Trump vs. Democracy

Donald Trump’s political speeches of late are chock full of warnings about “the threat from within” posed by his myriad opponents – those he decries as “vermin” out to destroy the US and the American Dream. He routinely promises to crush his critics and “make America great again.” As always with Trump, there’s a method to his madness. Historian Heather Cox Richardson argues that Trumpism claws at American democracy’s true roots – at what she describes as “the idea that a nation can be based not in land or religion or race or hierarchies, but rather in the concept of human equality.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course, Trump versus Democracy. Donald Trump's
speeches of late are chock full of warnings about the
threat from within posed by his myriad opponents, those he

(00:22):
decries as vermin how to destroy the US and the
American dream. He routinely promises to crush his critics and
make America great again. As always with Trump, there's a
method to his madness. A history that looks back to
a mythologized past as the country's perfect time is a
key tool of authoritarians, notes historian Heathercox Richardson in her

(00:45):
new book Democracy Awakening. It allows them to characterize anyone
who opposes them as an enemy of the country's great destiny.
Richardson is a professor at Boston College specializing in the
Civil War era, and she's the author of a popular newsletter,
Letters from an American, which closely monitors and ponders Trump's

(01:06):
intersection with US politics. Like all forms of authoritarianism, she argues,
trump Ism clause at American democracy's true roots, at what
she describes as the idea that a nation can be
based not in land or religion, or race or hierarchies,
but rather in the concept of human equality. Richardson joins

(01:28):
Crash Course today to discuss the lessons from her new book,
Democracy Awakening, which already sits happily and handily as top
bestseller lists. Welcome to the show, Heather.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's such a pleasure to be here, Tim.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
I'm just very stoked that you're with us today. We've
got so much to talk about, and I don't know
that we can contain it in this little narrow package
we have, but let's give it a shot. Tell me
why this book? What was the germinating kind of motive
behind this one?

Speaker 2 (01:53):
This book was intended to be a series of short
essays that explained all the questions that people ask me
every single day, like how did the parties switch sides?
And you know, what was the Southern strategy? But I
realized pretty early on that the question people ask me
most is how did we get here? What on earth
is going on? And how do we get out of it?

(02:15):
So quickly it became thirty short chapters that take us
from how we got to this particular moment in the
Republican Party that gave us Donald Trump, and how Donald
Trump took that moment and turned it into an authoritarian movement,
and then finally how we get out and it actually
grew quite a bit from what I initially had intended
it to be.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
And what do you think a historian brings to the
table that other analysts don't when taking on a project,
and the kind of questions you just brought up.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
That's a really important question because a lot of people
make the mistake of thinking that I am a journalist
and I am not. I'm trained very differently than journalists are.
What historians do is we try to explain how societies change.
So we become very well verse in looking at actual
facts on the ground, looking at documents, looking at speeches,
looking at events, at things that happen and how they happen.

(03:08):
But crucially, although there's overlap there between historians and journalists,
what historians then go on to do is look at
the patterns try and say this is what is happening
and how it is changing society. So in this particular moment,
there's so much coming at us all the time, which
by the way, is partly by design from people who
are trying to undermine our democracy. But there's so much

(03:31):
coming at us all the time that it's somebody like
me who can say, you need to pay attention to this,
maybe not so much to this, because these things show
patterns and they show how society is changing. That other
stuff is just noise.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, you mentioned that magic word patterns. I often think
that pattern recognition is one of the highest forms of insight,
whether it's in the arts or in history or in journalism.
That you know, weaving together connected events to them into
an understandable whole for your readers or your audience or whoever,
is a huge public service. It's I think an animating

(04:07):
force in your newsletter for sure, and it's certainly very
vibrant in this wonderful book that you've written.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Well, you can find patterns that are false. I mean,
that's one of the things that historians will do, is
we are not q you know, we are actually looking
for patterns that have establishment in history and that have
shown us how they play out. And that's an important
distinction as well.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
So let's talk about that a little bit in the
context of this book, because I find it very important
and it's fascinating. I think one of the things in
your work, at least from my standpoint, is the development
and evolution of Republican ideology. And there's a sort of
classic Lincoln era republican ideology which is very different from
republicanism today. But in your book, I think, as a

(04:53):
departure point, you begin with the New Deal in the
nineteen thirties, this federal response to horrors in the downturn
of a massive economic dislocation, and the very fact of
how the Roosevelt administration responded to that crisis raised a
number of threats to conservatives around how they believe the

(05:16):
world should work and what was happening to the world
they inhabited. That it set in motion a series of
responses that have led to where we are right now,
and I was wondering if you could kind of delineate
some of those for us.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
Sure, But first let's start with the idea that the
word conservative was picked up very deliberately in nineteen thirty
seven by those people who opposed the New Deal. They
weren't embracing conservative ideology, they were using that term politically,
and let me explain what I mean by that. So,
the reason that the book starts in nineteen thirty seven.
Is because after FDR I reelection in nineteen thirty six,

(05:53):
a lot of the people who really opposed what he
was doing thought that he was going to flame out,
that in fact, he was an aberration, and as soon
as he was thrown out of office in nineteen thirty six,
we would go back to the kind of government that
we had had in the nineteen twenties, which is the
one that they liked. FDR when he took office, began
to use the government in an entirely new way, doing
what he called offering a New Deal to the American people.

