for one reason, or another. And the great example here is under Harding’s administration, Warren G. Harding’s administration, Harding was a phenomenally weak president, and I always like to joke, “My mother was born during the Harding administration,” which is the only thing that makes me think it actually might have happened.

Because he didn’t actually do anything except go upstairs, it was Prohibition, go upstairs in the White House and drink and smoke and play cards.

But what that meant was that there’s a lot of power in the American government, and the power was sloshing around. If the president wasn’t going to take it, who was? Well, the obvious place for it to go was in Congress. If the president can’t do it, Congress should do it, but Congress had just spent a number of years fighting Woodrow Wilson.

So, they were good at complaining, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to do anything positive, and that’s how the power in the ’20s went to the Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and the Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover is because they were both on the job, and they sucked up all the power in Washington.

So, yes, the political parties are an issue, but in this moment one of the points that I keep making is that power is sloshing now, and somebody is going to grab it.

And what I did not see coming was the person who was going to grab it would be Elon Musk, but what that means is that because he is neither fish nor fowl, and they won’t call him anything … Although, he got a lot more power today, people haven’t really paid attention to that yet, but you’ll hear about it tonight.

He needs to be stopped, because once he gets all that power, it’s not going to slosh anymore.

Dylan Penningroth: One of the things that I think I’ve noticed, and just thinking again of this idea of parties, not branches, is that the Congress perhaps because it’s not a divided government, we have one party control of arguably all three branches of government, the Congress is ceding its Constitutionally mandated powers to the executive branch, expanding the power of the executive branch.

And this is a key thing that I think I’m noticing, it’s not that they’re failing to push back on Trump’s policies, that’s normal. We would expect that the Republican Party would favor policies that are proposed by the leader of the party. They want deregulation too.

It’s that they’re actually ceding powers that under the Constitution belong to Congress. Like, the spending clause, and you referred earlier to the Impoundment Act.

I want to ask you just a question about this two party system, and then turn to something else, a two party system requires a coherent opposition party, and at various points in our past few years, people have compared Democrats to that famous quip by Will Rogers, the great social commentator and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

So, I was going to ask you what do Democrats stand for? But maybe the better question is what should they stand for or is it enough at this moment to stand against?

Heather Cox Richardson: So, I think this is a really interesting question. I will point out on the idea of ceding power, that that’s something that Senator King talked about, and so did Lisa Murkowski just the other day. And so, there is starting to be some pushback on the abandonment of the powers of the Senate, and it’s one that people like me talk about a lot.

But the Democrats are really interesting in … And honestly, when we planned this months ago, that’s what I thought we were going to talk about, we planned a whole thing on talking about the modern Democratic Party, and the best-laid plans of mice and men. Right?

But one of the things that frustrates me to no end is the postmortems on the Democrats in this moment, because we are in a structural moment that does in fact favor one party, because since 1986 the Republicans have been working on suppressing votes.

If I read one more article talking about like, “Why aren’t Black people turning out?” after we had in the last three years, 34 states putting in voter suppression laws, my head is going to explode.

So, what we have is a system that began in 1986 to suppress Democratic voters, and then after 1993’s Motor Voter Act, in 1994 you started to hear Republicans talking about how Democrats won elections only by voter fraud, which came after, as I say, the Motor Voter Act of ’93.

And when it became clear that those things were still not enough to keep Republicans in power, we got the Operation REDMAP of 2010, which led to the takeover of state legislatures to turn purple states like North Carolina, like Wisconsin, like Michigan, like Kansas even at that point, and like Wisconsin into such severely gerrymandered districts that, for example, in North Carolina last year, more people voted for Democrats to go to the state legislature than Republicans, and yet the Republicans almost have a supermajority in the legislature. That’s gerrymandering.

Then, of course, in 2010, we get … After the election of Barack Obama makes it clear that the Republicans are still in trouble, we get the Citizens United decision, which permits unlimited dark money to flow into politics, and then in 2013, we get Shelby v. Holder, which guts the Voting Rights Act.

What we have here is the Democrats walking more and more and more and more uphill. And what interested me about the party with the rise of, first, Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris, and Kamala Harris’ choice of Tim Walz as a vice presidential candidate was it struck me that the Democratic Party had changed dramatically in their approach to the way that they looked at the government.

That is Joe Biden in many ways was reaching back to an FDR kind of government that focused on economic wellbeing at the same time that Kamala Harris was focusing on equality before the law.

But when she took over as the presidential candidate, she did something really interesting, and that was that she stopped talking about identity. She stopped talking about anything other than communities and children, a recentering of the idea of the liberal consensus around children and communities.

And, of course, then she tuns to Tim Walz and the two of them would have those conversations about how much they were alike, not how much they were different.