(06:17):
That's how it gets the name it has. And that
New Deal was a government that worked for the people,
and it did so by regulating business, providing a basic
social safety net like social security, for example. That's when
that gets instituted, promoting infrastructures, so the Tennessee Valley Authority,
for example, which brings electricity, among other things, to regions

(06:37):
that had not previously had it, and that works on
our roads, and that works on our public installations like
post offices and customs houses and hospitals and railroads and schools.
That was all part of the New Deal. And finally
the New Deal began to protect civil rights in the States,
not anywhere nearly as fully as it would beginning in
the nineteen forties, but all of those aspects of government

(07:01):
are new to the New Deal. A number of people
look at that new government and they consider it anathema.
They want to go back to the nineteen twenties. And
those people are led both by Republicans who don't want
business regulation because they insist that that takes a man's
property and interferes with his ability to run his affairs
as he wishes, and Southern Democrats who are virulently racist

(07:24):
and want to maintain their Jim Crow systems in the
American South. So those two groups come together in nineteen
thirty seven and they put together a document that they
call the Conservative Manifesto, and it says that the government
should not regulate business for the reasons I just said.
It should not provide a basic social safety net because
that belongs to the churches. It should not promote infrastructure

(07:46):
because that should be done by private enterprise, which can
then pocket the profits. And it certainly should not interfere
with civil rights. It calls for something called home rule,
which means that Southern states get to keep whatever racial
codes that they have. The Conservative Manifesto disappears really quickly
for a number of reasons, but it gets reprinted in

(08:07):
Chamber of Commerce newspapers and newspapers around the country, and
that set of principles becomes the centerpiece of a faction
of the Republican Party that becomes known as movement Conservatives.
And that's why I just drew the distinction about the
word conservative, because they are not embracing the ideals of
conservatism so much as they are a political movement. And

(08:28):
that political movement gradually comes to take over the Republican Party.
And we could walk through all the pieces of that
if you would like, But what it means is that
it begins to assault this idea that is shared by
both Republicans and Democrats after World War Two, that the
government should do all the things that FDR and later
Truman and Eisenhower begin to use it to do. Americans

(08:52):
like that, They've always liked that. But the movement conservatives.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Just interrupt you for just a second, right there. You know,
when you were talking about the development of the Conservative
Manifesto and the response to the New Deal, I recently
finished David Nassau's biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, and Kennedy
was essentially co opted by FDR to be an ambassador

(09:16):
to that very community. Kennedy was one of the few
sort of titans of business at the time who said,
you know, the world has changed. I consider myself a conservative,
but I also know now there's going to be a
permanent role for government in the life of the country
in a way that had existed before. And I'm ready
to sort of advocate for that. But most of the
business class he came out of, and certainly most of

(09:39):
the Republican Party where he had one foot in, didn't
agree with him at all around that. And that sort
of tension that began in that period that you've identified
really then gets to be this war over whether or
not the government itself is a valuable presence in American
life becomes this political football in the year that you

(10:00):
were about to talk about.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Well, and I'm happy to talk about them, but this
is a really interesting rabbit hole that you just opened up,
and that is that it is no accident that it
comes from somebody like Kennedy, because a lot of the
ideas behind the New Deal come from the Democratic Party. Obviously,
that has its roots in the urban areas in the East,
especially in places like New York, where local governments had

(10:25):
in fact been taking on these roles since the eighteen eighties.
And in many ways you can look at the New
Deal as the application of those lessons from the Gilded
Age in the cities to the national government. So having
somebody like Kennedy in there, who knew, of course, the
histories of those urban areas, had lived in those cities,

(10:46):
is a really nice bridge between that old urban machine
and the idea of bringing that kind of a government
to the national level.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
So let me get you back on track again, since
I bought you to the Kennedy rabbit hole. You know,
we have this post World War two consensus, as you
noted that both the New Deal and World War two
spending had created an economy and a high tide that
lifted many boats, and there was more or less a
consensus that that kind of an economy created a broad

(11:17):
middle class and was good for a broad swath of
Americans who had access to the economy. But that didn't
really survive the post World War two years intact, did it.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
It didn't, and it didn't because of the May nineteen
fifty four Brown Versus Board of Education decision, by which
the Supreme Court began to defend civil rights in the States.
It said that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. And
with that, the next year you get the establishment of
the National Review under William F. Buckley Junior, in which

(11:49):
he vows to tell, as he says, the violated businessman's
side of the story. But immediately he begins to make
the argument and his writers begin to make the argument
that all along, while people had liked this large federal
government that was protecting their economic rights, that what was
really going to happen was you would start to see
the redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers people of wealth

(12:13):
to undeserving black Americans. And this was a trope right
out of Reconstruction, and it's one that they deploy really
effectively from nineteen fifty five on that In nineteen fifty seven,
of course, Eisenhower is going to send the troops to
Little Rock to integrate Little Rock Central High School. That
simply adds gasoline too the fire. By nineteen sixty you

(12:33):
have the rise of somebody like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater,
who argues that he will take the government back to
the nineteen twenties. Sixty four, he becomes the Republican candidate
for president and picks up in that election his home
state of Arizona and the five deep Southern states that
want to maintain segregation. By sixty eight, Nixon's going to

(12:55):
have to make a decision about whether or not he's
going to go down that same route or try to
pick up the new black voters who have been empowered
by the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He
doubles down on the Southern strategy, telling strom Thurmond of
South Carolina, for example, that he would not use the
federal government to enforce desegregation. And that line keeps on going.

(13:15):
You see Reagan picking it up with the Welfare Queen
and giving one of his important speeches in Philadelphia, Mississippi,
where three civil rights workers were murdered very famously in
nineteen sixty four. And that thread that a government that
works for all the American people is simply redistributing wealth
from white people to black people, is a form of socialism,

(13:36):
which you are still hearing today from the Republican Party,
becomes more and more and more central to that party's
message and becomes more and more and more exaggerated.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
It also, you know, the idea that states' rights are
getting trampled at the expense of a muscular and overweening
federal government is part of this as well, and it
informs the federal ear of society. It informs this legal
push into creating a bulwark around the notion of states

(14:08):
rights and any other right that gets federalized, whether it's
access to reproductive rights, it's access to voting, etc. Et cetera,
et cetera, amounts to a trampling of states rights. So
in addition to everything that you've just charted here on
the political and socioeconomic side of the ledger, you get
this very powerful push on the legal side as well

(14:31):
to enshrine state rights as an argument against federalism.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
Essentially, yes, and that's precisely what they are doing. They
begin to argue that these Supreme Court decisions, which by
the way of course, are decided under a Republican Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren had been a
Republican governor of California, and they are unanimous decisions. Sings
like Brown versus Board is a unanimous decision. But those

(14:55):
decisions of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, those opponents of
those decisions begin to argue that this is judicial activism,
that is, judges are deciding something on which voters never agreed,
and so they begin to defend states' rights on the
idea that this is a way to return power to
the people. But of course there is within that a

(15:17):
poison pill, and that is that states also decide who
gets to vote. So by throwing everything back to the states,
you're throwing them to a body that gets to decide
who gets to vote in those states. And this was
always the problem with the concept of states rights, that
until you protect universal voting in the states very quickly,
what you see in the states is a few people

(15:39):
manipulating who gets to vote in those states and therefore
determining their outcome. And the very concept of states rights,
when Andrew Jackson first really began to embrace it ideologically
in the late eighteen twenties, was tied up in this idea,
and in the nineteenth century, that idea of states rights
actually gets to the point that you have people arguing

(16:00):
that the whole idea of a human enslavement is actually
pro democracy because voters in states have decided to enslave
their neighbors, and because they have decided to do that,
it's just fine. And you see that right throughout the
late nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
As long as the state wants to do it and
it's residents vote for it, even if those districts sort
of been jerrymandered, it's okay. You can do anything you
want under the umbrella of states rights. And we're living
with that now. We'll explore some of that as we
go forward. All of these concepts that you and I
are talking about, politicians and people on the ground, over

(16:38):
time became more and more adept at exploiting them. You
began with Barry Goldwater. You mentioned Richard Nixon. You get
to Ronald Reagan. You get from Ronald Reagan, I think,
to Nuton Gingrich. You get from Nuton Gingrich to Sarah Palin.
You get from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump. And Trump
is sort of the apotheosis of all of this, because
I don't think he's probably ever read a single book

(17:00):
of history. He certainly hasn't read yours, But in his
sort of reptilian brain, he does have this street smart
apprehension about what moves people emotionally. He's got a salesman's
understanding of how to pluck at people's heartstrings around certain
issues and certainly around the issues that divide them. And

(17:21):
that's what I want to get into as we continue
this conversation after the break, Heather, We're back with historian
Heather Cox Richardson, and we're exploring creeping authoritarianism in American
life and politics. So, whether we've been discussing the roots