And she very deliberately did not talk about identity at all on the campaign trail. So, for example, at the DNC, there was a night when everybody wore white in honor of the Suffragists, she wore Black. It was really, really interesting.

And I’m reading all these postmortems saying, “Well, the Democrats have got to get away from identity politics,” and those are the labels that the Republican media is imposing on the Democrats. It is not the other way around.

So, when I look at this moment, and in politics in this moment, to me, what really the 2024 election, one of the things it was about was the fact that the Republicans had very … Not the Republicans. The MAGAs are really not Republicans.

The MAGAs had built their own media chamber that was not just the places that people like me look, the Fox News channel, Newsmax, OAN, all those places. It was podcasts. It was YouTube videos. It was TikTok. It was all the places where they were politics-adjacent, and in that sphere, they define the Democrats and the Democrats did not compete in that sphere. They do not have a captive media the way the Republicans do.

So, for example, Charlie Kirk who runs Turning Point USA, there was a puff piece on him in I think it was The New York Times a week, or so, ago, in which they said, “Oh, he’s gotten all these donations,” and I thought, “Well, why don’t you take a look at where the donations are, because he’s bankrolled by a few very wealthy right-wing philanthropists, you can call them.”

He’s not popular on his own, and the Democrats do not have that. So, in this moment in what the Democrats should be doing, there’s a couple of things. Obviously, I think they should be developing that media, and I’m moving as fast as I can, and the other thing that they have really downplayed is class.

And the rise of Elon Musk is this softball pitch at anybody who can fog a mirror to hit it out of the park, and there was about a month there where I was like everybody else, like, “Hello? Is anyone out there?”

And if you watched last night after the budget resolution passed the House by one vote, the Democrats were all over social media. They were all of them, videos, commentary, all saying, “This country should not be owned by the billionaires.”

And we got Bernie Sanders out there in Nebraska. I think they are finding their feet, and Musk has just freaking teed it up.

Dylan Penningroth: Speaking of Elon Musk, have you seen the Barbie movie?

Heather Cox Richardson: The what?

Dylan Penningroth: The Barbie movie. Have you all seen the Barbie movie? Because the DOGE boys are really giving some Mojo Dojo Casa House vibes. You should see it.

Elon Musk, for those of you who haven’t followed the news, has installed a group of young men, between the ages allegedly of between 19 to 24 years old, into key parts of the federal government, including the IRS, the Treasury payment system, and the Social Security administration.

Now before I ask this question, I just want to make one thing clear, the word department is one of the names in the acronym DOGE, but it’s not a department. A department is an actual thing.

Heather Cox Richardson: We don’t know what it is.

Dylan Penningroth: And these guys are not federal employees. They haven’t gone through background checks. One young man apparently goes by the nickname Big Balls, and he is the CEO of a company called Tesla Sexy LLC.

So, the mission of these guys is allegedly …

Heather Cox Richardson: Can we just stop for a minute?

Dylan Penningroth: Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson: Did you …

Dylan Penningroth: I was on a roll.

Heather Cox Richardson: Did you ever in your worst nightmares think that you would be sitting there listening to the two of us talking about the people who are running the expletive Treasury Department of the United States …

Dylan Penningroth: I did not.

Heather Cox Richardson: … being called Big Balls?

Dylan Penningroth: His words. Not mine.

Heather Cox Richardson: Yeah. That’s his … Yeah.

Dylan Penningroth: So, the mission, the stated mission of this team is to slash bureaucracy. In your book, though, you say something fascinating. You say that, “Bureaucrats are,” and I’ll quote, “One of the key pillars of democratic government.” Why? Nobody elects bureaucrats. They just seem to slow everything down. Where did the federal bureaucracy come from historically speaking, and why are they important?

Heather Cox Richardson: So, I wonder what you think about this, because this is my theory about bureaucracy, and that is that … And I don’t talk a lot about my family. I have a sister who’s actually a pretty famous woman, who lives in another country, and it was talking to her that made me think this through in America, and that’s that in a democracy the bureaucracy is like the ballast of a ship, like, those are people who don’t … They might vote, and they might really care about politics, but, basically, they care about doing their job and doing their job really well.

And they are the ones who just keep the ship going, and the problem is if you get rid of the bureaucracy, and you make it loyal to one individual, or another, you lose that ballast. The ship is going to tilt according to whoever is in charge, and it’s going to go overboard. So, you’re going to go overboard.

So, the loss of our nonpartisan bureaucracy, which begins in 1883 after the assassination of James Garfield by a disappointed office seeker is really … It matters a lot in 1883, but the government doesn’t do a lot in 1883.

By the time you get the post-war government, you need that ballast and one of the things that has been astonishing to me in this whole moment that we’re in is that the government employees in the United States have not held steady. They did go up. They peaked in about 1990, but they are currently at the same level as they were 50 years ago while the country has grown by two-thirds.