(17:45):
of our current wrestling match with authoritarianism personified by Donald Trump,
I probably gave short shrift to all of that. I
think your book gives anybody who's got the time to
read Democracy Awakening, you can explore that at greater length.
Do you want to bring us up to the president?
Because Trump is such a litmus test and sort of

(18:05):
the approve I think of the dangerous outcomes that come
from a lot of the things we've been exploring, and
you bookend, I guess I'll refer to it as round
one of the Trump era. Because Trump has had one
tour through the White House, he's positioned, it would seem,
at the time of this podcast to be setting himself
up possibly for a second tour, so you sort of

(18:26):
bookend round one of the Trump era with his election
as president November twenty sixteen, and then the insurrection he
fomented at the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
I think it's obvious why you chose those two things.
They're vibrant and useful and disturbing. But talk to me
a little bit about how you, as a historian, think

(18:47):
about both of those events.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Well, let's start with something you just said, and that's
that Trump is a salesman. And I think it's important
to recognize that we would not have Donald Trump had
we not had the previous forty years of Republican leaders
dividing the nation into quite deliberately and convincing their voters
that those people who did not vote for a Republican

(19:11):
not necessarily just Democrats, but those other parties who didn't
vote for a Republican were people who were trying to
replace American capitalism with socialism. They demonized these people as
being increasingly anti American. And what Trump did was he
held up a mirror to those people and said, listen,
I can fix the economic stuff that you don't like.

(19:32):
People forget in twenty sixteen, he was the most moderate
Republican in terms of economics on the debate stages. You know,
he called for fixing tax loopholes, he called for better
and cheaper healthcare, he called for infrastructure, he called for
bringing back manufacturing. But he also promised that he would
actually hurt those people that the Republican Party had so

(19:53):
demonized with his sexism and his racism and his an
attacks on a disabled reporter, and all of the ways
in which he seemed to body the idea of getting
rid of those bad people. So his election, I think
was a picture of a certain part of the American
population in that moment in twenty sixteen. And I also
obviously talk about the disinformation campaign that really helped him,

(20:16):
and the different pieces of that election that were unusual
because there was an attempt to disrupt American democracy from
places like Russia, for example. But what Trump does that
is so important is he takes that disaffected population and
he turns him into a movement. And that welding of

(20:38):
those people into a movement are what gives us that
moment in twenty twenty one where his followers are willing
to destroy America. In order to recreate their own version
of a new kind of America in which they are
better than everybody else.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
It's deeply seated cult of personality. Essentially, you start with
people sort of throwing their vote to Donald Trump. You
end with people being willing to do whatever he tells
them to do because they think, in a world full
of mixed messages on social media and countervailing facts, that

(21:19):
he's a lens for both authenticity and value, and therefore
if he tells them to march, they'll march.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yes. But this is a place where historians are helpful
historians and scholars of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, because there's a
really central question there. How do people go from oh, yeah,
I'll cast a vote for this guy to yes, I
will follow him to the point that I'm going to
end up either dead or in prison for very long

(21:47):
periods of time. And his scholars began to study that
after World War II, and people like Hannah arent who
was a great theorist of totalitarianism, or Eric Hoffer, who
was a long shoreman in San Francisco, had a great
insight into what makes people follow an authoritarian and those
two ideas put together, I think tell us a lot
about Donald Trump's following. So, first of all, in twenty seventeen,

(22:12):
at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he
does something very important and just by the way it
changes the way he approaches the presidency. Although I don't
really talk a lot about that in the book, but
he gives authority to those militia movements, those far right movements,
those fringe movements that have been percolating through American society

(22:33):
really since at least the nineteen nineties, at least in
the Clinton administration and even before that. He says to them,
you are good people. You don't have to live on
the fringes any longer. And that matters because one of
the ways that you create a movement out of those
disparate fringe elements is by making them feel like they
are a team and that they are working with each

(22:55):
other to fight back against something. Once they have that
sense of unity, you can convince them to follow an
ideology that they were not necessarily that involved with to
begin with. They might have just been there with their
friends to throw some punches. By the time that they
are coming out of something like the Unite the right rally, though,
which is obviously more than throwing punches. But the idea

(23:18):
is the same. The ones they have come out of that,
they are very susceptible to a strong man taking them
to yet more extreme levels going forward from that. So
once they've done that, once they have started to go
down a violent path, a path in which they are
fighting people that they believe to be their enemies, there's
something interesting paradoxical that happens. And Eric Hoffer points to

(23:41):
this in his nineteen fifty one book True Believers. The
worse the leader behaves, the tighter they cling to him,
because they have become psychologically committed to the idea that
their enemies deserve to be treated badly. If they break
away from that, they have to admit that they were
the ones who were in the wrong, They were the
ones who deserved to be treated badly, and that's a