And the idea that somehow they’re all sitting around drinking mai tais is … I would go the other way. I would have more of them because what we have instead is our growth of government contractors has jumped by five times. So it’s government contractors that are the ones that seem to make the government so expensive. And yet, if you actually look at the numbers, the United States is a very, very low-tax country for a country of our size and economic development, significantly lower than our peer nations. And one of the things that when we’re in a moment like this and we talk about the government, and you hear people saying, “Well, it’s fat and all these people are doing all this sitting around doing nothing,” that’s rhetoric, that’s not reality. And it’s rhetoric that, again, the Republican Party has sold to the point that they have convinced a number of their voters that they’re going to be cutting, this is our new big lie, waste, fraud and abuse.

Waste, fraud and abuse. You hear it again and again, they’re all saying it all the time. Waste, fraud and abuse. I would lay money down that there was a list that went out that said, “Say ‘Waste, fraud and abuse’ as much as you can, because people will think that’s the case.” And if you spend any time on Reddit boards, as I do, reading, not participating, because I like to see what people are talking about, it’s fascinating how many people say, “Well, we must cut the government because there’s so much waste, fraud and abuse. But not my job, why did they take my job? I’m a really hard worker.” And we’re watching this moment where people are starting to recognize that in fact, government workers are vital to what we do. And so in terms of that ballast, I’d like to see more of it rather than less of it.

Dylan Penningroth: I’ll just say as a footnote, it may or may not be an accident that federal workers are disproportionately African American. Twenty percent of the employees at Health and Human Services, 24% at Veterans Affairs, almost 30% at the Department of Education. And of course the reason for that is that the federal government followed fair hiring rules, fair employment rules for decades earlier than the private sector. So these firings may have the effect of really hurting a Black middle class.

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, and it’s veterans. The government employees are 30% veteran, and because there’s favorable hiring practices for them as well. And that’s one of the reasons that a number of people are Black is because Black veterans. And in this first group of getting rid of the people who are probationary, which was either a year or two year time, 25% of those people that got culled in that first wave through, were veterans. So again, if I hear one more time, “Let’s take care of our veterans instead of giving the money to the government,” I’m not going to be polite.

Dylan Penningroth: I want to ask you a couple of quick questions about history. One of the themes that you touch on, I think repeatedly in your letters and in the book, is how democracies can be destroyed through the use of language and of history, and how we can reclaim it. In other words, reclaiming our history, I think what you’re saying, is essential to reclaiming our democracy. So first, just two quick questions. The first one is, what story does today’s Republican Party tell about our country’s history and what work does it do for them?

Heather Cox Richardson: I would love to hear your reaction to this, because I think we think about history differently, but not in conflict, in complementarily. I think what the Republican Party did under Reagan was it articulated a vision of American history, you know this, you’ve all read me, of the cowboy, an individual fighting the empire. And I pointed out, I don’t think it’s an accident that Reagan is elected in 1980 and the most widely watched movie of 1977 was Star Wars, which is a western. I mean, it’s a space western, but it’s a western. And I would love to talk more about westerns and movies, especially that one, because they really do matter. But there was this idea, the individual fighting the Behemoth, the bureaucrats, the empire. And it wasn’t just people in the American West who thought that way. I mean, one of the reasons it occurred to me at first, and the reason I thought about it, was I grew up with fishermen, with lobster fishermen especially, that’s how they see the world.

They’re the guy out there, the independent guy, who is taking on the world. And the reality of their lives does not match their image of what they are doing. And that, I think, is really important. I think that image is very important. So Reagan sold that, this idea that you can live your own life, you don’t have to worry about some person in a far off capital, some bureaucrat in a far off capital, and so on. Trump took that and turned that into, for his followers, a world in which white Christian men would rule other people. And that’s part of our history as well. It’s a very dangerous and dark part of our history, but it is part of our history. But it’s not the only history we have.

And the American history that I care about and that I love is what you wrote about in your first and your second books. It is the history of people who want to create a world that cares for people, that enables people to live their best life and they’re willing to work together to make that happen. And when we think about our great moments, you think about Washington crossing the Delaware, you think about … I mean, I think about Sitting Bull saying that he would protect his people’s right to practice a religion that he didn’t share. You think about Abraham Lincoln giving up everything for that war. You think about the GIs in World War II, and my uncle going to war because he wanted to have little jimmies back on his ice cream and the war had made that impossible. You think about individuals working together to make things better for people.

And one of the things I say about our history is that people like me, we have Fannie Lou Hamer, we have Abraham Lincoln, we have the great heroes that we look to for inspiration. And they have the enslavers, the Confederates, they have the neo-Nazis, and they have the alt-right. They can have them, but I want my country to be the one that is represented in the world I live in.

Dylan Penningroth: Who should do history? In this country, we have history departments, we have teachers in high schools, but I wonder whether history is something that should be practiced primarily by experts such as economics. There is a Council of Economic Advisers, they give advice to the President of the United States, they sit at his elbow. But there’s no council of historical advisers should there be?

Heather Cox Richardson: So I’m laughing. You all know the joke about FDR and his economic advisors? You know this? So he barely came out of a meeting with a bunch of them and said, “I want a room full of one-armed economists.” And someone said, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “They all go, ‘Well on the one hand, and on the other hand.’” So there is a profession of history. And of course, we are trained in it. Historians study what creates change, how societies change. And we develop theories about how societies change, and it’s important to understand those theories. So I am an idealist. I believe that ideas change history. What would you say you are?

Dylan Penningroth: I think ideas change history, but my work has mainly been about action.

Heather Cox Richardson: But your action is not Samuel Adams making a famous speech.

Dylan Penningroth: That’s right.

Heather Cox Richardson: Who are your actors?

Dylan Penningroth: So the people I write about are tenant farmers, they’re enslaved people and these are people who are exercising civil rights. We talked earlier about Lincoln, but the kinds of civil rights that my people are exercising are the rights of property and contract, and later on the right of standing, the right to go to court, sue and be sued.

And one of the things that has always been fascinating to me is how people who do not have first-class citizenship, they don’t have the right to sit in the same classroom with white children, they don’t have the right to ride on a bus with white people, they can’t vote for most of this period that I’m writing about. Nevertheless, they take these basic fundamental civil rights that the Republican Party ran on in 1860, and they turn them into something that they can make a living with, something that allows them to participate in society, to relate to one another and to white people. It’s through reading their actions, they don’t often leave behind diaries or speeches, but what I do is I look at how they act, what they do. And from that, I try to reconstruct something about their ideas, what they think the law is.

Heather Cox Richardson: And I would suggest putting words in your mouth, you can disagree with this, that you are looking at how they conceive of the construction of a society. You use the words law and order in a very different context than we are accustomed to knowing them, to talk about that sort of human impulse to create a fair society. Even if they are not able to enjoy all of it, they’re able to work within a system to reinforce a series of laws.

Dylan Penningroth: No, I think that’s absolutely right. And I love that you brought up that law and order quotation, because we often associate this idea of law and order with Nixon. And yes, he definitely had a particular vision of it, but what’s important to recognize about the system of Jim Crow, we talk about authoritarianism, the South in 1900 was an authoritarian state. It was one-party rule and you could be murdered for voting the wrong way if you were African American.

And so the kind of law and order that I write about, it’s a matter of under policing, as well as over policing. It’s about people who are hungry for the law, not necessarily to treat them as equals in all realms of life, but to pay attention and to give redress to their grievances. That’s the story that I tell. But what’s fascinating to me, and I want to kind of think about this question of history, because we’re both writing really complimentary histories in an era when history is very much at stake in our courts. The U.S. Supreme Court has set up a new test, as far as I can tell invented out of whole cloth, that says that regulations, government regulations, certain kinds, need to pass a history and tradition test. They need to be consistent with the nation’s history and tradition. So what that means is that judges …

Heather Cox Richardson: And then they’ve made it up.

Dylan Penningroth: And they’ve made it up. So judges need now essentially to be historians, and some of them seem to be wondering whether that’s properly their job. So what advice would you give to judges who are faced with this task trying to decide under this new regime?

Heather Cox Richardson: There’s a difference I think between talking to the judges and what you asked first that I never answered, because I got in … The reason I really think we need to focus on your new book is because I think it gets us to where we need to be now. And we’ll come back to that. But who should do history? We all should do history. I mean, there are professionals who do it to look at the ways societies change, but if you think about humanity, and you don’t have to think about it this way, this is kind of how I think about it. One of the things that distinguishes us from other mammals is we make sense of the passage of time through the stories that we tell. I mean, dogs do it through scent, right? Or I don’t know how cats do it. Cats probably live on another planet. But we make sense of our lives through the passage of time. We tell stories about who we are.

And the idea that we don’t need those stories, that somehow they live in a book and they don’t matter, means, I think, that we are rootless and that we don’t learn from our stories who we are. So if we let somebody feed us stories that say that America has always been a white Christian nation, America has never been a white Christian nation. Then we lose the ability to know who we are the same way you would lose your sense of who you are if suddenly learned that 20 years in your past you had misunderstood.

We lose our sense of who we are in this moment, but also of how to move forward. And one of the things, I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, people write to me and they usually call me by my first name, and then sometimes I get a follow-up email saying, “I’m so sorry I forgot to call you Doctor.” I like to be called Heather, because I want people to feel like this is their history too, and we can all do it together. The one exception I always joke is if you’re mansplaining to me, I am Dr. Richardson, and do not forget it. But otherwise, I think we should all do it.