(24:03):
psychological leap that very few people can do. So Paradoxically,
once a strong man has them on the hook, the
worse he behaves, the more tightly they cling to him.
And my great example of this, I mean, I think
people can see it certainly with Donald Trump, but also
with other authoritarian leaders in the past. You know, you
think people in twenty fifteen who followed Trump could not

(24:24):
imagine themselves now following somebody who calls his opponents vermin
and needs to get rid of them. You can see
how that transgression happened in our society. But lots of
people have read the Harry Potter books and Narcissa in
that is a classic example of somebody who follows Voldemort
no matter how badly he treats her, her compatriots, and

(24:47):
her family, because she is so psychologically committed to him.
And I think that comparison is a good one. If
you can't see what's happening to you in the United States,
to see it in this fictional world, because that's exactly
what Eric Hoffer described.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
You know. Another dynamic in this is that I think
that Trump learned his authoritarianism on the job. He was
certainly prepped to sort of glide into this moment. But
you know, I think he always wants to please who's
ever in front of him. He rode tests messages, and
then as he gets amplified responses, he doubles down on
those because he doesn't really care intellectually about the content

(25:25):
of the messages and He certainly doesn't care from a
public service standpoint, you know, whether or not he's delivering
effective policy or solutions to his voters. But he does
care about an emotional connection. He loves being affirmed. He
loves seeing people believe that he's affirming them. And I
think throughout his presidency he kept finding these moments where

(25:48):
he could pull more and more people in with increasingly
divisive and ugly messaging. And you know, like when you
mentioned him cultivating these small militia groups, I think they
began showing up at his rallies. I don't think he
really had knowledge and advance in the early stages of
his presidency that these crews would be rolling into his rallies,

(26:09):
But they showed up. He realized they were responding to
something that he was saying, and then he doubled down
again on that message. And what he was doubling down
on is someone's trying to steal your candy. That may
be a brown person from Mexico, it may be an
ambitious woman, it may be the Chinese. But there are
a lot of people out there who are trying to

(26:30):
take things from you. And I'm going to be your defender.
I'm going to stand in the way of that. And
that's essentially the sort of scene quann of who Trump is.
And I think he has learned as authoritarianism on the job,
though he was certainly also I think morally and intellectually
craven enough to just enjoy embracing that. But that brings
me to a question I want to ask you about,

(26:51):
which is why Trump. You know, we've traced this line
of Goldwater forward, but I don't think Richard Nixon or
Ronald Reagan would have been so deeply anti institutional and
so deeply unmoored as to deploy a lot of the
things Donald Trump has to just sort of wallow in
division and hatred, to have a willy nilly approach to

(27:16):
anti institutionalism, to publicly inveigh in such extreme and dangerous
ways against the rule of law and sitting judges and
anyone really who opposes him. You may disagree with me
about that, but I did want to use that as
a departure point for sort of exploring why Trump and
why now?

Speaker 2 (27:34):
So one of the words you didn't use when you
were describing Trump was the word power. That everything is designed,
of course for him to get approval, but also power,
and I think the anti institutionalism you point to is
crucially important, but it speaks to authoritarians, and it certainly
speaks to his quest for power, and that is that
one of the key ways in which an authoritarian works

(27:55):
is by cultivating those people who would not have power,
who would not be able to to enter an administration
for example, that required actual ability, that required you know,
lots of hard work. And the degree to which he
and his people are anti institutionalists, I think is in
part because they are not capable of running the institutions.
So the way that they're trying to garner power is

(28:17):
to say that they are going to tear down those institutions.
And for comparison, for example, think about the people that
President Joe Biden has put into office. They have resumes
as long as your arm, and some of them, Gina Ramando,
for example, at Commerce. You look at her CV and
you think she must be one hundred years old because
she has so many degrees and so many really high

(28:38):
plaudits for how much work she has done and how
good she is at it. And you compare that with
somebody like Chad Wolf that Trump had illegally in as
an acting Homeland Security secretary, you know he had no
qualifications at all, or Johnny mcintee for exatra.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Jared and Ivanka, the veterans of public policy and government
service exactly.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
So, if you are not able to join a merit
based system, you, I think default to this idea that
you have something in you by virtue of being anointed
in some fashion by someone to do it without that
kind of support, institutional and intellectual support to do that.
And you see that, I think with a response to

(29:19):
the coronavirus crisis, where you know, Jared Kushner gets put
in charge and he goes out and he says, you know,
we know the best people. We're going to take care
of this without working through the systems. But then of
course it ended up completely being a mess because they
didn't understand the different requirements for the hospitals, they didn't
understand supply chains, they didn't understand any kind of systems
of delivery. The whole thing just blows up in their faces.