And in terms of the judges, the problem … I assume you know Jonathan Gienapp’s work? OK. So there’s this fabulous guy, actually the son of one of my advisors, who is a really terrific guy on originalism. And he talks about how originalism theoretically was supposed to be we were going to go to the original meaning. And then the judge just started looking at the original meanings, and they were like, “Oh, we don’t want to do that.” So then they started inventing stuff. And the bottom line is that I’m not sure you can do that, because how do you talk about busing to a bunch of people who had horses? Or how do you talk about the internet to people for whom communication meant writing a letter to England and waiting six months till one came back? I really preferred the way that Justice Breyer talked about making decisions in the modern world, which was to say… And he’s got this wonderful, I guess it’s an interview, where he says, “Listen, the questions that the Supreme Court gets are hard. You don’t take a case if there’s an easy answer. What goes before judges is hard.”

And so for the Supreme Court, when there’s these competing interests that are really hard and they both are good cases, you decide in favor of the one that promotes democracy. And I think that’s the way that they should be thinking about it rather than trying to decide whether or not… I mean, the one that infuriated me was the idea that there was no abortion in early America. And I’m like, anybody who’s been through freshman year of college knows that in fact, this was absolutely everywhere until at least the 1870s.

Dylan Penningroth: Or that the Congress in 1866 in framing the 14th Amendment, did not literally mean to include people whose parents were present illegally from the Empire of China. They literally were asked that in the floor of Congress. And the answer that the Republicans gave was, “Absolutely, we mean to make them citizens.”

Heather Cox Richardson: So there’s this wonderful … Andrew Johnson, the president at the time, vetoes the Civil Rights Act, or the bill that was the precursor to the 14th Amendment. And he vetoes it and says, “Well, surely you didn’t mean to include all these people.” And they read that, and they put the exact same language into the 14th amendment. It was great. It’s like, “Yeah, we did.”

Dylan Penningroth: And yet, somehow op-eds keep getting written that say something different. Now, I want to turn for a moment to what can be done. I want to talk about a politics that can win. So maybe some of you have heard of the Leopard’s Eating Faces party. Anybody? Yeah? Anybody a member? Hope not. So this was a meme that was going around.

Heather Cox Richardson: Oh, I know.

Dylan Penningroth: You know this, right? So it came out, I think when Brexit was live. You want to explain this one?

Heather Cox Richardson: No, I was going to say that that’s one of the pieces of Reddit I read every night. I’m waiting for my copy editor, and I’m like, “Let’s check in on the Leopard’s Eating Faces Reddit page right now.”

Dylan Penningroth: It is endless entertainment. The basic idea, I think, is captured in a New Yorker cartoon from a few years ago. There’s a giant billboard in a pasture and there are all these sheep looking up at the billboard. On the billboard is a picture of a wolf in a coat and tie. And underneath the picture of the wolf are the words, “I am going to eat you.” And then the caption speaking for the sheep is, “He tells it like it is.” How should we understand members of this political party? And more importantly, how can progressives, or at least democracy advocates, appeal to them?

Heather Cox Richardson: Again, I think that the way you change society is you change ideas. And the people who adhere to MAGA at this point have been fed a diet of disinformation since at least the rise of the Fox News Channel in the mid 1990s. And they firmly believe, for example, that the government employees are wasteful and that their tax dollars are being taken by those people and that wealth is being redistributed from them, the MAGA people, down to the undeserving. While we know in the reality that about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% to the top 10% in … Or I’m sorry, the top 1% between 1981 and 2021 when Joe Biden took office. And they simply have never heard that.

And one of the things about Kamala Harris appearing on the Fox News Channel was that the stuff she was saying about Trump, the stuff that he had said, the things that people had said about him, like James Mattis, that was the first time those things had ever been said on the Fox News Channel. And it had very high ratings because people were shocked to hear some of the stuff that they were hearing. So I think what we have in this country is a huge disinformation problem. And there are ways to combat that, and one of the things that you are seeing, and I hope you’re aware of it, because it’s really interesting for people like us, we saw the same thing in the 1890s and in the 1850s, is the rise of an independent media that is telling it like it is.

And that’s quite new. We didn’t have that in 2016. And somebody said, people have been saying, “Why aren’t there people in the streets?” And my answer to that, and you read after the election, a number of traditional media outlets saying, “Well, people are just, they’re not reading the news, they’re turning out, they don’t care, they’re jaded.” And those of us in the independent media were like, “You should see our subscriptions.” And people now have ways to protest that are effective, and then I want to come back to your book, that are effective, that we didn’t have in 2016. We didn’t know what to do. So we walked out the front door as opposed to saying, “OK, now I’m really mad. I’m going to go protest at the office of this person who’s the chair of this committee, and I’m going to make sure that this next vote, that vote goes a certain way,” because we understand that much better now than we did in 2016.

So how do we reach those people, is again, I think we need to have that alternative media developing. And I think we also really need to press on this idea that we don’t want billionaires in control of our government because regardless of who is president, it is a huge problem. One of the things that made me crazy during the Biden administration was all the stuff that Lina Khan was doing at commerce never made it into the news. She broke up monopolies, she stopped mergers, she did all kinds of stuff, she made sure you couldn’t have… The banks couldn’t stack fees, she did all kinds of stuff, and nobody covered it except people like me. And so people never saw the stuff that the Biden administration was doing.

Well, now it’s all being reversed and people are saying, “Hey, why are banks allowed to do that?” And the answer is because this administration is going to do it. And if we can call attention to that in this moment, while people are losing their jobs and they’re losing the things that they feel that they should have, it might break through. But the other piece of it, I think, is to recognize what I talked about before, and that’s that between voter suppression, gerrymandering, money in politics, the electoral college and so on, it’s not simply a question of saying, “We need to get those MAGA voters.” What we need to do is make it possible for more people to vote, because we know that when people are able to vote, the Democrats win. And I’m not speaking as a capital D Democrat, I’m talking about somebody who’s extraordinarily concerned about the survival of American democracy. And it cannot survive if we simply make sure that only a very few people can vote.

Dylan Penningroth: I want to talk for just a second about radicals. So you have written movingly about leaders like Roosevelt and Johnson and Lincoln, and you’ve also very movingly on people like Frederick Douglas, Sitting Bull, you mentioned a little while ago. And I guess my question is about the relationship between the kind of political leaders who by necessity have to practice a kind of pragmatic centrism and the radical activists, the outsiders who demand transformation and not reform. And I want to take you to Boston in 1974, specifically to the Combahee River Collective. This is a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization.

Heather Cox Richardson: Just got a national park or a national, I’m sorry, I don’t remember which designation it was. Anyone remember? It’s a national … Is it monument? OK.

Dylan Penningroth: Monument. Thank you for that. So these are a small group of women who are meeting in living rooms in Boston. It’s really informal, but it took its name actually from a raid that was organized and led by Harriet Tubman during the Civil War 1863 that ended up freeing 750 human beings from bondage. So they named it very purposefully after that.

They also coined the term identity politics. And I just want to sort of run this past you. They argued the reason for existence was that the civil rights movement led by people like Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and the feminist movement led by white feminists could not make real change, they claimed, because those movements were too narrow. The civil rights movement saw itself as advocating for racial justice, and feminists advocated for gender justice. Unions advocated for class justice.

What the CRC argued is that you have to tackle all of these oppressions because they’re all interlocked and they feed off each other. And so therefore a white steel worker has a stake in the liberation of Black women. This is a quote that sticks with me and I want to see what you think of it. “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.”

The difficult thing though is how to translate that into mass politics, and we have difficult choices. One choice that pundits have floated is that democrats should downplay Black rights or trans rights in order to pivot pragmatically to the center of American politics because the American democratic system is at risk. This is a moment of grave danger. But another way to think is that maybe what we need is a bold, unapologetic, intersectional politics that can revitalize democracy either with or without the Democratic Party.

Heather Cox Richardson: So I’m going to say something that is adjacent to that I think, and one of the things that bothers me is when we talk about pivoting to the center, I consider where I stand in American history as being to the right of Eisenhower because I want to have … Somebody’s hissing, but my point is that in today’s world, people call me a radical on the left. I’m saying we need to stop saying that the center is over here because that center is so far right that we have lost the sense of where America is supposed to be.

So if I take us back or if somebody like me takes us back to where people have decent pay and unions and civil rights and all the things that I would like us to have and we start there, then we can go the rest of the way. And what I mean by that, so what I’m arguing for is what people now call centrist is way crazy right for American history. Center is progressive taxation, 92% during Eisenhower’s lifetime, civil rights, infrastructure. I would expand the social safety net, and again, I like the centering of children.

I think we need to stop talking about moving to the center by throwing people overboard and saying, let’s move to the center by including everyone. And then the reason that I’m starting there is that if you talk about making a steelworker understand that his rights are tangled with everybody else’s, one of the things we don’t talk about enough when we talk about reform in America is think about when reform happens. Reform happens when people have money. Reform happens when people are not worried that their neighbor is going to take their jobs, and that happens when we actually have a fair distribution of wealth in this country, which we don’t right now.