(29:40):
And what they end up saying is, well, it's not
our fault that this happened. It's the deep state. And
that I think you're seeing again now as we're hearing
about ideas for a second Trump presidency, in which they
are already talking about finding people who pass loyalty tests
rather than necessarily passing any tests of ability. And to
the degree that the Trump administration was just a complete

(30:02):
mess in terms of getting anything done, it's worth remembering
that that was when there were still people around him
who did know the ropes, who did understand the law,
and those will be gone if there is a second
Trump term.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
I'm glad that you reminded me that I had left
power out of the conversation, because I think one of
the truths of the Donald Trump moment is that trump
Ism will survive him whether or not he gets into
the White House again, because he's demonstrated to members of
his party and fellow travelers that trump Ism is an

(30:34):
effective path to power. It is a convenient and efficient
way to sort of grab power by the throat in
the US. And I think that's why Project twenty twenty five,
the Trump team's sort of playbook for what they would
institute an American life if Trump gets into office again,
doesn't necessarily have to be just a Trump document. It's

(30:56):
a trump Ism. It's a form of trump Ism distilled,
and I was wondering what kind of longevity you think
trump Ism is going to have.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Well, you've identified something that is definitely out there and
to be concerned about. But I'm going to suggest something different.
I find this concept really intellectually interesting. That is, we
got Trump in large part because of a political theory
called virtual politics or political technology, and the idea was

(31:26):
that you could destroy democracies not with heavy handed tactics,
by limiting anything that people can see in the media,
or by overt violence, but rather by creating an information
sphere in which people were being fed disinformation, which is
different than misinformation. Misinformation is when I make a mistake
and correct myself. Disinformation is when I am deliberately lying

(31:48):
to you.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Gaslighting is what we call it now. You get it
by throwing so much stuff at people that they become
apathetic and they figure they can't understand what's happening, so
it's fine for a strong man to take over. You
get it by running false candidates who either switch parties
after they're elected, or have names similar to an opponent
on a ballot, so that the opponent's votes get split
between the real candidate and the false candidate. You get

(32:11):
it in all of these ways, and we know it works.
You can see it worked in places like Victor Orbon's Hungary,
which was a democracy and now is coming together as
an autocracy under Victor Orbon. You saw it where it
was first really articulated, not necessarily conceived, but articulated in
Vladimir Putin's Russia, which destroyed the concept of democracy for
the post Soviet republics, and now, of course is very

(32:33):
much strong man rule, and certainly that was the intent
here in the United States. In fact, some of the
characters are the same in the places that I've just
talked about. But what's interesting to me about that is
we know how it works, but we are just now
learning what happens when it doesn't manage entirely to destroy
that democracy. That is what happens when people wake up

(32:55):
and say, hey, wait a minute, I am being manipulated here.
And what it seems to me we are saying is
that people take a number of different routes, and they
can take a number of roots. First of all, you
have people who are previously apathetic that were energized by
somebody like Trump probably dropping back and saying, ah, they're
all corrupt, I'm not going to play any longer. So

(33:16):
you get some people who are apathetic. You also get
some people who just don't care. They're going to burn
it all down because they can't admit they were wrong.
And I think we're seeing that as well with Trump.
But then there's another group, and they're the ones that
interests me and I think we are seeing nowadays in
the United States, and those are the people who say
not on my watch. I've watched people manipulate us to

(33:40):
give up our democracy, and I'm going to use those
same tools that they used, social media, making sure that
we have accurate information, mobilizing voters, telling stories that people
can get behind but that are based in truth. I'm
going to use those same tools to take democracy back.
And that I think is just as real an option

(34:03):
as the idea that we're going to be living with
the poison of Donald Trump and his movement for our
lifetimes anyway, because we can see it in things like
the overturning of Father Coughlin in the nineteen thirties, who
tried to put together an anti Semitic, far right Christian
organization to take over American government, or Huey Long or

(34:25):
some of the other.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Authoritarians Joe McCarthy.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Joe McCarthy, some of the other budding authoritarians who got
incredibly powerful until they weren't anymore. And I think that's
as possible as what you are describing.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
I want to come back to that thought after we
take a break here, Heather, because that's a note of
optimism in a dreary, dreary landscape. So let's hear from
a sponsor and then we'll come right back. We're back,
and we're talking about strong men, history and threats to
the American experiment with Heather Cox Richardson. Heather, you were

(35:00):
just talking right at the end of our last segment
about ways in which some of the very dynamics that
have given rise to Trump and authoritarianism various strong men
around the planet these days can also be used by
people who want other forms of representation and who want
to affect positive change themselves. You call it. I think

(35:22):
in the end of your book you talk about reclaiming America.
Talk to me a little bit about that, Like, what
are the tools that you see average citizens able to
take advantage of in an era in which power seems unfettered.
Media is a wash in disinformation. People don't trust facts,
people don't trust institutions. What is the avenue out as

(35:45):
you see it.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
So the avenue out starts with where you started, which
is the idea of a perfect past in which our
American democracy sprang fully formed out of the brain of
George Washington, for example, is ex authoritarian with the idea
that we could get back to that if only we
elected leaders who would follow a predetermined route back to there,

(36:10):
either a route that's determined either by religion or by tradition,
or by some specific plan that would take us back
to that perfect past. And the only thing that an
authoritarian needs to do is to get rid of those
people who would stop him from doing that, with, for example,
these unfortunate laws that are making him unable to do that.
That idea of a past that is stuck back in

(36:33):
some golden era and will only require an authoritarian to
unearth it again is very counter to the real history
of the United States, which is one that I'm calling
a small deed democratic history. The idea that people, ordinary people,
have agency, and that the world has never been perfect,
and that America has never been perfect. It has always

(36:55):
been burdened with sexism and racism and classism and all
sorts of things that made it impossible for everybody to
live their best life. But that in all of those circumstances,
ordinary Americans use their agency to change the future going forward.
And that's something that's really important in this moment when
so many people feel like they don't have control over

(37:15):
the world around them, and I think that is a
learned lack of control because of that sort of history
that has been fed to so many people for so long.
Once they take back their agency, though, there are a
number of critical things that people can do. So I'm
an idealist, which means that I believe ideas change the world.
And the way you change ideas is by changing the

(37:36):
way you talk about democracy, talk about the world, and
talk about the issues that are at stake in this moment.
And you can see how important it is to change
those ideas if you look at things like the fact
that Clarence Thomas re accused himself from a case involving
the January sixth attack on the US Capitol, which he
never would have done. Did he not feel that he
were under pressure from people who are concerned about his ethicsandals,

(38:00):
So the idea of taking up oxygen, of changing the
way people talk about things is number one. There are other,
much more instrumental things, though, and that is the people
who object to the authoritarian takeover of this country need
to contest elections at every single level to some degree.
And we haven't talked about the Democrats at all for

(38:21):
obvious reasons, but for a lot of people, I think
they have come to the place where they think that
just electing their president is going to be enough, and
the president will do magical things. In fact, it's at
the local and the state levels that so many of
the laws that affect our lives are being determined, like,
for example, redistricting that has led to such extreme gerrymandering
in places like North Carolina. That happened at the state level,

(38:43):
and at the local level. Of course, you're also looking
at school boards and at local ordinances, things that really
affect people at the day to day level.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
And state legislatures that are dominated by one party that
are no longer by cameral in any meaningful way exactly.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
And they got there not only by people vote at
that level, but also by the redistricting that gave the
Republicans such extraordinary legs up. Just a side note here,
jerrymandering benefits democrats in one state in the top ten
of gerrymandered states, but the other nine are all republican
gerrymandered states, so it's really kind of a republican problem there.
So there are lots of things that people can do

(39:19):
to affect the future going forward.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
You note in the book that and I quote, democracies
die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
So is the contra to that idea true as well,
that democracies are reinvigorated at the ballot box more than
any other form.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yes, I think it is, but I would say before
you get to the ballot box. You know, one of
the things about the last section of the book that
I think was subtle and maybe too subtle, is that
each section that takes the country from its inception through
the present looks at a different way that groups mobilized
people to expand liberal democracy. So it looks at, you know,

(40:00):
using organizations dramatically to change the way people understand what
their rights are. It shows how the NAACP, for example,
use that organization to bring transparency to the ways in
which laws were crushing individuals primarily in the Southern States.
It looks at ways in which people who did not
have access to the vote claimed places in the United

(40:22):
States by virtue of the way that they act and
the books that they published. So it looks at a
lot of different ways that people can affect their futures
in and expanding liberal democracy without limiting that simply to voting,
or even simply to taking up oxygen the way that
I've talked about.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
So being as active as possible in your community, even
if that's a micro community, organizing with local groups, voting,
paying attention and being discerning. Is that too simplistic?

Speaker 2 (40:52):
No, I don't think it is. I mean one of
the things that political scientists will tell you that there
is literally nothing you can do that's more effective to
change somebody's opinions about things and to change the way
they vote. It's something that they put a very fancy
name on they call it relational organizing. But all it
means is talk to your friends, you know, make sure
your friends understand what's at stake when they vote, and

(41:15):
help them get to the polls. And that makes a
huge difference in turnout and in the makeup of the
ultimate votes. So We see this all the way back,
of course, but really dramatically. The John Birch Society did
this in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties to
try and turn out a right wing constituency. There's no
law at all that says that liberals can't do the

(41:36):
same thing.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
You make a point in the book that the US
is built on embracing and explicitly democratic history that places
the principles of the Declaration of Independence at the forefront
of civic life. Do you see that as actually more
important than the Constitution? That the Constitution is a blueprint
of how a government should work, but the Declaration is

(41:59):
sort of a call for what our higher goal should be.
Or am I simplifying things again?