So it’s very hard to say to a steelworker who can’t buy a house, “You need to worry about somebody else,” because that’s what that person’s worried about, and vice versa. I don’t mean to pick on a steel worker. I would like to see us address the inequalities in the American economic system because then if you think about the 1960s for example, you think about all the periods in which people have been willing to expand American democracy, it’s been periods when we’re thriving, and if we could do that and then reclaim the language of the Declaration of Independence and the great leaders who didn’t talk about throwing people overboard, that is really deeply problematic that we can say those Americans don’t count.

I think it’s like Lincoln said … I’m going to stand on Lincoln here. “If you start to make distinctions about who matters and who doesn’t, it’s only a question of time before you are one of the ones that gets defined as someone who doesn’t.” So that argument that we should throw people overboard to get to the center, I think we should pull people onboard to get to this center and then move from there. I hope that was clear.

Dylan Penningroth: So I’ve been silently smuggling in questions from the audience in the last couple of these things here, not that last one. That was mine. But here’s one more question from the audience. Historically, it seems that people coming out into the street to protest government overreach has worked. I’m thinking about 2017 and the proposed gutting of the ACA. I know I’m supposed to call my congressperson, but is that really all we can do at this point?

Heather Cox Richardson: No. You call not only your congress critters, but everybody in your state legislature as well. And I’m not done yet, so don’t say you’re already doing that. The reason that you’re doing that is partly to make them understand that what they’re doing is unpopular, but it is also to demonstrate that this government does not have the legitimacy of popular opinion because in a democracy, you must have the people behind you.

More people voted for somebody other than Donald Trump than voted for him. This is one of the reasons he keeps talking about having a mandate. He does not have a mandate. You know what percentage of people wanted Project 2025, thought it was a good idea, what percentage of voters liked Project 2025 voted for a policy? 4, 4%. And they are now putting it into practice and saying, “We have a mandate to do this.” They don’t have a mandate to do this and we need to make absolutely sure they recognize that and to demonstrate that, but not just that, and I’m just going to sneak in here, run for office too at every level. And that’s where I wanted to go back to his work. So hold onto that.

But also, the way you change the ship of state I think is you change public opinion. So you push back when they talk about waste, fraud and abuse. Again. I’m so tired of people saying, “Well, I’m sure there are government employees who aren’t doing their jobs.” You know what? We got the same size government as we had 50 years ago. These people are working double time. The idea that anybody would again say, “We’ll just cut those people away,” to actually push back and say, “This is the country I want to have and this is what it looks like,” as opposed to, “I just hate him.”

Hating him is useful. It gets people engaged, but what we know from the way information works is that nothing moves people more powerfully than fear and anger, and you know that. But you know what else does equally, is inspiration. Think about it. You click on the dog that’s being rescued from the river, right? And to the degree that we can infuse this country with inspiration and belief in our values again, that will go a long way to changing this disinformation world that is poisoning so many people.

So find your squad, as they say, find your people and every day do at least one thing that moves some ball forward to promote democracy, whether it’s in a school board, whether it’s in a community activism, whether it’s in writing to a letter to an editor, writing to your congress critters, making sure that you and your friends are engaged, because speaking of numbers, we figure, political scientists figure, it takes about 3.5% of a country to change its politics, and we’ve got those people involved.

And as I say, if you write to Ron Johnson, it’s really probably not likely that he’s going to change what he does, but he’s not, I don’t think, going to live forever, and somebody else is going to want to get elected to that job. And so he might ignore you, but somebody else might look at you and say, “I’d like to be the senator from Wisconsin and I can get her vote if I behave in this way,” and that’s how we get political change. And I could actually tell you the theory behind that, but we know that potential political leaders are looking at what the people are doing. Think of the Tea Party Movement. We need to do the opposite of the Tea Party Movement, and it sure seems to me like we got it going on right now.

Dylan Penningroth: Last question, what gives you hope?

Heather Cox Richardson: I didn’t know we were coming up to the end. My phone and its clock is here, but I left it upside down. Well, this is kind of where I wanted to go with your book. So can we have one extra question so you can ask me that after I talk about yours? Because his last book talks about how people who are formally excluded from the law use the law to create a community that creates not … maybe I’m misrepresenting this, that creates a community that not only creates a community that adheres, that defines itself in part through the law, but also leaves a legacy that changes America. That’s what we need to do I think. One of the things that I think we are seeing is people recognizing that politics literally starts at home and in your local school boards, and then it moves from there to the county level and to the state level. And the recreation of American democracy in the communities I think will go a long way to recovering it all the way up. Do you think that’s fair?