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Well, there's a saying in history that if you have rights,
you stand on the Constitution, and if you want rights,
you stand on the Declaration. They're very different documents. One
sets out a set of principles to explain to the
world why it's an okay thing for the revolutionaries to
throw off the government of Great Britain, which of course

(42:25):
was radical, so totally radical thing to do. But in
that Declaration of Independence they embrace the idea of what
a government of the people should look like, you know,
because they don't know, they're really inventing it out of
whole cloth. And what they say is that it is
possible to construct a government based on the idea that
all men are created equal. And of course that's exclusionary

(42:47):
in many ways, but the principle that all individuals are
created equal is embedded in that document. And also they
say that every individual has a right to a say,
and is government of horse is expandable as well. Those
principles are I think the rock solid principles on which
the expansion of liberal democracy ever since then has stood.

(43:11):
That being said, the Constitution is the body of laws
that was designed to create a government for that community
of equals. Again very limited at the time, but it
was a set of laws designed to bring that government
into existence. And as we know, of course, it was
a reaction in part to the Articles of Confederation, and

(43:31):
so it created a much stronger federal government than at
first the framers believed was necessary to have a government
that was based in democracy. I think that's a really
important distinction. Both of the documents are important, but what
the Constitution really does is it sets up the concept
of a nation built on a body of laws and

(43:53):
the institutions that will support that body of laws. It
also sets up ways for us to amend that constitution,
which I think is also very important. But that machine
that would go of itself, as a poet later called it,
is I think an important basis for our democratic concepts

(44:17):
and remains vitally important in this moment when there are
people who would tear it down.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Heather, I always like to ask guests what they've learned,
what their most recent AHAs are, and I wanted to
know what you've learned about the threat of authoritarianism in
the United States that you didn't know before embarking on
the writing of this book.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
What really threw me for an absolute loop was the
degree to which foreign money and the use of foreign
money in our democracy since the fall of the Soviet
Union influenced what happened here in the United States. Absolutely
floored me. I had not been paying that much attention
to it either here in the UK. That was earth

(45:00):
shattering to me. And also the degree to which the
same people who were deeply involved in the elections of
Richard Nixon, people like Roger Stone and Paul Maniford, and
Rick Gates and Lee Atwater, although he is going to
die long before the present, how deeply they have been
involved in Republican politics since the nineteen sixties. And of

(45:23):
course we've got Paul Maniport acting briefly as Donald Trump's
campaign manager in twenty sixteen and bringing on board the
whole Russian oligarchs, So that connection I was not prepared
to see, and it really surprised me. It really made
me rethink the entire way that we conceive of American democracy.
For what reason, Well, because the interplay I think between

(45:46):
the rise of foreign oligarchs and their need to hide
their money in democracies, and how that then led them
to back political candidates who would focus on the protection
of property rather than the expansion of the public good
because they didn't want to pay money to do that.
Of course, that really surprised me. I was also really

(46:08):
surprised by the degree to which it seemed that the
Nixon administration, when it was thwarted at manipulating elections at home,
began to test out ways to do it in places
like Chile. That is, I knew the Chilean rise of Pinochet,
for example, but I didn't put it together with United
States democracy to the degree that it was like they're

(46:31):
testing stuff out over there to see if it will
work here. And what sparked that, of course, was the
the truck convoys that were clearly designed to hurt the
economy and thereby hurt democratic governments here, both in the
US and in Canada. That was actually one of the
tactics that led to Pinochet taking power, and it was
backed by the USCIA. And I was like, wait a minute,

(46:52):
this was just like a test and probably has something
to do with explaining why Trump followers in twenty sixteen
were tish sure it celebrating Pinochet.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
We're out of time, Heather, Thank you for such a
great conversation today.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Thank you for having me. Although I hate to leave
on the word Pinochet, so let me just end instead
with thank you.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
Heather Cox Frigerdson is the author of Democracy Awakening. She's
also the author of a popular substack newsletter, Letters from
an American. You can find her on Twitter at HC
Underscore Richardson Here at crash Course, we believe that collisions
can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In

(47:34):
today's Crash Course. I learned that of enough of us
just hold hands with our neighbors or anyone else we
can find on the block. Maybe, just maybe we can
affect some positive change in this otherwise chaotic political era.
What did you learn? We'd love to hear from you.
You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion
or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course.

(47:58):
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
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people find the show. This episode was produced by the
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and we had editing help from Stage Bauman, Jeff Grocott,
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(48:20):
sound engineering and our original theme song was composed by
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with another Crash Course