Dylan Penningroth: I think that’s fair. And one of the things that was fascinating for me in writing this book is the degree to which African Americans were engaged in struggles over democracy and autocracy within their own communities. I’m thinking particularly of Black churches where the minister is typically a man, and at least in Baptist denominations where I grew up, supposed to be democratic, but often is not. And so there’s this dynamic that develops going back to the 1790s where Black collectivities are constantly struggling over the terms of inclusion in the body politic that is the Church of Christ, and the need to act as a unified body to carry on a struggle against white oppression.

There’s this constant tension that African Americans have negotiated over centuries and it really produces difficult decisions for people, particularly for Black women who then and now compose the majority of the members of a church and who have the most stake in church democracy. So there’s this way in which it’s not just what we do when we’re consciously thinking about how to change our president, how to change our Congress or the Supreme Court. It’s the things that we do in the collectivities that are closest to home, sometimes even in the home. Those are the places where we build the muscles, the muscle memory that can make a difference in the long run, I think.

Heather Cox Richardson: And it would work for a democracy. I think so too. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. I highly recommend that book, by the way. It’s a great read too. I’m sorry, there’s some really great scenes in it. I’ll stop.

Dylan Penningroth: Thank you.

Heather Cox Richardson: But what gives me hope is this. As I say, in 2016, none of us knew what we were doing and we were all atoms out there frightened and unaware that other people felt the same way. And I look around me now and I see everywhere, millions of people talking about democracy, talking about why it’s important, talking about our foreign affairs, recognizing the importance of what it may be, that we appear to be in danger of losing and fighting for it. And it reminds me very much of the 1850s, as everything does. Let’s be honest.

Dylan Penningroth: It’s a scary thought.

Heather Cox Richardson: But if you think about the 1850s, yeah, a scary thought because of the one direction it went, but there’s also the other direction. So if you were alive in 1853, you would basically have thought that the elite enslavers had gotten it all. They were about 1% of the population, but they had the Supreme Court, they had the White House, they had the Senate. The only place that people who believed in stopping the spread of enslavement west had any power was in the House of Representatives. And so you could count on that. You had more people in the House of Representatives and people weren’t paying very close attention to what was going on because they were moving west or to the cities and they were making money and they weren’t paying a great deal of attention to the government.

And then in 1854, the elite enslavers got through the House of Representatives a law that would enable them to spread enslavement to the American West. And with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a number of congressmen meet in Washington D.C. They meet actually in Mrs. Crutchett’s boarding house because she’s the best cook in Washington. No fools they, right? 30 of them. And they go into that room for members of all different political parties and they come out and they say, “We don’t,” as I said earlier, “Agree about immigration and we don’t agree about finances and we don’t agree about internal improvement, but by God we can agree that we don’t want an oligarchy.” And they spread out across the North and they start going to talk to people and to talk about what’s happening in the American government in Washington, and people start to come together and they start to stand against what’s called Nebraska, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They’re anti-Nebraska parties.

So by 1856, those people have taken over the House of Representatives. They’re not really Republicans yet. They are anti-Nebraska people, and they don’t seem to be winning at first. In 1856, one of the elite southern enslavers beats a northern Congress person almost to death on the floor of the Senate. That’s Charles Sumner. And literally they beat him until there’s blood everywhere and the Southerners are standing around it and someone says, “Why didn’t you intervene?” And they said, “We didn’t think it was our fight.” Can you imagine to see that nowadays? And then of course we get the Lincoln-Douglas debates in ’58 and Douglas goes on to represent Illinois and the Senate, even though Lincoln is saying, “We don’t really want the spread of enslavement.”

But what happened in that period was that people started to recognize that their differences didn’t matter when it came to defending the United States of America. And they came together until they put Abraham Lincoln into the White House in 1860 on the idea that the government should work for individuals, not just the rich ones, but every Americans, and that enslavement should not in fact take over America and turn this into an oligarchy.

By 1860, he is in the White House to stand against the spread of enslavement. By January of 1863, he has issued the Emancipation Proclamation. By September of 1860, November of 1863, he has given the Gettysburg Address, which calls for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and has called for a new birth of freedom in America. So between 1853 and 1863, the nation went from the rich guys get it all and we’re going to be an enslaving country, through to Abraham Lincoln and a government of the people, by the people and for the people and a new birth of freedom. And if they could do it in the 1850s when only white men could vote, I believe that all of us coming together in the 21st century can do it again, and that’s what gives me hope.

And I will add my thanks to you all. I never forget that I am the luckiest person on earth to get to do what I do every night, to keep the record of this era for this country, and I never forget that I couldn’t do it without you. So thank you for cheering me on and asking questions and being there because if we do it, we’re going to do it together. Thank you very much, and thank you for doing this.

(Long applause and cheering)

Dylan Penningroth: I came into this conversation not knowing whether to be hopeful. I leave it inspired, determined, and hopeful. Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson.

Heather Cox Richardson: Thank you everybody.

(Applause)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out